Trent Bridge

At the end of a school day in the summer of 1921 two West Bridgford schoolboys in short trousers would race down Central Avenue to Trent Bridge cricket ground. Arriving at the ground they parted two uprights in a wooden perimeter fence and squeezed through. They dashed to the pavilion steps and wormed their way through to the front. They never had tickets and went unnoticed.  At close of play they thrust a small black autograph book into the faces of the departing players. These included icons of Nottinghamshire cricket – John and George Gunn, Joe Hardstaff Sr, the captain Arthur Carr, Fred Barratt and W.W. “Dodger’ Whysall. The older boy might squeeze off a photograph on his box camera. At that time, when their cricketing heroes included Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe, visits to the ground after school included Test Matches. The camera would then be carried home, mother was shooed out of her kitchen, the boys would set up a darkroom and they developed the photos of their heroes. The next day after school they returned to the ground with book and photographs and asked the players to sign them.

For these boys Trent Bridge was Mecca, a phantasmagorical field where academic studies were forgotten quickly and their sporting passions were indulged. The cricket ground was where they lived out their dreams whilst they knocked a bat and ball around with their fellows at the tea intervals. And so was born a lifelong love of a game and attachment to a few acres of green grass.

The younger of the boys was my father. Cricket engulfed him as he grew up without his father to interest him in other hobbies. Later in life he co-founded an amateur team at his factory. He passed on to me a feel for the game - only a modest talent to play it evolved. Yet Trent Bridge became part of me as it did for him and for successive generations of Nottinghamians for nearly two hundred years.

Trent Bridge cricket ground is one of the best and widely loved Test grounds in the world. I began to wonder why. Applying an interest in landscape and people co-existing together I discovered this piece of ex-swampy meadow has attracted a colourful cast of characters who have made their mark on history since 1838. Great drama has been witnessed taking place on this turf; sporting careers and reputations have been made, enhanced and broken too.

In 1838 a local man named William Clarke married the landlady of the (now world famous) Trent Bridge Inn. Being both a cricketing fellow and an entrepreneur Clarke developed both interests.  He became landlord of another famous city watering hole The Bell in Market Square and along the way he founded Nottinghamshire Cricket Club. Acquiring the meadow behind The Trent Bridge Inn he opened the ground for play on 28^th May 1838. The first inter county match at Trent Bridge was against Sussex two years later and the first Test Match against Australia in 1899.

My first memory of Trent Bridge was attending, amongst a crowd of 25,000, the 1955 Test Match against South Africa with my father. Having only played myself on The Forest (and regular beach cricket at Sutton on Sea) I was enthralled with the size of the ground, the brilliant green sward and the ancient pavilion. I don’t remember the play or who won. (Apparently I saw Frank Tyson take 6-28 and Peter May bat).

Next, and I do remember this; some idle days later that decade spent scoring county matches from the western stand. The team included a West Indian fast bowler named Carlton Forbes. He had a magnificent physique. His glistening skin reflected the green grass as he thundered in to bowl. His skill was awesome but how strange to make a living mostly in front of meagre crowds.

A summer holidays in1959 spent in the indoor nets at Trent Bridge proved ultimately to be non-productive for me, when the next year tennis and golf took precedence. Yet I got to face bowlers from the Notts coaching staff and I was happy.

In 1972 we were spellbound by both the magic of an unknown Aussie called Bob Massie and the speed and aggression of one Dennis Lillee. Paying spectators could, by now, drink beer all day at Trent Bridge; and we did; and Australia crushed England.

A Randall
bat

Friday 29^th July 1977 is one of the worst days of my sporting life. Here is the scene: Trent Bridge is full. The local hero, Derek Randall, is making his Bridge Test debut. England are batting on the second day of a Test Match against Australia. I am there. What could be better? In the first hour the cricket is dull, the crowd is subdued. A wicket falls. A murmur around the ground rises to a crescendo before bursting to loud cheering and hollering. Randall walks to the crease, our hearts uplifted and racing. This is pure heaven - partisanship in full flow – but who in the ground does not wish him a hundred? What happens when Randall is on 13 is apocryphal. (Wherever I travel in the globe, cricket fans of a certain age still commiserate with me). Horror show, appalling silence, disbelief, anger and a crumpled crowd whose dreams of a few minutes before are shattered. A Yorkshireman is to blame.

1993, the Aussies are here again. Elder son is deep into swotting for A-level exams, which are getting on top of him. What should we do? Go to Trent Bridge of course and pour beer down the lad as he tries to forget his studies and release the tension of the classroom – just like his grandfather seventy-two years before. I don’t remember the play much but as ever, there is little more agreeable in summer than watching the world’s best cricket unfolding live in front of your eyes, pint in hand, and enthusing the next generation.

2012 we basked in sunshine at the Bridge once again as Andrew Strauss made his twenty-first and last century for England. Then, a year later, more Trent Bridge drama. I still enjoy a mischievous smile at the memory of Stuart Broad’s bravado. He refused to walk after being incorrectly given not out to a decisive wicket-taking ball. How delicious it is to conjure up images of the Aussie fielders blowing gaskets and carrying a grudge away from the match. Two years on it is Stuart again with his mesmerising 8-15 against more Aussies. Oh, what joy, what theatre it all has been!

A science fiction backdrop

A sporting arena is not like other landscapes. When devoid of players and spectators, Trent Bridge is an eerie place, even uninviting. The deserted stands are like a backdrop to a science fiction film. On quiet winter nights the ghosts of former players and managers flit in and out of the alleys around the red brick buildings at the western end. The ghosts include Walter Marshall, coach to the players from 1897 to 1914 who stayed on as a groundsman. He gave so many years to the club he was still there by the Second World War. The committee tried to get rid of him due to his age but they failed, he was a component of the club. Another ghost is Harry Dalling. Harry was exceptional amongst cricket ground managers in that he welcomed everyone to his place. He created an atmosphere of inclusiveness for all lovers of the game and its traditions. This was not the case at other grounds.

Up until 1948 the club first team was made up purely of Nottinghamshire men. In that team of ’21 were seasoned players with years of service for Notts under there belts. Trent Bridge, ground and club, was central to their lives. They were not going to be separated easily. It was difficult for young men to get into the side.

When Joe Hardstaff finally managed to gain a place in the first team he arrived early at Trent Bridge and crept nervously into the home side’s changing-rooms. Fred Barratt was there before him. ‘Where should I put my bag Mr. Barratt?’ he asked. “Over theer,” Fred Barratt growled, indicating a spot beside the door through which the young man had just come. ‘Then thou’l’t be soonest out o’bleddy door. *

Another famous servant of Trent Bridge was groundsman Ron Allsopp. He did not start out as a man of the soil; earlier in life he made bicycles at the city’s Raleigh works. Yet he yearned to work outdoors, he had an interest in turf. Brought to the club after Frank Dalling retired Ron achieved fame and notoriety in the 1980s. Twice earning the accolade of groundsman of the year, and the ire of opposing teams, Ron cultivated pitches to exploit the talent of bowlers Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee.

Ken Taylor is a further, happy and contented Trent Bridge ghost that I found in the shadows. He was appointed one of the first professional managers at a county club in 1978 and assembled a team of brilliant yet strong-minded characters that won the championship in the ‘80s. Peter Wynne-Thomas (Nottinghamshire CCC President, author, librarian and possessor of all cricket knowledge) says: “Ken Taylor was the most brilliant manager I ever encountered.”

The ghosts of  Trent Bridge

An intriguing ghost is that of Eddie Marshall who started the supporters’ club after the Second World War. He ran a timber business and later was responsible for bringing Garfield Sobers from Barbados to Trent Bridge – one more Notts legend was created. Dick Milnes was a chairman and president of Notts CCC and a notable city businessman being company secretary at Boots. He enthused Peter Wynne-Thomas to start a library which today houses the second largest collection of books on cricket in the world. (It has one more after my latest visit). Peter’s idols are Joe Hardstaff Jnr and Bill Voce (the latter a name to send shivers down an Aussie’s spine along with a Trent Bridge favourite, Harold Larwood). Many former players still visited the ground to chat with younger players and anyone they met who shared a love of the ground. The place has this effect on people.

Trent Bridge is not only one of the best Test Match grounds in the world but also one of the most approachable and friendliest. In the last century, cricket grounds tended to be administered by gruff and conservative ex-military types who shunned innovation and warded off visitors and away teams. Peter Wynne-Thomas and his contemporaries strive successfully to adopt Harry Dalling’s philosophy and style in welcoming all and celebrating the game.

For 180 years a former meadow has - in summertime only and for one, three or five days at a time - drawn ordinary people to an arena and exposed them to drama. New pages of sporting history have been written; blood, sweat and tears have been spilled and then the people have been sent out on to the street to get on with their lives. Being a Nottingham lad I still get my sporting adrenaline rush from either a winter visit to the library or a day drinking beer sat on a hard white seat watching the world’s best players. The landscape set out before spectators is contrived and unnatural save the grassy square. Yet this strange field captivates cricket aficionados from across the world and draws them in to debate the game’s characters, traditions, its challenges and its future.

And what happened to that black autograph book? That is a mystery. It was given to a former Notts and England captain to add to the Trent Bridge archive but it never arrived. A piece of detective work is unfolding and one day the book may come to light and take its place at the hallowed place simply called Trent Bridge.

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* From The Trent Bridge Battery, the Story of the Sporting Gunns by Basil Haynes & John Lucas.

I am very grateful to Peter Wynne-Thomas who on two occasions has shared with me his immense knowledge of the good, the bad and the ugly of the wonderful game at Trent Bridge. The game and the ground have enriched lives. They continue to do so.

Home

An Englishman's home is his castle

At this point in the calendar millions of Christians will be making journeys across the world to celebrate an ancient rite with kinfolk. One member of the family will have volunteered, been volunteered or cajoled to host the get-together. Their house is chosen because it is large enough to accommodate the crowd or the location is convenient to the majority.

Probably without thinking we take advantage of developments in transport of the last fifty years as we jump into a motorcar, board an aeroplane or a ship to take us in record time to our destination. For all of us involved in these activities the pivotal requirement is a large house. This, many travellers may say, is a place they call home. Generations within one family will gravitate to this ‘home’, it being symbolic of their childhood or the place where family elders reside. For many, this is the place they call home even though they may now reside hundreds or thousands of miles away due to work, inter-national’s marriage or abhorrence of the European winter climate. It is a Western mode of living, this desire to have a house or apartment and call it home. “An Englishman’s home is his castle”, pronounced Sir William Coke in 1628. Yet it is a curiously English trait, in that we require a structure that we must own and call ‘home’ and fill with ‘stuff’.

Home for the people of Delhi

For Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Warlpiri people in Australia’s Northern Territories, the Squamish in British Columbia and many poor people of other religious faiths, home is not a building. It could have been these people of whom George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo”. Through either choice, (or in many cases economic circumstances), these peoples have no house, no castle nor modest flat. Home could be a piece of canvas thrown over a pole; a bed is a scratch in the dirt with a blanket for a covering – if they’re lucky. To 1 million Hindus home is Dharavi, a 550 acre shared slum in Mumbai. Here, if you want to use your allotted toilet any one of 15,000 of other co-residents could be waiting ahead of you. Further, despite the endeavours of its President, we still consider the United States of America to be a rich country with universal home ownership; but this month in Alabama and other states in the south, thousands of black and white citizens will call a leaky trailer ‘home’ in which they might pray to God or drown their sorrow that a southern Democrat is (democratically) elected to the U.S. Senate.

Home for The Squamish

Home for the Warlpiri people

Having this month gawped in astonishment at the squash of humanity living in the markets and bazaars in filthy back lanes of Old Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai I am re-assessing the importance of my modest sized Yorkshire ‘castle’. In Old Delhi, the smells, din, colours, flavours and crush of normal daily existence assault the senses and the values of Western visitors. It is difficult to comprehend how thousands of women, (whose daily journey at sunrise on crowded trains to the Sassoon docks in Mumbai where they buy one tray of stinking fish and return to sell), can form a home and contribute to a community. Yet they do.

British expatriates in Durban, Vancouver, Melbourne and Delhi do find fresh and cultural inspiration from their adopted national flavours. Traditional family Christmases ‘at home’ are, for many, an experience of the past as families move apart in search of something; is it happiness, security, fulfilment, prosperity or the real self?

For me and increasing bands of people throughout the world, being at peace with nature is becoming more essential yet precariously less easy. Thinking ourselves ill-served by our elected leaders, aghast at the direction our country is taking and appalled at how the landscape is being treated in our back yard we natives of the globe are considering what ‘living well’ really means. I am drawn to the lives of the peoples of the Amazonian rainforest. For them life is a ceaseless evolution of constructing relationships that bind folk to each other in the landscape in which they reside. Like them I believe living happily is not about acquiring more stuff. It is about finding wonder and joy with our life’s companions and cherishing different people who become neighbours. Furthermore we must ensure our proximate landscape and seascape is protected from the horrifying excesses of city living.

There should be much evaluation of these core tenets of life as we jet across the world to celebrate within our families, particularly so as we shudder at societal pressures over which we feel a lack of control.

One of my hopes this festive season and next year is that the friendly, noisy, colourful and joyful Indian people will cease discarding plastic bottles in The Ganga and the Indus. Then, there may be a happy future for all peoples of the lands across the globe.

Vancouver B.C.

There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run

When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun

Long before the white man and long before the wheel

When the green, dark forest stood was too silent to be real

Gordon Lightfoot, 1967

A green dark forest of British Columbia

16th October 1967

A naïve young Englishman starts working in a bookshop in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. He has embarked on a ‘gap year’, (a term he claims to have invented), between ten cloistered years of school and starting college. The schoolteachers had been scornful of his plan to spend a year off – their language was blunt - thinking no doubt that hedonism and money would ruin the lad. He was not to be dissuaded; early signs of obstinacy and a growing taste for travel sped him to the Pacific Northwest.

Downtown Vancouver

Footfall on my journey into a remote land of unknown people (I have second cousins in Vancouver one of whom I had met briefly) was in Montreal and Expo 67. British pavilion was reputed to be one of the best. What I saw was a dull looking hexagonal concrete tower, tapering to a 3D sculptured Union Flag set in the summit. But inside! Here was a celebration of all that was groovy about Sixties Britain. Well, England - I doubt the Scots, Irish, Welsh and Yorkshire were well represented; this was all Carnaby Street and Swinging London from the Mini (car), Mary Quant, Twiggy, the Mini (dress) and Beatlemania to The Rolling Stones and a Routemaster Bus. At least the pavilion’s architect was a Scot!

1967 was the year of Sgt. Pepper, flower power, Haight Ashbury, tripping out and turning on, Hippies, cheesecloth shirts and denim. Here was I, heading into the embers of the ‘Summer of Love’ on the west coast, and I did not know what marijuana looked like let alone how to smoke it. I lived for a while in a counterculture community where the scene was about drugs and a flourishing protest around the politics of the environment. Music was transforming popular culture. Scott McKenzie urged me Be sure to wear some flowers in my hair when I went to San Francisco (which I failed to do, despite plentiful flowers and hair, due to Commie-hating Yanks, more anon) but I was more intent on finding me a Brown Eyed Girl whilst trying to fathom A Whiter Shade of Pale. Some hardened but likeable and nutty Geordie boys, “we’re friends of Eric Burdon”, introduced me to The House of the Rising Sun yet I avoided becoming a ruined ‘poor boy’.

Vancouver, in Canada’s centenary year of 1967, was still a ‘young growing land’. Two hundred years before I arrived this land was covered by a thick ‘green, dark forest’ of Douglas fir, hemlock, cedar and spruce.  Several thousands of First Nations Squamish people lived in split cedar huts on the shores of Burrard Inlet. The first European to set foot in this mysterious place was Yorkshireman Captain James Cook in 1778; although an adopted son of God’s Own Country I identify with his claim of a far off land. For the next hundred years, trade between Europeans and the Squamish grew increasingly tense, with the Spanish and British challenging for supremacy over the land. ‘Guns, germs and steel’ resulted in the Squamish and other First Nations peoples of the west coast being pushed off their land, a shameful practice all too familiar wherever the British and Spanish ventured across the globe.

In 1792 Captain George Vancouver sailed in and out very quickly whilst searching the Pacific for the North West Passage through the Arctic Ocean. Up to this time the area of the current city was heavily forested and only the inlets and islands were named. It was not until 1886, when the city was incorporated, that it acquired the name of the sailor who first mapped the region.

The gold rush of 1858 firmly pushed Vancouver up the list of places to explore by my predecessors looking for gap year fun, an opportunity for adventure and getting rich quickly. On the banks of the mighty and majestic Fraser River a lucky explorer found a few grains of the magic metal. Over 25,000 giddy prospectors, mostly from California plus a few early luckless and importunate folk from Christchurch in New Zealand, descended on Vancouver, swelling the population and causing a building spree. In 1867 another fine and entrepreneurial Yorkshireman, one John “Gassy Jack” Deighton, realised the potential for getting rich off of the miners; he envisioned hundreds of thirsty miners requiring hooch, so he established a saloon downtown that became the focal point of a modern city that endures today.

One hundred and ten years after the gold rush, US citizens again came to the city. This time they crept in surreptitiously rather than with a swagger. They were draft dodgers. 1968 was a watershed year in the history of the Pacific Northwest in particular, and the world at large. The Vietnam War invaded our consciousness at every turn, ambushed us via our TV screens and radicalised students on university campuses. Unlike fortunate me young American men at the age of 18 were confronted with three choices: - go to Vietnam and fight (and probably be killed); break the law and refuse the draft; or go to Canada. I met some of the latter, the nicest guys I have ever met. One even sobered me up and set me straight after a notorious pot party where my one and only experience with the weed came to a disastrous end.

My recollection of April 1968 is vivid.  It was a time of revolution, violence and hatred yet with a touch of hope. In the US, students for the first time forced a university to close. The Civil Rights war was being fought on the streets of US cities and television beamed its bloody images to our living room. Washington was in denial. As W.B. Yeats wrote “Things fell apart – the centre cannot hold”. Civil unrest and demonstrations by students in the US were copied across Europe in London, Paris, Prague and even my hometown of Nottingham. Today’s docile cohort of University of Nottingham students would not know how to revolt. The US President, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a broken man. On 4^th April, whilst driving back from a drive-in movie with my Canadian flatmate, we heard on the radio of the assassination of Martin Luther King. I was shocked to hear my friend Bob growl, “Good riddance”, words I would not have expected from someone I called a friend. Eight weeks later Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles. Close to that date I had driven to the US border hoping for a day’s visit to Seattle. On examining my passport the US border agents noticed a double page spread of Iron curtain country stamps, for I had travelled in East Germany, Poland and Soviet Russia a year earlier. “You cannot come in”, they said, “You need a visa from Washington”. None of my companions required such authorisation to visit their rotten country. Well, they could keep their decaying nation and their incoming president, Richard M. Nixon. Never was a more dishonest, duplicitous and criminal man elected to President of the United States! Was there?

Also in April 1968 I witnessed a political phenomenon I doubt I will see repeated. It was called Trudeaumania. It came to Chinatown in Vancouver. With the visit of the forty nine year old Pierre Trudeau bringing glamour, sophistication and hope, a sea of passionate Vancouverites had found a new type of politician. Just elected Liberal Party leader he was Prime Minister of Canada within weeks.

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

You tell me that it’s evolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

But when you talk about destruction

Don’t you know you can count me out

John Lennon, 1968

Yet through all the anger of ‘68, all this demand for change, and all the hysteria, Vancouverites sided with John Lennon - they wanted no part in destroying what they had. When I left the city in July ’68 it was still the peaceful, serene and friendly place I had encountered ten months earlier. Modern Vancouver was founded on trade. In 1967 it welcomed folk from every continent; if you were prepared to work it gave you prosperity, fun, a breathtaking landscape – and tripping out every night. Vancouverites wisely know why their city works; it is because they welcome all, judge nobody and celebrate the positives of living every day. Back in that day too, men and women lived as equals and treated each other as such.

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But time has no beginnings and the history has no bounds

As to this verdant country they came from all around…

Built the mines, mills and the factories for the good of us all.

And when the young man’s fancy was turning to the spring

Their minds were overflowing with the visions of their day

                                                                 Gordon Lightfoot 1967

16^th October 2017

That former naïve young Englishman returns to his bygone pasture of wild oats. With the love of his maturer years by his side – and now a father, grandfather and Grumpy Old Man wiser and wistful – together they have come to rediscover a city esteemed by many folk as one of the most desirable places on the planet in which to live. How would it be?

Once again there is a Prime Minister Trudeau living at 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa. The green, dark forest still swathes the province close to the city. Stanley Park continues in its tranquillity; the ocean views from the ten-kilometre seawall walk are the same, with the single pine tree precarious atop Siwash Rock. English Bay is just as I left it after an all night barbecue in ’68. Both of us were reminded that the people on the streets smile all the time, even when it rains nonstop for four days. As I had been in ’68, Canada’s most famous troubadour serenaded us with songs of train rides, sinking freighters and lost love. We are Lightheads.

Has anything changed? Of course it has, fifty years is a long time in the life of a city. Claudia, one of the aircrew on our flight in, captures the essence of Vancouver’s change. “British Columbia has become wealthy, I cannot afford to live in the city now. When the Brits left Hong Kong many of the wealthy Chinese disinvested there and bought up downtown Vancouver”. The skyline is indeed changed from ’67, with vastly more high-rise apartment and office blocks reaching up from the tight grid system of streets. Trade permeates the urban landscape from the grand old Hudson’s Bay Company department store on Georgia Street to the ugly Canada Place built for Expo 86 on the waterfront. The latter did more to internationalise the city than the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1887. Granville Island Market is new, to me, and the reason we spent a day in its sublime food halls and breweries. Gastown is mature, sucking the tourists in but housing the wondrous Inuit Gallery of art and craft from First Nations people. Chinatown may have lost its magic and sparkle yet there is still wonderful food.

In addition to “Gassy Jack” Vancouver’s history is sprinkled with colourful characters. Skalsh the Unselfish, who was turned into stone by Q’uas the Transformer as a reward for his unselfishness, is commemorated at Siwash Rock; Steve Brodie was a young revolutionary who, through brilliant leadership, organised a thousand jobless men in 1938 to occupy two Vancouver buildings for thirty days to highlight the plight of the unemployed; Emily Carr, painter of green forests; Bill Duthie, founder of a chain of bookshops in 1957, who always found jobs for gap year travellers; and Simon Fraser, a Scot, who gave his name to one of the most tempestuous universities in Canada. Nonetheless, my favourite Vancouverite is Joe Capilano. A man of passionate political beliefs he would thrive were he alive today.

Stanley Park totems

Joe Capilano was born in 1850 and became leader of the Squamish in 1895. Joe held firm beliefs in the rights of his indigenous people and their ownership of the land, their customs and the culture of coastal British Columbia. He saw (like his contemporary indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand) the white man exploiting the forests and the rivers and polluting the landscape with mines, mills and factories. In 1906 he led a delegation to see King Edward VII in London. Joe and his fellow chiefs explained to the king that the Squamish had as much right to the land as the white man, that they had families and art to cherish yet they were receiving none of the privileges the white man was grabbing for himself. Sadly for Joe his trip to England was unsuccessful. Upon his return he banished the Roman Catholics from his villages and he was ostracised by the indolent European majority in B.C. But his people esteemed him until his death and I hope they do still.

In 2017 the role and standing of the First Nations in Vancouver and the rest of Canada is being rehabilitated, slowly but thankfully. As in Australia with the Native Peoples and in New Zealand with the Maoris, the white man is waking up belatedly to the fact that Joe and his people know how to tend the land and fish the rivers yet avoid the depletion of natural resources. If scientists and politicians are agreed the Arctic is melting then they should try to understand Joe’s philosophy and think up some solutions quickly to reverse the melt. I think Justin Trudeau is up for it. I very much doubt the forty-fifth President of the United States is.

Vancouver fall

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