Lives in Cricket No 38 - Lionel Robinson

64 The Great War War. The conventional view of the few cricket-lovers who have heard of Robinson at all, that he built a ground to first-class standard, funded a plethora of high-quality matches and was eventually rewarded with a game against the 1921 Australians is not so much a gross oversimplification as completely erroneous. By the time the tourists arrived in May 1921 the ground had reverted to being the home of a village cricket club, albeit one superbly equipped. In the two seasons of 1919 and 1920, between the recommencement of cricket at Old Buckenham after the war and the visit of the Australians, only two games of any significance were played on Robinson’s ground. The first saw Robinson’s XII take on the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) in 1919 whilst the second was when Old Buckenham hosted the fixture between Norfolk and the MCC in 1920. The contrast with the pattern of games before the Great War, when matters can be described as quintessentially ‘country house’ is striking to say the least – but has gone completely unremarked upon by the local media. The most plausible explanation is that Robinson, ever a shrewd operator in matters financial, was husbanding his financial resources in the absence of any further significant income. 48 It is not exactly clear when Lionel first realised that he had little time left to live and it would only be possible to have the blindest of guesses as to how this might have affected his spending on cricketing matters. 49 Keeping the flame alive Although Robinson declined to bankroll any further country house cricket after the Great War, he made sure that his ground continued to be maintained to a first-class standard. Indeed, as has been noted in chapter two, Robinson was still actively engaged in improving the quality of his playing surface as he had turf especially imported from Australia. Unfortunately this event is as tricky to date accurately as the original laying out of the wicket involving Alec Hearne. The fixture against the AIF constituted a dress rehearsal for the visit of the official Australian tourists two years later. The official visit had originally been planned for 1919 but had been cancelled and replaced by the AIF tour financed by the military authorities. Their tour of Britain was an extensive one, of 32 matches, 28 of which were deemed to be first-class and had the crowds flocking back to the cricket grounds after a four year hiatus. By the end of the tour, batsman Herbie Collins (who also replaced the prickly 48 That Robinson left nearly £250,000 in his will would mark him down as extremely wealthy by contemporary standards. However his nephew, Thomas Baxendale, responded to the details of Lionel’s will by stating that ‘he must have fallen on comparatively hard times if he only left £1/4m at his death’. Michael Robinson certainly remembers W.S. telling him that Lionel continued ‘spending money furiously’ during the war and commenting on ‘how much money Lionel wasted on Old Buckenham Hall’. It might thus be possible to argue that, after the war, Robinson considered himself to be, by the standards of his family, somewhat of a pauper and that he cut his cloth accordingly when it came to spending vast amounts of money on cricket. 49 There is some evidence that Robinson could still ‘splash the cash’ in that, in September 1919, he hosted a match against a scratch eleven of servicemen raised by a Major Lister, who was stationed in nearby Pulham. For some reason he felt the need to call on seven players with first-class experience, who duly repaid him by defeating Lister’s team by an innings. This could not have come cheaply and no-one apart from Robinson would have been at all interested in the result.