SF Barnes: His Life and Times

ACS Book of the Week

Each week we spotlight a fascinating title from the vast collection catalogued in the Cricket Bibliography project, drawing on insightful (but not necessarily positive!) reviews from the archives of our journal. Today we bring you Robert Brooke on Andrew Searle’s SF Barnes: His Life and Times, published by Empire in 1997.

On page 189, Searle makes a brief but rather ridiculous statement: that the debate over the greatest batsman of all time is constant and has raged for decades. His candidates include Bradman, Hobbs, Hammond, Sobers, Richards, Macartney and, GHU, Lara. Personally, this reviewer is adamant that there is no contention whatsoever: Bradman is the greatest, and the rest trail—most of them badly.

However, one must agree with Searle that there is little doubt about the greatest bowler: Sydney Francis Barnes. Bradman himself nominated O’Reilly, and some curious individuals have proposed Rhodes or Trueman. One feels that the latter two are left trailing by Hadlee and Warne. However, none can genuinely challenge Barnes.

Accepting this, it is certainly past time for a proper biography of Barnes. Leslie Duckworth did a reasonably competent job in S.F. Barnes: Master Bowler a few years ago, but somehow, the book never truly came to life. On the other hand, some of Bernard Hollowood’s original anecdotes—and certainly his Barnes cartoons—really do capture the man, and it is good that Searle utilises Hollowood here. If anyone knows of more brilliant cricket cartoons than those by Hollowood on pages 53 and especially 164, please show me!

Not that Hollowood provides the only worthwhile elements. Searle succeeds in getting inside the man, offering some marvellous anecdotes. One of the best is Barnes’ battle with Constantine in 1932. Not only did Barnes’s bowling tie Constantine down so thoroughly that he lost patience, losing his wicket to a nonentity at the other end, but Barnes the batsman also coped with Constantine’s thunderbolts for forty minutes. He was 59 years old—older than Constantine’s father, an awestruck CLR James points out!

A satisfactory statistical supplement takes the book past the 200-page mark; it does not feel like too slight a volume, yet Barnes would easily justify something much larger—something with room for complete statistics (his first-class career was sufficiently limited to allow for a match-by-match résumé) plus more anecdotal material.

One Barnes story I have never seen in print was told to me by my late father, a man not usually interested in cricket. In the late 1920s, a new playing field was opened in Heath Gap Road, Cannock, and Barnes was invited to play for a scratch XI against a team of schoolboys. If the organisers thought he would “go easy”—no chance! From memory, my father reckoned the boys’ team was all out for about twenty runs—twice—within two hours, almost entirely due to Barnes. He believed the match was over by mid-afternoon, well before the chairman of the local council had arrived at teatime to officially open the ground!

Something must have been said, as Barnes then stormed off the field and, as far as my father knew, never returned—despite it being within walking distance of his home. The day had been ruined as a spectacle, yet can Barnes really be blamed?