Cricket 1: more cult than game. Cricket 2: the legless wonders

I came across my old cricket bat by accident. It was all dry and nutty. I made stylish strokes in the store room, imagining there were three runs to get in the last over with light fading. That is how I came to dent the boiler. Easter was always the start of summer to me. They opened up the cricket field and we creaked like old gates. One of those I played with turned to the dignity of the white coat but, forgetting himself, took a brilliant catch at square leg. You could call that the dissolution of the British umpire.

If you know cricket you know life, whereas football merely measures skill and exposes weaknesses. Those who write about football often do so competently, but so far they have failed to establish a literature. Cricket leads because it had, first, Neville Cardus (who wrote as if cricket were music, and music cricket), then John Arlott, master and apt pupil, to invest the game with a poetry of its own. Ahead, then, another season. Behind, subtle fragrances of forgotten wickets peopled by wraiths.I am at one with a chap who wrote a chapter in a book called Cricket in 1888. He began: "The Egyptian monuments and Holy Scriptures, the illuminated books of the Middle Ages and the terra-cottas and vases of Greece have been studied to no practical purpose by historians of the game. . . "

What audacity! He could not believe, as I cannot believe, that cricket was not a part of the creation. Words are insufficient to measure it, so that W G. Grace became the man who "turned the single-stringed instrument into many-chorded lyre". The first-class professional had "agreeable, quiet manners with his superiors on the field" (like Fred Trueman?) and, in hot weather, wore "thick woollen drawers, half an inch generally visible above the waistband of his trousers". Like... well, Woolley?

Splendid. I met a chap who says he was stumper in my last game. He stood I5 yards back but became disturbed by the length of my run, which was 32 yards. In avoiding the ball, he was struck in his middle stump by the middle stump and retired himself thereafter. The confession gave me pleasure. Every bowler enjoys damaging stumpers because the sight of them - crouching like old frogs - is provocative. If you can not hunt down a stumper, life can lose its flavour.

Punishment and deviousness are essential parts of the game. Bowling with flapping sleeves is, and always has been, unfair; but it is expected, and always has been expected, of any bowler that he should pitch the ball into the sun, or into any convenient shadow. Few ploys are unacceptable so long as they are subtle, though a Kent batsman who regularly presented his rear to the bowler (since he could think of no other way of saving his wicket) was told by the umpire: "Jack, that ain't cricket. When a man stops a ball with THAT he must be out".

A chap named Fitzgerald who wrote Jerks In From Short-Leg, said straight-faced, that the captain should choose the fattest man for point (a position close to the batsman) "for nature makes it impossible for him to get out of the way of a hard hit". He knew his cricket, that fellow. It is the curious mixture of impeccable conduct and sadism that makes the game superior. How curious that cricket could produce both W. G. Grace ("Temperance in food and drink, regular sleep and exercise" as the prerequisites of a batsman) and an umpire who, when asked why he had not given a baronet out, declared, "Lor' bless you, sir. I've been his valet I5 years and I dussn't. He gets awful wild at times".

When we chucked lads into nettles for not abiding by the rules we were carrying on a long English tradition. I first realised the pain of the game when I faced a huge professional who bowled like a two-pounder gun. I was I08Ibs, white as a sheet. He noted this and increased his 30-yard run by so great a distance that I assumed he was going home.

Now I was sufficiently practised to know the THEORY of how to deal with him.

I made a classically correct stroke. But such was his strength that the ball took bat with it, and I was caught out. In the pavilion a chap said it was bad luck but I knew better. I was a victim of the admirably destructive quality that the game requires. It is as beautiful and finely balanced as a watch. In addition to the balance, it produces humour of a delicate kind. An old Yorkshire pro, asked why a ball pitched directly under the bat was called a yorker, replied, "What else could you call it?"

God rest old cricketers. They are like my bat - of no further use but fragile containers of memory. I listen to TV commentators and do not know what they are on about with their thick and thin edges.

A quick game in our old back street would knock the fancy notions from them, and they would then know that cricket is a jungle of hurt played out in apparent innocence. And Amen to that.

Cricket 2: The legless wonders

Test players were always remote from us, of course. There was no television in my formative years, so that during the thirties and forties our entire knowledge of our heroes was totally encapsuled on the front of cigarette cards. I never even knew they had Christian names until I was 14. I believed that all great cricketers were recognised at birth and endowed with suitable initials. They were S. J. McCabe, or S. G. Barnes, or A. L. Hassett. We would not have used the Christian names even had we known them, for that would have been too great an impertinence.

Being Lancashire League myself - Church and Oswaldtwistle CC to be precise - I observed dark faces coming among us and stared at them with the highest respect: Headley and Martindale and Constantine. John Willie Johnson, the most fearsome barracker I have known, was at the height of his career at our ground. He always had a crowd around him and he barracked home team or visitors with scant respect for either. Nothing escaped him, whether players were actually in motion or not. One unguarded moment when refreshments were being taken on the field; one instance of rinsing of the mouth and ejection of the fluid so used, could bring from him a piercing shaft of derision - "Watch him, umpire - he's watterin' t' pitch."

We had dynasties then. Jimmy Haworth followed Jimmy Howarth. Tommy Lowe followed Tommy Lowe. Father to son. We were like a little empire where the centre of all joy was The Field. Tom Clapperton was groundsman and he looked like a walking hazel nut. He slept on a bench in the pavilion if he suspected that the pitch would require attention at, say, 4 am. I suspect he had an aversion for the little group of old men in straw hats who appeared promptly each afternoon at 2pm to observe the passing scene.

Often there was no passing scene except Tom Clapperton. They accepted him as a reasonable substitute for a slow bowler. Their eyes kept pace with his trudging progression with the mower or roller for hours on end, and they would point out daisies he had missed, or give a studied opinion of the quality of his white-washing. On hot afternoons, you could see Tom Clapperton clouting posts with a hammer at the other end of the field and it seemed to take an age for the sound to reach your ears. Pure poetry, that - the flat, untroubled green and those rhythmic movements at the other side.

The old men knew everything. They were always on about Charlie Llewellyn, an Accrington professional whom nobody else remembered. It was a joy to strike the ball hard in their direction and see them squeeling and scattering, while Tom Clapperton looked on with what appeared to be approval.

When war came, barrage balloons appeared above the field, a spectacle which, to my innocent mind, suggested that the War Office was intimately concerned with the protection of our wicket. Instead of disturbing hedgehogs when we plunged into the nettles for balls, we disturbed air force women who ran off, squeeking, pursued by their mates. Occasionally, in height of summer, bits of ice from the balloons danced at our feet.

Old Johnny Long, a player whose exploits had turned to brittle yellow paper in the pavilion, presented me with his first eleven cap one day when I was playing particularly well in practise. He assumed that I would be a great cricketer and it was a symbolic act to him - the past paying tribute to the future. I think I let him down, though I got my silver teapot for being in a championship eleven at 17. In truth, I might have made something of cricket had it not been for such as John Willie Johnson. I did not see why I should give up five hours of every Saturday to be insulted without pay.

He troubled me. At various times I vented my spite on innocents, like one of the masters at school, who came with a visitor to see what we were up to. I got him in the back of the neck with a lofted ball and he took little further interest. He assumed it was an accident.

We had a bit of trouble with Mrs Almond, who had a kindly nature though not where balls were concerned. She lived by the side of the field and was much afflicted. If Mrs Almond had lived next to Old Trafford or The Oval they would never have got their balls back. We had great difficulty in retrieving ours, and we knew her.

Mrs Almond's sky was probably full of balls, and they hurtled in her direction when she was washing up. One narrowly missed their Vern. "You're not getting your ball back," she used to shout. "You'll kill somebody, you lot." Now I ask you, what would S. J. McCabe or S. G. Barnes have made of that?"

"Don what?" she would no doubt have said, if afflicted by Bradman. "You can tell him I'll be round at his mother's."

So afflicted were we by Mrs Almond's firm attitudes that we placed a firework in her air vent and her husband came out crying, "You've blown t' fryin' pon of t' oven."

Mrs Greenwood was far easier to deal with. It was a six down her chimney if you were playing in the back street (she recovered the ball, a bit sooty, from her front room) but always out over Mrs Almond's yard, locked or unlocked.

We got a big professional from Sussex and he had us shooting balls off the big roller (once pulled by a horse) to improve our slip fielding. I seem to recall him stuffing one of our players into a pad cupboard due to some minor disagreement, and I never found justification for that in the whole of Wisden.

We were hard, then, but I dare say we knew our cricket. After all, there was nothing else where we lived except a dairy and a laundry. Ralph Coupe, with the steaks in his stumper's gloves. Jimmy Howarth running ahead of the wind displaying the capability he had for catching up with his fellow batsman by the third run. Reg Parkin, son of the legendary Cec Parkin, inspiring us with awe at the relationship.

Ramsbottom and Rawtenstall and Bacup and Burnley and Colne seemed a long way then. East Lancashire club in Blackburn was supposedly toffee-nosed. All alien places full of threat. I was much happier in practise though, even in practise, we played our cricket without regard for injury. Other people's, of course.

Fred Stubbins once chased me, after suffering a bout of vicious bowling, and drove me into the hawthorn bushes with a wildly sweeping stump, the metal end of which carved a furrow through one eyebrow. We expected that kind of thing. We imagined that was what took place at The Oval. When I finally made the unprecedented journey to Old Trafford, all of 25 miles, and actually saw Test players I realised, with a shock, that they had first names, like us. And they were not ten feet tall.They had two legs each to propel them. The cigarette cards had not given a hint of this, being concerned, at the lowest points, with the third button of the shirt and at the highest, the tip of the cap.

I felt like going home. It was Syd and Lindsey and Don after that. As I said to the lads back at our field - "Somebody might have told us."

 

 

 

 

Church CC, Lancashire League champions, 1941

 

Left to right, back: Tom Howarth (treas}, Jack Dunbar, Jimmy Haworth, A. N. Other, Walter Burns, Walter Lomax, Ben Cunliffe (sec). Middle row: Joe Hargreaves,, Reg Parkin (son of Cecil), Tommy Lowe, Dr Pear (president), Sam Pilkington. Front row: Me, Percy Hilton (stumper)

Church CC Roll of Honour: Lancashire Cricket League Champions:
1939
1940
1941
1945
1962

You will note that things were at their peak while I played. Regrettably, I can not claim any credit for that.

 

Geoffrey Mather © 2004

19 January, 2008