The past • The novelty of cricket • The Star and Garter
• Publicans, promoters and the vanishing peasantry
• From Hambledon to Lord’s • Birth of a nation
• Transition and autochthony • The power of myth
No sport is as besotted with its past as cricket.
The action in Francis Thompson’s classic poem ‘At Lord’s’, published in 1898, does not take place in St John’s Wood, but at Old Trafford some twenty years before, when Gloucestershire, ‘the shire of the Graces’, came north to teach a cricketing lesson to ‘new-risen Lancashire’. The young Thompson, skiving from his Manchester medical studies, was wont to waste his days watching county cricket. Seven years after the match described in the poem, he abandoned dreams of a medical career and fled to London, where he descended into drug-addiction and bohemian vagrancy before achieving modest notoriety as a poet. Now, years later, his health broken, his poetic wellsprings drying up, his muse consumed by journalism, he was reluctant to visit Lord’s (‘It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk’) even when his beloved Lancashire were playing there (‘Though my own red roses there may blow’). The sheer hallucinatory power of his recollections of Old Trafford and the past overpower Lord’s and the present:
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro:
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!
The elegiac note sounded by Thompson belongs to cricket. From nearly the beginning, people have said the game is not what it used to be. Standards of technique, sportsmanship, loyalty or patriotism are perennially in decline. Crowd behaviour has always changed for the worse. And money is forever corrupting a noble pastime.
‘Since cricket became brighter, a man of taste can only go to an empty ground, and regret the past,’ said CP Snow in 1932. In the same year, the Daily Herald headlined an article: ‘Why isn’t cricket fun any more?’ That season, Woolley, Hobbs, Hendren and Sutcliffe were all playing first-class cricket. In 1899, at the height of the Golden Age, the England and Middlesex amateur Vyell Walker observed, ‘I am sorry to say that I do not think the game has improved. There is more self now than there used to be. Men do not play as much for their side as they did in my younger days ... there is far too much of the business element in it all around.’ In 1884, six years before the official founding of the county championship, the journalist Frederick Gale complained that too many county matches ended as tedious draws. ‘Cricket is now so common that it is a mere trade,’ he fulminated in a letter to The Times. ‘The heart and will to “play up” and waste no time are not the mainsprings of some of the modern matches.’ In the 1860s, the novelist Anthony Trollope observed that ‘cricket has become such a business, that there arises doubt in the minds of amateur players whether they can continue the sport’. In 1833, John Nyren, recalling from a distance of forty years the great days of Hambledon, the archetypal village cricket club, proudly asserted, ‘The modern politics of trickery and “crossing” were ... as yet a “sealed book” to the Hambledonians; what they did, they did for love and honour of victory.’
This veneration of the game’s past, inevitably accompanied by deprecation of its present, may be attributed in part to an association between this past and the individual’s own childhood. A personal loss of innocence finds a ready focus in the sense that the gods whom one worshipped on the pitch in one’s youth have been replaced by mere mortals, and not very admirable ones at that. The mythic power of childhood (or, in the case of most English cricket writers, public-school boyhood) overrides the discipline of history.
Being an American has spared me this English version of the old mismatch between ontogeny (the development of an individual) and phylogeny (the development of a species or type). But I can see its power. How pleasant to imagine a past where cricket was played with exuberant abandon, without awareness of commerce, of cheating, of national failure, of social tensions of any kind. And how useful for those with a vested interest in maintaining the social order inherited from that past. For them, the ills of the modern world are always the result of alien intrusions in a lost paradise.
That paradise is the English village green, purportedly the fons et origo of English cricket, bastion of its abiding values, source and mainstay of cricket’s unique ‘Englishness’. The literature of English cricket was, until very recently, overwhelmingly bucolic. In his book English Cricket, published as a morale-booster during the Blitz, Cardus writes, ‘In every English village a cricket field is as much part of the landscape as the old church.’ Cardus, of course, made a career out of celebrating cricket’s traditions and lamenting the passage of its Golden Age. His attachment to the elegance and complexity of cricket was accompanied by an aesthetic rejection of the modern mass society with which cricket, in his eyes, was perpetually at odds.
The most accomplished literary evocation of village-green cricket is Hugh de Selincourt’s The Cricket Match, first published in 1924, and very much an attempt to reconsider and reassert the values of village green cricket in the wake of the First World War. With great skill and a light touch, de Selincourt employs a cricket match to link together the destinies of the citizens of Tillingfold, his archetypal southern English village. The book ends: ‘Night descended peacefully upon the village of Tillingfold. Rich and poor, old and young, were seeking sleep.’
Because I have always seen de Selincourt as a clever Tory propagandist, albeit of the one-nation variety so despised by Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, I am afraid I have to contradict Benny Green’s dictum: ‘Even an American could read The Cricket Match and find himself profoundly moved.’ My problem is that in The Cricket Match, as in so much cricket writing, the village green and the cricket played on it are symbols not just of social harmony, but of social hierarchy, a hierarchy that can resist even cataclysms like the First World War.
In the midst of the Second World War, the poet Edmund Blunden published his Cricket Country, a celebration of English cricket’s rural innocence. Recounting the entry on to a humble village ground of a ‘sturdy’ blacksmith-batsman in ‘working clothes and leathern apron’, Blunden praises the principle of ‘degree’ exemplified in cricket:
In our country life hitherto, the much execrated principle of grades of society, walks of life, has been maintained not by compulsion but by inclination, and the keeping up of distinctions and of separate worlds in little has been done not just by those at the supposed top but by those, quite as much, who accept fortune and know a thing or two at the other end of the scale. It is a reversible ladder. And here once again I must bless the powers and the chances of the English love of games ...
This is the myth at cricket’s heart, the myth of an enduring and natural social hierarchy, the myth of the village green. It only requires a cursory survey of rural English life today to see that the myth bears little relation to contemporary reality. The village green, certainly as a meeting point of different classes and generations, hardly exists, having been replaced by the limitless suburbia of ‘commuter villages’ in which car parks take precedence over cricket fields. But the myth of the village green and the cricket played on it is not only a lie about the present. It is an even bigger lie about the past. Cricket is no more the organic outgrowth of the ancient community of the village green than Magna Carta is the work of freedom-loving Saxons.
In 1979, Geoffrey Moorhouse, in his book The Best Loved Game, commented: ‘Few things are more deeply rooted in the collective imagination of the English than the village cricket match. It stirs a romantic illusion about the rustic way of life, it suggests a tranquil and unchanging order in an age of bewildering flux.’
In fact, not all ‘the English’ are transfixed by this heritage. For many in the inner cities, the unemployed, the low-waged, the homeless, and all those who are abused because of their race or sex, the village cricket match is a symbol of the England in which they have no part. Cricket’s mythology is the product of a vision of social order in which large sections of the population are consigned to inferior rank. Yet it is also true that many who have no vested interest in this social order cannot help but feel the power and pleasure in Moorhouse’s ‘romantic illusion’.
There are good reasons for this. Cricket’s obsession with the past, its status as something of a national relic, its association with the village green are not accidental or even incidental. Yes, cricket boasts a longer history than other sports, but there is more to it than that. Cricket is what it is because of its origin as a modern sport in a particular time and place: late-eighteenth-century England. From that point of origin, everything flows.
These days, commercial spectator sport has spread to every corner of the globe and has become so much a part of our lives, our culture and our economy that it is hard to imagine just what a bold innovation it was in the late eighteenth century. The advent of cricket deserves the epithet revolutionary because nothing less than a revolutionary process could have bridged the gap between what cricket was and what it became.
Cricket historians have tried to trace the game’s lineage to the distant middle ages, to a ‘Merrie England’ of jolly, honest peasants and benign, patriotic lords. Accordingly, they have cited ‘club ball’, ‘stool ball’ and all manner of ancient stick-and-ball games as the direct precursors of cricket. The ‘creag’ mentioned in Edward I’s accounts of 1300 is said to be nothing less than cricket itself, simply because it is not clearly defined as anything else (significantly, these accounts were first published in 1787, the year of MCC’s formation). On the basis of no evidence whatsoever, the word ‘cricket’ is said to derive from ‘cricc’, an ancient Saxon word for a shepherd’s crook. Andrew Lang, the late nineteenth-century folklorist, translator and cricket lover, declared that ‘like almost everything else, cricket was evolved’. The need to prove continuity – direct descent from old England – has been a compulsion for nearly all the game’s historians, even a Scot like Lang. Alas, the word itself seems likely to be French in origin. Certainly the first reference to a game called ‘criquet’ is in St Omer in 1478.
Attempts to claim the game as a native ‘English’ product miss the point about the folk games from which cricket, like most modern sports, was derived. These games were pre-national. Countless stick-and-ball games existed – every village had its own version – but no one of these was more or less ‘English’ than any other. The games played in England at this time were clearly part of a pan-European folk culture. Cricket could have been as easily derived from any of the stick-and-ball games played on the continent as any of those played in England. Indeed, these games existed only in their innumerable local variations. No one thought what the games would be like if they were not tied to local traditions and topography. As yet the people playing these games did not imagine themselves as part of a larger, national community with a common culture. The games were, literally, parochial, and that was part of their appeal. They were children’s games, to be played by adults in times of holiday sanctioned by the agricultural or liturgical calendars.
It seems unlikely that any single one of them would be the model for the game of cricket that became fashionable with the elite some time after the English Revolution. Rather, elements from different local games were incorporated or discarded according to the whims of the patrons, who formed, at that time, the only nationally-integrated social class. The cumulative result of these adaptations was the creation of something quite new: a set of practices that transcended local tradition and enabled people from different parts of the country who had never met before to play cricket together.
The earliest surviving Laws of the game are contained in the ‘Articles of Agreement’ for a match to be played between the second Duke of Richmond and Alan Broderick of Peperharrow in Surrey. The match was played, not on a village green, but in London, in 1727. Around the same time, the infant weekly newspapers began to cover cricket. To the early reporters, the attendance of persons of high social status, not the result of the match, was the main item of interest. By 1730, cricket was being regularly played in London at White Conduit Fields in Islington, the Artillery Ground in Finsbury and Kennington Common.
In 1744, the first full ‘Laws of Cricket’ were issued and published by ‘the London Club’, whose president was Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, the father of George III. Perhaps, for the German-born Frederick, playing cricket was a way of proving his Englishness. If so, how piquant that he died in 1751 after being struck by a cricket ball.
One of the matches played under the new Laws (‘Kent’ against ‘England’ at the Artillery Ground) is the first for which a full scoresheeet survives. More important, it was one of the first to charge admission (6d). The match was also the inspiration for the first literary exercise on cricket per se, James Love’s ode to ‘Cricket! Manly British game!’ Love praised the social mix of the crowd, which included great lords and humble bricklayers. However, cricket’s popularity made some observers uneasy. The Daily Advertiser complained of ‘great disorder’ and the Gentleman’s Magazine disapproved: ‘The time of people of fashion may be, indeed, of little value, but in a trading nation the time of the meanest man ought to be of some worth to himself and to the community.’
The 1744 London rules spread far and wide. Within a decade, people in New York were playing under them. The game was becoming standardized, though it was to be another forty or fifty years before this process was complete. What was happening to cricket was happening at the same time to the English language. The vernacular was being systematized. Johnson published his Dictionary in 1755. The local wrinkles were being ironed out; a single national vocabulary and grammar were becoming standard.
In the 1760s and 1770s, it became common to pitch the ball through the air, rather than roll it along the ground. This crucial innovation gave the bowler the weapons of length, deception through the air, as well as increased pace. It also opened new possibilities for spin and swerve. In response to the demands placed on them by airborne bowling, batsmen employed new techniques. They now had to master timing and stroke selection. For the spectator, this development enriched the game more than any other. There were now many more ways for batsmen to score runs and many more ways for bowlers to get them out. It raised the premium on skill and lessened the fortuitous influence of rough ground and brute force. Scores became higher (John Minshull knocked up the first recorded ton in 1769) and matches lasted longer.
In the 1770s, modern cricket took shape with astonishing rapidity. That decade witnessed the inauguration of the game’s first annual series of matches, Sheffield v. Nottingham, and the first giant cricket crowd, the 15,000 reported to have turned out to watch ‘All-England’ take on ‘Hampshire’ in Kent. The weight of the ball was limited to between five and a half and five and three-quarters ounces and the width of the bat to four and a half inches. Both sets of limits remain in force to this day. The first printed score cards appeared at Sevenoaks, Kent.
In 1774, the first leg-before-wicket law was published. At this time, a third stump also became common. In the early part of the century, the wicket might be low and horizontal or even simply a hole in the ground. Now, with the wicket upright, with three stumps, and an LBW law, batsmen created the science of the ‘straight bat’ and all that went with it. By 1780, three days had become the normal duration of a major match. That year, Dukes of Penshurst in Kent made the first six seam cricket ball and presented it to the Prince of Wales (two centuries later, the firm is still in the trade). The Marylebone Cricket Club was founded in 1787. The next year it published its first revision of the Laws, which prohibited charging down or obstruction, though these practices persisted for years in remote areas. Rolling, mowing and covering the wicket were also now provided for by the Laws, evidence that the standardization of conditions was regarded as a necessary feature of the ‘modern’ game.
For Raymond Williams, an index of the revolutionary character of the late eighteenth century in England was that it saw the first use of the words industry, democracy, class and culture in their modern senses. He might have also cited the first appearance in print, at the same time, of the words cricket field, cricket bat, cricket ball, cricket match, cricket club and cricketer. By 1800, cricket had been transformed from one among a myriad of traditional, rural folk games into the world’s first modern spectator team sport. Its rules (or rather, Laws) were standardized and under the control of a single body, the MCC, recognized by cricketers and the general public as authoritative. It had a permanent urban showground, Lord’s, dedicated to staging the best cricket in the country. It had a small corps of paid professional players. It had attracted the interest of impresarios who had begun to exploit it commercially. It also displayed a degree of technical sophistication, an emphasis on skill and strategy, which other team sports would achieve only a hundred years later.
In 1784, a ‘Committee of Noblemen and Gentlemen’ accustomed to meeting at the Star and Garter tavern in Pall Mall (also at that time the home of the Jockey Club) published a new and complete version of ‘the Laws of Cricket’. They appended their 150 names to the Laws, clearly believing the list would enhance the authority of the new code. It makes fascinating reading. Many of those whose names appear on it took part in the founding of the MCC three years later. All were men of power and wealth, which in late-eighteenth-century England meant landed wealth.
At its head was the old Etonian George Finch, the ninth Earl of Winchilsea, then thirty-two years old. He had already raised a regiment of infantry to fight the American revolutionaries at a cost to himself of £20,000, which gives some idea of his disposable wealth. Besides helping to found the MCC (and playing, as a middle-order right-handed batsman in its early matches) he devoted himself to his estate in Burley in Rutland (a new addition to the family’s vast spread in Kent), where scientific improvements in agriculture went hand in hand with the construction of a cricket ground and the staging of cricket matches involving the most illustrious players of the day.
John Frederick Sackville, the third Duke of Dorset, was also a sponsor of the Star and Garter laws. His appointment as Ambassador to the French court in 1783 was lampooned in the newspapers, one of which depicted a Frenchman saying, ‘He no speak in de Senate but he be one bon cricketer.’ It is said that Dorset acquired in France the habit of drinking tea in the afternoon and was responsible for introducing it to England – in which case cricket’s debt to him is so much the greater. A Privy Councillor and for many years Lord Steward to the Royal Household, Dorset (whose portrait was painted by his friend, Joshua Reynolds) was a convivial aristocrat who set the tone for cricket and defied personal criticism and political satire to insist that it was a perfectly proper pastime for the rich and powerful.
The members of the Star and Garter ‘Committee’ were at the core of the oligarchy that ruled England. As landowning capitalists, they were the inheritors of the English Revolution and the ‘settlement’ of 1688 which had secured the supremacy of property over feudal right. As a result of the civil war of the seventeenth century, England, instead of groaning under the heel of absolutism, enjoyed the benefits of a ‘constitutional’ monarchy financially subordinate to a Parliament run by and for the landowners. In England, money talked – not customary rights or barter or feudal privileges – before it was even whispering elsewhere. It was the world’s first market economy on a national scale. And the men who issued the Laws of Cricket from the Star and Garter were its masters. These ‘substantial men of the county’ appointed the MPs, JPs, tax assessors, Land Tax Commissioners, and even most of the clergymen. This was the ‘Old Corruption’, which was, in fact, a novel mechanism through which the elite monopolized and plundered the state. The members of the Star and Garter Committee were at its heart.
Dorset’s friend, the Earl of Tankerville, was a Privy Councillor and Postmaster General (and, as such, a leading dispenser of political patronage). The Marquis of Graham became Paymaster General. Sir John Shelley, a relative of the powerful Duke of Newcastle, was Treasurer of the Royal Household. Frederick Howard, Lord Carlisle (Eton, Cambridge), was an ally of Fox in the Commons. Earl Spencer (Cambridge) was a parliamentary follower of Burke and later Home Secretary. Lord Charles Fitzroy (Westminster, Cambridge) was MP for Bury St Edmunds and aide-de-camp to George III. Thomas Pelham, who became the third Earl of Chichester (Westminster, Cambridge), was a Whig MP for Sussex and later Postmaster General.
The state machine also served as the engine of colonial expansion, and many of the Star and Garter men were deeply engrossed in the work of empire-building. Carlisle and Graham were both Presidents of the Board of Trade and the latter became a member of the Parliamentary Commission for India. Captain John Willett Payne had served in the recently-concluded American war, as had Colonel Benastre Tarleton, later an MP for Liverpool. Sir Ralph Payne, at this time MP for Shaftesbury and an ally of Fox, eventually became Baron Lavington, Governor of the Leeward Islands, where he took part in some of the earliest recorded cricket matches in the West Indies. William Monson, a Captain in the Indian army, was prominent in the war against Tipu Sultan which gave the English control of southern India.
Significantly, several gentlemen in the Star and Garter list maintained property in the colony closest to home, Ireland. Lord Tyrconnel and his brothers, the Talbots, had vast holdings there. Carlisle became a Viceroy of Ireland. Pelham became Irish Secretary under Pitt. The then twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Colonel John Fane (Charterhouse, Cambridge), later the Earl of Westmoreland, became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and a fierce opponent of Catholic Emancipation.
Under the rule of the landed elite, England in the eighteenth century had become known and envied not only as a beacon of commerce and hub of international trade, but also as the country in which the rule of law, as opposed to the dictates of individuals, was most advanced. Throughout the eighteenth century, statute law had been growing as the old customary rights proved inadequate or were simply overridden by the power of money. In particular, there was extensive legislation dealing with crimes against property, including poaching and squatting. The same people who passed these laws in Parliament drew up the Laws of Cricket, and for much the same purpose.
What drove the landowning elite to codify the laws of cricket were the high stakes now riding on many matches. Cricket’s two innings (which feature in all the earliest accounts of the game) made the game ideal for gamblers: it made the wagers more complex and the results less arbitrary; and the conclusion of the first innings provided the occasion for increasing the stakes or revising the odds.
In 1751, a £1,500 formal wager plus side-bets totalling £20,000 were at stake in a match between Old Etonians and ‘England’. In the Hambledon matches £500 a side was the normal wager. In 1794, the Earls of Winchilsea and Darnley bet 1,000 guineas on a match between their respective sides. Far from being hidden away in shame, this aspect of the game was promoted as one of its chief attractions. All the early versions of the Laws (including the Star and Garter Laws of 1784 and MCC’s first revision in 1787) included provisions to ensure bets were fairly settled. What was at stake in cricket in those days was not honour but money. People played for profit – the composition of teams shifted endlessly – and were only expected to play for love of the game or of country or of county much later. What could reflect more accurately the culture of the world’s first entirely money-based society?
The substantial sums bet on cricket matches, and the additional sums invested in the development of cricket fields and the employment of professional cricketers, were drawn from the landed elite’s vast and growing pool of liquid assets. During the course of the eighteenth century, the great English landowners were investing profits from land in canals and mines, mercantile ventures and government debts (which rose because of incessant warfare in pursuit of colonial expansion). Through the Bank of England (which was owned by titled peers) and the Stock Exchange (set up in the wake of the Restoration ‘settlement’), they were acting as capitalist financiers, just as they were in staging cricket matches and placing huge wagers on them.
The men who put their name to the Star and Garter Laws in 1784 were not indolent aristocrats with nothing better to do than rewrite the rules of a children’s game. They were men who took for granted their right to rule at home and abroad. They pilfered from the state and plundered other nations. They were bold (that is to say, shameless), enterprising, and overwhelmingly confident. All of this enabled them to create modern cricket – but they did not do so alone.
During the eighteenth century the landed elite began increasingly to rely on a new class of entrepreneurs, among them publicans and promoters, who swarmed around the rich at play just as they do today. Brewing interests were involved in cricket as early as 1668, when the Ram Inn at Smithfield was rated for a cricket ground. Organized matches were almost always played adjacent to a public house or tavern and innkeepers were the principal advertisers of matches in the press. Occasionally, inns would hire players to represent them in matches, though that seems to have become rarer as the landed elite exerted its authority. More and more, the booze-merchants and professional publicists assumed the role of cricket’s middle-men, mediating between the aristocrats who controlled the game and the larger public now willing to pay to see it.
Most of the early professionals were personal servants of the great patrons. John Minshull, the first century-maker, worked for the Duke of Dorset as a gardener at eight shillings a week. The second Duke of Richmond retained the batsman Thomas Waymark, immortalized in Love’s 1744 poem for dropping a sitter, as a groom. Dorset’s stable of cricketers was said to cost him £1,000 a year. Tankerville hired the bowler ‘Lumpy’ Stevens as a gardener and others as butlers and gamekeepers. Sir Horatio Mann employed a batsman as a bailiff (the ‘Old Corruption’ reared its head even in cricket). The few itinerant professionals played as temporary servants for whichever great patron was paying their wages on the day. These wages were always modest. There was a huge gap between the profits made by patrons from gambling and the payments made to players.
The history of the poor and oppressed in shaping cricket remains largely hidden. Though the great patrons played with personal servants, tenant farmers and yeomen, they did not admit the landless poor or labourers to the privileged enclosure of the cricket field. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, in Sheffield, Nottingham and Leicester, cricket was being played by self-employed artisans, who controlled their own hours of employment and sought a recreation in keeping with their skilled status. Hosiers in Leicester and lace-makers in Nottingham, both employed on piece-work, took to the game (and were later to provide the nucleus of the pioneering professionals of the early-Victorian era). The Hambledon generation of professionals included potters, shepherds, blacksmiths and small farmers like Billy Beldham, whose footwork was, according to John Nyren, ‘one of the most beautiful sights that can be imagined and which would have delighted an artist’.
In England, the peasantry, the numerically dominant class in every other European country, had been virtually eliminated by 1800. The effects of the ‘free market’ in land were augmented by the highly profitable process of enclosure. Between 1700 and 1845, half the arable land in England was enclosed by parliamentary Acts.
The result of this exercise in dispossession – in which the elite made full use of their unchallenged control of both the market and the state – was a population increasingly dependent on cash wages rather than subsistence farming or traditional rights to fuel and fodder. The cottagers and smallholders who depended on these rights were, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, transformed from ‘members of a community with a distinct set of rights into inferiors dependent on the rich’.
The enclosure movement, along with the Game Acts which restricted access to the countryside, undermined the old folk games. Many a traditional site for an annual parish contest was now deemed private property. In the second half of the eighteenth century, breaking into closes to play cricket was an offence tried frequently in the Court of Common Pleas. Landowners now permitted people to play cricket in areas where they had previously done so as of right.
‘Village cricket’ developed in the shadow of the modern cricket played under the aegis of the great landowners. Gradually, the old local variations were eliminated and the Laws issued by ‘the noblemen and gentlemen’ in London were given precedence. Increasingly, ‘village cricket’ sought to emulate not only the kind of cricket played by the leading patrons, but the mores and hierarchy which they had introduced into the game.
Like most nations, peoples, religions, political parties, indeed nearly all social institutions, cricket has its origin myth. These are tales communities tell themselves about how they entered history. They seek to explain not so much what these communities have been as what they have become. Cricket’s myth is no exception.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the English population had been moving at an ever quickening pace from the countryside to the city. By 1760, London was the biggest and richest city in Europe and the world’s greatest port and warehouse. It was also the only locus of anything like commercialized spectator sport. Driven from the villages, the landless and dispossessed created a new urban proletariat whose grievances exploded in periodic riot.
This traumatic, early transition from country to city became etched in English consciousness. The world’s first largely urbanized society lived on a cultural diet of sentimental ruralism. The patterns and models for upper-class life remained rural, though increasingly the lives led by that class were town- or city-based.
The late eighteenth century discovered the picturesque village and the cunningly landscaped country park. The cult of nature and rustic sincerity was born, and with it what came to be known as the Romantic sensibility. As a folk game played on wide, unmeasured spaces, cricket was gilded by that sensibility early in its history. With residences (and financial interests) in both country and city, it was natural for the landowning elite to bring the country game of cricket into the city and there remake it according to their needs. Modern cricket was thus formed through and continued to represent the link between country and city. Its origin myth, the symbolic journey from the village green of Hambledon in rural Hampshire to Lord’s in London, embodies the transition from one to the other.
The persistence of this myth owes a great deal to the sheer charm of John Nyren’s The Young Cricketer’s Tutor, published in 1833. Nyren was the last survivor of the great generation of Hambledon players. His father, Richard Nyren, had been captain and manager of the Hambledon Club in its heyday. ‘Young’ John Nyren was sixty-nine when he told his story to Charles Cowden Clarke, cricket’s first and probably most able ghost writer. Clarke, the son of a schoolmaster, was a childhood friend of John Keats and later a colleague of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. As a professional literary man (his lectures on Shakespeare were box-office hits) he was not only author but also publisher, promoter, distributor and retailer. Nyren’s cricket book seems to have been one of his most successful ventures.
Nyren and Clarke are at pains to emphasize the moral probity, dignity and ‘Englishness’ of the Hambledon players. ‘Thomas Brett, the fast bowler, ‘bore the universal character of a strictly honourable man in all his transactions’. The ‘word’ of Tom Sueter, the wicket keeper, ‘was never questioned by the gentlemen who associated with him’. Collectively, ‘no thought of treachery ever seemed to enter their heads’ – this in a period when high stakes meant large inducements to players to throw matches. ‘Like true Englishmen, they would give an enemy fair play.’ Richard Nyren himself, a left handed all-rounder, epitomized the team’s virtues:
I never saw a finer specimen of the thorough-bred old English yeoman than Richard Nyren. He was a good face-to-face, unflinching, uncompromising, independent man. He placed a full and just value upon the station he held in society, and he maintained it without insolence or assumption. He could differ with a superior, without trenching upon his dignity, or losing his own.
Even the punch at the Hambledon matches was ‘not your new ponche à la romaine or ponche à la groseille or your modern cat-lap milk punch – punch be-devilled, but good, unsophisticated John Bull stuff – stark! – that would stand on end – punch that would make a cat speak. Sixpence a bottle.’
To read Nyren and Clarke today is to encounter all the old cricket myths freshly minted, unencumbered by the musty air of pretence that they were to acquire later. Strangely though, there is little in the book about the club’s patrons, though a contemporary ‘Cricket Song’ dedicated to Hambledon insists:
Let’s join in the praise of the bat and the wicket
And sing in full chorus the patrons of cricket.
In the 1760s, the Reverend Charles Powlett, son of the wealthy Duke of Bolton (a descendant of the Whig landlords who backed William of Orange against James II) had secured an ecclesiastical living in a hitherto obscure corner of south-east Hampshire. With several former Westminster schoolmates, he founded the Hambledon Club (in London) and became its first secretary. Over the next decade, the club’s members included eighteen titled aristocrats, two MPs, two knights, and sons, brothers and cousins of the above. Its presidents included the Duke of Chandos, with huge estates in Herefordshire, and the Earl of Darnley, a leading Kent landowner whose grandson and great-grandsons were Presidents of the MCC. Among Hambledon’s other patrons were Winchilsea, Dorset, Tankerville and Horatio Mann.
The membership fee was three guineas a year, the same price Hampshire CCC were charging for annual membership as late as 1970. Club meetings and dinners were advertised in the London papers, as well as in Winchester and Salisbury. That this was very much a sophisticated gentleman’s drinking, eating and social club is indicated by the notorious Hambledon Club toast, ‘To the immortal memory of Madge’. For decades, the identity of ‘Madge’ perplexed cricket scholars (one opined that it could not be a woman, because women had nothing to do with cricket). However, recent research has revealed that ‘Madge’ was a slang word for female genitalia. Clearly part of the attraction of cricket clubs, like other elite men’s social clubs, was to get away from home, the nuclear family and the pretence of monogamy – and to reassert the predatory sexual freedom enjoyed by the old military-feudal aristocrats.
For all his pride in the ‘yeoman independence’ of the Hambledon professionals, John Nyren could still boast of ‘the style with which we were accustomed to impress our aristocratic playmates with our acknowledgement of their rank and station’.
Old Richard Nyren, who ran the club on behalf of the rich patrons, was one of tens of thousands of yeoman farmers then being squeezed out by market forces. As a cricket promoter and landlord of the Bat and Ball Inn, he found a new niche in the social hierarchy. He administered payments to the players (three or four shillings for a match or practice session). He also ensured they dressed in the livery provided by their patrons: sky-blue coats with black velvet collars, buckled shoes, knee breeches and stockings.
Hambledon was not so much ‘the cradle of cricket’ as a sophisticated nursery for the training and development of professional cricketers, run by the rich for the entertainment of the rich. Attracted by the prestige of the patrons, and the wages offered, players came to Hambledon from villages and towns throughout Hampshire and from Surrey, Dorset, Sussex, Essex and Kent.
John Nyren described Hambledon as ‘the Attica of the scientific art’. In its brief heyday, the club was the scene of rapid technical improvements in all aspects of the game. Hambledon players were the first to exploit bowling through the air and to add jerks, twists and turns to it. Tom Walker pioneered slow bowling; ‘The Little Farmer’, Lambert, the off-break (‘the first I remember who introduced this deceitful and teasing style of delivering the ball’). John Small was ‘the first who turned the short hits to account’; Tom Sueter ‘the first to depart from the custom of the old players before him, who deemed it heresy to leave the crease for the ball’.
Nyren himself makes clear that the innovations belonged as much to the professionals playing against Hambledon (the bowlers David Harris and ‘Lumpy’ Stevens in particular) as to the Hambledon players themselves. The technical revolution associated with Hambledon was not so much an expression of native English genius as of the concentration of resources and the incentive to win created by the capitalist patrons.
In 1787, many of the same individuals who had sponsored Hambledon (and who had issued the Star and Garter Laws) created Lord’s and the MCC. The architect of this crowning achievement of the eighteenth century cricket elite was, according to tradition, Thomas Lord, whom HS Altham (Repton, Oxford) described in his 1921 History of Cricket as coming from ‘sturdy and once prosperous yeoman stock’.
In fact, Lord’s family were Yorkshire Catholic landowners dispossessed because of their support for the Pretender in 1745. Lord turned Protestant and made his way to London where he became a wine merchant and sometime cricket companion of the gentlemen of the Star and Garter, who at that time played cricket in White Conduit Fields. It was the ideal milieu for an ambitious young entrepreneur prepared to make himself of service to the elite.
In June 1785, the Daily Universal Register, predecessor of The Times, lectured Lord’s new acquaintances:
It is recommended to the lordling cricketers who amuse themselves in White Conduit Fields to procure an Act of Parliament for inclosing their ground, which will not only prevent them being incommoded, but protect themselves from a petition of severe rebuke which they justly merit and received on Saturday evening from some spirited citizens whom they insulted and attempted vi et armis to drive from their footpath, pretending it was within their bounds.
After some delay, the ‘lordling cricketers’ took the advice to heart. Thus, the founding of Lord’s and the MCC had at its heart the capitalist drive for enclosure, the compulsion to transform common property into private property. The impatience of the anonymous journalist with the White Conduit cricketers is revealing: what annoys the writer is their assumption of private property rights without having secured them in law.
In 1787, the Earl of Winchilsea and Charles Lennox (later Duke of Richmond) guaranteed the thirty-one-year-old Lord against any loss if he would procure for them a new, private cricket ground. Accordingly, he leased land in May of that year on what is now Dorset Square. The first thing he did was to put a fence around the ground. This not only ensured exclusive use of the ground for the gentlemen but also enabled Lord to charge a 6d entrance fee.
The Star and Garter elite had already issued two revisions of the laws. As they moved their base from the open spaces of White Conduit Fields to Lord’s enclosed ground, they carried with them the authority of established lawmakers. They employed all the principal players and they were the biggest betters on the major matches, which were made in their names. Once Lord had provided them with a London base, they formed themselves into a private club, the MCC.
Although the early records of the MCC have vanished, it seems probable that new members always had to be nominated from among existing members and then approved by the rest of the club. This is a form of democracy often favoured by the English upper class: election – or recruitment – from above.
Lord’s was, in its early days, explicitly and unashamedly a business. Lord could get 5,000 into his ground, but to cover big-match expenses in advance, he would solicit ‘subscriptions’ in the fashionable men’s clubs, just as county cricket clubs flog hospitality packages today. He also hired out his grounds for foot races, pigeon shooting, hopping matches, ballooning, parades and ceremonies of all sorts. Gamblers of all types flocked to the cricket matches, as did pickpockets.
Lord was forced to move to Lisson Grove when Dorset Square was earmarked for residential development. A few years later he had to move again to escape canal construction. He arrived at the present St John’s Wood site in 1813. Lord would have thought ‘Plum’ Warner was barking mad when he said: ‘Cricket is not a circus and it would be far better that it should be driven back to the village green ... than yield a jot to the petulant demands of the spectator.’ Lord staged gimmick matches between left-handed and right-handed cricketers as readily as he took on the Eton v. Harrow match in 1805 (it is still played at Lord’s).
Lord turned from cricket promotion to property speculation. In 1825, he was eager to sell the lease on his St John’s Wood site to a residential developer, a more profitable exercise, at least in the short run, than running a cricket ground. The elite stepped in. William Ward (Winchester, Oxford), a master batsman whose 278 for MCC against Norfolk was the highest score at Lord’s until Percy Holmes’s 315 not out for Yorkshire against Middlesex in 1925, bought out Lord’s interest for £5,000. At this time, Ward was a director of the Bank of England. Later he was to become MP for the City of London. The next year, after the first Harrow v. Winchester match at Lord’s, a fire destroyed the pavilion and with it all the early MCC records. From then on, the game’s mythologists, uninhibited by recorded history, let their imaginations run wild.
In contrast to the rise of the MCC, the demise of the Hambledon Club is clearly documented. At the club’s last recorded annual dinner in 1794, it was minuted that Thomas Paine, ‘Author of the Rights of Man’, was present – along with only three members (none of them titled) and twelve guests. The landowners had decamped to London and high politics. Paine was the guest of Hambledon’s last honorary secretary, Henry Bonham, a radical Whig whose descendants include the Liberal Bonham-Carter family. Clearly, modern English cricket was congenial to the revolutionary democrats of the time. They recognized in it a suitable vehicle for their own aspirations. Yet they could inhabit Hambledon only when the club was a spent force. For all its democratic tendencies, modern cricket remained the creature of the English elite.
Appearing in the Star and Garter list as a humble ‘Lennox, Mr C.’ was the future fourth Duke of Richmond, Charles Lennox, descendant through an illegitimate line of Charles II, and perhaps the most prominent gentleman cricketer (a batsman and wicket-keeper) of his day. After a brief spell as MP for Sussex, he embarked on a long military career that took him to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant, across Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, to the Leeward Islands and ultimately to Canada as Governor General of British North America. Everywhere he went, he played cricket. On the eve of Waterloo, he organized a match for the English officers. He nearly became Prime Minister in 1809, losing out to his old cricket colleague William Bentinck.
In 1789, Lennox fought a duel on Wimbledon Common with the Duke of York, brother of George IV, who was a keen cricketer long before his dubious exploits in battle won him the immortality of nursery rhyme. Lennox’s second in the duel was his Star and Garter companion, Winchilsea. The next year Lennox faced York again, this time at Lord’s new cricket ground. Lennox appeared for ‘Hambledon’ and York for ‘England’.
Clearly, this was a ruling class with one foot still in the old ways, a continental-style aristocracy bound by a feudal code of blood and honour. But it was also a new type of elite, a capitalist elite, which mingled socially with the untitled and even on occasion the unlanded, not least on the cricket field.
Cricket, it must be remembered, was the first team game in which the upper classes took part – at least the first one in which they took part on foot, rather than horseback. They patronized football and other traditional, festive games, as well as the modern spectator sports of boxing and racing, but they played cricket.
This was a reflection of the gradual demilitarization of the English aristocracy, whose war-skills were to be used on seas and overseas in future, while other means were found to sustain their rule at home. Playing cricket was the logical consequence of the elite’s role in a society based not on hereditary rank (though that still counted) but primarily on landed wealth, on capital. The primacy of cold cash, and with it the subjugation of all to the rule of law, blurred social boundaries and brought together individuals from different strata of society. All were part of the nationwide market economy. All could play a single game under a single set of Laws.
Overseas, it was regarded as a peculiar foible of the English aristocracy that, despite its fantastic wealth, it disdained much of the culture of conspicuous display indulged in by its foreign counterparts. Stranger still, it often aped the fashions and manners of social ‘inferiors’, not least by playing cricket. This was an indulgence that French aristocrats, whose privileges rested not on the endlessly transformable power of money but on the rigid enforcement of a ‘divine right’ absolutism, could never have contemplated.
‘If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants their chateaux would never have been burnt.’ This famous dictum appears in GM Trevelyan’s English Social History, published during World War II to buttress national unity in the face of the fascist enemy. In Trevelyan’s vision of ‘village cricket’ in which ‘squire, farmer, blacksmith and labourer, with their women and children ... were at ease together and happy all the summer afternoon’, the great myth of English cricket was given a Liberal gloss.
The power of this myth derives from a grain of truth at its heart. When the aristocrats came down off their horses to play cricket with the lower orders, they wrought a revolution. They placed themselves at the head of a game whose premises (unlike those of horse-racing or boxing, the other two commercial success stories of that sporting era) were inclusive. It was on this basis that cricket first staked its claim to be a national sport, and it did so in an era that witnessed the birth of nationalist sentiment across Europe. In this too, England was a pioneer. ‘Rule Britannia’ was first sung in 1740. Within a few years, ‘God Save the King’ was adopted for royal ceremonials and became the world’s first national anthem.
Cricket in this era acquires and at the same time helps to create a national public. Between 1730 and 1740, some 150 cricket matches were recorded in the contemporary press; between 1750 and 1760, 230; between 1770 and 1790, over 500. By the end of the century, cricket was being played in most English counties, though it was still largely unknown in the far North and far West. Several towns had already seen cricket riots.
The first cricket annual, Samuel Butcher’s ‘List of all the Principal Matches of Cricket’ appeared in 1791. The Sporting Magazine was founded in 1793. It became possible to compile batting and bowling averages and make comparisons between players one had never seen. Cricket became something strangers could converse about. The newspaper, the novel, cricket: all come of age in this period and all require an impersonal paying public, not merely elite patronage. All address an anonymous, nationwide constituency.
By the end of the century, cricket, which had been seen as a passing aristocratic craze sixty years before, had become respectable, ‘manly’ and therefore ‘English’. In 1786, The Times’s report of a cricket match staged by Dorset in Paris made it clear that cricket had become something the English took pride in: ‘The French ... cannot imitate us in such vigorous assertions of the body.’ When 2,000 spectators packed the new Lord’s ground in 1787, The Times praised the crowd for ‘conducting themselves with the utmost decorum’.
Already, cricket’s Englishness was being identified with masculinity, law and order, and social hierarchy. Cricket’s social inclusion was innovatory, but highly conditional. The democratic revolution in cricket, as in English society as a whole, was to remain incomplete, truncated by the endurance of feudal rights within the English capitalist order.
In the old times, the lord of the manor would lay on meat and ale on festival days and, for a fixed period, tolerate a degree of disorder and insubordination. The old folk games were always staged as part of these local saturnalia. Things often got out of hand in parish football matches, which came into disrepute with the ruling classes at the very time cricket was in the ascendant. In cricket, at least after MCC’s first revision of the Laws in 1787, there was no body contact; violence was mediated by bat and ball, which made it possible for the elite to play in the company of their inferiors. By patronizing cricket they could control the festive spirit and use it to promote the old hierarchy in an age of rapid change.
When the great patrons began playing cricket with the lower orders, they barred women from the game. Byron spoke of ‘cricket’s manly toil’, a phrase which would have been unthinkable a century before, when cricket among the upper classes was merely a fashion and women joined with men in the child’s game played to pass the time on the great estates. Of course, the exclusion of women is something cricket shares with other sports. Significantly, the bar on mixed competition is usually enforced only after puberty. The male body of the team must be insulated from threat of female contamination. The body taboo which held sway for so many generations between gentlemen and players and in South Africa between black and white is still practised with rigour between men and women.
Cricket brought the rulers into contact with a cross-section of the ruled, but it allowed them to make this contact within a circumscribed social space, the space of the cricket field, under carefully controlled conditions, embodied in the Laws of Cricket, like the common laws of property prevailing throughout the market economy. It allowed the rulers to participate in sport with others without jeopardizing their social standing. Whatever happened on the field, social distinctions were preserved off it.
Cricket clubs were exclusively for ‘noblemen and gentlemen’. Professional players were employees and, in a telling phrase, ‘servants’ of the clubs. Cricketers were skilled workers, but they retained the mentality of medieval artisans dependent on noble patrons. Though this status has been challenged again and again in cricket history, it remained the norm up till our own time. Some would say it still does.
The inclusiveness of cricket, which gave it its claim to be ‘English’, was strictly limited, and that ‘Englishness’ became the property of the elite which ruled the game and the country. For all their innovatory spirit, the English, unlike the French, did not clear the decks of feudal rubbish by declaring a revolutionary ‘Year One’.
In 1789, the Duke of Dorset, then serving as Ambassador to France, proposed that an English cricket side visit Paris. His friend and fellow MCC member, the Earl of Tankerville, was in the government and secured approval from the Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Leeds, also a cricketer. What can only be called the first MCC overseas touring party duly assembled at Dover in July, only to be confronted with Dorset travelling post-haste in the opposite direction, fleeing the revolution which had just broken out in the French capital. The world’s inaugural international cricket tour was cancelled because of politics.
The French Revolution terrified the English elite. The Whig grandees of the Star and Garter abandoned the democratic heritage of 1688 and rallied to the crusade against Jacobinism. Several joined Pitt’s reactionary ministry in 1799, among them Carlisle, Thomas Pelham and Charles Fitzroy, and voted to suspend habeas corpus and implement the Alien, Sedition and Treason Acts. Earl Spencer became Lord of the Admiralty, in which capacity he suppressed the Spithead and Nore mutinies with copious hangings and floggings. John Willett Payne became a Rear Admiral. In 1800, William Wyndham, brother of the Earl of Egremont, became Minister of War. Sir Thomas Fremantle served with Nelson in the Mediterranean and became a Rear Admiral in 1810.
The exception that proved the rule was the former Hambledon cricketer, Sackville Tufton, a nephew of the Duke of Dorset and later Earl of Thanet. While so many of his cricketing peers were moving to entrench landlord and colonial power (particularly in Ireland), Tufton was sent to the Tower for ‘creating a riot’ at the Maidstone trial for ‘seditious libel’ of Arthur O’Connor, a leader of the United Irishmen who ended up working for Napoleon.
In the struggle against the French and the plebeian forces unleashed by their revolution, the elite invoked the ‘English’ national identity which had been forged in the course of the preceding century. Cricket was not only a component of that identity; it had helped create it. And the cricket elite, whose willingness to play with the lower orders had given the game such a powerful democratic impetus, now harnessed it to the cause of reaction.
Cricket’s pioneering role made it a prisoner of English history. As the creature of an age of transition, it still has a foot in both the past and the present. At times, it seems in danger of being rent asunder as the two pull in opposite directions.
Yet it is the very transitional nature of the game, the way the legacy of the old endures within the new, that accounts for the fascination of cricket. Cricket retains more features from the age of folk games than any of its modern rivals, forged in later eras. These ‘under-developed’ features are, indeed, the key to understanding the game’s angst ridden struggle to adapt itself to the modern world.
The general tendency of organized modern sport is towards standardization of conditions, regularized and systematic competition, and thorough commercialization. In team sports, these are supplemented by both greater specialization and subordination of individuals to the fortunes of the team as a whole. Sports are driven along this course by the need to make themselves more competitive and therefore more attractive to spectators. Against this general pattern, cricket seems a case of arrested development.
The earliest essence of cricket, undoubtedly an inheritance from the folk game, is two sets of wickets with bowling from alternate ends (single wicket cricket is a later adaptation). The early Laws never even mention these arrangements; they are simply assumed. Out of them came not only the complexity of cricket scoring but the mirror-effect of the change in the field at the end of the over, an eerie survival of an age besotted with symmetry and the pseudo-sciences of cabbala and numerology.
It also reflects the origin of the game in a countryside innocent of capitalist enclosure and ensuing industrialization. Boundaries were not written into the Laws until the 1870s; even today, The Laws stipulate only that ‘the umpires shall agree with both captains on the boundary of the playing area’. In the early days, all hits had to be run out: there were no fours or sixes. If the ball went into the crowd, the crowd cleared a way for the fieldsman to retrieve it. This is a legacy from the days when land was held in common and seen as unbounded. Cricket fields had a centre – the pitch – but not a periphery. Because of this, both bowling and batting become infinitely various and captaincy and field-placing infinitely subtle.
Where time-limits are the essence of football, rugby, basketball and hockey, in cricket, time, like space, is indefinite. The early matches had to be played out: there was no draw. By the end of the eighteenth century, three-, four- and five-day matches were common – not because that was the time stipulated for them but because that was how long it took for at least one side to bowl the other out twice. The game expanded to fill as much time as was demanded by the skill of the players in conjunction with the state of the pitch. This too was a legacy of a pre-industrial world before time was measured out in inter-changeable units, before labour was a commodity bought and sold in those units. Initially, the draw was simply an arbitrary abandonment of the game. However, the inevitable time-limit – even one as leisurely as five days – did add another dimension to the game, creating the triangle of runs, wickets and time which makes cricket dramatic.
Cricket’s open-endedness in time and space gives it the episodic quality which is one of its chief glories. The widely-held belief that the uneven rhythm of the game reflects a slower society in which the boundary between work and leisure was less stark is solidly grounded in history. That history is also reflected in the way batting in cricket carries such potent intimations of mortality: you know your innings will end, but you don’t know when; each ball might be your last, but then again it might not. The fall of a wicket, an immediate, ignominious and irreversible end to occupation of the crease, is the sort of sudden death which more advanced sports tend to eliminate.
Already in the eighteenth century, cricket’s great attraction is the gladiatorial contest between bowler and batsman. Cricket is the first modern team sport, but it is a team sport whose greatest fascination seems to be the display of individual prowess. Even today, the most fervent partisan will openly admire any piece of fine cricket by an individual, regardless of which side he or she plays for. It is impossible to play cricket of any real drama or skill without a full team; single-wicket or six-a-side are feeble shadows of the real thing. Yet it also seems that the most enduring attraction of full-blooded team cricket is the way it allows diverse personalities to flourish.
Cricket’s pre-industrial origins have thus stamped the game with a unique interplay between the individual and collective, derived from its special alchemy of space and time. These qualities have taken the game through the industrial age and may yet take it beyond.
Because it is played out over a longer period of time than other sports, cricket is more susceptible to the vagaries of weather. English cricket skills were developed to cope with these vagaries; the aim was not so much to master the environment as to exploit it. This is why the old conundrum – how could a game requiring five successive days of good weather ever be invented in England? – misses the point. English cricket is not made for relentless sunshine, which may be why touring abroad is often such an ordeal for English cricketers.
Most sports seek to make themselves weather-proof: Americans have taken this to a logical extreme by staging games in domed stadia on artificial turf. Cricket has resisted this process. Its grounds remain astonishingly diverse in size, shape, exposure to the elements, quality of pitch and outfield. This diversity does not reflect mere foot dragging by old-fashioned cricket authorities. It is the product of cricket’s autochthony, one of the game’s inner secrets.
The word comes from the Greek autochthon, of the land itself. In pathology, an autochthonous disease is one which is found in a particular locality. In ecology, it pertains to plants or animals indigenous to a particular region. In psychology, it refers to ideas or illusions that seem to originate in some alien, outside reality, like earth, rocks or trees.
Where most modern ball games required a standardized inflatable ball – and therefore had to await developments in rubber technology – cricket has always been played with a hard, solid ball composed of cork, twine and leather. Its red dye (the balls seem to have been red from the beginning) is merely a heightening and polishing of the natural colour of the leather. Because of their pre-industrial origin, cricket balls have peculiar, irregular, apparently contradictory qualities, many of them baffling physicists to this day. To exploit the ball’s primitiveness demands extraordinary skill and cunning, and to influence the behaviour of the ball, bowlers have applied spit, sweat, flannel, earth, sawdust and hair oil. In baseball, as every American child knows, you’re out of the game if you spit on the ball – or, at least, you’re out if you’re caught doing it. Not in cricket.
The oldest surviving measurement in cricket is the length of the pitch, twenty-two yards, or one chain. The chain was a surveyor’s device, a by-product of the transformation of land into a capitalist commodity, first used in England in the late seventeenth century. It consisted of one hundred links of equal length, measuring twenty-two yards in total. European Union or no, cricket, because of its early origins, is likely to continue to defy the invincible march of the metric system, that creation of the French Revolution.
In early cricket the ball was rolled (‘bowled’) along the ground. Pitching it under-arm through the air eliminated much of the arbitrary influence of ground conditions, but an essential contact with the ground remained. This autochthony accounts for the crucial role of the state of the pitch in determining the outcome of the games played on it.
Every time Thomas Lord moved his cricket ground, he dug up and transported his pitch. Up until 1811 the visiting team chose where to pitch the wickets, though always within a specified radius of a point picked by the home team. After 1811, the pitching of wickets was given to the home team’s groundsman and the toss for choice of innings became all-important – not least to prevent abuse by home groundsmen, always a topic of heated debate. The toss in cricket is more important in determining the result of matches than in any other sport. It requires cricketers to make complex meteorological and geological calculations which never enter the heads of players in other games.
Standardization has been essential to the development of most sports. By eliminating the arbitrary influence of ground conditions or weather, the players’ own skills, strength and state of mind play a greater role in determining results. In cricket, the limits of standardization – in time, space, and the very implements of play – are the key to unlocking its rich store of skill and drama.
Cricket’s early Laws are not comprehensive descriptions of the game or even systematic sets of rules covering every eventuality. They often fail even to mention the criteria for winning or losing. The circumference of the ball is not stipulated until 1838. The width of the bat was limited only in 1774 after Shock White walked on to the pitch to commence his innings against Hambledon with a bat as wide as the wicket itself. White was breaking no known Law. He was, however, violating what was already coming to be known as ‘the spirit of the game’. The LBW law was brought in, according to an elderly Billy Beldham, because ‘one of our best hitters was shabby enough to get his legs in the way and take advantage of the bowlers’.
Cricket’s perennial controversy over the supremacy of bat or ball was born with the game itself. Already there was debate over the legitimacy of bowling actions. Jerking, throwing, pitching, pushing are all denounced, but it always proves difficult to define them clearly enough to allow umpires to make consistent rulings. The third stump was added, it is said, because in a 1775 match against Hambledon, ‘Lumpy’ Stevens, a Surrey player, managed to get the ball between batsman John Small’s two stumps three times in an over without dislodging the bails. In 1798, MCC increased the size of the wickets from 22 × 6 to 24 × 7 inches in order to assist struggling bowlers against increasingly dominant batsmen (they are now 28 × 9). From the very start, then, we see the endless tampering with the Laws in a vain quest for the perfect balance between bat and ball. The pendulum had started to swing and was never to stop.
Generally, Laws are added or amended in response to attempts to exploit loopholes or in order to accommodate technical innovations wrought by higher standards of play. In cricket, law always follows practice. Even the early laws are meant to define and to restrict existing practices, i.e. practices associated with the folk games from which cricket was derived. Hence they are laws not rules. They are statutes passed against the broader background of common law and ancient custom, and implicit in them is the existence of unspecified norms to which people are expected to adhere. ‘Fair play’ is first mentioned in the Laws in 1774. The 1787 revision makes clear that umpires ‘are the sole judges of fair and unfair play’. Moreover, ‘they are not to order a player out unless appealed to by the adversaries’. Here is the origin of that peculiar cricketing custom, the appeal: in the assumption that both sides, being composed at least partly of ‘gentlemen’, should always invite the umpire to give an adjudication rather than have him intervene unilaterally. Cricket’s constitution, then, is like England’s: unwritten, and therefore open to abuse by those who claim to act in its name.
By the late eighteenth century, cricket had broken free of the liturgical and agricultural calendars. It was no longer an affair of seasonal wakes and parish festivals, but it had not established an independent schedule of its own. There was no cricket season; there were no leagues or championships or integrated competition of any kind. Play was at the whim of the patrons, the bookies and the weather.
The characteristically English arm’s-length relationship between the landowning elite and the nitty-gritty of industry and trade meant that the publicans and promoters who assisted the great patrons were subordinate within the hierarchy of the game. The exploitation of cricket as a commercial commodity, path-breaking in its day, remained, for one hundred years, hesitant and spasmodic.
The big matches were either one-offs or once-a-year affairs. A stable, reliable return on investment was not yet possible. In the heyday of fashionable cricket the proprietor of the Artillery Ground, the leading cricket venue in the country, went bankrupt. Despite the economic development of the eighteenth century, at its end there was still not a large and stable enough market to sustain cricket as a commercial venture. Until the 1840s, working-class spending power and leisure time was simply insufficient. Middle-class professionals and small businessmen were neither numerous nor confident enough as yet to provide an alternative. The costs and inconvenience of transport meant that the game could be made profitable only in London.
Representative cricket was haphazard. The teams that played under the names of Kent or Surrey or Hampshire were assembled by rich patrons, the ‘leading men of the county’. As landowners, they identified their social status with territorial authority. When they brought teams to London to play for and with them, they logically called these teams by the names of their counties. The cricket historians who refer to the ‘beginning of county cricket’ in the mid-eighteenth century (and the present-day county members who claim lengthy genealogies for their clubs) mistake the name for the reality. There were few fixed loyalties. The professionals belonged to patrons, not to organized clubs. It was common for teams to supply their opponents with ‘given’ men to ensure equal competition. ‘Hambledon’, ‘Kent’, ‘All-England’ were transient appellations of convenience. The word county (used in cricket in preference to the Anglo-Saxon ‘shire’) comes from the Latin comitatus, a body of companions or retainers, and later a feudal retinue. This was precisely what the early ‘county’ teams were. Out ot that heritage came the permanent anachronism that is English county cricket.
In the 1820s, the novelist Mary Russell Mitford championed village cricket against:
a set match at Lord’s ground for money, hard money, between a certain number of gentlemen and players, as they are called – people who make a trade of a noble sport, and degrade it into an affair of bettings and hedgings and cheatings, it may be, like boxing or horse-racing.
Cricket starts believing its own myths early in its history. After all, it was the gentlemen who placed the bets and suborned the honour of the players with bribery. It was the gentlemen who had staged the great matches and the publicans and promoters who charged admission. Why did the players, the professionals, get the blame? Why were those market forces which had given birth to cricket so quickly banished from its ideology?
Cricket becomes the first modern sport at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Indeed, the same forces that changed a childish folk-game into modern cricket unleashed that revolution: the spread of the market economy, the domination of the state by a landowning bourgeoisie, the triumph of private property and law, the revenues from overseas trade and colonial conquest, the movement into the cities. But the creation of modern cricket was nearly complete when the Industrial Revolution was just beginning to gather pace. Cricket was not a product of that revolution but a by-product of the conjuncture of social and economic forces which set it in motion.
Though market relations were widespread in the late eighteenth century, and critical to the emergence of cricket, cricket was also shaped in its early years by older, pre-market institutions, notably aristocratic patronage and a social hierarchy not entirely based on money. As the tempo of change accelerated in the early nineteenth century, creating hunger and want as well as new aspirations and new social movements, people began to see cricket as something with its roots in an earlier, less predatory, less money-minded age. The argument between cricket and the market has been going on ever since.
Even as the bonds of the past were being sloughed off, a new historicism was emerging. Unprecedentedly rapid social change made people more self-conscious about the past. The era was marked by a growing fascination with those linked lost paradises: childhood, the countryside and the primeval nation. No wonder cricket began looking backwards almost as soon as it opened its eyes. It was forged in the transition between old and new, between country and city, and stamped indelibly with the date and place of manufacture.
Ever since, rus in urbe, the country in the city, has been the leitmotif of the game’s mythology. You can feel it any time you step into a major cricket ground in a big city – Lord’s, the Oval, Old Trafford, Headingley. Suddenly you enter a world where the clock is ticking with an ancient, irregular rhythm, inflected by hints of the changing seasons and ineffable shifts in the weather. Across the sheer expanse of green, defying the long-term inflation in urban property values, the episodic, elastic, open-ended, earthbound game preserves a pre-industrial world, but preserves it in a form that has existed only in a market economy.
A hundred years junior to cricket, football, with its intense physical and temporal compression and fierce partisanship, is the classic expression of industrial urbanism. In contrast, cricket has come to represent the English pastoral, the dream of an unchanging, natural society in which all conflicts are magically resolved. It is a society outside history, abiding in the eternal world of mythological time, not the world of the wristwatch, the factory punchclock and the football referee’s whistle.
Cricket fans who find in the dress, grounds, jargon, ritual, pace and unobtrusive complexity of cricket a whiff of an earlier age are not deluded. That is the past they’re sniffing. And why shouldn’t people get high on this scent? There is more than enough that is ugly in the present to justify taking momentary refuge in an earlier time.
The past shades and highlights, nuances and enriches cricket. Alas, it also sits like a dead weight on the poor game, cutting it off from sources of renewal. The hypocrisy that has long been regarded as one of the chief characteristics of the English takes root early in cricket, and is indeed one of the things that makes English cricket English – the way it lies about itself to itself. The Englishness is in the lie, in the cult of the honest yeomen and the village green, in the denial of cricket’s origins in commerce, politics, patronage and an urban society. The tyranny of mere wealth, on which the English eighteenth-century achievement rested, had to be wrapped in something finer and, at least in appearance, older.