Cricket. Horace Gordon Hutchinson
AS PLAYED IN THE ARTILLERY GROUND, LONDON, IN 1743.
CHAPTER I
SOME POINTS IN CRICKET HISTORY
By The Editor
Cricket
began when first a man-monkey, instead of catching a cocoa-nut thrown him playfully by a fellow-anthropoid, hit it away from him with a stick which he chanced to be holding in his hand. But the date of this occurrence is not easy to ascertain, and therefore it is impossible to fix the date of the invention of cricket. For cricket has passed through so many stages of evolution before arriving at the phase in which we find it to-day that it is difficult to say when the name, as we understand its meaning, first became rightly applicable to it. The first use of the name "cricket" for any game is indeed a matter entirely of conjecture. It is not known precisely by Skeat, nor
Strutt, nor Mr. Andrew Lang. But whether the name was applied by reason of the cricket or crooked stick, which was the early form of the bat, or whether from the cross stick used as a primitive bail, or from the cricket or stool, at which the bowler aimed the ball, really does not very much matter, for all these etymological vanities belong rather to the mythological age of cricket than the historical. Neither is it of great importance whether cricket was originally played under another name, such as club-ball, as Mr. Pycroft infers, on rather meagre authority, as it seems to me, from Nyren. Nyren did not hazard the inference. The fact is that the form in which we first find cricket played, and called cricket, is quite unlike our cricket of to-day, so that we do not need to go seeking anything by a different name. They played with two upright stumps, 1 foot high, 2 feet apart, with a cross stump over them and a hole dug beneath this cross stump. The cross stump is evidently the origin of our bails. Nyren does not believe in this kind of cricket, but he gives no reason for his disbelief, for the excellent reason that he can have had no reason for his scepticism; and the fact is proved by the evidence of old pictures. He was a simple, good man; he never saw anything like cricket played in that way, so he did not believe any one else ever had. He did not perhaps understand much about the law of evidence, but he wrote delightfully about cricket. The fourth edition of his guide, which a friend's kindness has privileged me to see, is dated 1847, some time after the author's death.
Engraved from a Painting by
Francis Hayman, R.A.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY CLUB IN MARYLEBONE FIELDS.
A MATCH IN BATTERSEA FIELDS.
Yes, in spite of Nyren, they bowled at this cross-stick and wicket which the ball could pass through again and again without removing the cross piece, and the recognised way of getting a man out was not so much to bowl him as to catch or run him out. You ran him out by getting the ball into the hole between the stumps before he got his bat there—making the game something like rounders. Fingers got such nasty knocks encountering the bat in a race for this hole that bails and a popping crease were substituted—at least the humane consideration is stated to have been a factor in the change.
It is not to be supposed that even we, for all our legislation, have witnessed the final evolution of cricket. Legislate we never so often, something will always remain to be bettered—the width of the wicket or the law of the follow on. About the earliest records that have come down to us there is a notable incompleteness that we must certainly regret. The bowler gets no credit for wickets caught or stumped off his bowling. What would become of the analysis of the underhand bowler of to-day if wickets caught and stumped were not credited to him? But at the date of these early records all the bowling was of necessity underhand. Judge then of the degree in which those poor bowlers have been defrauded of their just rights. Whether or no the name of our great national game was derived from the "cricket" in the sense of the crooked stick used for defence of the wicket, it is certain, from the evidence of old pictures, if from nothing else, that crooked sticks, like the modern hockey sticks, filled, as best they might, the function of the bat. They are figured as long and narrow, with a curving lower end. There was no question in those days of the bat passing the four-inch gauge. They must have been very inferior, as weapons of defence for the wicket, to our modern bats—broomsticks rather than bats—more than excusing, when taken in connection with the rough ground, the smallness of the scores, even though the bowling was all underhand and, practically, there was no defence. The solution of these problems, however, is, I fear, buried in the mists of antiquity, and one scarcely dares even to hope for a solution of them, or the fixing of the date of the changes. There are other problems that do not seem as if they ought to be so hopelessly beyond our ken. In Nyren's cricketer's guide, one of the laws of cricket, therein quoted, provides that the wickets shall be pitched by the umpires, yet in part of his time, if not all of it—and when the change was made I cannot find out—it must have been the custom for the bowler to choose the pitch, for he records special praise of the chief bowler of the old Hambledon Club, that on choosing a wicket he would be guided not only by the kind of ground that would help him individually best, but also would take pains to see that the bowler from the other end had a nice bumping knob to pitch the ball on—for by this time "length" bowling, as it was called, had come into general use. Nyren's words are that he "has with pleasure noticed the pains he—Harris—has taken in choosing the ground for his fellow-bowler as well as himself."
In 1774 there was a meeting, under the presidency of Sir William Draper, supported by the Duke of Dorset, the Earl of Tankerville, Sir Horace Mann, and other influential supporters of cricket, to draw up laws for the game, and therein it is stated that the "pitching of ye first wicket is to be determined by ye cast of a piece of money," but it does not then say by whom they are to be pitched, nor does this function come within the province of the umpires as therein defined. This, therefore, is the first problem which I would ask the help of all cricketing readers towards solving—the date at which the pitching of the stumps ceased to be the business or privilege of the bowler. It was the introduction of "length" bowling, no doubt—previously it was all along the ground—real bowling as in bowls—that forced them to straighten the bats. Mr. Ward, in some memoranda which he gave Nyren, and which the latter quoted at large, says of these bats, used in a match that arose from a challenge on behalf of Kent County, issued by Lord John Sackville, to play All England in 1847: "The batting could neither have been of a high character, nor indeed safe, as may be gathered from the figure of the bat at that time, which was similar to an old-fashioned dinner-knife curved at back and sweeping in the form of a volute at the front and end. With such a bat the system must have been all for hitting; it would be barely possible to block, and when the practice of bowling length balls was introduced, and which (sic) gave the bowler so great an advantage in the game, it became absolutely necessary to change the form of the bat in order that the striker might be able to keep pace with the improvement. It was therefore made straight in the pod, in consequence of which, a total revolution, it may be said a reformation too, ensued in the style of play."
Then follows a record of the score of the match, which need not be detailed. England made 40 and 70, and Kent 53 and 58 for nine wickets, a gallant win. "Some years after this," Mr. Ward continues—it is to be presumed Nyren quotes the ipsissima verba, for whenever he wants to put in anything off his own bat it appears above his initials in a note—"the fashion of the bat having been changed to a straight form, the system of blocking was adopted"—that is to say, some years after 1740.
The date is vague. Let us say early in the second half of the eighteenth century, and I think we may go so far as to say that cricket, as we understand it, began then too. It can hardly have been cricket—this entirely aggressive batting. The next date ot importance as marking an epoch, if we may speak of the next when we have left the last so much to conjecture,