VILLAGE CRICKET

By C. F. Wood

Constant readers of the Pall Mall Gazette will not have missed a most amusing article on “Yokels at Cricket,” which appeared over the initials “R. E. M.” during the summer of this year of grace 1902. With a felicity of exaggeration which would do credit to Mark Twain, the writer describes his experiences on a pitch where the blocks were too large to begin with, and too numerous; where all that could be said of the fielding was that the men in the lost-ball region did their ferreting well; and where the fast ball shot, rose five feet, and shot again. Sometimes, he pathetically adds, the five-feet rise came last.

Something of this kind possibly still exists in the remoter parts of our sportive country, but as it is my intention in the present paper to set down nothing about village cricket that has not come within the scope of my own experience, I must forego at the outset the attractions of these humorous irrelevancies, and speak the truth as far as I know it, even at the risk of making my contribution to this historic work unnecessarily serious.

For the same reason I must deny myself the pleasure of dishing up once more the innumerable funny stories about village cricket that appear periodically in books of this kind; and I have further registered a solemn vow to leave the top-hat period severely alone, and make no reference to Fuller Pilch, Caffyn, Mynn, or any other belted heroes of prehistoric days. So what it comes to is this: I am going to put down here my own experiences and opinions of village cricket as it is played to-day by my own village eleven, of which I have the honour to be captain, and if the result turns out unsatisfactory and of little interest, kindly believe that the fault lies in my incapacity of expression, not in any lack of excitement in the cricket. That at least is beyond reproach.

Please don’t think from the above that, unlike the heroines of most of our modern stuffy plays, our club has no past! On the contrary, I have before me now the accounts of our village club right back to 29th July 1865, when we expended the sum of £1: 7s. in the following irreproachable manner:—

Four shillings apiece for the umpire’s and scorer’s “dinner” may seem expensive in these modern half-crown days, but judging from the next entry, we can only consider it an exceptionally moderate occasion. On 21st September of the same year, when, if we may judge by 1902, the summer was just beginning, the same entry reads:—

Dinner for ditto, scorer, and beer £0 11 0

Whether the extra 3s. represents the amount of liquid refreshment required by the umpire and scorer alone, or in conjunction with those acting in similar capacities on the other side, whose integrity they thus thought to drown, does not transpire from the account.

All these and many other like interesting matters are at the disposal of the gentleman who may still do for Kent cricket what Lord Alverstone and C. W. Alcock have done for Surrey in their Surrey Cricket, just published; but I must not break through my self-imposed rule and enlarge any further on these exploits of bygone days. Good old Kent! Where is the historian that shall do justice to your past glories? Or is it that the part is after all greater than the whole, and that when Philip Norman finished West Kent Cricket, there was nothing left unsaid?

Now of all the various sorts of cricket that are played in and out of this country, I am prepared to maintain against all the writers in this or any other book that village cricket is at once the most amusing to watch, the most exciting to play, and of the greatest educational value to the English race. Notice, I do not call it the most scientific form of the game, though there is a special sort of science required to finish a match between 3 and 7 P.M. every Saturday afternoon! Let us first compare it, from a spectator’s point of view, with county cricket; and it will help to emphasise my point if I quote one or two reports of county matches culled at random from the daily press in August this year:—

Notts v. Kent, at Nottingham. “Kent, holding a lead of 91 runs on their first innings, did not hurry themselves unduly in their second venture. Dillon took forty minutes to register a couple of singles”!

Leicester v. Sussex, at Brighton. “On Saturday, Dr. Macdonald was in three hours and three-quarters for 48 runs, having in the previous innings made 33 in about two hours. In other words, he was batting five hours and forty-five minutes for 81 runs”! And the poor reporter adds drowsily, “It was a terribly monotonous performance.”

Is not this a veritable caricature of cricket? Why, rather than watch such a game drag its dreary trail over three summer days, I would vow never to go near a ground again, and take to German skittles. Compare this “terribly monotonous performance” with the compressed interest of a whole match completed in four hours on a village green, with the supporters of each eleven shouting each other down, as the sun sinks all too rapidly in the western sky, and both runs and wickets are freely given away as the excitement rises to fever pitch. Which would you rather do, candid reader, if you had the choice? Stand on your hind legs in the field all one day, sit and smoke your tongue sore in the pavilion all the next, with a chance of getting a knock on the third, or join our village eleven on Saturday afternoon, and have four certain hours of unadulterated joy? Well, most of us would choose the county eleven, I suppose, though we should find it weary work.

But here it strikes me I am poaching on other people’s preserves, and before I commit the indiscretion of mentioning country-house cricket, which is a subject my friend Mr. H. D. G. Leveson-Gower is treating in his usual masterly way, let me hasten back to my own little corner, from which I was an ass to stray.

And yet, having gone so far, I ought perhaps to explain why I consider village cricket to be of so great an educational value to our race. And by education I do not mean the mechanical stuffing of an unwilling agent with knowledge for which he can never have any possible use, but rather the formation of all those characteristics which help to build up what we call a man—pluck, temper, self-restraint, respect for others, abnegation of self, et hoc genus omne. Now the people who play first-class cricket are divided into two categories—those with means and leisure who play for love of it and because they are good at it, and those who play because they are good at it and can make a living out of it; and though most of the above virtues can be cultivated to a certain extent in a team made up of these two classes, yet it is certain that the same spirit does not animate an eleven of amateurs and professionals as will work wonders in a village team made up of every rank in life, the parson, the cobbler, the squire’s son, and the blacksmith, all playing on an absolute equality, all playing for their side and not for themselves, all playing for glory and none for averages or talent-money.

And now I really must tell you a little about our own village club. In the old days we always used to play on the Common, where the turf was excellent and the boundaries out of sight; but as London got nearer and nearer, and every train belched forth a volume of trippers right across the ground, we had to shift our quarters, and for £10 a year we now have a large but not exclusive interest in a ten-acre field. A large square, capable of providing about a dozen good wickets during the summer, is enclosed with posts and chains, and the patient labour of our groundman and umpire (who in his leisure hours is also a shoemaker and a lamplighter) is year by year producing better results. For although it is unwise to have a perfect pitch for half-day cricket, yet, on the other hand, it must not be dangerous, and with the limited means at the disposal of a village club, the happy medium is not easy to attain. As the seasons roll on, patches are repaired with turf “sneaked” from the Common, weeds are removed (some of them), manure and fine soil is bush-harrowed in, seed is sown, and every summer we congratulate ourselves that, if not yet quite like the Oval (which we do not want it to be!), at all events our ground is the envy of our neighbours. I should add that this year (1902) we had a whip-up and laid the water on, but only used it twice!

Perhaps, in connection with our wicket, I may be allowed to recount a little reminiscence, still fresh in my memory, of the days when the pitch was not what it is now. A short-tempered and fiery member of an opposing team was batting, as he always did, in spectacles, when a rising ball from our local Lockwood hit him right in the face. Seeing what I supposed was his eye drop out on the pitch, I dashed forward to field and return it, only to discover one glass of the spectacles unbroken on the turf. Beyond a cut on the bridge of his nose, the man had suffered no hurt, but it was long before he paid us another visit, or the scorched grass recovered from his language.

It is not necessary, but it is useful, to have some sort of a pavilion, even for Saturday afternoon matches, and we were lucky to get, some five or six years ago, for the cost of removal, an old Norwegian house, built of wood, with a corrugated iron roof, which suited our purpose admirably. It originally consisted of three rooms, two bed-rooms and a sitting-room between, and, by putting all the windows in the side facing the ground, altering the doors, and fitting up the interior with lockers, washing-places, store-room for the groundman, bat-racks, etc., we have quite sufficient accommodation for our purpose. We are also the proud possessors of a tea-tent, where every Saturday throughout the season, when there is a home match, our kind lady friends provide our opponents and ourselves with an excellent tea. This smacks perhaps of luxury, and wastes a little time, but you must remember that our matches are nearly always over before the time for drawing stumps arrives, and it is a great attraction for those of us who do not always get such a good tea for nothing! But more than this, it makes our weekly matches a cheery social gathering, it provides an enthusiastic gallery of lady friends and admirers, and thus adds a charm to the natural beauty of our ground which we should be extremely sorry to lose. In fact, I attribute much of the prosperity of our club to the kind interest of the ladies in the village, who do so much for us, and I should like to see their excellent example more generally followed elsewhere.

Well, now we have got our ground, our pavilion, and our tea-tent, what about our officials and our members, and the all-important question of “subscription”? We have a president, captain, vice-captain, secretary, treasurer, and a committee of six members, all being elected fresh every season at the annual meeting. However, so far as my five years’ experience goes, no change has been made except to fill up vacancies caused by death or removal, and the meeting is a merely formal affair where we re-elect each other en bloc! The president in our case has always been the persona, or parson, of the parish, and where there is a curate, he is the best man, in my opinion, for the secretaryship. The advantages of this arrangement are obvious, for he is probably the only gentleman in the place who is there all day; he knows where all the villagers live, and it is easier for him than any one else to go round and get up the teams. For however much you print on your match-cards that “members wishing to play in any match should send in their names to the captain before Thursday evening,” or words to that effect, the fact remains that no villager has ever yet been known to offer to play; and though a man may be thirsting for a place in a certain match, and would be seriously hurt if he were not asked, yet the only reply he will make to your pressing invitation is a half-hearted, “Well, I don’t mind if I do”! But, if the curate is not a good player, he should content himself with his secretarial duties, and not appear in the field. However excellent he may be in other ways, if he cannot hold a catch or keep his bat decently straight, he ought not to give the enemy occasion to blaspheme. As Dean Hole says in answer to his own question, “Is it right for a clergyman to hunt?” “On one immutable condition—that you ride straight to hounds.” We limit our committee to six members, chosen from every walk in life—a merchant, a farmer, a solicitor, a gardener, and so on—and in the diversity of opinions there is sometimes much wisdom. As a matter of fact, I have never found gardeners, as a class, of very much use in connection with cricket. They may know a little about turf, but, barring a few exceptions, they do not make good players. The reasons are not far to seek. From the very nature of their work, they have fewer opportunities than others of taking part either in practice or matches: in summer, there is always a lot of mowing, watering, and so on to do, and when a man has been working with his back, arms, and legs all day, he feels little inclined for more violent exertion. This too is probably why they are slower in their movements and clumsier with their hands and feet than most other people. But at least they take their waistcoats off, which a stableman never does. Now, why is that? It is almost a rule without an exception that a man who works in the stable in trousers, belt, and shirt, adds a waistcoat to his outfit before he goes in to bat. Still, waistcoat or no waistcoat, he is generally bright and quick, and with practice makes a smart field. Perhaps the best village cricketers, taking them all round, are recruited from the ranks of carpenters, footmen, blacksmiths, and schoolmasters, rather than from the stables and the gardens, but in any case it’s more than half the battle to get them young. There must be disappointments, of course. Some of the most promising boys lose their interest in the game when they think they are men, and become loafers; some go out to work in other places, and the team knows them no more; but you are amply repaid if two or three of one generation at last find their strength, and after a year or more of painstaking duck-eggs suddenly blossom out into consistent scorers, to the no small astonishment of their friends and their own huge delight. Don’t think from this that we set too much store by good batting. On the contrary, all our matches (and other people’s too!) are won or lost by fielding, and I can never tell my men too often that it does not do to give your opponent two, or even three, lives, when he has made up his mind to take yours at the very first opportunity. Only, as at golf the good drive gives one the greatest pleasure, though the high approach may be the prettiest shot, and the deadly put wins the hole, so at cricket the greatest pleasure of the greatest number is to make lots of runs, though they may not be wanted, when a good catch in the deep field or a smart return may win the match.

I mentioned just now the ominous word “subscription.” The question of finance is one which must enter to a large extent into the prosperity of a village, or any other, club, and happy those who have enough cloth to cut to ensure their coats fitting! In our own case we generally seem to have succeeded in making both ends meet, though, as will be seen from the following typical years’ figures, times were not always prosperous:—

I ought to add that these amounts represent only annual subscriptions and current expenses, and do not include special collections made for special purposes, such as enclosing the pitch in posts and chains, laying on the water, and so on. If a “round robin” is not sufficient to cover these extras, I generally find a good village concert in the winter is sufficient to wipe off any deficit. We have a minimum subscription for the villagers of 2s. 6d. a year, which is readily paid when they find it is a sine qua non; but the rule must be rigidly enforced, even to the exclusion of your best bowler, if he prove refractory! The amount collected in this way is of course trifling, yet without it I believe the club would very soon stop for want of members; for it is the experience of all who have many dealings with their village neighbours, that they do not value or take any interest in the thing which costs them nothing. Free education has been a sufficient curse to our villages without giving them free cricket too! The rest of our income is collected by the lamplighting, shoemaking, groundman and umpire, who goes round with a book to all the houses in the parish at what he considers the psychological moment, generally after dinner in the evening; for which extra labour he is accorded a commission of 1s. in the pound collected. The details of expenditure require no elucidation; they are the same in all cricket clubs; only the healthy countryman, with plenty of muscle, but no skill to apply it, will require at least twice as many bats every season as an ordinary cricketer. And mind you, they don’t go at the edges; they come right in half. Is it the stiff wrist? But when all is said and done, what fun it is! I have played most sorts of cricket—country-house cricket, club cricket, touring with my old school eleven, and so on, and once I even appeared for the county second eleven, when I was run out by a local tradesman before I had a ball; but none of them ever touched village cricket for pure, unadulterated amusement. My earliest recollection takes me back to a pretty little ground not far from Croydon, where a local schoolmaster enjoyed a great reputation as a demon underhand bowler. It was not so much the pace or the pitch that proved so disastrous to the batsmen, as the man himself. He looked destructive from the moment he began his run, and as soon as the ball was delivered he used to ejaculate fiercely, “That’s got yer!” Whether such a remark at such a critical moment was entirely in accordance with the customs of the game, it never entered our heads to inquire; we only knew it generally had the desired effect.

It was on this same ground, I remember, that Edward Norman, one of a distinguished family of Kent sportsmen, coming in last when his side wanted six runs to win, hit the first ball he received, a straight one well up, clean out of the ground to square leg, over the boundary road and a high wall into the kitchen garden of the local squire.

Here too the head gardener of the same squire annually disports himself in spotless white, to his own huge gratification and the vast amusement of his numerous underlings. Not that they would dare to smile while the august eye is on them, for he is an autocrat in his way, and can both look and say unutterable things. Once, I remember, when he was taking part in a Married v. Single match, one of the under-gardeners had the misfortune to clean bowl him for a duck. He looked first at his shattered wicket, then at the spot where the ball had pitched, and proceeded to march solemnly towards the trembling and penitent bowler. We held our breath, fully expecting that some fearful tragedy was to be enacted, and that, having first brained the poor man with his bat, he would follow it up by giving him the sack on the spot. But when he had reached the middle of the pitch, he pulled himself together in the most dignified way, merely remarked, “Well bowled!” and stalked off to the pavilion. So even in his moment of defeat he was superior to most of us, for I have noticed it is generally considered etiquette in this class of cricket to run to shelter as fast as you can, if you have taken no exercise between the wickets.

It would be in the highest degree imprudent for any one in my position to say a word against country umpires. And, to give them their due, I have almost always found them, in what some would call these degenerate modern days, to be as accurate and as honest as their brethren in more exalted spheres; but there are brilliant exceptions! “To play eleven men and an umpire” is, I am told, a chestnut in Gloucestershire, and one story I can vouch for certainly bears out the theory. It was a match between two old-standing village rivals, and contrary to custom, the visiting team turned up with twelve men, owing to the unexpected arrival of a fairly good player. Another member of the team, conscious of his own weakness, but with perhaps more cunning than good-nature, promptly offered to stand down, “for,” said he, with a sly wink to his captain, “I can be of more use to the side if I umpire!” That comes from Gloucestershire, but it is easily beaten by the remark of the real umpire in a village match in Oxfordshire last August. “How’s that?” shouted the wicket-keeper proudly, as he captured the ball straight off the edge of the bat. “Not out,” said the umpire, “but it was a damned fine catch if he hit it.” I do not wish for a moment to insinuate that our friends in the north are not always the good sportsmen we believe them to be, so we will put the following tale under the head of “exceptions.” The match, a two-day one, was being played at Whitehaven, in Cumberland; things had gone badly with the home team, and all the morning of the second day the local umpire had been engineering his opponents out in the most courageous way. But to everybody’s astonishment, when a confident appeal was made against the last man on the side, he gave him “Not out.” Struck by this sudden conversion, a friend asked him what the meaning of it was. “Well,” he said, “if I’d a given ‘im out, they wouldn’t ‘a stayed to loonch, and my father does the caterin’”!

In one of the keenest matches I ever took part in (it was on the 16th of August 1902, and we won by four runs), two men of the opposite side were batting, one a very fair bat, and dangerous when set, the other a dubious quantity at all times. The bowler sent down a fast one to leg which the wicket-keeper failed to stop, and both men started for a bye. Meanwhile, short slip, backing up, had stopped the ball, and threw the near wicket down, while both men were apparently in the middle of the pitch. The good batsman refused to go, and the indifferent one apparently held no views on the subject, but stayed where he was, while the two umpires (I blush to record it) gave, almost unasked, an opinion favourable to their respective sides. Party feeling was running high, but I never allow any discussion in the field, and it was properly left to the umpire at the end where the wicket had been broken to give a decision. Unfortunately, it was their umpire, and the weak batsman had to go! And it was a fair decision. There was obviously a doubt, and he gave his own side the benefit of it. Who could do more? But we had our revenge on the gentleman who refused to go. He hit a lovely half-volley to square leg, which did not quite reach the boundary. My man was after it like a hare, and while they were trying to get the fourth run, he threw the wicket down full pitch from where he picked up the ball, at least 90 yards off, and with only one stump visible. A fluke, of course, but when I complimented him afterwards on his brilliant performance, which practically won us the match, he simply said, “Oh! that’s nothing, sir; I was always a bit of a slinger”!

Our great annual event is, of course, the Married v. Single match, which takes place on the last Saturday of the season. In the old days, when we played on the Common, this was the occasion of what one might almost describe as a village orgie. Men turned up from everywhere, who never honoured the club with their patronage at other times, some even dressed, most appropriately, as clowns, and the cricket was distinctly of the “Dan Leno at the Oval” variety. Well, well, Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. It was doubtless very amusing, but there were objections, latterly even objectors (whether of the conscientious variety or not doesn’t matter), and the present tea-tent is in every way preferable to its rival “down the road.” So we play on our own field now, and get a very fair amount of amusement out of it, even without the clowns. I have tried for years to get up some sort of a representative married team before the day of the match, but it’s no use. They are all too old, or too stiff, or too busy. Yet when the eventful afternoon arrives, there are generally some fourteen or fifteen Benedicts ready to do battle for the honour of their wives and families, against a meagre dozen or so of the less fortunate Bachelors. Public enthusiasm, at all times keen in village cricket, reaches its high-water mark on this great day, and the ladies especially assemble in large numbers to do honour to the brave. Sympathy is invariably and entirely with the married men—I suppose because part of the audience are the wives of the team now stripping for the fray, and the other part hope that by next summer at latest they will be in the same proud position. On paper there can be no question that the Bachelors have the strongest side, but against their youth, their practice, and their skill we place our experience and our considerable numerical advantage, so there is not much in it. Then again, they look rather contemptuously at our weather-beaten ranks; say we have no bowling, can’t run (two of us are over seventy, certainly!), and are altogether as sorry a collection of prehistoric peeps as ever took the field. Nous verrons! The Bachelors win the toss and start batting. An old man of sixty-seven, who has recently contracted a second matrimonial alliance to make sure of his place in the team, asks to keep wicket, and after buckling on a pair of lovely old faded yellow pads, he goes to say “Good-bye” to his new “missus,” and get her to pull his waistcoat down and stuff it inside the back of his trousers (this I saw myself). Then I arrange the rest of my veterans in a sort of inner and outer circle round the wickets, in places where they are least likely to be hurt, and the game begins. It is true we have no bowling, in the modern sense of the term, but it’s quite good enough for the Bachelors. At one end I put on our village umpire, who bowls fast straight underhand, literally “daisy-cutters,” and at the other a newly-married groom, just come into the parish, whose methods are precisely the same. Scoring is out of the question. You may stop the ball as long as your patience lasts, but you can’t get it away, and wicket after wicket falls, as the pick of my village eleven try in vain to turn fast sneaks into slow half-volleys. I feel quite sorry for them when the end comes, and twelve promising young cricketers, with “Mr. Extras,” have all been dismissed for 76. Then our turn comes, and the umpire and I make a good start by putting on 30 for the first wicket. But it’s not all over yet! Six wickets fall for an additional 9 runs, and the audience begins to hold its breath. We have still eight or nine batsmen, but can they possibly make 5 runs apiece? We are soon put out of suspense. The groom goes in for hitting, knocks up 15 in a few minutes, which demoralises the field, the best bowler is taken off at the critical moment, and the rest is easy. We have had a most thrilling afternoon’s cricket, and no one is any the worse except the old wicket-keeper, who is so stiff he cannot come downstairs for two days.

I feel I ought to apologise for appearing in such august company as this book affords, but it is our cheery editor’s doing, not mine. My enthusiasm for the subject is the only excuse I can offer, and that he has kindly accepted, so I need say no more. Only I shall always regret that no more capable pen than mine was found to do justice to such an inspiring theme as “Village Cricket.”