by Arunabha Sengupta
A superb all-rounder for Nottinghamshire, William Attewell scored over 8000 run in first class cricket and capturing almost 2000 wickets. He also toured Australia twice and played 10 Tests for England. Primarily a medium pacer of extraordinary accuracy, he was also a good enough batsman to score 102 against Kent in 1897. And he also has the unwanted distinction of being the first man to be dismissed for a King Pair in Test cricket.

However, he is immortal in cricket literature because of the supposed days spent in Shaftsbury/ Shrewsbury with a young Neville Cardus. ‘Supposed’ because as with so many ‘events’ recounted by Cardus, this too never happened.

According to the master cricketing fabricator, in 1912 Cardus was engaged as an assistant cricket coach at Shrewsbury School. Somehow, when in 1929 he wrote an account of his days in the school in his Summer Game, he used the name Shatsbury.

Now, in both Autobiography and Summer Game Cardus assiduously remembers William Attewell, the old Nottinghamshire and England cricketer, who played 10 Tests for England. He was supposedly the head coach Cardus reported to at Shrewsbury/Shatsbury.

Here is what Cardus writes in his Autobiography: “The head professional was none other than Attewell, who years ago had played for Nottinghamshire and had made history at Lord’s for the Players, and also had crossed the seas to Australia in a period when people talked of Australia as a place ‘down under’. I had decided to share my Shrewsbury diggings with him, we slept in the same bedroom … He was a plain simple character, lazy in the Midland counties way of the nineteenth century; much journeying about the land and several voyages to Australia had not in the slightest sophisticated him. As soon as he saw me … he looked at me like a father and said, ‘There’s not much of thi, mi lad.’”

This is followed by the description of ‘William’ in his international cap, sharing the cricket field with Cardus and talking about his experiences.

“William had worked in a factory when he was a boy, then out of obscurity he was taken far and wide by cricket.” This seems a recurrent theme in Cardus, rags to riches holding on to the willow and the leather, dripping with romanticism till the shape of the underlying facts were almost impossible to discern.

The two seemed close enough to have talks about God and the arts as well.

In Summer Game Cardus ‘remembers’: “When two o’clock had come and cricket was over for a space, William and I used to sit in our flannels on the little pavilion’s balcony, and rest ourselves from our scorching work in the nets. William would light his pipe, put his feet on the balustrade in front of our seats, and sigh contentedly. His famous career with Nottinghamshire and England never brought him greater happiness than the summers he spent at his life’s end down at Shastbury.”

Ah, the memories! I am sure several sports journalists, stumbling on to such pieces of romantic retrospection, will try to make scrupulous notes about the formative years of the genius, rooming with an old cricketer, milking his memory to discover delightful droplets and all that rot.

Only, William Attewell never coached at Shrewsbury. However, because of Cardus and his flight of imagination, some of his short biographies do adamantly proclaim that he was there as senior professional at the school.

Further, Attewell never really did anything special in the Gentlemen vs Players matches at Lord’s. He did put in some good performances, but almost always in the showdowns at Hastings or Scarborough, and these never amounted to anything like ‘making history’.

After his cricketing days he became an umpire.

The man who did coach Shrewsbury School, and was the head professional when Cardus claimed to have been hired by the institute, was the cousin of the famed William Attewell, a small-time cricketer called Walter Attewell. So much for Cardus rooming with and wading through the reminiscences of his dear ‘William’, famous for his exploits in Australia and his international cap.

Walter Attewell appeared for Nottinghamshire only once, in a match against Surrey at Trent Bridge in 1891. He bagged a pair and bowled 4 overs without a wicket. After that he went abroad. Not to Australia, but to North America. He became a wandering coach who worked in Philadelphia, and played four First-Class matches in United States in 1894. So much for his All-England days and international cap, Australian journeys and the rest of it.

It was Walter who coached Shrewsbury School from 1906 to 1912, after which he was replaced by Ted Wainwright. Of course Cardus later ‘extracted memories’ about matches that never took place from Wainwright as well, taking due care to publish those pieces after Waingwright’s deat

As for Walter Attewell, he passed away in 1919. In 1994, Wisden published his deferred obituary with the words, “ATTEWELL, WALTER, who died on February 3, 1919, aged 54, played one match for Nottinghamshire in 1891 but was better known as a wandering coach who worked in Philadelphia in the 1890s and, from 1906 to 1912, at Shrewsbury School where he was assisted by Neville Cardus. However, in his Autobiography Cardus appears to confuse Attewell with his more famous cousin William.”

Confusion? I have reservations about that conclusion.

It was just Cardus’s way of spinning a delightful yarn in days when looking up records was too difficult.

Is it a coincidence that his first recollections of William Attewell and his stint with Cardus in the quaint school were published in Summer Game in 1929? After all Walter died in 1919 and William in 1927, so none of them could deny any of the delightful stories.

Incidentally, Summer Game also had that bit of fiction about Wainwright deploring the Ranji-Fry stands at Hove against Yorkshire. This man, who replaced Walter Attewell at Shrewsbury, passed away in 1919 as well.

Oh, well. That’s Cardus for you. With his plume dipped in the ink of Seshat, Seraphis and Sia, and all of the Muses, he was equipped to take generations for a ride. And he took due care to deploy his pen with a flourish after checking the death records. Those seem to be the only records he ever checked.

William Attewell was born on 12 June 1861