July 29, 1981, a day of glorious high-summer weather, is remembered by many as the day on which the heir to the throne of the United Kingdom was married to Lady Diana Spencer.
A lot of people still retain memorabilia – mugs, books, crockery, fridge magnets – pertaining to the day. A piece of history.
There are no fridge magnets in circulation to commemorate what occurred at the War Memorial Ground, Stourbridge, on July 29, 1981. But plenty of people who were there still cherish the memories of the day.
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Around 5,000 people were inside that historic sporting venue to see the opening day of Worcestershire’s county championship match with Northamptonshire.
Most punters were hoping to see runs from the great New Zealand batsman Glenn Turner, then a firmly-established opener of the highest class with the Kiwis and Worcestershire but who, years earlier, had made his tentative steps (playing for 15 shillings a match and his bus fare) into English cricket with Stourbridge in the Birmingham League.
Turner did not put a foot or a bat wrong on the way to a glorious century before lunch.
Against an attack led by Kapil Dev, no less, he reached his ton in 95 balls on his way to 161. He also added 101 in the second innings for good measure. Exquisite cricket in a charming venue – the perfect encapsulation of the glory of county cricket.
Meanwhile, a few years earlier, beneath the rustling elm trees at Chalkwell Park, Westcliff-on-Sea, overlooking the Thames estuary, Essex all-rounder Ray Smith has the strike and is on the attack. Smith is capable of hitting the ball a long way – and he connects.
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But this particular smite goes far even by his standards – the ball travels six miles after crashing through the top deck of a passing double-decker bus. No-one is on the upper deck at the time and the driver doesn’t notice so the ball travels halfway to Basildon before it is spotted rolling round underneath a seat.
Mind you, Smith, fine player though he was, would have been hard-pressed to mete that sort of punishment out to a spinner of the calibre of Ray Illingworth. Especially when conditions favoured the bowler, as they did at the Crabble ground, Dover, in 1964.
The Crabble, tucked cosily beneath the famous white cliffs, rang to the celebratory shouts of Illy and his team-mates time and again as the spinner reaped match figures of 14 for 101 to speed Kent to defeat. His wizardry had the home players at sixes and sevens but the figures portraying Kent’s declining fortunes on the scoreboard did nothing to still the buzz of conversation in the gleaming marquees or the chink of wine glasses as spectators basked in the ambience of that most wonderful English sporting tradition – the cricket festival.
Turner, Smith and Illingworth excelling at Stourbridge, Westcliff and Dover – three examples of a world now diminished (though, thankfully, not entirely lost). And a world explored in vivid and elegaic detail in a new book by Chris Arnot.
“Britain’s Lost Cricket Festivals” is an engaging and evocative tome during the compilation of which the author travelled around the country researching numerous outgrounds, many gone, some still active, throughout the 18 first-class counties.
Its fascination is not just in the accounts and pictures that it lays before the reader but also the tangents those accounts and pictures trigger in the reader’s mind.
Arnot reflects in detail upon Abergavenny, set gloriously beneath the Welsh hills. Warwickshire supporters will recall that sylvan plot as the one where Collins Obuya first represented the county. The Kenyan spinner made his debut there against Cardiff UCCE in 2003 and reaped 23.3-7-53-1 against the students. At the end of the innings, I asked Vanburn Holder, who had umpired at Obuya’s end, what the bowler had done with the ball during his long spell. “Nothing,” replied Vanny.
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Arnot reports in detail from Scarborough (the venue for Dennis Amiss’s farewell first-class appearance in 1987) in 2006 and 2007.
And then there is Leyton. There is a lovely picture in the book of spectators milling about the outfield in 1932 in front of a scoreboard which reads 555 without loss, the work of Yorkshire openers Herbert Sutcliffe and Percy Holmes.
The big stadia and headquarters grounds have their merits and, of course, their own lavish histories but one of county cricket’s great joys has always been its diversity of venue – and “Britain’s Lost Cricket Festivals” does justice to that.