And is it not curious to see how the rules were made and modified to meet the occasions as they arose. The misfortune of that
Honest Lumpy who did ‘low,
He ne’er could bowl but o’er a brow—
in bowling so many times between the stumps of the too greatly blessed Small—whence the introduction of the third stump. And White with his barn-door bat, from “Ryegate,” as it pleases them to spell it, compelling the use of the gauge.
We are too apt to think of the laws as “struck off at one time,” like the American Constitution, instead of regarding them as something of slow growth in the past, that will have to grow, with our growth, in the future. We shall get into trouble if we regard them as something too sacred to touch and do not legislate as occasion arises.
We have altered them greatly since that meeting at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall in 1774, when they seem first to have been committed to writing, and by the end of the twentieth century it is likely that we shall have modified them considerably from this present form. We have a notion that our forefathers played the game in such a sportsmanlike manner, taking no possible advantage but such as was perfectly open and above-board, that they required scarcely any rules to guide them, but some sad things that the stern historian has to notice about the influence that betting had at one time on cricket—this, and also a sentence or two from these very memoranda of Mr. Ward, whom Nyren extols as the mirror of all cricketing chivalry—may show us, I think, that our cricketing forefathers had something human in them too. How is this for a piece of artful advice? “If you bring forward a fast bowler as a change, contrive, if fortune so favours you, that he shall bowl his first ball when a cloud is passing over, because, as this trifling circumstance frequently affects the sight of the striker, you may thereby stand a good chance of getting him out.” And again, a little lower on the same page: “Endeavour, by every means in your power—such as, by changing the bowling, by little alterations in the field, or by any excuse you can invent—to delay the time, that the strikers may become cold or inactive.”
A very cunning cricketer, this Mr. Ward.
Previously he had said: “If two players are well in, and warm with getting runs fast, and one should happen to be put out, supply his place immediately, lest the other become cold and stiff.” Now just compare these two last suggestions with each other, you will say, I think, that the last is fair and just and proper counsel, instilling a precaution that you have every right to take, but the former, according to the modern sense of what is right and sportsmanlike, seems to me to be counselling something perilously near the verge of sharp practice. You send your man out quickly, that the other may not grow cold, and what happens? Your purpose is defeated by the bowler and field purposely dawdling in order that the man may grow cold. It does not strike one as quite, quite right, though no doubt it is not against the rules. But it is tricky, a little tricky. And so again we draw a date, without his suspecting it, of a new moral epoch, from our invaluable Mr. Ward. About 1833, or a little later, we grew a trifle more delicate and particular in some small points of cricketing behaviour and sportsmanlike dealing. The betting, and the like evil practices at one time connected with the game, were a grosser scandal which carried their own destruction with them.
If any man, therefore, can throw light on these three dark points, I shall be very grateful to him—the date at which the first high wicket was narrowed down to 6 inches, the date at which the bowler ceased to have the pitching of the wicket, and the present habitation of that famous piece of old iron, the gauge used on the barn-door bat of White of Ryegate. Nyren, the matchless historian of the game, reveals himself, in his little history, as a very estimable man, of some matchless qualities for his task—an unbounded love of his subject and a sweet nature perfectly free of the slightest taint of jealousy. He writes of no other cricketing societies, except incidentally, than of those men of Hambledon in Hampshire. Quorum pars magna fui, as he says, with a single explosion of very proper pride, and a note appended thereto explaining apologetically that he has some certain knowledge of Latin. But after this single expression, very fully justified, for he was the beloved father of the Hambledon Club for years, he speaks of himself again hardly at all, just as if he had no hand in its successes, preferring to find some generous word to say of all the rest—of Beldham, Harris, Aylward, Lumpy. Beldham was not nearly so handsome to him, speaking of him to Mr. Pycroft. “Old Nyren was not half a player as we reckon now,” was Beldham’s verdict. However, the old man was fifty then.
At least he was a very good type of an Englishman and cricketer, whatever his class as a player, or he could never have written that book. And how much Hambledon may have owed to Nyren we can never know. As it is, Hambledon has the credit that Nyren specially claims for it of being the Attica, the centre of early civilisation, of the cricketing world. But there may have been other Atticas—only, like the brave men before Agamemnon, unsung, for want of their Homeric Nyrens.