The quality of cricket and cricketers is the highest when the mind of the fan is at its most impressionable. In other words, cricket for the fan is whatever he sees, especially when he is young, his mind broad and his waist narrow. All cricketing events before and after that get bundled into a fuzzy mix of the primitive and the decadent. If we look at the cricket fiction of PG Wodehouse, especially the ones which were later republished, we find that the author and his editors were extremely aware of this phenomenon.
by Arunabha Sengupta
There is a simple rule in the game of cricket and its followers—the realisation of which prevents untold frustration and heartburn. This golden guideline holds true for almost every fan to ever draw breath..
Simply put: “The quality of cricket and cricketers is at its highest when the mind of the fan is at its most impressionable and, as a corollary, the waist of the fan at its most slender.”
For the majority of fans—and we can safely assign the conservative estimate of 99.94% for this assertion—when the broad mind and narrow waist exchange their dimensions, cricketers drastically lose their class and the game itself loses its lustre. Simultaneously the deeds of the cricketers of one’s youth gather coating of gold dust while rolling along the passing years, thus fast snowballing into exponentially extraordinary feats of heroism.
In other words, cricket for the fan is whatever he sees, especially when he is young. The cricketing events that take place before, after or away from his sight, get bundled into a fuzzy conglomerate of the primitive and the decadent. Cricketers before that particular golden moment—when the fan was introduced to the game—simply don’t exist. After his formative years, the game goes perennially down the hill.
There is a scientific term for this—Rosy Retrospection.
This epochal moment and the object of adoration vary with every fan—depending on the time and place of his birth and so on. Hence, we have all the futile arguments about the greatest batsman, fast bowler, spinner, captain and all that rot. No two fans can agree on all these unless connected through near astrological alignment of stars.
And of course, it is well known that numerical, scientific, historical or any other sort of logical argument cannot hold any ground in discussions about the noble game. They are devastating to the spirit and case of fandom.
For the negligible percentage of diligent adherents who try to understand the sport through a thorough grasp of its history and numbers—in other words, that minority for whom the rule thus far discussed does not hold—knowledge of this golden rule prevents untold hours of beating their heads against the wall, trying to make logical headway through concrete walls of fanatic devotion.
Thus, player A remains the greatest opening batsman ever because we have never heard of other opening batsmen of yore like, say, H and S. Besides, we don’t care that the latter-day opening batsman K has a better record even after catering to the era-variance. Similarly, off-spinner S is the greatest of all time even though I have never known of spinners T or L. After all, when I was growing up the conditions were most difficult. Yes, for both batsmen and bowlers. Figure that if you can.
The Upgradable Wodehouse
It is quite counter-intuitive that an author like PG Wodehouse, often classed and categorised as anachronistic, and even criticised for being stuck in his preferred era, was actually very well aware of this phenomenon.. Together with his editors, he took every measure to counter expressions of bafflement and a hasty dissipation of interest that would have otherwise blighted the ratings of some of the master’s novels
In his writings Wodehouse remained somewhat rooted to a world he was comfortable with—a sort of inter-bellum period with somewhat impoverished peers and idle gentlemen of leisure, their footmen and valets, gadding about his pages. It was his way of writing, not going into the deep and all that.
However, when it came to cricket, he and his editors were well aware of the snapshot-in-time psychology of the fans of the noble game. In other words, he had his fingers on the pulse of his readers.
Of course, we know that he stopped writing about cricket altogether when he scented readership across the pond, preferring the multi-national decipherability of golf to the inscrutable-for-Americans cricket and the too-primitive-for-British baseball. Cricket, for all intents and purposes, started and stopped with his school stories. Once in a while New Yorkers like Bingley Crocker wondered what on earth ‘Hayward c Woolley b Carr 67’ was supposed to mean. But otherwise the sporting bits of the stories banked upon the fascination Wodehouse developed for golf—about which he wrote with his blood, possibly clad in his plus fours as he diligently described the mashie-niblicks and scripted forewords under the truncated title Fore.
But, what did happen was some of his old school stories were republished in the 1950s.
Jackson Junior, later renamed Mike, was a cricket novel featuring Mike Jackson, the schoolboy prodigy hailing from a family of first-class cricketers. It was published in 1909 by A & C Black. The sequel was a serialisation called The Lost Lambs, published in book form as Mike and Psmith in 1935.
In 1953, these two novels were republished by Herbert Jenkins as Mike at Wrykyn and Mike and Psmith.
You see the problem?
1909 to 1953 is a huge period of time for readers, and more so for cricket adherents.
The teenager who read Mike in 1909 would perhaps go to his grave in the 1970s adamant that Victor Trumper would forever remain the greatest batsman ever to grace the game. Don Bradman’s monumental feats, unleashed during the reader’s middle age, would move him not in the least. After all Clem Hill’s marginally superior record than Trumper had passed him by during his formative days as idle wind that wavered him not.
At the same time, for another young man reading Mike in 1953, Denis Compton would have been the one who had shown the world how to bat. Before that, the Trumpers and Hobbses and Bradmans had merely used those objects in their hands as clumsy wooden planks.
Hence, keeping the readership in mind, Plum and his editors did call for alteration.
So, while in Mike, one learns about that ‘ass Frank’ dropping ‘Fry and Hayward in the slips before they had scored, with the result that the spared expert had made a couple of hundred and still going strong’, things had to change in Mike at Wrykyn. After all, for the reader who was a cricket fan in 1953, CB Fry and Tom Hayward did not exist. Hence their names were replaced by May and Sheppard. Excellent choices too, with both Peter May and David Sheppard rising young batsmen at that point of time.
Similarly, when in Mike the protagonist gets asked whether like his elder brothers he too was a young Tyldesley, in Mike at Wrykyn the same Wyatt asks the youthful Jackson whether he was a potential Compton.
In Mike Wyatt touches upon Billy Burgess, the Wrykyn cricket captain, stressing on how miserly he is in his praise. “If you took him to see NA Knox bowl, he’d say he wasn’t bad.”
This was somewhat sentimental from Old Plum, with Neville Knox being his teammate in Dulwich who later opened the bowling for England. A splendid speedster for Surrey, Knox had nevertheless already played his only two Test matches in the summer of 1907, before Mike was published. Sticking to the timeline and style of bowling perhaps Walter Brearley or George Hirst would have been better choices, or Arthur Fielder if one wanted to stick to the South of England. However, there is a lot to be said about camaraderie, the Code of the Wodehouses, and the fact that Plum had even ghosted a cricketing article for his friend Knox.
In Mike at Wrykyn, however, this flaw is addressed in the most emphatic of ways. Wyatt alludes to none other than Fred Trueman, the ’Finest Bloody Fast Bowler that Ever Drew Breath’. (That description of Trueman stated in the last sentence is by the modest fast bowler himself).
And later in Mike, when Wyatt angrily tells Burgess of the need to give Mike a chance, he invokes the man considered to be the best batsman of his day. “Here’s the kid waiting for you ready made with a style like Trumper’s … ”
In 1953 Wodehouse cleverly maintains the quality of batsmanship intact by replacing Trumper with the then current best batsman of the world, whose greatness can also stand the test of cold numbers. Yes, in Mike at Wrykyn, Wyatt does say that Mike has a style like Len Hutton’s.
More such replacements follow.
In the match against Ripton, rain makes the wicket dicey. In Mike it is stated that Wilfred Rhodes would have relished the conditions. In Mike at Wrykyn it seems Jim Laker would be itching to have a bowl.
Rhodes is alluded to again when Ellerby wonders if the man bowling in tandem with the Ripton star is yet another incarnation of the legendary Yorkshire left-armer. In Mike at Wrykyn, the replacement is Roy Tattersall, who, according to Tony Ring, was surely flattered by the editors by being nominated a replacement of the legendary Rhodes.
Finally, in Mike, the house prefects express varying degrees of excitement at the news that Tyldesley has made a century against Gloucestershire. 44 years later, in Mike and Psmith, the news that Sheppard has made a century against the same county does not really move Adair. The Sedleigh captain keeps champing on his bread and marmalade with an abstracted air.
It is only partly true that the words and world of Wodehouse continued to operate in a fixed period between the Wars as the world moved on to the post-War era.
Even as England regained The Ashes during the coronation year of 1953, Bertie was summarily dispatched to a school that taught the aristocracy to fend for itself and Jeeves thereby landed up in the employment of Bill Belfry, Lord Rowcester.
In 1962-63, Ted Dexter’s men became the first England team to Australia to cover part of their journey by air. They flew to Aden before boarding the Canberra to Fremantle. By 1964, Jerry Shoesmith had shunned the boat train and the boat itself and flown to Paris from London. It was only when up in the clouds during the return journey he remembered that he had forgotten to do what he had gone there for, namely to collect Biff’s Boudin.
Amidst all the earls and dukes and cerebral valets and prizewinning pigs, Wodehouse did follow the arrow of time, albeit at a leisurely pace. And nowhere is it as apparent as in the republication of the cricket stories—where moving with the times was perhaps a necessity in order to avoid the glassy eyes and the hanging jaws of the archetypal cricket fan.