2

Where and Why the Game Grew

I’d rather be at Lascelles Hall

Ephraim Lockwood, of Yorkshire, at Niagara Falls

Lascelles Hall is no longer renowned, let alone famous, even if you rhyme it with ‘hassles’ as West Riding folk do. After stopping at a pub on a moor above Huddersfield, I had to inquire of several staff and customers before getting directions to the village a couple of miles away. My satellite navigation refused to admit the very existence of Lascelles Hall.

Yet this village of fewer than one thousand souls once had the strongest cricket team in England – other than representative sides like MCC, or the Players, or the North of England – and therefore in the world. Before the 1870s, a few scattered individuals played cricket, rather than communities, so there was no single place in which the standard could advance. As analogy, individuals studied science in various Classical cities, but it was only when Greek-speaking scientists came together in Egypt’s Alexandria, in buildings devoted to research, that major advances were made in astronomy, geography and physiology. One generation thereby handed on its knowledge to the next generation, who did not have to go back to square one, but raised the standard further.

Lascelles Hall was cricket’s first hot spot, or nursery, or academy. The Hambledon club, in Hampshire, had been the centre of the sport in the 1780s, but few if any players came from the village: thus the club faded away when their more aristocratic members returned to London during the French Revolution. In the 1860s and 1870s, the majority of men who lived in Lascelles Hall played cricket. Thus they enabled their village to:

▪	defeat Yorkshire 2–1 in the three matches they contested

▪	defeat Surrey by an innings in their only match, in 1874

▪	have the better of a drawn match in 1878 against the North of England, who included the best cricketers from Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire other than themselves

▪	beat Sheffield in 1870 for a stake of £500 and the unofficial title of ‘home of Yorkshire cricket’

▪	supply five members of the Yorkshire team for numerous matches, on one occasion six, and on another seven, except one had to stand down through injury.

Lascelles Hall used to call itself ‘the happiest village in England’. Going back there helps to explain why cricket is played more in some places than in others, and to a higher standard.

The advent of the railways turned the series between Gentlemen and Players – intermittent after its inauguration in 1807 – into the focal point of the English cricket season. (A mass spectator sport needed mass communication so that the best players could move around the country.) Before international fixtures, the Gentlemen v Players match was the main test of a cricketer’s calibre, given the natural rivalry between amateurs and professionals; and the first batsman to carry his bat through an innings in this series, in 1874, was not W.G. Grace, but Ephraim Lockwood of Lascelles Hall.FN16

As the match in question was played at the Oval, Lockwood had an advantage: it was his favourite ground. Six years earlier, in 1868, he had been summoned there by telegram to make his debut for Yorkshire against Surrey. One of Yorkshire’s players had dropped out and their opening batsman, John Thewlis, who lived in Lascelles Hall, had recommended Lockwood – who happened to be his nephew. Lockwood took the train to London, where he was mystified by the Underground and refused entry by the Oval gateman because he looked so rustic. ‘I’m a laiker,’ Lockwood protested in his Yorkshire dialect. ‘I’ve coom ’ere to laik.’ He looked no less rustic when, having been told to open the batting with his uncle, he walked out to bat in a checked shirt, tight trousers and boots two sizes too big: the Oval crowd nicknamed him ‘Mary Ann’, which stuck for life.FN17 But Lockwood scored 91 on his debut, Thewlis 108, and their partnership of 176 stood as a record for Yorkshire’s first wicket for 29 years.

According to Grace, Lockwood was ‘not a brilliant batsman, nor particularly free in his style; but what he lacked in that respect he made up in patience and carefulness.’ Lockwood’s own recipe for success was ‘practice and more practice’ – which is exactly what set the cricketers of Lascelles Hall apart from those in every other community in England. Grace’s description makes me think Lockwood also pioneered the aerial chip shot, which the New Zealander Glenn Turner was credited with inventing a century later when batting for Worcestershire in one-day cricket: ‘off slow bowling, he [Lockwood] made what seemed a half-hearted hit just over the bowler’s or mid-off’s head, but which did not go far enough for long-field to reach.’

At the Oval in 1874, Lockwood carried his bat for 67 out of the Players’ total of 115: the Grace brothers, W.G. and Fred, were all over the professionals, taking nine wickets for 38. In the second of the two Gentlemen v Players fixtures of that year, on this occasion at Lord’s, Allen Hill performed the first hat-trick in the series. Hill, too, came from Lascelles Hall. ‘He was one of our very best round-arm bowlers, particularly between 1870 and 1875,’ according to Grace, who had been bowled by Hill in both innings in the Oval fixture of 1874. ‘He had a very easy delivery and beautiful style. He did not put much work on the ball, although now and then he would break from the off; but he bowled very straight and kept a good length.’

Hill’s hat-trick was a rare one for being unassisted: one batsman was lbw, two caught-and-bowled. One victim was Albert Hornby, immortalised by Francis Thompson in his poem ‘At Lord’s’, who became England’s captain. We are told it was the talk of the Lord’s pavilion that Hill and Lockwood not only came from the same Yorkshire village, but lived next door to each other. Thanks to Hill, the Players won at Lord’s, their first victory in this series since 1866, when Grace had appeared and weighted the scales towards the Gentlemen.

In the first ever Test match, at Melbourne in 1877, two members of England’s team came from Lascelles Hall: Hill and Andrew Greenwood (Lockwood was too much of a home-lover to want to tour). England’s best all-round Test cricketer ever in statistical terms also came from Lascelles Hall: Willie Bates, whose Test batting average of 27 and bowling average of 16 gives him a differential of 11. It might have been bigger but for a tragic accident of a kind that has been remarkably and mercifully rare. Bates was practising at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, on England’s 1887–88 tour, when a stray ball struck him in the eye and damaged his sight so badly it terminated his career aged 32. He tried coaching and suicide, before dying of pneumonia, caught while attending Thewlis’s funeral in Lascelles Hall.FN18

The national census of 1841 listed the population of Lascelles Hall as 500. By 1881 it was 800, of whom we can estimate that between 120 and 150 were men of working age. In the following year of 1882, according to the club secretary, 23 players from the village were employed in cricket around the country, whether as players, coaches or groundsmen – while Luke Greenwood, Andrew’s uncle, umpired the Oval Test that year, which Australia won by seven runs, when he impressed the tourists with his fair judgement. Later that decade, a Huddersfield newspaper claimed that more than 30 of the villagers were employed in cricket, without listing them. This would mean one adult male in every four was working as a professional cricketer. To me, it is inconceivable that any community of any size in the world has ever had such a high ratio of its menfolk employed in cricket.

Cricket’s first hot spot was no accident, but the product of circumstances. Above the Hall, built by the Lascelles family after their arrival from Normandy, squat granite-stone cottages climb the hillside. The villagers used to make their living inside them by spinning cloth on hand-looms; and by working at home, not in factories, they could work whatever hours they liked, by candlelight if necessary, and go out to play cricket whenever they wanted and the weather allowed.

Hand-weaving has no part in training for today’s cricketers, yet it was almost as beneficial as working out in a gym. The first historian of Yorkshire cricket, Alfred Pullin, observed the villagers of Lascelles Hall: ‘In their work as hand-loom weavers hand and eye were being constantly trained, and feet kept in active motion. Between shuttle and pick and treadle a weaver had his power of sight, smartness and endurance very considerably sharpened, and thus the groundwork was laid for that remarkable quick timing of the ball and general activity in the field for which most of the Lascelles Hall cricketers became famous.’ Pullin was not exaggerating: the fielder singled out for praise by Australian newspapers after the inaugural Test of 1877 was Allen Hill.

When word that it was time for cricket spread up and down the village street, the men and boys of Lascelles Hall put on their wooden clogs and walked up the steep hill – as good a way of warming up as any – to the ground they had made themselves. The ninety or so club members had dug and flattened the field, then laid new turf of lawn seed and white clover. They must have done a fair job, because John Lockwood, Ephraim’s cousin, became a groundsman at the Oval.

When the villagers practised – in the middle, not in nets – the custom was for each player to bat for 40 balls. Afterwards, when not bowling, he took a turn at every position in the field, to gain experience of it. Thus the players of Lascelles Hall practised intensely on a summer evening, enjoying the long hours of northern daylight, like no other community in England. At Lord’s, the groundstaff would bowl to members who were in town, and pupils at certain public schools had nets in which to practise. Hornby, when at Harrow, even had use of one of the original bowling machines, a Catapulta. On the other side of the world, it was around this time that the Melbourne Cricket Club began to systematise training for its members. But in the northern hemisphere, the players at this Yorkshire academy had a start of several heads.

Situated at the top of a hill, the ground was naturally drained, and a club member would be paid a shilling an evening out of club funds to work on it. So the pitches were true, like almost nowhere else at this period except the Oval (stones could be found in the pitches at Lord’s). When Harrow Wanderers, including Hornby, came to play Lascelles Hall on their northern tour, they complimented the villagers on their pitches but thought the boundaries were a bit short (naturally so, as there is a steep drop down the hill on one side). Harrow Wanderers may have been a little sniffy after they had lost four of their five matches there, drawing the other.

No stroke depends more on the predictable bounce of a pitch than the cut shot, and Ephraim Lockwood became renowned for it. When he scored 208 not out for Yorkshire against Kent, on a fast pitch at Gravesend, he kept cutting one of the fastest bowlers of the period until the Kent captain posted six slips. But old ‘Mary Ann’ still worked her thread through the eye of a needle.

Pullin, the son of a curate, could claim to be the first full-time sports journalist, as he reported on both cricket and rugby union for the Yorkshire Post under the pseudonym of ‘Old Ebor’. He rendered the game fine service by tracking down former Yorkshire cricketers and publishing some of their hard-luck stories, shaming the club into making some provision for them, and making other counties follow suit. He found the 70-year-old Thewlis walking 20 miles a day in Manchester, collecting and delivering laundry. Lockwood was better off after he had retired from ‘laiking’, as he sold cricket equipment at a shop in Huddersfield. When Pullin caught up with Lockwood, he talked about his cricket and especially his favourite stroke, the cut: ‘It came to me naturally. It was a hard chop, square with the face of the bat, and with full force behind it. Yet it was all from the wrist; a quick turn of the wrist on to the ball and away it used to go to the boundary . . . I never was a powerful man; it was simply a natural action.’

Lockwood can be forgiven for using a term which in cricket has seldom been used correctly. When batting, what is ‘natural’ is ducking or swaying the head out of the ball’s path: this is instinct at work, the survival instinct. (The pull shot, whenever the batsman raises his front leg to protect his genitalia, could be included.) But no cut, clip or drive is natural or instinctive; it is the product of conditioned reflexes. Take the finest athlete in France or Russia who has never seen cricket, and give him a bat: he will not be able to play any shot naturally, without instruction, except perhaps a swing to leg. (A related myth is ‘muscle memory’; muscles do not have a memory.) So Lockwood’s cuts – and his chip shot, to judge from Grace’s description – were the fruit of hundreds of hours spent conditioning his brain and strengthening his muscles in an environment designed for practice.

What happened next in Lascelles Hall, after the 1880s, is as revealing as what happened before: almost nothing. The villagers kept on playing cricket, and still do today, but they had lost their head start. Pullin interviewed the former club secretary, Mr Jessop, to whom public schools or clubs or wealthy landowners used to refer for a player or coach. ‘Fast looms have destroyed our fast bowling,’ Mr Jessop lamented. The villagers, instead of doing piecework at home, had been forced to walk to factories and work long fixed hours, so that by the time they got home the daylight had gone. The nature of their work had altered, too: mechanisation did not develop agility of hand and foot in the way the old looms had. Lascelles Hall won the Heavy Woollen District Challenge in 1891, and that was it. The club survived, and remains in the Huddersfield League, but no more cricketers of note were born or nurtured there. Cricket’s first hot spot, or academy, or nursery, was closed.

Surrounding communities, meanwhile, caught up. Look across the valley from the Lascelles Hall ground, and a couple of miles away is another hilltop ground, Kirkheaton. England’s first left-arm swing bowler learned to harness the prevailing breeze there – an inswinger from George Hirst, bowling round the wicket, was said to be like a fast throw from cover. In a farm building on the outskirts of Kirkheaton, a left-arm spinner practised so assiduously one winter that he became a club professional in Scotland, before returning to Yorkshire and becoming the highest first-class wicket-taker of all time: Wilfred Rhodes. At least until the 1950s, when Keith Miller and Garfield Sobers raised the bar, the local saying was valid: ‘Who is the greatest all-rounder there has ever been? Nobody knows, but he batted right and bowled left and came from Kirkheaton.’

Once the Factory Acts allowed workers their Saturday afternoon off, much of the West Riding became one big cricket hot spot. Football, having to compete with rugby league, was less prestigious. Cricket clubs and leagues proliferated in towns and villages, until almost every male child had access to a ground and a pathway to the top. In the 66 Championship seasons from 1893 to 1968, Yorkshire won the title 29 times and shared it once.FN19

Of the 665 players who had represented England at Test cricket at the time of writing, 81 were born outside England and Wales. Of the remaining 584 players, 97 – one-sixth – were born in Yorkshire, mostly the West Riding, making it the most fertile soil in the country, even allowing for its density of population. And while 14 of them were playing for another county when they were first selected to represent England, like Jim Laker of Surrey, the vast majority (83) were exercising their birthright and playing for Yorkshire.

The county where the second largest number of England Test players have been born is Lancashire with 54, and Nottinghamshire the third, with 37. Even London has produced fewer England Test cricketers than Yorkshire, depending on your definition of the city’s environs: 80 by my calculation.

The 655th player illustrated the qualities of Yorkshire cricket as well as anyone. Joe Root came in to bat in the fourth Test against India in Nagpur in 2012–13 to find as big a crisis as England have faced outside an Ashes Test: England’s batsmen, so desperate to win a Test series in India for the first time in 28 years, had ground almost to a standstill at 119 for four in the 61st over. Alastair Cook, the captain, had scored one run off 28 balls; so had Ian Bell. But Root walked out, smiled at his partner Kevin Pietersen and scored ten runs off his first ten balls in Test cricket. He just put the bad ball away with orthodox technique and unflappable temperament. As soon as he replaced his helmet with an England cap, he could have come from any decade of Yorkshire cricket in the previous century; but when Root bent into his forward defensive against an Indian spinner, head so low that his eyes were bail-height, really ‘sniffing it’, he was reminiscent in particular of Len Hutton, embodiment of the best in Yorkshire cricket through the ages.

On one visit to Lascelles Hall, I bowled a few ‘walk-throughs’, towards the sheep on the moor at one end, towards Kirkheaton at the other. The ground was damp and I should apologise for leaving footmarks in the creases. Twilight had set in . . . yet I could just about make out the Victorian womenfolk sitting against the granite wall with their shawls and backs to the wind: about half of the women of Lascelles Hall were said to attend a match, and highly informed their criticism was, too. I could just about make out the Thewlises and Greenwoods, Bateses and Eastwoods, packing up their kit and walking along the farm track to the lane dropping down into the village. They were talking about the tours being arranged for the forthcoming winter, to the United States and Canada or Australia, and the terms being offered to the pros. Old ‘Mary Ann’, looking down on the West Riding spread out below like a banquet, would have none of it. He had seen Niagara Falls, he said, and they were all right, but ‘I’d rather be at Lascelles Hall’.

Among the General Orders issued from Horse Guards Parade on 3 March 1841 was, I think, the single most important decision in the history of global cricket. The consequence was that cricket became embedded as the sport of the British army and, therefore, of the British empire.

The Hampshire Advertiser and Salisbury Guardian reproduced this General Order:

The Master-General and Board of Ordnance being about to form cricket grounds for the use of troops at the respective barrack stations throughout the United Kingdom, commanding officers of regiments, depots, and detachments, are to cause these grounds to be strictly preserved, and no carriages or horses to be suffered to enter them. The cricket-ground is to be considered as in the immediate charge of the barrack-master, who, however, cannot reasonably be expected to protect it effectually unless assisted in the execution of that duty by the support and authority of the commanding officer of the station, as well as by the good feeling of the troops, for whose amusement and recreation this liberal arrangement is made by the public. Lord Hill will treat as a grave offence every trespass that shall be wantonly committed by the troops, either upon the cricket ground or upon its fences. The troops will, moreover, be required, in every such case, to pay the estimated expense of repairs, as in the case of barrack damages. Special instructions have been issued to the barrack masters by the Master-General and Board of Ordnance.

By command of the Right Hon.

General Lord Hill, commanding in chief

Cricket in England was moribund by the 1840s. The Dukes of Dorset and Richmond, and royals like Frederick, Prince of Wales, had not been replaced. The Regency period was the most decadent in England’s annals: nobody who was anybody got out of bed until the afternoon. The nation’s resources had been drained by the war against Napoleon. MCC moved from one ground to a second, then a third: a season passed without the leading club playing a single game, let alone taking the lead. Following a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, 1816 was known as ‘the year without a summer’. And when cricket was played, it was gripped by an existential crisis like never before or since: should bowling be under-arm or allowed to shoulder-height? For as many cricketers that cried ‘forward’, as many cried ‘back’ – among them the Reverend James Pycroft, who coined a phrase when he said that round-arm bowling was ‘not cricket’.

Inter-city cricket had died out all too early. As the sport had spread north from the south-east of England, matches between the growing industrial cities were the natural vehicle of competition, without any need for patrons putting up stakes and purses. Nottingham v Sheffield was a crowd-puller: lacemakers v steelworkers. Coventry v Leicester was a vibrant fixture in the 1780s: ‘The Leicester players were met at the entrance of their town by an incredible concourse of people . . . who took the horses from the carriage and drew it to their inn through the principal streets of the town, some of which were illuminated for the occasion, and the evening was spent amidst the congratulations of their friends and the satisfaction of conquest,’ according to the Northampton Mercury. When the squirearchy took on the organisation of county cricket, from the mid-nineteenth century, it was driven by less demotic vigour than inter-city cricket.

Even the fixture which should have been the highlight of every season seemed moribund, because the Gentlemen, after the realignment of the aristocracy, could no longer give the Players a game. Absurd attempts were made to engineer a balance: nine Players were matched against eleven Gentlemen, or eleven Players against sixteen or eighteen Gentlemen. Even more ingeniously, the size of the wicket was reduced when the Gentlemen batted: in 1832, they were given stumps five inches lower and two inches narrower. In 1837, William Ward, the city financier and MP who had bought the third Lord’s ground and scored 278 on it for MCC v Norfolk, had a brainwave: when the Players batted, they would have to defend a wicket made of four stumps, three feet high and one foot wide. Yet they still won by an innings. The match came to be known as ‘the Barn Door Match’, or ‘Ward’s Folly’.

Rowland Bowen, the cricket historian who was so eccentric that he tried to amputate one of his legs in a bath, called 1820 to 1840 the era of single-wicket matches. One local champion playing another for a purse might have been interesting for the two players concerned, and gamblers, but not for anyone else, because they were representing themselves alone. A single-wicket player had up to five fielders, and no runs could be scored behind the wicket; moreover, to score a single run, the batsman had to run to the non-striker’s end and back. So difficult did batting become that in 1846 Felix batted for two hours against Alfred Mynn before getting off the mark. ‘The Victorian idea of team spirit had not yet been born when the period began,’ Bowen noted. It was cricket without teammates, without camaraderie, without spice.

Only in one respect was cricket well resourced. Bookmakers lurked around the pavilion at Lord’s, like money-changers in the Temple. In 1817 MCC banned the leading professional batsman, William Lambert, for match-fixing, but – just as in our day – some fixers were too big to touch: in this case, Lord Frederick Beauclerk. No wonder Mary Mitford, author of Our Village, scorned the higher echelons of the game in favour of her beloved village teams. ‘I do not mean a set match at Lord’s Ground for money, hard money, between a certain number of gentlemen and players, as they are called – people who make a trade of that noble sport, and degrade it into an affair of bettings, and hedgings, and cheatings, it may be, like boxing or horse-racing.’ On 28 July 1827, The Times reported from Brighton: ‘People are talking here very loudly, that the cricket match [Sussex v All England] which has just ended was a cross, and that it was lost purposely by the men of Sussex.’

In the context of this decadence, the command that every barracks in the United Kingdom should have a cricket ground was momentous. Approximately fifty regiments around the country were to benefit, and when they were posted abroad they would inevitably take the game with them: cricket became a – the – embedded sport. The Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, on 27 March 1841, was typical in voicing approbation: ‘A capital thing. Cricket has long been practised in the 43rd Light Infantry, and that regiment, we all know, is a perfect model. The British army had not had a major engagement for 26 years, since the Battle of Waterloo, and it was considered to be high time for the officers and troops to have some amusement and recreation.’

Cricket was already played overseas, sometimes by soldiers, but in small pockets. Malta and Corfu had most of the ingredients: a sufficient number of Englishmen, a warm climate not disturbed by much rain, some flat open ground and a port where cricket equipment could be transported without prohibitive cost. The sport never bloomed in Malta and Corfu, however: they were naval bases.

But wherever in the empire British soldiers went thenceforth, bat and ball would go with them. The seed would be spread, and most notably to three main hot spots: one in Australia, one in India and one in the West Indies.

All three were ports, where the heat was tempered by sea breezes, and cricket could be played for most, if not all, of the year. The first was Sydney, where cricket had started to be played in the 1820s. The second was Bombay, where members of the Parsi community watched soldiers and civilians playing cricket at the Gymkhana club and decided it was fun, or more than fun: as a tiny minority in India, they thought they would be playing their economic and social cards right if they emulated Englishmen. The third hot spot was Barbados, where the garrison laid out a cricket ground beside the sea on the edge of Bridgetown.

Being a non-contact sport was essential to cricket’s growth around the empire. A bowler from Barbados or the North-West Frontier Province could bowl as fast as he liked, but he could not come closer than a few feet to the batsman who represented the Raj, and certainly not touch him. If there had been any physical contact – as in football, let alone rugby – it is inconceivable that the British establishment in the colonies would have taken the field alongside their native subjects.

Who does cricket have to thank for this momentous decision? The General Order was issued ‘by command of the Right Hon. General Lord Hill, commanding in chief’. He was renowned as a good egg, such a kind commander that he was affectionately known by his troops as ‘Daddy Hill’. But cricket was not Hill’s sport; the hunting of foxes and otters in his native Shropshire was. We should look elsewhere for the author of this command, before examining its far-reaching consequences.

As a boy, Arthur Wesley,FN20 the future Duke of Wellington, did not play cricket at all, and certainly not on the playing fields of Eton. While attending school there, from the age of 12 to 15, Wesley spent most of his spare time in the stream near the house where he lodged; or so he recounted in later life. As a sensitive youth, and the son of the Professor of Music at Trinity, Dublin, the only thing he played was the violin. The dictum about Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton was never uttered by Wellington; it appeared in an article by a French journalist who visited the school to write a profile of the Iron Duke.

On returning from Eton to his native Ireland, Wesley had few prospects. The family inheritance went to his elder brother, the Earl of Mornington. On falling in love with a girl from a neighbouring estate within the Pale, he was rejected by Kitty Pakenham because his prospects were so poor (once they improved, so did her attitude). At this juncture, he did the Georgian equivalent of ‘man up’. He abandoned the violin for ever, bought a commission in the army and became aide to the Rt Hon Major Hobart, whose name is commemorated in Tasmania. Hobart had attended Westminster School and learned his cricket on the ground at Vincent Square.

On 8 August 1792, in Dublin, the Garrison played All Ireland ‘for the sum of one thousand guineas, five hundred each side’, according to the Freeman’s Journal. And there can be little or no doubt that the future Duke of Wellington represented All Ireland. The only surviving scorecard, printed in the Freeman’s Journal, lists ‘Hon. A Wesby’ batting at number five; but this has to be a typographical error by the Dublin printers. The reporter sent to cover this match clearly knew very little about cricket: he reported the result as a draw, whereas the Garrison actually won by an innings. Maybe the bibulous fool had a few drops of the hard stuff in the marquees before scrawling down the scores in his notebook with several misprints. In the next edition of the Freeman’s Journal he tried to laugh off his mistake as ‘rather unlucky’. In any event, the surname of ‘Wesby’ is not recorded anywhere else in Ireland in this period. Arthur Wesley, on the other hand, was then Honourable, and a captain. When the match report refers to ‘the Hon. Captain Wesby’, it has to be the future Duke of Wellington.

In this match on the Fifteen Acres, as Phoenix Park was called, the outstanding cricketer was the captain of the Garrison team, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lennox. Even the reporter of the Freeman’s Journal – anonymous, and thus he should remain – could see Lennox was an elite athlete. He scored 59 in the Garrison’s only innings, and ‘astonished the spectators with a display of agility and skill during the whole contest, which even the amateurs of the science admitted to have been without parallel in the coarse [sic] of their experience. His subtlety at bowling it was that so soon caused the event of the day to determine in favour of the Garrison; and his facility of catching the ball may be witnessed, but it cannot be described.’

This report of ‘subtlety’ suggests that Lennox might have been the first under-arm bowler to spin the ball both ways. Spinning the ball from leg had been the norm in under-arm bowling until the late 1770s, when a shepherd called Lamborn (first name unknown) had tried off-breaks as he whiled away his hours in meadows. In subsequent life, Lennox went on to become the fourth Duke of Richmond, and was destined to meet Wesby, or Wesley, again on the eve of Waterloo – on the same side, this time. Eventually, he was appointed Governor-General of Upper Canada, where his athleticism could not save him from being bitten in the face by a rabid fox.

Wesley – for it was surely he – was bowled by Lennox for five in his first innings, and caught for one in his second. (As in the scorecards of 1744, if the batsman was caught, only the name of the catcher was recorded, not the bowler.) Two unproductive innings did not, however, stop our foolish reporter fawning. He did not mention the lower ranks, who batted down the order in almost strict adherence to the social hierarchy. But Wesley was high enough, in the pecking and batting order at number five, to be rated ‘active, and remarked for a promising player’.

Four years later, in 1796, Wesley – or Wellesley as he had now become – set sail for India as colonel of the 33rd Regiment. He is known to have taken plenty of books on the voyage, and no violin, but did he take a bat and ball as well? A tradition survives on the Malabar Coast, or Kerala as it is now, that the future Duke of Wellington introduced cricket when he set up a garrison in Thalassery, or Tellicherry; and the natives were allowed to participate when the garrison did not have sufficient soldiers to make up a game. When he reached Calcutta, he certainly found cricket being played by men of the East India Company like the diarist William Hickey and his hedonistic companions.

Having risen through the ranks, the Duke of Wellington was commander-in-chief by the Peninsular Wars, and his second-in-command was ‘Daddy Hill’. Wellington remarked: ‘The best of Hill is that I always know where to find him.’ It was a valuable trait before the mobile phone. In the mayhem of battles like Badajoz, Salamanca and Vitoria, Wellington knew where to find his number two. But for all their victories in Spain, in the summer of 1815 the conclusive battle still lay ahead, the one on which Europe’s future hinged. Napoleon Bonaparte, having escaped Elba, left Paris for Brussels with an army of 122,000 men, confident that he would be victorious and that most of Europe would be assumed into his French empire. Only if Wellington won, with the principal aid of the Prussians, would the nation-states of western Europe survive.

In the week before Waterloo, we know that Wellington, based in Brussels, was awaiting the delivery from London of the boots that he favoured. This was the calm before perhaps the greatest storm Europe had seen. Five days before Waterloo, he decided to take the afternoon off, to go and watch some of his officers playing cricket nearby at Enghien. For company, he took with him the 16-year-old Lady Jane Lennox, daughter of the captain of the Garrison team in that match of 23 years before. Lady Jane’s father, by now the Duke of Richmond, was playing in the game at Enghien.

What did they talk about in the carriage? The last thing Wellington would have mentioned – because that would have been tempting fate – was his famous record of having won more than 50 battles and only losing one, his first, in India – or his marriage to Kitty Pakenham. When he had returned from India and proposed after 12 years away, and Kitty had accepted, she turned out to be so far from what he remembered that he made overtures to the high-society courtesan Harriette Wilson. Assuming Lady Jane did not say she was bored with cricket and stamp her foot, and demand to go shopping in Brussels and drink hot choclolate, the Iron Duke may have settled for regaling the 16-year-old girl with stories of her father and the subtlety of his bowling . . .

The game was not played out: it was halted when the Prince of Orange arrived, and never resumed. According to the tutor of the Lennox girls, the Duke returned to Brussels with Jane later that evening. And maybe it was on the ride back to Brussels, if not before, that the seed was sown in Wellington’s mind: that if the greatest of battles was won, and British troops had some peace to enjoy, then they too might benefit from the ‘amusement and recreation’ of playing cricket.

By 1841, the Duke of Wellington was both prime minister and the army’s honorary commander-in-chief, and the national debt had been partly repaid. It would have taken only a few moments to summon Hill and instruct him that every barracks in the country should have its own cricket ground. It was an order obeyed so comprehensively that cricket became the only sport for which every regiment in the British army had a team.

While the villagers of Lascelles Hall in Yorkshire were looming large, so to speak, a family in Downend, Gloucestershire, was practising no less hard. The rivalry between the three Grace brothers spurred them on until they all represented England in the same Test team at the Oval in 1880 (the only other instance of three brothers representing their country in a Test is the Mohammad brothers of Pakistan in 1969–70). Cricketers need space in which to play, which favours those who grow up with a garden, or an orchard like the Graces. They were coached by their father and more especially their mother. Their cousins joined in, and their dog fetched the balls. Given such resources, a family structure can go a long way towards producing cricketers. A family can be a miniature form of hot spot, academy or nursery. A family has the same strength in offering lots of practice, but does not eliminate failings and weaknesses so thoroughly as a hot spot would.

Almost one-quarter of the players to represent England at Test cricket have had a brother, father or uncle who represented England: 154 out of 665. In addition, another 110 England Test players have had a father, brother or half-brother who has played first-class cricket. Such is the enormous advantage at a young age of having somebody good to play with and against: somebody who will bowl at him, give him a few basic tips, perhaps buy him a bat, and start programming his brain to the paths of a cricket ball. Of England Test players, 264 out of 665 – two in every five – have benefited from beginning in the miniature form of hot spot that is the family.

Where both the father and son have played Test cricket, the son has been the better cricketer in roughly twice as many cases. This measurement cannot be made entirely objectively. If the father has played in an era of far fewer Tests, the fact that his son has scored more runs or taken more wickets does not automatically make him better. Worldwide, 33 sets of fathers and sons have played Test cricket for the same country. In nine cases, I would say, with an element of subjective judgement, the father has been distinctly better; and in 17 cases, the son has been distinctly better; while in the other seven cases, no such conclusion can be drawn.

TEST-PLAYING FATHERS AND SONS

1. The nine cases where father and son have played Test cricket for the same country, and the father has been distinctly the better cricketer, even where their Test records do not bear this out.FN21

FN22

2. The 17 cases where father and son have played Test cricket for the same country, and the son has been distinctly the better cricketer.

3. The seven cases where father and son have played Test cricket for the same country and have to be judged more or less equal as cricketers:

Notes: Frank Hearne of England and South Africa was roughly as good as his son George of South Africa.

George Headley of West Indies was one of the all-time greats. His son, Ron Headley of England, was neither so good as his father nor as his son, Dean Headley of England.

Nawab of Pataudi Snr of England was not so good as his son, Nawab of Pataudi Jnr of India.

Walter Hadlee of New Zealand was better than his elder son, Dayle, but not so good as his younger son, Richard.

Lala Amarnath of India was better than his elder son, Surinder, but not so good as his younger son, Mohinder.

Jahangir Khan of India was not so good as his son, Majid Khan of Pakistan, while Majid was better than his son, Bazid Khan.

Wazir Ali of India was better than his son, Khalid Wazir of Pakistan.

Or perhaps the parents have no time for, or interest in, cricket. In that case, a first-born boy may have to wait until a younger brother arrives and begins to bowl at him. The sample size in English cricket is too small to generalise: there have been ten pairs of brothers who have played Tests for England, in addition to the three Graces and three Hearnes. But, worldwide, 65 pairs of brothers have played Test cricket (excluding, for this purpose, two sets of twins).

In 17 cases, by my estimation, the elder brother has been better at Test cricket. In 32 cases, the younger brother has been better, while in 16 cases, they have been more or less equally good. This sample size is big enough to suggest it is a distinct advantage to be a younger brother, presumably because he plays and practises more at a formative age than his elder brother, who may have had to wait for someone to play with.

In addition to being the better cricketer, the younger brother is more likely to bowl. According to my estimation, in 12 cases the elder brother has been more of a bowler than his younger brother, while in 25 instances the younger brother has been more of a bowler. Anecdotal evidence suggests the elder brother has a bat first, perhaps because he owns the equipment, and the younger brother has to dismiss him before he has a turn to bat.

How many of us watching a talented boy play cricket have been told: ‘Ah, but you should see his younger brother’? Thus, Martin Crowe was perceived to be more naturally gifted than his elder brother Jeff Crowe, and Robin Smith more talented than Chris Smith. But too much subjectivity is involved to prove that younger brothers as a rule have been more talented, however that term is defined: is Dwayne Bravo, the all-rounder, more talented than his younger brother Darren Bravo, the batsman? Or it may be that the younger brother is often perceived to be more talented than his elder brother because, aside from batting, he is more of a bowler.

The one exception, although again the sample size is too small to be conclusive, occurs in India: here the first-born son has in general been more successful than his younger brother or brothers who have also played Tests. This is consistent with the cultural trend in India of pouring more resources into the first-born son than any other child, in order to safeguard the family inheritance.

TEST-PLAYING BROTHERS

1. The 17 pairs of brothers of whom the elder has been better at Test cricket than the younger.

Key: * = elder brother was more of a bowler

† = younger brother was more of a bowler

No mark where one brother bowled as much as the other.

2. The 32 pairs of brothers of whom the younger has been better at Test cricket than the older.

3. The 16 pairs of brothers, and half-brothers, who have been more or less equally good at Test cricket.

Notes: The two pairs of twins, Mark and Steve Waugh of Australia, and Hamish and Jamie Marshall of New Zealand, have been excluded from the above lists.

In addition:

Australia have produced the three Chappell brothers who have played Tests: Ian, Greg and Trevor.

In addition to his three Tests for Australia, Albert Trott played two Tests for England.

England have produced the three Grace brothers who have played Tests: Edward, William and Fred; and three Hearne brothers: Alec, Frank and George.

Pakistan have produced the three Akmal brothers who have played Tests: Kamran, Adnan and Umar; and the three Elahi brothers: Manzoor, Saleem and Zahoor; and the four Mohammad brothers: Wazir, Hanif, Mushtaq and Sadiq.

South Africa have produced the three Tancred brothers who have played Tests: Bernard, Louis and Vincent.

Sri Lanka have produced the three Ranatunga brothers who have played Tests: Dammika, Arjuna and Sanjeeva.

Schools with cricket facilities are another form of hot spot. Of England’s 665 Test cricketers, 220 have either been amateurs before the distinction was abolished in 1962, and can therefore be assumed to have attended a fee-paying school; or else, since then, can be verified as having attended one. In other words, one-third of England’s Test cricketers have come from fee-paying schools, whereas less than one-tenth of the population has attended them. Such a background has been, and remains, an enormous advantage, especially for batsmen.

At these fee-paying schools, normally known as public schools, a larger part of the timetable is set aside for cricket than at state schools, where in many cases there is no cricket or ground at all; and the pitches are likely to be maintained far better. The coach at a fee-paying school has often been a county cricketer himself, so he knows the network and how to put in a favourable word for a pupil. Public schoolboys who went on to Oxford or Cambridge universities have been expected to graduate into their county side and captain it, with the prospect of an even higher honour. Of England’s 79 Test captains, 32 went to Oxbridge.

If one side of the coin is that England has the advantage of these mini-hot spots, the down side is far too many cold spots, notably cities in the Midlands and north of England. Not one England male Test cricketer has been born in Wolverhampton (in 2011 Rachael Heyhoe Flint was created Baroness Heyhoe Flint of Wolverhampton). One England Test cricketer has been born in each of Hull, Newcastle and Wakefield. Two England Test cricketers have been born in each of Cardiff, Plymouth, Stoke-on-Trent and Sunderland. One Test cricketer has been born in Liverpool, and one in Sheffield, since the nineteenth century. Overall, half of the 20 most populated cities in England and Wales have barely produced a Test team in the last hundred years.

This failure to maximise human resources goes a long way towards explaining why England has not been so successful as Australia at cricket, in spite of having a population several times larger. Boys who have grown up in the state-run primary and secondary schools of England’s inner cities have had a vastly reduced chance of reaching the top. The lack of cricket grounds, of time and support by teachers and families, of coaching, of networking, and of peers who also aspire to play cricket for a living, has marginalised a large section of the population of England and Wales.

An alternative pathway used to be football: 58 of England’s Test players are listed in the Who’s Who of Cricketers as having played football. Most of them represented professional league clubs, the earlier ones Corinthian Casuals. The last of this line was Arnold Sidebottom, who represented England at Test cricket in 1985. At one time a football club was a quasi-cricket academy, in that it made the cricketer fitter and probably better at fielding and more confident. A figure of 58 out of the 512 England Test cricketers who played football, up to and including Sidebottom, gives a proportion of 11.3 per cent. Since his day, it has been impossible for a boy to combine both sports after his very early teens.

Very few of the 584 England Test cricketers born in England and Wales have reached the top without the help of at least one of these four stepladders: 1. a fee-paying school; 2. a close relative who has played either Test or first-class cricket, or will do so; 3. professional football, with the benefits entailed; 4. being born in Lancashire or Yorkshire, where even small communities tend to have a cricket ground (Nottinghamshire lost more than 20 grounds when its collieries were closed and has been replaced by Durham as a source of fast bowlers). The majority of the male population of England and Wales does not fit into any of these categories. The waste has been enormous.

Nurturing, I conclude, is highly significant in the development of cricketers, and batsmen in particular, more so than in the case of most sportsmen. As one example of what is almost cause and effect: when Sir Everton Weekes grew up in Bridgetown, the ball was lost if he hit it out of his garden, so he hit no more than two sixes in his 4455 Test runs, and one of those did not clear the ropes but was all-run. There are many similar anecdotes: a batsman favours the cover drive because if he hit straight at home, the ball went down the road. The cricketers of Lascelles Hall excelled because of their nurturing – because they practised more than any other community of their time – rather than nature. If genes had been decisive, their descendants would also have excelled at cricket.

Take identical twins at birth, and bring one up as the only child of an inner-city family living in a high-rise apartment and attending a state school. The other identical twin is brought up by a father who has played first-class cricket, in a house with a garden, along with several brothers, before being sent to a fee-paying school. One identical twin is far less likely to play cricket for England than the other.

Nurture, not nature, accounts for the extraordinary case of Wolmer’s. This school was founded in Kingston, Jamaica, by a British merchant who made his fortune when Port Royal was infamous for its debauchery, and who set aside money for a school in his will, perhaps in the hope of saving his soul. It remains the oldest school in Jamaica, but not the most elite, because it has expanded so much, to the point of having more than one thousand boys and more than one thousand girls.

West Indies had played 290 Test matches to the end of the fifth Test against England in 1991 – and former pupils of Wolmer’s had kept wicket in 138 of them, or 47 per cent. Karl Nunes kept wicket, and captained West Indies, in their first three Tests. Shortly afterwards, he was succeeded by Ivan Barrow, who kept wicket in ten Tests, in addition to scoring the first Test century for West Indies in England. After the Second World War, Gerry Alexander kept wicket in 25 Tests, Jackie Hendriks in 20 Tests, then Jeffrey Dujon in 80.

Not one of these West Indian wicketkeepers who attended Wolmer’s was related to another. They came from very diverse backgrounds: a mixture of German, Jewish, Scottish, English, French and African origins. What they had in common, apart from a cricket ground in the school, and a snowballing tradition of producing West Indian wicketkeepers, was a type of nurturing. A former pupil, after playing Test cricket, would return to the school, watch matches being played by the new generation and advise a wicketkeeper who was talented. This unofficial mentoring system had ceased, so I was told during my visit in 1998. But the tradition was revived when a downtown Kingston kid was sent on a scholarship to Wolmer’s, and Carlton Baugh followed in Dujon’s footsteps for 20 Tests.

In an area of southern Birmingham that could at best be described as tired-looking, and more accurately as run-down, lies Stoney Lane Park. It is not how many people would envisage a park. It is green only where there is neither tarmac nor concrete, and no larger than a football pitch. When a tornado ripped off surrounding roofs and they had to be replaced with new ones, it was said to have done the area a favour.

Yet here is a hot spot to compare with Lascelles Hall or anywhere else in the West Riding, or with the playing fields of Eton and Harrow. In the middle of this park, an area the size of a cricket square is surrounded by a wall about three feet high. The surface of tarmac is not perfectly flat, but at least it is not dangerous to bowl on with a taped tennis ball, as the boys do.

Like most cricketers in Pakistan, where many of their forefathers came from, or the West Indies, these boys were not coached until their teens, if then. They learned for themselves – with the odd shouted tip from their mates – while playing all day at weekends and in the holidays. They could play into the night because this cockpit, along one side, had mini-floodlights – before they were vandalised. Floodlighting was also a factor in the development of Jos Buttler into the most versatile hitter the England team had known: it enabled him to play on the verandah of the family home on winter evenings from aged three, with his elder brother. Without artificial lighting, an English batsman is less likely to practise for the ten thousand hours which have been identified as the key to genius. This does not apply to bowling: the lad who bowls pace for ten thousand hours will not be able to stand, for stress fractures.

Two England Test cricketers grew up in this cockpit: Kabir Ali and his first cousin Moeen Ali; and two county cricketers who played for several years, Kadeer Ali and Naqaash Tahir; and at least two minor county cricketers in Omar Ali and Rawait Khan. Several of them had brothers who were skilled players. From the local primary school, named after Nelson Mandela, which runs alongside one edge of this park, they moved on to Moseley School, where they were able to play some cricket, and the Moseley Ashfield club. At one stage, the club had a team that included eight members of Warwickshire Under-15s.

In 2014, Moeen Ali went on to become England’s ninth Test cricketer born in Birmingham, less than a year after the eighth, Chris Woakes, whose background was not much more privileged. It is possible for anyone to reach the top, because success in sport is multifactorial. There are some advantages, too, in learning cricket in the street: such players are not over-coached; they are stretched when playing against boys older than themselves or young men; they become streetwise, if they want to survive the gang battles; they learn to fight and scrap (Kabir Ali became a death-bowling specialist); and without nets to hem them in, they can grow up scoring all round the wicket and seeing the value of their shots. (A schoolboy who plays a cover drive in the nets is likely to be told ‘Good shot’ with no regard to his placement of the ball.) Moeen Ali became one of the most gifted of all England’s strokeplayers; when his teammates watched him in the nets, they tried to work out which balls he did not hit for four.

No one background for a cricketer can be considered ideal. What is essential is that a team should be composed of cricketers who think on their feet and hail from a variety of backgrounds. Bowling is the posing of problems, and batting the solving of them. You do not want all the players coming at them from the same perspective – even if they were born in Lascelles Hall, and went to school at Wolmer’s.