Drawing on contemporary newspaper reports, this splendid book recreates cricket’s watershed year, 1864. At the time, Kit Harris explains, football was still in its infancy and ‘there was almost no other sport to occupy a man’s time’. So cricket was played in winter, too. The smooth surfaces of frozen ponds and lakes made for prodigious scoring: ‘The ball, once struck, found no obstruction before reaching the banks.’
Boundaries didn’t exist, so batsmen ran until a fielder returned the ball. Later that year, playing for United England against All England, William Mortlock ‘hit one ball past square leg, through the gateway, out of the ground, across the road and into a garden wall opposite’. The stroke brought seven runs.
The public’s appetite for cricket news was insatiable. ‘The first match of the season came off on Saturday afternoon,’ the Dundee Advertiser announced: Academy United had beaten Thistle by ‘16 runs and an innings’. A reader pointed out that the match had in fact been played by eight-year-old boys, using a fourpenny India-rubber ball, without umpires, full teams or much regard for the laws of cricket. The editor confessed that he had assumed the clubs were respectable because the boy who submitted the report had such good handwriting.
The rapidly expanding railway network allowed teams – and spectators – to travel further. The Llanelli Railway Company stopped its trains so that passengers could alight to watch Carmarthenshire play Breconshire at Dolgarreg. Newspapers reported contests between ‘married vs single, sons vs fathers, over 5ft 8in vs under 5ft 8in, Whigs vs Tories, singers vs instrumentalists, toolmakers vs sheepshearers, and even bearded vs barefaced’. When the Lords and Commons faced a strong ‘wandering’ team of gentlemen, the politicians needed 22 players to compete on anything like level terms.
In July, a 15-year-old W.G. Grace, later described by John Arlott as ‘the greatest cricketer of them all’, played for South Wales against the Gentlemen of Sussex. The Brighton Gazette reported that he sent the ball ‘about in every direction’ on his way to ‘the enormous score of 170’.
Elsewhere, teams were notable for rather different reasons. In Tunbridge Wells, they were all pensioners. In Peckham, more than 1,000 spectators paid sixpence to watch one-armed players take on one-legged opponents. In Southsea, a player fell and broke his leg. The crowd roared with laughter as he was carried away and the leg amputated: ‘Fortunately, it was made of wood.’
Nor did the elements stop play. E.M. ‘Teddy’ Grace – W.G.’s older brother – batted in his waistcoat against the cold, but the pitch was so rough that one delivery broke his wristwatch and another smashed the pencil case in his pocket. When Yorkshire played Surrey, ‘the cricketers remained at their posts’ despite the rain, so ‘the inconvenience was trifling’. During an England tour of Australia, play continued until the cricketers were ‘ankle-deep in mud’.
These were tougher times. On the voyage to Australia, Teddy Grace recorded that George ‘Tear ’em’ Tarrant had developed toothache: ‘Cured him by pulling the tooth out… but required all my strength, so tremendously tight was it in.’ A few weeks later in a contest with an Aboriginal spear-thrower, Grace again drew on his strength to hurl a cricket ball 120 yards. Meanwhile, Harris notes dryly, the tourists in 1864 undertook ‘a good deal more acclimatisation and practice than an England team touring Australia would bother with in the 21st century’.
Cricket was played in winter, too. The smooth surfaces of frozen ponds made for prodigious scoring
But not everything was different back then. Gamesmanship was already well established. Tom Hayward, fielding in the covers, routinely ran batsmen out by pretending to have misfielded. In Melbourne, the Australians tried to prevent an England victory by repeatedly stopping for brandy. ‘The players went to the tents to “liquor up”, as they term it here,’ wrote one English player. The heat might induce thirst, he conceded, but not ‘such an unquenchable thirst as to require drinks every ten minutes’.
LBW decisions were already provoking fierce dissent. One newspaper offered advice that remains applicable: ‘If the umpire thinks it is out, what is the use of disputing it? Exit at once, for the sake of example.’ The aggrieved batsman could complain later, enlist sympathy – ‘especially from the women’ – and congratulate himself on what he would have achieved but for the injustice.
By December of this great cricketing year, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack had appeared for the first time; the first full-strength England team to tour Australia had returned triumphant; overarm bowling had been fully legalised; Lord’s had been saved from destruction; county cricket had been reborn; and W.G. Grace had begun to make headlines. And, appropriately, the year ended as it had begun. On Boxing Day, the Leeds Times reported a match on the frozen Moor Dam at Yeadon: 11 men wearing skates against 11 without.
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