More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years. John Major
however imperfectly, I shall try to bring alive the mosaic of times past in order to present a more rounded picture of them and the nature of their lives.
Cricket, once first among English games, is no longer so, as the winter sports of football and rugby grow in popularity. It must fight for its future. Even the cricket season seems to shrink annually as football eats away at both ends of the season. By the autumn equinox on 22 September the season is dead and gone, even though, theoretically at least, the sun is still above the horizon for twelve hours every day. Even the refraction of the sun’s rays, caused by the earth’s atmosphere, which gives the British Isles an extra six minutes of daylight, cannot compete with the commercial imperatives that lengthen the football season.
And yet – cricket is different. It is a team game made up of individual contests. Batsman and bowler are locked in gladiatorial combat. One must lose. Each batsman faces alone the hostile intent of every member of the fielding side, all seeking to dismiss him, with the sole support of his batting partner at the other end of the pitch. He knows his contribution may decide the outcome of the match. And can any other game provide a father figure for a nation to match W.G. Grace, who turned a country-house sport into an international obsession – and who is still recognised by his initials alone nearly a hundred years after his death? No, it cannot. Can any other game offer a pre-eminent genius so far above the normal run of talent as Don Bradman? No, again.
In its first 450 years, cricket has besotted wise men and fools. Its fairy godparents were gambling and drink. Its early enemies were Church and state. And yet, it has brought together beggars and royalty, thrown up a rich array of characters, invaded literature and art, and evolved from primitive beginnings to the sophistication of the modern game.
Although cricket is of the very essence of England, the skills of Bradman and Sobers, of Hadlee and Tendulkar, are evidence that the game has far outstripped the land of its birth. England no longer owns cricket. Like radar, penicillin, electricity, the steam engine, railways, the jet engine, computers and the worldwide web, cricket is an English invention – an export as potent as the English language itself. At one level it is a game and no more; at another it helped cement an Empire and bind a Commonwealth. Its legacy is a fellowship of cricket-lovers across continents and through generations. In the world of sport, it is the greatest story ever told.
It began a long time ago.
* As anyone can now do under reforms I instituted in 1993.
But we don’t know how long. The search for the birth of cricket has been as fruitless as the hunt for the Holy Grail: neither can be found.
What is cricket, at its most basic? It is a club striking a ball: so are golf, rounders, baseball, hockey and tennis. So are the ancient games of club-ball, stool-ball, trap-ball, stob-ball, each of which some scholars have been keen to appropriate as ‘early cricket’. The nineteenth-century pioneer historian the Reverend James Pycroft asserts, without proof, that ‘Club-ball we believe to be the name which usually stood for cricket in the thirteenth century.’* His case, however, collapses in the light of later evidence, and the great mid-nineteenth- century cricketer Nicholas Felix (a pseudonym – his real name was Nicholas Wanostrocht) was more likely right when he wrote: ‘Club ball is a very ancient game and totally distinct from cricket.’
The paucity of early mentions of cricket has led to some farfetched assumptions about games that might have been cricket, but probably are not. The poet and scholar Joseph of Exeter is said to have written in 1180:
The youths at cricks did play
Throughout the merry day.
If they did so, no one else noted it for hundreds of years. This claim has other defects, too: the couplet sounds more eighteenth-century than twelfth, and all Joseph’s known writing is in Latin. In any event, in 1180 Joseph was onhis way to the Third Crusade as an official chronicler, and thoughts of ‘youths’ and ‘merry days’ may not have been uppermost in his mind.* We can dismiss Joseph of Exeter. Even less likely is the evidence of an eighth-century monk, Eustatius Constacius, that cricket was played in Florence for the entertainment of Parliament.
Much ink has been spilled by historians over an entry, in 1300, in the wardrobe accounts of King Edward I referring to the sixteen-year-old Prince of Wales, the future Edward II, playing ‘creag’ and other sports with, as some have suggested, his childhood friend the lamentable and doomed-to-a-bad-end Piers Gaveston. It is evident that ‘creag’ is a game, but it requires a mighty leap of faith to claim that it was cricket; the kindest judgement that can be made upon this romantic assumption is ‘not proven’. In any event, could the villainous Gaveston have been a forefather of cricket? I hope not, and fortunately I think not.
Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of history that ‘It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory.’** In the absence of concrete evidence, of documentary proof, of contemporary records, his maxim holds true of the genesis of cricket. It may have been played under another name earlier than we know, but since its birth is shrouded in legend and mystique, we cannot be certain. The silence of antiquity suggests that the game was not played in ancient times, but does not prove that it was not. It is probable that games such as club-ball were ancestors of cricket, but they cannot be acknowledged as the game itself, and should not be assumed to be so. As the fourteenth-century philosopher William of Occam wrote: ‘Things not known to exist should not be postulated as existing.’ This is a good principle for soundly-based history. Although the mists and myths are enticing, the truth is more prosaic: cricket evolved from instincts and games as old as man himself.
But when? Here we may be on firmer ground. 1598 was a memorable year. The weather was foul that winter, and on 21 December, in a mini-ice age, the Thames froze. A week later, in a snowstorm, men of the Chamberlain’s Company of Actors, led by Richard Burbage and armed in case of unwelcome interruptions, dismantled a theatre in Shoreditch, loaded it onto wagons and transported it through Spitalfields and Bishopsgate to a waterfront warehouse. From there it was ferried across the Thames to be rebuilt on a new site. They called the new theatre the Globe, and the players’ favourite son, William Shakespeare, had part-ownership of it.
That Christmas Shakespeare had a new play, Much Ado About Nothing, which the players performed at Court for Queen Elizabeth I. A similar view might have been held about a contemporary court case over land ownership. Mr John Derrick, otherwise a forgotten English gentleman, testified to a Guildford court that: ‘Being a scholler in the ffree schoole of Guldeford hee and diverse of his fellows did runne and play there at creckett and other plaies.’* W.G. Grace cast doubt on this in his Cricket (1891), and suggested that a local historian may have inadvertently substituted ‘cricket’ for ‘quoits’. It is not clear why he thought this. As Mr Derrick was a coroner, it is likely that his deposition was accurate. And as he was then nearly sixty years of age, he would have been a young scholar around 1550–60, thus giving us a precious date by which cricket was being played.
It is not surprising that cricket attracted little contemporary attention, for greater matters were afoot. Within a few years of the death of Henry VIII in 1547 a mighty struggle for souls was raging as the religion of the state swung from Protestant (under Edward VI) to Catholic (under Mary), and back to Protestant once more (under Elizabeth I). Henry VIII had been sufficiently even-handed