Part 6

Then there was the Kent match in ’21, when Middlesex, with the championship to win, made over three hundred runs in four hours, to win the match; then the great battle four days later against Surrey. And as I correct these proofs I feel that, in spite of the printer’s bill, it would be ungenerous in me to pay no tribute to the second day of this year’s Sussex game at Lord’s. It began dingily enough, with a dull sky and a cold wind, and H. L. Dales taking ninety minutes to make sixteen. But fortunately I spent that first hour or so in the warm comfort of a tube. And after lunch the sun came out; the cricket became exciting, and the afternoon grew into one of the happiest that I have ever spent at Lord’s. The excitement, curiously enough, was focussed on a battle for a first innings lead. Usually one does not enthuse about points on the first innings. But one is out to enjoy oneself on a Whit Monday. There is in the presence of a big crowd the contagion of a herd emotion. And certainly the cricket was very good. Sussex is the best fielding side in England; I am not certain that J. W. Hearne is not to-day the finest batsman in the world. And the afternoon was a long struggle between Hearne and Sussex.

I have not the exact figures by me, but Middlesex wanted some 311 runs for their two points, and seven wickets were down with the follow-on still unsaved, when Twining came in to partner Hearne. On some of his partners Hearne must, I think, exert a magnetic influence. Certainly Twining, when he is in with him, looks and is a fifty per cent. better player than when Lee or Hendren is at the other end. He has never done anything comparable with the great partnership with Hearne that won Middlesex the championship in 1921. Indeed, I rather think that his fifty-seven not out that Whit Monday afternoon is his second highest score in a county match. A useful rather than a good innings, perhaps, but he stayed there; and I doubt if I ever saw a finer innings than Hearne’s 140.

Some people find Hearne dull, as some people find Tolstoy dull. He has not the volcanic, the eruptive vigour of Hendren and Dostoieffsky. He is moving with a complete economy of effort towards a very distant point. Where other batsmen think in fifties, he thinks in double centuries. He knows exactly what he is doing all the time. Batsmen like Holmes and Mead and Ducat get there somehow in the end; but they have not all the time the end in view, or rather, perhaps, the spectator as he watches them, has not the end in view. Holmes, whether he makes a cypher or a century, never looks anything but an ordinary player. Hearne is a great batsman the moment he walks on to the field. No one who knows anything about cricket could see him play one stroke and have any doubts as to his quality.

But it was after Hearne was out leg-before to Gilligan and Murrell had failed, that the excitement really started. Twelve runs were wanted, I think, when Durston came in to bat. They got them somehow, amazingly, but they got them. There was a shriek of hysterical excitement every time the ball hit the middle of the bat and trickled safely to mid on. There were byes, and there was an overthrow, and miraculously Durston turned Gilligan to leg and along the ground. It is the only good stroke that I have ever seen him make. Sometimes I think I am uncharitable to Durston. “He is not so awfully bad,” I tell myself, “not worse, really, than Mignon was, or Rushby. It is only that there is so much of him to look incompetent.” And then I see him bat again and I say, “No, really he is absolutely the worst, without exception the worst. There can be no man living whom the captain could, save as a practical joke, put in No. 11 for a side of which Durston was a member.” But on Whit Monday, when he made that stroke for two off Gilligan, he was cheered as has rarely any stroke by Hobbs been cheered, and the large, jolly, holiday crowd poured homewards the happier for his batting.

Every summer has its own landmarks, its own sensations, its own big matches; even this cold and miserable spring of numb fingers and dropped catches. There is no season so poor that we cannot look back to it for some things gratefully. And the future will be as good; better, perhaps. And yet----. I wonder whether ever again there will be a day at Lord’s to equal that of the 31st of August three years ago.

No cricketer will need me to remind him of what happened then, or to retell the story of “Plum” Warner’s last and greatest match. Enough to say that it was the most dramatic, the most fitting thing that has happened in any sport in any country. If no championship even had been at stake it would have been a great, a memorable match. With the championship dependent on the result it was a titanic battle. But with the added sentiment of Warner’s last appearance--such things come only once in a generation.

I was not there on the first day. I was playing cricket at Hayward’s Heath, and I remember the excitement with which I tore open the first issue of the _Evening Argus_ to see which side had won the toss. Middlesex batting. I gave a sigh of relief. That will be all right, I thought. A plumb wicket. The Surrey bowling is weak. They took all day yesterday to get out Northampton. There will be three hundred on the board by six o’clock; and then came edition after edition with the news that things were not going well at Lord’s. Lee out, Hearne out. Hendren only 41; 109 for 5; 149 for 6. And then tardily in the last issue news of a stand starting between Warner and Greville Stevens.

But even so, it was not good enough. To bat all day and only make 250. And all through the Monday I watched hour by hour the match and championship slip away. Catches were put down; the bowling had no sting. And in the intervals one read on the tape machine of the manner of mess that Lancashire were making of Worcester in the north. I left the ground when Fender declared his innings closed. Seventy-three runs behind. Only a day left for play. We could make a draw of it probably if we wanted to. But only with a win could we win the championship. It was no use. It was over. Better not see the end.

And yet I went down there on the Tuesday. There was still a chance; should we win, I should never forgive myself had I not been there to cheer the team. And hope came back to me when I met “Skipper” Pawling on the steps of the pavilion. “It’s all right, my boy,” he said; “it’s all right. We’ll just manage it.” Mrs Warner had come down with white heather for the professionals. And I can still hear the eager, high-pitched tension of her voice, “We shall do it, shan’t we, Mr Pawling.” I am not certain that Sydney Pawling is not the most vivid memory to me of that long August day. I can see him drawing his great hand across his mouth; I can see him muttering when Hearne came in to bat, “He’s looking ill; fine drawn. I must send him over some champagne; some champagne.” And I can remember him almost in tears at the end of the day as the Surrey wickets fell.

But then we were all of us, I think, very near to tears at the end of that great evening. When I went to Lord’s for the first time in a sailor suit in the spring of 1904, I cried when Warner’s wicket fell, and I rather think I cried at the end of it all at twenty past six on the thirty-first of August, when the huge crowd swept over the playing field and carried him shoulder high to the pavilion.

Will Lord’s ever see such a scene again? Will Lord’s ever again know anything to equal the excitement of that last hour, from the moment when Hendren caught Shepherd high over his left shoulder as he backed against the screen? It was the turning-point, that catch. In half the time Surrey had got half the runs, and only two wickets had gone down. Then came that catch which only Hendren could have held off a stroke that from the other end would have been a six. It was a match again. Fender came in next; there was an awful hush. Half an hour of Fender and the match was Surrey’s. But he hit right across a straight length ball from Durston. 112-4-1. Still there was Peach to come, and Reay, and Hitch and Ducat, with Sandham batting beautifully at the other end. The odds were still on Surrey. But Hearne and Stevens did not fail their captain in that last hour. Hendren, of all people, missed Hitch low down at mid-wicket, but the bowlers could afford to do without their fielders. Wicket after wicket fell. 176 for 9, and Rushby came in, swinging his arms, while the crowd laughed. Rushby, a clown batsman; nothing more. But he stood there, and singles began to come; and one looked at the clock and reminded oneself that Rushby had once stayed in while Crawford put on 80. Twelve runs in ten minutes; would the end never come? Then an unplayable ball from Stevens. It was all over. The ball trickled to short leg. Hearne and Hendren rushed from the slips after it. Hearne got there first, ran with his “souvenir” to the pavilion. And the great crowd swarmed about the wicket.

I do not expect ever to see again anything to equal it. But I am proud and glad to have been there, to have taken part in that tribute to the greatest hearted cricketer the world has ever known.

VI

How many hours during the year, I wonder, must we spend over our _Wisden_? A great many surely, so many, indeed, that we cannot help thinking how small is the literature of cricket. Only two shelves out of thirty. There are one or two novels, _Willow the King_, A. A. Milne’s _The Day’s Play_, a few of Mr Lucas’s Essays, the complete works of P. F. Warner, W. J. Ford’s _Middlesex Cricket_, Lord Harris’s _Lord’s and the M.C.C._, a few volumes of reminiscence, one or two textbooks, P. G. Wodehouse’s delightful _Mike, The Hambleden Men_, and Neville Cardus.

Poor stuff, too, for the most part. The literature of cricket can be divided into two categories. There are the books by men who understand cricket but do not know how to write, and the books by the men who know how to write but do not understand cricket. In the course of a year many books and stories dealing with the game are published, but only rarely in a generation comes combined the sportsman and the man of letters. Whom have we to-day: P. G. Wodehouse; but he prefers to write of golf. A. A. Milne; but he is dabbling in grease paint. E. V. Lucas; but so rarely nowadays. Neville Cardus; yes, the only one, the only genuine one, perhaps. The first man to make literature out of cricket. His essay on Tom Richardson; his description of Maclaren leaving the field for the last time at Eastbourne; his “Greatest Test Match.” They were written for the columns of a daily paper, but there is literature in them, real prose, real melody, real emotion. He is alone, though, Neville Cardus.

Hardly any poetry has been written about the game. There is Thompson’s “Oh, my Hornby and my Barlow Long Ago,” and there is a quantity of verse, pleasant jingly stuff of the drinking-song variety, the best of it valedictory, such as Andrew Lang’s “Beneath the Daisies Now They Lie.” But the few attempts that have been made at serious poetry have not been fortunate. Edward Cracroft Lefroy, for example, to whom cricket appealed chiefly as an æsthetic spectacle, included in his catalogue of the physical attributes of a bowler the

Elbows apt to make the leather spin Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin,

which is not only poor verse but proves on the part of the author an inadequate knowledge of the no-ball rule.

But perhaps verse is not a happy medium through which to express an enjoyment of cricket. Phrases like “unwary shin” will intrude themselves, and, although Pindar used to celebrate with equally appropriate ardour the feats of generals and of athletes, the very idea of commemorating in heroic couplets Woolley’s two great test-match innings at Lord’s seems ridiculous. We have grown so accustomed to reading accounts of cricket matches in the prose style of the sporting press that any other treatment is impossible. Perhaps Mr Masefield will one day attempt an epic of the fifth test match at the Oval, but I doubt if it would be a success. It would be a quaint performance, as though one were to walk down the Strand in court dress of Jacobean cut. The jargon of a cricket report is unsuited to heroic verse, but it is indispensable. If, for instance, we were informed that Hendren,

Snared into over-confidence, stept back, Swinging his bat as though he would eclipse The thundered violence of Albert Trott. Yet had he not correctly judged the flight Of the quick spinning ball. Aghast he heard Behind his back the rattle of the stumps,

we should not be very much the wiser. We should prefer to learn of such a tragedy in straightforward narrative: “Hendren hooked Mailey to the on-boundary twice in succession; but, in an attempt to repeat the stroke to a ball that was pitched farther up to him and that went away with the arm, he was clean bowled.”

Indeed, A. E. Housman’s “On an Athlete Dying Young” is the best serious poem that can be said to interpret any side of cricket, and that poem is written to a runner. But it is universal, for it contains the tragedy of all professional sport:

Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran, And the name died before the man.

Contemporary reference to any cricketer no longer playing is made in the past tense, “Tarrant was ...”; and how many of the enthusiastic Ovalites who recall so eagerly the great days of “Locky and Brocky” pause to consider that their hero is still alive?

The lack of prose literature dealing with cricket is, however, as surprising as it is deplorable. For a hundred years ago the game must have been able to supply an intriguing background for a novel. Lord’s was like Paddington recreation-ground, and, when there was no match, the public were allowed to hire a pitch there for a shilling, a sum that included the use of stumps, bat, and ball; there were no mowing machines then, and the grass was kept down by a flock of sheep, which was penned up on match days. On Saturdays, four or five hundred sheep were driven on to the ground on their way to the Smithfield Market. And then half a dozen small boys would run out and pick out any long grass or thick tufts that were still left. It is not surprising that there were shooters then. And never since the days of the gladiators can there have been such wholesale bribery and corruption as there was in the days of Lord Frederic Beauclerk.

Enormous bets were made. Matches were played for stakes of one thousand guineas a side--in those days no small sum, and professionals found it hard to live on their pay; indeed, they made little effort to; and in big matches where a lot of money was at stake it was not uncommon to find one side trying to get themselves out while their opponents were trying to give them easy balls to make runs off. Indeed Lord Harris tells a story of how two professionals had a dispute at one of the annual general meetings at Lord’s, and in the presence of the noble lords of the M.C.C. such questions as “Who sold the match at Nottingham?” and “Who would bowl at anything but the wicket for Kent?” were bandied about to the consternation, Lord Harris says, “of some of those present who had lost their money contrary to all calculation on the matches referred to”! There were few newspaper reporters then, and things could be done at Old Trafford news of which would come tardily to Lord’s.

The only persons who appear to have remained incorruptible during these early days are, strangely enough, the umpires. Perhaps they put too high a premium on their honesty, and the bookmakers found it cheaper to have dealings with the players, or perhaps there was a general conspiracy of silence, no one being sufficiently without blame to cast a stone. At any rate, the interpreters of the law seem to have given satisfaction, and they can have had no easy time. For it was during these years that the code of rules under which we play to-day was compiled. And it was compiled in a most haphazard fashion. No committee sat over a table and weighed every possible contingency and interpretation of the laws. The authorities were worthy fellows, but lazy and unimaginative. They drew up a rough code and waited for things to happen. If any particular practice began to cause a nuisance they were prepared to put a stop to it. In the meantime let the wheel turn.

It did turn, and often with uncomfortable complications. At one time, for instance, in the days when there were only two stumps, a hole was cut between and beneath the wickets, and when a batsman completed a run he had to pop his bat into this hole. If the bowler succeeded in popping the ball there before the bat the batsman was run out. It was found, however, that bat and ball would often arrive in the hole simultaneously, with sad results to the bowler’s fingers; and often enough, when a fieldsman had anticipated the bat, the defeated player would take what revenge he could by driving his bat upon the knuckles of his conqueror. After a certain number of fingers had been broken the authorities thought fit to substitute for the hole the present popping crease.

Much the same thing happened in the case of leg-before-wicket. As pads were not then invented, and as the ball was delivered with much rapidity, it had never seemed likely that any batsman would, with deliberate intention, place his unprotected legs in the path of a hard ball. But one day the cricket world was thrown into consternation by the tactics of one Ring, who placed his body in front of the wicket in such a way that it was impossible for him to be bowled out. His shins became very sore, but his score became very large. This gallant act of self-sacrifice for the good of his side did not win the admiration it deserved; it was described by a contemporary writer as “a shabby way of taking advantage of a bowler,” so that when Tom Taylor adopted the same tactics the bowlers “declared themselves beaten”: a leg-before-wicket rule was drawn up, and another opportunity for Spartan courage was lost to an effeminate age.

The rules were altered to suit each fresh development. And when we remember the manifold and barbarous practices of that day, we cannot but shudder when we try to imagine what fearsome and horrible atrocities must have taken place before the rule about “obstruction of the field” was invented. Cannot we picture some burly butcher skying the ball to point and then, in order to save his wicket, rushing at the fieldsman and prostrating him with his bat? Cannot we see the batsman at the other end effecting a half-nelson upon the bowler who was about to catch his partner? The laws of Rome were not built up without bloodshed, nor were the laws of cricket. What opportunities for humorous narrative have been lost!

If only there had been some naturalistic writer who would have collected laboriously all these stories and made a novel of them. If Zola had been an Englishman we could have forgiven him his endless descriptions of gold-beaters and agricultural labourers, if one of the Macquarts had been a professional cricketer and one of those interminable novels had reconstructed the cricket world of his day. If only the caprice of things had allowed George Moore to spend his early years near a cricket field instead of a racing stable.

But even those few novelists who have included cricket in their panorama of the period appear woefully ignorant of the management of the game. What a sad mess Dickens made of it, and how well he might have done it! How entertaining Mr Winkle might have been behind the wicket: what sublime decisions he would have given as an umpire! But, no: Muggleton play Dingley Dell, and the great Podder “blocked the doubtful balls, missed the bad ones, took the good ones and sent them flying to all parts of the field,” which is surely the most quaint procedure that any batsman has ever followed; and as a climax Dingley Dell give in and allow the superior prowess of all Muggleton, apparently before they have had their own innings--an action without precedent in the annals of the game.

And so it has happened that our one complete picture of the Homeric days has come to us not from the novelists, the official recorders of the hour, but from John Nyren, who wrote without any thought of posterity a guide-book for the young cricketer. There are some books that, like wine, acquire qualities with the passage of time, and for us to-day the _Cricketer’s Tutor_ possesses a value that it did not have for those in whose service it was written. To the young blood of 1840 it was merely a manual, a sort of field service regulations; to-day it is a piece of literature; it interprets a period; it reveals a personality.

As we read John Nyren’s advice we can see how the game was played in 1820 on rough pitches, without pads, in top hats, and with a courage the extent of which may be gauged from the instructions that he gives to long-stop:

When the ball does not come to his hand with a fair bound, he must go down upon his right knee with his hands before him: then in case these should miss it, his body will form a bulwark and arrest its further progress.

In those days we learn that spectators were patient folk who sat on backless seats, drank porter, smoked long pipes, and made bets about the match. There was leisure then, and John Nyren believed that the batsman should wait to make his runs till bowler and fieldsmen were exhausted:

I would strongly recommend the young batsman to turn his attention to stopping: for by acting this part well, he becomes a serious antagonist to the bowler; who, when he sees a man coming in that he knows will stop all his length balls with ease, is always in a degree disheartened. He has no affection for such a customer. Besides, in this accomplishment lies the distinction between the scientific and the random batsman.

The random batsman: it is an adjective we find often in the _Cricketer’s Tutor_. For Nyren had an intense hatred of unskilled success. Cricket was to him an art the technique of which could only be mastered after an elaborate apprenticeship. He distrusted the short cut, and we find him the most bitter opponent of the young idea. He is the eternal Tory of yesterday, of to-day and of to-morrow. And he is very human to us as he stands on the brink of change uttering his solemn warning. For it was towards the end of his career that round-arm bowling was introduced, and it is hard to realise the revolution this caused in the world of sport. It made as much stir and roused as many bad feelings in its own province as its contemporary the Reform Bill. This bowling was described as the “new march of intellect--style,” and in 1827 three matches were played between Sussex and England to test the merits of the two methods. The county won the first two matches, and the nine professionals on the England side were so incensed that they signed a formal petition “that we, the undersigned, do agree that we will not play the third match between all England and Sussex unless the Sussex bowlers bowl fair--that is, abstain from throwing.” And the great Mr Ward, when asked his opinion, said, “I can only say cricketers are a peaceable class of men. With this bowling I never see a match that might not end in a wrangle.”

John Nyren was its most fierce opponent, and it is rather pathetic to read his violent and ineffectual protest. This invention would ruin cricket. He saw a new game that would lack the grace and skill of the game as he and his friends had played it. The ball would come so fast that the batsman would not have time to prepare for it.