SPORTING ASPECTS
WinterThoughts at Lord's
By JOHN ARLOTT
THE outside of Lord's cricket ground is not impressive. The ugliness of its yellowish brick walls, darkened by the soot of the neighbouring power-station and railway, is ignored by those who are unimpressed by cricket grounds. Snow on the ground establishes that Lord's is not a cricket ground but a precinct which contains a cricket ground. Certainly that ground is fine, the focus of highly expert—and almost reverent—attention, its slope deliberately preserved, both for its history, and for the fact that it provides one of the traditional hazards of the game. Any batsman bowled at Lord's by a ball which ' comes back up the hill ' regards him- self as historically ill-used, while the bowler attempts to look modest.
The winter work on the pitch would represent the major —almost the sole—labour of most grounds. At Lord's it is a single aspect of the activity of what is, in effect, a village which controls a little empire. The secretary's office is con- cerned with fixtures for matches to be played at the opposite side of the world, and with interpretations of the laws raised anywhere within his loosely-tied but unchafing commonwealth.
He is equally concerned with his club's tavern, bakery, and clerk of works' department whose carpenters, painters, plumbers and bricklayers maintain the buildings of the ground and the surrounding houses, bounded by the nearest roads, which represent the Lord's estate. The gardeners responsible for the lawns and the flowers are not groundsmen. Middlesex County Cricket Club is a tenant of the Marylebone Club, whose wealth is not to be measured by the small figure of its members' annual subscription, whose membership is three times greater than the capacity of its pavilion, a quarter that of the entire ground. The snow inside the main gate has been churned and blackened by cars and vans coming and going about the business of the cricket village where mechanism is now tolerated. A hundred years ago when J. H. Dark, the grounds- man, borrowed a lawn mower, he was careless enough to have it in use when the Hon. Robert Grimston came to Lord's. Grimston observed the innovation and went out, forthwith, to a gang of navvies working on a trench in St. John's Wood Road. Would they, he enquired, care to earn ten shillings ? Ordering them to bring their pickaxes, he led them to the ground and, pointing to the mower, ordered them to destroy the infernal machine. Lord's had always been mown by its own flock of sheep and Grimston saw it as his clear duty to preserve the tradition. There is a sharp band of green where the little bank to the pavilion rails proved too steep for the dry snow of last 'week to lie. The stroke played to the pavilion must have enough way on it to carry that sharp rise, for no boundary is scored there unless the ball touches the rails. On that bank, in the 1820s, John Gully, formerly boxing champion of Great Britain and later to become a Member of Parliament, used to sit to take bets on the result of a match, the individual performances of players or any other wager the game afforded.
The birds fly in and peck through the 'snow which seems to vary in shade and depth with the differing shadows of the strips of prepared pitch, from the Test match ' middle' to the domestic pitches for the Cross Arrows season next September. Stevie. Slatter, who worked on the ground for forty years in the last century, taught himself to swim in one of the two ponds which used to form on the, pitch in winter. - The notice-board announces the championships to be played on the royal tennis court behind the pavilion. When ' Squire' Osbaldeston, enraged at being chaffed after his defeat at single-wicket by Brown at Brighton, resigned from the MCC, he struck his name from the list of members with a stroke of the pen so violent as to obliterate also the names of the only other two members whose surnames began with 0.
Little can remain of the turf which, for the second time, Thomas Lord dug up and brought with him, in 1814, to his third ground. Six years ago I took an Australian on his first visit to Lord's. There was no play, and the high walls made it a separate place, geographically—but not otherwise—part of London.. The Australian respectfully asked the groundsman for a piece of the turf of Lord's. His request was received in the same serious manner as it was made. The piece of earth and grass was cut and he was given a tin in which to carry it away. The manager of Lord's tavern is a steward, the groundsman a bailiff, the workmen retainers, the ground-staff boys 'prentice craftsmen. The Lord's ground staff of modern times has pro- duced Compton, Edrich, Hendren, Hearne, Durston, Sims, MCC men, known as Middlesex players for England; mean- while, Gibbons, Worcester's chief batsman, Bowes, who dis- guised rearing pace with an amiable, ambling delivery, and other men trained here, have left to make their reputations in provincial and less feudal counties.
Originally Lorcrs was the training ground for professional players who were sent as cricketing workmen, attendant, in matches, upon the amateur members of MCC. When opposing batsmen were profitably entrenched, they would be asked to bowl all day; but they might think themselves lucky to be put on at all if there were a bowler's wicket. Their batting, at direction, was employed to shore up a tottering innings, or force the pace for a declaration. They must hold / their catches: they must know the cunning of the game to give reliable- tactical advice when it .was asked, know their place to hold their tongues, even in face of error, unless they were specifically consulted. There are ti.te boys now. They walk respectfully upon this grass, pick up a bat with the familik ease of a joiner 'lifting his hamnier, settle a cricket ball into their hands as a cobbler cuddles his wax., They, in fact, are the villagers rather 'than their masters and., perhaps, the truest Lord's cricketers.
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