Rain stopped play....

...but not at the Open golf

While England cricketers lurked in the pavilion and Old Trafford’s faithful spectators huddled beneath their hoodies and oilskins, SKY Sports switched hurriedly to the Hoylake links – bleak and windswept on the best of days – where golfers competing in the Open sloshed their way manfully through the final day.

While the Test Match scorers supped tea and cakes and marked off the hours to a draw, golf’s superstars put on a gritty show in front of an equally hardy gallery.

It’s what England cricket fans expect – and accept. But was it always so?

I spent the rained-off final Test day with a TV eye on the golf and my nose in a fascinating old volume written by the great Victorian sporting character J Arthur Gibbs – an MCC and Somerset Gentleman cricketer in the days when it was a game for wealthy amateurs, who didn’t mind a bit of a dowsing from the elements, nor the perils of the soggy pitches which resulted.

In fact Gibbs revels in adversity, as this extract from  “A Cotswold Village”, written in the late 1890s, reveals:-

Some of the pleasantest matches we have ever taken part in have been those at Bourton-on-the-Water. Owing to the very soft wicket which he found on arriving, this place was once christened by a well-known cricketer, Bourton-on-the-Bog.

Indeed, it is often a case of Bourton-under-the-Water but, in spite of a soft pitch, there is great keenness and plenty of good-tempered rivalry about these matches.

Gibbs was an old Etonian and Oxford MA who spent two years working for the family banking firm and then retired to his Cotswold estate at Ablington, near Cirencester, and a life of sporting endeavour. As well as playing cricket at the highest level, he was a noted angler, huntsman and shot and he was never happier than when indulging his lust for sport in the Cotswolds, touring village cricket clubs with his MCC team-mates.  He continues:

Bourton is a truly delightful village. The Windrush, like the Coln at Bibury, runs for some distance alongside of the village street. The M.C.C., or " premier club"- as the sporting press delight to call the famous institution at Lord's - generally get thoroughly well beaten by the local club. For so small a place they certainly put a wonderfully strong team into the field; on their own native " bog " they are fairly invincible, though we fancy on the hard-baked clay at Lord's their bowlers would lose a little of their cunning.

Local hazards were not just weather-borne.  Gibbs recalls:

In the luncheon tent at Bourton there are usually more wasps than are ever seen gathered together in one place; they come in thousands from their nests

in the banks of the Windrush.

If you are playing a match there, it is advisable to tuck your trousers into your socks when you sit down to luncheon. This, together with the fact that the tent has been known to blow down in the middle of luncheon, makes these matches very lively and amusing.

What more lively scene could be imagined than a large tent with twenty-two cricketers and a few hundred wasps hard at work eating and drinking; then, on the tent suddenly collapsing, the said cricketers and the said wasps, mixed up with chairs, tables, ham, beef, salad-dressing, and apple tart, and the various ingredients of a cricket lunch, all struggling on the floor, and striving in vain to find their way

out as best they can?

Fortunately on the only occasion that the tent blew down when we were

present, it was not a good wasp year.

Sadly, for one so active and daring, Gibbs’ halcyon days were cut short in 1899 by a fatal heart attack at the age of only 31. He left behind, though, a number of books, including “The Improvement of Cricket Grounds on Economical Principles”. His writings provide a glorious glimpse into what was a flourishing cricketing culture.

Besides the matches at Bourton, there is plenty of cricket at Cirencester, Northleach, and other centres in the Cotswolds. The " hunt" matches are great institutions, even though hunting people as a rule do not care for cricket, and invariably drop a catch.

A good sportsman and excellent fellow has lately presented a cup to be competed for by the village clubs of this district. This, no doubt, will give a great impetus to the game amongst all classes….anything that can make the greatest pastime of this country popular in the merrie Cotswolds is a step in the right direction.

It is pleasing to watch boys and men hard at work practising on summer evenings. The rougher the ground the more they like it. Scorning pads and gloves they "go in" to bat and make Herculean efforts to hit the ball. And this, with fast bowling and the bumpy nature of the pitch, is a very difficult thing to do. They play on, long after sunset, the darker it gets, and the more dangerous to life and limb the game becomes, the happier they are.

I don’t know what Gibbs would have made of today’s top class game and the men – and women – who now play it. But it is certain that he would have been itching to get out of the pavilion and on to the wicket, even one a little slippery from rain. For what he said of cricket followers remain true today:

The British public are essentially hero worshippers and especially do they worship men who show manliness and pluck…it will be a bad day for England when success in our sports and pastimes no longer depends on the exercise of pluck… when the wholesome element of danger is removed from our recreation and pursuits….when hunting gives way to bicycling and cricket to golf.

Oh…hold on a minute there, Arthur. Your words can be excused by you being long-dead, but if St Peter has installed SKY TV and you had tuned in to the events at the Royal Liverpool on Sunday,  I think you might now have a new respect for the players who battle for honours on the fairways and greens.

A Cotswold Village – or Country Life and Pursuits in Gloucestershire was published by John Murray in 1899 just months before the untimely death of J Arthur Gibbs and ran to two editions with four printings of the second edition, which appeared after his death with a second Preface of tribute to Gibbs. My copy was a gift from my daughter, Laura, but original copies do appear in specialist shops and on-line.