In a week when England did superbly to beat India in a five day Test Match, one of the top nations in the world at cricket, I thought it timely to write a blog about cricket. This blog is going to be about the art of cricket but not in the sense of how the game is played but in the other meaning of art as the importance of cricket to England as being immortalised in the art of 1000 years. I have just read a remarkable book by Brendan Cooper called “Echoing Greens - How Cricket Shaped the English Imagination”[i]. Across the centuries, cricket’s aesthetics have been as vital to the English landscape as the hills and meadows captured in the art of Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. In every direction – painting, poetry, fiction, drama, film, television, photography and music - the game has played a part in the story of English creative endeavour.

Before reading this remarkable book I was aware of only a small part of this and I don't actually believe that it's ever been explored in full before. The story is lined with surprises, forgotten tales, and unnoticed details. Beneath cosy patriotic dreams of ‘English values’, a much wilder, more complex truth exists - not just one of heroic figures, noble values and pastoral idylls, but also vice, violence, hypocrisy, and scandal. The book not only shows compelling new light on the game's relationship with the English imagination – but it also forced me to reconsider the history of cricket itself.

For hundreds of years, the English have believed that as an expression of noble conduct cricket is also an expression of England. That is of course outlandish and there are several other countries which adopted cricket for their own and it would be outrageous to think any differently. But people do and it is a belief that it's at the heart of the relationship between cricket and English imagination. No other game has enchanted artists and writers like cricket has. No other game has been so wrapped up in that most treasured and tenuous of dreams, the dream of the precious stone set in the silver sea, the blessed plot of England.

Neville Cardus is the most celebrated cricket writer in history and he wrote “There can be no summer in this land without cricket. “He carried on “A wonderfully English game is cricket. The fact is cricket is more than a game. For one thing it is part of summer. How many of us have gone home after watching cricket and taken with us no impression more likeable than we have seen during the day the sun climb up the sky, pause over us for a while in beneficent noon heat,  and then descend towards evening while the field turned a softer and softer green. “

Cardus was far from alone in harbouring a belief that there is an essential quality to cricket in England.  JB Priestley “thought cricket was a part of England and part of English character. Losing it would have diminished England somehow.” Poet and novelist Edmund Blunden wrote of “cricket, that ever changeful, changeless game with some even among the English view as the prime English eccentricity.” John Major claimed “Cricket is an English invention - an export as potent as the English language itself.” but what is true is that the game has inspired a library of literature so vast it dwarfs that of any other sport.

One of the most famous of all cricketers was WG Grace. In 1867 when he was just 19 years old he'd already been tagged as the finest player in England The previous summer he averaged over 50 with the bat including an innings of 224 not out, the highest first class score for nearly half a century, as well as taking 31 wickets at an average of 14. But this season he had missed playing cricket in May and June the early months of the season when he was laid up with an ankle injury and then suffered a bout of scarlet fever. His batting had been badly compromised but in the Gentlemen versus Players fixture he produced some brilliance with the ball taking 8 wickets for 25 runs in the second innings. He was an extraordinary looking man with a vast moustache and a huge body. He was painted by Archibald Stuart-Wortley and his portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. He transformed the art of batting, introducing undreamt of sophistication and range. Before him, players developed restricted techniques to suit their strengths. There would be ‘back players’ or those who batted in the ‘forward style.’ Grace dismissed all this. He would play forward or back as it suited him, with equal comfort and skill. A famous story tells of the Lord's crowd rising to their feet in order to applaud his masterful blocking of four ‘shooters’ in a row. One cannot imagine that happening today.

He was clearly the world's best cricketer of his generation and his achievements somehow seemed magical. In 1872 R.A. Fitzgerald captained a pioneering MCC tour of North America and the following year, he wrote a memoir about that trip called Wickets in the West: Or, the Twelve in America. There were other fine cricketers in the touring party but there was no doubt that Grace was the star of the show. Without the star quality of Grace the North American tour may well have not happened at all. It was after all Grace that people came to see.

He became a hero to boys across the land and the Boys’ Own Paper of 1880 delivered an affectionate profile that highlighted his achievements. “England has no more popular game than cricket.” it begins, “and cricket has had no greater exponent than William Gilbert Grace. For the last seventeen years his position in the cricket world has been unique … few bowlers have surpassed him, few fields have equalled him, no batsman has approached him.”

Former cricketer and Whig politician Lord Charles Russell said “looking at Mr Grace’s playing I have never been able to tell whether that gentleman is playing a winning or losing game… just as he plays one ball so he plays the game; he is heart and soul in it,” Grace, in other words, was not just a great cricketer -  he was a living embodiment of  Victorian English virtue.  Hard-working, dedicated and motivated by noble instincts he was a moral as well as a sporting paragon. But such a hero could be capable of hypocrisy. Notoriously he operated as an amateur whilst happily pocketing fees dwarfing those of any professional. During the tour of Australia the team was welcomed upon their arrival but the positivity did not last. The Australian public was shocked by some of the snobbery they witnessed and they were also shocked to see that the so-called gentleman cricketers who pretended to be amateurs would not even stay at the same hotel as the actual professional cricketers. Grace was clearly guilty of gamesmanship and gained a reputation for trying to diddle umpires and even on occasions disputing with them.

 Sadly only a single short film of his batting survives. It was made in 1901 when he was in his 50s and well past his best. But they are compelling as a tantalising window into a lost age; a momentary glimpse of a mercurial genius who still to this day might well be the greatest English cricketer of all.

A more recent cricketer who might challenge Grace in many ways is the great all-rounder Ian Botham. He too was the subject of a portrait by John Bellany in 1985. Botham had remarkable self-confidence. Even at the age of seven his mother stumbled upon him writing his name again and again on a piece of paper. “What on earth are you doing.” she asked. “Well people are going to be asking for me for my autograph one day” was the reply. “So I'm just practising it.” When the painting was unveiled in the National Portrait Gallery the public reaction was largely hostile. Cricket fans branded it rubbish. Bellany’s biographer John McKeown called the portrait one of the most contentious contemporary acquisitions by a public gallery in post 1945 Britain. Once he retired Botham then rather surprisingly became one of TV’s cricket stalwart pundits and he was again painted but looking much more like a smarter more refined media dignitary. Nick Botting's 2001 portrait is now hanging at Lords.

The origins of cricket are not clear but certainly there are very early pictures of people playing some form of game with a bat and a bal. There is one drawn in the 12th century between 1120 and 1130 which appears in a manuscript of Bede’s life of St Cuthbert. In the spring of 1300 according to the wardrobe accounts of Edward I, the King's son Prince Edward was recorded ‘as playing at creag and other sports.’ clearly it cannot be proven that this was cricket but during the following century more art started to appear across England bearing an intriguingly cricketing air. Another manuscript dated 1344 and now in the Bodleian library shows a group of monks and nuns playing with bat and ball. In 1363 Edward III passed a proclamation designed to outlaw most forms of games all together because he wanted to make archery compulsory. The banned sports in Edward III’s proclamation included ball games played with the hands, played with the foot, with a club and with a curved stick. Clearly enough people were playing these games for the king to be concerned.

And it was Geoffrey Chaucer who best captured the centrality of sport to mediaeval England. His works are crowded with games and play. During this period the old games of England cannot be clearly drawn but by the 16th century we can say with some certainty the game called cricket was being played in England. In a 1598 court paper John Derrick was recorded to have played in his youth on some land of disputed ownership. By now Derrick was in his late 50s so referring to the time when he was a schoolboy means that this was in the middle of the century. He wrote ‘Being a scholler in the Ffree school of Guildford hee and diverse of his fellows did runne and play there at creckette and other plaies.’ but despite this there's not much to link the game in any reliable way. The plays of Shakespeare are stuffed with sports and games - containing mentions for instance of billiards, rugby, bowling, football, backgammon, tennis, croquet, bear baiting, archery, chess, wrestling, dice, cards, board games, jousting, hunting and falconry. About cricket though the bard apparently had little to say.

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