unhappy, and you can’t be unhappy if you do play cricket was a maxim that met general approval over the rum punches and the laughter. It has certainly been true in my own life.
In fact, cricket can unlock all the emotions. On the day, after sixteen barren years, that England regained the Ashes at The Oval in 2005, I watched the crowd spontaneously and joyously sing ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. There are precedents for such a display. When Jessop scored a famous hundred to win the final Test against Australia at The Oval in 1902, the spectators hurled their bowler hats to the sky in ecstasy. We may be sure that many were lost. So too at Jack Hobbs’s first innings at The Oval after passing Grace’s record of 126 career centuries in 1925. Amid the applause the Yorkshire captain called for three cheers for Hobbs and then, Yorkshire being Yorkshire, dismissed him for a beggarly eight runs. The emotion displayed that day was affection for a great cricketer. When Boris Karloff, an enthusiastic amateur wicketkeeper, visited The Oval, Surrey weren’t sure what to do with him. He was watching the cricket avidly from the balcony when, in reply to a polite enquiry from an anxious host, he muttered in that inimitable voice: ‘Wonderful. I think I’m dead and gone to heaven!’
Karloff was a character. Cricket attracts them. I was on The Oval balcony with another, Sir George Edwards – then around ninety years of age – when a guest asked the old man, rather pompously, what he remembered of the war and what, if anything, he’d done in it. George smiled bleakly. ‘I helped design the Wellington bomber,’ he said, ‘if that counts.’ I treasure that moment. It was an understatement: George did more than that. He worked with Sir Barnes Wallis on the ‘bouncing bomb’ that destroyed the great German dams but which, in early tests, kept sinking. George, a keen cricketer, knew why. ‘It’s underspin, not overspin,’ he explained. Barnes Wallis relented – and the Dam Busters took out the Möhne, Sorpe and Eder dams with a leg-break.
‘History is bunk,’ supposedly said Henry Ford, who never played cricket. That is not my criticism. A number of fine writers have already told the story of cricket. Is there more to be gained by treading on the old turf? I believe so. There are myths to dispel, neglected areas to be examined, for the history of cricket is often seen in a vacuum, as if it developed unaffected by the turbulent history of the nation that gave it birth. But from its earliest days, to the recent tremors of match-fixing and corruption and the innovation of technology-aided umpiring, the game has held up a mirror to the temper of the nation.
Moreover, what of the cricketers? Too often, they appear in one- dimensional form only: all that is known is their on-field exploits. But what were they like? Who were they? What did they do after the cricket years were over, and their eyes dimmed and their sinews stiffened? What was happening off the field as they played cricket? How was the world changing? How did people live? What were their recreations? Cricketers had a flesh-and-blood existence outside the game, and however imperfectly, I shall try to bring alive the mosaic of times past in order to present a more rounded picture of them and the nature of their lives.
Cricket, once first among English games, is no longer so, as the winter sports of football and rugby grow in popularity. It must fight for its future. Even the cricket season seems to shrink annually as football eats away at both ends of the season. By the autumn equinox on 22 September the season is dead and gone, even though, theoretically at least, the sun is still above the horizon for twelve hours every day. Even the refraction of the sun’s rays, caused by the earth’s atmosphere, which gives the British Isles an extra six minutes of daylight, cannot compete with the commercial imperatives that lengthen the football season.
And yet – cricket is different. It is a team game made up of individual contests. Batsman and bowler are locked in gladiatorial combat. One must lose. Each batsman faces alone the hostile intent of every member of the fielding side, all seeking to dismiss him, with the sole support of his batting partner at the other end of the pitch. He knows his contribution may decide the outcome of the match. And can any other game provide a father figure for a nation to match W.G. Grace, who turned a country-house sport into an international obsession – and who is still recognised by his initials alone nearly a hundred years after his death? No, it cannot. Can any other game offer a pre-eminent genius so far above the normal run of talent as Don Bradman? No, again.
In its first 450 years, cricket has besotted wise men and fools. Its fairy godparents were gambling and drink. Its early enemies were Church and state. And yet, it has brought together beggars and royalty, thrown up a rich array of characters, invaded literature and art, and evolved from primitive beginnings to the sophistication of the modern game.
Although cricket is of the very essence of England, the skills of Bradman and Sobers, of Hadlee and Tendulkar, are evidence that the game has far outstripped the land of its birth. England no longer owns cricket. Like radar, penicillin, electricity, the steam engine, railways, the jet engine, computers and the worldwide web, cricket is an English invention – an export as potent as the English language itself. At one level it is a game and no more; at another it helped cement an Empire and bind a Commonwealth. Its legacy is a fellowship of cricket-lovers across continents and through generations. In the world of sport, it is the greatest story ever told.
It began a long time ago.
* As anyone can now do under reforms I instituted in 1993.
But we don’t know how long. The search for the birth of cricket has been as fruitless as the hunt for the Holy Grail: neither can be found.
What is cricket, at its most basic? It is a club striking a ball: so are golf, rounders, baseball, hockey and tennis. So are the ancient games of club-ball, stool-ball, trap-ball, stob-ball, each of which some scholars have been keen to appropriate as ‘early cricket’. The nineteenth-century pioneer historian the Reverend James Pycroft asserts, without proof, that ‘Club-ball we believe to be the name which usually stood for cricket in the thirteenth century.’* His case, however, collapses in the light of later evidence, and the great mid-nineteenth- century cricketer Nicholas Felix (a pseudonym – his real name was Nicholas Wanostrocht) was more likely right when he wrote: ‘Club ball is a very ancient game and totally distinct from cricket.’
The paucity of early mentions of cricket has led to some farfetched assumptions about games that might have been cricket, but probably are not. The poet and scholar Joseph of Exeter is said to have written in 1180:
The youths at cricks did play
Throughout the merry day.
If they did so, no one else noted it for hundreds of years. This claim has other defects, too: the couplet sounds more eighteenth-century than twelfth, and all Joseph’s known writing is in Latin. In any event, in 1180 Joseph was onhis way to the Third Crusade as an official chronicler, and thoughts of ‘youths’ and ‘merry days’ may not have been uppermost in his mind.* We can dismiss Joseph of Exeter. Even less likely is the evidence of an eighth-century monk, Eustatius Constacius, that cricket was played in Florence for the entertainment of Parliament.
Much ink has been spilled by historians over an entry, in 1300, in the wardrobe accounts of King Edward I referring to the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, the future Edward
