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  If a local cricketer does well in this sort of company it is not long before the committees of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire or the other traditional heartlands of league cricket are making inquiries. Now that strong leagues are established in the Southern counties as well, there is less chance of outstanding ability wasting its sweetness on the desert air. Since most of the matches are played under limited-over rules, however, league cricket has become more predictable and the trends – as with the counties – are towards much improved fielding, defensive tactics and bowling designed to save runs rather than take wickets.

  THE VILLAGE GREEN

  Even village clubs have been drawn into leagues in recent years, but the essential character of village cricket has not, happily, been lost. After all, village cricket, though it may have been laughed at from outside, has always been a very serious business for those taking part.

  A few seasons ago a City investment analyst named Tim Lowdon was walking his dog round the village green at Whitchurch in Hampshire one Sunday morning. He was hailed by the village captain who, knowing him to be a keen cricketer, asked him to make up the numbers that afternoon as they were one short. Tim came in to bat at number eleven later in the day with Whitchurch in a spot of trouble at nought for nine! With great aplomb he scored a single off the first ball he received to get the scoreboard, if a trifle belatedly, moving. Unfortunately his partner was less fortunate and the home team were dismissed for one. The glorious uncertainty of cricket is never so uncertain or so glorious as it is on the village green where the game first came to be played in an organized form around the 17th century in the Weald of Southern England.

  Much of the comedy of village cricket lies in its very seriousness. For every husky, untutored blacksmith breasting the brow of the hill, or paunchy publican labouring after the ball in the outfield with more concern for his lumbago than for saving the four, there are two at least in the side who see in every village game a Test match. Their dress and equipment are correct, and unlike the others they do not rely on the soiled and inadequate collection of old bats, non-matching pads and gloves and festering boxes which litter one corner of the dressing-room. In the field they rub their hands before every ball, get down low in the slips or move in briskly from the covers as each ball is bowled. At the crease, regardless of ability, they chew gum assiduously to aid their concentration, prod the pitch and touch the peak of their cap after each ball, look amazed if they are beaten, even more so if they are bowled and quite outraged if they are given out l.b.w.

  One such character was given out l.b.w. one day when the ball struck him on the chest. Striding furiously past the umpire he muttered that it could not possibly have been out. ‘You look in the local paper on Friday and see if it was out or not,’ said the umpire. ‘No, you look,’ was the biting riposte, ‘I’m the editor.’

  Some of the more unexpected and amusing incidents occur when village teams meet grander and more pretentious ones. On a recent tour of the West Country a wandering team lost their first wicket early against a rustic Somerset side but were unworried because they had an outstanding batsman who had scored a good many runs for Oxford against strong county attacks earlier in the summer. He walked out slowly, twirling a top-quality bat and adjusting the peak of his Oxford cap. The first ball was outside the off-stump and popped a bit and our hero elegantly shouldered arms, then strolled down the pitch to flick away a sod of earth near where the ball had pitched. At once the wicket-keeper threw down the stumps, appealed and the square-leg umpire raised his finger with alacrity and a smile which seemed to say: ‘That’ll teach the swanky bastard.’

  The funniest end to any match I have played in occurred when a village team, again with some help from the umpire, had hurtled through a London school Old Boys side full of talented players. There was nothing for it but to play for a draw. The opposing captain, a Cambridge Blue this time, played three successive maiden overs against the village club’s off-spinner and duly pushed safely forward to the first five balls of the final over. The last ball was tossed right up and the batsman pushed even more carefully forward, his bat angled correctly over the ball. Yet somehow it spun very slowly back under the bat, trickled towards the wicket and gently removed one bail!

  The professions of village cricketers these days are much more varied than they were in the days before trains and motor cars when the landlord, the parson and the squire, supplemented perhaps in larger communities by a solicitor or a doctor, were surrounded mainly by those who worked on the land or with animals. A village I know well in West Surrey has a useful spin bowler who unfortunately has to miss a season every now and then because he is continually being caught climbing up ladders against the walls of country houses at night. He has recently turned over a new leaf and has had two successful seasons, although he did show special pleasure last summer when told that the opposing batsman he had just had stumped was a policeman!

  Humiliating experiences such as that suffered by Whitchurch are common enough in minor cricket. Well in excess of a hundred instances of sides being bowled out for nought have been recorded, the most recent possibly being the game between Red Triangle Second XI and Tarleton Second XI in the Fourth Division of the Southport and District League in 1980. Having been bowled out for nought Red Triangle lost the match to a leg-bye scored from the seventh ball of the Tarleton innings; their captain, Tony Quinn, immediately resigned. In the following game, however, against the Y.M.C.A. Second XI, Red Triangle scored 183 then bowled their opponents out for 19, one ‘Taffy’ Clegg taking seven for 16.

  A similar experience had been suffered by Bexley in Kent in 1884. They were bowled out for seven by Orleans Club, for whom one F. R. Spofforth – the demon himself – took seven for two in 27 balls, but a few games later they scored 402 for no wicket, John Shuter making 304 not out, against Emeriti C.C.

  There are, incidentally, at least seven authenticated instances of bowlers taking all ten wickets for no runs. They were listed by E.K. Gross in Volume Three of the Journal of the Cricket Society, starting with A. Dartnell, a draper by trade and Methodist by religion, who took all ten for none for Broad Green against Thornton Heath at Croydon in Surrey in 1867.

  The term ‘village,’ in the sense of a small rural community, sadly applies strictly now to only a very few of the thousands of cricket clubs of Britain; but more than seven hundred, defined as rural communities of not more than 2,500 inhabitants, contest each year the Whitbread Village Championship organized by The Cricketer.

  The essence of village and league cricket lies not in statistics but in people. Most clubs are based round a few dedicated characters like the former club captain who tends the pitch through the week, rolls it until it is dark on Friday night, marks out the creases on Saturday morning and watches philosophically through the smoke from his pipe as the rain begins to fall at a quarter to two. He is complemented by the younger man who starts phoning round the members on Monday night, finds eleven fit and willing men by Thursday, replaces two of them because they have dropped out on Friday, captains the side on Saturday and Sunday, as often as not making most of the runs or taking a good many of the wickets, serves behind the bar after the match, cleans up when most of his mates have gone and reminds his wife when he gets back home that an extra tea will be needed for the Colts match on Wednesday. The sleepy, eternally loyal, reply comes back: ‘Ah, and don’t you forget the Committee meeting on Tuesday to discuss the President’s match. And the Donkey Derby to raise the money for that new sightscreen . . . and for that new fridge in the kitchen.’

  WANDERING CRICKET

  One such was ‘Bushy’ O’Callaghan, who played for many clubs, including the Cryptics, a wandering club most of whose members are schoolmasters. Despite playing almost every day from April to October in the hot summer of 1947, he just failed to emulate Denis Compton and Bill Edrich, who that year each scored 3,000 runs. He therefore organized a special match on New Year’s Eve and duly reached the magic figure.


  There are wandering clubs and wandering clubs but generally speaking they cater for the more exclusive sort of club cricketer. I should be more explicit: generally they make no apology for the fact that the majority of their members are cricketing sons of the public schools and jealously maintain their right to be exclusive. They seldom turn out a bad side; their colours are almost always a combination of gaudy stripes; they are usually full of gifted and expansive stroke-players but a bit short of quick bowling. They believe that a proper game of cricket on a single day has a declaration by the first side at anything over 200 no later than halfway through the match with the second side getting the runs in the last over or losing their last wicket instead in a gallant but vain attempt.

  This may be considered a somewhat old-fashioned approach in the days of Saturday league cricket. However, because of this generous attitude to the game, a throwback almost to the Golden Age and certainly to the now almost vanished era of country-house cricket, one seldom plays in a bad game when two wandering clubs are involved.

  They may be school Old Boys sides such as those who contest The Cricketer Cup each year; university offshoots like the Quidnuncs or the Harlequins; service sides like the Green Jackets; county-based clubs like the Band of Brothers, Yorkshire Gentlemen, Sussex Martlets, Hampshire Hogs, Devon Dumplings, Gloucestershire Gypsies, etc; or long-standing privately formed clubs like I Zingari, Free Foresters, Incogniti, Arabs, Buccaneers, Stoics, Cryptics, Romany, Yellowhammers and many others. Indeed one seldom plays in a bad game when only one side is one of these famous wanderers because their approach always seems to bring out the best in opposing clubs, most of whom are now bound by the ‘play for points’ mentality of Saturday league cricket. They often discover on Sunday that a pitch upon which 150 runs seemed a desperate struggle to get on Saturday has suddenly become a ‘belter.’

  WHO WAS WISDEN?

  The founder of the revered Cricketer’s Almanack, John Wisden (1826–84) has another if lesser-known claim to fame as the smallest fast bowler ever. He was 5ft 4in tall and weighed only 7 stone. A Sussex regular, Wisden’s greatest achievement on the field happened in 1850 when he took all 10 wickets for South v. North.

  These clubs of proud traditions, full as they are of university Blues, Etonians, military officers and double-barrelled names, may be exclusive by nature, but the majority of their members are at ease in any sort of cricket below first-class level and many of the active younger members would not be satisfied if they did not mix their wandering cricket with some club or village games in which the competitive spirit is that much tougher and meaner. This is not to say that wandering cricket is not keenly contested. The standard is invariably very high, apart from some languid fielding on occasion and a paucity of good fast bowlers. Moreover one seldom comes across a cricketer in these games who is not knowledgeable about the game and almost never one who is not gifted in at least one department of it. For me wandering cricket means good company, good wickets, players out to enjoy the game and the near-certainty that everyone will have a sense of the game’s ethical traditions, a knowledge of the basic technical rules, and a certain cricket know-how that prevents them, for example, from standing in no man’s land in the outfield of a small ground, too deep to save the one and too close to catch the skier or cut off the four.

  This was not always so. Alec Waugh once recalled the captain of the now-defunct Chiltern Ramblers, who had flourished in the 1920s when club cricket was more leisurely and more varied in standard than it is now. The Chiltern Ramblers could call upon players of the calibre of R.H. Bettington of Oxford, Middlesex and New South Wales, for first-class cricketers played a good deal of club cricket then but now seldom have the chance or the inclination. However, they were captained by a barrister named E.E. Carus-Wilson. Waugh wrote of him:

  ‘He was tall, elegant, sandy-haired. He looked a cricketer. He would walk to the wicket with a firm, confident stride. He would take guard, look round, settle his stance. Then as the bowler’s arm went over, he would lift his bat; his left leg would go down the wicket; his left elbow would face the bowler; his bat would follow his leg: a copybook forward stroke. But the ball would miss the bat. I never saw him make a run . . . He would field at mid-on. I do not remember seeing him hold a catch.’

  The ladies, and ladies is the word, have more of a part to play in wandering cricket than they do in other forms of the club game. It is not that they do the teas or anything like that: but they are a part of the elegant scene, their dresses and hats, pretty faces and lissom figures drawing the eye from the striped blazers, and their good breeding and intelligence helping to divert conversation away from strictly cricketing matters onto broader plains.

  Sometimes etiquette can be taken to excess. At a match in Kent between two wandering clubs a few seasons ago, a batsman was badly hurt early in the game when he tried to hook a ball and ‘top-edged’ it into his face. Seeing him prostrate on the ground, bleeding profusely, the president of the fielding side, who was playing in the game, hastily summoned his wife from their Jaguar on the boundary’s edge. ‘Bring the first aid kit, dear, quickly,’ he called.

  The president’s wife, smartly dressed, hurried out to the middle carrying a tin of plasters, ointments and bandages. Gratefully the stricken batsman half-raised his wounded head from the ground. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the president quickly. ‘I don’t think you’ve met my wife. Diana, this is Nigel Tapscott-Jones . . .’

  Since there is little point in joining a club unless you play for it, you have to be careful as a keen young cricketer not to be tempted too often by the prestige of a famous tie. Yet it is difficult to resist the honour of joining I Zingari (founded in July 1845 by J.L. Baldwin, R.P. Long, Sir Ponsonby Fane and the Hon. Frederick Ponsonby, later Lord Bessborough) especially when the letter informing you of your election is conveyed by a knight on behalf of a peer of the realm who was once prime minister!

  Another of the pleasures of wandering cricket is that the clubs have a knack of searching out not only good batting wickets but also some of the most beautiful grounds. The best of them all, without doubt, is Arundel, in the lee of the castle with its majestic arboreal variety and its long views across the South Downs. Within the space of a few months I was fortunate enough to play one match for the Foresters against the Australian IZ at their New South Wales ground at Camden Park, seat of the Macarthur-Onslows; and another at Arundel for the Arabs against Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk’s Eleven. The first match, in February, was played in a temperature of 110°F. For the second, in May, the thermometer struggled to reach 50. Both were well-fought cricket matches played in an atmosphere of civilized enjoyment.

  If anyone is surprised to read that country-house cricket exists in Australia, he or she may also be interested to know that it once flourished in Hollywood in the days when the former England cricketer C.A. Smith was playing his permanent role as the archetypal English gentleman. As he grew older, however, Sir Aubrey’s eyesight began to fail and to his embarrassment he dropped a simple slip catch one day during one of the games over which he would preside with much majesty. Instantly he stopped the game and called for his butler, who walked slowly onto the ground and bowed low.

  ‘Bring me my glasses,’ commanded Sir Aubrey.

  With due ceremony the butler left the field and returned a few moments later with a pair of spectacles on a silver salver. Sir Aubrey put them on and signalled to the umpires that they might resume play. The bowler tore in again, refreshed by the break. The batsman pushed timorously forward, edged the ball and watched as Sir Aubrey juggled vainly with the catch and dropped it. Picking up the ball in fury he yelled across to the watching butler:

  ‘Hetherington you idiot, you brought my reading glasses!’

  There is another ‘cricketing butler’ story concerning the Duke of Norfolk who, shortly before a match between his side and the Sussex Martlets at Arundel, discovered that there was only one umpire. He asked his butler, Summers, to do the vacant job. Unfortunately, whe
n the Duke was batting his partner called him for a short single and the great man slipped in the middle of the pitch. In the heat of battle his identity was forgotten and the Duke was easily beaten by the return to the wicket-keeper. There was a loud instinctive appeal of ‘How’s that?’ from the fielding side. Acute embarrassment for Summers: would he give his Master out? After a long pause he was asked by the nearest fielder: ‘Well, is he in or out?

  Summers replied with impressive dignity: ‘His Grace is not in.’

  The Duke was the keenest of cricketers. Apart from his presidency of Sussex, the Duke was manager of the 1962–63 M.C.C. tour of Australia, with Alec Bedser as his assistant. The Duke’s grasp of mundane financial matters was found to be somewhat limited when he took the side to Kalgoorlie for a country fixture whilst Bedser stayed in Perth for net practice with some of the other players. Bedser had given the Duke the tour cheque book with the request that he should pay the hotel bill and record the full details. When the Duke returned he handed back the cheque book, saying that he had thrown away the bill but the details were all recorded on the counterfoil. Bedser looked inside and saw on the counterfoil the single word: ‘Kalgoorlie.’

  In all other respects his Grace was a very successful manager, and there is another charming story told of that tour. The Duke and Duchess were visiting another country match and a local schoolgirl was given the honour of presenting a posy of flowers to the Duchess. Just before she did so her headmistress reminded her: ‘Don’t forget to say “Your Grace”.’ The little girl went shyly up to the Duchess, curtsied and said: ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’