Читать книгу Cricket - Horace Gordon Hutchinson - Страница 5
CHAPTER I
ОглавлениеSOME 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, is 1775. On 22nd of May of that year there was a great match" in the Artillery Ground between five of the Hambledon Club and five of All England, when Small went in, the last man, for fourteen runs and fetched them. Lumpy "—a very famous bowler baptized Edward, surnamed Stevens—"was bowler upon the occasion, and it having been remarked that his balls had three times passed between Small's stumps, it was considered to be a hard thing upon the
Engraved in 1745 by H. Roberts.
After L.P. Boitard.
AN EXACT REPRESENTATION OF THE GAME OF CRICKET.
bowler that his straightest ball should be so sacrificed; the number of the stumps was in consequence increased from two to three."
That is plain enough, but what is not plain is the height of the stumps at that time.
Mr. Pycroft puts the height of the stumps at 1 foot, with a width of only 6 inches, up to 1780, and it is evident from what Nyren says—(a) that he had never seen stumps of 1 foot high and 2 feet wide; and (b) that they were not of 22 inches high until 1775. Therefore here is evidence in support of Mr. Pycroft's 1 foot high and 6 inch wide wicket, to say nothing of the unimpeachable value of his own statements. But he himself adduces nothing that I can find in its support, nor does he attempt to give us the date of the first narrowing of the stumps; and with regard to the alteration from two low stumps to three 22-inch stumps I am obliged to find him at variance with Nyren.
The point, therefore, that I want to light on is the date and circumstances of the change from wickets ot two stumps 1 foot high and 2 feet apart, to wickets of two stumps 1 foot high, and only 6 inches apart. This very drastic change appears to have been accomplished without a word of historical comment upon it. There was a deal of discussion at the time of the introduction of the third stump about the probable effect on the game of this change, some arguing that it would shorten the game—that every one would get out quickly.
Mr. Ward took the opposite view, that it would lead to more careful and improved batting, and cites a remarkable match played in 1777 between the Hambledon Club and All England, in which, despite the third stump, England made 100 and 69; and Hambledon, in a single innings, made the wonderful score of 403. Aylward, who seems to have gone in eighth wicket down, scored 167, individually, notwithstanding that he had the mighty "Lumpy" against him. Mr. Ward's memoranda therefore give us some interesting facts.
So far as we can see back, the distance between the wickets has always been 22 yards, but up to about some time in the first half of the eighteenth century the wicket consisted of two stumps 1 foot high, 2 feet apart, with a cross stump, and a hole between them.
Later, this was changed for two stumps, first of 1 foot and then of 22 inches high, 6 inches apart, with a bail and a popping crease.
About 1750 "length" bowling was introduced, superseding the all-along-the-ground business, and nearly concurrently the bats straightened instead of curved. And I think we can scarcely say "cricket" began before that, whatever "club-ball" or "stoolball" may have done.
In 1775 a third stump was added.
This last date, I know, does not agree with Mr. Pycroft, but I cannot quite make out what his original sources are. He writes: "From an MS. my friend"—he has mentioned so many friends in the previous paragraph that it is impossible to identify the one he means—"received from the late Mr. William Ward, it appears that the wickets were placed 22 yards apart as long since as the year 1700. We are informed also that putting down the wickets, to make a man out in running, instead of the old custom of popping the ball into the hole, was adopted on account of severe injuries to the hands, and that the wicket was changed at the same time—1779–80—to the dimensions of 22 inches by 6, with a third stump added." So, on the authority of the "MS. received by his friend"—it may have been the very memoranda given to Nyren, for Mr. Pycroft has mentioned Nyren in the preceding paragraph—Pycroft cites Ward as lumping together the double change from the two low stumps to the three higher stumps in 1779–80, whereas, in his memoranda to Nyren, Mr. Ward distinctly names 1775 as the date at which the third stump was added.
Curiously enough, Pycroft must have known all about this, really, but it slipped his memory, for, a page or two further, we find him quoting almost Nyren's or Ward's words: "In a match of the Hambledon Club in 1775, it was observed, at a critical point in the game, that the ball passed three times between Mr. Small's two stumps without knocking off the bail, and then, first a third stump was added, and seeing that the new style of balls which rise over the bat rose also over the wickets, then but 1 foot high, the wicket was altered to the dimensions of 22 inches by 8, and again, to its present dimensions of 27 inches by 8 in 1817." Though I find all up to that point in Nyren, I do not find the italicised words, but I have no doubt they present the fact quite accurately. They tell us nothing, however, as to the date at which the wicket was first narrowed.
Another curious piece of information Mr. Ward gives us, by the way. "Several years since—I do not recollect the precise date—a player named White, of Ryegate, brought a bat to a match which, being the width of the stumps, effectually defended his wicket from the bowler, and in consequence a law was passed limiting the future width of the bat to 4¼ inches. Another law also decreed that the ball should not weigh less than 5½ oz. or more than 5¾ oz." Nyren appends a note to this: "I have a perfect recollection of this occurrence, also that subsequently an iron frame, of the statute width, was constructed for, and kept by, the Hambledon Club, through which any bat of suspected dimensions was passed, and allowed or rejected accordingly." "Several years since," says Mr. Ward, or Nyren, writing, as I presume, about the year 1833, so that perhaps we may put this invention of the gauge about 1830, or a little earlier. I wonder who has this iron gauge now. Has it been sold up for old iron?
That is a third very practical problem that one would like answered.
And is it not curious to see how the rules were made and modified to meet the occasions as they arose. The misfortune of that
Honest Lumpy who did 'low,
He ne'er could bowl but o'er a brow—
in bowling so many times between the stumps of the too greatly blessed Small—whence the introduction of the third stump. And White with his barn-door bat, from "Ryegate," as it pleases them to spell it, compelling the use of the gauge.
We are too apt to think of the laws as "struck off at one time," like the American Constitution, instead of regarding them as something of slow growth in the past, that will have to grow, with our growth, in the future. We shall get into trouble if we regard them as something too sacred to touch and do not legislate as occasion arises.
We have altered them greatly since that meeting at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall in 1774, when they seem first to have been committed to writing, and by the end of the twentieth century it is likely that we shall have modified them considerably from this present form. We have a notion that our forefathers played the game in such a sportsmanlike manner, taking no possible advantage but such as was perfectly open and above-board, that they required scarcely any rules to guide them, but some sad things that the stern historian has to notice about the influence that betting had at one time on cricket—this, and also a sentence or two from these very memoranda of Mr. Ward, whom Nyren extols as the mirror of all cricketing chivalry—may show us, I think, that our cricketing forefathers had something human in them too. How is this for a piece of artful advice? "If you bring forward a fast bowler as a change, contrive, if fortune so favours you, that he shall bowl his first ball when a cloud is fussing over, because, as this trifling circumstance frequently affects the sight of the striker, you may thereby stand a good chance of getting him out." And again, a little lower on the same page: "Endeavour, by every means in your power—such as, by changing the bowling, by little alterations in the field, or by any excuse you can invent—to delay the time, that the strikers may become cold or inactive."
A very cunning cricketer, this Mr. Ward.
Previously he had said: "If two players are well in, and warm with getting runs fast, and one should happen to be put out, supply his place immediately, lest the other become cold and stiff." Now just compare these two last suggestions with each other, you will say, I think, that the last is fair and just and proper counsel, instilling a precaution that you have every right to take, but the former, according to the modern sense of what is right and sportsmanlike, seems to me to be counselling something perilously near the verge of sharp practice. You send your man out quickly, that the other may not grow cold, and what happens? Your purpose is defeated by the bowler and field purposely dawdling in order that the man may grow cold. It does not strike one as quite, quite right, though no doubt it is not against the rules. But it is tricky, a little tricky. And so again we draw a date, without his suspecting it, of a new moral epoch, from our invaluable Mr. Ward. About 1833, or a little later, we grew a trifle more delicate and particular in some small points of cricketing behaviour and sportsmanlike dealing. The betting, and the like evil practices at one time connected with the game, were a grosser scandal which carried their own destruction with them.
If any man, therefore, can throw light on these three dark points, I shall be very grateful to him—the date at which the first high wicket was narrowed down to 6 inches, the date at which the bowler ceased to have the pitching of the wicket, and the present habitation of that famous piece of old iron, the gauge used on the barn-door bat of White of Ryegate. Nyren, the matchless historian of the game, reveals himself, in his little history, as a very estimable man, of some matchless qualities for his task—an unbounded love of his subject and a sweet nature perfectly free of the slightest taint of jealousy. He writes of no other cricketing societies, except incidentally, than of those men of Hambledon in Hampshire. Quorum pars magna fui, as he says, with a single explosion of very proper pride, and a note appended thereto explaining apologetically that he has some certain knowledge of Latin. But after this single expression, very fully justified, for he was the beloved father of the Hambledon Club for years, he speaks of himself again hardly at all, just as if he had no hand in its successes, preferring to find some generous word to say of all the rest—of Beldham, Harris, Aylward, Lumpy. Beldham was not nearly so handsome to him, speaking of him to Mr. Pycroft.
"Old Nyren was not half a player as we reckon now," was Beldham's verdict. However, the old man was fifty then.
At least he was a very good type of an Englishman and cricketer, whatever his class as a player, or he could never have written that book. And how much Hambledon may have owed to Nyren we can never know. As it is, Hambledon has the credit that Nyren specially claims for it of being the Attica, the centre of early civilisation, of the cricketing world. But there may have been other Atticas—only, like the brave men before Agamemnon, unsung, for want of their Homeric Nyrens.
The fact of the matter is, we know little but gossip of how the cricket world went before the year 1786, when Bentley takes up the running and records the scores. A sad fire occurred in the M.C.C. Pavilion—at that time the Club played where the Regent's canal now runs, after being built out of Dorset Square—and burnt all the old score books—irreparable loss.
Mr. Pycroft made an excursion into the home of the Beldhams, and brought out much valuable gossip, along with the unhandsome criticism on Nyren. "In those days," says Beldham—1780, when Mr. Beldham was a boy—"the Hambledon Club could beat all England, but our three parishes around Farnham at last beat Hambledon."
"It is quite evident," adds Mr. Pycroft to this, "that Farnham was the cradle of cricket."
Something that Beldham and others may have said to Mr, Pycroft may have made this fact "quite evident" to him, but I cannot see that he has transmitted any such evidence to us. This much, however, I think we may say with confidence, that all that was best of cricketing tradition and practice in the south of England—that is to say, as far as was in touch at all with its influences—clustered in the little corner of Surrey in which the parish of Farnham is. But that is not to say that there were not other nuclei of cricket in the north and elsewhere, and I think there is evidence to lead us to think there were other centres, perhaps less energetic.
The "county" boundaries were not so rigid in those days. "You find us regularly," says Beldham to Mr. Pycroft—"us" being Farnham and thereabouts—"on the Hampshire side in Bentley's book," and it is quite true.
Then, from this little nucleus, cricket in the south extended. Beldham had a poor opinion of the cricket of Kent at first. Crawte, one of the best Kent men, was "stolen away from us," in Beldham's words. Aylward, the hero of the 167 runs, was taken, also to Kent, by Sir Horace Mann, as his bailiff, but "the best bat made but a poor bailiff, we heard." Sussex was a cricketing county from an early date, but Beldham had a poor opinion of its powers likewise.
The elements of the nucleus formed round Farnham were disseminated, as much as anything, by the support that certain rich and influential people gave the game. We have seen how Sir Horace Mann stole away Aylward. Other great supporters of the game were Earl Darnley, Earl Winchelsea, Mr. Paulet, and Mr. East—all before the centuries had turned into the eighteens.
"Kent and England," says Mr. Pycroft, "was as good an annual match in the last as in the present century." But in those days, as even his own later words show us, "Kent," so called, sometimes had three of the best All England men given in, even in a match against "England." They were not so particular then—what they wanted was a jolly good game, with a good stake on it.
"The White Conduit Fields and the Artillery Ground," Pycroft goes on, "supplied the place of Lord's, though in 1817 the name of Lord's is found in Bentley's matches, implying, of course, the old Marylebone Square, now Dorset Square, under Thomas Lord, and not the present, by St. John's Wood, more properly deserving the name of Dark's than Lord's. The Kentish battlefields were Sevenoaks—the land of Clout, one of the original makers of cricket balls—Coxheath, Dandelion Fields, in the Isle of Thanet, and Cobham Park, also Dartford Brent and Pennenden Heath; there is also early mention of Gravesend, Rochester, and Woolwich. The Holt, near Farnham, and Moulsey Hurst, were the Surrey grounds.
But there was cricket further afield. In 1870 the Brighton men were playing, and in the following year we find an eleven of old Etonians, with four
THE GAME OF CRICKET.
From an Engraving
Published in 1787.
THE CRICKET FIELD NEAR WHITE CONDUIT HOUSE.
players given, playing the M.C.C. team; also with four professionals, in Rutlandshire. This M.C.C. team went on to play eleven "yeomen and artisans of Leicester," defeating them sorely, and in the same year the Nottingham men met with a similar fate at the hands of the Club.
From these matches and their results we are now able, I think, to infer two things—first, that cricket had been played for some long while, not as an imported invention, but as an aboriginal growth, in these northern counties before these teams visited them from the south, and secondly, that the southern counties had brought it to a much higher pitch of perfection, for they could never have gone down so ninepinlike before any eleven of the Marylebone Club. Likely enough the inspired doctrine, of the straight bat and the left elbow up, of that gifted baker of gingerbread, Harry Hall of Farnham, had not travelled so far as the home of these northern folk, and in that case they would have been at a parlous disadvantage to those who had been brought up by its lights. They had not perhaps been so long in the habit of coping with "length" balls, which made the adoption of the left elbow up almost a necessity of defence. When the bowling came all along the ground it did not matter. Also there was in the south that prince of bowlers, Harris, whose magical deliveries shot up so straightly from the ground that it was almost essential for playing them to get out to the pitch of the ball. And if they had not this bowling, what was to educate them, unassisted, to a higher standard of batting? But they were not left unassisted, for the masterly elevens from the south began to come among them, and taught them many things, no doubt, both by example and by precept.
This was in 1791. 1793 brings a wider ray of light on the scene of cricket history. Essex and Herts come on the scene as cricketing counties—of second class, as we should call them now, to Kent and Surrey, but players and lovers of cricket all the same. They combined elevens apparently, and played twenty-two against an eleven of England, which beat them in a single innings. Mr. Pycroft has a specially interesting note in this connection. He was told by two old cricketers, one a Kent man and the other an Essex man, that when they were boys, cricket in both these counties was a game of the village, rather than of clubs. "There was a cricket bat behind the door, or else up in the bacon rack, in every cottage." Of course in London it was a game played in clubs, for they only could find the spaces where land was valuable. It was in the year of 1793 that "eleven yeomen at Oldfield Bray, in Berkshire, had learned enough to be able to defeat a good eleven of the Marylebone Club."
I am scandalised by the wholesale way I have to steal early history from Mr. Pycroft's book. The only excuse is that I do not know where to go to better it, though probably I may supplement it from chance sources.
In 1795 he tells us of matches in which the
The LAWS of the NOBLE GAME of CRICKET. as revised by the Club at St. Mary-le-bone. From the Frontispiece to the Laws.
captains were respectively the Hon. Colonel Lennox—who fought a duel with the Duke of York—and the Earl of Winchelsea. A munificent supporter of the game was my Lord of Winchelsea, and used to rig out his merry men in suits of knee-breeches, shirts, hosen, and silver caps. It was a kind of feudal age of cricket, when the great captains prided themselves on the powers of their retainers, and staked largely on the result.
"In 1797," says Pycroft, "the Montpelier Club and ground attract our notice," and then goes on to speak of Swaffham in Norfolk, as a country of keen but not very successful cricketers. Lord Frederick Beauclerk took down an eleven that appears to have beaten three elevens combined of the Norfolk folk, and that in a single innings. This Lord Frederick Beauclerk, with the Hon. H. and Hon. J. Tufton, got up the first Gents v. Players match in 1798; but though the Gents, after the generous fashion of the day, were reinforced by the three chief flowers of the professional flock—namely, Tom Walker, Beldham, and Hammond—the Players beat them. In the same year Kent essayed to play England, only to be beaten into little pieces, and in 1800 they began the new century more modestly by playing with twenty-three men against twelve of England.
For of course, after all has been said, the centre of the national game, as of everything national, was then, as now, smoky London. Lord's Pavilion was then, as it had been since 1787, on the site that Dorset Square occupies now. In London the men collected who loved cricket, and had the money to bet on the game and to engage the services of the players. There were keener cricketers, more general interest in cricket, then than a little later in the century. Three to four thousand spectators sometimes came to see a match at Lord's, and royalties sometimes took a hand in the game.
In the first years of the new century, Surrey was the great cricketing county. Only two of the All England eleven, Lord Frederick Beauclerk and Hammond, came from any other county. Hammond was wicket-keeper to the famous Homerton Club—"the best," says Mr. Ward, quoted by Pycroft, "we ever had. Hammond played till his sixtieth year, but Brown and Osbaldestone put all wicket-keeping to the rout"—by the pace of their bowling, of course.
About the first decade of the century the counties seem to have been divided off more strictly, for cricketing purposes, than before. Hampshire and Surrey, as we saw, ran in double harness, the men of Hants helping Surrey in a match, and the Surreyites mutually helping Hampshire. But now they no longer play together. Broadhalfpenny and even Windmill Down have gone to thistles, and the gallant Hambledon Club is no more. Godalming is mentioned as the strongest local centre of the game, and in 1808 Surrey had the glory of twice beating England in one season. But in 1821 the M.C.C. is again playing the "three parishes," Godalming, Earnham, and Hartley Row, and it is in the accounts of this very same year that we tumble on a dark and significant observation. "About this time," said Beldham to Mr. Pycroft, "we played the Coronation match, M.C.C. against the Players of England. We scored 278 and only six wickets down, when the game was given up. I was hurt, and could not run my notches; still James Bland and the other Legs begged of me to take pains, for it was no sporting match, 'any odds and no takers,' and they wanted to shame the gentlemen against wasting their—the Legs'—time in the same way another time."
"James Bland and the other Legs." At this distance of time we may perhaps repeat the epithet or nickname, and even class a named man under it, without the risk of an action for libel. Perhaps even the term "Legs" did not imply all the qualities which attach to it to-day, but in any case it is surely something of a shock to come on the presence of these questionable gentlemen just casually stated, not with any note of surprise, but merely as if they were a common and even essential accompaniment of a cricket match.
Of course we knew quite well that our forefathers betted large stakes between themselves, often on single-wicket matches. This was a favourite style of match with Mr. Osbaldeston—the Squire—because his bowling was so fast that no one, practically, could hit it in front of the wicket, and hits did not count for runs, in single-wicket, behind the wicket. In double-wicket matches he often "beat his side," we are told—beat his own side—"by byes," no long-stop being able to stop his bowling effectively. The chief check to the Squire's career seems to have been the discovery of the famous Browne of Brighton, who bowled, some said, even faster. Beldham, however, made a lot of runs off the latter on one special occasion. This is a digression, into which the consideration of single-wicket matches for money—and is it a wonder we do not have more of them now?—beguiled me. But perhaps it is a good thing that we do not have them, for they may well have been the root and source of all the subsequent "leg-work."
The Coronation match is the first occasion on which Mr. Pycroft notices the "Legs," in his order of writing, but lower down on the very same page he quotes some words of Mr. Budd, who shared, with Lord Frederick Beauclerk, the credit of being the best amateur cricketer of the day, relative to a match at Nottingham—M.C.C. v. Twenty-two of Notts—in which the same evil influence is apparent. "In that match," he says, "Clarke played—the future captain of the All England travelling team. "In common with others, I lost my money, and was greatly disappointed at the termination. One paid player was accused of selling, and never employed after.'"
Mr. Budd must have done his level best to avert defeat, too, for Bentley records that he caught out no less than nine of the Notts men; but one paid player was accused of selling, and Clarke was on the other side! However it happened, Notts won. Mr. Pycroft also says that in old Nyren's day the big matches were always made for £500 a side, apart, as we may presume, from outside betting. Nowadays a sovereign or a fiver on the 'Varsity match is about the extent of the gambling that cricket invites. The James Bland referred to above had a brother, Joe—Arcades ambo, bookmakers both. These, with "Dick Whittom of Covent Garden—profession unnamed—Simpson, a gaming-house keeper, and Toll of Esher, as regularly attended at a match as Crockford and Gully at Epsom and Ascot."
Mr. Pycroft scouts the idea that a simple-minded rustic of Surrey or Hampshire would long hold out against the inducements that these gentry would offer them, "at the Green Man and Still," to sell a match, and indeed some of the naïve revelations that were made to him by rustic senility when he went to gossip with it, over brandy and water, might confirm him in a poor opinion of the local virtue.
"I'll tell the truth," says one, whom he describes as a "fine old man," but leaves in kindly anonymity. "One match of the county I did sell, a match made by Mr. Osbaldeston at Nottingham. I had been sold out of a match just before, and lost £10, and happening to hear it, I joined two others of our eleven to sell, and get back my money. I won £10 exactly, and of this roguery no one ever suspected me; but many was the time I have been blamed for selling when as innocent as a babe." Then this old innocent, with his delightful notions of cavalleria rusticana and the wooing back of his £10, goes on to tell the means—hackneyed enough in themselves—by which the company of the Legs seduced the obstinacy of rustic virtue. "If I had fifty sons," he said, "I would never put one of them, for all the games in the world, in the way of the roguery that I have witnessed. The temptation was really very great—too great by far for any poor man to be exposed to."
There is a pathetic dignity about this simple moralising that contrasts well with the levity of his previous confession, but the state of things that it shows is really very disgusting. It is another tribute to the merit of this first of English games that it should have lived through and have lived down such a morbid condition.
"If gentlemen wanted to bet," said Beldham, "just under the pavilion sat men ready, with money down, to give and take the current odds. These were by far the best men to bet with, because, if they lost, it was all in the way of business; they paid their money and did not grumble." The manners of some of the fraternity must have changed, not greatly for the better, since then. "Still," he continues, "they had all sorts of tricks to make their betting safe." And then he quotes, or Mr. Pycroft quotes—it is not very clear, and does not signify—Mr. Ward as saying, "One artifice was to keep a player out of the way by a false report that his wife was dead." It was as clever a piece of practical humour as it was honest. What a monstrous state of things it reveals!
And then Beldham, inspirited by Mr. Pycroft's geniality and brandy and water, goes on to assure him —as one who takes a view which the majority would condemn as childishly charitable—that he really does not believe, in spite of all that has been said, that any "gentleman," by which he means "amateur," has ever been known to sell a match, and he cites an instance in which for curiosity's sake he put the honesty of a certain noble lord to the test by covertly proposing selling a match to him. But though his lordship, who seems to have been betting against his own side, had actually £100 on the match, even this inducement was not enough to tempt the nobleman from the paths of virtue.
We will hope that no amateur did fall, and may join with Beldham in "believing it impossible," but the fiction that they did was used by the Legs to persuade any man of difficult honesty to go crooked. "Serve them as they serve you," was the argument, or one of the arguments, used. That "fine old man" whom Mr, Pycroft drew out so freely gives no edifying pictures of the players of the day: "Merry company of cricketers, all the men whose names I had ever heard as foremost in the game, met together, drinking, card-playing, betting, and singing, at the Green Man—that was the great cricketers' house—in Oxford Street—no man without his wine, I assure you, and such suppers as three guineas a game to lose and five to win—that was then the sum for players—could never pay for long."
That was their rate of payment, and that their mode of life—perhaps not the best fitted for the clear eye and the sound wind.
It appears that this degrading condition of cricket was brought to an end by its own excesses; it became a crying scandal. "Two very big rogues at Lord's fell a-quarrelling." They charged each other with all sorts of iniquities in the way of selling matches, all of which accusations, when compared with the records, squared so nicely with the truth that they carried conviction, and "opened the gentlemen's eyes too wide to close again to those practices."
Mr. Pycroft has a note on his own account about the match at Nottingham in which his informant confessed to him that he was paid to lose. There were men on the other side who were paid to lose too, but, perhaps because there were twenty-two of them, they could not do it, but won in their own despite.
It must have produced funny cricket, this selling of a match both ways, and Mr. Pycroft picked up a story of a single-wicket match in which both were playing to lose, where it was only by accident that a straight ball ever was bowled, but when it came it was always fatal. It reminds us of the much-discussed wides and no-balls bowled in the 'Varsity match to avert the follow-on: but, thank heaven, there is no suspicion of fraudulent financial motives in even the queerest of cricketing tactics to-day.
It is truly wonderful how all heavy betting has gone out. Partly, no doubt, this is because men play more in clubs. When individuals used to get up matches the players' expenses came very heavy; therefore they made the matches for a considerable stake to cover them, but the practice cannot have comforted the losers much. Nowadays the club pays players out of the subscribed funds.
Why the single-wicket game is all given up is hard to say, for it is an age of individual emulation, but we are content with the better part of the game of eleven a-side. And when first was that number, which seems to have some constant attraction for the cricketer, introduced? We cannot tell. It seems usual from the dawn of history. Moreover, the length of the pitch was always, so far as the historic eye can pierce, twenty-two yards—twice eleven, and twice eleven inches was the height of the stumps when they were first raised from the foot-high wicket.
Mr. Budd told Mr. Pycroft of a curious single-wicket match in which he was something more than magna, even maxima, pars. It was against Mr. Braund, for fifty guineas. Mr, Braund was a tremendously fast bowler. "I went in first, and, scoring seventy runs, with some severe blows on the legs—nankin knees and silk stockings, and no pads in those days—I consulted my friend and knocked down my wicket, lest the match should last to the morrow, and I be unable to play"—on account of the injuries to his nankin knees, I suppose, "Mr. Braund was out without a run, I went in again, and making the seventy up to a hundred, I once more knocked down my own wicket, and once more my opponent failed to score."
Another interesting match that Mr. Pycroft records was Mr. Osbaldeston and William Lambert against Lord Frederick Beauclerk and Beldham. Mr. Osbaldeston, on the morning of the match, which was fixed under "play or pay" conditions, found himself too ill to play, so Lambert tackled the two of them, and actually beat them. I am sorry to say I find a record of a little temper shown—perhaps naturally enough—in this match, as on another occasion, when he was bowling to that barn-door bat of the Hambledon Club, Tom Walker, by Lord Frederick Beauclerk; but after all, what man is worth his salt without a temper? And no doubt both occasions were very trying.
The date of these single-wicket matches was about 1820, which brings matters up to about the time at which a stopper should be put on the mouth of this gossiping and cribbing Muse of History, for we are coming to the days as to which men still living are able to tell us the things that they have seen.
