THE NURSERY OF CRICKET
IT is delightfully appropriate that Winchester should have bought Broad-Halfpenny ; and it is historically charming that the event should be celebrated by playing a match against Hambledon, on a pitch at least 150 years old. Some of us will see the ghost of John Nyren revisiting the fields, where he began life as " farmer's boy " and made a name that will live as long as cricket. Winchester boys have played games in Hampshire for some 600 years and " great is juxtaposition." They are therefore natural enough owners of the pitches where cricket, as we know it, had its birth. There were county matches between Surrey and Hampshire twenty-, five years at least before Hambledon's great days. Never- theless the club was the mother club, not excluding the Marylebone, which carried the name " Lord's " from the first home in Dorset Square. There have been no changes of place or name at Hambledon ; even the " Bat and Ball " remains, though the game there began to lose quality from the day Nyren migrated. It was a grievous pity that the fire at the new Lord's destroyed the records, but we have a fairly continuous reference to the fields where Nyren exercised his physical and moral talents ; and his own works have kept green the name of his great fellow-players. Winchester cricket has been good for many years, but if there is anything in the spirit of a place, in the continuity of history, it will acquire yet more sterling properties now that the College has a closer . connexion with the very nursery of the game, It might even do some of them good to read Nyren's still sterling advice. He was in love with the technique of cricket hardly less than with its moral influence. Hamp shire breeds—or at any rate develops—such characters., It is not perhaps altogether a foolish fancy to associate: in imagination John Nyren and Gilbert White. They were' contemporaries. Both were classics and should remain so: in reputation. Both breathed a sort of moral exhilaration in their pursuits, while they preserved a quiet demeanour.
John Nyren's book boasts even a certain precision of just description that might not be disowned by White, and his assistant scribe, C. C. Clarke—to whom, doubtless, much is due—has a name associated with the best in British literature, through his joint authorship of the Shakespeare Concordance. Gilbert White was only less interested in cricket than in the willow warbler. Mr. E. V. Lucas, that notable cricket historian, begins a work on Nyren with this pretty letter of White's about his four- year-old nerAew. It was written on August 1st, 1787: '" Little Tom Clement is visiting at Petersfield, where he plays much at cricket : Tom bats ; his grandfather bowls ; and his great-grandmother watches out ! "
The Hambledon Club was probably formed about .1750 ; and during its years of glory—all in the eighteenth century—cricket really took shape. The hole between the wickets, where the ball might be placed for stumping or running out, was abolished. The two stumps with the absurd gap between them, a cause of lamentation to the unlucky bowler, gave place to three, allowing no passage to the ball. The crooked bat (following an evolution that was recorded a century later of the lawn-tennis racquet) became a symmetric bat. Even forward play and the squared left elbow were recognized as virtues, albeit new ones, before the glories of Hambledon waned. But Nyren was never reconciled to the new bowling, which he called throwing. In case a modern controversy should revive,, it is well to remember that Nyren would have preferred to broaden the wicket rather than interfere with the bowler.
It is a nice question whether Hambledon or Winchester is the more honoured by the new connexion, for the boys after all have the longer heredity. Cricket was first prac- tised as a boys' game ; and the first authentic references refer to the playing of the game by schoolboys in the parent counties of Surrey and Hampshire. The first, under date 1598, reports a witness as saying that "Hee, being a scholar in the free school of Guldeford, Hee and several of his fellows did runne and play there at crickett and other plaies." The second has direct reference to Winchester itself, where in 1650 Bishop Ken, when still a schoolboy, was rather unkindly described as " attempting to weild a cricket bat."
The modern critic would rather say of the present schoolboy that " he attempted to bowl a ball." How very well the boy bats, with conscious art in every stroke. How very badly he bowls, with individual weakness all over ! It is perhaps a mistake that he does not descend— if it is a descent—to the Broad-Halfpenny manner of de- livering the ball, even if the bulk of modern batsmen on the modern wicket think they could make small beer of any underhand delivery. Who knows ? Perhaps recol- lection will set afoot a new fashion in lobs In popular imagination the cricket era that followed Hambledon is much the better known. Lillywhite and Fuller Pitch are almost household words among people who have never heard of John Small or David Harris, those giants of old. Now, Harris was a greater man than " old Lumpy," for when he walked up to Broad-Halfpenny at six in the morning of a big match he would " pitch a good wicket " not only for himself—mark that !—but for the man who had to bowl with him. Not so old Lumpy, who being more selfish and cunning would " select a point -where his own ball was likely to shoot, that is, over the brow of a little hill." He was unlike Lumpy, too, in pre- feriing a rising ground against which to pitch his balls, and this—" with his manly contempt of every action that ,bore the character of meanness "—he could select.
The pitch will not so be chosen on July 11th. If the ball kither bumps or shCoots it will be accounted for a discredit, not a virtue in the groundman ; and perhaps after all why we know Fuller Pitch so much better tlipn David Harris is that Lord's, not Hambledon, is the nursery of the modern pitch, and therefore of the modern style of both bowling and batting.
However that may be, no single locality ever produced so masterful a group of cricketers as Hambledon, and this Hambledon game, in which as in old days local and county players will have a share, will help to keep lively the historical imagination of our cricketers and keep green the memory of its great men and of its literature. After all, Nyren (or Clarke) wrote one of the best title-pages of any sporting book. How well it reads : " The Young Cricketer's Tutor : comprising full directions for playing the elegant and manly game of CRICKETT ; with a complete version of the laws and regulations : by John Nyren a player of the celebrated Old Hambledon Club and in the Mary-le-bone Club."
" The elegant and manly game ! " It is still that, and likely to be ; and in spite of the heresy of " throwing " its moral qualities do not wane, either among " gentle or simple," either in this country or in our Antipodes.
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