More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years. John Major

an early-nineteenth-century Surrey player), known as ‘the Little Farmer’, as something of a bumpkin, without intelligence but with talent. Lambert was in fact a shepherd, and had the natural gift of bowling underarm off-breaks. He practised these aiming at sheep hurdles, but it was only when he was told where to pitch them by Richard Nyren that he tumbled out Kent and Surrey batsmen ‘as if [they were] picked off by the rifle corps’.

      The finest of the early batsmen was John Small Senior, a pioneer of forward play, renowned as the best judge of a short run – a skill perhaps learned from his specialist fielding positions at the equivalents of the modern-day cover point or midwicket. Small was the Hambledon version of the ‘senior pro’, whom Richard Nyren consulted on tactics and cricket law; he also entertained the team with his fiddle and double bass, and made bats and balls in the off-season. It was Small who developed a new straighter bat with a marked shoulder at the head of the blade. This was a great improvement, but it was still unsprung – such refinements lay far ahead.

      Behind the stumps, the wicketkeeper – with no protective pads or gloves – was Tom Sueter, handsome and easy-natured by temperament, who must have stood up to Brett’s fast bowling for he ‘stumped out’ many a batsman. He was also an accomplished left-handed batsman. Sueter was popular, ‘a pet of all the neighbourhood’. A chorister in Hambledon church with a sweet tenor voice, he often sang solo or led team songs in the dressing room, and afterwards as they drank their ale at the Bat and Ball. His partner in harmony was George Lear, counter-tenor, middle-order batsman and, his chief role in the team, longstop to Sueter’s wicketkeeping.

      New players arrived to strengthen the team over the years. Noah Mann, short and swarthy as a gypsy, would ride twenty miles each way on horseback to practice every Tuesday: a fleet-footed, agile man, he batted and bowled left-handed and was an excellent fielder. Poor Noah came to a sad end: after a convivial evening he fell onto the smouldering ashes of a fire, and died of his injuries. He was only thirty-three. Years later, his son would umpire one of the most fateful games in cricket history (see page 132).

      Even among the working men of the team, the two Walker brothers, Tom and Harry, stood out as ‘unadulterated clod hoppers’. But they were difficult to dismiss and utterly without nerves – valuable attributes in a cricketer. Harry was a dashing batsman, quite unlike his brother. ‘Old ever-lasting’ Tom, who once faced 170 balls for one run, was hardly an advocate of brighter cricket. He did, however, make the first century on the first Lord’s pitch (which was subsequently partially covered by Dorset Square): 107 for MCC against Middlesex – followed by four other hundreds on the same ground. Nyren’s description of Tom Walker is memorable:

      a hard, ungainly scrag-of-mutton frame; wilted, apple-John face; long spider legs, as thick at the ankles as at the hips; the driest and most rigid limbed chap; his skin was like the rind of an old oak, and as sapless. He moved like the rude machinery of a steam engine in the infancy of construction and, when he ran, every member seemed ready to fly to the four winds.

      A second set of brothers, George and William Beldham, brought forth the greatest batsman cricket had yet known. ‘Silver Billy’ Beldham had been taught by a gingerbread baker, Harry Hall, and he had learned well. Hall, from Farnham – the very cradle of cricket – may have been the first batsman to realise the full potential of playing forward. Hall was not a great player, but he batted side-on, with his left elbow up and a straight bat, which meant he could play down the line of the ball and hit to the off side of the field in a manner that had previously been impossible. Beldham was a keen pupil, and in the game in which Tom Walker scored the first hundred at Lord’s, he scored 144. ‘Silver Billy’, an instinctive ball player, was a star from the moment of his arrival at Farnham in 1780 at the tender age of fourteen. He was engaged by Hambledon in 1785, aged nineteen, and played his first ‘great’ game two years later. Beldham was a batsman of elegance and style, a savage hitter with a particularly fine cut; a fine fielder in the slips and a competent medium-pace bowler, he lived for ninety-six years, played cricket for forty of them, and his memories, faithfully recorded by Pycroft in a famous conversation in The Cricket Field (1851), cast light in his old age upon the times in which he played.

      Many other talented cricketers were part of these Hambledon teams: James Aylward (see page 70), the rustic who in 1777 scored 167 over three days, at the time the highest score in cricket; John Wells, a baker and a brilliant fieldsman, built like a cob horse and known as ‘Honest’ John; the Freemantle brothers, John and Andrew; Tom Scott; John Small Junior; Richard Francis; Tom Taylor; William Fennex; Richard Purchase; and finally – but by no means least – the man who changed cricket forever: David Harris.

      The name of David Harris does not convey the magic of a Sydney Barnes, a Harold Larwood or a Shane Warne, but his role in changing the face of cricket was greater than any of theirs. As Tom Brett left Hambledon, Harris arrived, to become the pioneer in that most fundamental of cricket skills, bowling on a length – and nothing was ever the same again.

      Early bowling was underarm and along the ground, as in the ancient game of bowls: the ball, therefore, did not rear up, and the stumps did not need to be of any height. But in a 1744 codification of the laws the stumps were both heightened and narrowed. They became twenty-two inches in height and only six inches in width, and were adorned with both a proper bail and a popping crease. The target for the bowler was suddenly very different, and the concept of ‘length’ bowling became possible: a ball could pitch and rise and still hit the stumps, rather than passing safely over them.

      From this much followed, and Harris practised summer and winter to perfect his new style. He was accurate and difficult to score off, and his best deliveries rose to trap unprotected fingers against the bat handle. Such ‘length’ bowling was a tricky prospect for the batsman: for a start it was no longer possible to play with the old- fashioned curved bat resembling a hockey stick. In or around the 1750s, therefore, the modern bat, or a near replica, was born, with a flat and square-faced front. Even so, the batsman’s plight remained dire if he stood within his crease and attempted to swat every ball to leg in the traditional manner.

      Before the advent of the new bat, forward defensive strokes were unknown, as they were all but impossible with the ‘hockey-stick’ shape. But against bowling pitched on a length it became essential, as did an array of strokes familiar today but unknown in the mid- eighteenth century. David Harris not only changed bowling, but batting too, as batsmen adapted to face the new threat to their wicket.

      On one occasion Harris was presented with a gold-laced hat for an outstanding bowling performance. So far as we know he did not take three wickets in three balls on that occasion, but this incident may be the origin of the action, adopted in the 1850s, of presenting a hat to a bowler who accomplishes that feat. Or it may not, for in his wonderful series of novels purporting to be the adult memoirs of the cad Harry Flashman, immortalised in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), George Macdonald Fraser gives a different explanation. In Flashman’s Lady (1977), Flashman, by trickery of course, dismisses the great cricketers Felix, Pilch and Mynn in three balls, and is presented with a hat by Mynn. It is pure fiction of course, but for all we know something similar may have occurred. One day, hopefully, a researcher may uncover a hidden piece of cricket history to reveal the truth.

      John Nyren’s recollections of Hambledon give us a vivid picture of early cricket that is unavailable elsewhere … and yet one longs for more. His narrative is rich in character studies of the players, but silent upon their lives and views. What did this mixture of honest yeomen and simple rustics think of the society in which they lived? How did they react when they left Broadhalfpenny Down to play matches in the sprawl of London? Did they know anything of the political turmoil of the wars against France, of the American Revolution and the fall of Lord North’s government? What opinions did they have of twenty-four-year-old William Pitt the Younger becoming Prime Minister? Did they know Captain James Cook had discovered Australia? Nyren is silent on all these issues.

      There may also be errors in his account of the changing game itself. Under Articles of Agreement signed for a game in 1727 (see Appendix 1, page 399), runs were scored when the batsmen crossed and touched the umpire’s stick. In The Young Cricketer’s Tutor Nyren refers to a ‘block hole’ between the stumps