Get a Hundred

Waited all year for this day. I use to sit in an east London office and stare out the window at a tower bloc named after Sir Stafford Cripps. As tower blocs go, it wasn’t too bleak but if I looked long and hard enough, I could see the Close  emerging out of  the brickwork.  I wasn’t on anything. It was the job. It was hallucinatory at all times.

My days were filled with sharks and Nazis. I was the wolly writing genius ideas handed down by ‘execs.’ Every day wasn’t a shark and Nazi day but it felt like one. Summoning visions of cricket grounds from blank stares into the distance brought a little relief.

The Close is one of a few grounds with a stunning backdrop of Victorian buildings spanning the breadth of one end. It is part of cricket lore. I’ll bore you as to why later on- if you don’t know already.

In at 9,  so plenty of time to wander round. I went down  memory lane, that cluttered and foggy street, where all the stores sell dodgy recollections.  I passed the spot where I learned the game. It was on a lower field next to today’s game. Cricket came into my life here. It took of hold, took root and  never let go.    

The Close

The fons et origo meorum malorumwas born on a sun kissed spring day. Dressed in yellowy white Viyella shirts and grey flannel shorts, I was one of sixty or so boys, aged seven to nine trialling for the Under10a, b and c teams. An hour or two later, we were split into those who could play- the A’s; those who could play a bit- the B’s and those who couldn’t play at all- the C’s

Our names were read out. Somehow I was chosen for the A squad. How I don’t know. Cricket was foreign to me. No one I knew played it in Nigeria. Although years later I found out my great uncle in law was captain of the Nigeria cricket team, a stalwart of the game in West Africa and that cricket flourishes in small enclaves there. But no one in my immediate family had  played the game.

Don’t remember being thrilled when I heard my name called for the A team; do recall shielding my eyes from the sun, sitting down picking daisies and tearing blades of grass from the earth, wishing I was old enough to do athletics. You had to wait until you were in the under eleven age group for this choice. Thus, all boys under ten had to play cricket. There was no choice.

In a series of drills- how to hold a bat, play a defensive shot, catch, bowl, field and throw, I’d shown that I might be able to play cricket. ‘N’, a decent and caring man made this call. He was first my cricket master.

When I make that long walk back to the boundary, greeted by the familiar silence of failure, knowing glances and muttered condolences from assembled team mates, I sometimes think back on N’s decision. If only he’d stuck me in the C’s. I wouldn’t have bothered with the game if I’d been told I was crap at the outset.

Instead life as a cricketer took a different turn. I flattered to deceive in successive teams from that day. ’N' arguably brought more misery to my life than any other human being. That day he gave an eight year old boy false hopes and fucked up his adult summers.

Any reasonable person would laugh this off. But a batsmen in the immediate seconds of a dismissal or in the minute, hours, days and sometimes years it takes to accept that an innings has come to an end, will tell you that reason has nothing to do with cricket.

I should have given up a long time ago but the game got in my blood from the very beginning. That I couldn’t have started at a finer nursery of the game only rubs salt into the wounds of my current plight.

The Under 10 trial took place on the same turf a 13 year old boy plundered 628 runs in one match. A small obscure plaque on the boundary wall commemorates the feat. It reads “upon this ground in 1899 A.E.J Collins in a junior house match in June 1899 scored 628 not out. This innings is the highest recorded in the history of cricket.”

628, 628, 628 runs- all scored by one person, not by a man but a boy.

Collins’ heroics made no impression though. I was always late for practice and raced past the inscription to face a wrathful master in charge. Few though, man or boy can fathom what Collins did. On Thursday, June 22, 1899 13 year old Arthur Edward James Collins strode to the wicket with his opposing captain, won the toss, looked at the wicket (guesswork on my part) and didn’t hesitate to say we’ll have a bat. Collins opened the batting and shook the world.

The match started at 3 pm- the time for practice after lessons during the week. The contest was an in-house grudge match; a fixture between the under 14’s of Clark’s and North Town houses of Clifton College. No doubt this has all the makings of a Python sketch and many will ask just how good or bad were these boys? But these matches were keenly contested. They were not great mismatches. It wasn’t Australia v Paddlewick Green. Five of the boys would go on to play for the Clifton XI a few years later and two of them would Captain the XI. Given the preeminence of cricket at the school in the late 19th century and the many great cricketers it reared in this era- two epoch defining test cricketers in Townsend and Tylecote and dozens of Gloucestershire players and good number of  blues- the standards would have been quite high; well ‘highish.’ Truth is I’ve got no idea how crap they were.

Neverthless Collins’ deeds require one to suspend disbelief. Collins batted for 4 days in a game that lasted five days. Saturday was reserved for fixtures against other schools and Sunday was the Sabbath. The game ran till Wednesday. Collins batted for six hours 45 minutes. I don’t think I’ve batted three hours this season.

You’d think Collins was a cruel Flashmanesque boy. He had to be flawed in some way. What else explains his brutal and unrelenting demolition of the opposition? Sadly, he was a modest flaxen haired boy whose peers described as lacking ‘side’- meaning he had no front or swagger about him. To further underline his heroic credentials, he was also an orphan. Yet to mass such a huge score, there had to be something odd about him. At some stage you would have thought his conscience said to him ‘I’ve had enough of this. It’s a bit unfair. This lot are bloody are terrible.’

Perhaps he did think this and tried his best to get out. North Town dropped Collins on 80, 100 and 140, 400, 556, 605, 619. I doubt he was being charitable though. I know how easy it is to get out. If he wanted to give it away, he could have. He gave chances but these were small lapses in concentration and not overconfidence. With so many runs under his belt, overconfidence should have made him try the outrageous; hit the ball harder, further, higher.

 After all, he would have been right to think at 200, 300, 400 or 500, ‘I can play any shot’. He should have played across the line, he should have tried to hit one too hard, missed a straight one and been bowled. That he didn’t points to a boy with overdeveloped powers of concentration. We all know how tiring batting can be. On the few occasions I’ve batted longer than an hour concentrating has been nigh impossible.

Back to Collins. On Friday, day two, most of the school, well wishers, bystanders and the local press had formed a crowd that cheered and acclaimed the stocky little hero when he passed Andrew Stoddart’s world record score of 485. He finished on 509 with the score at 680 for 8. Wretched North Town must have thought the carnage was almost over. They needed two more wickets. If they could keep Collins off strike and bowl the other batsmen out, their humiliation might end early Monday. But North Town dropped Collins again on 556 on Monday. They did take another wicket to leave Collins on 598.

It looks like Collins slowed up on the Monday. North Town must have offered him a single as often as possible and kept him of the strike. On Monday Collins scored less than a 100 runs but there was only 55 minutes available for play that day- I don’t know why. On Tuesday 27th, North Town dropped Collins again on 605 and 619. After 25 minutes play their suffering came to an end when 11 year old Victor Fuller Eberle the youngest boy on the field who had dropped Collins on 400, caught Thomas Redfern, the last man and  my favourite alias for signing into places I shouldn’t be in. 

When Eberle dropped Collins on 400 there was a huge groan from his team mates. When he caught Redfern, he was probably equally unpopular. Collins and the crowd must have had 700 on their minds. And from there , who’s to say he wouldn’t have got a 1000. Collins was out of partners and his house out of luck. His innings consisted one six, four fives, 31 fours, 33 threes, 146 twos and 87 singles. 628 out of 836 runs were Collins’s.

Collins hadn’t finished with the hapless boys of North Town. After four days in the field North Town, gave up the game by Wednesday, the fifth day. Collins captured half of their wickets; taking 11 wickets for 63 runs. Abject North Town were dismissed for 87 and 61.

In all fairness North Town were not terrible. They bowled Clark’s house for 208 minus Arthur’s 628. Exactly what the standard for late Victorian under 14 house matches was, is not something any sane human being should spend time pondering. I can only recall my own experience of house matches in the 80s and 90s- a century later. They were not exceptionally easy contests or great mismatches. Every house had one or two able players carrying a team of average cricketers. You never took on the Blind XI. Neither did Collins I reckon.

In 1938 JW Hall one of the scorers in the match wrote in a letter to the Times “the bowling probably deserved all the lordly contempt with which Collins treated it, sending a considerable number of pulls, full pitch over the fives courts into the swimming baths to the danger of the occupants.” Since Hall was there, it’s hard to argue with his view on how crap North Town were. But look in the scorebook. The records still show North Town weren’t that bad. The highest scorer after Collins were extras at 43. The best batsman on Collins’ team made 42. North Town were not a bunch of no hopers then.

The ground was postage stamp size. I did not score more than twenty on the pitch. I was eight though. The ground was an under 10s pitch when I played on it. The 13 year old Collins would have found it contemptibly small. It was 60 yard longs end to end. Its width was perverse. One side was less than 30 yards, the other seemed endless, over 100 yards.

Several cricket matches were played on the 100 yard long boundary in my day. Games took place side by side and fielders often crossed into adjacent matches to retrieve balls. All runs to the long boundary had to be run in Collins’s time and hits to the short boundaries were worth two. He ran one six, four fives, 31 fours, 33 threes and 87 singles; 326 in total. This was hard physical work requiring stamina and strength. In the modern sports science lingo, he used aerobic and anaerobic energy. For endurance and stamina to bat over long periods, Collins would have drained his aerobic capacity.

Over the short intense seconds to strike the ball and run between wickets, he required anaerobic energy. Draw on both forms of energy and you burn out. Collins scored 500 in 2 days, over 4 hours in 2 afternoons. How he didn’t flag and get out over those first two days is a mystery. This has to be the stand out fact. He didn’t get out. Many cricketers will swear that the worse the bowling is, the easier it is to get out. You lose concentration because you think it’s a doddle.

What of Collins in later life? The cricket professional at the college noted that Collins “likes to jump in and have a bang and though very quick and possessed of a good eye, he is still far too reckless to achieve permanent distinction, unless he improves.” Prescient stuff since Collins did not go on play first class cricket.

21 years before Collins another boy at the school one Edmund Ferdinando Sutton Tylecote -some name hey- also achieved the world record for the highest innings. The previous record in all cricket was 278. In 1868 Tylecote scored 404 not out for Classical v Modern. Like the Collins match this was another in-house grudge affair played in the afternoon.

‘Classical’ were boys who studied Greek, Latin, Maths and Ancient History. They took a sniffy view of the Moderns who studied Sciences and other new disciplines like History, Geography, and English. The teams were a lot older in Tylecote’s match. Tylecote was 19 and they played on a large outfield. Again there were local rules. Each days play started at 2.30 pm and ended at 5.30. It was a one innings match but every one had to bat. There were no declarations laws as yet.

Modern mustered a 100 runs between them and took two hours to do so. Classical replied with 630. The boundaries were right at the edge of a large ground known as the Close. Both square and horizontal of the wicket can measure over a 100 yards. On this mammoth field, Tylecote who was Captain of the XI ran one seven, five fives, 21 fours, 39 threes, 42 twos and 87 singles. All hits out the ground scored four. There were no sixes. Tylecote opened the innings at 4.30 on Saturday 22nd May.

Tylecote reached 34 on Saturday. Before play resumed on Monday, Ferdinando wrote prize winning verse, sat and won a Maths exhibition to Balliol, wrote an opera, felled 70 trees, made love to 20 Bristol virgins, set a world record for the 440 yds, won a fortune playing cards till dawn on Monday, took a light breakfast after, then swam from Bristol to Bath, rested for 15 mins before scoring 165 runs from 2.30 to 5.30.pm. He batted for 150 mins and ran for every minute he batted. He ran 20.2 metres every minute.

On Tuesday Tylecote passed the existing world record of every of 278 and became the first man to score a triple century. When the chapel clock struck 5.30 Tylecote was 404 not out. Classical were 630 for 9. Tylecote scored 205 runs in two-and-a-half hours that afternoon; faster than a run a minute. Unlike Collins Tylecote gave no chances and he never slowed up. It would be easy to write this off as another one sided slaughter but Modern were not abysmal. Again, look in the scorebook. Classical’s next highest batsman scored 52. Modern’s highest score was 49. Minus Tylecote’s score Classical only ran up 226; a mere 116 runs more than modern.

In Modern’s defence Tylecote entered cricket folklore with his later achievements. He played for England, Oxford and Kent scored a decisive 66 to beat Australia in their own backyard to regain the Ashes and is commemorated in verse on the famous urn- the ashes. The deeds of Tylecote and Collins lie in very distant pavilions. Tylecote lived a longish and happy life whereas Captain Arthur Collins was killed in the first months of World War One. The war also claimed the lives of his two brothers.