Cricket in camera
Benny Green
I find that over the years I have gradually developed the habit of looking at cricket photographs for the wrong reasons, or at least for reasons which could have occurred at the time to neither the photographer nor his sitters. I think the habit must have begun a few years ago when I was lying one afternoon on John Dankworth's drawing-room carpet staring glumly at a sheet of musical notation, trying to think of a rhyme for 'socialist.' Exhausted by the stern intellectual disciplines of my work, I rolled over on to one side and saw confronting me in a packed bookcase the ribs of some old volumes, one of whose titles was Cricket-1912. This turned out on closer examination to be a collected volume of Edwardiana bequeathed to my host by a maiden aunt who had apparently enjoyed a lifetime of devotion to the game.
Stimulated by my own relief at noticing something to do with cricket, I suddenly saw what, in the context I was using, would make a suitable rhyme for socialist, scribbled it down and settled in for a page-leafing session, examining at leisure the sturdy figures of heroes long-since forgotten. But it was not the sturdy figures themselves which commanded my attention, but the backdrops which framed them. I do not mean those quaint photographic subterfuges by which the later Victorians sought to approximate reality, the imitation grass on the studio floor, and those two-dimensional woodland glades just behind the model's head. I think there is a famous photo somewhere of the great Australian wicketkeeper Blackham, whose studio simulation of plein d'air looks no more convincing than Blackham's beard, which has always reminded me of the man who swallowed a horse and left the tail hanging out.
What began to preoccupy me in the photographs was something quite different, and which first manifested itself when I found myself wondering about the famous photo-. graph of the Australian left-hander Clem Hill advancing to meet a short ball. Who is the bloke in the bowler hat and one hand on his watch-chain, keeping an eye on the proceedings with an air of proprietorial approval? And what about the small group of stage Yorkshiremen you can always find in pictures of Holmes and Sutcliffe coming out to bat at Headingley? There they sit, these tweeded and piped cricket-fanciers, quietly glowing in the reflected glory of their two heroes. As for the buildings behind the batsmen and bowlers in the carefully poised would be action snaps of Edwardian years, who lived in such privileged locations?
Such utterly pointless questions swim around in my brain because of a new book called An Illustrated History of Australian Cricket by R. S. Whitington (Pelham Books 0.00), whose text is so-so but some of whose photographs combine,the bouquet of a familiar face with the sauce of an unfamiliar pose. For instance the glimpse .of an elderly Dr Grace delivering a roundarm off-break is new to me, and so is a picture of that other doctor, H. V. Hordern, displaying all the controlled venom of a googly bowler in full flight. The most photogenic Australian cricketers of all time are of course, Victor Trumper and Keith Miller, although a snap of Trumper in mufti so closely approximates to Stan Laurel as very nearly to shatter the myth of Trumper's grace.
This whole question of athletes in street clothes is a baffling one. There is no question that there is something about cricketers in jackets and hats which is infinitely pathetic. It is not just that, like policemen with their helmets in their hands, they look too mundane to be any longer the objects of our fear or idolatry, but that they, stand revealed as quite insignificant creatures. There surrounded by Whitington's text sits Trumper, in a jacket that would get any tailor six months hard labour. There stride two boyish chaps in double-breasted suits who turn out on closer inspection to be none other than Woodfull and Percy Chapman. There cutting a celebration cake is a mouselike bank clerk who turns out to be Lindsay Hassett. And what of that group of veterans in mufti at Melbourne, looking less like Warvviok Armstrong and company than a delegation from Chicago come to take over Capone's empire?
But the most interesting, and most exasperating picture in the book shows a group of gentlemen and ladies sitting as though posed for the photograph at the annual garden fête. The caption simply says, "Members of M. A. Noble's 1909 team at one of the stately homes of England." No hint of which stately home, and without a strong magnifying glass and an encyclopaedic: knowledge of Edwardian country house society, neither of which I possess, there is no chance of my identifying anyone. There is one man who looks faintly reminiscent of Lloyd
George in one of his Maundy Gregory moods, but which clearly isn't. And as for the ladies, they are so finely camouflaged by their MerrY Widow hats.that they might easily be members of the Yorkshire side in disguise. I think perhaps the best time to publish sO charmingly diverting a volume is not in summer, when cricket seems reasonablY secure, but in dead of winter when it is hard to believe that the last late cut has not been played, and a picture album of late late cuts is a reassurance against the dark forces of cigarette company subsidies. That leaves mY rhyme. It worked out as:
There ought to be a brochure list ing every Irish socialist. . . .
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