Talks with old English cricketers Read online

  "My other 10 wickets in an innings were for the Gentlemen of Middlesex v. the Gentlemen of Kent on June 16, 1864, and for Middlesex against Lancashire at Manchester in July 1865. Against the Kent Gentlemen the 10 wickets cost 37 runs; the 10 Lancastrians' cost 104 runs. I must admit, however, that batsmen got their own back sometimes. I had to put up with as much ' snuff' as any bowler in my time. As a batsman I suppose the best thing I did was that century for England in the match with Surrey, in which I managed to get 10 wickets, though there was a match at the Oval in 1869 when Freeman was bowling on a difficult wicket, in which my score of 40 was probably worth more than a century on a good wicket would be. But I really do not care to continue talking about my own performances. There is nothing in them that I think is worth enlarging upon.

  "We were talking about George Freeman a moment ago.

  I consider that Freeman, Spofforth, and John Jackson were the best fast bowlers I have seen. Jackson had a perfectly fair round-arm delivery, and could bowl for hours. I am bound to add, however, that on the perfect wickets of the present day he would have been punished as other fast bowlers are. George Freeman was never quite himself after an accident that he met with in a match Yorkshire v. Middlesex at the cattle-market at Islington. This was in August 1868. I was the batsman to whom the ball was delivered. I can fancy I see the ball being delivered now. It came at a terrible pace, a little on the off-side, and was really the fastest ball I ever saw. On making the delivery Freeman fell to the ground. I assisted to pick him up and carry him to the dressing room. He had badly sprained his leg, and though he apparently got over the injury, I don't think he was quite as deadly a bowler afterwards as he had been. Freeman was an extremely fine fellow, and quite the doyen of fast bowlers of his day, if not of all time. Every one liked him, and every one respected him as a cricketer and as a man. His colleague, Allan Hill, was another fine straight fast bowler, with a beautiful delivery, but without Freeman's sting. We used to call Hill 'old poacher.' Whether he had earned that title in other game than cricket I cannot say.

  "Another great fast bowler of the same period was George Howitt, who played both for his native county of Notts and for Middlesex. We really brought him out at the cattlemarket in the match just mentioned, when he had the analysis in one innings of 28 overs, 17 maidens, 17 runs, 6 wickets. I should be sorry, however, to say that all his deliveries were fair. Candour compels one to say that he had a twist of the wrist which made one think that he threw down a ball now and again.

  "Mr David Buchanan—' old David' we used to call him, and he won't resent the familiarity now—was another of my contemporaries. Many are the struggles we have had with him in matches with the Free Foresters. David did not like being hit any more than other bowlers, and he would not allow a chance of getting a man leg-before-wicket escape for want of the asking. He used to keep a record of his bowling, and I remember once he had to put up with a good deal of chaff in a match at Southgate, when we made his analysis out to be something like 120 balls for 120 runs. Mr C. I. Thornton did some terrific hitting in the same match, and off one of Mr Buchanan's deliveries he was missed quite 100 yards away from the wicket by Mr E. Rutter. After missing the catch Rutter gazed ruefully at his fingers, while David looked at Rutter with a silence that was more eloquent than all the adjectives in the bowlers' vocabulary.

  "Talking of Mr Thornton's hitting, I should class Thornton, Bonnor, and Lyons as the hardest hitters the world of cricket has ever seen. Mr Thornton's hitting in the match at Brighton in August 1871, for the benefit of John Lillywhite, was perhaps the most terrific of the lot. Poor Martin M'Intyre had an experience in that match he probably never forgot to his dying day. Mr Thornton had only 14 balls from him, but in those 14 he scored 8 hits, and the aggregate was 34 runs, when M'Intyre had him c. and b. One of the hits by mid-off was about the finest I ever saw. His famous Scarborough hits it was not my good fortune to see.

  "Then as to Bonnor, he used to chaff Spofforth and say that the first time he had the chance of meeting his bowling in a match he would give it the severest trouncing the deliveries of the demon bowler had ever met with. He had his opportunity in the Smokers v. Non-Smokers' match at Lord's in September 1884, when he made one of the best hits ever seen at headquarters, the ball coming into the pavilion at a height of about 10 feet. Lyons used to do his hitting more with the forearm than either Thornton or Bonnor."

  Mr Walker has opinions of his own on the merits of modern cricket as compared with the game of his own active days. He is rather chary of expressing them, for the reason that the conditions are so widely different. At the same time, as he sees modern cricket pretty frequently, he can be accepted as an authority on both past and present times, and his judgment upon both will interest practical cricketers everywhere.

  "The whole conditions of the game have altered, and therefore," says he, "it is very difficult to draw comparisons between individual players. In the first place, the wickets at Lord-s, oh dear! In old Dark's days the ground was all ridge and furrow, and you had to consider yourself lucky if you did not get two shooters in each over and one on the head. Perhaps I might compare the Surrey team of about the year 1860 with Mr Shuter's team of the 'Eighties. In the former were such men as Burbidge, Miller, Julius Caesar, Caffyn, Dowson, Griffith, Tom Humphrey, Lockyer, Mortlock, and H. H. Stephenson. Candidly speaking, I do not think the men that Mr Shuter had under him, great though they undoubtedly were, would have been able to hold their own with the Surrey team of the early 'Sixties with the men I have named in the list.

  "In other respects I am sorry to have to say that I do not think the game has improved. There is more self now than there used to be. Men do not play as much for their side as they might do, and as they did in my younger days. 'Average hunting' and record beating have done something to bring this unwelcome change about. I also think that too serious attention is paid to the game, and this is good neither for the pastime nor for those who play in it. In short, there is far too much of the business element in it all round.

  "I have always thought it a thousand pities that runs could not be run out as they used to be, though I confess I do not see how the difficulties in the way of abolishing boundaries are now to be overcome. By the present system of boundaries a great deal of the beauty of the game in the field, particularly in the art of throwing in, has disappeared. The endurance of the batsman is also not what it had to be formerly. W. G. Grace could not have made anything like so many hundreds as he has done in the more recent part of his career had the runs been actually run out, as in his younger days. His weight would not have allowed him to get over the ground in time. Here at Southgate, I may say, we were all great sticklers for the game, and it was played as strictly as at Lord's.

  "All the seven brothers of our family have taken part in a match here on three or four occasions. 'Donny' was the best bat of the seven, and the most prominent of all of us in first-class cricket. Fred had a fine cut, but his career was shortened by rheumatic gout, to which he was a martyr. It first attacked him when he was only twenty-seven or twenty eight years of age. My second brother, Alfred, was the only one of us who did not appear in much first-class cricket, yet he could bowl well. His delivery was very fast under-hand, and he had a good deal of curl from leg. One of my earliest recollections of cricket consists of seeing a countryman longstopping to Alfred's bowling, with a red handkerchief round his knee, kneeling down to stop the fast balls.

  "I may mention that the Chronicles of the Walker family are now being written by Mr W. A. Bettesworth, and in them the doings of my brothers will be found, I expect, more fully recorded. For myself, I can only add that I am now sixtythree—I was born on April 20, 1837—and that though I can no longer follow the game in an active sense, my interest in its welfare, and in the success of the new generation of those who play it, in no way diminishes as the years roll on. It seems an age since I played cricket, but I love it yet."

  28

  GEORGE ANDERSON.

  IT is a
snug room in a comfortable house in Aiskew, Bedale. Two striking portraits assist in embellishing the walls, and mark the old cricketer's dwelling; the original of each sits in his cosy arm-chair and chats pleasantly of the cricketing days of his wellremembered past. The two portraits show George Anderson in two stages of his cricketing career: now he has passed into his seventies, no longer perhaps as erect as when he wore the white flannel and red spots of the All-England Eleven, but still with commanding presence, and with but few of the infirmities of a ripe old age. The earlier portrait was sketched in 1853 by N. Felix, a great cricketer and no mean artist, whose sketch of Alfred Mynn was declared by Richard Daft to be the most "natural and lifelike" he had ever seen. George Anderson appears as a young man of seven-and-twenty under Felix's brush and pigments, "straight as a gun-barrel," as a fellow-cricketer has described him to the writer, with the perfection of an athlete's physique. The other portrait was drawn in Melbourne ten years later, and shows the matured cricketer when at the height of his career and in the full flush of a robust manhood. The two portraits on the walls, and the septuagenarian in the arm-chair, suggest the three ages of a great cricketer's life. That the closing scene may be delayed many years longer is the sincere wish of all who have the pleasure of George Anderson's acquaintance.

  George Anderson was born on January 20, 1826. "I was born," he says, "in Bedale, have lived there all my life, and hope to die there. What changes Time has wrought! Of our original All-England Eleven, Caffyn and I alone remain. My contemporaries in first-class cricket are also nearly all dead—among them, Fuller Pilch, N. Felix, Mr Alfred Mynn, Thomas Adams, Wm. Clarke, W. Martingell, George Parr, W. Hillyer, John Wisden, E. G. Wenman, J. Dean, T. Box, Mr F. P. Miller, the Rev. C. G. Lane, Tom Hunt, Henry Sampson, Tom Lockyer, Edgar Willsher, Julius Caasar,—all great cricketers in their time.

  "When did I start playing cricket 1 At sixteen years of age. My last match was played when I was fifty. It was for Constable Burton against Darlington. I scored 114 not out, and was so tired that I said I never would play again, and I never did. As you say, it was not a bad finish for a man of fifty.

  "In the year 1850 old William Clarke wanted to bring me out with his All-England Eleven. He used to come down regularly to Bedale to coach the young players—he laid our present ground, in fact—and he wanted me to play with them at Manchester. I thought in my own mind I was not good enough, and I did not go, but the year following he got me up to London to play for the North v. Surrey. Afterwards I played with him in the All-England Eleven for twenty-one years. I started playing with the Yorkshire County team in 1851, and left them in 1871. I was the captain for four or five years, and for four consecutive seasons was the highest scorer.

  "Life in the All-England Eleven was very jolly, and I often look back upon those days with pleasant feelings. Old Clarke, our General, as we called him, was a very dry customer. I remember one gay young spark telling him he wished to learn cricketing, and asked what was the first thing to do. 'Get your finger-nails cut' was the laconic reply. "On another occasion—and this story is mentioned in another form by Daft in his book 'Kings of Cricket'—a lady asked Clarke's advice about her son. She thought he would make an excellent cricketer, as he 'stood six feet in his stockings.' 'Dear me, what a large number of toes he must have,' was the dry, if not polite, comment by which Clarke crushed the maternal feelings.

  "Clarke used to sing a cricketing song which never failed to bring down the house. It is very many years since I last heard it, but I think my memory, which plays me odd tricks in these days, is to be trusted for the words. Here they are:—

  'When cricket first in olden time

  Was played by Briton's hardy race,

  In that great science they were far behind

  The men who now the wickets grace.

  (Refrain.)

  Then success to cricket, 'tig a noble game,

  It's patronised by royalty, and men of wealth and fame.

  The Marylebone ranks first of all,

  It's they who do our laws enroll;

  And then I Zingari, those trumps with bat and ball,

  And the Eleven of All-England, composed of great

  and small.

  Then success to cricket, &c.

  May honour be its guiding star,

  And batsmen carefully their wickets guard;

  Then shall it flourish, shall flourish through the land,

  And merit meet its just reward.

  Then success to cricket, &c.'

  This song was written by old Clarke himself. Its rhyme is a bit halting. The tune was supposed to be 'Rule Britannia,' with variations never imagined by the composer. All the same, it was always a very popular song, and the old man used to render it with great gusto.

  "Cricketers who now go about the country in saloons and express trains have a much easier life than we of the AllEngland Eleven had to grow accustomed to. Dublin to London, London to Glasgow and Edinburgh, and so on— those were the journeys we had to do, often in one night, to be ready for the next day's match. I remember one difficulty we got into, going from Wisbeach to Sleaford. We had to do it in one night by coach. Our driver got lost, and we all wandered about the Lincolnshire roads in the darkness until we struck a guide-post. Old Martingell clambered up this post, struck a light, and found out the way we had to go. We landed at our destination at 6 A.M., and had to play at noon. On two or three occasions I have had to play in London on the Wednesday night, and in Glasgow the next morning. Was there any wonder that I should have had to be roused up out of sleep to go in to bat 1 That actually happened.

  "And the money we got for this sort of thing, you ask 1 Well, we could not make very much out of it. We got £$ a game, and sometimes when we had a long journey we would get a little more, but never more than jQ6 a match in all. After paying expenses, there was not much left to get fat on. Still, it was a happy and, on the whole, a healthful life. Most of our fellows were very steady. I only knew one who could get drunk and play the next day, but I won't mention his name. He could sleep it off, and come up smiling for his innings next morning. He is now dead and gone, poor chap! You may take it that a man cannot indulge and play cricket. One glass of grog before bedtime was my usual allowance, and that was the habit of a good many of my comrades. I am very glad to be able at my age now to say that no one ever saw me unfit to play cricket from the effects of drink in my life.

  "Betting and money matches, you ask? I never knew a farthing played for by any of the teams that I played with. Moreover, I never saw a sixpence betted on a single match that I was connected with. When lads, some of us used to play for 6d. or 1s. apiece, when we could raise it—which was not very often.

  "Oh, the wickets that we used to play on! Why, the first time we went to Glasgow, before we could begin to play, old Fuller Pilch had to borrow a scytha and mow the wicket. It was like playing in a meadow. Then once at Truro one of our men, in fielding a ball, actually ran into a covey of partridges!

  "There is no doubt that the tours of the All-England Eleven, and its offshoot, the United Eleven, did a great deal of good in educating the public and teaching the players. Not a little of the credit for the present popularity and high standard of cricket must be given to the teams generalled by Clarke, George Parr, and others; indeed it is not too much to say that cricketers of the present day are reaping the fruit of the seed which we sowed before they were born.

  "Cricket in local places that we visited was extremely raw. We should have been able to play 66 of some teams. We used to play a great deal in Lincolnshire. I remember one old clergyman played against us ten times, and I never saw him get a run. He was never likely to get one, either.

  "Some of the local batsmen we met up and down the country used to go to the wickets as white as a sheet. I remember one gentleman who was in the Balaclava charge, and who said he did not feel half so frightened in that historic onslaught as when Tinley was going to bowl to him. He stuttered a little, and caused much amusement by saying, 'I sto
od the B-b-b-balaclava charge, but didn't f-f-f-feel half as f-f-f-frightened as I do now. I know the little b-b-b-beggar will g-g-g-get me out.' The little beggar did.

  '; In one of the Yorkshire matches with Surrey, before the present county club was formed, I remember we had a very exciting finish. The two last men were in, myself and Ike Hodgson. We wanted 3 runs to win. I was really caught at the wicket. It was a very slight touch of my india-rubber glove. Tom Lockyer heard something, but he didn't appeal. I was afraid he would do so, and I made some motion as if the ball had touched my shirt. The next ball I hit for 4, and we won the match by 1 wicket, much to my relief, because the old chap at the other end, Hodgson, was not worth a run. It was a close shave, and we should have lost by 3 runs had the umpire been appealed to, and had he heard it, though I thought he could not, for I could scarcely feel it myself."

  George Anderson was a member of the second team of English cricketers to visit Australia in 1863-64, under the captaincy of George Parr, and he recalls with pardonable pride that "no team could say what we were able to—that we never lost a match there." They were sixty-one days on the journey out. They went on board the Great Britain in the Mersey on October 14, 1863. Captain Gray, who was in charge' of the ship, and a favourite with all, said he intended to be in Melbourne to eat his Christmas goose, and he was. This captain, says Mr Anderson, made a good many voyages to Australia, and finally on one of them he jumped overboard and drowned himself.