My Favourite Books

No 78 - The Penguin Cricketer’s Companion - Alan Ross

There’s a misconception that Scottish people en masse loathe and detest the English game of cricket and all that it stands for. I’m Scottish and I love cricket and I know loads of other Scots who share my enthusiasm for the game.

And some who exceed even my enthusiasm - I have a lawyer friend from Stirling whose infatuation with the game is a lifetime obsession and goes beyond even that of the most fervent member at Lord’s. And talking of Lord’s, there was an old Sheriff at Glasgow (now sadly deceased) who probably had the most prime seat in the Member’s pavilion there - right at the very front next to the players gate, so that he could be first to congratulate the centurion or the multiple wicket taker as they left the field - I often saw him during television coverage, because his position was so spectacularly optimal and constantly in the eye of the camera.

And of course, a number of correspondents on this blog are clearly both Scottish and cricket fans.

Some years ago Freuchie fae Fife won the UK National village cricket championship by defeating a team from Surrey in the final at Lord’s. During the build-up to that match there was quite a lot of speculation about Scottish ability on the cricket field - one cricket magazine (which I’ve still got in the loft somewhere, but cannot find, natch) had an amusing article entitled “Can these men play cricket?” illustrated by a cartoon drawing of hairy highlanders dressed in cricket white shirts, kilts and tackety-boots.

The article answered its own question with an emphatic ‘No’, which made Freuchie’s ultimate victory all the sweeter.

Also emerging in the wash during that time was the quite extraordinary, but apparently true, statistic that more Scots, as a proportion of the population, played organised cricket during the summer than did the English.

And indeed there is a thriving County Cricket Championship of several divisions operating in Scotland. In the town where I live there is the West Lothian County Cricket Club which has frequently hosted international matches between Scotland and overseas visitors.

Anyway, this is all by way of explanation why an SNP supporter from central Scotland happens to have quite a substantial library of cricket books, including several Wisden annuals and any number of collections by such as John Arlott, E.W Swanton, Neville Cardus and Brian Johnston et al. I simply love cricket and the Englishness that it represents.

Many years ago when Mad Mac first persuaded me to pen something about fitba for TAG, I remember us both bemoaning the fact that football had nothing like the quality of literature devoted to it as cricket. Almost all football writing is anaemic sludge appealing to the lobotomised shed-enders, while very much cricket literature is first-class writing aimed at a highly demanding and discerning audience.

Thus this book, which is an anthology of cricket-writing has a huge pool of superb writing to select from, where a book this size about football would be mainly filler and tripe.

And so there are contributions from Dickens, Siegefried Sassoon, A.G Macdonell, L. P Hartley, Cardus, Swanton, Robertson-Glasgow, Arlott, William Blake, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Conan-Doyle, A.P Herbert, Wodehouse, Betjeman, and Harold Pinter, just to name the most famous of dozens of contributors.

You have poetry, passion, drama, humour, tragedy and comedy, just like cricket itself.

There are stories about cricket or where cricket is the backdrop (eg Dickens’ Dingley Dell v All Muggleton match from ‘Pickwick’). There are profiles of players (WG Grace, Ranitsinhji, Bradman, Compton etc). There are recollections of ‘Men and Moments’ (Len Hutton’s 100 centuries (Hutton pictured right), England winning the 1953 Ashes, Eton v Harrow at Lord’s etc). There are sections devoted to ‘the Poetry of Cricket’ and ‘New Prose’, the latter mainly devoted to more modern players (though the book was first published in 1960, so that ‘modern’ in this context means the period between 1960 and the second edition publication in 1979).

In short, something for everyone.

The book is a delight in almost the same way as reclining semi-comatose, partly-consumed pint of scrumpy in hand, in a deck-chair on the edge of a cricket-pitch on a sunny Sunday afternoon, the snick of leather on willow and cries of ‘catch it’ somewhere in the distance, the Sunday Times covering your head from the glare of the sun, not a care in the world, roast beef and Yorkshire for tea, is a delight.

There’s a wealth of humour and pathos here, and this short ode by George McWilliam combines them both :-

EPITAPH

As in life so in death lies a bat of renown
Slain by a lorry (three ton);
His innings is over, his bat is laid down:
To the end a poor judge of a run