The Wicket, as we collect from a MS. furnished by an old friend to the late William Ward, Esq., was, in the early days of the Hambledon Club, one foot high and two feet wide, consisting of two stumps only, with one stump laid across. Thus, straight balls passed between, and, what we now call, well pitched balls would of course rise over. Where, then, was the encouragement to block, when fortune would so often usurp the place of science? And, as to the bat, look at the picture of cricket as played in the old Artillery Ground; the bat is curved at the end like a hockey stick, or the handle of a spoon, and—as common implements usually are adapted to the work to be performed—you will readily believe that in olden time the freest hitter was the best batsman. The bowling was all along the ground, hand and eye being everything, and judgment nothing; because, the art originally was to bowl under the bat. The wicket was too low for rising balls; and the reason we hear sometimes of the Blockhole was, not that the blockhole originally denoted guard, but because between these two-feet-asunder stumps there was cut a hole big enough to contain the ball, and (as now with the school boy’s game of rounders) the hitter was made out in running a notch by the ball being popped into this hole (whence popping crease) before the point of the bat could reach it.
Did we say Running a Notch? unde Notch? What wonder ere the days of useful knowledge, and Sir William Curtis’s three R’s,—or, reading, writing, and arithmetic,—that natural science should be evolved in a truly natural way: what wonder that notches on a stick, like the notches in the milk-woman’s tally in Hogarth’s picture, should supply the place of those complicated papers of vertical columns, which subject the bowling, the batting, and the fielding to a process severely and scrupulously just, of analytical observation, or differential calculus! Where now there sit on kitchen chairs, with ink bottle tied to a stump the worse for wear, Messrs. Caldecourt and Bayley (’tis pity two such men should ever not be umpires), with an uncomfortable length of paper on their knees, and large tin telegraphic letters above their heads; and where now is Lillywhite’s printing press, to hand down every hit as soon as made on twopenny cards to future generations; there, or in a similar position, old Frame, or young Small (young once: he died in 1834, aged eighty) might have placed a trusty yeoman to cut notches with his bread-and-bacon knife on an ashen stick. Oh! ’tis enough to make the Hambledon heroes sit upright in their graves with astonishment to think, that in the Gentlemen and Players’ Match, in 1850, the cricketers of old Sparkes’ Ground, at Edinburgh, could actually know the score of the first innings in London, before the second had commenced!
But when we say that the old players had little or nothing of the defensive, we speak of the play before 1780, when David Harris flourished: for William Beldham distinctly assured us that the art of bowling over the bat by “length balls” originated with the famous David; an assertion, we will venture to say, which requires a little, and only a little, qualification. Length bowling, or three-quarter balls, to use a popular, though exploded, expression, was introduced in David’s time, and by him first brought to perfection. And what rather confirms this statement is, that the early bowlers were very swift bowlers,—such was not only David, but the famous Brett, of earlier date, and Frame of great renown: a more moderate pace resulted from the new discovery of a well pitched bail ball.
The old players well understood the art of twisting, or bias bowling. Lambert, “the little farmer,” says Nyren, “improved on the art, and puzzled the Kent men in a great match, by twisting the reverse of the usual way,—that is, from the off to leg stump.” Tom Walker tried what Nyren calls the throwing-bowling, and defied all the players of the day to withstand this novelty; but, by a council of the Hambledon Club, this was forbidden, and Willes, a Kent man, had all the praise of inventing it some twenty years later. In a match of the Hambledon Club in 1775, it was observed, at a critical point of the game, that the ball passed three times between Small’s two stumps without knocking off the bail; and then, first, a third stump was added; and, seeing that the new style of balls which rise over the bat rose also over the wickets, then but one foot high, the wicket was altered to the dimensions of 22 inches by 6, at which measure it remained till about 1814, when it was increased to 26 inches by 8, and again to its present dimensions of 27 inches by 8 in 1817; when, as one inch was added to the stumps, two inches were added to the width between the creases. The changes in the wicket are represented in the foregoing woodcut. In the year 1700, the runner was made out, not by striking off the transverse stump—we can hardly call it a bail—but by popping the ball in the hole therein represented.
David Harris’ bowling, Fennex used to say, introduced, or at least established and fixed, a steady and defensive style of batting. “I have seen,” said Sparkes, “seventy or eighty runs in an innings, though not more than eight or nine made at Harris’s end.” “Harris,” said an excellent judge, who well remembers him, “had nearly all the quickness of rise and the height of delivery, which characterises overhand bowling, with far greater straightness and precision. The ball appeared to be forced out from under his arm with some unaccountable jerk, so that it was delivered breast high. His precision exceeded anything I have ever seen, in so much that Tom Walker declared that, on one occasion, where turf was thin, and the colour of the soil readily appeared, one spot was positively uncovered by the repeated pitching of David’s balls in the same place.”
“This bowling,” said Sparkes, “compelled you to make the best of your reach forward; for if a man let the ball pitch too near and crowd upon him, he very rarely could prevent a mistake, from the height and rapidity with which the ball cut up from the ground.”—This account agrees with the well-known description of Nyren. “Harris’s mode of delivering the ball was very singular. He would bring it from under his arm by a twist, and nearly as high as his arm-pit, and with this action push it, as it were, from him. How it was that the balls acquired the velocity they did by this mode of delivery, I never could comprehend. His balls were very little beholden to the ground; it was but a touch and up again; and woe be to the man who did not get in to block them, for they had such a peculiar curl they would grind his fingers against the bat.”
And Nyren agrees with my informants in ascribing great improvement in batting, and he specifies, “particularly in stopping” (for the act of defence, we said, was not essential to the batsman in the ideas of one of the old players), to the bowling of David Harris, and bears testimony to an assertion, that forward play, that is meeting at the pitch balls considerably short of a half volley, was little known to the oldest players, and was called into requisition chiefly by the bowling of David Harris. Obviously, with the primitive fashion of ground bowling, called sneakers, forward play could have no place, and even well-pitched balls, like those of Peter Stevens, alias Lumpy, of moderate pace might be played with some effect, even behind the crease; but David Harris, with pace, pitch, and rapid rise combined, imperatively demanded a new invention, and such was forward play about 1800. Old Fennex, who died, alas! in a Middlesex workhouse, aged eighty, in 1839 (had his conduct been as straightforward and upright as his bat, he would have known a better end), always declared that he was the first, and remained long without followers; and no small praise is due to the boldness and originality that set at nought the received maxims of his forefathers before he was born or thought of; daring to try things that, had they been ordinarily reasonable, would not, of course, have been ignored by Frame, by Purchase, nor by Small. The world wants such men as Fennex; men, who will shake off the prejudices of birth, parentage, and education, and boldly declare that age has taught them wisdom, and that the policy of their predecessors, however expensively stereotyped, must be revised and corrected and adapted to the demands of a more inquiring generation. “My father,” said Fennex, “asked me how I came by that new play, reaching out as no one ever saw before.” The same style he lived to see practised, not elegantly, but with wonderful power and effect by Lambert, “a most severe and resolute hitter;” and Fennex also boasted that he had a most proficient disciple in Fuller Pilch: though I suspect that, as “poeta nascitur non fit,”—that is, that all great performers appear to have brought the secret of their excellence into the world along with them, and are not the mere puppets of which others pull the strings—Fuller Pilch may think he rather coincided with, than learnt from, William Fennex.
Now the David Harris aforesaid, who wrought quite a revolution in the game, changing cricket from a backward and a slashing to a forward and defensive game, and claiming higher stumps to do justice to his skill—this David, whose bowling was many years in advance of his generation, having all the excellence of Lillywhite’s high delivery, though free from all imputation of unfairness—this David rose early, and late took rest, and ate the bread of carefulness, before he attained such distinction as—in these days of railroads, Thames tunnels, and tubular gloves and bridges—to deserve the notice of our pen. “For,” said John Bennett, “you might have seen David practising at dinner time and after hours, all the winter through;” and “many a Hampshire barn,” said Beagley, “has been heard to resound with bats and balls as well as threshing.”