EARLY DEVELOPMENTS OF THE CRICKETING ART

By The Editor

When I first formed the presumptuous design of editing this work, it was my original purpose to divide this chapter into two parts, whereof the one should treat of the development of batting and the other of the development of bowling. But I very soon found that such a division would never do, for it would be a dividing of two things that were in their nature indivisible, from the historian’s point of view, the one being the correlative of the other, and the effects of the one upon the other being ever constant. Of course those effects have been mutual; the bowling has educated the batting, and in his turn, again, the batsman has been the instructor of the bowler. No sooner has the one changed his tactics at all than the other has changed front a little in order to meet this new attack. Naturally, perhaps, it seems that the bowler has the oftener taught the batsman, than vice versa; the aggressor, by a new form of attack, forcing on the defendant a new line of defence. I think it is the generally accepted view to-day that it is the bowling “that makes the batting,” but on the other hand one is inclined to think that the excellence of the Australian bowling, and also of their wicket-keeping and general fielding, is very much the result of playing on such perfect wickets that the batsman practically would never get out unless fielding, wicket-keeping, and bowling were all of the highest quality. Therefore, in that special instance it may rather be said that the batting, under specially favourable conditions of climate and wickets, has “made the bowling.” Of course the natural effect of playing on perfect wickets in matches that last as many days as you please has had its effect, and to us not altogether a pleasing effect, on the Australian batting, but this is scarcely the place to consider that feature of the case.

The first point of interest to notice is that Beldham is quite at one with us in attributing the advance in batting to the advance of bowling, notably to the wonderful bowling of Harris, which was of that portentous character to which the name of epoch-making is not misapplied, and Nyren is of the same opinion with Beldham, whom he considers to have been the first to play Harris’s bowling with success by getting out to it at the pitch.

We have seen, in another part of the book, that, setting aside the stool-ball, and the other legendary sports of the ancients, which were “not cricket,” the first game worthy of the name of cricket that appears in the dim twilight of history is the game they played at the beginning of the eighteenth century—say for simplicity’s sake in 1700. In 1700 and for some time later the wicket that men bowled at was formed, as we have seen, of two stumps, each 1 foot high, 2 feet apart, and with a cross-stump by way of a bail laid from one to the other. Between the two stumps, and below the cross one, was a hole scraped in the ground—the primitive block-hole. There was no popping-crease: the batsman grounded his bat by thrusting the end of the bat into the block-hole. Then he was “in his ground.” But if the wicket-keeper, or any fieldsman, could put the ball into the hole before the batsman had his bat grounded in it, the batsman was out. Observe, it was not a matter of knocking off the cross-stump with the ball, but of getting the ball into the hole before the batsman grounded his bat in it. It takes no very vivid imagination to picture the bruised and bloody fingers that must have resulted from the violent contact of the bat when there was a race for the block-hole between wicket-keeper and batsman.

And the bowling? The bowling of course was bowling, all along the ground, as in the famous old game of bowls. Very likely it was in some respects the best sort of bowling for the business. With a wicket only a foot high, anything between the longest of long-hops or the yorkiest of yorkers would have jumped over it. They found out this disadvantage later, when they began to bowl “length” balls, which, after all is said, must have been far the more puzzling for the batsman. And besides the chance of going over the wicket, there was also the excellent opportunity of going through the wicket, between two stumps set as far apart as 2 feet. Probably this occurred so often that it did not seem particularly hard luck. The batsman, more probably, deemed himself very hardly used if he did not get two or three extra lives of this grace.

And after all, though no records that I can find have come down to us from those times, it is safe to infer that the batsmen did not make an overwhelming number of runs. Had it been so we should almost certainly have heard of it by oral tradition, and Aylward’s great score of 167 at the end of the century would not have stood out as such a unique effort. Nor have we far to seek for the reason that the scores were not prodigious. Though the wicket was low, it was very broad, and a ball running over the surface of bumpy ground, as we may suppose those wickets to have been, would very often have taken off the cross-stump only a foot above the ground. Perhaps, even, at a foot high it was more assailable than at two feet by these methods of attack. Then too the weapons of defence—the bats, so to call them—are figured more like the hockey-sticks of to-day—“curved at the back, and sweeping in the form of a volute at the front and end,” Mr. Ward’s memoranda of Nyren say. Of course these were very inadequate weapons of defence, and in point of fact no defence seems ever to have been attempted. It was all hit. And for actual hitting of a ball always on the ground a bat of this shape may not have been so very ill adapted after all.

We do not know what the wiles of these old all-along-the-ground bowlers may have been. Probably they were fairly simple. Yet there is a significant word that crops up in the pages of Pycroft, that delightful writer, that almost inclines one to suspect these old-fashioned fellows of some guile. He constantly uses the expression “bias” bowling. He speaks of it, it is true, in connection with “length” balls, breaking from the pitch. But why should he have used the word “bias” unless it were in common parlance, and how should that singular word have come into common parlance unless from the analogy of the game of bowls, in which it is a cant term. In the game of bowls the bowls are sometimes weighted on one side, for convenience in making them roll round in a curve and so circumvent another bowl that may “stimy” them, to borrow a term from golf, from the jack; but sometimes—and this seems a more scientific form of the game—there is no bias in the bowl itself, but “side” can be communicated to it, by a finished player, with the same result as before. Now if it was the habit of these old-fashioned cricketers to bowl their “daisy-cutters” with bias on the ball, so that it would travel in a curve as it came along, the reason for the term as used by Pycroft is simple enough; but if this is not the explanation, the only alternative one is that the term first came into use—never having been mentioned in cricket before—for balls that broke from the pitch, wherein the analogy from bowls would be very far-fetched indeed, and the term altogether not one that would be likely to suggest itself. Therefore I think there is a likelihood—I claim no more for my inference—that these old cricketers bowled their underhand sneaks with spin on them, just as we often have seen them bowled—and a very good ball too on a rough wicket—in country cricket matches to-day.

Then we come to a change, and the date of that change appears to involve some of the highest authorities in a certain disagreement. But I am going to stick to Nyren, or rather to Mr. Ward’s memoranda as edited by Nyren, rather than to Pycroft, both because the former wrote nearer to the date of the occurrences treated of, and also because the latter—though I love and revere his book—seems to me to have lumped dates together in a certain scornful, contemptuous haste, as if they were scarcely worth a good cricketer’s attention. Nyren, or Mr. Ward for him, is more careful in his discrimination, according to my judgment as a grave historian.

According to Nyren, then, it was some time about or before 1746 that the stumps were both heightened and narrowed. From 1 foot they sprang up to 22 inches in height, and from 2 feet across they shrank to as little as 6 inches in width. A bail crossed their tops, and a popping-crease was drawn for the grounding of the bat, to the great saving, as we cannot doubt, of the wicket-keeper’s fingers. Still, however, unless Nyren was mistaken, there were not as yet but two stumps—virtually it is certain he was mistaken in declining to believe that the game ever was played with a wicket of 2 feet width, but that does not prove him wrong in another matter in which all the probabilities are in his favour.

We are not given any very clear reason for this change in the height of wickets, but we very quickly see its effects. Hitherto bowling had been all along the ground, the wicket being so low that it was almost necessary to bowl in this now derided fashion if it was to be hit at all. But a wicket 10 inches higher might have its bail taken off by a higher-rising ball, the higher-rising ball was found to be a more difficult one for the batsman to hit, the higher-rising kind of ball was thereby proved the best for the bowler’s purpose; in a word, “length” bowling, as they called it—the bowling of good length balls, as we should say—was introduced.

And now, all at once, the position of the unfortunate batsman was found to be a very parlous one indeed. For, remember, he had in his hand, to meet this bowling, a thing that had more resemblance to a hockey-stick than a cricket-bat. There is a certain “invisible length” which, as we all know, is extremely difficult to play with a modern square-faced bat and with all the science of modern theories of wielding it. How much more helpless then, as Euclid would put it, must the unfortunate man with the bandy-stick have felt when he saw coming towards him through the air a ball of that length which he knew would make it impossible when it reached him. Batsmen must have had a most miserable time of it for a year or two.

At length, out of their necessity was produced a new invention. It was about the year 1750 that the “length” bowling came into fashion, and very soon afterwards the form of the cricket-bat was altered to that straight and square-faced aspect which gave it a chance of meeting the new bowling—which was assailing comparatively new wickets—on equal terms. Obviously there ought to be some kind of relation between the shape of the bat and the contour of the wicket that it is concerned to defend, and the contour of the upright 22-inch wicket demanded defence by a straight bat—that is to say, at first, merely a bat straight in itself. The gospel of the left elbow up and the meeting of the ball with bat at the perpendicular had not been preached thus early.

And I take it that virtually cricket, worthy to be called by any such great name, did not really begin before this. This game of trundling along the ground at a two-foot wide wicket, and a man with a hockey-stick defending it, is really rather a travesty of the great and glorious game. The origin of cricket it was, no doubt, and as such is to be most piously revered, but actual cricket—hardly. Consider that old print of a game in progress on the Artillery Fields, where the players are equipped with the curved bats, wear knee-breeches, and the wicket is low and wide, with two stumps upright and one across. There is not a fieldsman on the off side of the wicket—a significant fact in itself; but further, and far more significant, a spectator is reclining on the ground, entirely at his ease, precisely in the position that point would occupy to-day. There can be but one meaning to this picture—that such a thing as off hitting was absolutely unknown. Possibly it was difficult enough to hit to the off, even with the best intentions, off these bats like bandy-sticks; it is at all events certain that it was a style of stroke not contemplated by the gentleman reclining on the ground.

I have spoken above of the bat as an instrument of defence. So to style it when writing of this era is to commit an anachronism. The earlier cricketers, even of the straight-bat epoch, were guiltless of the very notion of defence. They were all for aggression, trying to score off every ball. The reason of this was, no doubt, in the first place that the idea of merely stopping the ball had not occurred to them—partly because the object of the game is to score, and because the bandy-stick style of bat must have been singularly ill designed for defence; but also there is this further reason, that chance was much more on the batsman’s side in the old days than it is now. Nowadays, if a ball is straight and the batsman misses it, it is a simple matter of cause and effect that the bails are sent flying and he is out. But with the wicket 2 feet wide, and no middle stump, this was by no means so inevitable. On the contrary, it must have been a very frequent occurrence for the ball to pass through the wicket without any disturbance of the timber. Even when the wicket was narrowed to 6 inches, there was still room for the ball to pass between the stumps, of which the fortune of the before-mentioned Small was a celebrated and flagrant instance. The old-time batsman was therefore not so essentially concerned with seeing that no straight ball got past his bat. He did not bother himself about defence. He gallantly tried to score off every ball that came to him.

Yet, for all that, his slogging was not like the slogging of to-day. He had no idea of jumping in and taking the ball at the half-volley. His notions went no further than staying in his ground and making the best he could of the ball in such fashion as it was pleased to come to him.

“These men”—the “old players,” so called in 1780—says Mr. Pycroft, quoting the authority of Beldham, backed by that of Fennex, “played puddling about their crease, and had no freedom. I like to see a player upright and well forward, to face the ball like a man”—at this time of day, the wicket had lately been raised from 1 foot to 2 feet high, but had for some while been only 6 inches wide, a small mark for the bowler.

Mr. Pycroft goes on, quoting Beldham again: “There was some good hitting in those days”—towards the close of the eighteenth century is the date alluded to, as far as I can make out—“though too little defence. Tom Taylor would cut away in fine style, almost after the manner of Mr. Budd. Old Small was among the first members of the Hambledon Club. He began to play about 1750, and Lumpy Stevens at the same time. I can give you some notion, sir, of what cricket was in those days, for Lumpy, a very bad bat, as he was well aware, once said to me, ‘Beldham, what do you think cricket must have been in those days when I was thought a good batsman?’”

This is instructive comment, as to the style of batting previous to 1780—that is the date that it appears we must fix for the change of style that brought batting in touch with modern theories. But by the way we ought to notice that Beldham spoke of the fielding as being very good, even in the oldest days of his recollection, and Mr. Pycroft is careful to add a note saying that this praise from Beldham was high praise indeed, and eminently to be trusted, as Beldham’s own hands were also eminently to be trusted, whether for fielding the ball on the ground or for a catch.

But with the year 1780 we come to a new era in the art of batting, associated more particularly with the name and art of a famous bowler, David Harris, the association being again an illustration of the truth, which has several times already been in evidence, that it is the bowling that is the efficient cause in educating the batsman—that it is the bowling that “makes the batting.”

“Nowadays,” said Beldham to Mr. Pycroft, “all the world knows that”—namely, that the upright bat and the left elbow up and forward is the right principle of batting—“but when I began there was very little length bowling, little straight play, and very little defence either.”

Beldham was a boy in 1780, and even before this, Harry Hall, the gingerbread-baker of Farnham, of immortal memory, was going about the country preaching the great truths about batting. May be he was but little listened to. At all events it is certain that until men had the straight bat to play with and the length bowling to contend with there can have been little opportunity or demand for straight batting.

“The first lobbing slow bowler I ever saw was Tom Walker,” Beldham says. “When, in 1792, England played Kent, I did feel so ashamed of such baby bowling, but after all he did more than even David Harris himself. Two years after, in 1794, at Dartford Brent, Tom Walker, with his slow bowling, headed a side against David Harris, and beat him easily.”

And this Walker, by the way, was a wonderful fellow in more departments of the game than one. A terrible stick, but very hard to get out—very slow between wickets, so that one of the old jokers said to him, “Surely you are well named Walker, for you are not much of a runner”—a moderate jest, but showing the sort of man he was. Then he was “bloodless,” they said. However he was hit about the shins or fingers, he never showed a mark. Only David Harris, that terrible bowler, made the ball jump up and grind Tom Walker’s fingers against the handle of the bat; but all Tom Walker did then was to rub his finger in the dust to stanch the reluctant flow of blood. It is all very grim and Homeric. David Harris, rather maliciously, said he liked to “rind Tom,” as if he were a tree stem withered and gnarled. And it is a marvellous fact that a man of this character, whom you would call conservative to the core of his hard-grained timber, should actually have invented something new. But he did. He first tried the “throwing-bowling,” the round-arm, which was credited to Willes—probably an independent invention, and so meriting equal honour—many years after. Well may Nyren speak of the Walkers, Tom and Harry, as those “anointed clod-stumpers.” Harry was a hitter, his “half-hour was as good as Tom’s afternoon.”

And meanwhile what has become of David Harris? David Harris, it is said, once bowled him 170 balls for one run. And what manner of balls were these? Let us consider a moment a description of David Harris’s bowling culled from Nyren. Parts of it lend themselves to the gaiety of nations, and the whole description, if not very lucid, is full of terror. “It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to convey in writing an accurate idea of the grand effect of Harris’s bowling”—the effect, as a matter of fact, is conveyed a deal more clearly than the way in which it was produced. “They only who have played against him can fully appreciate it. His attitude, when preparing for his run previously to delivering the ball, would have made a beautiful model for the sculptor. Phidias would certainly have taken him as a model. First of all, he stood erect as a soldier at drill; then, with a graceful curve of the arm, he raised the ball to his forehead”—singular and impressive ritual—“and drawing back his right foot, started off with his left. The calm look and general air of the man were uncommonly striking, and from this series of preparations he never deviated. His mode of delivering the ball was very singular. He would bring it from under the arm by a twist, and nearly as high as his arm-pit, and with this action push it, as it were, from him. How it was that the ball acquired the velocity it did by this mode of delivery, I never could comprehend.”

Nor any one else either, for Harris was a very fast bowler. But I am inclined to think that there must have been some explanation to be discovered out of the fact that he was by profession—before cricket became his profession—a potter. With the strength of fingers that the potter acquires through working at his clay, he may have had the power of putting an amount of spin on the ball impossible for men whose digits had not gone through this course of training. In underhand bowling such as, after all is said, Harris’s must have been, the spin is almost entirely the work of fingers. The turn of wrist had little share in it; for one thing, it was forbidden to deliver the ball with the knuckles uppermost.

And so it may well have been that, whatever the pace with which the ball was propelled, by these singular and statuesque means, through the air, it may have carried so much spin as to leap up twice as fast off the ground, as a billiard ball with much side on will seem to gain twice as much life after touching a cushion. And all that we read of Harris’s bowling shows that the balls did come off the ground with tremendous speed.

“His balls,” says Nyren, in another place, “were very little beholden to the ground when pitched; it was but a touch, and up again, and woe be to the man who did not get in to block them, for they had such a peculiar curl that they would grind his fingers against the bat. Many a time have I seen the blood drawn in this way from a batter who was not up to the trick. Old Tom Walker was the only exception. I have before classed him among the bloodless animals.”

We have seen, however, that even from him Harris occasionally drew blood.

In Harris’s day it was the custom for the bowler to choose the wicket, and it was always his preference to have a bump to pitch on, and so help this rising tendency of the ball off the pitch. Of course this would be the recognised aim of a bowler of to-day, but it was not so recognised then, and indeed Stevens, nicknamed “Lumpy,” generally regarded as the second-best bowler to Harris of his day, always liked to bowl “o’er a brow” in order to make his balls shoot. The result was, as Nyren points out, that Lumpy—Lumpy of the honestly avowed preference for bowling “o’er a brow”—would hit the wicket oftener, but that more catches were given off Harris, though his balls often went over the wicket. But there was no manner of doubt as to which was the finer bowler. Harris was the man.

And now as to its effect on the batting. Notice these words of Beldham, for really they contain the kernel of the whole matter: “Woe be to the man who did not get in to block them, for they had such a peculiar curl that they would grind his fingers against the bat.”

And again he says the same in more distinct words: “To Harris’s fine bowling I attribute the great improvement that was made in hitting, and above all in stopping, for it was utterly impossible to remain at the crease, when the ball was tossed to a fine length; you were obliged to get in, or it would be about your hands, or the handle of your bat, and every player knows where its next place would be.”

In this connection Mr. Pycroft writes as follows: “‘Fennex,’ said he”—“he” being Beldham again—“‘Fennex was the first who played out at balls; before his day, batting was too much about the crease.’ Beldham said that his own supposed tempting of Providence consisted in running in to hit. ‘You do frighten me there jumping out of your ground,’ said our Squire Paulet; and Fennex used also to relate how, when he played forward to the pitch of the ball, his father ‘had never seen the like in all his days,’ the said days extending a long way back towards the beginning of the century. While speaking of going in to hit, Beldham said: ‘My opinion has always been that too little is attempted in that direction. Judge your ball, and when the least overpitched, go in and hit her away.’ In this opinion Mr. C. Taylor’s practice would have borne Beldham out, and a fine dashing game this makes; only, it is a game for none but practised players. When you are perfect in playing in your ground, then, and then only, try how you can play out of it, as the best means to scatter the enemy and open the field.”

So says Mr. Pycroft, a very high authority, and one whose instructions to the batsman are very sound and worthy of the very highest respect. No doubt he is right in his cautious counsel—human nature is prone to err on the side of rashness—but he does not notice the indisputable fact that it is easier to meet the ball at the pitch, if you can reach it, than later—always supposing it is not a rank long hop. He is rather inclined to treat this principle of getting out to the pitch as a counsel of perfection, and perhaps it is more easily put in practice now that wickets are more perfect than in his day, though if you really go out far enough—and unless you can get so far as to command the ball, however it break, it is surely better not to go out at all—the most troublesome ball has not time to develop much of its dangerous eccentricity before you have met it. Of course there is always the chance of missing it, and then there’s the wicket-keeper’s opportunity.

But, all details of prudence apart, there is no doubt that we have here a totally new departure in batting, devised, as is usual, to meet some new requirements on the part of the bowler. A very kindly, genial, remarkably honest man—a really loveable man—was this potter, David Harris, though he did say, in chaff, that he liked to “rind” Tom Walker, and certainly he was an epoch-making bowler, for he made the ball come off the ground with an underhand action in the very way that is the study of our overhanders. He was a good sportsman too, and when he had the pitching of the wicket, tried to give Lumpy, at the other end, a brow to bowl over, while he chose for himself a brow to pitch against. No one ever seems to have hinted that Harris’s action was a jerk, though there were jerkers in the world in those days.

Beldham and Fennex, then, were the first to pick up the new style of going in to meet the pitch of the ball, and so prevent its jumping up “and grinding their fingers on the bat.” Hitherto there had been good hitting, but all inside the crease, cutting and drawing to leg. Small had his bat straightened for the special purpose of making the draw stroke better. But hitherto there had been no idea of driving a shorter ball than a half-volley. Now first was developed the idea of going in to drive the ball and of forward defensive play; and therewith, as I conceive, the batsman’s art became, in its principles, pretty much as Mr. Warner found it when his school coach began his education.