Lives in Cricket No 38 - Lionel Robinson

6 racing stud, was at the height of his financial powers, and his pristine new cricket ground beside the hall was complete and ready for use with MacLaren installed as his cricket manager. It was also the year of the ground-breaking Triangular series when both Australia and South Africa toured England. Was this an opportunity for Robby to become something more than a bastion of country house cricket? Did he covet a part on the bigger stage? He had the money to make an impact; the tie-up with MacLaren added credibility. Cricket had no commercial sponsors in those days, so the money required to guarantee an international side’s participation (and provide a few extras to oil the wheels of the tour) had to be raised from private sources. Step forward L.G. Robinson as a guarantor for the South African tourists, including an early invitation for team members to spend a weekend of relaxation and exercise at Old Buckenham. He may well have also sponsored the Australians, though evidence has proved elusive. Robinson demonstrated he could be relied on get a top cricket show on the road, but it was apparently not enough to win him power or influence within the hierarchy of cricket’s snooty establishment. Perhaps he was a bit too brass-necked, a bit too Australian, to be handed a bigger role in the English game. There was to be no MCC membership, no place at the top table. Then the war put a tin hat on it all anyway, and it was not until cricket emerged from those darkest of times that Robinson and MacLaren came to prominence again. The 1921 match between a strong England team, playing as L.Robinson’s XI and captained by MacLaren, and the formidable Australian tourists led by Warwick Armstrong was to prove Robby’s final hurrah. Already suffering from terminal cancer, he declined inexorably during the early months of 1922 and died in July aged just 55. Cricket lived on at the hall ground, however, though without the international players who had graced Robby’s arena. The author continues the story to cover the colourful tenure of bon viveur playboy Everard Gates, whose father bought the estate from the Robinson family. As Gates’ lifestyle increasingly impacted on his wealth, the hall estate and the cricket ground entered a moribund era in the 1930s. Here, with the cricketing hiatus, Stephen Musk’s fascinating story comes to a natural conclusion. The decline of Lionel Robinson’s beloved hall and cricket ground – testimonies to the alliance of ‘new money’ with Edwardian grandeur – was temporarily arrested by the establishment of a private prep school in Robby’s grand house just before the Second World War. It proved a short- lived reprieve, though, as fire ravaged the building in December 1952, removing Old Buckenham Hall School from the village and plunging the cricket ground back into a state of neglect. For a while it was a campsite, its boundaries skirted by an ugly motorcycle grass-track. By 1960 the once carefully manicured turf had become an unkempt hayfield. An annexe of the hall that survived the fire was the home of engineer Oliver Sear, whose sporting interest was motor racing rather than Foreword by Tom Walshe