Town v Gown
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 Tony Watts’s Town v Gown; City v Village: A History of Cricket in Cambridge (2024), reviewed by Charles Barr.
Going back to Cambridge after many decades, looking for cricket, is a deflating experience. A fine day in June 2024 offered listless back-to-back T20 games, Cambridge vs Irish Universities, at a deserted Fenner’s. No cricket occupied the once-busy Parker’s Piece, now reduced anyway to a single pitch, at the edge; the Hobbs Pavilion, opened in 1930, is now a Thai Restaurant, and you have to search its outer wall to find data on Jack and the Cambridge connection. Elsewhere in the city, as we learn from Tony Watts’s book, the amount of cricket now played, on and beyond the grounds of Colleges, is much diminished. But there are compensations. ‘Whereas in the past, players came into Cambridge from villages to gain access to good cricket, the direction of travel is now reversed.’
This is an important book: unlikely to feature on standard short lists for Cricket Book of the Year, but it makes it onto mine. It falls into none of the main favoured categories, from the first-class game through to the quirky memories of lower-level players, or of followers; its remit is local, as the title indicates, but its meticulous historical coverage works to illuminate a wider picture.
In some ways Cambridge, along with Oxford, is a special case: until recently, both Universities clung on to their first-class status, having provided over the years a stream of Test and county players, many of them captains. The book takes this level of history as read, so much so that it gets some details wrong. Graeme Hick becomes Graham; Douglas Jardine, epitome of Winchester/Oxford arrogance, becomes, weirdly, a Cambridge Blue. In the record run-feast at Fenners in 1950, the West Indies total is given as 700-3, not the correct 730-3: it makes little difference, any more than if one were to credit Hutton with 354, not 364, at the Oval in 1938, but such errors, in an ACS publication, are surprising.
The author is an academic scholar, and it shows – in all the right ways. In the Preface he thanks 81 men and women whom he has interviewed: most of them from Cambridge, city and county, most of them involved with the game at grassroots level, literally so in the case of several groundsmen. In the absence of a Bibliography, it would be too laborious to count the books and essays cited, but the number must be comparable: these range from the big histories by Bowen and Altham and company to a rich variety of local studies, old and new. All this scholarly apparatus, with 402 footnotes, is kept in its place, never clogging up the lucid main narrative.
The latest winner of the Village Cup Final, played at Lord’s in September, was Foxton Granta, a club formed by merger in 2021 between teams with a long history. Granta, a good Cambridge name, was founded in the city in 1951: one of five case studies in Chapter 10 traces its fluctuating fortunes, up to the move out of the city to join the village team in Foxton, seven miles to the south. The Lord’s win gives this chapter a topical interest, but all the case studies, all the chapters, have their own interest, contributing to a compelling narrative of social as well as cricketing change.
Tony Watts had a long local playing career, but is sparing with reminiscence, except when a club of his own was involved in a significant move or merger. Jack Hobbs is on the cover alongside Tom Hayward, two proud Cambridge men, and Watts has an unexpected link to him, which he is too modest to mention. As well as five appearances for Cambridgeshire, Cricket Archive records a match against Kimbolton School in 1989 in which he made a century, just as Jack Hobbs had done on the same ground in 1941, evidently his final innings. Jack Hobbs remains The Master, and this book in its own way can be called masterly.