SPORTING ASPECTS

Rough Diamond

By JOHN ARLOTT TOM WASS, the cricketer, died a week or two ago in Sutton-in-Ashfield, the village where he was born. He was seventy-nine. As a. young man he played in Scotland and was once qualified for Lancashire, but he was always Nottinghamshire's man.

Wass's great cricketing days were long over when I first met him at Trent Bridge in 1946, and shook hands with a man whose third and little fingers were immovably fixed in the palm of his hand from many years of bowling what modem cricket terminology calls the " leg-Cutter," but which Edwardian players called, fairly enough, .a fast leg-break. Later that day,.1 turned to Tom Oates, for years the county's wicket-keeper, but by then their scorer, holding his pencil in fingers jerky as oak-twigs from the fractures of his trade.

' How good a bowler was Tom Wass? "

" He was dam' good."

" Then why didn't he play for England? "

" Tom were a roogh diamond."

" So were a good many of the Northerners of those days who played for England."

" Ay, but Tom were roogher'n moast."

" In what way, Tom? " " Well, when he first come to play for t'county, skipper Dixon hisself goas down to meet Tom off t'train. Tom gets off wi' graat sheep-dog. ' What,' says skipper, ' tha can't bring., that wi' thee to t'ground, tha knows.' ' Then,' says Tem. ' if dog can't coom, Tom doan't coom,' and goes over bridge an' back home on t'next train." When the weather was dry at Trent Bridge, the master batsmen of the pre-war years of this century took unhurried centuries from Wass's and his fellows' bowling on that green and regal wicket. On their own grounds, however, or at Notting- ham, when there had been rain, Wass's leg-cutter would pitch on the leg stump and hit the top of the off or, taking the outside edge of the bat, fly to one of the five crouching slips or the prehensile A. 0. Jones in the fielding position which he invented at gully. Wass had a reputation for bowling an extremely accurate first ball, and P. F. Warner and C. B. Fry fell to him only less often than the impeccable R. H. Spooner, who was beaten by that fast breaking ball for several ignominious " ducks."

He was christened simply Tom, which his friends " short- ened " into " Topsy," but he was jealous of the right to address him thus, and one most eminent amateur batsman's amiable " Hullo, Topsy " at the crease was answered with " Tom Wass is my name, but I gi' thee mister, and I'll have mister o' thee—if tha must talk."

That Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfield on which Wass was born has been a breeding ground for fast bowlers for more than a century. They are men with the sloping shoulders and deep chests of the coalrminer, but few of them have been Wass's full six feet in height, for the narrow seams do not as a rule develop tall men. He had, however, the true miner's weight of body-muscle, and bowled long, tire- lessly and eagerly at the cricket which brought him his days in the sun.

He belonged to that old breed of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire professionals of the great days when the real cricketing strength of England was centred there.

They travelled third-class by rail—the motoring cricketer is a very recent phenomenon—and if they had been offered the writing of a gossip-column in a newspaper they would have been professionally indignant, even if they had been literate enough to encompass it, for they believed that cricket was a full-time job. In the winter, they put on their, heavy, grey- tweed suits and their black boots, and drank beer and talked about cricket, for this time of bad weather was the well-earned holiday against which they had saved the shillings of the summer.

Good judgments among the players of his time confirm Tom Oates's opinion that Wass might reasonably have played for England. He took 1,665 wickets for Nottinghamshire—more than any other bowler—and, in 1907, he and Hallam virtually, bowled the county to the Championship.

During one Lancashire versus Nottingham match at Aigburth, where Wass was once the club pro', he and A. C. MacLaren, the Lancashire captain, met when they were both looking at the pitch after rain. " Wass," MacLaren said, " you know this wicket; how do you think it will play ? " The fast bowler looked slowly up at him, paused a moment, and said, " We shall win." Subsequently he took nine Lancashire wickets for sixty runs in verification of his opinion.

From 1897 to his bare two hours of post-war bowling in 1920, he bowled twelve thousand overs, running long and straight and often under punishment on batsmen's wickets. Most remarkably for a fast bowler, too, he came late to first- class cricket. The fast-bowler's effective period is usually regarded as the years between nineteen and thirty, but Wass did not have a full season—in which he bowled as many as five hundred overs—until he was twenty-six, while his best season came at thirty-three while, at thirty-eight, in the " blood " match with Derbyshire, he had still the initial fire to take their first eight wickets for nineteen runs in fourteen balls.

The men who bowled at Trent Bridge have always had to take the task seriously, and Tom Wass's fitness was a pressing matter in his winter. He spent an hour with a punching bag every morning and he followed the hounds, often as far as twenty miles in a day, twice a week all through his " off season.

From the pavilion at Trent Bridge, he watched the county games as a forgotten player in the Thirties until, during the past few years, he became something of a legend. Up there on the roof he held court in the eternal cloth cap set straightly upon his head, a collar looking two sizes too large for , the neck which had become stringy with age, and wearing a lciose jacket which drooped about his craggy bones. The men who had played with him would climb slowly up the two flights of stairs to see him. As he came back into his heroic own, much, of his earlier hardness seemed to drop from the old man, and, if he was never really expansive, there was perhaps more of social uncertainty than of unfriendliness in his silences.

" Tom were roogher'n moast," said Tom Oates, and the bowler himself once told me, " Ah feared nowt." His batting was almost useless, and Wisden said of his fielding—when according him selection as one of its " Five Cricketers of the Year " in 1908—" When an easy catch goes to him the bats- man has a feeling of hopefulness until he sees that the ball has been safely held." So his bowling was his cricket and his living; perhaps that was why he gave so little away. In fact, his economy was always careful, like that of most of his fellows. The three pounds a week of the Edwardian profes- sional left little room for extravagance, and in the effort to economise on their match money many of them had arrange- ments with the players of opposing counties to save hotel bills by housing one another on a " home and out " basis.

It was a strange irony which brought together in such a bargain A. E. Knight, the Leicestershire all-rounder, who was a fervent Salvationist, and the big " roogh " miner who bowled with such fury that he needed beer to give him something to sweat out, and who unloaded his emotions in words as hard as his bowling. For years, the dressing-rooms cherished the story of Albert Edward Knight, given a camp-bed in the Wass family bedroom, and, saying his prayers within the hearing of his host, closing with " Please, Lord, let me make a century tomorrow. Amen." There was, they say, a creaking of the springs of the Wass bed, Tom fell upon his knees, introduced himself to the Almighty as one whose voice might' not be well known in those regions, but who was the Nottingham fast bowler and who prayed that he might be allowed, upon the morrow, to " bowl beggar out for aught."

He followed the hounds for many years in those strong black boots of his. He had a good run, and would, I fancy, relish the thought that, like many a fox of those distant winters, he has gone to his Nottinghamshire earth.