Around the south in nine objects – Almanack

My first county match was at Weston-super-Mare in 1993 – hardly surprising, given that my grandfather was the area chairman at Somerset, and had for two decades organised the annual cricket festival in Clarence Park. It became a tradition for me, though not for long: three years later, it was scrapped. By then, I had graduated from handing out scorecards to operating the upper tier of the scoreboard, watching Hansie Cronje and Piran Holloway score hundreds from the best seat in the house. Apart from a minuscule wooden pavilion – a shed, really – the park had no amenities or infrastructure. Everything had to be brought in, with hot water carried in buckets. When he was umpiring, Dickie Bird would arrive every morning at seven, demanding a bucket and flannel – and my grandfather would unlock the ground so he could have them.

The scorer, David Oldam, worked in a Portakabin, and communicated with the scoreboard via a Second World War field telephone. Its wire ran along the boundary, at the mercy of fielders’ spikes. In 1996, as Durham’s bespectacled slow left-armer David Cox glimpsed a maiden first-class century, the phone buzzed. An unhappy Oldam told me I had overlooked the four Cox had just hit. “But Dickie Bird signalled leg-byes,” I protested. Bird was not one to wait for the scorer to acknowledge his signal, and Oldam had missed it. “Add four to Cox!” he barked. Cox finished on 95 not out. He never did score a century. 

The Somerset museum, a converted barn on the eastern edge of Taunton’s County Ground, is the final resting place of that telephone. It is a 1940 Set F Mark II magneto type, cast in Bakelite, most likely used in the North African desert campaign. A plate in its case lists the phonetic alphabet of the time: Beer for B, Don for D, Yorker for Y. Made for a cricket festival, one would think. Oldam never used those codes. He just barked.

Every county have their trove of artefacts, ancient and not-so-ancient, all evocative. Ten grounds have museums, but archivists elsewhere must cram their treasures into corridors, cupboards and attics. Kent’s store is the dustiest and loftiest, at the top of a wobbling staircase, inaccessible to the public except by special arrangement. Here lies another memory of war – the personal effects of Colin “Charlie” Blythe, killed in action near Passchendaele in 1917. He was a brilliant left-arm spinner: Jessop and Ranjitsinhji thought him the best. He put his success down to exceptionally long fingers, strengthened by hours on the violin. He was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1904, and had 2,503 wickets at 16 – including 100 at 18 in Tests – at the outbreak of war. His England career had ended amid suggestions of a nervous complaint: the neurologist Sir William Gowers said Blythe “suffers from the strain caused by playing in a Test match, and the effect lasts for about a week afterwards… [the problem] does not exist in the case of county matches”. It might have been anxiety, even epilepsy. Either way, Blythe could have avoided military service. But he joined the Territorial Force, rose to the rank of sergeant, and in September 1917 was sent to the Western Front.

The sight of Blythe’s wallet is still shocking. Two banknotes – for five francs and for one mark – have been pierced by shrapnel. They sat above Blythe’s heart. So did a photograph of his wife, Gertrude. The shrapnel passed right through. It is a dumbfounding object, imbued with layers of meaning. The display cases at the St Lawrence brim with bats, balls and cups – there is even a scorer’s notching-stick – but Blythe’s wallet is kept hidden. It is considered, simply, too much.

County archives are overrun by bats, yielding few surprises. The one with which WG Grace scored his 100th hundred is at Bristol, where he scored it; Denis Compton’s Warsop-Hendren, which yielded an English-record 3,816 runs in 1947, is at Lord’s. But the London counties each have a unique exhibit.

Surrey possess the earliest known bat – perhaps the oldest item in any county museum. Dating from 1729, it weighs 2lb 4oz, somewhat lighter than modern bats, and was owned by John Chitty of Knaphill, near Woking. The blade resembles a hockey stick, suited to striking a pea-roller; back then, the ball was propelled along the ground. Posterity does not relate how successful Chitty was, but he was proud enough to emblazon his initials on the bat. Perhaps he disposed of it in the manner of the Surrey player Henry Venn who, in 1747, gave up his bat a few days before his ordination: “Whoever wants a bat, which has done me good service, may take that, as I have no further occasion for it.” Venn preached for another five decades, by which time his bat was outdated: bouncing deliveries, and the straight bat, were the order of the day.

At Lord’s, meanwhile, they have something that looks like a bat, but isn’t, even if it was fleetingly used as one. The leangle is a traditional fighting club used by Australia’s Indigenous people, but it was for a defensive purpose that it came to fame on the Aboriginals’ tour of England in 1868. The group played 47 matches, and varied widely in ability: Jumgumjenanuke, known as Dick-a-Dick, averaged two in 35 completed innings that summer, and seldom bowled. And yet he became a public favourite, acclaimed wherever he went. It helped that, in 1864, he was among a party of trackers who had rescued three white children, lost in the bush for eight days. But his reputation was burnished all the more because of his expertise with the leangle.

For English crowds, it was novelty enough to see black cricketers. The main attraction, though, came after the match: a display of Aboriginal throwing skills with spear, boomerang and a weet-weet (a bulb-headed stick faintly resembling a long-tailed rodent, hence its other name, the kangaroo rat). Jumgumjenanuke was the star turn. Spectators were invited, for a shilling, to hurl a ball at him from ten paces; he would  repel every throw with his leangle and shield. Nobody could best him.

These exhibitions were enormously popular. The Trent Bridge archives hold an old playbill, advertising the event held there. It was mysteriously found in Essex in 1948, folded and wet on the foreshore at Canvey Island – exactly 80 years after the touring party arrived in Nottingham. The beachcomber who salvaged it, a cricketer named SS Ulyatt, sent it to the Nottinghamshire secretary. Few of these bills are extant; even Lord’s doesn’t have one.

The leangle, which the Aboriginals sometimes called a “lil lyl”, is about two feet long, made of hard wood (probably gum or box) with a rich patina. Its head is curved and bulbous – shades of hockey stick again – though an awkward attempt has been made to repair it, which detracts from the blade’s sweeping elegance. The handle is carved and fluted, with a beehive grip. To all but the most expert hand it would be unwieldy, at least for fending off cricket balls. It is simple, yet beautiful. To Western eyes, it may look primitive, but it is almost certainly younger than the Chitty bat. Examples such as the one at Lord’s are typical of the late-18th or early-19th century.

Jumgumjenanuke showed athletic prowess in other ways. He threw a cricket ball 104 metres, bettered only during these exhibitions by Grace, hurled a spear 130 metres, and won a 100-yard sprint against allcomers at Trent Bridge. He enthralled the locals – and England left an impression on him. He fell in love with a British woman, who reportedly agreed to marriage, but tour manager William Hayman refused to allow it. Jumgumjenanuke became a Christian, and (according to one version) died at a mission house in 1870. 

Cricket was, for those of a certain class, awash with money. For the Aboriginals, there was little. Hayman made his profit; the rest of the tourists were seen as, if not a quite a freak show, then a travelling circus. England was cold and, though the audiences were warm, there were exceptions. Not just cricket balls were thrown, but racist words, and bottles. The otherness of the travellers at times reinforced a sense of haves and have-nots.

County pavilions are usually stuffed with silverware, and the two London grounds are no exception. MCC have a cigarette box, presented to Douglas Jardine at the end of the 1932/33 Bodyline tour. It bears the inscription “To our skipper, in appreciation and admiration of his leadership and wonderful courage”, and is engraved with the autographs of the England team. It is a gorgeous piece – chiefly because the signatures are so stylish. 

At The Oval, there is a 9ct gold cigarette case, which Ranjitsinhji sent to Jack Hobbs on belatedly learning of his 100th hundred, in 1923. Next to it is a letter, written by Ranji from Jamnagar House, his home in Staines. “I noticed an omission on my part… this was brought to my notice by my Secretary, who never seems to miss these things. I am attempting to discharge my obligation with interest.”

Ranji first came to attention when he left Cambridge University, without graduating, in 1894, accompanied by a reputation for batting talent and colossal wealth. Several counties courted him, but the persuasive powers of Sussex captain Billy Murdoch tipped the balance. Ranji took rooms at the Norfolk Hotel in Brighton and, in his first three seasons, amassed 4,380 runs at 47. He wintered with the Murdoch family, and presented Billy’s wife, Jemima, with a silver tea set at Christmas in 1896. It is breathtaking: a coffee pot, tea pot, sugar bowl and milk jug, all surprisingly light and delicate, and a heavy salver.

By the winter of 1897/98, Ranji was playing for England but, during his first tour of Australia, pursued a claim to the throne of Nawanagar, in his native India, and travelled there after the Ashes; he would not return to Sussex for a year. He left his rooms at the Norfolk Hotel unoccupied, his bill unpaid. This was not wholly unexpected: Ranji was in hock all over England. The hotel claimed his possessions, from egg cups to carpets; a fine oak table and six chairs ended up at the Sussex museum with the tea set.

The Essex museum in Chelmsford provides a counterpoint. In 1984, they completed an unprecedented double, winning the County Championship and Sunday League. The club wanted to give every employee a keepsake: from the president to the 16-year-old apprentice groundsman, all received a silver ashtray.

Stuart Kerrison was that apprentice. Beginning a youth training scheme placement that April, he is still with Essex, where he has been head groundsman since 1991. No current member of any county’s ground staff has been with their team for longer. “I was born a mile up the road, and now I live on site,” he says. “Essex have always been a club who look after their staff. That’s why I’ve been here so long.” He found the ashtray while he was clearing old football trophies out of his attic, and asked the museum curator if he wanted it. Smoking accoutrements are a staple of cricket museums, it seems. Did Kerrison use his ashtray? “I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.”

One category of cricketana is underrepresented in the county archives: training equipment. And yet this is perhaps the area in which there has been most experimentation, with innovative paraphernalia coming and going as fast as the seasons. Bexhill Museum in Sussex has a working specimen of John Wisden’s 1860s Catapulta bowling machine – a terrifying contraption resembling the bastard child of a gibbet and a longbow. The curators at the County Ground nearly swooned at learning of its existence.

Maybe in decades to come the contents of the coach’s cupboard will be preserved on the museums’ shelves. Contemporary catching aids alone would fill a display cabinet: we have the amorphous reaction ball, the corrugated ramp, the rebound net, the foam bat. But they’re all still in use; why consign them to memory lane? Even the slip cradle, invented in Norfolk by the Rev. Gilbert Harrison Bartlett in the early 20th century, is occasionally pressed into action.

There is a catching aid, though, that predates them all – and it lives in the Museum of Welsh Cricket at Cardiff’s Sophia Gardens. The exhibit is “Peacock’s Patent 3528”, a gut-strung tennis racket, shaped like a bat. It was devised by a Londoner named Peacock, who wanted to find a way of practising catches without breaking bats. Tennis rackets were occasionally used for this purpose, so he created something bespoke. Prototypes were made, and sent to England’s principal manufacturers – but they didn’t catch on. Presumably the tennis racket was deemed sufficient, without needing to be reshaped. Only four of the prototypes are known to survive; Peacock’s was passed down to his family in Gilfach Goch, a mining village north-west of Cardiff.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and cricketing Glostonians seem to have understood that as well as anyone. The museum at Bristol houses an engaging display of items from Jack Russell’s kitbag: thimble, needle and black thread for restitching his wicketkeeping gloves; a tea bag, mischievously thrown in by Roger Gibbons, the curator; and a bottle of Copydex, the brushable white glue we once had at school, which Russell apparently used for painting over worn areas of his trademark floppy hat. The hat itself, alas, is not present. Perhaps he is still wearing it.

Batting gloves, of a sort, were in widespread use by the time Gilbert Jessop first played for Gloucestershire, in 1894. The design, at least three decades old, wasn’t so much a glove as a rubber knuckleduster, which protected the hand, but left the palm bare. Many a son of Bristol wore them; WG Grace certainly did. The trouble was, they slipped off as easily as they slipped on. To get around this problem, in the late 1880s, the sports outfitter Frank Bryan produced a set of four sheaths, into which the fingers were inserted, with another for the thumb. A rubber protector was sewn to the back of each sheath, and a web of straps fastened the whole apparatus to the wrist. Grace, William Gunn and Andrew Stoddart were all photographed wearing them, and Jessop used them in his early days at Gloucestershire.

But the rubber tended to become unstitched; even if it didn’t, it would become brittle, and perish. Jessop adopted a practical solution: he took a bicycle tyre, cut it into half-inch sections, and glued them in place. When they fell off, he simply stuck them back on. His makeshift glove, with the exception of the bat Grace used for his 100th hundred, is the pride and joy of Gloucestershire’s collection. Gibbons is reluctant to model it for a photograph: “I don’t want my fat fingers going where Jessop’s nimble hand went.” No risks must be taken, he says: the 150th anniversary of Jessop’s birth – May 19, 2024 – is not far away. A little later he sends a photo, with an unknown hand wearing the glove.

Readers may be surprised to have got this far without encountering the Lord’s sparrow, killed by a delivery from Jahangir Khan of Cambridge University to MCC’s Tom Pearce in 1936 (the bird and ball are in the MCC Museum, and have been exhibited in the natural history museums of London and Rotterdam). There is a reason for its omission: they have something stranger at Hampshire.

According to John Arlott, Hampshire off-spinner Charlie Knott “was on his day as deadly an off-spinner as you might find”. Just ask the Portsmouth butterfly, brought down as he bowled to Gloucestershire captain Sir Derrick Bailey at the United Services Ground in August 1951. Stitching and stuffing a sparrow is one thing; preserving a Pieris brassicae (large white) is quite another. It is carefully kept in the archivists’ store room at the Rose Bowl.

Flight risk: the unexpected victim of Charlie Knott’s off-spin, and the fatal ball. It is understandable that a ground as small as Kent’s should struggle to find a public area large enough for a permanent museum. That Hampshire have no room, in their large, state-of-the-art venue, is baffling. In all, there are eight counties without a dedicated space. To an extent, it comes down to the money available, or the largesse of chief executives. Some appear to regard museums as obsolete and fusty, appealing to the ageing member rather than the coveted new audience. Several collections are closed on Blast days, when the largest and youngest crowds come. But many children love museums and, during a three-hour Twenty20 game, can be grateful for a sideshow. My daughter’s first match was, like mine, at Somerset. She is not a huge cricket fan, but she enjoys the atmosphere, and always wants to see the museum. Give her an “explorer’s trail” card, and she’ll scrutinise every bat, ball and bail, and marvel at every oddity. Better to keep open the door to the past.

A tour of the nine remaining counties will appear in Wisden 2025.

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