ONE LEARNS WITH experience, unfortunately, that the greatest of men have feet of clay. It is a shame, because we like our heroes, our icons, our role models.
Large sections of the modern media rely on celebrities to appeal to a mass market, and there is probably a childish gene in most of us that craves fame and the privileges it brings. Those who achieve celebrity by whatever means, however – some through ambition and hard work, others by polishing divinely bestowed talent, a few by natural physical beauty and a willingness to exploit it, a few more through sheer notoriety – soon learn that to be famous is a mixed blessing.
It requires a responsibility which proves too much for some. For an unfortunate few it brings loss of privacy, and in politics and sport in particular even the worthiest of the mighty tend to fall sooner or later. So we do well sometimes to remember and dwell upon not the infamous, but the unfamous; not the well documented, but the often unconsidered. ‘Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.’
This is a refreshing collection of writings on cricket not because it neglects to praise some of the famous men and women of the game – it does – but because it concentrates more on what some of the earlier anthologists referred to, in deference to the most assiduous of early cricket researchers, F. S. Ashley-Cooper, as the highways and byways.
Most of us know something about Alastair Cook or Sachin Tendulkar or Don Bradman but I dare say that no one will be aware until he or she delves into the pages that follow that Frederik Ferslev is truly one of the unsung heroes of cricket, a Dane who worked with extraordinary determination during the Second World War to find a means of making new bats to keep the game going under German occupation in a country that has never been especially associated with bats and balls.
We could not play or watch cricket without ‘quilt binders and pod shavers’, groundsmen and rollers, umpires and scorers, stumps and bails, pads and gloves, captains and coins, boundaries and (well, in my day at least) bars. Where better to mix warmly with opponents, discuss the Test team, revel in a successful day or forget a bad one?
Even the great had bad ones. I was surprised to read W. G. Grace, the Great Cricketer, admitting that in 1859, albeit at the age of only eleven, he played eleven innings for the West Gloucestershire Club that produced twelve runs. Less so that Rachael Heyhoe Flint (now the Baroness) made ‘about 380 not out’ in the garden against her elder brother and his friends, or to be reminded that Alfred Shaw took 13 for 11 against 22 of Wellington on the 1877 tour of New Zealand.
There is humour in the ensuing pages: Raymond Robertson-Glasgow on Somerset’s gateman; Alan Gibson on the travelling that overshadowed the joys of reporting county cricket; or Mike Brearley on why Bob Barber summoned him on to the field with a fresh pair of gloves. There is drama – Frank Tyson describing his greatest day, Angus Fraser recalling Lara’s 375 out of 593 – and poignancy: Graeme Fowler reflecting on the professional’s need on tour to ‘catch your emotions, bottle them and throw away the bottle’.
About the only pleasure missing is poetry, which is noble of an editor who has won prizes for his own work in this field. But good writing was his sine qua non, and there is plenty of that. Dudley Carew, to give but two examples from the same piece: ‘Hobbs played his innings as an actor plays a part in a play he has written himself’; and ‘Sandham . . . works in cool monotones, never attempting the heroic, but seeing that everything he does is in perfect taste.’
Cricket, as Sam Johnson might have averred, has all that life affords. Almost every aspect is touched upon in this delightful collection. It is the product of wide reading, deep interest and a versatile mind.
Christopher Martin-Jenkins