SPORTING ASPECT
The Playing Fields
, By ,D. W. BROGAN IT is a long time since I read, I believe in the works of the late Philip Guedalla (of Rugby), that the first Duke of Wellington did not say that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. it is my purpose to show that Mr. Guedalla was wrong and that whoever put these words into the mouth of the Duke of Wellington, Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo, Prince of Waterloo, etc., was right. But not for the reasons advanced by Mr. Fairlie in last week's Spectator in his ingenious article designed to show that I was wrong in asserting that cricket was not the English national game.
My original grounds for asserting this were objective and statistical. I am as indifferent to soccer as to cricket. Indeed, being left-handed, or, as they say in Scotland, ' corrie-fisted: I was better at cricket than at any other game, given the ex- tremely low standards of cricket in the small Scottish town in which I grew up. The mere sight of my appearing on the wrong side brought down such wickets as had not been already knocked down by players whose hearts were really set on soccer (or, as it was called, football), rugby, curling, or tossing the caber. I have no bias, that is to say, against cricket as such. 1 merely assert that cricket is only a national game in England in a platonic sense.
For the gist of Mr. Fairlie's argument is not that cricket is a real' national game in England, but that it is convenient to pretend that it is. So far the court is with him, as the judge said in the famous legal anecdote. This is what Plato recom- mended as a. convenient political lie. We all know, for example, that the real ruler of the country is Sir Winston Churchill and not Queen Elizabeth (to avoid complicating the argument I do not add numerals). But it is no doubt highly desirable to pretend that cricket is a national game, and I shall carry the argument much further than Mr. Fairlie probably intended. I shall not, of course, go to the extreme length of visiting Fenner's any more than I propose to visit Hampden or Murray- field. I am concerned with a pattern laid up in heaven.
The fiction that cricket is the English national game is part of the great English confidence trick played on the world, and more especially on the Scotch, Irish and Welsh. Cricket is a ' ame played in these islands. Parnell played cricket. Sir James arrie played cricket, although not, I think, at Glas2ow cademy or at Edinburgh University. For all I know, r. Aneurin Bevan may have played cricket, or may play it till. At any rate, 1 understand that Glamorgan is quite a spectable county—as a cricketing county. But, if ' national ' eans a game played, thought about, passionately interesting to the mass of the people, cricket is not the English national game. It has its devotees. One of my sons is quite as devoted to cricket, i.e., to making computations of averages, club cham- pionships, etc., as his father was many years, ago, when he knew the weight, prospects and skill of every serious professional boxer in the world. That one of my sons knows nearly as much about somebody whose name escapes me, as I once knew about Jim Driscoll or Battling Nelson. But this proves nothing in either case. The great sport of the English people, which it has exported all over the world, is Association Football, of which rugger is a heresy celebrated in Rugby school and else, where, as heresies often are. That the vast majority of the English people do not play soccer is as irrelevant as the fact that the vast majority of the English people do not attend the services of the Church of England. Soccer is the game they stay away from as the Church of England is the church they postage on this issue: Inland and Overseas lid.; Canada (Canadian Magazine Post) ld. do not attend. But one is the national ch*ch, and the other is the national game.
Nor do I think that Mr. Fairlie's ingenious suggestion that protests from the ,Daily Express, or whatever paper it was, about the " guilty men of soccer," show that cricket is the real English game, because either the English always win at cricket or don't care. They don't always win at cricket and they do care. Nothing has threatened the unity of the Empire (or Commonwealth) since the Boston Tea Party as much as the bodyline bowling controversy which almost drove Australia to imitating the rebellious colonies of North America. In fact, having been in Switzerland recently, I am inclined to believe thgt the only genuine excuse, at the superficial level, for assert-, ing that cricket is the English national game is that cricket is one of the few games in which the English are not hopelessly outclassed from the start.
There are great cricket heroes; there were great cricket heroes. But the literature of the-past suggests that this proves very little. The great heroes of the Greek world were runners, chariot drivers, etc. They were celebrated by Pindar. The great heroes (in the sporting sense) of the much grosser. Roman sporting life were gladiators, real professionals. But I under- stand that when Caracalla (perhaps as a result of his visit to Scotland) decided to perform in the arena himself, there was the same scandal as when Miss Grace Kelly's grandfather pro- posed to row for the Diamond. Sculls, in which contest it is highly probable he would have left all the old Etonians stand- ing or sitting, whatever the proper metaphor may be.
Most games, to those who are not brought up to them and even to those who are, have their absurdities. I can well remember trying to explain to a group of Frenchmen at a regatta on the Meurthe, a narrow river, how much simpler it would be to adopt the Oxford and Cambridge bumping system. It is sufficiently difficult to explain this to rowing men from Philadelphia, Seattle, or Ithaca. It is impossible to explain'it in French. I had roughly the same experience in trying to explain the meaning of American football, in French, to an Italian lady born in Florence, living in Rome, who found her- self, much to her surprise and, finally, annoyance, in the Yale Bowl. In short, chacun a son goat.
I could, of course, go on to point out how inferior is cricket fielding to baseball fielding, how probable it is that players of pelota could master the simpler arts of cricket in two or three sunny Basque afternoons. But the real secret of cricket is more profound, more a part of the arcana imperil than Mr. Fairlie realises.
The real secret is that the English ' summer game' requires a summer. It is unnecessary to insist that, quite often in English life, years may pass' with no summer. Cricket more than most games requires a non-sodden turf, yet one of the chief shrines of English cricket is Old Trafford, which, I understand, is near Manchester. Cricket there is rather like having Chu-Chin-Chow on Ice in Calcutta. The very absurdity of cricket or, at any rate, the very absurdity of the idea of playing cricket in England, is so great that it has deceived many foreigners, but not me. The great English secret is to conceal the fact that they are by far the cleverest people in the world, much cleverer than the Scotch, the Irish, the Jews, not to waste time by going further. Brigadier Gerard discovered that he could play cricket (i.e., bowl bodyline) very quickly. I attribute the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo to the fact that he had heard about cricket, had heard of the absurdity of the rules, and assumed that perfidious Albion would play cricket. But the Duke of Wellington, although an Etonian, didn't play cricket in 1815, perhaps because, as Guedalla suggested, the favourite game at Eton in his time was marbles. But I think the deeper explana- tion of the saying attributed to the Iron Duke is that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton by an Etonian who never played cricket himself, but managed to persuade the greatest soldier in history that he, the Duke of Wellington, was going to. The Germans, I believe, made the same mistake about the greatest Harrovian who, I believe, played just as much and as little cricket as the greatest Etonian.
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