The story is told of the colossus of cricket's golden age, Dr W.G. Grace, that in a Test match against Australia he had S.P. Jones run out when the unfortunate batsman went out of his ground to pat down the pitch between deliveries. Joe Darling, Australian captain from 1899 to 1905 later wrote:
Grace appealed to Bob Thoms, one of the best and fairest umpires the world has ever known...Thoms...asked Grace if he wanted a decision and on Grace saying "Yes" replied: "It is not cricket, but I must give the batsman out."1
"It's not cricket" became the cry of writers like Neville Cardus, who saw the game as a teacher of morality, sportsmanship and fair play, a kind of ethical microcosm. The word “cricket” became a moral principle; what was "cricket" was a sense of social order, decorum and above all, Englishness. Something "not cricket" was not properly English either. Yet the myth of "cricket" is open to critique because of the behaviour of the men who supposedly illustrated the ideal of cricketing rectitude. The famous W.G., with his prodigious frame and luxuriant beard, was the Zeus-like symbol of the virtues inherent in the sport. Even his "sharp practices" (the story above is by no means unusual) were excused as a kind of playful gamesmanship by contemporaries, and by later writers such as C.L.R. James.2 Neville Cardus claims that he once asked an experienced Gloustershire cricketer if it was true that W.G. cheated; but that the old man replied indignantly: "Not he. The old man cheat? No Sir! He was too clever for that."3 The paragon of "cricket" himself proved open to the charge of "it's not cricket!"
The game of cricket has been used as an embodiment of the great myths of English culture: the bat and the ball became the icons of the cult of virility and the symbols of imperial rule; the pastoral vision of an Arcadian, pre-industrial England was incarnated in the game played with willow on the village green; the qualities of the old England, the middle-class-less England, apparently remained embedded in cricket; and there is the myth of cricket as a game of principles, where the "spirit" of the game was to be obeyed as much as any written code. The journalist who wrote under the pseudonym of "A Country Vicar" wrote in 1933:
I remember when it was considered a sad want of etiquette — almost immoral — to pull [a type of cricket shot] a ball...had you committed such an ill-mannered offence of set purpose...well, there! You would have been outside the pale of polite society — an outcast, a Goth, a vandal — no cricketer!4
The writings of Neville Cardus contain virtually all these mythic elements, although ostensibly his project was an appreciation of cricket as "art". What the content of his aesthetics of cricket was he never divulged; Cardus rather draws on qualities of art in describing his favourite cricketing themes. It was he that wrote:
"...It is far more than a game, this cricket."5
What he meant was that cricket aspired to the finest of arts; however, these pretensions could not mask the social significance of Cardus' writings. He is more than aware, for example, of cricket's connection with an English consciousness:
"If everything else in this nation of ours were lost but cricket — her constitution and the laws of England of Lord Halsbury — it would be possible to reconstruct from the theory and practice of cricket all the eternal Englishness which has gone to the establishment of that Constitution and the laws aforesaid".6
Cricket thus represents what is "eternally English". However, Cardus' "eternal Englishness" turns out to be largely a nostalgia for the sublime, pre-war England. The most thorough critique of Neville Cardus' writing can be found in Derek Birley's vehemently iconoclastic book The Willow Wand - Some Cricket Myths Explored.7 Cardus is one of his chief targets. Birley's chapter "Cardus and the Aesthetic Fallacy" hones in on his remoulding of the Victorian apotheosis of cricket for the twentieth century reader. This, according to Birley, is sentimentality of the worst kind:
...Cardus' writing is like advertising copy.. He exploits the nostalgic, white-on-green, rustic bliss, dreaming spires and village inn images that can be relied upon to evoke deep and satisfying in cricket-lovers, just as a television commercial exploits sex or greed.8
A significant component of this sentimentality in Cardus is his nostalgia for the feudal social origins of the game. In particular, he delights in the rapport between the lords and the serfs, or in the terms of the cricket of Cardus' day, the "gentlemen" amateurs and the professionals. Birley, reflecting on Cardus' delight in the fuedal, writes:
The stories Cardus wove around cricket used a literary convention older than Shakespeare in which the rustics are clowns, pointing up the true nobility of the serious characters by making shrewd homespun comments, and occasionally, without forgetting their place in life, discomfiting their betters...in his fictional world of cricket the true gentry are benevolently autocratic and dashing, the old-style pros know their place, and it is the suede-shoed modern suave interloper trying to blur the distinction who is the threat.9
A passage from his 1934 book Good Days provides a piece of nostalgia which exhibits Cardus' idea of Englishness.10 The description of the pre-war Lancashire batsman Reggie Spooner places him as a minor deity at the centre of a pastorally conceived cricketing world. He is the young aristocratic hero — fair, morally innocent, graceful, feminine, homo-eroticised, public school educated. Spooner at the crease plays "strokes" rather than "shots" or "hits", for he does nothing from raw aggression or with brute force. He bats with ease, without raising a sweat. His background and his breeding are essential to his batting:
Spooner told us in every one of his drives past cover that he did not come from the hinterland of Lancashire, where cobbled streets sound with the noise of clogs and industry; he played always as though on the elegant lawns of Aigburth; his cricket was "county" in the social sense of the term....What's bred in the bone comes out in an innings; I never saw Spooner bat without seeing, as a background for his skill and beauty, the fields of Marlborough...11
For Cardus, Spooner brings to the industrial north of England a piece of the pastoral south: Old Trafford becomes a pastoral island (Canterbury, in fact) in the most un-pastoral city of Manchester. The figure of Old William, on the other hand, "religious in a simple old-world way", is Cardus' method of dignifying the lower class cricketing professional. He is a "holy fool" type, a sage whose lack of aristocratic sophistication is met by the aphoristic quality of his conversation, a simple, folk-loric wisdom. In this section, Cardus the author becomes the pilgrim to the holy man, but only by patronising William because of his simple awe of education.Yet lurking beneath the surface of Cardus' peaceful pastoral setting is a militaristic aspect of Englishness. Of Spooner it is said: "straight from the playing fields of Marlborough he came and conquered". This phrase touches the same cultural nerves as the famous saying "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton", popularly attributed to the Duke of Wellington, who was supposed to have had this insight while observing a cricket match.12 "The playing fields" of the public schools are places where young men prepare to do battle by participating in character-strenghtening games, building both body and moral fibre. Beneath the vision of cricket's pastoral beauty lies the idea that for the players the game is training for war, for defending (or extending for that matter) the same Englishness that the game of cricket expresses. The link between the pastoral and the military in cricket is made explicitly in Sir Henry Newbolt's 1928 poem "Vitae Lampada":
There's a breathless hush in the close tonight,
Ten to make and a match to win,
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in,
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'
The sand of the desert is sodden red,
Red with the wreck of a square that broke.
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far and honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'
Cardus gives even more away by describing the results of a Spooner shot as having "crashed amongst the dust and cinders like an exploding shell". Not only is this a militaritistic image: it describes a pre-war event with a post-war consciousness. While not impossibly conceived prior to 1914, it is a reminder that Cardus' construction of the pastoral relies on retrospection; Spooner is a childhood memory of England as it should be now — batsmen now are ungainly and less heroic. Likewise, Old William is a reminiscing veteran, not a contemporary commentator. The present state of the nation and the Empire, for Cardus and company, is, like the present state of the game, "not cricket".
[1] D.K. Darling, Test Tussles On And Off The Field, published privately in 1970.
2 Beyond a Boundary, Hutchinson, 1963.
3 Cricket, Longmans Green, 1931.
4 Second Innings, Hutchinson, 1933
5 English Cricket, Collins, 1947
6 Cricket, Longmans, Green 1931
