Century partnership
Benny Green
England versus Australia, a Pictorial History David Frith (Lutterworth Press £12.50)
On 15 March, 1877, eleven cricketers of England stepped on to the field at Melbourne to play against the locals. The English team was led by James Lillywhite, the Australian by David Gregory. Many of the relevant facts remain fascinating to students of the game: for instance, that this English side, unlike the one Dr Grace had brought out four years before on his honeymoon tour, consisted entirely or professionals; that this was the first time an English touring side had faced anything like a truly representative Australian eleven; that Spofforth, piqued by the choice of Blackham as the Australian wicketkeeper, stayed away, sulking like some colonial Achilles in his tent; that both the heroes of the Australian vietory, Charlie Bannerman and William Midwinter, were English-born; that Bannerman's match-winning innings of 165 would have ended at ten but for a mosquito which impeded Armitage as he was taking a catch; that on the last day 10,000 people turned uP, including 'a surprising number of beautiful young women,' and that so far from being a novelty, this international cricket match was being played thirty-two years after the United States had first played Canada. But of all the facts pertaining to that match at Melbourne a hundred years ago, the one which transcends cricket history in its social significance, is that it set off a train of events which is still proceeding, a series of dramas and comedies, tragedies and farces so diverting as to have enabled countless millions of men to preserve the more desirable aspects of their own boyishness even into senility. That sequence has embraced the twisty-twirly legerdemain of that brilliantly original philosopher B. J. T. Bosanquet, the larky illegalities of Dr Grace, the infallibility of Bradman—except on stickY wickets—Hobbs and Sutcliffe, Gregory and Macdonald, Grimmett and O'Reilly, Lind wail and Miller, Barnes unplayable before lunch at Melbourne, 1911; Compton holding a broken bridge at Nottingham, 1948; Hutton batting on interminably at the Oval, 1938; Trumper's century before lunch at Manchester, 1902; and Jessop's stupefYing response three weeks later at the Oval; Laker's nineteen out of twenty at Man" chester in 1956; Bradman's three hundreds in each of the three sessions of play at Leeds' 1930; the duel to the death between Dexter and Benaud at Old Trafford, 1961 . catalogue isendless, which means that its adequate depiction is aphysical impossibility.
And yet, in attempting the impossible'
David Frith has done a marvellous job with his one thousand drawings and photographs of the hundred years' argument. Indeed, some of his photographs are so sensational that one wonders where he ever found them. That glimpse of Charlie Turner, 'The Terror,' for instance, and that shot of Ranji trotting into the pavilion after making 175 at Sydney, how many files had to be burrowed through, how many annals ransacked, how many false hares breathlessly pursued before discovering such items ? Of course the problem Changes as the years go by; at first it is a question of what to put in, but gradually it becomes the even uglier one of what to leave °Lit. The early years are buttressed by line drawings and scorecards; by the turn of the century action shots are becoming practicable; by the end of the Great War there is an increasing embarrassment of riches until, I°ng before the telly-age, the snapshots are familiar even to people who know nothing about cricket.
Of course there is something hypnotic about any collection of cricket photographs: those attitudes of youth caught by the camera-eye for an instant before dissolution, sunlight and shadow of dead days whose 1Mmediacy was once so pressing, two-dimensional mythical heroes dead and buried long before we were born. But Frith is distinguished among cricket historians, as one of the very few specialists working in that field today who understands the paradox that the Only way to capture the essence of a game is !o diverge from its central issues at certain Junctures, The figure of Dr Grace, for ex4,n1ple, would be far clearer to us if only 'nose old men in the pavilion had told us What the Doctor did when he wasn't playing games. What do they know of cricket who Only cricket know ? Frith knows all about that paradox, and it is that knowledge which raises his book from the merely indispensable to the quite priceless. Some of his early group photographs I have seen on the walls of the pavilion tearoom at Lord's, but it is comforting to have them n Lt.) hand—especially that one Of the 1087-88 England side in Australia, with a Young C. Aubrey Smith gazing with a Captain's fortitude at the lens almost as though rehearsing for his role in The Prisoner °A.f. Zenda, still lying in the womb of time. nother group shot with much to commend it is the England side three years later, with j °. linnY Briggs and Bobby Abel perched at either end of the front row, looking like identical twins, the Tweedledum and there of the Victorian field. Then in,ere are the occasional casual glimpses of FlaYers practising at the nets, and that brilLan_t fashion parade on the Lord's turf in am9. The most evocative pictures of all ? 1
M torn between the snap of the Australians Plied into their horse-drawn cab in 1902, the W onderful portrait of the 1899 Australians
Sitting down to breakfast at their Holborn "°tel, moustachioed waiter at the ready, and,
Perhaps most poignant of all, the sight of _ the 1894 tourists lining the rails of
t ne OPbir as they pull away on their long
journey—Stoddart, the paragon, the captain of cricket, the rugby international, who twenty years later was to blow his brains out in a Maida Vale bedroom. It sounds like a parody of an Edwardian melodrama, and it takes photographs like those Frith has selected to remind us that sometimes history, including cricket history, is intensely melodramatic.
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