A Bit More Cardus
Aditya Basrur
this evening, and kick off the annual awards ceremony.
Anyway, this piece apparently originally appeared in the "Spectator", around
about the end of April 1952. It was later republished in Cardus's book,
"Close of Play", from what I can make out. There are a few books listed in
the contents, and I doubt I'll ever be able to get my hands on any of them
... there's "Days in the Sun", "The Summer Game", "Good Days", "Full Score",
"Close of Play", "Second Innings", "Cricket All the Year", "The Playfair
Cardus", and possibly a few others. Seven publications of one's work isn't
bad going.
Anyway, this is taken from pp. 79 to 82 of this edition.
Aditya [Any idea if the fact that Kotnis once owned this book makes it more
valuable?] Basrur
--
C. B. FRY
C. B. Fry went beyond eighty on 25th April, 1952, according to 'Wisden', a
witness to which he paid a certain respect. But he is not likelier to count
a matter of eighty years in a man's life as of higher numerical importance
than he counted, in his prime, eighty runs made on the cricket field. He was
usually sustaining a batting average of three-score-and-ten while taking in
his stride achievements in other fields and spheres - first-class honours in
Classical Moderations at Wadham, association football in the Oxford
University and the England XIs, journalism, the captaincy of the England
cricket team, acting as a substitute delegate on the Indian representation
at the first, third and fourth assemblies of the League of Nations. Nobody
will share his diverse distinctions, a century in a Test match and an offer
of the Kingdom of Albania. Bradman has equalled Fry's performance which in
1901 seemed to verge on the marvellous: six centuries in six consecutive
innings. But Bradman has never sent translations to The Times of the English
Hymnal and written a speech which turned Mussolini out of Corfu. In his
stride Fry did these things.
We should just the same have written something in celebration of Fry's
eightieth year if he had never handled a cricket bat in his life. He himself
thinks he might be remembered for his work as a moulder of character and
educator of youth on the training-ship Mercury. For a while Fry held the
world's record long-jump. In these days athletes are schooled from cradle to
beat records; the preparation is hiearatical. Fry jumped in by nature or,
let us say, by grace. From zest of living he excelled in many and different
callings, mastered by other people mostly by severe application or
professional labour. Fry was one of the last of an English tradition or
breed, an amateur in things of the mind and of the body, not bound to or
tyrannised by skill but sometimes free of it, because it has come, in part
at least, by a sort of inspired dilettantism. But here is the paradox; when
Fry gave himself to batsmanship, Apollo turned ascetic.
The comprehensive cricket skill which won him lasting fame in two
hemispheres was the consequence of hard study and practice. Not by grace but
by reasoning and self-discipline did he in his career amass 30,000 runs,
averaging 50 over his many summers. It was, in fact, as a fast bowler that
nature first stirred the cricketer in him, until Jim Phillips, the umpire,
no-balled him for throwing. His coaches in the school-nets said he would
never make a batsman. When Fry was seen in his heyday and Kumar Shri
Ranjitsinhji at the other, on a June day at Brighton long long ago,
imagination beheld visions of Oriental conjurations in contrast to a Spartan
austerity of exercise. Fry batted by the book of arithmetic and, while
'Ranji' seemed to toss runs over the field like largesse in silk purses, Fry
acquired them - no, not as a miser his hoard but as the connoisseur his
collection.
Fry was so much the student of batsmanship that often he appeared less
interested in the runs he was making than in the bowling as it presented
itself to his intellect almost in the abstract. Only by staying a long time
at the crease could he arrive at the detachment necessary for scrutiny as
objective as this; his centuries accrued as a by-product. I am certain that
in his years of supremacy as a batsman no thought of personal records or
aggrandisement occurred to him. He was absorbed in the problems of
technique; he was interested in the rationale of strokes, seeking the answer
to the great trick of S. F. Barnes, the ball which 'ran away' very late.
(Yet Fry considers Barnes was not a more dangerous bowler than George
Lohmann.) So lost was Fry to the common and external furniture and
accountancy of cricket, so deeply did he thrust his mind into the heart and
centre of it, that once I saw him, after he had been struck on the hand by a
fast ball while batting, walk beyond the square-leg umpire, shaking the
bruised fingers, then looking clearly at them, as though contemplating pain
not as a personal experience or sensation, but as a metaphysical phenomenon.
At Leeds, in 1930, Bradman scored a triple century on one and the same day
against England. I was sitting with Fry in the lounge of a Harrogate hotel,
over the weekend, and he was recalling a season of the 1900s and a match
between Middlesex and Sussex at Lord's. I want the reader to try and imagine
the scene; Fry stretched in an easy chair, playing with his monocle, myself
and a friend fascinated by his talk, Bradman forgotten. 'At close of play on
the second day,' he said, 'I was not out 80 or so, and next morning it was
our policy to get runs quickly as some rain had fallen in the night. I
reached my century and then - and then ... Albert Trott clean bowled me,
yes, clean bowled me with an off-break.' Here Fry rose from his chair, and
his eyes were looking across the distance of thirty years. He walked up and
down the lounge, and went through the motions of a batsman playing an
off-break. 'I can't think what I was doing,' he said; 'I simply can't.'
Thirty years after the event he was still seeing Trott's off-break as a
problem to be solved.
By concentration he conquered most bowlers. Against Yorkshire with Hirst,
Rhodes, Haigh, Wainwright and sometimes F. S. Jackson, an attack
superlative, Fry scored nearly 2,500 runs in all, average 70. In 1903 he
made 234 against Yorkshire at Bradford; next summer at Yorkshire he made 177
at Sheffield and 229 at Brighton in successive innings. It isn't possible to
convey the amazement felt by followers of cricket in the 1900s as Fry went
his processional course. None but players truly great could get anywhere
near a score of 200 in a period which saw bowling at its best. The game was
still unstaled; the soil had not been entirely turned and morning was in the
air, with much to be done that had not been done before. Batsmanship was on
the gold standard; the currency hadn't been debased. When Fry scored six
hundreds in six consecutive innings in little beyond a fortnight, two on
bowlers' wickets, he caused not 'a sensation' but wonder and nothing less.
Equally impressive was a failure by Fry to score. There was that staggering
afternoon in 1902 when news came from Lord's that England against Australia
had lost two wickets for no runs; and in the newspapers we saw in black
staring print:
C. B. Fry, c. Hill, b. Hopkins 0
K.S. Ranjitsinhji, b. Hopkins 0
This same season Fry and 'Ranji' were both dropped, in their pomp, from the
England XI, for the had momentarily disclosed a mortal fallibility. It all
seems legend now; great figures in the sun, sure of themselves. They
remained at a distance from us; there was no means of rendering them
familiar to us off the field, or ubiquitous.
I don't fancy schoolboys of the 1900s thought of Fry at all as an ordinary
man who wore ordinary clothes, a stiff collar and the rest. On the field he
was a sight for Phidias, the living sculpture of upright masculine grace and
handsomeness, with just a hint of Sir Willoughby Patterne hauteur. As he
stood at third-man, on the boundary, waiting for the bowler to get to work,
he would make movements on his toes suggesting a waltz. When he chased a
ball, his long effortless strides kept the indignity of hurry at bay; and
his aquiline tawny face flushed in the sun and air. He was past sixty when
he went to Australia to write comments on the Test matches there. I saw him
one evening stripped and about to dive into the pool on the liner Orion. The
balance of him, the upraised arms and the suggestions expressed by nerve,
sinew and limb of unstaled satisfaction in living, the rays of the setting
sun on him and the deepening blue of the Pacific sky above - somehow I think
of him today as I saw him then, even before I think of him as I saw him in
his prime, batting with 'Ranji', while the bowlers toiled and sweated and
wondered which end of the wicket was the one really to avoid.
'Play back or drive.' 'Watch the ball and deliver the stroke at the ball
itself and not at a point in space where you hope the ball will presently
be.' This was the Fry-Ranjitsinhji doctrine that brought revolution to the
game. The 'classic' lunge forward, which extended the batsman to a point
where stretching allowed little freedom of action, and where the ball could
only be guessed at to inches, fell into obsolescence amongst the great
players. 'Play back or drive' - and no cricketer has driven a ball with more
than Fry's easy power and imperiousness of swing. 'The only way of getting
on top of Barnes,' C. B. Fry has written, 'and it was not often done, was to
drive him over his head.' Think of it! - advice to batsmen: drive S. F.
Barnes for purposes of defence. It all sounds strange language in the 1950s,
and indeed to read of Fry's prowess at cricket, and of the luxuriance of it
all, impels us to imagine that the game once upon a time was sort of an
Arabian Nights Entertainment; it certainly reads that way in 'Wisden' now.
Every lover of the game will fervently wish, a private indulgence, that he
could just for an hour look again at Fry and Ranjitsinhji in conjunction;
flicks and magical passes at one end of the wicket, while at the other Fry
moves calmly towards close of play, the scholar athlete in excelsis.
---
Phew.
John Hall
Aditya Basrur <sandaa...@yahoo.com> writes:
<snip>
>
>Anyway, this piece apparently originally appeared in the "Spectator", around
>about the end of April 1952. It was later republished in Cardus's book,
>"Close of Play", from what I can make out. There are a few books listed in
>the contents, and I doubt I'll ever be able to get my hands on any of them
>... there's "Days in the Sun", "The Summer Game", "Good Days", "Full Score",
>"Close of Play", "Second Innings", "Cricket All the Year", "The Playfair
>Cardus", and possibly a few others. Seven publications of one's work isn't
>bad going.
There are more Cardus books than that. You might well be able to get
your hands on some of them. Try some of the Web second-hand bookm sites
such as www.abebooks.com and www.bibliofind.com
<snip>
>
>Phew.
>
>
Thanks for your efforts. I'd read it before, but it was well worth
reading again.
--
John Hall
You can divide people into two categories:
those who divide people into two categories and those who don't
Sid
> For Sid. In return, he'll write a report of the Singapore RSC meet we held
I will? Here's the short version. Harish TK, Sid and Aditya met at
Holland Village in Singapore. Ate Indian food at Kinara, had a couple
of beers, had coffee at Coffee Club express. Talked about cricket and
RSC and (a bit of) Wodehouse. It was good. :-)
> this evening, and kick off the annual awards ceremony.
Ah yes, that I will. Must dig up old posts for categories.
--- snip without prejudice ---
> austerity of exercise. Fry batted by the book of arithmetic and, while
> 'Ranji' seemed to toss runs over the field like largesse in silk purses, Fry
> acquired them - no, not as a miser his hoard but as the connoisseur his
> collection.
> Equally impressive was a failure by Fry to score. There was that staggering
> afternoon in 1902 when news came from Lord's that England against Australia
> had lost two wickets for no runs; and in the newspapers we saw in black
> staring print:
>
> C. B. Fry, c. Hill, b. Hopkins 0
> K.S. Ranjitsinhji, b. Hopkins 0
> This same season Fry and 'Ranji' were both dropped, in their pomp, from the
> England XI, for the had momentarily disclosed a mortal fallibility. It all
> seems legend now; great figures in the sun, sure of themselves. They
> remained at a distance from us; there was no means of rendering them
> familiar to us off the field, or ubiquitous.
> Every lover of the game will fervently wish, a private indulgence, that he
> could just for an hour look again at Fry and Ranjitsinhji in conjunction;
> flicks and magical passes at one end of the wicket, while at the other Fry
> moves calmly towards close of play, the scholar athlete in excelsis.
Thanks a lot. It was a great read.
Sid
--
sid at nerte dot net
http://www.nerte.net