The Rest Is History - 129. Cricket

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

How did a game played by peasants in the English countryside as early as the 17th century evolve into one of the most popular sports in the world? Jon Hotten, author of 'The Meaning of Cricket', joins Tom and Dominic to discuss the origins of the game, its Victorian transformation and the inextricable link with Empire. To sign up to the brand new Rest Is History Club and enjoy benefits like bonus episodes, live streamed shows and ad-free listening, as well as membership of the RIHC Discord chatroom, go to www.restishistorypod.com *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. There is a breathless hush in the close tonight, ten to make and the match to win, a bumping pitch and a blinding light, an hour to play and the last man in. And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat, or the selfish hope of a season's fame,

but his captain's hand on his shoulder smote play up play up and play the game oh tom holland i could see your lip curling in a metropolitan smear no i'm wiping away a manly tear so that is uh vitae lampada by sir henry newbold's the great poem of empire isn't it um and the great partbolt. The great poem of empire, isn't it? And one of the great poems of cricket. Much derided, I think, in the 21st century. But definitely a favourite poem in the Sandbrook household. I'm so glad to hear that, Dominic.

Very much a favourite poem in the Holland household as well. I read it to my daughters every now and then. And do they laugh? They do. They do. So we're doing today's episodes on cricket which is obviously something i've been wanting to do for ages and ages and ages and the excuse for that is that um we this episode is going out midway through the first test match in the ashes series between england and australia And I'm aware that we will have lots of listeners

who will have no idea what we're going on about, who will have no interest in cricket, no knowledge of it at all. If you're an American, that's just babble. Yeah. So just by explanation, the Ashes is the kind of the oldest international ongoing contest in cricket between England and Australia.

And it's the kind of centrepiece of every English cricket fan's obsession. But Iia and it's the kind of centerpiece of every english cricket fans obsession but i think also it's legitimate to look at cricket because i think you know just we did football didn't we uh we did the olympics and i think sport is a fascinating topic for historical inquiry whether you have any interest in it or not it is absolutely tom i mean as you know i'm not a great cricket fan but cricket has been an important part of english national identity and as that poem suggests because that poem goes on the later verses that have a scene in the sudan a battle in the sudan so cricket is kind of woven into britain's sense of the gatling jammed the

gatling's jammed and the blood is seeping into it. It's brilliant. And a voice pipes up, play up, play up and play the game. It's presumably the same fellow who was playing crickets at Cheltenham. I think it's set at Cheltenham. Anyway, it's a reminder that also it's not just about England. Of course, it's also about empire. Oh, exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. And the reason that, of course, people play crickets in India and Australia, as we will discover in this podcast, is because of the empire. But Will, I feel that even with your mighty mind and your great knowledge of cricket, we need a guest. Am I right? We do. And we need a top writer on cricket. I would say the top writer on cricket in England.

And it is my friend and teammate in the authors, the team that I play cricket with, John Houghton, who writes this fantastic blog called The Old Batsman. He co-wrote a film called Death of a Gentleman, which was an absolute evisceration of contemporary international cricket administrators. Absolutely brilliant film. And he wrote a book very modestly titled the meaning of cricket that's good yeah so john knows the meaning of cricket and john you're currently um you're

you're collaborating on a book with sir jeffrey boycott who is a name that will mean a great deal to people who have any interest in cricket um may will mean absolutely nothing to loads of our listeners so so that's that's that's something we've got to remember right the way through so um i mean just we've got a question here from judith downey is it possible for a conversation about cricket to hold my interest for the time span of a podcast and i mean i let i hope so i hope so because this is cricket is a really really fascinating mirror held up to all kinds of historical, cultural, social trends, isn't it? You would say so. Yes. I mean, it's a really it's a question that gets asked quite often.

I think that question, why should I be interested in cricket? Because it has this kind of weirdly high bar to entry. You know, it's not that there's a there's a great story from Martin Amis when he was writing London Fields. And there's a character in it called Keith Talent, who's one of these sort of evil dwarf type characters. He plays darts. They're all evil dwarves in Martin Amis. He said he wanted, he knew the character had to, wanted to be involved in a sport. He had to play some sort of sport. And he first considered snooker,

but then he chose darts. And the reason he chose darts was that he said, you can tell anyone everything they need to know about darts in five minutes, right? Which is kind of cruel, but it's really true. There's no hinterland in darts. There's no kind of post-match technical analysis of a darts match you know you just chuck things at a board cricket is a sort of diametric opposite to that you know it's a game

that exists in the imagination and through time and if you don't have either of those things to give to it i i think this will be very difficult for you because it's archaic, it's arcane, it's hard to understand. And I've done a really good job in selling it. Yeah, you have. So are there any listeners left? Well, OK, so there's a question from Thad Will, question from the USA. Please explain, as you would for a child, how this game is played. We have no clue. Now, this is not a sports podcast, so we're not going to go into all that. But I would say at its most basic, actually, it's very simple.

It's a bloke chucking a ball and somebody tries to hit it. Trying to hit it, yes. I mean, people sort of... And that's, you know, it could be baseball. I mean, in a way, it's kind of hockey and golf. I mean, they all kind of... Yeah. It's a stick and you try and hit a ball.

So if we're looking at where cricket comes from, how it originates, how it emerges in England when it it does where does cricket begin and this is a much mythologized issue is it not it really is yes i i even saw a quote today from from uh john major who is a cricket obsessive former prime minister historian himself historian he wrote a very good good book about the history of cricket. And he said it's a bit like searching for the Holy Grail. You will never find it. You will never find the origins of cricket. WG, cricket's most famous player, he claimed it originated from coits.

But what century do you think we're talking about? 16th, 17th, 18th? Well, Dominic... Oh, don't tell me to go back even further. Well, shall I tell you what the... He's been dying to tell this story. What an Armenian professor, Dr. Abraham Terrian, thinks it came from,

and who the first person to play it was. No, don't. Go on, go on. Is it a big name? Is it an Armenian king? who the first person to play it was? No, don't. I'm going to tell you. Go on, go on. Do you know who it was? There you are. Is it a big name? It is a big name. Is it an Armenian king? No, it's...

Is it R2V2? No, Dominic, it's Jesus. Jesus played cricket. So he found... Based on what? He found in the manuscript library of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem... Yeah.

...an 8th century copy of a much earlier gospel which described the infancy of Jesus. And in this gospel, Jesus is described as playing something faintly similar to cricket, i.e. people throwing balls and he's hitting it. And the catch is that Jesus, when he chases the ball,

can run onto the sea. Thereby. Wow. Did we not discuss in a previous podcast about how Piltdown Man had a cricket bat or something like that? An ancient cricket bat? Yes. So that's the kind of classic example of the way in which people can kind of back project and create myths around it. I mean, I think obviously Jesus didn't play cricket.

Obviously this wasn't cricket. And there have been all kinds of attempts to kind of trace its origins beyond England. So there's... Surely people are now claiming it's invented in China or something. Are they? Well, Belgium is very popular.

Belgium? Criquet. Right. Yeah. Tintin was a great cricketer. Yeah. And there's... And Hercule Poirot.

An eighth century monk saw a sport with a bat and ball being played in Florence. Okay. There's an 8th century monk saw a sport with a bat and ball being played in Florence. Okay. There's a 12th century poet says that young men in England enjoy a game called cricks. And there's a clerk in the reign of Edward I who complained that the Prince of Wales, so future Edward II, was passionate about a game called CREAG. Okay. They sound very implausible to me, to be honest.

Yeah, I think they are implausible. But John, are people playing cricket, let's say, in the Civil War? Well, again, yes. Yes, you would say a recognisable version of what becomes cricket, yes. But cricket, you know, it's one of those things it has many roots many origins it had many forms it wasn't really and i suppose until grace came along and you know his his first season was in 1864 a very kind of significant time for cricket because it was the first season that uh overarm bowling was legalized for example it was the it was the first season that over-armed bowling was legalised, for example. It was the year the first Wisden came out.

So Wisden is the almanac that comes out and gives you all the details every year. You know, one of cricket's great hinterlands is its statistical meaning and the way it's recorded. And so at that point, cricket was recognisably cricket. Before then, there'd been lots of different versions of cricket, so small-sided games. You had famous games where you'd have a farmer and his dog playing against a bloke up the road in the village, and they'd be playing a version of cricket.

Generally, in those tales, one of them drops down dead because the dog is a brilliant fielder and no one can score a run, you know. So there's lots of those kind of origin style myths. But the amazing thing, I think, I suppose the thing to say is the root of the game as we know it would probably come from two places. And I would say one of them is the measurement of the pitch, of the area of ground that it's played on. And the measure of a cricket pitch is 22 yards. And when is that decided? And that comes from Thomas Gunter's chain, which you may or may not have heard of.

It was a way of measuring land. He came up with a way of measuring land using a physical chain that was 66 links or 22 yards long. And when was that? And that was used as the base of the length of the field. I think Gunter's chain, I'd have to look it up. I'd have to look it up. I'm not a historian who immediately recalls the dates. I will look it up for you now.

This is brilliant. This is live action. Live research. Live research. Live research. But the amazing thing is it has never changed. It's never changed. Everyone being able to lay down this chain and say that's how long a pitch is. I've looked it up.

It's 1620. 1620. So the amazing thing about 22 yards is that it has contained the whole game ever since, which is an astonishing thing. And anyone can play on it, you know, whether you're five foot three, a real little short ass, whether you're six foot ten, you can compete equally on this distance. And unlike sort of golf courses or tennis balls or anything like that, it's never changed. So, John, people who are playing it. So England is a very, very rural society at this point. The town is pretty small. I mean, they're expanding. So you obviously need quite a lot of space, but there is a lot of space. So basically it's a village game rather than a town game, is it? Before Victorians made it what we know as cricket today, it would be tiny little games played in hamlets and villages. It was a country sport for working class people.

It wasn't this thing that it would become. And Puritans are actually complaining, aren't they, if people are playing it? Yeah, I mean, there's sort of around where I live, which is on the Surrey-Hampshire borders, there's a lot of this origin stories of the game. There's a village called Recklesham, who I did play cricket for in my youth. And there was a story that Recklesham, it's had something like five pubs within its village boundaries

and was a kind of a place known for bad behaviour on a Sunday. People would go to the pubs on a Sunday and then play cricket. And cricket was this kind of, you know, almost a roguish, terrible thing to do. So at that point, people are playing just on their one day off, basically,

are they? I mean, there aren't multi-day games. I mean, because they're working in the fields and stuff. Yeah. And also the game, although it had its 22 yards, it couldn't go on for long enough. It was too difficult to play in those days. I mean, the reason cricket lasts for a long time now is that people have got very good at it.

Before then, I mean, you know, the games would be quite low scoring and quite quick. Because the pitches are kind of rough. The pitches don't exist. They're just in the middle of a field. I mean, there used to be cricket starts. Most cricket matches start now with the toss of a coin. So the two teams can decide who's going to bat and who's going to bowl. Very, very early, the winner of the toss got to decide where the pitch would be.

That's good. That's great. So they would walk into a field and toss a coin and then the winning captain could select where in the field he would put the pitch. And we've got a question from Nathan Hogg, which actually we should ask. So Nathan Hogg says, the name, where did cricket get its name from? Because it is kind of a weird name. I mean, football makes sense. Rugby, obviously, because it's the school.

But why cricket? Yes, I mean, all these things like cricks kriag and coits was wg's suggestion yeah who knows i don't know and that is part of the mystery of it yeah yeah it's and i mean it again like football football in a way you know all kinds of different versions of football were played through the middle ages right the way up to the victorian period and you keep talking about the victorian period that this is where it gets regularized this is where laws get introduced where kind of standardization happens but before that again you're kind of saying that there are all these different versions of it that have been played in different villages in different counties

um i mean is that right that basically it's it's it's in the south to begin with but then also it starts to spread up to the up to to Yorkshire and places like that? Well, here we go. I mean, we kind of tend to think of it as having begun in the south because that's where it's first recorded. I mean, in deepest Hampshire, there's a village called Hambledon, which is considered to be the cradle of the game. There's a pitch there called Broadhapenny Down, and that's where the game's thought to have started. But the only reason people think it started there is because that was where it was first written down, really. So the son of the publican, obviously, the pitch was opposite a pub. There's a great tie always between cricket and alcohol, certainly in England, cricket

and drinking, both amongst the players and the spectators. But so the son of the publican, John Niren, began to write down the stories of the cricketers he'd seen in his youth. He called it Cricketers of Our Time. And those were the first cricketers we really know about and the first matches we really know about in any depth. And so people tend to think, well, that's where the game started. Whether there was another village in Yorkshire where exactly the same thing was happening, but no one wrote it down. Who knows? And what's interesting then is that you've got this kind of rural game and it's played among people who are not necessarily upper class at all. I mean, often labourers, the opposite of it. But at the same time, certainly in the 18th century you're starting to get very very posh people i mean including even the prince of wales starting to become obsessed by it too and we've

got a question from um from dan jackson friend of the show northumbrian would you agree that cricket is arguably the least class-based sport in england played and watched by everyone certainly in comparison to football and rugby i mean i, I guess maybe that's changed with football now. But that sense that cricket is a sport that is played both by agricultural labourers and by dukes does make it kind of distinctive, doesn't it? Well, it does. Yeah. I mean, I think it goes back to this notion of time again. You know, there were huge chunks of time that the aristocracy and the wealthier men had to fill in. I mean, what did you do all day? If you were rich, what did you do all day?

You had to do something. So cricket kind of becomes tied up with other things like hunting and boxing. There was a great rage for the gentlemen to be able to box at one point, fighting in the streets. It becomes tied up with these other leisure pursuits. There's something great rage for the gentleman to be able to box at one point, you know, fighting in the streets. All of these, it becomes tied up with these other leisure pursuits. There's something to do. Horse racing, you know, you had to fill your time. So you had these kind of patrons emerging who would go and literally patronise the good cricketers in their area.

And also it lends itself to gambling, doesn't it? Very much. And it lends itself to a day out. I mean, it's a relatively slow moving sport you can stand there and have a chat with people and turn around and not much has happened in the meantime you probably haven't missed anything um and it just became a kind of very very nice day out really a summer's day out so at what point if you had to i i know you the records are very hazy and it's all kind of in the murk of time but if you had to, I know the records are very hazy and it's all kind of in the murk of time,

but if you had to pinpoint a time when people went to watch cricket. Oh, that's a good one, yeah. When are people going in sort of decent numbers, i.e. not just to watch their family member play, but to watch a game? Well, I mean, cricket has a great, has always had a long ongoing relationship with novelty.

It loves novelty. It loves to reinvent itself. It has this sort of pastoral image as something unchanging. In fact, it's a game that is constantly reinventing itself. So as the sort of, I suppose you'd say the Regency era, the fancy, as they start to go to games to fill in time, they want these kind of novelty events to happen that they can watch. So you had games, certainly in the Regency era,

after the Napoleonic Wars, you had games where you'd have a team of men with one arm against a team of men with one leg. That sounds brilliant. How could the men with one leg run? I mean, that's all part of the fun of it. And it was, it was called something like a grotesque spectacle or something,

but they were all veterans of it. They were mostly guys living in, you know, in, I suppose, arms, accommodation given to ex-Navy personnel. The aptly named Arms Houses. Arms Houses, yeah. There's a really famous scorecard, and I've always wondered whether this was where they got the name from, where the number 11 for the one-legged team was called Baldrick.

Yeah, seriously. And he was run out twice for Nought. And they were given, like, the game lasted for two days and overnight they were fed on ale and meat and all of this tremendous, impossible to digest stuff. And it just became, and then you had games like married versus single. You had games like 13 stone versus under 13 games with like a 13 stone versus oh you know under 13 stone they should do more of that they're definitely in a way in a way that is what they do that in a way that you know with the reinvention of cricket

with new formats like 2020 cricket and those sort of things that's the modern equivalent of what that was well so there's a really interesting question here from david davis uh who says i often hear complaints that modern cricket is dumbing down the great games tradition so talking about 2020 whatever however i do feel the 2020 the ipl gambling money etc is much closer to its georgian roots in the public school victorian morality of early 20th century cricket do you agree so that that's focusing in on what is quite an interesting pivot in the history of cricket that you you do have this kind of buccaneering Regency sense where they're all one-legged, gambling on it, all that kind of stuff and getting drunk and all kinds of things. And then with the Victorian period, that's where you start to get ideas of it not being cricket. Yes.

Am I ever simplifying? No, I don't think so. I think the Victorians were the ones who imposed this moral sense on the game. So before the Victorians did that, it was a game for rogues. There was a lot of cheating. There was a lot of gambling. There was a lot of match fixing. And so the Victorians came along and I suppose with their general culture thought, well, we can't have that. Actually, here's a game that can be a vision of England. And as the Victorians do that, you get this great star emerging, the first famous cricketer really in WG Grace.

And he comes along because he's a huge man with a big beard. And maybe even people who know nothing about cricket perhaps may have a sense of him well this is the interesting thing is that he is probably still today more famous than some of the people in the england cricket team and this is this is the resonance his image is kind of carried with it down the years john you said i mean you say um that he's the most famous cricketer i mean in a way he's the most famous person in victorian england he's the first great celebrity is he is he is he's the most famous cricketer. I mean, in a way, he's the most famous person. In Victorian England. He's the first great celebrity, isn't he? He is. He is. He's the first celebrity. And of course it goes to his head and to his gut.

I mean, he comes from a small village called Downend outside of Bristol. He's got a very high-pitched, squeaky voice. Like a Neanderthal. Like a Neanderthal, yes. He's thought of as, you know, a slight figure of fun. They look down their noses at him. But he is a genius at this game.

He's a huge, I mean, he's a huge man. First of all, he's sort of six foot three. He gets bigger and bigger as he eats and drinks more and more and becomes more of a star. But you compare this to Victoria in England when everyone was a short ass. You know, it would be like us looking at Tyson Fury, you know, the enormous man with a big beard.

Even if you see pictures of him when he was 18 and made his sort of fabulous breakthrough season in 1866, when he plays the innings that comes to define modern cricket, the innings that people often say, if you could see one innings from cricket history, one moment, what would it be? Well, it would be WG as an 18-year-old at the Oval scoring 224 against Surrey for All England

because this innings changes everything. And he does it over two days. And why does it change everything? Well, he does it over two days. And until WG came along the the contest between bat and ball which is the the pivotal contest in cricket was always won by the ball there was a wg himself said two days yeah wg himself said um uh it was it was thought that if the bowling was good uh all the batsman could do nothing about it.

All he could do would keep it out. Well, I resolved to challenge that theory. And he begins with his great size and strength, whacking the ball in the air over the field as it becomes spectacular and amazing. And what he does really is he imagines a future. He changes the mindset of the game. And this is how the game always changes with an act of imagination. And he's the first one to do that. And the great thing is, this is how much of an athlete he was

before he became the big guy. A man of size. In between this two-day innings in the evening, he goes from the oval to Crystal Palace and wins the 420-yard hurdles. That is so brilliant. In his pink racing knickerbock hurdles. That is so brilliant. In his pink racing knickerbockers. That's so Victorian behaviour. So he was a bit of a lad, you know, but obviously a star.

And as he becomes bigger and bigger, and, you know, obviously the railways come along, the newspapers come along, and all of a sudden he can go around the country. He can play cricket all around the country. People can see him. When he gets to Australia for the first time, the docks at Melbourne are aligned with people because they just want to see him.

And he gets sponsored, doesn't he? He gets sponsored by Coleman's Mustard. He did get sponsored. So at that point, you have record-keeping of games. Yeah, yeah. So people know what his score is. You have crowds going. And do you have an organised national competition of any kind?

Yeah, I mean, that is emerging at exactly the same time. There isn't international cricket when WG comes along, but there is county cricket. Now, for those listening outside England, I suppose you define as county. I mean, Tom will give you chapter and verse on what is a county and what is a region and all of that stuff because he yearns for the return of Wessex. But essentially, I think of it like a state or, you know, your local. Now, why?

That's a puzzle to me because football and rugby, I mean, they have clubs in big towns. So, you know, in in football it's obviously Manchester United or Wolves or whoever in rugby well there's a shut up Wolverhampton Wanderers is one of the founder members of the football league I'll have you know right um it's the one that comes to everyone's mind of course it is of course it's got such a iconic history and a emblematic badge I don't know what you're talking about um rugby you know bristol bath i mean they're all big okay their strength is in the west country but it's in towns or in leicester or gloucester or whatever why is cricket county why isn't it cities yeah well i

think i think just because it's slightly earlier it's very slightly earlier and and counties were big enough to to generate 11 or 22 or however many men you needed to form a team. Right. So, I mean, I would guess that's the reason. And because of the rural roots, I suppose. Yeah, maybe the rural roots as well, yeah. But it just happened slightly earlier than those, you know, those football clubs you're talking about were, what, 1870, 1880?

Yeah. Some of the top clubs, I 1877 Tom so so the the counties in cricket are very slightly you know 20 or 30 years earlier than that so John you um you mentioned Australia and in after the break we should look at the kind of the spread of cricket around the world but just one last thing on Victorian cricket and its growth. The phrase, it's not cricket, the kind of sentiments that were expressed in the poem with which Dominic opened this episode. The idea that playing cricket is somehow morally improving, that it's about sportsmanship, that it's about fair play. That it has a moral dimension. Yeah. That is not a feature of the game when you've got all these kind of snuff-taking rakes who are gambling and paying one-legged men and so on.

Where does this idea that, you know, you play up and play the game come from? Well, yeah, I don't know. I think I've always been really fascinated by that because I think there is something in the seeds of the game that give you an idea of fairness. It's a contest between batsman and bowler. And the contest is somehow, due to the dynamics of the game, the way it's scored, the length of the pitch and the equality between bat and ball, there's somehow a kind of fairness within the sport. the length of the pitch and the equality between bat and ball. Yeah.

There's somehow a kind of fairness within the sport, whereas if you do your best and you're good at it, you will succeed. But isn't there a counter-argument to that, that you mentioned WG Grace, and he's the Titanic figure in the history of cricket, really, but he's a notoriously bad sport. I mean, notorious for his gamesmanship. Yes, he's sort of, you know, there's the famous story about the guy, Charles

Courtright, the fast bowler knocking two of WG's three stumps out of the ground and saying to him, going already doctor, there's still one stump left. I mean, WG was yes, you would say that. They've come to watch me

bat, not you umpire, all that sort of thing. But still, I think, how would I say it? You know, he's still governed by the framework of the game. He can't get away with everything. These things we're talking about, they might be close decisions. They might be, you know, I could have gone this way, I could have gone that way. So he exploited his fame and the laws in some way.

But at the heart of the game is this contest that you might say gives it its fairness and its kind of moral quality if there is one. See, if I was being sceptical, Tom, and you won't like this, I would say that as cricket is eclipsed eventually or is rivaled by football, particularly for their hearts and minds of kind of the industrial, urban working classes, then it becomes very important for cricket's sort of the Tom Holland figures to sanctify it as this pastoral, idealised repository. Tom Holland figures, I don't sanctify it at all. You do. You probably think it's sacral. I mean haven't mentioned christianity yet but it's

i'm sure the only moments away yeah well i mean no i think tom should mention christianity because i think that whole notion of cricket as a you know as an upstanding moral force does come from the sort of muscular christianity idea of health and vigor and fair play yeah i think it very much comes yeah but but but i mean cricket is an industrial sport as well as a a rural sport i mean that's the whole that's the whole key to it it's played it you know in leeds and in manchester and in birmingham just as it's played in sunset and not just not as well well but i mean i'm joking i always remember the the um kind of blinding realization of why was it that football and cricket were played you know in industrial cities whereas rugby wasn't and the answer is is that you can play cricket and football on cobbled hard stones

yeah you know whereas rugby you can't because you've got to kind of throw yourself on the ground. It's going to be incredibly painful. So I think that, I mean, on this question of how cricket kind of bridges divides, another question from Luke, I don't know whether Luke, is cricket the ultimate metaphor for and symbol of British society cutting across the class and North-South divides the individual versus collective? And I think there is something to that. And it was definitely something that the British in the 19th century felt very, very kind of sentimental about.

And Dominic, you were like this. They contrasted it with France. What did they play? Pétanque? On the day the Bastille was stormed, the Earl of Winchelsea, who's a key figure, he's kind of behind the drawing up of the laws of cricket,

the sponsorship of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which is the MCC, ends up buying Lord's Cricket Ground, the most famous cricket ground in the world, in London. He was playing in the Hampshire-Kent match at Hambledon, which John mentioned, and he gets clean bowled by an agricultural labourer called William Bullen. This is on the day, the 14th of July or whatever? On the 14th of July, yeah.

1789. Yeah. And G.M. Trevelyan, the great historian, writing about this, observed, if the French nobility had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateau would never have been burnt. Rule Britannia. come back we should look at um the ambivalent role that cricket has played in imperial british imperial domination of the world and the way in which the the colonized have used cricket to fight back so we'll see you after the break i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q&A we pull back the

curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Now some of you may have heard a very exciting development, which is that we have been having so much fun doing this show that we have launched our very own community, The Rest Is History Club. You're very excited about this, aren't you, Tom?

I'm very excited about it. And what do you get? You get, well, I'll tell you one thing you get. You get every episode with no ads, including all the old episodes. So if you've, yeah, if you've already signed up to it, you won't be listening to this the days of the guardian saturday supplement of beer 52 of all our tremendous sponsors you'd be saying goodbye to all that which is a bit of a wrench i know however on top of that you would also get an extra episode every week it will go

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welcome back to the rest is history uh we are talking about the history of cricket. So we've done rakish origins. We have talked a little bit about the Victorians. And now we're going to look abroad. Now, here is an amazing fact. John, is this true? I read this online. I'm not ashamed to admit I'm reading it on Wikipedia. It says the first ever international cricket match took place between the United States and Canada in 1844.

Can that possibly be true? It is more than true. It's an established fact of the game. Yes, I mean, it's very odd that cricket did have this very brief hold and grip in the United States and Canada, mostly on the eastern seaboard, as you'd expect and as we'll come to discuss, because the Brits got over there and started playing it. And somehow, and I think no one's really worked out how and why, it loses that grip and in its place comes...

Well, John, you know, when the Pilgrim Fathers go and they have their first Christmas, and there are loads of people who've gone with them who aren't pilgrims, and they all go out to have a prayer on Christmas Day. And they come back and they find that they're playing cricket. These other people are playing cricket. So they confiscate their bat and ball, which I think is where America went wrong. That could be the exact moment.

I've heard it said that it's partly to do with Union soldiers in the American Civil War found it easier to play baseball than than cricket uh just to play an impromptu game is simpler and also that it's when after the american civil war that america has a much stronger sense of itself as an alternative to europe rather than a sort of a descendant of it so they need their own game as part of a kind of american nationalism and stuff i don't yeah that sounds a bit kind of retrofitted but uh okay but i mean it could be couldn't it it could be it really could be i mean i think i think the interesting thing is that and a lot of places that don't have cricket there is a game like cricket that has a sense of time and um a sort of an internal relation a game you can have an internal ongoing long relationship with like baseball like baseball

and baseball you could hold up as but but i think you know a lot of places do have equivalents but it's interesting so um america obviously rejects britain that's the whole point of it uh and and so in a sense as cricket becomes more and more identified with britain so it becomes more and more important i guess to america to have a sport that is not cricket the the contrast with that is australia which is likewise a settler society but where cricket really does put down massive routes very quickly um we i mean to the degree that so we have a question here from um and and i think that this touches on all kinds of fascinating issues from dan norcross who is of course a commentator on test match special um would love you to dwell a

little on the australian aboriginals tour of england in 1868 the team held its own and was largely well received across the country apart from york but returned to australia penniless and barely any of them played cricket seriously again so So in 1868, a team of indigenous Australians are coming over and playing cricket. I mean, that seems amazing. It does. I mean, I think, again, you know, we mentioned novelty earlier. And I think that that's a factor here. You know, this this idea that cricket loves that kind of thing. It's something to come and stare at. It's something that will fill up a day. I think the really, really interesting thing, and you are probably

far better qualified to talk about this than I am, about this tour is that the origin of the species, Darwin, had just come out. It'd been out for, i don't know 10 years or something like that maybe less than that uh when this team arrived and there's this kind of horrible now again talking retrospectively sort of goggle-eyed looking at them by the victor you know and descript you know horrible we would think of now horrible descriptions in the paper of how they looked, their hair, their beards, you know. So, yeah, you imagine being one of that team and how that must have been. Well, I mean, the stuff I'm reading here about it, extraordinary. So at the end of the games, they would put on an exhibition of boomerang and spear throwing. And a man called, one of them who was called Dicker Dick, would hold a narrow shield and people would pay to throw cricket balls at him. Yeah.

I mean, that would be, it's hard to see that being reintroduced into the game. But again, this is, yeah, it's like, it's these rich guys trying to fill up their time, isn't it? Let's go down to Lourdes. Let's see, yeah, after the game, we'll see if you can chuck the ball hardest at him. But what's, I mean, also what's fascinating about that, though,

is that it's presumably well before Australian national teams are coming over and playing England. Yeah, well, it's... And we're doing this against the backdrop of the Ashes that have just started in Australia. But what is it about... So tell us how the As come into being john and and why it is that england australia come to have this kind of epic quality this titanic i think purely

and simply it's because you could get there you know all of a sudden there was a you know by by boat there was a method of going somewhere and this is why you know the whole of cricket exists on these sort of victorian time scales you, it goes on for several days because people had nothing to do and they wanted to go and watch something that lasted for a while. Tours, cricket tours, and the way international cricket is structured is that one country goes off to play a series of matches against another country and they will stay in that country for several months while they do it, usually. I mean, some tours are slow, but the early tours would last for six months. So cricket's a summer game. You have to go somewhere where it's hot to play it.

So in the English winter, where do you go? You have to go to the Southern Hemisphere, essentially. So they set sail to Australia. The notion of internationals comes along again. It's something, you know, WG scores England's first Test Match 100. It arrives again a little too late for his prime. I thought you said it makes a Test Match a Test Match. Well, I mean, again, what makes a Test Match a Test Match?

It's played slightly longer than... So for people who know, Test Matches are international matches. Test Matches are international matches and they last. And people who don't really come from non-cricket playing countries, they last for five days. It can end in a draw. And not only do they last for five days, there are usually five of them in a series.

Yeah, and they break fatigue. I mean, that will be the thing that will really astound and love overseas listeners. So, yes, where does this, you know, this, again, I mean, I guess, you know, it's always famously said it's called test cricket because it is a test, you know, it's the ultimate test of time and skill and endurance and, you know, you're in a foreign... It's really difficult to, I mean, if you've played test cricket,

really very difficult to get a test cricketer out, Dominic. Oh, shut up. Let alone two, let alone two. But I don't think they were in their prime when you got them out, were they? They were test cricketers, Dominic. I got two test cricketers. I'm just putting that in. John, does he mention this a lot when you're playing in your team?

I do, yes. Let's not talk about it. The notion of international cricket, should we go back to that? Yes. England versus Australia becomes the first real contest. They're the first two test match playing nations. They can test the first test match. terribly free and it's so destructive to the english vision of themselves a couple of likely lads take a uh a piss-taking advert in in the in the times newspaper saying that um the yeah this this defeat is so terrible that they've burned the uh they've burned the remains of english cricket um and put them in in this little urn. And that becomes known as the ashes.

What is in the urn? I mean, I've seen it. What's in it? Supposedly. Supposedly. I mean, who knows? It's two bales, isn't it? It's the bales from the game. So in cricket, you have the stumps, which are what the bowlers aim at.

And there are three of those. And across the top of the stumps are a couple of smaller bits of wood, which are called the bales. And they have to be knocked off in order for a dismissal to occur and this is 1882 isn't it so this is the this is the first the first ashes test match yeah and then uh the contest is enjoined this it catches the imagination obviously and i think australia winning was a big part of that i think i think it was important australia won that because immediately well English said, well, we can't have that. We've got to win it back. So the contest, had England won the first 30 Ashes test matches incredibly easily, I Australia, you could argue that the Ashes kind of channel both an opportunity for Australians to demonstrate that they've emancipated themselves from the mother country, from the kind of,

you know, the colonialism with which Australia had been founded. But at the same time, because cricket is so distinctively English, it enables them to maintain ties as well. I mean, would you say that that's part of the role that cricket has played in Anglo-Australian relations? Yeah, I think so. I think it's that notion of, you know, in its simplest form, beating your own game, you know. And that's played out not just in England versus Australia.

Really, the cricket, the history of international cricket is the history of empire. Well, hold on, Dominic. John, before we come, just specifically on Australia. So the most famous, indeed, most notorious Ashes series becomes known as the Bodyline series. Yes. And that's in the 1930s. It's a tremendous name, isn't it? See, I think whoever came up with that, that made it historic as well, Bodyline. Okay, so just tell us about the Bodyline series and why that was,

I mean, it was much more than a sporting story. It was a huge crisis in Anglo-Australian relations and, in fact, in the entire fabric of the british empire yeah well well after after you know grace grace became the this this this defining cricketer and after grace there were lots of really good cricketers but uh in the 1920s and 30s comes along a player called donald bradman who probably even to this day remains sport's greatest outlier. By the statistics, Bradman is... Of every sport. Of every sport.

By the statistics, Bradman is between 30% and 40% better than anyone else who's ever played cricket. Better than WG Grace? Yes, by the statistics. So if we use statistics as a measure, there isn't another sport in which one person has been that far ahead of the field for as long as Bradman was ahead of the field and has remained ahead of the field. So Bradman comes along, immediately begins scoring runs at a rate that

no one has ever seen before. And England's captain, Douglas Jardine at times, as people know, I think he was actually Scottish, but he comes to represent England and empire and all of those things because he's the sort of guy you could imagine plays the national anthem before he goes to bed. Nothing wrong with that. As we all do, obviously. So he goes out to Australia with the aim of winning back the ashes from Bradman's Australia. And he comes up with a plan to combat Bradman.

And that plan is essentially for his bowlers to bowl it as fast as they can at Bradman's head and body. And the cricket ball is, you know, again, if you don't know anything about cricket, cricket ball is made of leather it has a cork interior it's rock it's very hard it's especially when it's new it's rock hard and cricket's a dangerous game people are you know the history of cricket is littered with people who've died playing it partly because the ball was very hard and is propelled towards you at 90 miles an hour from 22 yards away you don't have a lot of time to get out of the way and this this tactic of of um of jardines slightly more sophisticated than i've described but essentially it was built around you know uh physical danger and fear and and that goes back to this victorian moral sense of game. Is that a legitimate tactic?

Is it cricket? So they call it leg theory, don't they? Jardine didn't like it being called, you know, the term body line that's come to represent it. That certainly wasn't his term. His term was leg theory. Again, without giving you a description of how cricket's played, I can't tell you why that makes sense.

But it does make sense as a description of what it is. But essentially it causes an international incident. At government level, body line becomes a problem because by now you've got newsreel footage and people can see this happening that weren't at the grounds. And they see... Yeah, kind of ball thudding into the batsman and the batsman falling down.

The batsman falling to the ground. And Bradman, if we give you a kind of really simple overview of what he was doing, Bradman, every time he went into bat, would score around 100 runs, which is a lot of runs in cricket. Well, Jardine's tactic essentially halves that. So Bradman scores around 50 runs per inning. Just excellent captaincy, in my mind. So really, he just brings Bradman back to everyone's level.

That's what his tactic did. Why is it such an international incident? I mean, is this genuinely something that governments are kind of concerned about? Yeah, famously questions were asked in Parliament because, you know, at this point, cricket is representing something beyond cricket. But it's also because it's in the 30s. Britain is feeling nervous about the future of the empire. It's under geopolitical threat. And suddenly the Australians are saying there are two sides out there and only one is playing cricket yeah um that was not a very good australian accent by your standards tom no it wasn't only two sides

out there and only one's playing cricket much better much yeah and um australia has a sense of national identity post world war one doesn't it exactly yeah you know it's playing into all that it's playing yeah and uh i mean doug stardew even though he's scottish embodies for australians the absolute archetype of a kind of sinister english milord kind of yeah he's played but i didn't there's a brilliant uh well it wasn't brilliant but it was hugely enjoyable uh drama about it in which he was played by um the guy who plays elrond in lord of the rings. Hugo Weaving. Yes, Hugo Weaving. Yeah, he's great.

And it seems to Australians absolutely indicative of the British class system, that he's very posh. And the bowler that he's getting to do this incredibly violent bowling is Harold Larwood. He's been rustled up from a Nottinghamshire coal mine. He's D.H. Lawrence. He's D.H. Lawrence. And of course, all the blame ends up being dumped on Harold Larwood,

not on Jardine. Not on Jardine, yeah. Well, I mean, Jardine was unrepentant about it and had that view that it was a legitimate tactic and he just exploited the laws of the game, which had been done since time immemorial. So Australia, it's two predominantly white countries playing one another.

In the West Indies, in India, it's different because there are additional dynamics there, which are particularly focused in the West Indies around issues of slavery and race. Well, mean the west indies yeah we well sorry we should quickly go back to empire and say if you if you look on the map of of test playing nations international cricket nations although it's a bit bigger now you you might as well have drawn the british empire on the map because it's in India and it's in Australia and it's in the West Indies.

But the extraordinary thing about the West Indies is that it doesn't exist. It exists only as a cricket team. It's a collection of autonomous islands. And I think it exists in two forms. It exists as a university. There's a university of West Indies and there's a West Indies cricket team.

But those are the only two places in which it does exist. And yet it comes to represent something enormous to that region, to those people and to the diaspora as it spreads out. And as, you know, the Windrush generation come to England and make lives here, it assumes huge significance in their lives and not just as a game of cricket. And when did the West Indies start playing test cricket? Well, they come into it when most of these others start coming along. England and Australia play away together for 20 or 30 years and then you get the West Indies coming along.

So you're talking about the early part of the last century and then by the 1950s you've also got uh pakistan and you've got india and then sri lanka join even later than that and so over the course of the century all of these places come and join and start playing cricket do you think i mean do you think that the it's it's quite a kind of complicated dynamic, isn't it? Because it's not just, so for the British, the British associate cricket with their own civilization, it's a marker of their,

you know, their, their values, their, their kind of everything that they see the British empire at its best as embodied teamwork, sportsmanship, those things.

And so therefore for say, you know, the therefore, for, say, the planters in the Caribbean or for Maharajas in India, it's a way of basically kind of sucking up to the British. It's a way of kind of aligning themselves with the values of the colonial power. But then that enables the roots to be put down, but then it gets taken up by people, by the kind of the masses, and becomes a way of kind of fighting back against British claims to supremacy. And the West Indies is the

most kind of dramatic illustration of that. Because, you know, the roots of cricket in the Caribbean do go back to a time where you have, you know, where the aristocrats and it's the bowlers who are the kind of the peasantry. In the Caribbean, it's even more kind of dramatic. And that, you know, slaves are being employed basically to bowl at the masters, which is why increasingly they bowl faster and faster and faster to try and make the masters hot. And so that's kind of the tradition of fast bowling in the West Indies that you still get. But of course, to stand at the wicket and to smack around white bowlers for a black batsman, again, I mean, it's an incredible. It's amazingly symbolic, isn't it? You know, that's the, I mean, and also for.

Can I quote you a line from the Whalers? Yeah. Slave driver, the table is turned, catch a fire. Yeah. But isn't there that famous moment in the 1970s when the England captain, what is his name? Tony Gregg. Tony Gregg.

He says he wants to make the West Indies grovel. And there's this huge furore, isn't there? Because that scene is basically... He's a South African. Although he's captain of England, he's South African. A rhetorical kind of reassertion of the old master-slave dynamic. I mean, that's maybe a bit harsh on Tony Greig, but that's exactly how it's interpreted.

Well, look, that's one of the hugely significant times in West Indies cricket. The first is probably, you should say, in 1950, was when they first beat England in a test match. And the first time that all of the other test playing nations beat England in a test match, it takes on an extraordinary significance for them. That plays out through the history of the game.

But then, yeah, come the 1970s, and that tour that you're talking about happened in 1976, the summer of 1976 in england which is you know as you all know dominic was just a time you know it was the time of punk rock it was the time it was garbage in the streets and you know all of this stuff's going on james callahan he is yeah glad we got him in yeah a backdrop to all jesus and james callahan and and here come this cricket team and this was the first time i ever went to a test match as a little kid here comes here come this west indies cricket team was the first time I ever went to a test match as a little kid. Here comes this West Indies cricket team.

And they are like gods. I mean, they are like gods among men. They bowl faster. They hit the ball further. They're incredibly athletic in the field. They're playing a new kind of cricket that no one's seen before. I mean, it begins a revolution in the game. And they're sort of summed up by the man

who becomes their leading batsman, Viv Richards, who's this incredibly, his nickname was Smoking Joe because he looked a bit like Joe Frazier and he had that kind of boxer's physique, incredible Roman nose, and he carried himself with such. He's my absolute hero.

Yeah, and mine. And I think, you know, the amazing thing that that team did, certainly for me and for a lot of people, is it just made it impossible to think of West Indies and West Indies as anything other than superior beings. Yeah.

Because they were just, they were, you know, the England team at that time were led by Tony Gregg who was a South African but was a six foot seven sort of beanpole guy who ran in a strange way and batted in a strange way

they had David Steele in the team who was grey haired in his thirties wore glasses kind of John Major didn't he he was known as the bank clerk who went to war they had they had Derek Underwood as a spin bowler who he sort of looked like an Oxford Don you know he's

prematurely bowled his feet splayed out when he ran and you're comparing them to these these guys who are like they must have looked at the England teams thought what what is this but then if we're talking about emblematic figures right I mean if you fast forward just a little bit, you have one of what somebody who I would see as one of the absolutely most sort of richly emblematic figures of British life in my lifetime, a British kind of political and cultural life. And that is Lord Botham of Brexit.

So Ian Botham, working class conservative, Thatcherite. And then later on, a hugely outspoken Eurosceptic. And it was going to be James Bond, wasn't he, Dominic? It was going to be James Bond. And a personification of a kind of Georgian Englishness that I think has reasserted itself in the last few decades. Also, let us say, in fairness to Lord Botham of Brexit, Viv Richard's best friend.

Yeah, exactly. Which is really interesting. And early teammate. They famously shared a flat together. So a sort of populist hero, basically. A populist hero who comes along and never defeats the West Indies, in fairness. West Indies are too good even for both of them. Well, he always fails against them.

He can never do anything against them. But he does slay Australia and he does reassert English dominance in the ashes, which makes him into this folk hero. Yeah. So, John, I mean, I think I think it's the kind of the friendship between Botham and Richards, England's greatest, West Indies greatest batsman, is a reminder that cricket can, you know, it's not just about kind of racial oppression. No, I mean, it's not just about kind of um racial oppression no i mean it's about friendship however i mean it is in in against the backdrop of kind of recent scandals involving racism in accusations of racism at yorkshire in particular um with south asian players uh we should i think we should look at the role that cricket plays in because we're running out of time we should look at the role that cricket plays in, because we're running out of time, we should look at the role that cricket has played in India,

in Pakistan, and perhaps the role that it plays within racial dynamics in England now. Because basically, cricket now is fundamentally an Indian sport rather than an English one. Would you say that's an exaggeration? Oh, no, not at all. Yeah, India is the heart of the game now. It's the financial centre of the game.

Cultural centre. But it's also where the soul of the game is because the population is so obsessed with cricket in a way that we're not in England and increasingly they're not in the West Indies anymore. The Australians are, but obviously they're a much smaller population. So no no India is

where the soul of the game is now There was a question, I can't actually see it on the list we've got but somebody asked a question, do you think that India against Pakistan in cricket is the biggest sporting fixture in the world? I do, well one thing I would mention really quickly before that

I know we haven't got loads of time but it was a game again that I was at as a, as a young, a young lad. And it was the 1983 world cup final. Which they've just made a film about. They have just made a film about, which was India versus West Indies.

And this was the moment of which, if you, if you were saying there was a moment at which India began to emerge as the center of the game that we're talking about, it was at this game when as game when, as massive underdogs, they defeated West Indies, who had been at that point twice champions. And there was a tremendously symbolic moment when Kapil Dev, the Indian captain, caught out Viv Richards from a high,

steepling catch and the whole of Lour's holding its breath as this ball falls to earth. And Capple holds the catch and dismisses the great Richards. And this is the moment at which India comes out. A new India is born. Well, before then, there's no doubt and there is no doubt. I don't know how to say this in the right way, really. There was a kind of cultural cringe in India, a kind of feeling amongst Indians that they were somehow beneath still the hand of empire. And this was a moment,

I think, when actually that began to lift and they got underneath chapel. They all stood up, their chests puffed out, and they began to think, hang on, you know, we're a serious cricket team here, we're a serious force. And that's the moment, that's the moment it happens. And it starts to build and build. And, you know, obviously, India-Pakistan is always going to be a ferocious rivalry. The Pakistan come along in 1992 and win the World Cup. And that becomes a moment for them under Imran Khan,

who is now the president of Pakistan, was the captain of the Pakistan cricket team. So you can probably see how important the link is between cricket and the rest of society in Pakistan. But the India-Pakistan relationship is always played out under India's power. So India, for example, now has the most famous cricket league in the world, which is called the Indian Premier League. And it doesn't allow Pakistani players in it.

That's the one nation they don't allow. But that's why when India meet Pakistan in international cricket contests, that's why it's so huge, isn't it? And why in the recent World Cup when Pakistan beat India, actually crushed India. It was such a, you know, there was glee around the world because everyone likes to see the, you know, the bully get a black eye. And that was what Pakistan inflicted. But yeah, I mean, there are, you know, we could have another three hours on why Pakistan and India is such a contest, but yes, it is.

Well, maybe we should save that for later then. We definitely should um yeah uh john i mean one one final question um i mean we've been talking about kind of international cricket professional cricket uh the great stars of cricket but i mean you know cricket continues to be played uh by amateurs as well oh no for god's sake. It does. And I wonder, is there maybe a particular innings, perhaps even a particular shot played by an amateur player that has a kind of historic resonance? Think very carefully about the answers that the listeners will want to hear.

A mythological resonance. You see, this has so come to infect my mind so often. I mean, I would say that, yeah, amateur cricket. Let's first of all, a really quick analogy. If you imagine an iceberg that's sort of 10% above the surface of the water, the 10%, that's the professional game. The 90% under the water is guys like us who like to play, guys and girls who like to play at the weekend

and play amateur cricket very badly. In the context of playing amateur cricket incredibly badly, you can still have triumph and disaster. Can you think of one? Maybe it's been photographed. And really, this is a tale of the social media age, I think, in that Tom's one great moment as a batsman. Well, one moment.

I think great moment is probably a bit much, isn't it? Dominic, you didn't remember cricket. But, you know, you talk about symbolic resonance, Dominic. We're talking about the playing fields of Eton. I mean, where else, if you were going to strike the one shot of your life, So we should explain, shouldn't we, to listeners, that this is, I hit a six, and a six is where you hit the ball so hard, so well, so luckily, that it goes over the kind of boundary rope,

which contains the which contains the cricket pitch i was thinking about it's when i was toying with how to introduce this podcast and i went with my sir henry newbolt power yes the alternative which i had tracked down this morning was one of the grey friar school stories in which by a stroke of extraordinary chance billy bunter the fat owl of the remove, hits a six. And I thought, I won't read that out because that's a bit mean to Tom to compare him to Billy Bunter. No, not at all. But now I wish I had.

No, not at all. Because the point is, it's not just that I hit it, but that it was photographed. And listeners who want to know this, I will make sure to include it on my Twitter feed. The narcissism of the Instagram age. That's exactly what it is. It's me playing the game, playing up, playing up and playing the game. As you have done, John, can't thank you enough. I think it is time to...

On that bombshell. Draw stumps, retire the team. Take the bails. Retire to the pub. Thanks very much, everyone um thank you uh enjoy the ashes if you like cricket uh i hope that some of this has made sense if you don't goodbye thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

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