“He is likely to be a better all-round player than his father.”
Manchester Guardian
FOUR YEARS AWAY from regular bowling at a young age may be no bad thing, as adult muscles have time to develop without the unnatural rigours of pounding in and contorting. Years of war service, lugging the signalling equipment in use long before the digital age, might actually have helped create the big-hearted stamina for which Tate would become revered.
The 1919 season, taking place in an atmosphere of relief that the war had ended mixed with considerable shortages, was different to any other. Counties still played two-innings matches, but each lasting no more than two days. It was hoped this would create brighter play and allow busy aficionados a better opportunity to watch entire matches.
Sussex opened the season later than normal, on 21st May, at Taunton. The game had been worth waiting for. Somerset scored 243, and Sussex almost matched them with 242. Tate provided some evidence that his all-round abilities might come to something, nine years after he was first taken on. Coming in at number eight, he hit 69 – his first half-century for the first XI.
Somerset, in their second innings, scored 103, leaving Sussex just 105 to win. Tate, after his revelatory batting, was promoted to the previously unknown heights of number four. His willingness to take risks made him ideal for a run chase. Tate tried to play expansively but was caught for 11.
Later, the team were cruising along at 103 for six, with just two runs required. Sussex’s number 11, Harold Heygate, who had injured his leg, was not expecting to bat. But when Sussex lost their seventh and eighth wickets for no extra runs, he started padding up, still wearing his normal clothes. The ninth went with the score on 104. The two teams’ match totals were tied.
Heygate hobbled out to face the bowling, but Len Braund – the bowler off whom Fred had made his terrible drop – was still playing for Somerset. He appealed to umpire Alfred Street, arguing that Heygate, who was struggling to walk, had taken too long to reach the crease. Street agreed, leaving the match as a tie. Heygate was listed in the records as “absent injured” rather than timed out.
It was a hugely deflating way for Sussex to start the post-war period, but it had been a gripping match nonetheless. Although a tie, the game was listed as a draw, as there was no provision for such a result in the system for calculating the championship standings. Somerset’s actions caused some moral debate. But The Times acknowledged the umpires had had to deal with “quite exceptional” circumstances.
Sussex started the 1919 season playing intermittently, but fixtures came more frequently as it progressed. Tate’s figures as a bowler improved on his pre-war showing. He took four for 97 against Kent, opening the attack, along with several ‘two-fors’.
His greatest achievement, however, came on – that ground again – Old Trafford against Lancashire at the end of July. In the second innings Tate scored 108, his first century, containing 11 fours and a six. The Argus reported: “With Mr [Norman] Holloway as his partner Tate had the satisfaction of reaching his first hundred for his county. He was loudly applauded, but when he had added another eight was stumped. His very fine display had been of the greatest possible service to his side.” Sussex still lost by three wickets, Tate’s none for 16 from two overs in Lancashire’s second knock not helping.
In the return match with Lancashire during the Hastings festival in August, the Manchester Guardian’s anonymous correspondent noticed potential in the off-spinner, who took four for 28 in the first innings: “Maurice Tate came out with the best analysis, and his deliveries approached the classical standard. He is likely to be a better all-round player than his father, who was a fine bowler.”
Tate endured several low scores, interspersed with 78 against Essex. It was, in the end, a disappointing season, Sussex coming 11th, but Tate was an ever-present in an outfit weakened by the war. The start of the 1920s would bring better, supporters hoped. Off he went again for some more agricultural labouring, still living with the Beaches. He recounted that the fresh air and exercise had “developed my bowling muscles wonderfully” and helped build up the frame which was to do so much work.
The cricketing future was still uncertain, though. Tate’s role was ill-defined. He was a sort of trundling off-spinner – lacking his smaller father’s subtlety of flight – who kept it tight but failed to take wickets en masse, and an occasional big-hitter when batting. It is not difficult to see such a player, had he come along now, being pigeon-holed as a one-day or t20 specialist. Back then, bits-and-pieces cricketers were more plentiful among the amateurs who could pick and choose their games, rather than the professionals, who were paid to perform in their chosen skill and judged against stricter criteria.
Tate, over the years, had received many chances to take wickets, but had done so only sporadically. Ahead of the 1920 season, it was debated whether to turn him into a batsman pure and simple. Sussex captain Herbert Wilson and the club’s secretary, Major William Sarel, were very much in favour of this, but the idea was eventually discarded. Sir Home Gordon claimed at least his own share of the credit, writing: “Had I not pleaded earnestly that he should be given another season with the ball, England would have lost one of her best post-war bowlers.” The decision later proved incredibly fortuitous for Tate, Sussex and England.
Tate’s financial situation also became clearer during that winter. The professionals had been pushing for pay to be extended to the entire year. In November 1919 the Sussex committee capitulated somewhat, resolving that “£1 per week should be allowed as from Oct 1 to April 30, but that should any special case of necessity arise, the match committee should be empowered to act in the matter”.
The tone of control over the players is striking. Wilfred Rhodes, in his dotage, remarked to the cricket writer David Frith that the game, with its professional/amateur distinction, had been run along the lines of an ‘apartheid’ regime. Coming as they did in the 1970s, the remarks bear the mark of the great political struggle of that later era. Might it not be more fruitful to compare the cricket set-up – revered, preserved and promoted by the Victorians and their successors even as society changed – to the childcare regime of the time? In other words, the idea was that professionals should be ‘seen and not heard’.
Any granting of privileges or money was very much from on high. Tate would have been more affronted than most professionals by this attitude. At least on his mother’s side, he had come from some solidly middle-class stock and had even attended a private school. He was no academic but neither was he uneducated and subservient.
As the 1920 season began, Sussex still clearly had plans for Tate as a batsman. He was now coming in at five or six. After making three scores in the thirties and forties, he was promoted to open with Ted Bowley against Northants in late May and scored 36 and 41. He picked up wickets in dribs and drabs, sometimes opening and sometimes as a change bowler. Still, the overall returns were underwhelming until he made another breakthrough, to rank alongside the previous season’s century. Playing against Oxford University at Hove in June, Tate opened the bowling, taking five for 48. It was his first five-wicket haul at first-class level – in his fifth season as a player. The pitch was easy for batting, adding to the achievement. He went one better in the second innings, capturing six for 42.
Such feats were to become commonplace for Tate later on, but for now a repeat proved elusive. He took four wickets in an innings four times during the remainder of the season and was becoming a useful bowler, taking 71 wickets in total, at an average of 20.64. He moved around the batting order and managed six half-centuries, with a highest score of 90, also in the Oxford University game. He took 50 wickets and scored 1,000 runs. Sussex earned a praiseworthy sixth place. Tate’s career was improving.
In January 1921 Tate married Kathleen, whom he had been visiting “two or three times a week” over the previous few months. Attempting a “flowery” proposal speech, the words came out all wrong, and Tate spluttered out the killer line: “Look here, we’ll have to get married.” The honeymoon was just as romantic an affair, spent coaching two Eton schoolboys at their home in Cirencester shortly before the season began.
Over the winter, Tate had secured clerical work at a London bank, something this outdoorsy type never enjoyed. He blamed it for his not being properly fit when he returned to nets in the spring. Perhaps having seen what some of the ‘other half’ among the bank’s customers were earning, Tate was becoming more aware of his worth to the club. The committee minutes for 24 January 1921 stated: “A letter was read from M.W.Tate and E.H.Bowley asking if the Committee could see their way to increase their weekly allowance of £1 to £2, owing to their inability to gain regular employment.” They go on: “It was resolved that owing to the loss Tate had received from the suspension of Farrow’s Bank an increase of 10/0 [shillings] per week be made to him as from October 1st 1920, but that in the case of Bowley no action be taken.”
Farrow’s, known as the “people’s bank”, had suspended payments in December 1920 after years of mismanagement which had been covered up by its founders Thomas Farrow and William Crotch, and their accountant, Frederick Hart. They were all jailed in June 1921. Paying the customers a good rate of interest since the bank’s foundation in 1907, the three men had illegally exaggerated the value of its assets. Those who lost out after the discrepancy was revealed by an investigation were predominantly small businessmen, clerks and others on middle incomes.
While the case involving Farrow, Crotch and Hart was still subjudice, on 17th February 1921, the MP for Islington East, Alfred Raper, asked in the House of Commons whether the government intended “to give assistance in the more necessitous cases”. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Austen Chamberlain, replied: “I am fully alive to the hardship which has been caused to the depositors by the failure of this bank, but I do not think that the circumstances are such as would justify the grant of relief from public funds.” It was not an ideal financial start to Tate’s married life.
Still, cricket was soon back. As the 1921 season began Tate showed an increased versatility by batting anywhere from three to five and opened the bowling. In the Lord’s match against Middlesex he took eight wickets, but the scores did not come again. At the end of May against Surrey, Tate made a pair but took six for 125 in Surrey’s first innings. This was his first haul of five wickets or more in the championship. The question loomed as large as ever: was he a better batsman or bowler?
As his batting deteriorated, he was moved down the order. However, two games later there came an excellent performance – four wickets in the match and scores of 151 and 47 not out batting at number six against the mighty Nottinghamshire. Sussex won by five wickets. Three quietish fixtures and he scored another century – 142 – batting at seven, a game in which he was first-change bowler. Then he was steady for three more games, until a notable five for 65 against Surrey at the Oval. Tate utilised the wet conditions to worry the formidable foe.
The Argus noted that “to begin with Mr [Alfred] Jeacocke was distinctly uncomfortable with Tate, being beaten by him three times in the course of as many overs”. The victims included the future England opening batsman, Andy Sandham, and Percy Fender, while Tate also scored 83 in the first innings, coming in at four. He was doing well, but not making history – yet.
Against Northants at Hove that July Tate and Bowley proved their worth, and it was definitely more than Sussex were paying. On a scorching Wednesday morning, Sussex won the toss and batted. From the start things went their way. Captain Herbert Wilson and Ted Bowley put on an untroubled 63 for the first wicket, the Hove pitch playing as benevolently as ever. Wilson was dismissed and Tate came in at three. At this point all normality ended. The young friends decided to enjoy themselves, to the despair of the hot-and-bothered Northants attack. In the days when scoring rates were usually measured in time taken, rather than balls faced, Sussex hit their first hundred in just 65 minutes.
With Tate and Bowley at the crease, things sped up. The second hundred came in 45 minutes, as did the third. The pair went for everything, knocking drives, cuts, pulls – all shots – around the ground, thrilling the Hove crowd. The fourth hundred also came in three quarters of an hour. The Northants attack had no answers, with eight bowlers used. Tate actually outscored his specialist batting partner while they were together, showing a particular skill at cutting. He reached his first, and only, double century in first-class cricket just before tea. It had taken just two hours and 55 minutes. When he and Bowley returned to the pavilion for tea, the score was a colossal 446 for one. The crowd cheered and hollered. The pair had already beaten the best partnership made by Sussex – 349 by CB Fry and left-hander Ernest Killick in 1901.
The break, as is often the case, proved fatal. Soon after coming back out, Tate was dismissed for 203, bowled by the persevering paceman William Wells. He had brought up his thousand runs for the season during the innings, scoring 30 fours and two sixes. But the team kept on going. Bowley eventually went for 228 in a comparatively pedestrian four hours and 15 minutes. The next highest scorer, after Tate, was George “The Guv’nor” Cox, the left-arm spinner and foreboding senior pro, with 70. The team declared on the second morning on a huge 670 for nine, off just 130.4 overs.
Northants were then dismissed for 251, Cox taking five for 53 and fast bowler Arthur Gilligan, who was to become a major figure in Tate’s life, getting two for 59. The visitors followed on and, demoralised by the fate which had befallen them, collapsed to 128 in the second innings. Tate took no wickets in his 29 overs in the two innings, but he could be forgiven. The margin of victory was staggering: an innings and 291 runs.
The Sussex Daily News reported of Tate and Bowley’s effort: “It is a long time since an exhilarating display in any way comparable to this has been seen at the Sussex headquarters.” It described Tate’s innings as “quite free from blemish”. For all the supporters of ‘brighter cricket’ – the idea that amateurs were needed to take the emphasis away from winning at all costs to playing the game with verve and style – this was a lesson.
The two young professionals had entertained royally and allowed Sussex to win comfortably. How far this must have seemed from the days when CB Fry, as the gentleman, had ordered the talented, but waged, Joe Vine to rein in his extravagances and play a supporting role. There was no such subservience in Tate and Bowley’s effort and Sussex cricket was all the better off for it.
Tate’s batting was volcanic rather than consistent. Every now and then there was a huge explosion, among some low scores and a few respectable ones. During a season when Warwick Armstrong’s Australians were destroying England in the Ashes, his chances of a Test call were limited, as he had shown brilliance at batting, and sometimes at bowling, but achieved little in the way of consistency. The rest of the county season passed by unremarkably, with a top score of 40 and best bowling figures of four for 33. Sussex finished ninth in a championship increased to 17 teams by the inclusion of Glamorgan.
Tate’s last game for the county was against the Australians at Hove. It was a contest the tourists won easily, by 197 runs. Coming on as fourth change in the Aussies’ first innings he took none for four. When Sussex batted he made seven runs. Tate’s luck changed when he bowled again. Fourth change
once more, he took four for 21 in nine overs, going through the middle order and tail. Those dismissed were Armstrong, fast bowler Jack Gregory, wicketkeeper Sammy Carter and Gregory’s famous fellow tearaway, Ted McDonald.
Whether because of his promising season or his proximity to the ground, Tate was picked to play for The South against the Australians at Hastings on 3rd September, his first representative match. It was not the strongest side, lacking the likes of England batsmen Jack Hobbs and Frank Woolley, but Bowley and Gilligan both played. Tate did little in the Australians’ first innings, coming on as seventh change and bowling just one over. He hit 30 in 17 minutes when The South batted, dismissed by leg-spinner Armstrong, and 11 at seven when they followed on. Again he was bowled by a leggie, this time the charismatic Arthur Mailey, another name who would later loom large in Tate’s career.
After another season of steady progress, interspersed with brilliance and several failures, Tate was still little more than a good county player – not quite the bowler his father had been, but a far better batsman. He had, though, at least encountered, in Australia, one of the greatest teams in history and was keen for more.
In sporting terms the 26-year-old Tate was becoming middle-aged. 1922 was to be the year when his talent finally began to reach its potential.