THE COLOURED COUNTIES
By BERNARD DARWIN NOT long ago I was sitting in a 'bus next to a middle-aged and apparently peaceful citizen. We stopped for a moment by a boy selling evening papers and my fellow traveller dashed out and bought one. " Seven for seventy-seven," he cried. " They're beat!" and then with a furious energy, as of one proclaiming a deep, religious faith, " I hate Yorkshire."
This is the time of year at which such juvenile—or pos- sibly senile—ebullitions of sentiment are common, for the County Cricket Championship is approaching its climax. Every decimal becomes of importance, and there is much hatred, of course in the Pickwickian sense, of other people's counties. Summer is the season of county patriotism. At other times it is, comparatively speaking, in abeyance, or at best the patriot is content to worship mere images ; he boasts of his county's natural beauties or its tales of great men. Now it comes flaming out over cricket, and such of us as have the fortune to belong to first-class counties feel a genuine pity for those whose counties find a place, if at all, in the second-class table. There is not a county in England that has not a good conceit of itself. None are more justly proud, none more certain that their county is the best of all than, let us say, the men of Devon or Norfolk or Northumberland. This superiority is not a matter for argument but of incontrovertible fact. Yet in the summer we who belong to Yorkshire or Kent, or even Middlesex (which they doubtless regard as being hardly a county at all) enjoy the satisfaction of being sorry for them. Our thrills and agonies, our idiotic elations and depressions, are not for them. They are orphans who can indeed adopt a parent and so feel our emotions, faintly and at second-hand, but as far as real patriotism is concerned, they have to subsist on their own inner convictions. We almost wonder that they trouble to open their morning paper.
Each of us luckier ones has, of course, his own county, which differs from all the rest. " There was no mistaking the Kent boys, when they came staring into the 'Green Man'." That was what old Beldham said to Mr. Pycroft, and, since my county is Kent, I like to think that there is no mistaking them still. By a great piece of self-restraint I will not quote the poem on Alfred Mynn, nor point out the manner, so reviving to the spirits, in which Kent have this year finished their matches one way or the other. " Sir," as Mr. Staple remarked, " I am a Deller, a Dingley Deller," and there is an end of the matter. Apart, however, from this feeling for our own county, all or nearly all the others have for us their own flavour or complexion. This is as a rule of ancient growth, from the days when we first began to read cricket in the newspapers. Thus we are still in the frame of mind of the little girl (in an old Punch picture) who, on crossing the border into a fresh county, exclaimed " But it's not pink !" No subsequent learning of geography, of prin- cipal towns and products, can materially affect that early conception. Take, for example, Notts, which is quite a different thing from Nottinghamshire, the county of romance, of Robin Hood and merry Sherwood. Notts is the county of cricket, which once of its superfluity gave cricketers to all the others. It may not be quite what it was, but the glory of illustrious names still hangs round it. It was when those names sounded most stirring that I first began to cut the cricket out of The Times day by day, and my imaginary picture remains still unblurred. For me Trent Bridge is a rustic wooden bridge leading to a ground, green, sunny and countrified, on which alien bowlers perspire in vain. There, Scotton having been at length dismissed, Shrewsbury and Gunn go on and on with their tireless and polished art, on a perfect wicket in eternal sunshine, while Barnes or Selby waits for ever, with his pads on.
Notts's neighbour, Derbyshire, suffers from being only on the fringe of first-class society. In those paper-cutting days I think it only hovered, sometimes coming up and sometimes descending again, so that it seemed like the " sandwich boat " in the May Races at Cambridge. For the same reason. I regret to say, Hampshire, that nurse and home of cricket, has never quite shaken off my infant patronage ; there were fewer first-class counties in those days. It is deplorable in one who knows his Nyren and has made a pilgrimage to Broad Halfpenny ; but these county feelings are beyond our control. That must be the excuse for a cordial dislike of Surrey. Did I perhaps live too near its border, so that insulting persons thought sometimes that one lived actually on the wrong side? No, there was something more than that. It possessed gorgeous names—Lohmann and Beau- mont, Abel and Walter Read and Maurice Read—but my picture of it was but of a giant gasometer. Its supporters were not patriots of its woods and heaths, but of its urban Oval, and since my own bit of Kent was admittedly rather cockney Kent, London could hold no glamour.
Sheffield, unknown except through Ivanhoe, could have plenty and still has. It is the dread and murky glamour which for the southerner envelops the north. Is there any one who does not feel it in his bones as the train passes the slag heaps of Staffordshire or crosses from Runcorn to Widnes under its alkali canopy? I was afraid of Yorkshire, but never did I hold the atrocious sentiments of the man in the 'bus. They have always been too great for any puny hatred. They have been so courageous and so ruthlessly efficient, and there has always been another of them ready to receive the torch. One can fancy any member of the eleven saying, with Joe Scott in Shirley, " Ay I'm fairish, but there's thousands i' Yorkshire that's as good as me." If they do not generate a positive affection in southern breasts—and for my part I timidly adored them —they insist on respect. Ulyett and Hall, Emmett and Peate, Lee and Grimshaw, were my early heroes, and I feel, perhaps quite wrongly, that the counterparts of each might be found today. What Christian names they had, too! I was a little too young for Ephraim Lockwood and Luke Green- wood, but I had found them in a book. There was some- thing agreeably exotic about Louis Hall, and as for Saul Wade, he went straight to the heart. How can anyone pre- sume to hate Yorkshire? To be a little sorry for Lancashire because Yorkshire so often beat them is intelligible and human, but hatred of the White Rose is the involuntary homage that the low pay to the high.
There may once have been, I suppose, a race of envious pygmies who, when the Graces were at their zenith, hated Gloucestershire. They were so all-shattering : " their bats were like maces," and that great family, like Yorkshire, gave nothing away. When my scissors first got to work, E. M. and W. G. were still there, but they hardly inspired the same awe as the north county men had, and since in their boy- hood, they had played in an orchard, Gloucestershire were always pictured amongst apple-trees, rural and friendly, and breathing of cider. Somerset were fiercer by comparison. They were the giant-killers, who would suddenly and surpris- ingly beat Surrey and give me cause for the same malign rejoicing as that of my friend in the 'bus. Sussex were a little dim, though they had pleasant names, Tester and Jesse Hyde and Finery, which according to some grown-up, was really fils-le-roy. There has never been anything to be said against Sussex except—and here my grown-up sentiments supervene—that too many people not born in that county and having, therefore, no rights, have adopted it and lauded it too loudly.
That is a point on which your true county patriot strongly, if sometimes illogically, insists. No man, he thinks, is en- titled to swear by a county through thick and thin, unless he was born in it, or would but for inevitable mischance ha \ been born in it. It is true that sometimes the county's he: oes were born elsewhere. It is, to be sure, a long time ac , but it must be confessed that the immortal Fuller Pilch came from Norfolk to Kent. This is regrettable, but it cannot be helped. Adopted players may be winked at, but ,:)r adopted supporters it is not their fault and we should not blame them for the accident of birth, but they are not the real thing. This is, perhaps, rather a narrow-minded sentiment, but at any rate we are broad-minded about other people's counties ; we do allow that they are right to stand up for them. Even the man in the 'bus would have admitted that had he been born a Yorkshireman his views would have been very different.
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