The Home of Cricket

An early finish to my working day afforded me a trip to Lord's for the last day of the Test. As I sat there, taking in the surroundings, watching the game peter out to an amiable conclusion, a thought occurred to me - how many people here really know about the ground within which they're sitting? 'Lord's' and 'history', 'heritage' and other such terms seem inextricable, yet most of us fans pay the terms lip service only. Even the Wikipedia entry on the ground is remarkably sparse. To quote C.L.R - what do they know of cricket who only cricket know?

First, you'll have noticed it's 'Lord's' - not 'Lords'' - a more common mistake than you might think. And you'll probably know that this refers to Thomas Lord. But who was he? Well, we should actually start our story with someone else - George Finch, the Earl of Winchilsea. This chap:

Winchelsea was a very keen cricketer. Having taken up the game aged 32, he played wherever he could and was no mean player. Apparently, he used a 4lb bat. He was a member of the Hambledon club - a sort of cricketing Harlem Globetrotters of its day (a mix of aristocrats and some hired professionals) and more crucially the White Conduit Club. This was located in Islington (which at the time was a village) and was born of earlier gentlemen's clubs. 

It was a revolutionary time. The French were chopping aristocratic heads off left, right and centre, and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man was selling like hot cakes. White Conduit Fields was a lovely venue, but it was no good for the staging of 'great matches', which had evolved out of the scratch games played between rustics. In Winchelsea's time such games, largely played by aristocrats and hired professionals, attracted huge attention and were often played for the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of pounds. 

White Conduit Fields wasn't the perfect setting, lacking any kind of fencing or entrances. It meant any prole could wander across the outfield and tell the players exactly what they thought of their game. Anyone who's played at London Fields and been told they're crap by a drunk tramp (I don't care if he had a point) would understand their desire for a bit of privacy.

Now into this mix comes Thomas Lord. 

He was an ambitious young provincial, who was looking for a way into the wine trade to help his family out of the poverty trap into which they'd fallen. He got a job at the White Conduit Club as a net bowler (he'd learned the game in Norfolk) and general jobsworth. Astutely matching the toffs' desire to control their spectators with his own desire for money, he leased a stretch of land in Marylebone from the Portman family estate with Winchelsea's financial backing. He got more money from Winchelsea's friend Charles Lennox, a wicketkeeper/bat who once shot the Duke of York, had fourteen children and died after a fox bit him. 

There was no problem with people watching - so long as they were the right sort of people, and prepared to pay an admission fee, which they were. In the pre-professional era - in the absence of names like Tendulkar or Bradman - the 'Earl of' or 'Duke of' generated an equivalent celebrity buzz. 

The ground could be - and was - hired out for all sorts of other purposes, like pigeon shooting, balloon hopping and even for a French hot air balloonist. In fact the cricket schedule was rather meagre. That said Eton and Harrow played each other for the first time in 1805, a game which was, it seems, organised by Lord Byron in his school holidays. He wrote: 'We were rather drunk and afterwards went to the Haymarket theatre and kicked up a row, as you may suppose.'

That's a painting of the place in 1851.

The first 'great match', the sort of which had previously taken place at the Artillery Ground (which we've already visited this season) took place in 1787. Lord was one of half a dozen esquires to leaven the mixture, according to Derek Birley. A year later, those involved in the White Conduit Club formed a mysterious 'Marylebone Club.' I think you can see where this is going. 

Actually, the early MCC was no kind of governing body at all. It got a lot of public interest, but only because there were so many aristocrats playing. In 1791 the MCC took on a challenge from Charles Churchill, a Marlborough family member garrisoned at Nottingham. The MCC vs Nottingham match garnered 10,000 spectators, it's said.

There were two major events in 1793: a single wicket match between Winchelsea and the Earl of Darnley, and war with France. It's a shame we don't play single wicket any more - the rules are simple. It's mano-a-mano cricket. You bowl to the batsman, who hits it. You do the fielding. He runs until you get back to the stumps. Flashman has a brilliant game in one of his books against a pirate. Lord's had a sixpenny charge, but it still suffered crowd troubles - cricket had gone from being a rustic pastime to a national sport. A crowd of 4-5,000 at the ground meant heavy gate receipts. Soon the make up of the MCC began to take on a slightly less aristocratic appearance.

By the 1810s things were pretty miserable across the country - a bad harvest, Luddite riots with magistrates bearing down on supposed Jacobins, and a war with France that didn't seem to have an end in sight. To cap it all, the lease had ended on Lord's ground. Lord now obtained a lease on two fields in Lissom Grove, but in 1813 Parliament requisitioned the land for the Regent's Canal, which was cut through the site. Lord uprooted the turf - literally - and took it to the current site in St John's Wood (the gesture apparently a bid to persuade the MCC to continue playing there). But he wasn't making enough money and requisitioned the ground to develop for housing.

I wonder how much this decision pained him. He had evidently fought tooth and nail to keep the ground alive. Hell, he was a player himself. I think he must have been in agony. Thank God, then, for this guy:

William Ward M.P., batsman (holder of the highest ever first class score till Grace overtook him), M.P, director of the Bank of England, and all round unsung hero and bloody good egg, who bought the ground off him. Commemorated in an anonymous poem:

        And of all who frequent the ground named after Lord,
        On the list first and foremost should stand Mr Ward.
        No man will deny, I am sure, when I say
        That he's without rival first bat of the day,
        And although he has grown a little too stout,
        Even Matthews is bothered at bowling him out.
        He's our life blood and soul in this noblest of games,
        And yet on our praises he's many more claims;
        No pride, although rich, condescending and free,
        And a well informed man and a city M.P.
 

And just as London got its cricket back, Napoleon found himself overstretched in Russia. Brick by brick, the ground grew, and continued to bear Lord's name.

And that's where we were sitting on Tuesday. So what do we take from the story? Well, you think Allen Stanford and Lalit Modi are anything new? What was William Lord if not a bright, entrepreneurial upstart, riding on the desires of an elite to profit from and control the public's experience of the game? Lord's may be redolent of aristocracy, history and privilege, but it was always a ground put in place by the people and for the people. And what about the seat-of-the pants survival of the game in the face of overwhelming financial pressures?  Seems all-too-familiar in an era when we may soon see our first county go bust.

Nothing new under the sun. As to the game, rather less to say. Sadly I missed windowgate though a little personal experience of the individual involved means I'm not too surprised. Strauss' reaction was a knowing shake of the head. Was very disappointed to see Jonathan Trott bowls 1.2mph faster than me. But then he did produce the ball of the day, so it wasn't all bad. Which I missed, because I was in the toilet. So maybe it was. His victim, Parav.... Piranha....the left handed opener, played some lovely drives. Finn looked easily the most threatening bowler live (if not when I watched the game on TV), so it's a bit disappointing he's surely for the chop. I don't have much else to say that hasn't been said by every other punter. Of course we should have scored quicker and declared earlier.

I only managed to get told off by the stewards twice - for talking on my mobile and trying to walk along the back of the stand during an over (even though the bowling was coming from the other end). Good. You can't go to Lord's and not get a bollocking from the stewards. I imagine the public in Thomas Lord's day were treated with even more disdain.