Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

was the personal nature of the barracking rather than the barracking as such which deeply offended Rockley Wilson. 81 Naturally, the British Press was inclined to blame the Australian crowd, sometimes rather patronisingly. The Daily Express , which had hired Rockley Wilson, observed in a leading article on 1 March, 1921 that “the whole thing is wretched” and went on to say: “If Tests are to continue at all, if cricket is to keep its place as a clean and wholesome game, the decencies of sportsmanship must be preserved all over the ground, not only inside the boundaries.” The Observer , on 6 March, 1921, said “barracking of any sort is, and will ever be, offensive, always repugnant, never sporting, always provocative of retaliation, and certainly shocking and bad manners since no well-bred person ever has, or ever would, barrack” – a high-minded opinion indeed, though one Rockley Wilson would no doubt have shared. On 2 March, The Times came closer to the heart of the matter. It criticised the barracking and the “occasional heated questioning of umpires’ decisions” as “entirely foreign to the spirit of the game” but added that the problem was exacerbated “by the tone of certain journalistic messages sent home by members of the English side.” It considered the practice of cricketers on tour writing about the games “undesirable and harmful” and concluded that no one should be selected to play for his country without the understanding that “when he becomes a Test player, he lays down his pen.” 82 Australia and After 86 81 One England player who took a generous view of the barracking was Cecil Parkin. He liked the Australian crowds, admired their enthusiasm for the game, and thought that the barracking added to the interest and entertainment of the proceedings: see Cecil Parkin, Cricket Triumphs and Troubles , Nicholls and Co, 1936, p.70. But by background and personality, Parkin was more likely to empathise with an Australian crowd than were most of his team-mates. 82 This account of the barracking incidents is drawn largely from newspaper reports of the time, but also Streeton, op.cit., Malies, op.cit., E.H.Hendren, op.cit., and Jack Hobbs, My Life Story , The Star Publications, 1935. It has to be pointed out that Jeremy Malies’ account of the barracking at Sydney Cricket Ground is incorrectly said to have been at the MCC v New South Wales match, the match in which Hobbs incurred his injury, not the Fifth Test match in which barracking of Hobbs’ laboured fielding sparked the incident. A great curiosity is that Fender’s book, Defending the Ashes , op.cit., written in the immediate aftermath of the tour, has virtually no comment on the barracking or its cause. A reviewer in The Cricketer , 23 July, 1921, commented: “Without Mr Fender’s views on controversial matters, the book has the appearance of a censored letter home from the front, when Tommie wants to tell the home-folk what he thought of plum and apple and the shell shortage.”