Cricket. Horace Gordon Hutchinson

Cricket - Horace Gordon Hutchinson


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       Horace Gordon Hutchinson

      Cricket

      Published by Good Press, 2020

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066065782

       PREFACE

       CHAPTER I

       CHAPTER II

       CHAPTER III

       CHAPTER IV

       CHAPTER V

       CHAPTER VI

       CHAPTER VIII

       CHAPTER IX

       CHAPTER X

       CHAPTER XI

       CHAPTER XII

       CHAPTER XIII

       CHAPTER XIV

       CHAPTER XV

       CHAPTER XVI

       INDEX

       Table of Contents

      Surely it is sheer neglect of opportunity offered by an official position if, being an editor, one has no prefatory word to say of the work that one is editing. It is said that that which is good requires no praise, but it is a sayi-ng that is contradicted at every turn—or else all that is advertised must be very bad. While it is our firm belief that the merits of the present book—The Country Life Cricket Book—are many and various (it would be an insult to the able heads of the different departments into which the great subject is herein divided to think otherwise), we believe also that the book has one very special and even unique merit. We believe, and are very sure, that there has never before been given to ​the public any such collection of interesting old prints illustrative of England's national game as appear in the present volume. It is due to the kind generosity of the Marylebone Cricket Club, as well as of divers private persons, that we are able to illustrate the book in this exceptional way; and we (that is to say, all who are concerned in the production) beg to take the opportunity of giving most cordial thanks to those who have given this invaluable help, and so greatly assisted in making the book not only attractive, but also original in its attraction. In the first place, the prints form in some measure a picture history of the national game, from the early days when men played with the wide low wicket and the two stumps, down through all the years that the bat was developing out of a curved hockey-stick into its present shape, and that the use of the bat at the same time was altering from the manner of the man with the scythe, meeting the balls called "daisy-cutters," to the straightforward upright batting of the classical examples. The classical examples perhaps are exhibited most ably in the pictures of Mr. G. F. Watts, which show us that the human form divine can be studied in its athletic poses equally well (save for the disadvantage of the draping flannels) on the English field of cricket as in the Greek gymnasium. The prints, too, give us a picture-history of the costumes of the game. There are the "anointed ​clod-stumpers" of Broadhalfpenny going in to bat with the smock, most inconvenient, we may think, of dresses. There are the old-fashioned fellows who were so hardly parted from their top-hats. These heroes of a bygone age are also conspicuous in braces. We get a powerful hint, too, from the pictures, of the varying estimation in which the game has been held at different times. There is a suggestion of reverence in some of the illustrations—a sense that the artist knew himself to be handling a great theme. In others we see with pain that the treatment is almost comic, certainly frivolous. We hardly can suppose that the picture of the ladies' cricket match would encourage others of the sex to engage in the noble game, although "Miss Wicket" of the famous painting has a rather attractive although pensive air—she has all the aspect of having got out for a duck's egg.

      More decidedly to the same effect—of its differing hold on popular favour—do we get a hint from the spectators assembled (but assembled is too big a word for their little number) to view the game. "Lord's" on an Australian match day, or a Gents v. Players, or Oxford and Cambridge, hardly would be recognised by one of the old-time heroes, if we could call him up again across the Styx to take a second innings. He would wonder what all the people had come to look at. He hardly would believe that they were ​come to see the game he used to play to a very meagre gallery in his life. But he would be pleased to observe the progress of the world—how appreciative it grew of what was best in it as it grew older.

      Another thing that the collection illustrates is the various changes of site of the headquarters of the game, if it had a headquarters before it settled down to its present place of honour in St. John's Wood. There is a picture (vide p. v) of "Thomas Lord's first Cricket Ground, Dorset Square, Marylebone. Match played June 20, 1793, between the Earls of Winchilsea and Darnley for 1000 guineas." With regard to this interesting picture, Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, in his catalogue of the pictures, drawings, etc., in possession of the Marylebone Cricket Club, has a note as follows:—"This match was Kent (Lord Darnley's side) v. Marylebone, with Walker, Beldham, and Wills (Lord Winchilsea's side). M.C.C. won by ten wickets. It will be noticed that only two stumps are represented as being used, whereas, according to Scores and Biographies, it is known that as far back as 1775 a third stump had been introduced; many representations, however, of the game at a later date show only two stumps." No doubt at this early period there was no very fully acknowledged central authority, and such little details as these were much a matter of local option. The wicket shown in this picture does not seem to differ at all ​from the wicket in the picture of "Cricket" by F. Hayman, R.A. (vide p. 1), in the possession of the Marylebone Club, though the date of the latter is as early as 1743. Neither does the bat appear to have made much evolution in the interval. It is on the authority of Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, in the catalogue above quoted, that we can give "about 1750" for the date of the picture named "A Match in Battersea Fields" (vide p. 3), in which St. Paul's dome appears in the background. Here they seem to be playing with the three stumps, early as the date is. Again, in the fine picture, "painted for David Garrick" by Richard Wilson, of "Cricket at Hampton Wick" (vide p. 375), three stumps are in use, and the bat has become much squared and straightened. Of course the pictures obviously fall into two chief classes—one in which "the play's the thing"; the cricket is the object of the artist's representation; the other in which the cricket is only used as an incidental feature in the foreground,


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