Lives in Cricket No 38 - Lionel Robinson

74 Successful though Archie MacLaren had been in arranging six first-class games in his six seasons as Lionel’s manager of cricket, he had always to squeeze his fixtures in to suit the schedules of his prospective guests rather than being able to present his employer with top quality matches at the height of summer. Hence the 1912 South Africans and Jack Mason’s XI both visited in the festival month of September whilst the games played by both universities against Robinson’s teams were their last before the all-important Varsity matches – conversely Lionel had to content himself with hosting both the AIF and the 1921 Australians at the start of their tours. Beggars, even exceedingly rich ones, cannot be choosers. Gideon Haigh professes to being puzzled by the existence of the fixture at all, stating that: ‘How [Robinson] had insinuated a traditional country house match into the Australian team’s crowded schedule is a mystery; it is a fair guess money played a large part.’ Ronald Mason is a little more cryptic, describing the fixture as ‘somewhat ambiguous’. It is indeed unclear quite how Lionel managed to secure the visit to Old Buckenham by the 1921 Australians; it may be that strings might have been pulled at an extremely high level. In the Victorian era the organisation and financing of Ashes tours were generally carried out by the tourists themselves and wealthy cricket-lovers such as Lionel had chances of “buying” a fixture. However, in the years before the Great War, the MCC and its counterpart, the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket (ABCIC), muscled in and assumed the rights to administer all future tours, rights they guarded jealously. This signalled the end for the likes of Lionel and the match at Old Buckenham in 1921 remains the only match granted first-class status that the Australians have played on a “country house” ground since that War. As such it was something of a “living fossil”, a throwback to earlier times that demands further explanation. That the two captains, Archie and Warwick Armstrong, were close friends would have facilitated the organisation of the match once it had been arranged but neither was in a position to exert sufficient influence to bring it about in the first place. Armstrong had been defeated in his power struggle with the ABCIC, and particularly with Syd Smith, the man appointed to manage the 1921 tour, whilst Archie was a maverick; although not exactly persona non grata at Lord’s, he was not particularly persona grata either. Michael Robinson has pointed out that the impetus to accommodate Lionel’s match into a busy tour may well have been provided by his brother, WS, who: “had a very close relationship” with the Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, and also: “had an important relationship with the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George and in particular with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Horne...”. Without going as far as identifying WS as a significant mover-and-shaker in arranging the Australians’ visit to Old Buckenham, Michael states that: ‘These connections would not have been unhelpful to Lionel in connection with his proposed 1921 cricket match.’ Whether or not WS was indeed involved, influence of the magnitude that he was able to wield would seem to have been necessary to bring about “Lionel’s coelacanth” in the face of the usual institutional lack of enthusiasm for private enterprise demonstrated by The visit of the Australians In 1921