Teresa McLean was the first woman to win a cricket Blue for both Oxford and Cambridge. Her book The Men in White Coats was published in 1987.
IN ALL EARLY cricket an umpire’s main responsibility towards batsmen was to stand where they could touch his staff with their bats to score notches (runs). That is why the umpire at the batsman’s end is shown in all cricket pictures right up until the early nineteenth century standing at leg slip, where his staff was in easy reach, not at square leg, to which position he gratefully retreated when staff touching stopped being the means of scoring notches.
Short notches were favourite causes of dispute and it took a brave umpire to call one if he thought the batsman had not run the full length of the pitch. Notches and short notches were signalled to the notchers, or scorers, who sat on the field of play with long hazel sticks into which they cut a notch for every run scored and a deep notch for every fifth or every tenth run, to make adding up easier at the end.
The notchers, like the umpires, retreated gradually as batting improved, until they reached their present position outside the boundary ropes. In 1727 there were, as yet, no boundaries. Every notch had to be run and the number of notches scored could be shouted to the notchers without a signal. Long after the introduction of the popping crease, batsmen continued to hit the umpire’s staff to score a notch.
[. . .] In 1744 a score-card appeared for the first time, though most scorers still notched up the score on sticks. A Kent scorer recorded all the individual scores in a Kent/England game, all the byes, which meant all the extras – mainly overthrows, and gave the names of a catcher and stumper as well as a bowler. It was thirty years before such a detailed card was seen again.
The growing interest in cricket and the ever increasing betting on it created a demand for details of individual scores. There were bets on everything: how many runs a batsman would score, how he would be out, when, to whose bowling, at which end. By 1773 the best score-cards recorded how all the wickets were taken, not just the ones that were bowled and caught, with the occasional run-out. Scorers at sophisticated games kitted themselves out in smart clothes, moved out of the field of play and sat at tables, watching for umpires’ signals and writing the score. Most cricket was pretty rough, and so were its notchers, but by 1775 scorers were second only to umpires as status symbols at clubs like the Star and Garter.
Keith Booth is a writer and the principal scorer for Surrey.
His book Knowing the Score appeared in 1998.
THE FASTEST RECORDED authentic hundred – i.e. disregarding those scored in contrived circumstances to expedite a declaration – is by David Hookes who achieved it in 34 balls. How this compares with earlier efforts by (say) Gilbert Jessop around the turn of the century, who recorded hundreds in 40 and 42 minutes in 1897 and 1907, we do not know and never shall.
Instrumental in crystallising the thinking in the minutes v balls issue was the advent of limited overs cricket and money. When the John Player’s County League began in 1969, there was a prize of £250 for the fastest 50. It was won by Keith Boyce who clocked 23 minutes. Then, someone, somewhere must have said that the measure of time was less valid than that of balls received and in 1972 the prize went to Glenn Turner who made 50 from 32 balls. There was still an element of unfairness in that the prize was restricted to televised matches, but that is another story . . .
Bill Ferguson was recording balls received somewhat earlier and in the statistical appendices to Douglas Jardine’s book about the 1932–33 ‘bodyline’ tour In Quest of the Ashes includes tables of runs scored and balls received by each batsman against each bowler in each Test and over the series.
Roy Webber in the 1950s demonstrates that it is possible to calculate balls received, but does not maintain a cumulative record and the statistic does not form an integral part of the system. It began to do so when Bill Frindall redesigned the Ferguson system in 1966 and for media scoring has done so ever since.
Official records, however, have been slower to catch on. We have seen how limited overs cricket accelerated the inclusion of balls received, but it did not become a feature of first-class records until later. Wisden makes no mention of balls received in Robin Hobbs’s 44-minute hundred against the Australians at Chelmsford in 1975 and in The Oval Test match scorebook the first record is as late as 1984. Mike Ringham, who scored for the Australian touring team in 1985 (and two earlier tours), recalls that in that year he was helping county scorers come to terms with the concept of recording balls faced.
The history of the Walter Lawrence Trophy, one of the Ridley Awards, presented for the season’s fastest first-class century, parallels the chronology outlined above and illustrates this stuttering progress towards using balls faced rather than time at the crease as a measure of the speed of scoring. Oozing with nostalgia, the list records the first winner as F.E. Woolley with a hundred in 63 minutes for Kent against Northamptonshire at Dover in 1934 and continues to 1939 when L.E.G. Ames recorded one in 70 minutes.
The award then died and was not resurrected until 1966 when it was restricted to Test Matches and calculated in terms of balls (First winner: K.F. Barrington against Australia at Melbourne – 122 balls). It then reverted to all English first-class cricket in 1977 and the speed of scoring was again measured in minutes. (As the late Harry Sharp, player and scorer for Middlesex for many years, was fond of reminding his colleagues: ‘We didn’t have balls in my day!’) Only in 1985 are balls introduced and the first two winners are, perhaps unsurprisingly, I.T. Botham and I.V.A. Richards.
That nostalgic diversion serves to illustrate that, while linear scoring systems have provided the facility to record balls faced for some time and media scorers have used it, it has only recently replaced time batted as the official method of measuring speed of scoring.
Opponents of linear scoring have argued that there is too much to do at the end of an over, especially when a wicket falls on the last ball. It is certainly true that the demands are greater than under the traditional system, but, on the other hand, more information is immediately available and there is usually time while the players are changing over to record the information. And the sky will not fall down if the changed statistics resulting from an over with extras, wickets and boundaries to more than one batsman are not entered until half way through the following over.
Most scorers have established a routine of a tripartite check with their colleague of runs from the over, cumulative runs against the bowler and total. Periodically – perhaps every ten overs or so – the batsmen’s totals and balls received are compared to ensure that any discrepancies can be rectified before they are continued too far down the sheet. At the Foster’s Oval, the almost invariably accurate manual scoreboard is directly opposite the scorebox and any discrepancies in the total and batsmen’s scores are usually noticed pretty quickly. The scoreboard operators are among the most efficient in the country, but it is easy enough to miss the umpire’s bye or leg-bye signal, especially when it is given in the opposite direction.
Scorers vary as much in their approaches to cross-checking as they do in their personalities: some do no checks at all, preferring to leave it all to the end of the innings; others check at the end of each over. Personally, I prefer to adopt a middle route and check occasionally when the opportunity is available.
There is a certain bonhomie about the county scoring circuit with virtually all scorers on good terms and willing to help one another with cross-checks, calculation of statistics etc. Byron Denning of Glamorgan has a complicated system of numbering the balls of the over by the names of towns running east to west through South Wales – and if that were not sufficiently confusing, he does it in Welsh. I believe the origins of this labyrinthine scheme lie in the coincidence of Porthcawl rhyming with fourth ball and the mythical superstructure has been built on either side. Thus, the first ball is Cas Newydd (Newport), the second Caerdydd (Cardiff), the third Pen-y-Bont (Bridgend), the fifth Castel Nedd (Neath), the sixth Abertawe (Swansea) and the seventh, where there is one, Llanelli. Clem Driver has attempted to devise a rival scheme based on the towns of the Essex coastline, but could find nothing between Clacton and Southend.
Just as runners bore non-runners with talk of courses and PBs, so do scorers bore non-scorers with talk of scoreboxes, their accessibility, the view of the playing area therefrom and the quality of the catering on the grounds of the county circuit. They have even ritualised it and established a ‘Standards League’. Until his retirement from the county scene, Bill Peterbridge, Yorkshire’s 2nd XI scorer, used to invite scorers to mark on a scale of one to five, the scoring position under accessibility, assistance, communications, comfort and viewpoint, and the ground under atmosphere, catering, hospitality, ease of access and car parking.
W. E. W. Collins had a brief first-class career of seven matches in the late nineteenth century. From Leaves from an Old Country Cricketer’s Diary (1908).
ONCE AGAIN, THE man who is always thinking about his bowling or batting average not only loses half the enjoyment of the game but lacks the true spirit of a cricketer, and deserves to be relegated to the golf-course. Still, in years gone by I used to be not a little amused by the care which a certain gentleman of my acquaintance took to ensure that he should be supposed to be playing up to his reputation. It was his habit to send to a weekly paper the scores of the matches in which he played, and according to the ‘authorised version’, which eventually appeared in print, he was in country cricket among the best all-round performers of the day.
‘Hulloa,’ he would remark as he unrolled the score-sheet, ‘this won’t do. Only nineteen runs and two wickets. That’s not good enough for F. C—. Now, just look here! That greedy great creature, Brown, has gone and got forty-seven runs. Hang Brown! he’s no good, never saw a worse innings in my life; he ought to have been out a dozen times over; he’ll have to part with some of that little lot. Besides, forty is just as good as forty-seven, so I think we’ll give my old friend F. C— that odd seven. Then there’s Jones – fourteen. Who the devil is Jones when he’s at home? He won’t see the “Field”, you bet. He may think himself deuced lucky to be allowed a run at all. However, he shall keep the four and I’ll have that ten. That’s thirty-six anyhow. But, hang it all, if I’m not a better bat than Brown I’ll eat my hat, and he’s got forty. Oh, I say – extras seventeen, that looks bad, don’t it, and besides, I’ll vow I touched one of those byes that went to the boundary. What an ass their umpire was! And that Winchester boy really did not keep wicket half badly. Young talent ought to be encouraged, and he’ll be awfully pleased to see some of the byes knocked off. Well, we’ll call it four byes instead of twelve, and I may as well have that odd no-ball while I’m about it. The bowler won’t mind, and somehow forty-five looks better in print than forty-four. It’s half-way on to fifty, isn’t it? Well, here goes, F. C— forty-five. And now about wickets. F. C— two? Here, I say, old chap, you got four, don’t be greedy, give me one and then we shall be quits. And here’s Walker got a wicket. One wicket is no good to any man. I’d rather get none than one, wouldn’t you? I think F. C— may as well have Walker’s little lot. And then there was a silly beast who got run out. I’ll bet he’d rather have been bowled. Leastways we’ll chance it and call him bowled. There now, that’s better, F. C— five wickets and forty-five runs. Good old F. C—, deuced fine player still, eh!’
And that, possibly, was the opinion of sundry of those enthusiasts who make it their business to follow the doings of great men in the columns of the sporting papers.
Funny tricks are occasionally played by the scorers themselves. Some twenty years ago I was playing at Vincent’s Square against the Westminster boys. As it happened, theirs was a very poor side, and we won our match pretty easily. Small thanks, however, to the scorers, two small collegians with very few inches and no conscience at all between them. Probably, through wholesome fear of ulterior consequences, they credited their own heroes with their proper or even more than their proper quota of runs, but they employed a process of subtraction and division, varied by occasional fits of absence, bodily as well as mental, when we were batting. I only scored a single figure myself, and so was not a material sufferer; but even so, I would just as soon have had the nine runs which I really did make as the three which they were generous enough to allow me. But when a hard hitter who had been piling up runs at a tremendous pace retired after a solid hour’s batting, he was considerably disgusted to find that the telegraph board showed thirty odd as the result of his exertions.
‘But please, sir, I wasn’t scoring all the time,’ pleaded one of the small culprits when tackled on the subject.
‘Nor was I,’ chimed in the other.
‘Well, where are the fellows who were scoring, then?’
‘Please, sir, I don’t know,’ and there is no getting beyond this ultima ratio of the small boy.
‘Well, I’ll vow that I got a hundred, and I shall count it a hundred in my average,’ announced the victim; and it is to be hoped that in this resolve he found consolation.
I may say that if on that occasion we found the gallery at Vincent’s Square moderately sympathetic, some of their personal criticisms savoured of candour rather than of courtesy. Ours, as it happened, was a side without a wicket-keeper, but a good-natured veteran, built on rather substantial lines, good-naturedly volunteered to ‘stand back’ with the gloves. It was unfortunate under the circumstances that he should have brought his newly-married wife to watch his prowess; still more unfortunate that he should have found her a seat where every remark of the gallery – they don’t talk in whispers at Vincent’s Square – was all too audible; most unfortunate of all that the first ball of the match should have been steered just out of the gentleman’s reach, and that he was enforced to run after it. For I never yet met the wife who really relishes hearing her husband saluted as ‘fatty’, and in that case ‘fatty’ was quite the least objectionable term applied to the panting runner, some of the gallery preferring to particularise.
I had more reason for posing as an aggrieved party when in a match in Northants upwards of a quarter of an hour’s really hard hitting on my part was rewarded by the addition of two runs both to my own score and our total. Having looked at the score-sheet at lunch-time I happened to know that I had got sixty-seven runs, and at the time of my final dismissal was quite prepared to believe that I had made well over a hundred, and I had been not a little surprised that the gallery had not in any way shown their appreciation of the fact. As it happened, both telegraph board and plates were second-hand articles, and the figures were so illegible at a distance that nobody in the field ever thought of looking at them. When, however, I passed the scoring-box, en route for the pavilion, I found the small telegraph boy in the act of returning my score as sixty-nine. On entering the box to lodge a protest, I found that the one and only scorer, a valet who had been pressed into the service in the absence of the regular official, had in the first place counted on a whole hour’s interval, then added an extra five minutes on his own account, and had finally got to work again in the last over of my innings. As we had supplied the scorer, and as his omissions did not affect the result of the match, things were left in statu quo.
Alan Gibson was a journalist and broadcaster.
From Growing Up With Cricket (1985). The then world record partnership of 555 by Sutcliffe and Holmes took place against Essex at Leyton in 1932.
I SAW A GOOD deal of this famous partnership. Every moment when I was not at school and play was on, I was on that balcony. I refused to go downstairs to eat. Mother was inclined to make trouble about this, but I had the support of father, who was an enthusiast himself, and promised to ‘keep an eye on me’ – so long as he had his meals up there too. Think what it meant to me, the little Yorkshire exile, when my very own heroes came and did this to the Londoners! Who were the Frenchmen now? At the end of the first day – I do not have to look this up – Yorkshire had scored 423 for no wicket. I remember the swift, silent running between the wickets (very different from modern Yorkshire practice) and the huge pull for six to mid-wicket with which Sutcliffe reached his 150. Next morning I raced back from school again. No wicket had fallen. It was about one o’clock that the 555 was reached (the previous record had been 554, made by two other Yorkshiremen, Brown and Tunnicliffe in 1898). The cheering was rapturous, none more than mine. There was a big crowd by now, many Yorkshiremen having travelled south during the night. I saw Holmes and Sutcliffe stride down the pitch towards each other, majestically, and shake hands. Life, I felt, had not anything to show more fair, though I did not put it that way; and I am not sure that it has had.
However, I soon learnt that bliss does not long remain unalloyed. Next ball, Sutcliffe, taking a wild swish at Eastman, was bowled. By this time I was in the ground itself, nobody bothering to keep children out in all the excitement. Holmes (224 not out) and Sutcliffe (313) were assembled to be photographed under the scoreboard. Suddenly the total on the board moved back to 554. There had been a disagreement between the scorers about a noball. Had they only equalled the record, not broken it? There was a time of agonised suspense, and then the board moved back to 555. There has been much research into which was the true figure, none of it, I think, conclusive. I would not be surprised if both were wrong; we shall never know. Before modern scoring techniques were invented, in the first place by Arthur Wrigley, and then developed by Roy Webber, Bill Frindall, Irving Rosenwater and several more – scoring in first-class cricket was haphazard. It was commonplace for one scorer to ‘take a stroll around the ground’ for half an hour, and then fill in his book from his colleague’s, while the colleague in turn took his stroll. Something like this, I expect, had happened at Leyton. I like the story that it was a little parson (Essex grounds have always seemed to harbour a lot of parsons) arriving with his own scorebook, meticulously kept, who settled the argument.
William Slatter joined the Lord’s ground staff in 1863 and rose to be head groundsman. His Recollections were published in 1914.
THE SCORING IN those days, as now, was done by the professionals, but it was done on a stand made of iron rods framed up with a wooden seat and back, about seven feet from the ground. The scorers rested the score book on their knees and if the rain came on suddenly they often got wet with their book, before they could scramble down from their perch and seek shelter under the old sheds, where the Grand Stand now stands. The score board was attached to this stand on the right hand, and the scorer on that side had also to put up the figures. This scoring stand laid about for some few years after the score boxes with the board each side were erected, but what eventually became of it, I do not know.
[. . .] No accommodation was made at Lord’s for the press until the Grand Stand was erected. Previous to this, the reporters had to stand their chances of getting a seat anywhere, and I believe that they had to pay entrance to the ground just the same as any other visitor. There were shrubberies at each end of the pavilion, and Mr. Knight, the only recognised paper representative in those days (1861–64), (and a nice old gentleman he was), attended to his business on the ground and not in the refreshment bar. He has stood all day in the bushes inside the rails, being the only place to view the cricket on a crowded day, with no score board or slips to tell him the state of the game, and having to score the whole doings of the match in his own notebook. He had no refreshments from lunch time until 7 o’clock when stumps were drawn with the exception perhaps of a cup of tea which I have taken to him when I have had the chance. I have never heard him grumble, and he reported only what he saw and knew. On an ordinary match day you would find Mr. Knight sitting on one of the forms among the general spectators. I believe I am correct in saying that he reported cricket for ‘Bell’s Life in London’, the leading sporting paper of that time, which is now, I understand, incorporated with the ‘Sporting Life’.
From Cricket in the Long Grass (1995), a memoir of village cricket in Hertfordshire in the years before the Second World War. The names of places and people are fictitious.
AS MOST OF the cricketers worked until noon on Saturdays there was little time available for all that had to be done before the official start of play time of 2.30 p.m. Some, like the Bates brothers for example, lived in the outlying hamlets and may have several miles to bike home from their place of work – have a quick dinner, smarten up, and don the whites – then bike off to the cricket field. The sacred meadow was somewhat tucked away, on part of the Squire’s large estate, on the outskirts of Shappley; in fact, it bordered onto the long drive leading to the Manor House itself, so that the magnificent chestnut trees forming the avenue also became one of the boundaries behind the bowler. Like most village cricket fields – its first and primary purpose was to provide a pasture for cattle – and the tiny mown rectangle, cut in there in the middle, would today look as incongruous as a tennis court on the African veldt. Consequently some form of strong protection was required to prevent the cows from meandering all over this tempting patch, which, quite naturally they desired to sample. The fence, therefore, was both high and strong – made of heavy six-foot wooden posts bearing three strands of barbed wire. There were concrete sockets every few yards around the ‘table’ to accommodate the posts and the whole affair constructed in two ‘L’ shaped halves – each having about a dozen posts and being joined at diagonal corners with iron screw-bolts; so some ten men were needed to dismantle and drag one half up to the top boundary near the spinney, then drag the other half down to the ditch/boundary at the bottom. It was not unknown for members of the visiting team to lend a hand in this operation – although this might depend, to some extent, on certain umpiring decisions at the last meeting! The fourth direction, opposite the giant chestnuts, enjoyed no natural lines of demarcation, and was therefore deemed unlimited.
Whilst Jim helped with the small secondary fence of chicken wire (which, in this case, was there to keep rabbits out rather than chickens in), two lesser mortals were despatched to the nearby Lodge-keeper’s cottage to borrow the good lady’s well scrubbed scullery table and, hopefully, two chairs for the benefit of the scorers. The wooden box of numbers, and the stand for their portrayal, were fished out from under the hollybush which served as changing-room, toolshed, and clothes rack. The club bag arrives – balanced, fore and aft, on the handlebars and seat of Bill Miller’s bike. More men appear, in dribs and drabs, from various directions – over stiles, through hedges, and, more circumspectly, on bikes down the road. The visiting team were biking the five miles from Menin and arrived, more or less, together about a quarter to three; some wearing ordinary trousers through fear of getting black chain oil on their precious whites which were rolled up and tied onto the carrier with the usual piece of hairy ‘Binder String’. These particular blokes repaired to the uninviting corner behind the hollybush where the necessary change could be affected in some measure of privacy from the highly interested eyes of the various giggling schoolgirls in the vicinity. In the meantime, George and Jack Bates had finished mowing and marking out the creases – pitched the stumps, and returned their equipment back to the all-enveloping holly bush. Eventually, at about three-o’clock, when all the fielders had rolled, and enjoyed their final pre-match ‘fag’, all is ready for battle – and the two umpires, resplendent in freshly laundered white milking coats, make their stately way out to the middle; whether they walk out together with a friendly chat – or separately in stony silence, again depends on what transpired when the two teams last met.
Having won the toss, Bill decided on first knock so Jack Bates and Fred Owen get padded up as best they can from the sorry-looking five pads available in the bag, here again – binder string, that constant friend and companion of the countryman, is much in evidence where straps and buckles have suffered damage over the years. These two openers can enjoy the privilege of wearing a pad on each leg if they so desire – a luxury obviously denied the rest of the side, unless, of course, both men are dismissed quickly, in which case some of the more fussy ones may ‘double up’. The introduction of that piece of equipment known, strangely, as a ‘Box’ has not yet reached Barfordshire, so all in all, padding-up is not a very complicated affair.
Jim takes his seat of office at the table and, under the guidance of the captain, fills in the batting order and other relevant details. The order will need to be fairly fluid because Bob Green has had trouble with a scythe during the week and is reduced to wearing a carpet slipper on his damaged left foot, so if he goes to the crease at all it will be as a temporary enforced left-hander. This small hiccup in Bill’s plan of campaign is offset, to some extent, by the news that one of the visiting side will be late because he has suffered a ‘Puncher along be ’Unny Lane’. Thus, with the sun beaming its approval on the proceedings so far – Charlie who has been shovelling away the worst of the ‘pancakes’ round the edges of the wicket area, gave it up as a rather pointless exercise and threw his shovel under the bush.
The distant church clock strikes once – ‘ar parst three then Wal, yearse, jist struck ar parst be the church’, observes George to Big Wally-Stanton as they indulge in another leisurely ‘roll’ and light up.
There is little time for young Jim to daydream about the possible time, in the vague future, when he would be one of the white-shirted demi-gods now engaged in battle – because wickets fell at a rate which demanded his full attention to the all-important book and instructing the lesser ‘Hobble-De-Hoy’, whose duty it is to change the appropriate numbers on the ‘Telegraph’ board.
The lush long grass, with patches of two-feet high thistles and nettles, in the outfield ensured that only the lofted blow is likely to bring much reward; any stroke played along the ground stopped dead at the edge of the mown ‘table’ and is rarely likely to produce more than a scampered single. Later in the season, especially during a hot dry summer, things may improve in this respect, in that the cows would consume more of the dwindling grass faster than it could grow, thus close cropped areas would appear here and there, allowing the ball to bounce and possibly roll.
The Shappley innings follows a fairly normal pattern, with runs keeping just ahead of wickets, at Ten for Six; then comes a flurry of runs from the bat of Alf Marsh who has simplified batting by using a powerful golf-like swing regardless of the line or length of the delivery. To-day he ‘strikes oil’, so to speak, and clobbers a six and two fours over long-on before missing a straight ‘shooter’.
Thirty-three all out is a handsome enough total and will just about allow both sides to speculate on victory during the tea interval.
As the players wander off to the village-hall a quarter of a mile back into Shappley – where tea will have been prepared in typical village style, Jim is faced with the most arduous and only disliked part of the day – for the cows were already advancing menacingly towards that succulent looking, temporarily vacant, rectangle – and armed only with a cricket stump in each hand he races out to begin his hour-long battle with these fifteen four-legged enemies of cricket. Sometimes he received some assistance from one or two other boys who might also be looking for a free jam sandwich brought back by the players, but, today he is fighting alone and dashes madly around in desperate attempts to keep the pitch inviolate; as he bashes one intruder on the nose with his stump two more are stealthily encroaching elsewhere so that he is forced to run and shout continuously to prevent their cruel hooves from injuring the sacred turf.
Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the enemy seemed to lose interest and withdraw in disorderly manner. With great relief Jim fetches the shovel and sets about removing the worst of the steaming new deposits that had appeared – especially on the bowler’s run-ups and the ’keeper’s normal territory; there was unmistakable evidence, too, of at least one successful trespasser – at Silly Point, (or Short Mid-On as the case may be), evidence which demands frenzied attention for removal before the men’s return – otherwise the lad’s protective efficiency may be questioned and his reward accordingly reduced. Fortunately, on this warm July day, the players’ stroll back after the interval is somewhat desultory, so he just has time to sprinkle some fairly fresh grass mowings over the offending stains – thus hoping they will escape notice before returning to his seat at the scorer’s ‘throne’.
Brother George slaps down two slices of well buttered and well jammed new currant bread onto the scoring book then turns his back to lean on the table to roll another ‘homemade’ in company with his team-mates. Having finished the delicate operation and got ‘steam up’ once again he suddenly said, ‘Ullo, wot we got ’ere then?’ and withdraws from his open shirt front one of the delicious triangular iced cakes which were an extra product of the local currant-bread baker.
‘I wunder ’ow that got there?’ says George. ‘Well blow me if there een’t another one? They musta’ cre’p in there summow.’ Jim munches quietly away at his second jam sandwich – supplied this time by the Captain, hoping, of course, that he might be in line for an iced cake.
‘I carn’t eat ’em,’ announces George, ‘I’ve ’ad anuff, anybody warnt ’em afore I give ’em t’ the sparrers?’ Right behind his broad back young Jim holds his breath, knowing full well that as a mere schoolboy he was not authorised to answer the general question posed by George; in any case, he was beginning to suspect that it was all a hoax perpetuated by his elder brother who had, in fact, carefully nursed these iced delights all the way back from the tea table especially for the young scorer; Jim’s suspicions are soon proved right when all the other men vowed they were ‘Bustin’ and couldn’t eat no more’; so George, with a broad grin, turns and puts the rather battered looking items onto the scorebook with the words ‘P’raps the scorer can find a ’ome for ’em, eh Jim?’ The Menin scorer had, of course, enjoyed an official tea with the players so all is well for the hard-earned reward to be consumed at leisure.
Subsequently the visitors innings gets underway; their openers prove sound and solid, ten runs come without loss and things look black for Shappley – although it must be pointed out that Alf, the main strike bowler, is below par due to his brand new, dark blue, braces which have not yet ‘worked in’ and consequently restrict his usual rhythm. Fortunately Wally at the other end discovers a patch of daisies and dandelions just short of a length on a line of off-stump and, in the space of three accurate overs, swung the match by reducing the opposition to Nineteen for Seven – and eventually, with the last man being run-out, Menin muster only Twenty-nine. Several of them are most disgruntled at this dubious end to the game and, without stopping even to change trousers, they climb the fence, mount their steeds and speed off with angry shouts of ‘Yew jist wait ’til yew come over our place, tha’sall’. The rest are more philosophical – with one or two even helping to drag the fences back then agreed on a pint and postmortem at the ‘Dog and Duck’.
All in all, a fairly typical day and very much to Jim’s liking.