The leading edge
Peter Oborne MORE THAN A GAME by John Major HarperPress, £25, pp. 433, ISBN 9780007183647 © £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Three out of the last ten prime ministers have been cricket fanatics. The first was Clement Attlee. In the immediate aftermath of the second world war a newswire service was installed in 10 Downing Street. Attlee ignored it except that during the summer months he used what he called his 'cricket machine' to keep up to date with the close-of-play scores.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home is the only prime minister so far to have played the first-class game, including two matches for Middlesex in the mid-1920s. After retiring as Tory leader, he became president of the MCC.
Finally we have John Major, a useful player before a crippling knee injury forced him to abandon the game. When he was at Downing Street, cabinet meetings would be interrupted by the latest scores. Cricket provided his only link to deadly critics such as John Redwood and Simon Heffer. Now he has become the first ex-prime minister to write a book about cricket.
More than a Game tells the story of the sport from its prehistory up to the end of the 19th century. It appears to be based on original research and makes audacious claims to independent scholarship. Major has the confidence to take on existing authorities. He is very firm, for example, on the contentious issue of early cricket in France. Rowland Bowen, probably the greatest historian of the game (to whose brilliant, path-breaking work Major makes no reference), maintained that cricket could be traced back to 15th-century Flanders and probably before, arguing that cricket had its origins in an old Celtic game in a form more primitive than anything we know now. Major will have none of this, asserting that this line of thought relies on textual misreadings. 'There is no medieval text identifying "criquet" as a game, since it was not: "criquet" is the French name for an insect similar to a grasshopper,' he asserts.
He is also scornful of claims, accepted by many cricket historians, that the court records of King Edward I show cricket being played in the early 14th century. For Major, cricket only definitively emerges in the Tudor period. However, he attacks the historian H. S. Altham for claiming that cricket matches were already a feature of Restoration London. 'So far as I can determine,' he says, 'there is no record of a cricket match being played in London before the 1700s, and no mention of a club until 1722, 62 years after the Restoration.'
The book comes alive when he arrives in the 19th century, when records for the first time become abundant. His account of the All-England eleven which toured the shires in the early Victorian era is admirable. He is excellent on the precarious finances of the team and the tensions between its impresario William Clarke and the professionals whom he organised. He is interesting on W. G. Grace, fairly good on the emergence of county cricket, and always acute on the rise of his beloved Surrey County Cricket Club. At all times the book is carried along by his enthusiasm and obvious love for the game.
From time to time he interrupts cricketing anecdotes with sketchy accounts of English social history: Behind the mullioned windows [of the 1550s1 men drank beer for breakfast before hunting wildlife on cultivated heaths and shooting pheasant, duck, partridge and snipe, while their womenfolk gossiped over needlework, wrote letters, read and supervised the kitchen.
Doubtless all this was the case, but these generalisations occasionally lead Major into anachronism and error. His assertion that the spirit of democracy was coming alive in Britain in the 1620s would be regarded with bafflement by contemporaries. And his claim that cricket in 19th-century South Africa 'was really a white man's pastime' is wrong.
He falls into the trap of seeing the game through the eyes of the white minority, always a mistake as Andre Odendaal has recently demonstrated in his tremendous book, The Story of an African Game.
Major's well-received autobiography was partly ghost-written. Not so this volume, which contains numerous examples of the archaic turn of phrase which was one of the hallmarks of his premiership. Back then his press secretary, Gus O'Donnell, now Tony Blair's cabinet secretary, would share with lobby correspondents his private theory about John Major and the English language. He pointed out that Major had enjoyed a limited formal education. His first serious contact with the written word came during the long convalescence from the very serious car crash in his early twenties which wrecked his knee and put a stop to his cricket-playing. He filled his time by reading Victorian novelists, in particular Trollope, but also Jane Austen. According to O'Donnell, he modelled his style on them.
However it came about, the Major style is now unmistakable. It is greatly to be hoped that this is not his final word on cricket. (He would, for example, be well suited to write a life of his early heroes, the Bedser twins.) This book will give pleasure to many readers, and may in due course come to be seen as a classic.
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