How golden was the golden age of village cricket?

VILLAGE cricket is struggling. All who love it fear for its future. Each season the worrying tally of leagues and clubs that have folded, and games conceded through a lack of players, mounts.

Of course it was never like this in times past. The summer landscape swarmed with the white-flannelled figures. The ambition of every country lad was to play for his village team. “Cricket to us was more than play. It was worship in the summer sun,” wrote the poet Edmund Blunden in 1925. If not quite the heart and soul of the community, the cricket team came very close.

Tim Wear with his manuscript documenting the history of Broughton Cricket Club. Picture: Richard Doughty Photography

But hang on. Before we become too dewy eyed and lyrical let’s look back. 1929 should be far enough. Between the wars. Cricket was still England’s undisputed king of sports. Crowds of up to 20,000 flocked daily to Roses matches – Yorkshire v Lancashire it might now be necessary to inform some. The stop-press county scores were eagerly scanned.

Top players such as Jack Hobbs, Patsy Hendren and Walter (Wally) Hammond, among numerous others, were household names. And, at the local level, let’s say Crathorne, near Yarm, there could never be any question of the cricket club being unable to field a team.

Or could there?

Well, on the final day of the 1929 season that humiliation befell the club, handing scheduled hosts Great Broughton a walk over.

Did Broughton gloat? One hopes not, for in 1935 the tables were exactly turned. Broughton were unable to send a team to Crathorne.

Worse was to come for Broughton, playing in the Langbaurgh West Rural League. A report in this newspaper of the opening Saturday of the 1939 season revealed: “The most unfortunate happening was the inability of Broughton to field a team against Seamer.”

The following week, the D&S scribe gloomily announced he had news “of a doleful character” to convey: both Broughton and Seamer had dropped out.

These team-raising difficulties of village clubs in the supposed heyday of cricket punctuate a highly-detailed record of the Broughton club in the decade 1929 to 1939, newly compiled by Tim Wear, of Nunthorpe. His late father-in-law, Tom Chapman, played for Broughton before switching to nearby Carlton, and the discovery of some old team photos in a cardboard box launched Tim on research that has borne splendid fruit as an impeccably-produced manuscript, currently bound in a ring folder.

Its general cricket interest stretches beyond those surprising revelations of player shortages. Doubtless reflecting the condition of most rural grounds at the time, matches in which each side scored at least 100 were rare. Throughout the decade, only five Broughton players achieved a half century, none twice. Yet in the first half of the decade Broughton were the league’s dominant team – twice champions, runner-up once and four times winners of the league cup.

No century was scored by any league player in Tim’s research period. But in a play-off against Broughton for the championship in 1938, Carlton racked up an astounding 238. In partnership with G Hugill, who batted at number six and scored 44, last man G Swainson blasted 75 not out. Beyond recording it as a league record, the D&S report was strangely muted over the astronomical total, merely attributing it to the “dead easy” wicket – at Swainby. But, in what turned out to be their last game (until they were re-formed in 1954) Broughton managed only 94.

Though their team was ageing, and had lost key players to other clubs, Tim poses the question: “If they had been successful in the play-off, would the events of May 1939 have unfurled differently?”

The now-perceived strength of village cricket at the time was mirrored in a rule that players must live within four miles of their chosen club. Noted by Tim, the scrapping of that rule in 1962 recognised the growing necessity of recruiting further afield. But Tim records a weekend when three teams conceded their matches. Perhaps to spare their blushes, the D&S correspondent identified only the beneficiaries: “Broughton, Ingleby Cross and Seamer were presented with the points.” But his added comment hints at an endemic problem: “Some way out of this difficulty will have to be found, as it makes the league very uninteresting.”

Tim is as yet unsure what to do with his research. It merits publication as a booklet and a place in official archives. From a report of the league’s cup final at Broughton in 1936 he highlights a reference to the “excellent tea produced by the ladies”. A newcomer to Broughton cricket until he began his research, he happily reports that he found “this traditional quality maintained 80 years later…a classic offering that would have rated 5* on any TripAdvisor review”.

However, drawing on “my own experience and others”, he also salutes the cricket tea as “a disappearing art throughout the land”. Raising a team isn’t village cricket’s only problem.