OUNDLE: THE GENTLE HOTBED

‘Cricket in an English market town’

By Andrew Radd

CHAPTER ONE

‘The pots, wherein these plants are set, may be plunged into a

gentle Hot-bed in order to promote their taking root…and this

will promote its flowering.’

(The Gardener’s Dictionary - 1732)

‘The town of Oundle – in the Anglo-Saxon, Undela – has behind it

a very long history circling around the Parish Church, but bringing

also before the imagination kings, queens, archbishops and high

officers of State, as well as the business man and worker, who

have all made their contribution.’

(‘Oundle’s story; a history of town and school’ by W. Smalley Law)

1826. Beethoven was still alive, just. Landmark legislation

authorising construction of a ‘railway’ between Liverpool and

Manchester passed through Parliament. John Wisden, the ‘Little

Wonder’ and founder of the Cricketers’ Almanack, was born in

Brighton while Hambledon’s John Small, first acknowledged

master of the straight bat, died in his native Hampshire, and a

new pavilion at Lord’s (not the current one) was opened following

a fire the previous year which destroyed all MCC’s original records

and trophies. Two of the principal architects of American

independence, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, departed this

life within five hours of each other, appropriately enough on July

4 - half-a-century to the day since they signed the latter’s

momentous map-changing declaration in Philadelphia. Here,

Prime Minister Lord Liverpool’s Tories trounced the Whigs in a

general election, and the first Cowes Regatta was held off the Isle

of Wight.

Inland, what passed for a crime wave in Oundle that summer saw

‘a fine sheep’ – belonging to Mr Deacon of Benefield – stolen and

slaughtered one Saturday night, while 20 brace of pike were

pinched from Mr William Walcot’s fish pond in the town. A

reminder, perhaps, that there were plenty of hungry people

around the countryside in the England of gluttonous King George

IV.

A few thirsty ones too. ‘Three notorious characters…all old

offenders’ were hauled up before the Reverend Charles Euseby

Isham, vicar of Oundle for 38 years, on charges of drunkenness

and disturbing the peace of the town. They were let off with a

‘suitable admonition’ – two of them having spent much of the day

in the stocks – but warned that next time they would not escape

so lightly. Talking of which, servant Elizabeth Southwell was

committed to Oundle’s house of correction for seven days as

punishment for ‘unlawfully absenting herself from her master’s

service.’ Clearly a case of pour encourager les autres.

Health and safety was also an issue. A man found himself 20

shillings (plus costs) worse off as a result of his conviction under

the Oundle Improvement Act for ‘riding upon the foot pavement.’

The Act, passed the previous year, concerned itself with ‘lighting,

watching, paving, cleansing and otherwise improving’ the town; a

body of commissioners was appointed and charged with the task

of finding ‘a sufficient number of fit and able-bodied men to

patrol, watch and guard the streets, and provide watch-boxes for

them’ – while the decision was taken to illuminate said streets

with ‘oil and cotton.’ Functional if not fragrant. With civic pride

so much in evidence – and notwithstanding an excellent wheat

and barley harvest – the townsfolk were clearly in no mood to be

taken for a ride by the undeserving poor; a woman with two

children attempted to gull the people of Oundle and Titchmarsh

by throwing herself on the ground and pretending to be about to

give birth, ‘imposing upon the credulity of several well-disposed

persons’ to earn a few bob before making herself scarce –

‘doubtless to practise her deceptions in some new place.’

But it wasn’t all crime, punishment, benefit claimants (albeit in

this case with a large dose of private enterprise) and street

lighting – all staples of the local media in the 21st century. The

town’s new market house was starting to take shape, built from

stone (‘of very excellent quality’) recycled when the church of All

Saints in Barnwell was pulled down. A short walk away stood the

Dolphin Inn on North Street – run at the time by one William Ellis,

bought by the School in 1867 and now known as the ‘Old Dryden’

building which, amongst other things, used to house the studios

of OSCAR radio. And it’s there the blue plaque should probably

go; ‘Oundle Town Cricket Club was born (or at least baptised)

here.’

The Huntingdon, Northampton, Bedford and Cambridge Weekly

Journal was sufficiently enthused by this piece of sporting

intelligence to include a lengthy paragraph (above an account of

an escaped prisoner returning to the treadmill at Northampton

Gaol) in July 1826:

‘The gentlemen and tradesmen of this town and neighbourhood

have lately established a Cricket Club, and if we may judge from

the public spirit of the projectors, little doubt can be entertained

of it soon attaining great celebrity. The members exercise

regularly, and a stimulus is given to their exertions by playing for

suitable refreshment. The anxiety of each gentleman to become

an adept in this noble game and to escape “scot free” is kept alive

by this plan, and the social hour enlivened by the well-earned

bowl. Yesterday a well-contested match was played for “a rump

and a dozen” in which the rising merits of every player was

observed with much pleasure by the spectators. After the sports

of the day, the party partook of an elegant entertainment at the

Dolphin Inn; the “rosy wine” was briskly circulated, “auld

acquaintances were brought to mind”, new friendships formed,

and each aspirant departed in the evening well pleased with the

harmony and goodwill which characterised their convivial

meeting.’

The idea of ‘gentlemen and tradesmen’ playing for comestibles –

‘a rump and a dozen’ – made good sense, presumably. A decent

knock and trundle, plenty of ‘rosy wine’ and then a slap-up

breakfast of steak and eggs next morning; who could ask for

anything more? They might even have considered boiling up

some of the ‘very fine mangel wurzel roots, weighing from 18lbs

to 21lbs each’ grown by Mr Webster from Polebrook and

exhibited at that year’s Oundle Fair.

Cricket itself, though, was becoming more ‘scientific’ by 1826,

with the acrimonious debate continuing among England’s leading

administrators, patrons and practitioners about what should

constitute a legal bowling action. Reformers wanted the hand to

be allowed level with or even above the elbow, while the old

guard clung jealously to the old ‘pure’ underarm method. At

length, it was agreed in 1835 that a ball ‘not thrown or jerked in

which the hand or arm did not go above the shoulder’ – round-

arm, in other words – would be acceptable. The march of science,

another indication of the reforming spirit that did away with the

rotten boroughs, or a compromise to accommodate girls in

hooped skirts? Take your pick. Whether this revolution reached

the new Oundle club sooner or later isn’t clear, but if that first

newspaper report is any guide its members were perhaps more

immediately concerned with the social rather than the technical

aspects of the game.

Elsewhere in the county, matches were played between ‘Married’

and ‘Single’ on Northampton’s Racecourse that summer; Lord

Sondes fielded a side at Rockingham against Uppingham Union;

and an almighty row erupted between the players of Naseby and

Clipston which prompted a feisty correspondence in the local

press. Naseby were 32-8 in reply to Clipston’s 42 all out when

the former ‘considered themselves to be unhandsomely treated’

and left the field, accusing the opposition of ungentlemanly

behaviour and challenging them to another match, not for steak

and eggs but for the sum of a hundred sovereigns. Clipston’s

finest reportedly tore the challenge into pieces and ‘threw it into

the air as a token of contempt.’ Importantly for this story, the

game was also flourishing in and around Peterborough; the

cricket historian Jim Coldham described it as ‘perhaps the most

important cricketing centre in the County’ around that time. As

far back as 1801 there is a record of the Peterborough club being

dismissed for 7 at Wisbech, while in 1818 they played home-and-

away against Stamford. Arthur Annesley of Ufford was a keen

patron of the game and ran his own side - in 1809 he and the

Earl of Winchelsea led a team of ‘gentleman from Oakham and the

neighbourhood’ in a match against ‘a party of friends’ at

Stamford, ‘won by the Rutland men by one inning (sic).’

But who were Oundle’s worthy founders, doing (so far as we can

tell) rather friendlier battle on those rough, sheep-cropped

pitches? Their names are not recorded in the Journal’s account,

but Pigot’s Directory of Northamptonshire – published just a few

years later – gives a flavour of how Oundle’s ‘tradesmen’ earned a

living; bakers and flour dealers, blacksmiths, (inevitably) boot and

shoe makers, braziers and tin-men, chymists (sic) and druggists,

grocers and tea dealers, maltsters, perfumers and hair dressers

(four listed in the town), surgeons (five of them), straw hat

makers, tallow chandlers, wheelwrights and a solitary chair turner

in Mill Lane. No ‘sports outfitters’ there, but just a short ride

away in Stamford’s High Street a Mr Boyall was advertising in

1826 ‘cricket bats and balls of most approved makes’ – along

with brushes, combs (‘tortoise-shell and bone’) and fishing

tackle. For adventurous types, the ‘Old Oundle’ coach departed

from the Swan Inn to London three times a week, via Thrapston,

Kimbolton, St Neots and Stevenage, and the parish of Oundle

(according to ‘the last returns to parliament’ and despite the

ravages of typhus fever that summer which left ‘three or four

persons lying ill of the disorder in one house at the same time’)

could boast precisely 2,279 inhabitants. A few of them, at least,

keen cricketers.

In 1826 Stephen Coales would have been pushing 40. According

to Arthur Howitt, a local saddle maker, in his quirky little book

‘Oundle Reminiscences’ published in the 1950s, this Oundle

worthy died in October 1889 aged ‘over 102 years’ although the

man himself had claimed to be 105. Howitt reports Mr Coales

‘would climb a ladder and trim the grape vine’ at Laxton’s

Hospital even after reaching three-figures and ‘was very fond of a

pint…occasionally he would have a glass of gin’ but didn’t smoke.

By the end of his life he possessed ‘but one tooth, of which he

was rather proud.’ He had been a gardener and helped his father

plant many trees on the Ashton estate, of which more anon. A

fanciful thought, maybe – but might he have been one of those

present at that first recorded gathering of OTCC?

And what of the venue for it? Arthur Marshall – both a pupil and a

Master at Oundle School as well as a writer, broadcaster and,

eventually and deservedly, National Treasure – knew Dryden

House as a new boy in the 1920s and recalled it in his hugely-

entertaining autobiography ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’:

‘(It) had started life as a coaching inn on a modest scale. Its

double doors opened on to a cobbled, sunless roadway between

two lofty wedges of rooms, and led to stables and a small,

gravelly yard. Little, if anything, had changed from the days when

the coaches came rumbling in…the tiny, airless and almost

lightless changing room in which we prepared ourselves for

games, and de-briefed ourselves after games, made the black

hole of Calcutta seem by comparison like the Dorchester. One

wag, providing for the yearly House Magazine an article on the

house’s origins, wrote ‘the old inn accommodation has now been

tastefully converted into spacious suites of rooms for boys.’ This

was considered satirical and was ill received by authority.’

No mention, satirical or otherwise, of its central role in the town’s

cricketing history.

On August 27 1827 Oundle (in the role of halfway house) hosted

a big match between Peterborough and Thrapston. ‘Big’ in terms

of betting interest, at any rate. It’s worth noting that even half-a-

century later in the 1870s, James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual

included detailed instructions for gamblers in the Laws of Cricket:

‘No bet upon any match is payable unless played out or given

up…if the bet be made on both innings (and) any one party beat

the other in one innings, the runs of the first innings shall

determine it,’ and so on. In this case, ‘a bystander’ bet 40-to-1

against Peterborough’s gentlemen, who emerged victorious by

nine wickets, and the punter’s actions ‘excited great interest’ in

the result. No Anti-Corruption Commissioner there, of course,

but the whole business of match-fixing is nothing new. A few

years before OTCC came along, the great batsman William

Lambert was ‘warned off the Turf’ at Lord’s (according to ‘Plum’

Warner in his history of Headquarters) for allegedly ‘selling’ a

match by not trying his best. Nor was that an isolated incident,

prompting James Pycroft in ‘The Cricket Field’ (1851) to devote

several pages to ‘A Dark Chapter’ in the history of the game.

The Oundle club, meanwhile, was soon strong enough to

challenge decent local opposition – losing only narrowly to ‘the

Gents of the neighbourhood’ by ten runs (28 and 64 versus 65

and 37) in August 1836 in a ‘smartly contested’ fixture. They

may even have secured the services of an occasional ‘ringer.’ The

first OTCC match for which a full scorecard survives was against

the village of Bourn, although the venue was ‘the Race-course

near Stamford,’ on Monday July 24 1837, just a month into the

long reign of Queen Victoria:

OUNDLE BOURN

Cobb – c by Phipps 4 Phipps – b by Wells 2

Hunt – run out 29 William – b by ditto 37

Wells – c by Eley 0 Collingwood – b by

Fentiman 55

Lomas – b by ditto 0 Barratt – c by Hunt 13

Wood – b by ditto 1 Stringfeller – b by

Fentiman 9

Smith – b by Phipps 6 Johnston – st by Lomas 19

Webster – c by ditto 4 Roberts – st by ditto 6

Croston – b by ditto 5 Daniel – c by Smith 16

Fentiman – b by ditto 0 Eley – st by Lomas 10

Newton – not out 25 Bellingham – b by Lomas

4

Knight – c by Roberts 1 Pearson – not out 0

Byes 8 Byes 13

Wide balls 3 Wide balls 2

No balls 5 No balls 3

Total: 91 Total: 190

Not exactly a print-out from Total Cricket Scorer, but it gives us

the gist. ‘Some good batting was exhibited on the part of

Oundle,’ noted the local correspondent, ‘particularly by Messrs

Hunt (who we understand to be a Sussex player) and Newton

junior. At the end of the first innings the Oundle gentlemen

scored 91 – not a bad innings.’ But as the scorecard shows it was

nothing like enough against the might of Bourn’s William and

Collingwood, and it was agreed that for the return fixture Oundle

should receive ‘two given men as bowlers.’ Regardless of the

result, the social niceties were not ignored. Around 50 gents sat

down to an ‘excellent cold collation’ in the grandstand, ‘and the

health of the noble (2nd) Marquis of Exeter and other toasts were

drunk.’ All very appropriate given that the local aristo – a future

Lord Lieutenant of Northamptonshire – had been a keen cricketer

in his youth and even played a first-class match at the ‘new’

(current) Lord’s ground in 1817.

And what of Mr Hunt, the possible Sussex player? At this distance

in time his full identity is not known. Perhaps it was a cricketing

nom-de-guerre. But against Bourn he should have run a bit

faster.

Even before the opening of Oundle’s railway station in June 1845,

linking the town with Northampton and Wellingborough in one

direction and Peterborough in the other, local cricketers seem to

have adopted ‘have bat, will travel’ as an early motto. Useful

trade, perhaps, for Jinks and Son, who operated the wagons of

their carriers business from West Street. After hosting Rothwell in

1838 – winning by 26 runs on first innings, 74 to 48, and the

opposition subsequently ‘giving up the game’ – the club tackled

home-and-away fixtures against Harborough the following

summer. The Northampton Mercury (chronicle of county news

since 1720) reckoned the match in Leicestershire was ‘well-

contested’ with both sides ‘(keeping) up the game with great

spirit throughout the day, excepting only a few intervals for

refreshments.’ The home side triumphed then by seven wickets –

Oundle 90 and 47, Harborough 83 and 56 for three – although

‘the utmost good humour and hilarity prevailed.’

That cheery bonhomie didn’t last, though. The return match a

couple of weeks later was, according to the Lincolnshire

Chronicle, ‘by no means a pleasant game, certain members of the

Harborough club not exhibiting that urbanity which should be

shown by a cricketer on the field.’ The row seems to have

revolved around a player named Woodward (possibly Alfred from

Stamford, who in later years popped up in the colours of

Peterborough and Melton Mowbray as well as his home town) and

specifically which team he should turn out for. Harborough

refused to take the field unless Woodward was ‘given’ by Oundle.

This duly happened, but much good did it do them as

Harborough went down by nine runs – 81 to 72.

An interesting footnote. The Oundle club was able to host the

fixture ‘through the kindness of Mr Newton of Elmington (a

hamlet a couple of miles outside the town on the Peterborough

road), in a close of his which he had prepared in consequence of

the usual place of play being rendered unfit by the late floods.’

So where was ‘the usual place’? Hard evidence is scarce, although

the mention of flooding maybe lends credence to local lore that it

was what became known as the ‘Lower Cricket Ground’ in South

Road, near the river. The School certainly granted use of that

field to local teams in the 1870s and 1880s, when it was also

used for miscellaneous events like flower and vegetable shows

and, as in July 1883, the ‘Anniversary of the Loyal Providence

Lodge of Oddfellows’ who fielded 22 against the OTCC XI in a

special cricket match - and then had the temerity to claim victory

when time was called ‘although the club only required two runs to

win.’ The assembled company also played quoits and enjoyed the

music of the National School’s drum and fife band before

adjourning to The Talbot for the evening bash.

By the late-1840s Oundle’s cricketers were matching themselves

against the very best in the county. The Northampton Town club

– founded in 1820 and with its home on the Racecourse, where

the great Alfred Mynn had ‘guested’ for the North of England

against the South in 1844 – was already strong and becoming

stronger by the time Oundle met it in a double-header in the

late-summer of 1849. The matches between Northampton’s

‘Town’ and ‘County’ members helped lay the foundations for a

properly-organised Northamptonshire County Cricket Club which

duly arrived (with Oundle involvement, of course) three decades

later. For now, Northampton won the away fixture comfortably –

OTCC’s cause not helped by an unhealthy tally of byes and wides,

numbering 27 in a total of 119 all out – but had the tables turned

on them back at their own headquarters, with ‘Garrett’

(conceivably William Garrat, a Shropshire-born former

Nottinghamshire player who turned out around this time for

Peterborough and Wisbech in ‘big’ matches against the All

England Eleven and was once dismissed when his top hat fell on

the stumps) hitting an unbeaten 59, which was eight more runs

than the home side - including their distinguished captain and

secretary, William Griffiths Hollis - managed between them in

their first innings. Woodward, the cause of the great Harborough

rumpus, claimed six wickets. Northampton fared better at the

second attempt but the match wasn’t ‘played out’ to a finish.

That same season saw Weekley (not bracketed with neighbouring

Warkton in those days) skittled for 27 and 24 in ‘very fine’

weather at Boughton Park – still one of the loveliest venues in

Northamptonshire cricket – with Oundle’s Mr Fentiman bagging

14 wickets in the match. The visitors’ 85 all out was enough to

secure victory by an innings and 34 runs. The 1849 fixture list

also featured a couple of games against Walcot Park, based in the

grounds of the hall near Barnack owned by the Nevile family.

Barnack CC remain regular opponents in the Rutland League, and

the two clubs contested the John Wilcox Cup final in September

2014. The first of those 1849 meetings at Oundle even merited a

few lines in a London newspaper, ‘The Era,’ on the same page as

reports of Kent and Surrey versus England – Mynn, Fuller Pilch

(one of whose descendants will feature in this story many years

hence), John Wisden et al. ‘There was a large company from the

neighbouring villages and from Stamford who had come to

witness the game, which was carried on with great spirit until

half-past-eight o’clock, when the Walcot Park side had to get 31

notches to win with seven wickets to go down.’ The opposition

also held the upper hand on their own field, although once again

bad light intervened in the fourth innings. Oundle entered the

lists too – albeit unsuccessfully - against the ‘Peterborough

Crown’ club in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition. Once

again, the gamblers were much to the fore; it had been agreed

that play ‘should be confined to one day, and if unable to finish

the game the first innings was to be decisive, not only of victory

but of all bets pending the result,’ as the Cambridge Chronicle

and Journal explained helpfully. Oundle’s 90 all out owed much

to ‘Collingwood Esquire’ who made 47 before departing hit-

wicket.

This was also the era of Nicholas Wanostrocht, aka Felix, one of

the first to recommend the use by batsmen of padding (including

‘longitudinal socks’ featuring the new vulcanised rubber and worn

under the trousers) to combat ‘the modern system of throwing.’

There were also ‘sprung’ bats now, to reduce – although never

entirely eliminate – the jarring effects of toe-ending a yorker.

Whether the gallant yeomen of the Oundle club went in for these

new-fangled inventions is not clear. No milksops, they – nor

what Derek Birley in his masterly ‘A Social History of English

Cricket’ describes memorably as ‘gaily coloured, beribboned

good-time Charlies’ who set up clubs, many short-lived, as an

amateur response to the travelling bands of professionals

roaming the kingdom to take on all-comers.

Admittedly, cricket didn’t have the sporting stage all to itself in

this corner of Northamptonshire. Oundle races were also a major

attraction, as a report from the summer of 1842 confirms: ‘The

town began to fill with visitors at an early hour, and our merry

church bells gave full assurance of the spirit of the town to

support them. Twelve o’clock being the time appointed for

starting, the stewards left the Dolphin Inn for the race ground,

preceded by the Oundle band, when a very animated scene

presented itself…’ Nevertheless, the world – or at least the local

cricket scene – appeared to be Oundle Town CC’s oyster in the

middle of the 19th century. Especially with such a notable nursery

just up the lane.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Long ere the cruel marauders of many a Danish band

Rowed up the broad Nene valley, and plundered the fertile land,

Here in our town of Oundle, high over the river-side,

Wilfrid of York once rested, and founded a school, and died.’

(Oundle School song by B.J. Benson, 1864)

In 2005 Oundle School celebrated the 150th anniversary of cricket

there – specifically of the first match of which an account

survives, according to W.G. Walker in his weighty but invaluable

‘A History of the Oundle Schools’ published in 1956. The report

appeared in the Oundle Gazette and Northamptonshire Advertiser

of August 30, 1855:

‘A match was played last Tuesday, between the Uppingham and

Oundle Schools. We must say on behalf of the latter that of the

eleven players they had last year, only three played on this

occasion, viz: Bowker, Welch and Richardson. Notwithstanding

this serious disadvantage, they accepted the challenge of the

Uppingham boys and far exceeded the expectation of their

friends. Bowker played remarkably well: Welch, Richardson,

Stansbury, Guille and Davidson distinguished themselves.

Uppingham however gained the day, with eight wickets to go

down. We trust next year the Oundle boys will not be so terribly

overmatched, when doubtless we shall have the pleasure of

reporting a very different result.’

Only the worst kind of cynic would point out that the School

advertised in this short-lived publication – ‘Terms £2 per annum

including French, Entrance Fee £1, no extras, but books and

stationery’ - so the kindly spin on a heavy defeat (Oundle 33 and

77, Uppingham 108 and 3 for two) may not be too much of a

surprise. Equally unsurprising is the fact that cricket had actually

been played at the School long before this particular drubbing.

As far back as May 1830 a couple of local newspapers related

details of ‘a match at the manly game…between eleven of the

young gentlemen of the Kings Cliffe academy, and a like number

of the Reverend Mr Shillibeer’s academy at Oundle (John

Shillibeer, also a talented artist, was Headmaster between 1829

and 1841), on Morehay Lawn.’ It sounds like quite an occasion –

‘the declivity…was more than usually gay’ with praise for the

‘gentlemanlike feeling’ shown by both sides – but this beautiful

rural spot failed to inspire the Oundle boys who lost to Kings

Cliffe, triggering wild celebrations: ‘The village bells welcomed

them home and flags were raised in honour of the feat.’ For their

sterling efforts the village boys received a cricket ball, while the

Oundelians had to console themselves with the fact that they

were ‘on a strange ground, and had other barriers to their

success.’ A tantalisingly ambiguous comment sadly not enlarged

upon.

The game was already considered a selling point, though; an

advert from the following year, October 1831, assured the public

that Oundle’s ‘Cricket and Play Grounds’ were ‘large and airy’

while the pupils were treated with ‘kindness and liberality.’ And

after prize-giving at the School in May 1846 (during which the

senior pupil, W.T. Wilkinson, made a speech in honour of

Shillibeer’s successor as Headmaster, the Reverend David Pooley,

that would have won any award for sheer barefaced crawling

hands-down – ‘my fellow pupils concur most heartily in

expressing the same gratitude and affection towards you’) it was

reported that ‘the party adjourned to the cricket ground, and the

gentlemen and pupils had an excellent game which lasted until 4

o’clock.’ Five years later, Oundle enjoyed a comfortable win in a

two-innings match against the Albion schools.

By that time, the School had already produced its first cricketer to

shine on the national stage. John Morley Lee became a pupil at

Oundle in 1840, won three Blues at Cambridge and appeared in

first-class matches for a variety of sides including MCC,

Gentlemen of England, Cambridge Town and County Club, and

Surrey. Scores and Biographies claimed his entry into the Church

of England (he became an honorary Canon at Winchester

Cathedral) deprived the Gentlemen of ‘one of the most valuable

men they have ever had in their annual contest against the

Players.’ That said, he missed out in his final ‘G v. P’ fixture at

Lord’s in 1850, dismissed by John Wisden in the first innings and

by William Clarke, canny founder of the touring All-England

Eleven and Nottingham’s Trent Bridge ground, in the second. In

this case you may know a man by the company he keeps.

The oldest scorebook in the School archives was donated by

George Shirley Terry, an assistant master, in 1857, and it

chronicles some of the outstanding performances of Nottingham-

born William Williams, who followed in Lee’s footsteps from

Oundle into ‘big’ cricket and scored the first recorded century for

the School, against a Masters’ team in 1859. He spent four years

in the Eleven and in 1863 was presented with a silver cup by ‘the

past and present members of the Oundle Grammar School Cricket

Club’ in recognition of his achievements. By then he’d already

represented (aged just 17) the Gentlemen of the North against

those of the South at Trent Bridge; a few years later he married

the youngest daughter of Oundle’s then-Headmaster, Dr John

Fortunatus Stansbury, and returned to the School to represent the

Past (who usually won) against the Present – although Sporting

Life noted in 1866 that ‘the younger Present boys played

Williams’s fast bowling very pluckily.’ Hopefully the Head’s son-

in-law did the decent thing and kept it pitched up. In fact, the

importance of making this important annual fixture and social

event a reasonably competitive contest was a recurring theme;

back in 1861 it was reported that ‘to prevent (the Present side)

being overwhelmed…being rather under the mark this season, a

professional bowler has been giving the boys daily instructions,

which have already wonderfully improved them.’ Something to

hearten supporters of the Present, who wore pink ribbon favours

to distinguish them from the partisans of the Past XI who pinned

on blue ones.

In 1875 Williams played under W.G. Grace’s captaincy in the Gents

versus Players match at the Prince’s ground in Chelsea, the

unpaid – admittedly a somewhat hollow term in Grace’s case -

undone on that occasion by Alfred Shaw and James Southerton, a

pair of great professional bowlers who would both appear in what

became accepted as the first-ever Test match in Melbourne in

March 1877. His final appearance in first-class cricket was for an

England XI – captained by Fred Grace, W.G.’s younger brother –

against the Players of the North at Dewsbury in 1878, and he died

seven years later, aged only 40.

They were clearly keen on their cricket at the School in Williams’

time. Walker recounts the tale of another Past versus Present

fixture in the 1860s when one of the examiners left a guinea on

offer for the best individual performer. A.E. Francis, then a

Cambridge undergraduate, top-scored for the old boys – having

walked through the night from his college! In 1862 the School

tackled North Northamptonshire home and away (the latter game

at Drayton Park, Lowick), and in the home fixture handed out a

thoroughgoing thrashing to opponents who relied heavily on the

Reverend Hugh Hodgson Gillett, an Oxford Blue and vicar of

Finedon and, later, Wadenhoe. ‘The Reverend Gillett, who would

guard his wicket with his leg, paid the penalty,’ it was reported.

‘Had he been content with the usual defence of his bat, the result

might have proved different…’ The scorecard shows Gillett

dismissed lbw in each innings, for nought and two. In an

apparently unconnected cricketing development from the same

season, a chap named Reade won his second Blue for Oxford

University – captaining the side and capturing four wickets as the

Dark Blues dismissed Cambridge for 171 on the opening day of

the Varsity match at Lord’s. He would play a major role in the

Oundle story…but not just yet.

When the School placed those advertisements in the local rag in

1855 it boasted again of possessing ‘an excellent cricket ground’

- although the ‘large and airy’ bit from 1831 had been dropped

by then. In fact the School had acquired the use of a new facility

during 1853 in circumstances which rankled with their

neighbours – Oundle Town Cricket Club – for many, many years

to come.

Around the start of that decade OTCC paid £5 a year to Mrs Mary

Curtis, who kept the Cross Keys Inn (described as ‘a noted

cricketing headquarters…much frequented by the clergy and the

gentry around’), to use the club’s present-day headquarters in

Milton Road – known until 1899 as North Backway. The Cross

Keys was in West Street (the building still stands as a private

house) and so the field would have been at the back of the pub,

presumably ensuring a brisk trade on match days. As late as

1881 an athletics report in Sporting Life described the venue as

‘the Old Cross Keys Grounds’ which admittedly has a certain ring

to it. In September 1852 it hosted a ‘long-awaited’ tussle

between Oundle and Wellingborough, the visitors winning by an

innings and 14 runs – a result attributed by the Northampton

Mercury to the fact that the hosts fielded a weakened team: ‘On

looking at the Oundle shed something told us that all was not

right: true, there was the steady and telling Gravely, Norburn, G

and W Curtis, Hunt, Daniell, Guille and Newton, all good men and

true…but we could name some who ought to have been there

instead of deserting the club in its utmost need.’ To make

matters worse, the estimable Mr Fentiman was listed as ‘absent’

in the second innings.

And talking of desertion…

The authorities at the School felt they needed something better

than they had to encourage parents to part with their hard-

earned money – and the shrewd Mrs Curtis may have sensed a

golden opportunity to cash in. According to Walker, ‘she had

given notice that if the schoolboys made use of (the field) the rent

would be raised to £9 (and) the cost of upkeep would similarly be

raised by £3 to £4 a year.’ The School’s governing body agreed

to pay £10 a year towards the rent and maintenance, ‘provided

that the cricket ground should be available for all the boys,

Laxton Scholars as well as boarders.’ In other words, the

cricketers of the Town club could look elsewhere. Reporting this

coup on July 9 1853 the Cambridge Independent Press declared it

‘a great advantage to the boys residing in the town, who will now

have a playground all the year round, under the control of their

masters, where they may enjoy the manly game of cricket in the

summer and football in the winter.’ Other local residents would

have felt rather differently about it.

Forgive and forget? Not likely. The best part of 30 years later –

at the Town club’s annual dinner at The Talbot in 1881 – the

chairman, solicitor George Maxwell Edmonds, picked deliberately

at a few old scabs whilst proposing the main toast of the evening,

‘Success to the Oundle Cricket Club,’ to an audience of 35

members and guests. Edmonds referred to the time ‘when the

Town club held the field, now known as the Grammar School

Ground. They had spent over £120 to level it, but by some

means (the author’s italics) it got into the hands of the school.

He trusted that when the school took possession of their new

grounds they would once more play on the old field.’ This was a

reference to ‘the Thirty Acre’ (30 acres, 3 roods and 30 poles to

be precise) or ‘Grocers’ Field’ bought by the School from T.S.

Sharman for £5,000 at the end of 1879 and first used for cricket

a few years later. The Ordnance Survey map for 1885 has the

current Milton Road HQ marked as ‘Cricket Ground’ with St

Ann’s-in-the-Grove Infant School beyond the boundary in the

south-west corner and otherwise precious little sign of habitation

around the field – although by 1901 a pavilion is marked on the

site of the current one. Around the same time the School’s

temporary chapel came into use on the site of what is now the

Sports Hall car park. But it’s not entirely clear when the Town

club returned on a permanent basis to its former home, its

stalwarts still grumbling presumably (in approved

Northamptonshire fashion) about their ‘gazumping’ back in the

1850s.

We do know that they attempted to return the compliment by

offering John Vincent Eayrs – a local vet who had also taken over

the Cross Keys following the death of Mrs Curtis in 1856 – the

princely sum of 15 guineas a year to grab the ground back from

the School ahead of the 1872 cricket season. Stansbury managed

to thwart the Town’s counter-move by paying £14 for that

summer and pointing out to Eayrs that they had been reliable

tenants in the past, whilst suggesting simultaneously to the Court

that a long-term lease would be preferable. That didn’t happen

but Eayrs eventually agreed an annual rent of £16 for the School’s

exclusive use of the field for ‘cricket, athletic sports and football’

– although Walker claims he broke his word by allowing the town

sports to be staged there during the school holidays in 1873.

That event became a regular Easter Monday fixture at the ground,

attracting hundreds of spectators, competitors from as far afield

as London and (according to Arthur Howitt) the Town Crier in

frock coat, brass buttons and a tricorn hat bearing the Queen’s

initials to announce the races. One on occasion he declared the

first event to be ‘the pole jump’ and Howitt claimed the Oyez-

shouter in question, one Ben Marshall, wasn’t allowed to forget

his error for some time. But within a few years the lack of

security of tenure (Eayrs had apparently threatened again to

replace the cricketers with cattle) must have concentrated minds

and convinced the School that permanent facilities of their own

were needed, hence that important purchase in 1879.

The immediate consequence of all this jiggery-pokery was that

OTCC needed somewhere to play – and a report in the

Peterborough Advertiser in May 1858 underlines the scale of the

problem; indeed, it suggests the ground issue had threatened the

club’s very existence. ‘We have much pleasure in stating there is

every prospect of the original Oundle Cricket Club being re-

formed,’ it ran. ‘At a meeting held at the Cross Keys Inn (a touch

ironic given the source of their main problem) it was resolved to

canvass the cricketers of the neighbourhood, which has been

attended with every success, 40 names having been enrolled.’

The whole business of how much it had cost the club to level their

former ground was aired again, together with dark hints about

‘the opposition which the projectors of (this) revival’ had

encountered, and the revelation that the ground’s ‘occasional use

(had) been refused by the committee of the Oundle Grammar

School club.’ Might this have been discussed before, during or

after a drawn match in 1857 between the ‘Old Oundle Club’ and

the School? What we do know is that Mr Eayrs served up a good

dinner. The vet/publican was not a man to cross, though. Some

years later he appeared at the Petty Sessions accused of taking

his whip to an 11-year-old boy for playing cricket in his paddock

after being told not to. The boy’s mother appeared as a witness

for the prosecution but the case was dismissed.

Curiously, the School’s scorebook for the 1857 season shows

matches against both Oundle Town and ‘Oundle Amateurs’ – the

two sides containing a number of the same players, although the

latter combination proved decidedly amateurish in the worst

sense and were bowled out for a paltry 11 runs, including four

byes! Details of this rout even appeared in ‘Bell’s Life in London’

- a weekly newspaper that blended sporting intelligence (horse

racing especially) and general gossip, ‘published in time for all

the Saturday morning mails and early railways.’ Its contributors

included Charles Dickens, although it’s unlikely he concerned

himself with that particular fixture. Hard Times? Coincidentally,

153 years later, two Oundle Town bowlers – Mohammed Qadeer

(6-7) and Cameron Wake (4-4) dismissed Brigstock for that same

total in a Northamptonshire league match, setting a new

competition record.

Christopher Swann – landlord of The Swan and later The Dolphin

in Oundle – offered the use of a field ‘near Elmington toll bar’ (the

same one pressed into service following the floods of 1849?) as

OTCC’s new home in 1858 ‘until such time as a ground can be

prepared nearer to the town.’ A subscription list was opened and

Fitzpatrick Henry Vernon, twice an unsuccessful Liberal

parliamentary candidate for North Northamptonshire and later the

2nd Baron Lyveden, headed it. Mr E.J. Bannister was elected

‘secretary pro-tem’ and immediately called a meeting at The

Swan to enrol extra members and elect a full committee.

It’s possible that all this activity – and the local publicity it

attracted, not to mention support from the gentry – prompted a

few second thoughts up at the School, because another report

concerning this ‘revival’ claims the use of ‘the old ground’ had

been granted to members on Wednesdays and Fridays. On the

face of it a relatively small concession but at least diplomatic

relations hadn’t been severed entirely. Besides, squabbles over a

cricket ground paled into insignificance compared to the tragedy

that befell the School one Saturday in August 1865. Phineas

Charles Ellis, aged 16, went bathing in the River Nene near the

town, became entangled in the weeds and drowned. He had been

due to captain the School’s Present XI against the Past just a

couple of days later. Invitations had gone out to the traditional

ball and ‘many ladies and gentlemen had reached the town, but in

consequence of this lamentable accident anticipated heart

rejoicings were turned into mourning.’ The inquest, held at the

Dolphin Inn, heard he was ‘esteemed by all’ and the jury

suggested a more suitable bathing place should be provided, ‘the

Nene in many parts being exceedingly dangerous.’ And yet a few

years later at least one national periodical reported on the

activities of the ‘Nene Water Polo Club’ on the river at Oundle and

published drawings of the game which, bizarrely, required the

players to ‘ride’ barrels in the water. ‘It is a most charming game

when once played and affords infinite amusement to the

onlookers,’ enthused the correspondent. He added: ‘The club is

prepared to meet any other in the United Kingdom on their own

ground at Oundle, provided the other club brings its own barrels.’

Obviously.

Attempting to follow the Town cricket club’s fortunes over the

next few years can be a slightly confusing business based on the

information available. A few semi-social matches were played,

including one at Lilford Hall in 1860 when Oundle (Creeser,

Bullivant, Pooley, Stansbury, Richardson, Norburn, Elderfield,

Newton, Guille, Price and Ridway) lost by ten runs, and another at

Wadenhoe House, residence of George Ward Hunt – the MP for

North Northamptonshire who served briefly as Chancellor of the

Exchequer under Benjamin Disraeli. Legend has it that Hunt

turned up at the Commons for his first (and last) Budget speech

in 1868 and realised he had left the ‘red box’ containing it at

home, giving rise to the tradition of Chancellors holding up the

box to the public gaze before setting off for the chamber. His

cricket team (in which he himself played and scored a few runs)

had the worst of it against Oundle, but both sides were

entertained to a ‘sumptuous repast’ at the house. In the same

year, a fixture between Oundle’s ‘Benedicts’ (married men) and

bachelors resulted in a comfortable victory for the latter. The

following spring, 1861, brought fresh ‘revivalist’ fervour with

another meeting, this time at The Ship Inn – featuring discussion

about another potential new ground, believed to be a meadow

owned by that pub’s landlord, Mr Afford, although in subsequent

years it could only be used after the hay had been cut. A few

weeks after that gathering, Oundle lost comfortably to

Wellingborough by 70 runs on first innings – and this being a

home match, they must have found somewhere to play.

Frustratingly, the newspaper report is not more specific about the

location. But when King’s Cliffe beat Oundle (shades of the 1830

schoolboys?) in 1863, the sting of defeat was happily eased by

the aforementioned Mr Afford’s hospitality: ‘(he) provided an

excellent collation to which 36 cricketers and their friends sat

down and did ample justice thereto.’

Throughout the 1870s most accounts refer to the ‘Oundle and

Church Choir Cricket Club’ indicating a local link-up in the

interests of muscular Christianity. In 1867, teams labelled

‘Oundle’ and ‘Oundle Church Choir’ had played against each

other, with the latter winning both times. Daniel Dakin (keen on

both cricket and singing, according to his obituary notice printed

in 1890) acted as ‘ground-keeper’ and umpire for the ‘merged’

team, and in 1870 the Reverend Robert Charles Linton – curate of

the parish and just back from his honeymoon – was presented

with a suitably inscribed electro-plated cup to recognise his

‘great exertions in furthering the interests of the club, through

which it now stands very strong, not only numerically but

financially.’ It could still be a dangerous game, though; early-

season practice on a cold Friday in May 1874 was ‘poorly

attended…and marred by one of the players getting a severe hit

with the ball near the left eye.’ To muddy the waters a little, the

‘Oundle Town Cricket and Athletic Club’ (possibly a different

organisation involved predominantly with running the

aforementioned town sports) met during the summer of 1875 in

the Ship Inn, boasting ‘a very good balance in hand.’ In that same

season a side representing the town met a team raised by

Anthony Mildmay Julian Fane, Lord Burghersh (later the 13th Earl

of Westmorland), who appeared occasionally for

Northamptonshire and whose family seat was nearby Apethorpe

Hall – now known as Apethorpe Palace – until he sold it to Henry

Brassey in 1904. He turned out for OTCC in the 1880s, later

served in both the Boer and First World Wars, was appointed an

aide-de-camp to King George V and died in 1922.

Oundle’s cricketers must have sorted themselves out eventually,

however, because at that dinner at The Talbot in 1881 it was

reported the Town club ‘was in a much better position than four

years ago’ – notwithstanding the brouhaha over the ground.

OTCC’s secretary and treasurer Arthur Bent Beardsley, owner of

the Anchor Brewery, delivered a stirring patriotic speech

proclaiming ‘so long as they practise (cricket) there is no fear of

the sons of old England degenerating in muscular strength…and

not until they are driven away by a foreign foe will they lay aside

bat and ball.’ A wide-ranging toast list also featured ‘The Bishop

and Clergy of the Diocese and Ministers of Other Denominations’,

‘The Army, Navy and Reserve Forces’, ‘The Umpire’ (always a

sound diplomatic move in any club) and ‘The Hostess’ (ditto). Mr

E.G. King provided ‘pleasing accompaniment at the piano’ to the

evening’s sing-song and everyone joined together in fellow-

feeling for cricket, ‘a grand old sport and pastime.’ Sounds like a

long night. Thus fortified, OTCC was back in full fighting trim by

the start of the following season, tackling some of

Northamptonshire’s best. It may have pained Messrs Edmonds,

Beardsley and some of their colleagues to admit it – but a couple

of chaps from the School deserved at least some of the credit.

CHAPTER THREE

‘No playing-field, no boarding school.’

(H. St J. Reade)

‘The game of cricket, philosophically considered, is a standing

panegyric on the English character; none but an orderly and

sensible race of people would so amuse themselves. It calls into

requisition all the cardinal virtues…’

(James Pycroft ‘The Cricket Field’ – 1851)

When Oxford University’s former cricket captain succeeded

Stansbury as Headmaster of Oundle in 1876 it was a very

different place to the School of today – and possibly not quite

what 36-year-old Henry St John Reade had been expecting. As

Raymond Flower explains in his 1989 book ‘Oundle and the

English Public School’:

‘There were no compulsory games, no house matches, no Sixth

Form, no prefects, no tradition of Speech Days, no societies, no

school magazine, no uniform apart from the college cap. At a

time when bat and ball fever had already become a sort of

religion, and the fortunes of the country seemed to rely on an

unfailing supply of schoolboy games heroes, there were not even

any colours at Oundle. Reade changed all this overnight…’

Cricket colours were awarded with the Eleven wearing four-

buttoned blue flannel coats (blazers, in other words) adorned with

the Grocers’ shield on the breast pocket, plus blue caps with

crest. A dozen matches were played in that first summer, Reade

himself turning out except in fixtures against other schools. It

must be admitted, though, that not everyone in what is now

termed the education industry was all that fussed about blazers,

bats and balls; when the philosopher Thomas Hill Green wrote a

detailed report on Oundle for the Endowed Schools Commission

in 1866 he noted somewhat sniffily that ‘at the time of my visit

the most advanced boys in the school had unfortunately gone off

to play a cricket match…’ Had he pitched up a dozen or so years

later he might have found a few more pupils out in the fresh air.

Reade liked other sports too – even the relatively Johnny-come-

lately ones: ‘With scrimmages well packed, as they always are at

schools, it (Rugby Union Football) is the safest as well as the by

far most amusing form of the game for boys,’ he informed

readers of the London Standard in 1878; it was Reade’s choice to

switch from the Association to the Rugby code. He also had an

eye to posterity and, earning in the process the undying gratitude

of countless future researchers and historians, founded The

Laxtonian magazine.

But Oundle School wasn’t the only local institution where cricket

was at a lowish ebb in the early-1870s. As we’ve seen, the Town

club was looking to re-establish its identity following the ground-

related ructions of the previous two decades; and

Northamptonshire faced an unequal struggle to make its presence

felt among England’s major cricketing counties. In 1875, for

example, just two fixtures were listed – against MCC and (believe

it or not) a 12-a-side game with Uppingham Rovers – and a

disgruntled letter-writer to the local press questioned the club’s

right to call itself ‘Northamptonshire’: ‘A more selfish and un-

English spirit could not pervade any body of men…are we to

acknowledge a club without discipline, management or funds?’

The much-needed major re-organisation of Northamptonshire

County Cricket Club centred around two matches in July 1878

between teams representing the gentlemen of the north and

south of the county, culminating in an historic meeting at The

George Hotel in Northampton on the evening of Wednesday, July

31. Reade didn’t play in either of the fixtures (in Kettering and on

Northampton’s Racecourse) but he did write a supportive letter to

those behind the move to put the county club on a proper

footing, promising an annual subscription of five guineas. He

was duly elected to serve on the ‘new’ NCCC’s very first

committee under the presidency of the 5th Earl Spencer – the ‘Red

Earl’ of Gladstone governments – and thereafter captained the

county side occasionally, including a decidedly unsuccessful

outing against Leicestershire in 1879 when the start of play was

delayed while Northamptonshire scrambled around to finalise

their team! The result, defeat by an innings, was hardly

surprising in the circumstances. But anyone who enjoys top-class

cricket at Wantage Road with many leading lights of the

international game on show owes a debt of gratitude to Reade

and his fellow pioneers; and it’s worth noting that in 1886, the

current County Ground’s inaugural season following the move

from the Racecourse, Oundle Town was one of a handful of local

clubs (along with Kettering, Wellingborough, Long Buckby and

Althorp Park) to host Northamptonshire Club and Ground.

Reade himself was a serious cricketer. After Tonbridge School

and Oxford he played for a host of clubs including Gentlemen of

Berkshire, Pembrokeshire, Hertfordshire, South Wales CC and

Moor Park – and Scores and Biographies commended him for a

particularly plucky innings of 126 in a match between Town

Malling and Eastbourne, “being at the time dead lame.’ But

perhaps his most memorable match came in 1882, during his

Oundle days, when he turned out for Northamptonshire against

the Australian side whose shock seven-run victory over England

at The Oval later that summer gave rise to the whole saga of The

Ashes. Reade was past his cricketing prime by this stage –

indeed, it was to prove the penultimate summer of his life - but

he could at least boast (although as a Reverend he was unlikely to

do so) that he had shared a field with the likes of Billy Murdoch,

George Giffen, mighty hitter George Bonnor and ‘The Demon’

himself – Fred Spofforth – who castled Reade for 5 in the County’s

first innings. It was reckoned around 10,000 spectators turned

up to watch over the two days, and even after paying five guineas

to the Freedom of the Borough for the privilege of enclosing the

Racecourse for the occasion (at other times it was a public right

of way, prompting at least one brawl involving groundsman Alf

Stockwin and the driver of a brewer’s dray who trundled his

vehicle across the carefully-tended cricket square)

Northamptonshire made a handy profit of £97.

Reade ‘retired’ from his post at Oundle in 1883 following a row

which resulted in the Court passing a vote of no-confidence in

him and requesting his resignation. As Raymond Flower puts it:

‘Reade was not a lawyer, nor a financier, nor a politician, nor a

civil servant. What seemed simple to him appeared different to

people who thrived on complexities. There were difficulties

behind the scenes that he never suspected. Reade…had

obviously no idea how much he had fallen from grace. Of the

four reasons for dismissing a headmaster – immorality,

dishonesty, incompetence or disagreeableness – he concluded

that in his case it must be the last.’

Whether he was a good Headmaster of Oundle this writer is not

remotely qualified to say. He certainly rubbed some influential

people up the wrong way, and the ‘Division of the School’ in 1876

between ‘Classical’ (Oundle) and ‘Modern’ (Laxton) didn’t please

everyone. The latter, needless to say, also boasted some fine

cricketers before it was formally reunited with Oundle in 2000.

His loyal second master, Robert Brereton, reckoned his boss had

been in too much of a hurry to effect change. But Reade was

unquestionably good news for cricket in the town and county.

‘An able scholar, a good athlete and a thorough gentleman’ said

The Laxtonian, and most of us would settle for that as an epitaph.

On a lighter note, his brother Charles, a naval officer, visited

Reade as part of a 1,400-mile journey across England on a

tricycle nicknamed ‘Chummy’ and wrote a book about it –

‘Nauticus on his Hobby Horse’ - viewed these days as something

of a neglected classic. It received some belated publicity when

the inaugural Women’s Tour cycle event started in Oundle in

2014. Charles clearly enjoyed the ‘charming little town of nice

old-fashioned houses and well-kept streets’ not forgetting a

certain school that was ‘just getting its name up.’ Fraternal

solidarity, and all that. Henry St John was also a nephew of the

novelist Charles Reade, whose works included ‘Hard Cash’ and

‘Terrible Temptation.’ Despite their prescient titles, both were

published many years before Kerry Packer or the IPL came to

prominence.

Reade lived only a few months after leaving Oundle, dying from

cancer in February 1884 aged 44. Among the mourners at his

funeral was one of his early staff appointments at the School,

Richard Foord Winch, born in Kent and another outstanding

cricketer – ‘a hard-hitting bat, good change bowler and fair field’

according to James Lillywhite - who appeared alongside Reade in

the County’s team against the Aussies in 1882. The pair were

also instrumental in founding the old boys’ side, Oundle Rovers,

in 1881 – beginning with a ‘very merry’ tour incorporating

matches against Burghley Park, Jesus College Cambridge (against

whom Winch hit a hundred) and Bedford School. Like all such

teams, the Rovers have struggled from time to time with

availability – prompting this admonitory paragraph in The

Laxtonian in 1898:

‘We can forgive a man for being in love, even in the cricket

season, and with the gentleman who feared he might not get his

dinner at the ordinary hour age and dyspepsia may help some of

us to sympathise. But these things should be discussed

beforehand, not telegraphed an hour or so before the match is

due to begin. Cricket is played for pleasure. If a man does not

wish to play, let him say so candidly and stay away. If he wishes

to play but truly is unable, let him give due notice and express a

decent sorrow.’

Sentiments familiar to club captains and secretaries in the 21st

century. Winch doesn’t seem to have missed many cricket

matches, through love or dyspepsia or any other reason, and his

prowess as a bowler brought him two ‘all-tens’ for the School

side (masters routinely followed Reade’s example and played in

matches except those against other schools), the first of them at

the expense of an all-amateur Northamptonshire team on the

Racecourse in July 1879. Winch top-scored with 58 in the

School’s 198 all out before going to work with the ball:

T.H.G. Welch b Winch 1

F. Tebbutt b Winch 12

J.M. Markham b Winch 1

H.J. Kingston b Winch 13

Capt. Lynch b Winch 1

G.B. Hooper b Winch 2

C.M. Robinson b Winch 0

J.J. Stockburn not out 32

W. Pitts b Winch 7

W.J. Wickens b Winch 5

W. Darnell b Winch 8

Extras 8

Total: 90

Bowling: Winch 25.2-9-38-10; Reade 22-6-42-0; Hinchcliff 3-1-

2-0.

Winch took the first nine wickets on a showery opening day – it

was a horribly wet summer – before adding the tenth (Darnell)

first thing next morning. Following-on, the Gents were sent back

for 93 in their second innings to lose by an innings, but this time

it was Reade (4-21 from 18.4 overs) who returned the best

figures. Winch then bagged another ‘ten-for’ – remarkably, also

all-bowled - against Kettering a couple of years later, on June 2

1881, and not long before his death in 1927 he wrote a rather

touching letter to the Northampton Mercury asking if anyone had

a copy of a report on that match they could let him have. ‘If so,

Mr Winch would be grateful for a duplicate of it.’ Yes, old men do

forget, and the details in The Laxtonian are surprisingly sketchy

given the magnitude of the achievement. Kettering were

dismissed for 94 (Mr Markham standing firm to make 41); the

School then totalled 144 thanks to an unbeaten 90 from Reade,

before Winch repeated his feat of 1879 ‘against the county of

Northampton.’ A kindred spirit, evidently, of the great Brian

Statham - if they missed he hit.

In fact, Winch’s cricket career might easily have ended on a June

afternoon in 1877 when, during a match against the Old Boys, he

jumped the wall surrounding Milton Road – opposite what’s now

St Anne’s Court – and landed heavily in the lane below, breaking

his ankle. ‘He was at once conveyed to his residence, at the

School House, where, under the care of Dr Calcutt, he is

progressing favourably,’ noted the concerned local newspaper.

Generations of OTCC cricketers and opponents hurtling towards

that wall to save a boundary might well mutter: “There but for the

grace of God, go I.”

Several outstanding schoolboy talents emerged in the Reade era.

Buckinghamshire=born Arthur Melbourne Sutthery switched to

Oundle from Uppingham as a 15-year-old in September 1879,

and according to the magazine ‘Cricket’ (which published his

portrait and a detailed account of his career in July 1887) this

meant Oundle deserved ‘the chief credit’ for his development. He

scored just over 1,500 runs and claimed 205 wickets (70 of them

in 1881) across his four years in the Eleven, and in 1883

clobbered Mr Worthington’s XI, an Oxford combination, for 215

which stood as a School record for four decades. Sutthery won a

Blue at Cambridge in ‘87 – ‘(doing) full justice to his Oundle

training’ according to the article – and was picked for Gentlemen

against Players at The Oval that same season. Sutthery also

turned out for Northamptonshire, Devon, Shropshire and MCC,

and played in three separate fixtures against the 1888

Australians, representing ‘An England XI’ at both Hastings and

Crystal Palace. In the latter match he made 54 out of 98 all out

(no-one else reaching double figures) against the formidable

Charlie ‘Terror’ Turner and Jack Ferris, who decimated countless

batting sides around the country that summer. ‘Mr Sutthery not

only watches the ball carefully but can hit well, and his is never an

easy wicket to get. He bowls fast round-arm with a rather high

delivery and on certain wickets is sure to be dangerous. He is,

too, safe field,’ enthused ‘Cricket.’ Like so many others, Sutthery

endured the pain of losing a son (Dorian) in the First World War,

following an accident with a hand grenade. Arthur made his

home in Perthshire, was a director of George Outram and

Company who owned several prominent Scottish newspapers and

died in London in 1937.

Outliving Sutthery by four years, the splendidly-named Richard

Augustus Agincourt Beresford (‘cuts well, bowls with a high

delivery’ according to a contemporary publication) made a

comparable contribution to the School’s cricket – 1,718 runs and

144 wickets. Although he missed out on a cricket Blue at

Cambridge (despite what the Morning Post described as ‘a

brilliantly hit and faultless’ century in the 1889 Freshman’s

match) he did ‘putt the weight’ for his university, far enough to

help them beat Oxford in the varsity athletics contests of both

1891 and 1892 at Queen’s Club, and appeared for

Northamptonshire. Indeed, this vicar’s son from Castor opened

the batting for the County against Warwickshire at Edgbaston just

short of his 18th birthday in August 1887, soon after reaching

three-figures for the School against OTCC in the annual fixture.

He was unstoppable the following summer – a horribly wet one,

note – plundering 102 not out and 307 not out in a two-day

match for School House against Laxton House at the end of May,

helping his side scrape a victory by 417 runs! A fortnight later,

on June 15, he stroked 225 out of 373 in the Past versus Present

fixture. Beresford was headmaster of a prep school in

Hunstanton (allowing him to play Minor Counties cricket for

Norfolk) for over 30 years, and wrote Latin and Greek text books

some of which are still listed on Amazon’s website. As we shall

see, the Beresford family’s connection with Oundle School has

been long and distinguished – oh, and Richard’s niece Elisabeth

(the daughter of his younger brother John Davys Beresford,

himself a well-known writer whose ground-breaking novel ‘The

Hampdenshire Wonder’ featured a ‘wunderkind’ whose father was

famous cricketer) created The Wombles of Wimbledon Common…

Other luminaries at the School during that particular ‘golden age’

included Norfolk-born Charles Badeley, who outstripped even

Sutthery with 233 wickets in four seasons between 1885 and

1888, and the Dickson brothers with the confusing initials –

H.H.W. (Hilario Howard Watken, known as ‘Dido’ and later Vice-

Principal of King William’s College on the Isle of Man) and H.W.

(Harry Wilfrid) – who both captained the Eleven. Less

accomplished but more intrepid, perhaps, was a lad named Bayley

– a pupil in Dryden house – who climbed the spire of St Peter’s

Church in the 1880s and placed his cap on the weather vane

where it remained until the wind blew it down into North Street.

In 1890 it was returned to its ‘rightful’ place on high by one Mr

Upchurch, a professional steeple jack. It can now be seen in the

School archives. Legend has it that young Bayley was rewarded

for his daring feat with a flogging and a guinea.

And what impact did all this cricketing activity at the School have

on the Town club? While the Reverend Reade was leading his

flock in the ways of cricketing righteousness, another man of the

cloth - the Reverend Robert Russell Cobbold - became in 1878

the first and probably last (to date, at least) captain of OTCC to be

born in China, where his parents were missionaries. Cobbold

subsequently spent 20 years as vicar of Earls Barton, one of the

oldest churches in England. In 1882 the club won seven of its 12

matches, and the batting averages posted in the local newspaper

show R.F. Winch figuring prominently alongside Arthur Cribden –

described as ‘the Oundle School professional’ – and 18-year-old

Henry Richards, who would remain a stalwart of the club, both on

and off the field, for many years. Team-mate Charles Evors

captained the School and played county cricket for both

Northamptonshire and Herefordshire in the late-1870s and 80s.

Those batting stats weren’t boosted very much by the home-and-

away fixtures against Northampton Britons – at the time close to a

full-strength Northamptonshire side, including several members

of the famous Kingston brotherhood with County professionals to

do most of the bowling. Eight of the nine sons of William

Kingston played for NCCC, including the eldest – parson and poet

Fred Kingston – who was born in Oundle in 1855 when his father

was a Commercial Master at the School. Fred, described as ‘one

of the best cutters in the country’, graced the great Cambridge

University team of 1878, played alongside Reade and Winch

against the 1882 Australians, churned out reams of worthy and

uplifting verse including ‘Cedric, or a Soul’s Travail’ and ‘Julian’s

Vision’, was vicar of Willington in Bedfordshire for 20 years and

supposedly learned much about wicketkeeping from watching

Northampton’s own Tom Plumb, one of the outstanding English

stumpers of his day.

Father William’s departure soon afterwards to open his own

private school, Abington House, in Northampton – taking some

Oundle boys with him - didn’t go down at all well with

headmaster Stansbury (‘ungentlemanly conduct’ he called it), and

you can only speculate on what might have been had Mr Kingston

senior – who died in 1900 – stayed put and brought up his large

family in Oundle rather than decamping to the county town.

OTCC might have taken some beating for many years to come.

As it is, William occupies a nice little niche in the annals of

Northamptonshire CCC on his own account; he proposed the

toast to ‘The New County Ground’ at lunchtime on the opening

day’s cricket there, against Surrey Club and Ground in May 1886.

Stansbury may have fallen out with him, but not long before his

death a group of his former Abington House pupils presented Mr

Kingston senior with a purse containing £164 ‘as a practical

evidence of their affection for their old schoolmaster.’

Britons were unsurprisingly much too strong for OTCC in 1882

despite the best efforts of Cribden and W.T. King with the ball.

King, incidentally, played for the School earlier that summer in a

crushing 208-run victory over Kettering (still smarting from

Winch’s heroics the previous year) in which six of the latter’s

batsmen were out for a duck, and he later became OTCC’s

secretary. For his part, Cribden’s employment in the town

doesn’t seem to have lasted beyond the end of the 1882 season;

in August 1883 he featured in a well-publicised court case in

Daventry after being accused of stealing money from a publican,

Mr John Wiggins, whilst in straitened financial circumstances

(despite having just sold a bat and pads for ten shillings) and

being under the influence of alcohol. He was discharged – a

decision received ‘with great cheering’ in the court - but

immediately detained again by PC Foster to face a fresh charge in

Rugby. There is no record of him returning to Oundle and he is

believed to have died in London a few years later. But he must

have been a steady cricketer; in one of the defeats against Britons

he picked up four wickets and then scored 38 out of 50 all out,

opening the batting and the last man to be dismissed.

The summer of 1882 also saw the first staging of the Rural

Challenge Cup competition, initiated by Northamptonshire CCC to

promote the game in clubs outside Northampton itself. Ten

teams entered that year but Oundle didn’t, and possibly didn’t

feel they’d missed much as the competition became mired in

controversy culminating in a farcical County Court case in March

1886 which saw Sir Herewald Wake seek to retrieve from Rushden

CC the £25 silver cup he had originally donated. Rushden had

won it in 1884, been disqualified the following summer and

subsequently launched a counter-claim for compensation – you

get the trophy back if you pay us ten guineas! His Honour Judge

Cooke QC found for the plaintiff and a couple of seasons later

Wollaston made the cup their own property by winning it three

years in a row. Similarly, when local clubs came together in1895

to lay the foundations for a Kettering and District League, OTCC

was not among them.

In Oundle the pattern was firmly established of pupils, masters

and even employees from the School appearing for the Town

club. By 1884 it was reported that the latter had 60 members,

paying a subscription of five shillings each, with 25-year-old John

Hume ‘Jack’ Smith (of the Smith’s Brewery family) as captain. Five

years later – during a successful season which brought victories

over Alwalton, Lilford Park, Stamford Commercials, Rockingham

Park, Thrapston and Oundle School (twice) – Old Harrovian Henry

Edwin Caldecott, then teaching at the School and later

headmaster of Eastman’s Royal Naval Academy in Southsea,

scored a century against the boys on Saturday, July 20 1889.

Might it have been OTCC’s first three-figure innings?

J.H. Smith b Hammond 5

H.E. Caldecott not out 113

H. Richards b Hammond 12

Hon. J. Powys c Farmer b Calcott 7

L.R. Jones b Calcott 0

E. Richards c Farmer b Reade 5

J. Seneschall b Reade 6

T. Smith b Lewis 1

J.E. Wyatt b Lewis 3

G. Edmonds b Reade 9

J.E. Ferrall run out 2

Extras 14 Total: 177 all out

The School had been dismissed for 89 batting first – and ‘on the

Town going in we looked like winning’ commented The

Laxtonian, not unreasonably. ‘But Mr Caldecott punished the

bowling very severely and carried his bat through the innings;

with the exception of (Henry) Richards the rest failed to reach

double figures.’ A truly remarkable individual performance. The

wicket-taking Reade in question here was W.H.V., the late

headmaster’s son. Also a noted tennis player – West of Scotland

champion in 1894, by which time he was teaching at Blair Lodge

School – Caldecott died in 1910, aged 47. Although

overshadowed on this occasion, club secretary Richards was as

consistent as ever at the top of the order (377 runs in 1889 and

376 the following summer) while Tom Smith took the bowling

honours.

In 1890, Oundle Town was one of the clubs featured in the one-

and-only edition of the Northamptonshire Cricket Annual, edited

by A.E. Daniell – a fascinating little book with a portrait of County

captain Jim Kingston (wearing a natty bowler hat) at the front and

enough statistical information to satisfy the most punctilious

Victorian number-cruncher. The likes of Richards, Winch and J.H.

Smith featured for Oundle as usual, along with the aristocratic

figure of the Honourable John Powys, glimpsed already in the

supporting cast for Caldecott’s century. In 1889 he batted nine

times, highest score 31, and as a bowler accounted for 20

batsmen. A few years later, in June 1896, he became the 5th

Baron Lilford, and over the next quarter-of-a-century did more

than anyone – with the possible exception of the great all-

rounder George Thompson – to raise Northamptonshire to first-

class level and then keep it there. His involvement with OTCC

lasted a while longer, too – while the cricketers of the town would

soon be welcoming the greatest of them all into their midst.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us’

(Ecclesiasticus 44:1)

‘God Grant Grace’

(Oundle School motto)

R.F. Winch continued to make his presence felt in Oundle Town

colours for a while longer; in June 1893, he and Richards were

joint top-scorers (with 33 runs apiece) as Rushden, containing

several county players, were beaten by 58 runs in the first-ever

meeting of the two clubs. Oundle’s 129 all out was a more-than-

adequate total when farm labourer Tom Craythorne, a member of

a notable (and large!) local family living in Drumming Well Yard,

captured four wickets for three runs to skittle out the ‘cracks’ for

71. Sadly, Rushden won the return on their own turf by a big

margin. The following summer – 1894 – found the club in

excellent fettle with a full fixture list stretching from early-May to

the end of August, including home-and-away dates with Lilford,

Burghley Park, Peterborough, Thrapston, Weldon and the School,

as well as their new best chums, Rushden. A couple of years

further on they were running two sides, ‘the second team having

the distinctive title of Saturday team conferred upon them.’

Winch eventually left Oundle at Christmas 1896 to become

headmaster of New College, Eastbourne (his former employer

refusing his request for a pension to recognise 20 years’ service)

and his place on the staff was taken by William Gilbert Grace,

junior. The last word is obviously significant. He was the eldest

son of ‘W.G.’ – arguably the best and unarguably the most

instantly-recognisable cricketer in the world, even today, a

century after his death. ‘Bertie’ (as he was known in the family)

had studied at Clifton College and Pembroke College, Cambridge,

and proved himself a capable cricketer, winning a Blue in 1895,

as well as representing Northampton (‘The Saints’) and East

Midlands on the rugby field. But it seems his father had hoped

for more. The great golf writer Bernard Darwin, who knew the

Old Man well in his later years, wrote easily the most insightful

and readable biography of him:

‘The younger W.G. had done well for the Clifton eleven, and if a

somewhat angular, ungainly and artificial batsman, yet he could

get runs, and all that affectionate encouragement could do for

him had doubtless been done. For once the writer here can speak

from direct personal experience, as he bowled at him, and, what

is more, got him out in a Long Vacation match between Trinity

and Pembroke…(which) was not an experience to heighten one’s

admiration for his batting, which seemed a little lacking in natural

dash, due no doubt to the fact that he had broken an arm as a

boy and it had remained stiff ever afterwards.’

When the young man appeared in the Varsity Match, W.G. senior

turned up at Lord’s in the unaccustomed garb of frock-coat and

tall hat which, according to Darwin, ‘seemed to shine with the

reflected joy and glory of its owner.’ He may have ‘dressed down’

a little for his first visit to Oundle, which came on July 3, 1897

when he ’guested’ for the Masters – alongside Bertie – against the

School. How much persuasion did he need, we may wonder? And

did anyone dare call him a ‘ringer’ to his face? At least he had

some decent facilities to change in; the new pavilion had been

opened on the School ground in 1895 with a clock turret donated

by Lord Lilford and the timepiece itself made by William Potts and

Sons of Leeds. The cost of the building – just under £500 – was

higher than expected and a tuck-shop was installed there to help

pay the bills. Lady Thatcher’s father, Alfred Roberts (born in the

village of Ringstead near Thrapston), worked there before the

First World War.

Anyhow, fresh from a successful outing for MCC against Oxford

University at Lord’s the previous day, W.G. scored 54 and 4 in a

comfortable victory over the boys, and shared all 20 wickets with

Bertie; only Graces were guaranteed a bowl on this occasion. By

the time he returned in 1901, ‘W.G.’ had finished with Test cricket

and left his native Gloucestershire in a bit of a huff to run the

London County side at Crystal Palace. On this occasion he

travelled down from Chesterfield, where his new team had drawn

a rain-affected match with Derbyshire, and gave the spectators –

if not necessarily the School’s attack – what they had been hoping

to see. ‘We were delighted to see Doctor Grace at Oundle again,

accompanied by Mrs Grace and a younger scion,’ enthused The

Laxtonian. ‘The School was dismissed early to watch the cricket

and lunch on the field. The weather was beautiful and (W.G.) was

in great form.’ To the extent that he biffed the youngsters

around for 141 – ‘a practical demonstration of how cricket should

be played’ - until he was eventually caught after being ‘missed

several times, mostly after passing the century.’ Was he trying to

get out? Somehow such a profligate act doesn’t seem remotely in

character. It wasn’t reported at the time, but thanks to the

meticulous researches of J.R. Webber (whose ‘The Chronicle of

W.G.’ is the definitive work on the subject) we now know it was

his 200th three-figure score in all cricket:

W.G. Grace, junior c Williams b Becher 28

J.W.D. Smith b Chase 42

D.A. Macnaughton st Winser b Becher 4

M.W. Brown c Tindall b Becher 17

Dr W.G. Grace c Jameson b Adendorff 141

C.B Grace c Armitage b Jameson 0

H.H. Wilford c Becher b Jameson 0

R.M. Garnier c Winser b Jameson 4

J.W. Mercer b Jameson 0

W.G. Lewin not out 31

C.W.E. Tiddy not out 16

Extras 5 Total: 288-9 declared

But it wasn’t, in fact, the Doctor’s first hundred against Oundle

bowling. The previous August he made exactly 100 not out for

London County against the touring Rovers side - including his

son, Winch and Richard Beresford – at Crystal Palace. Billy

Murdoch also scored runs, and might he have remembered Winch

from the game on Northampton’s Racecourse 18 years earlier?

Perhaps the Old Man felt he needed to make a point; in the 1899

fixture between the two sides, it was Bertie who excelled with 214

– including 26 fours – as Rovers won by ten wickets. One of their

more notable victories. But guess who eventually got Bertie out?

Mustn’t let the boy take too many liberties, y’know…

Grace senior was just a fortnight shy of his 53rd birthday when he

made that second trip to Oundle in July 1901, but his appetite for

the game was clearly as voracious as ever. In the following week

he turned out three times for London County against London club

sides, before heading to The Oval for the Gentlemen versus

Players match. He was on the cricket field for 22 of the 27

available playing days (excluding Sundays) that month. W.G.

visited again in July 1902 and made 69 runs to plant more vivid

memories in the minds of those present who were proud to tell

children and grandchildren they saw him bat – not on a Test or

county ground but at Oundle School. But fame, as we know, is a

strange beast. W.G. (no escaping those initials!) Walker relates

the comment of a spectator who saw father and son, the latter

clad in Cambridge blazer, arriving at the ground: “That’s him,

next to the chap in the pea-green jacket!”

There was a curious sequel to W.G.’s triumph in 1901. Nine days

later, Oundle Town entertained Lilford Park in what was described

as ‘one of the best matches of the season’ with ‘both sides

(putting) an excellent team into the field.’ Town were eager for

revenge after losing the away fixture by 37 runs, and this time

Bertie came into his own in the colours of OTCC – plundering

141, precisely the same score his father made at the School.

Henry Richards – by now secretary to Oundle Brewery and a busy

figure in the life of the town – notched 25, ‘one for every year he

has played for the club.’ Bertie was eventually run out and then

possibly caused a few embarrassed coughs and averted glances

by bowling Lord Lilford for two! It must be admitted, though, that

evidence of the stiff, less-accomplished Bertie glimpsed by

Darwin still surfaced from time to time; in 1900 he was castled

third ball in a crushing 175-run defeat for OTCC against

Wellingborough. His cricket career is best summed up, perhaps,

by the scorecard of London County’s contest against MCC at

Crystal Palace in August 1901, not long after his father’s visit to

Oundle. Bertie made 32 in a half-century opening stand with

W.G. but then got out, while cricket’s Grand Old Man powered on

to a century and beyond. He was good, but he just wasn’t as

good as Dad.

As well as Grace junior, Richards, J.H. Smith and Charles F. McKee

of the Anchor Brewery (whose wedding in 1899 prompted his

team-mates to splash out on nice a carriage clock for him and his

bride), the Oundle side against Lilford Park also contained farmer

Charles Thorp - born in Fotheringhay (like King Richard III), a

former pupil at the School and a future Northamptonshire

batsman who appeared in nine first-class matches for the County

in 1908 and 1909. His selection may have owed something to a

memorable innings of 140 for Oundle Town against

Northamptonshire Club and Ground in 1907, the opposing attack

including the great slow left-armer Sydney Gordon Smith – then

qualifying for Northamptonshire by residence after coming to

England from Trinidad – and another County bowler, Roderick

Falconer, who was employed at Oundle School at the time:

A. Stretton c&b Falconer 5

A. Townsend b Falconer 8

G. Baldwin b Smith 9

J.J. Kearney c Beasley b Smith 82

C. Thorp lbw b Falconer 140

Marriott b Hyde 6

C.F. McKee b Hyde 0

T. Hubbert st Thompson b Smith 1

W. Trevener st Thompson b Smith 6

H. Ramshay b Smith 1

S.W. Fenn not out 0

Extras 15 Total: 273 all out

Kearney, an old boy of Dulwich College who died at Gallipoli in

1915, supported Thorp superbly – and the County side could only

manage 155 in reply, George Baldwin (who had turned out for the

County against Leicestershire the previous season) claiming 4-49

and Kearney 3-22, despite Smith’s 62 at the top of the order.

This emphatic 118-run victory over the men from Wantage Road

was a serious red-letter day for sport in the town; ‘the spectators

were loud in their appreciation’ declared the Northampton

Mercury. Against lesser opposition Thorp stood head-and-

shoulders above team-mates and opponents alike; in 1901 he

scored 82 out of 107-8 against Warmington, who mustered just

38 runs between the eleven of them.

Cricket was evidently booming in Edwardian Oundle, on the field

at least. The Town club still doesn’t seem to have been

particularly flush, to the extent that £30 raised by a jumble sale

at the Victoria Hall in May 1906 would reportedly be ‘a great help’

to the coffers. On the same day as Bertie Grace’s big ton against

Lilford Park, it was reported that ‘the other Oundle team was in

the field, viz. the Avondale’ – and the Town duly beat them

(margin unrecorded) at August Bank Holiday 1906. Mind you,

enthusiasm could be taken too far. Around this time it was noted

that ‘in consequence of the rough play and noise caused by

children on the Town Cricket Ground during matches, the

management have decided to charge an admission for all

spectators.’

Sadly, Bertie’s days – and not just his cricketing ones – were

numbered. He left Oundle in July 1903 to take up a post at the

Royal Naval College, Osborne, on the Isle of Wight. There he died

in March 1905, aged only 30, following an operation for

appendicitis. Oundle School sent a ‘magnificent’ wreath to his

funeral while MCC passed a vote of condolence with his father.

For poor W.G. it was a second awful bereavement in the space of

six years; his daughter Bessie, only 20 years old, had died of

typhoid fever in 1899.

By a tragic coincidence, Lord Lilford – another of the ‘famous

men’ in this story – also knew what it was like to lose a child. His

only son, 13-year-old Thomas, failed to recover from what

should have been a routine adenoids operation in 1909. His wife

then died shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, and

during the conflict his Northamptonshire home – Lilford Hall, just

six miles from Oundle – was requisitioned by the military and

most of the contents sold off, leaving just a suite of rooms for his

own use. He passed away in Kettering General Hospital shortly

before Christmas 1945 and ‘Wisden’ overlooked the fact in its

obituary section until Northampton-born Matthew Engel rectified

the oversight when he became editor of the cricketer’s bible in

the 1990s. He deserves to be there because, in addition to

keeping Northamptonshire afloat during his long stint as

President between 1903 and 1921, he also played a single first-

class match – aged 48 – against All India at the County Ground in

1911.

His Lordship was generous to NCCC, to OTCC (listed as a Patron

on the 1897 fixture card, along with the Marquis of Exeter and

the Worshipful Company of Grocers, and appearing for the club

against the County’s Club and Ground side at Wantage Road as

late as June 1906 when fast bowler ‘Bumper’ Wells shattered his

stumps for five) and, as we’ve seen with that clock turret, to

Oundle School. But he was even more inclined to offer the best of

everything to those who played in country house matches at

Lilford Hall. Many years later, Peterborough’s Alex Snowden – a

talented left-hander and the first batsman to score a century for

Northamptonshire against the Australians, in 1934 – recaptured

the flavour of those games in a lovely article for the Journal of the

Cricket Society. For starters, of course, you had to be picked.

Thorp, the tamer of S.G. Smith and Warmington back in ’07,

usually captained Lilford’s XI, with a couple of professionals from

the County staff ‘mainly to do the bowling’ – but according to

Snowden it was unusual for the side to take the field with fewer

than six players of first-class experience, and often it was more.

And woe betide any cricketer who pitched up late. ‘Play’ was

always called at 11.30am and anyone not on parade then without

a very good excuse was unlikely to find another invitation coming

his way. That, of course, would mean missing out on a Lilford

luncheon (definitely NOT lunch) taken at 2pm sharp. No wonder

his Lordship appeared, as a contemporary rhyme claimed, ‘as

round as a pea’:

‘A full 45 minutes (plus) was allowed to enjoy it, for it was a

wonderful repast. His Lordship’s servants, in their colourful black

and yellow regalia, would wait at table and also see that the

glasses were kept full. Charles Thorp, the ‘major Domo’ took

charge of the carving of the cold roast beef, whole hams, steak

and kidney pies and galantines. This was followed by fruit pies in

season or fruit salad laced with clotted cream, specially prepared

in the Lilford dairy. Finally, there was always a whole stilton

cheese on table, with cheddar for those who might prefer it. The

cheese was traditionally eaten with rich fruit cake, liberally spread

with even richer farm butter. For refreshment, there was a

selection of whisky, beer, various wines and port. However, the

piece-de-resistance was the home-brewed teetotal ginger beer.

This was served from magnum champagne bottles and could be

described as vintage ginger beer. It was wonderful stuff,

extremely popular with all, even down to the hardened topers.’

When Snowden hit a century for Lilford’s team he was summoned

afterwards to his host’s marquee where he was congratulated and

presented with one of his special home-grown rosy apples:

‘He always watched the cricket from the marquee, sitting in his

mobile wheelchair. To receive one of these apples was quite an

honour at Lilford, for his Lordship presented them only for

meritorious performances. He had to use a wheelchair to travel

around the grounds and the estate yard, as he was crippled in his

later years with arthritis.’

It’s a touching but rather sad vignette concerning a man whose

life – whilst unquestionably privileged in a material sense – was

far from a bed of roses. He loved his cricket, to the extent that in

his younger days he reportedly carried a ball around with him in

case the opportunity for a spot of fielding practice arose. In

addition to the money he put into Northamptonshire cricket from

his own pocket, he was ready to use his social clout – as

alderman, landowner, cattle breeder and prominent Freemason –

to cajole others into doing the same. It was a bit rotten of Bertie

to skittle him out like that in 1901, as one OTCC man to another,

but as a cricketer in the fullest sense you suspect this munificent

peer of the realm would have taken it in his stride.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘The old world in its sunset was fair to see.’

(Winston Churchill)

‘We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because

they are what help us grow.’

(H.G. Wells, ‘The Time Machine.’)

‘For learning is not our object here, but doing. (The boys) may

learn things in a deadly static way, they may learn much in a

static way and gain nothing of life. Not here, I hope. No, the

germs of life come from the spirit…’

(F.W. Sanderson)

The extraordinary men just keep coming in this story.

Headmaster of Oundle School from 1892 until his death in

harness in June 1922, Durham-born Frederick William Sanderson

still enjoys an exalted reputation as one of the most forward-

thinking educationalists of his time. His friend and biographer

H.G. Wells – who was chairing the meeting of the National Union

of Scientific Workers in the Botanical Theatre at University College

London when Sanderson suffered his fatal collapse after

delivering a speech – believed him ‘beyond question the greatest

man I have ever known with any degree of intimacy’ while

distinguished Oundelian Richard Dawkins has claimed that were

F.W.S. alive today he would be “contemptuous of the

pussyfooting, lawyer-driven fastidiousness of Health and Safety,

and the accountant-driven league tables that dominate modern

education…’ Arthur Marshall paid tribute to ‘Sanderson’s great

principle…the school must be made to suit the boy and not vice-

versa.’ Among the early suspicions about ‘Beans’ (under whose

stewardship the number of pupils grew five-fold from a paltry 92

when he arrived) were firstly, that he wasn’t a clergyman;

secondly, he hadn’t attended a public school himself; thirdly, he

had a distinct northern accent; and, fourthly, he didn’t attach

sufficient importance to sport. It was even claimed, horror of

horrors, that his bow ties were of the ‘made-up’ variety.

According to his biography:

‘His lack of inside knowledge of games was to Sanderson a matter

of deep regret. He was keenly interested and took a real delight

in all matters athletic. He held that every boy should take an

active part in the games (but) to an 'Aristocracy of Athletes’ he

was strongly opposed.’

And yet, of course, he employed Bertie Grace and a host of

professionals with first-class experience, presided over the

building of the pavilion and – as a consequence of the growing

roll – saw cricket flourish handsomely at the School. Just one

other irresistible (if somewhat tenuous) link between the game

and this great teacher; one of his colleagues at the School,

Samuel Gimson Squire, wrote an article entitled ‘Sanderson of

Oundle’ which appeared in the magazine Northamptonshire Past

and Present in 1960. Squire made a single first-class appearance

for Cambridge University and in 1922, the year of Sanderson’s

death, caused comment whilst playing for Leicestershire

Gentlemen against their Northamptonshire counterparts at

Aylestone Road by bowling left-arm to a right-handed batsman

(‘Tubby’ Vials) and right-arm to the left-handed Roy Wright. An

unorthodox approach of which his old boss would surely have

approved!

Probably the pick of the cricketers in the Sanderson era was

Christopher Gimson, who played for his native Leicestershire after

the First World War whilst on home leave from the Indian Civil

Service. His five years in the Eleven – between 1902 and 1906 –

brought him 1,950 runs and 96 wickets, and he was captain for

an unprecedented three years. Gimson turned out in club cricket

for Leicester Ivanhoe and must have endured some good-natured

ribbing when he then played against them for Oundle Rovers in

1911. Northampton-born Charles Wood, a prolific run-scorer for

the Foxes in the County Championship, hit an unbeaten double-

century, Gimson and his fellow trundlers logged bowling figures

to forget…and Christopher’s two brothers were both playing for

the opposition! Gimson made old bones and maintained his keen

interest in the game; at a special star-studded Savoy Hotel dinner

in July 1951 to honour Freddie Brown’s achievements as captain

of MCC in Australia, he found himself seated at a table with,

amongst others, Jack Hobbs, Percy Fender, Peter May and the

famous cartoonist Tom Webster, and a few years later he

attended the opening of the School’s new pavilion. He also saw

his county win the Championship for the first time under Ray

Illingworth in 1975 (with the deft strokeplay of 18-year-old David

Gower catching the eye), passing away later that year at the ripe

old age of 88.

Any cricketing body – school, club or county – needs its reliable

types to keep things ticking over behind the scenes. At the

School, a long and distinguished series of pros have supplied

cricketing and worldly wisdom (and sometimes wit) to help the

boys hone their skills, make the right decisions in match

situations and choose the best kit – possibly with a vested

interest if they were selling it themselves - as well as offering a

sympathetic ear and occasionally issuing a rocket or two, all in

support of the Master-in-Charge.

Precisely what Cribden’s duties as ‘professional’ were back in

1882 we don’t know; the School’s own records suggest that

George Basford was the first, in the 1890s, while a welter of

former first-class players worked there over the following two

decades – including Surrey’s Richard Humphrey, a top-flight

batsman in his day whose body was found in the River Thames

near Waterloo Bridge in 1906. An inquest was told ‘he had no

trouble of any kind, and he had means’ so the coroner recorded

simply ‘found drowned.’ But he had been no stranger to ill-

health and poverty over the years, and his story features in David

Frith’s definitive chronicle of cricket suicides, ‘Silence of the

Heart.’ Another ‘Brown Hatter’ was Fred Holland, one of the

‘Noted Cricket Coaches’ featured in an issue of the Boy’s Own

Paper in 1916, seven years after leaving The Oval for Oundle.

Holland was even permitted (in April 1913) to advertise in Athletic

News for some help in the form of ‘a good bowler, able to coach

junior boys, light duties during morning…’ The longest-serving

of all the pros, though, was William Montgomery, who came to

the School in 1922 following an intermittent county career with

Surrey, Somerset, Cheshire and Hertfordshire. He stayed for over

a quarter-of-a-century (‘respected and loved by generations of

schoolboys’ according to his obituary) before retiring just after

the Second World War, and continued to live in Glapthorn Road in

the town until his death in 1952.

Arthur Fielder of Kent and England (who claimed an ‘all-ten’ for

Players against Gentlemen at Lord’s in 1906 and was a Wisden

Cricketer of the Year), William Brown, who appeared for

Leicestershire between 1910 and 1919, and Nottinghamshire’s

James Iremonger (whose brother Albert was doing the same job at

The Leys in Cambridge) also spent time at the School before the

Glamorgan connection – in the shape of Arnold Dyson and Allan

Watkins, the latter another international and the last man to field

a ball struck by Don Bradman in a Test match – took over between

1948 and 1986. Tony Howorth, a prolific run-scorer for

Peterborough Town, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire and

Northamptonshire 2nd XI in his playing days and who retired as

pro in 2003, happily remains a regular at both the School ground

and Milton Road, ever a stickler for the game’s best traditions and

a rich store of knowledge and anecdote. And Merwe Genis from

Paarl in the Western Cape – a ‘pied piper’ when it comes to

coaching and enthusing the rising generation – has been

instrumental in enabling any number of young local cricketers to

gain some valuable winter experience in the sunshine of South

Africa.

Writing in ‘The Cricketer’ magazine in 1933, ‘M.A.’ reckoned

‘certainly (Oundle) School cannot complain that they have not had

first-rate professionals as mentors.’ Spot on, ‘M.A.’ He also

commented on ‘the heavy ground, of clay’ which meant little

encouragement for the bowlers in a dry summer, and insisted

‘Oundle is not as well-known in the cricket world as its

Northampton (sic) neighbour Wellingborough, who have a cricket

record which stands very high.’ This is not the place to air old

rivalries. Suffice it to say that Wellingborough may have W.G.

Grace’s doorstep, ‘rescued’ from the demolition of his former

home by the legendary E. Murray Witham, eccentric schoolmaster

par excellence who buried whisky bottles containing cricketers’

autographs under his school’s square; but Oundle had the great

man in person, three times. When, incidentally, the two schools

got around to playing each other in the early-1990s the two sons

of BBC Sports Personality of the Year for 1975, Northamptonshire

and England hero David Steele, appeared on opposing sides –

Arran for Oundle and Mark for Wellingborough.

Finding people to do the donkey work was and is even more

important at a ‘weekend’ club like OTCC, and it seems as though

the Town was well-served in that respect as what’s frequently

described as the game’s ‘Golden Age’ – beginning roughly in

1890 and ending definitely in the late-summer of1914 – neared

its close. There was the faithful Richards, whose commitment to

sport including lobbying persistently at meetings of the Urban

Council (to which he was elected in 1901) for a public recreation

ground in the town, although he struggled to obtain much

support for his proposal; and in January 1912 the death was

noted of former Empingham grocer and champion rose-grower

Mark Canner, at the age of 83. One morning in his North Street

lodgings he asked his landlady for a cup of tea, the universal

panacea, because he felt unwell; he drank it and promptly

expired. He was, according to the Northampton Mercury, a

‘veteran cricketer…(who) during his residence in Oundle scarcely

missed a match as score-keeper to the club.’ For much of his life

‘toothache and headache never made his acquaintance’ and it was

claimed that even in his eighties ‘he could pass as less than

sixty.’ Scorer Canner – also famed for growing king-sized

gooseberries ‘that rivalled plums for size’ – would have

acknowledged the signals of Robert Lilleker, who umpired with

OTCC for 13 years (‘missing one match only’) before taking over

as groundsman; a worthy successor to Daniel Dakin of the 1870s.

Oundle Town’s fixture list looks a fairly parochial affair around

1912 – the memorable if somewhat soggy season that saw the

innovative Triangular Tournament and little Northamptonshire

shock cricketing England by finishing as runners-up to Yorkshire

in the Championship; but for a day’s rain on August 7 the title

could have been theirs. Oundle focused on playing sides like

Ashton, Barnwell, Elton, Warmington, Kings Cliffe, Islip, Benefield

and – inevitably – Peterborough, and judging by one anecdote

were not always a strong combination on the field. In 1939, the

Thrapston Journal carried an article on Miss Sophie Short to mark

her 40-year stint as scorer at Thurning CC. She referred with

some relish to a match in this period when her village side racked

up 300 for seven and then dismissed Oundle ‘in half-an-hour’! It

all seems pretty unlikely, but clearly the man from the Journal

wasn’t about to let the facts get in the way of a good tale.

Altogether better chronicled is an equally one-sided game in the

opposite direction in May 1905, the month of Northamptonshire’s

debut as a first-class county. Milton Park ‘brought a weak team’

to Oundle and were demolished for 53, the hosts responding with

280-4 when time ran out. In that same summer the club was

able to field a Wednesday team against local rivals including

Thrapston; the ‘Wednesdays’ remained a feature of the OTCC

fixture list for many years. A wonderful photograph from this

period shows eleven men and eleven women outside the pavilion

at Milton Road, the familiar wall visible, all in cricket attire, with a

scorer (Mr Canner?) in the group too. Might OTCC have been

running a ladies’ team long before the current progressive set-up

came into being?

The 1914 season saw the School under I.G. Owen win three and

draw five of their eight matches. The Town (usually described in

this period as ‘Oundle Tennis and Cricket Club’ after a tennis

section was formed around 1909) had one of their final flings at

Kings Cliffe in July, and Oundle Rovers looked forward to their

two-day contest at Burghley Park starting on August 14. By then,

of course, Great Britain had been at war for ten days. The Bank

Holiday Monday preceding the outbreak of hostilities was a

deceptively peaceful affair in the town, according to the

Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph: ‘(There was) no public

attraction and those who did not take themselves away found the

river the principal attraction for fishing and boating…’ County

cricket drifted on for a while until the intervention of Oundle’s

distinguished former visitor W.G. Grace, who insisted in a letter to

The Sportsman on August 27: ‘It is not fitting at a time like this

that able-bodied men should be playing cricket by day and

pleasure seekers look on. I should like to see all first-class

cricketers of suitable age set a good example and come to the

help of their country without delay in its hour of need.’ Grace

himself died just over a year later, in the autumn of 1915. The

County Championship ended on September 2 and didn’t resume

until May 1919, by which time an awful lot in the world had

changed.

As soon as war was declared around 30 reservists left from

Oundle station, seen off by local worthies including Sanderson,

McKee and J.H. Smith, the last-named by then chairman of the

Urban Council, who ‘spoke with emotion.’ Just five weeks later

Smith’s own son was dead, a casualty of the Battle of the Marne,

and J.H. himself (‘upright in all his dealings’ according to his

obituary in the Mercury) passed away at his home, Cobthorne, in

February 1916, aged 57. Four masters at the School joined up

before the end of 1914 and all were all killed in action. But public

school cricket continued during the war, even as the casualty lists

swamped the newspaper pages and left countless families

bereaved; as Walker says, ‘boys could be in the School one term

and their names on the Roll of Honour the next.’ On July 8 1916,

a week into the bloody Somme offensive, Oundle lost to The Leys

by 14 runs in a low-scoring home match, and a year later the

youngsters were taught a batting lesson by Northamptonshire

professional Bob Haywood who walloped seven sixes and 20 fours

in 162 for Lord Lilford’s XI – the only match his team played that

summer. By then, old boy Alexander Basil Crawford – a Captain in

the West Yorkshire Regiment – had died in France a few days

short of his 25th birthday. He played for his native Warwickshire

during their Championship-winning campaign in 1911 but

switched to Nottinghamshire the following season and took 51 off

the touring Australians at Trent Bridge. Crawford was, in the

words of his battalion commander, ‘a most able officer (and) a

most gallant man, full of dash and pluck.’ He was also a very

keen golfer, who once set out to play seven rounds at the Bulwell

Forest course in a single day. He teed off at 4.30am and duly

completed his task, holing out for 126th time at 10pm. Within

weeks the School was also mourning the death of Edward Crozier

MacBryan, brother of the Somerset and future England batsman,

Jack. He captained the Eleven in his final year at Oundle, 1912,

and also turned out for Wiltshire. Just a couple of the 221

Oundelians who gave their lives in World War One and are

remembered with quiet dignity in the School’s beautiful Memorial

Chapel.

Even closer to home was the loss of Lieutenant Roy Broughton

Sanderson, the headmaster’s recently-married eldest son, who

died of wounds at Estaires in April 1918. According to F.W.s

biography: ‘The two had closely sympathetic minds, and to him

Sanderson had looked for the development of his own education

ideals.’ Roy’s name appears on the Oundle and Ashton war

memorial outside The Talbot, unveiled by his father in November

1920, along with that of Gunner Ralph Lilleker, son of OTCC’s

long-serving umpire/groundsman.

With the carnage over the appetite for cricket as a symbol of

normality was unsurprisingly strong. A magazine for boys – ‘The

Captain’ – featured many of the captains of the leading public

schools in August 1920, including Oundle’s G.C. Dewes. This

followed the lead of ‘Wisden’ whose Five Cricketers of the Year in

both the 1918 and 1919 editions were all schoolboys. One of

them, Harry Calder of Cranleigh, was traced to a nursing home in

Cape Town in 1994, the year before his death, and was unaware

of the honour, insisting he hadn’t played cricket since leaving

school!

Oundle School looked to make up for lost time and played 13

matches in 1919, the highest number since the 1890s.

Reassuringly, they met a Northamptonshire Club and Ground side

including 56-year-old Lord Lilford – who contributed a dozen

runs. And, as we’ll see, some of the best cricketers the School

ever produced came into the picture over the next few seasons.

They also enjoyed arguing about the game too, judging by a letter

sent to the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in 1921 and

discussed at great length by F.J. Sellicks on his ‘Cricket Causerie’

page. It all stemmed from a match between Town and Field

Houses, which saw the latter – much the stronger side on paper

with eight members of that year’s XI – pile up 196 and leave the

opposition two-and-a-half hours to get the runs, spread over two

days. The Town Houses captain put in a ‘good, but not forcing,

bat – and a blocker’ at the top of the order, rather than risk his

best hitter who had just kept wicket for three hours in the blazing

sunshine and, the skipper reckoned, needed a rest. Together the

openers made 75 in an hour before the close, but some youthful

wranglers reckoned the tactics were misguidedly cautious. ‘School

opinion was divided’ reported the sagacious Sellick, but in the

end he came down on the side of the maligned batting captain.

So there.

The Oundle Town club was certainly up-and-running again in

1920, winning 11 and losing six of its 19 matches – helped by

Charles Wright, who won himself a bat as the best batsman of the

year, and A.W. Clark, named best bowler. Wright might have

needed a new willow wand by then; he was presented with one

back in 1913 (‘by Councillor Townsend’) for scoring a century

against Cotterstock – pleasing continuity. By the end of 1920

OTCC was fundraising again to level another part of the ground (a

‘work in progress’ for many years) and Milton Road also staged a

dance for the Discharged Soldiers’ Federation with music from the

Warmington Excelsior Band. The Rovers, too, returned to a pre-

war pattern; in August 1923 a strong-looking side (including

Thorp and Richard Beresford) thoroughly enjoyed a five-day tour

of Norfolk with fixtures against Sheringham Visitors, Great

Yarmouth, Aylsham and Overstrand. And before long another

notable figure in the story made the journey to Oundle from

Wantage Road.

CHAPTER SIX

‘The period between the wars, uneasy armistice as it may be

called now, had many long moments of ease and enjoyment when

the sporting pages of the newspapers were more frequently read

than the columns which reported the Wall Street crash or the

latest speech by Hitler…’

(Dudley Carew – ‘To the Wicket’)

‘But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks – ‘Play up! Play up!

And play the game!’

(‘Vitai Lampada’ – Sir Henry Newbolt)

Wilfrid Timms knew all about schoolboy cricketing heroics.

Northampton-born (his family’s terraced house in Clarke Road

backed on to the County Ground) and a pupil at the town’s

Grammar School nearby, the 18-year-old made a national name

for himself by scoring an unbeaten 154 to save the match for

Northamptonshire against Essex in 1921. It was only his second

Championship appearance and earned his school chums – who

had carried him shoulder-high from the field – an extra day’s

holiday courtesy of the delighted governors. He missed the

County’s next match, against Warwick Armstrong’s all-

conquering Australians, while he sat (successfully) his Cambridge

entrance exam; had he made runs against them, might the

panicky England selectors – who picked 30 players in the five

Tests that summer – have taken a punt on him? In the event, he

captained Northamptonshire a couple of times later in the season

(as the ‘senior’ amateur in terms of appearances, despite the

presence of old pros like George Thompson) and went on to

notch nearly 4,000 first-class runs in 99 matches spread over a

dozen years.

He figures here because after leaving Cambridge University in

1925 – without a Blue, sadly, although he appeared several times

for the Light Blues against county opposition – he took a teaching

job at Oundle and became the School’s Master-in-Charge of

cricket, still featuring in the County Championship during the

holidays as so many schoolmaster amateurs did. And here the

author must declare a personal interest. Wilfrid was a distant

relative on my maternal grandmother’s side of the family and I

met him in the 1980s, not long before he died, at his home near

Charterhouse School in Godalming. He moved there in 1932 and

ran the school’s cricket for many years (Peter May his most

notable ‘product’) along with professional George Geary, as well

as teaching modern languages. He was a courteous old

gentleman with some good Northamptonshire stories and still

had all the newspaper cuttings and congratulatory letters and

telegrams from his 1921 triumph tucked inside an old school

register. ‘Wilf’ had rarely a bad word for anyone, although he

struggled a little when it came to his fellow County amateur

Vallance Jupp who once accused him of being “a bloody coward”

for giving himself room against Nottinghamshire’s Harold

Larwood at his fastest – a tactic subsequently employed, of

course, by Don Bradman during the ‘Bodyline’ series in Australia.

The Oundle Eleven’s results were nothing special during his

tenure – in fact in his first season at the School, 1926, they failed

to win any of their eight matches. But he knew his stuff and

hopefully some of those who shone in subsequent summers

benefited from that knowledge. Wilfrid also turned out for

Oundle Town, and at the end of May 1926 – the month of the

General Strike – he opened the innings against Lord Lilford’s XI

and made 27 out of 104 as Oundle lost by 92 runs. His team-

mates that day were L.A. Baker, J.G.R. Potter, a Mr Tebbutt (who

top-scored with 33), A. Singlehurst, I.M. Carling, W. Brown

(possibly the pro at the School), J. Richardson, C. Marriott, A.

Baker and an anonymous or possibly absent eleventh man.

While Timms was impressing the Wantage Road cognoscenti as a

schoolboy, Reggie Ingle (a year-and-a-bit younger) was heading

the run-scoring lists at Oundle School. Born in Cornwall, Ingle

went on play 325 first-class games - substantially more than any

other Oundelian – and nearly all of them for Somerset, whom he

captained between 1932 and 1937. Ingle overlapped with Timms

at Cambridge and, like the future Master-in-Charge, missed out

on a Blue. He was fortunate to be working in the family law firm

(he became a solicitor in Bath, taking on some tough criminal

cases) because his father was willing to give him time off for

cricket; hence he was one of the ‘regular’ amateurs in the county

game, as opposed to the ‘occasionals’ who flitted in and out of

the side for the odd match, usually hacking off the professionals

(who could lose out on appearance and talent money) in the

process. But he was still regarded as a sufficiently glamorous

figure to warrant a full page portrait in one of the illustrated

newspapers in February 1931, marking his engagement to ‘the

leading lady of musical comedy’ Jean Colin, whose ‘mingled

charm and talent’ had secured her notable successes in

productions including ‘The Five o’clock Girl’ and ‘Here Comes the

Bride.’ The headline over the feature = ‘Women in Sport’ – was

very much of its time.

An indication of Ingle’s popularity with the Somerset teams he

skippered can be found in Bill Andrews’ wonderful memoir of his

chequered cricket career, ‘The Hand that Bowled Bradman’ –

published in 1973. Andrews doesn’t have a great deal of time for

the some of the amateurs he came across but describes Ingle as

‘very considerate’ and gives a flavour of his leadership style. On

one occasion, against Worcestershire at Weston-Super-Mare, the

captain promised his key all-rounder Arthur Wellard a bottle of

champagne if he dismissed the Nawab of Pataudi for a duck. The

prince promptly nicked one to wicketkeeper Wally Luckes who

dropped it; Pataudi made 222. Good idea by the captain, poor

execution from his stumper. But Ingle wasn’t a soft touch when it

came to dealing with the hired hands. The Yorkshire batsman

Maurice Leyland once gave the Somerset pros some likely winners

from the day’s racing programme and the scorer’s signals from

the pavilion indicated they were all coming in as planned.

Unfortunately, Herbert Sutcliffe was dropped several times while

the fielders’ thoughts were in the betting shop – and Ingle (not

averse to a flutter himself, as Andrews points out) had stern

words with the team, banning gambling during a match. Ingle

eventually fell foul of club politics and lost the captaincy in 1937,

rarely returning to the County Ground at Taunton before his

death in 1992.

Reggie Ingle’s Somerset side were not Championship contenders

as a rule – but another Oundle old boy, Frank Greenwood,

enjoyed the distinction of leading Yorkshire to the title in 1931,

his only full season in charge. His record at the School was pretty

modest but he managed a first-class hundred against Glamorgan

in 1929 and attracted a measure of notoriety when he and

Gloucestershire’s buccaneering skipper Bev Lyon agreed an

exchange of ‘freak’ declarations (before forfeitures were

permitted) in a rain-affected Championship match at Sheffield,

both men calling their batsmen in when four byes had been given

away in an effort to produce a positive result. The authorities

were not impressed, but ‘The Cricketer’ clearly liked the cut of his

jib:

‘After a very unpromising beginning (in 1931) Greenwood got his

side going so well that, though near the end of June they were

eighth in the table with a mere two wins to their credit, they

ended the year with sixteen victories. The old Oundle boy…set

an example (in the field) which has been copied in other quarters.

He was an advocate of the practice of having fielders standing in

very close to the opposing batsmen. Certainly many catches were

made in this manner which would not have been possible to old-

fashioned fielding.’

Greenwood died in the summer of 1963 after suffering a stroke

whilst – according to Wisden – watching the Fourth Test between

England and the West Indies on television in the Huddersfield

Conservative Club.

Meanwhile, a couple of other inter-war Oundelians made their

mark on the wider cricketing stage. Norman Gordon ‘Tiger’

Wykes was a Cambridge Blue who turned out for Essex, and his

finest hour came in 1927 when he notched 162 against a Kent

attack including three great spinners – A.P. ‘Tich’ Freeman, C.S.

‘Father’ Marriott and Frank Woolley – among the grey ammunition

boxes at Leyton. Then there was Henry Worgan Marshal, born in

Colombia but an Argentine international (against ‘Plum’ Warner’s

MCC touring side in 1927) who also came to England with the

South America team in 1932 and took 153 off Oxford University

in The Parks.

It was also an era of broken records at the School. In 1923 Philip

Mair thoroughly enjoyed himself against Lord Lilford’s XI, hitting

246 in an hour and 50 minutes – featuring 46 fours! Their

generous host’s side came a distant second after conceding 405-

7 (no rosy apples for them, presumably) with Greenwood

dismissing His Lordship for a single to end the match. The same

season also saw the School tackle a Northamptonshire Club and

Ground side including the qualifying Vallance Jupp. Then in May

1930 (the first year as Master-in-Charge for the popular Frank

Spragg, famously photographed with Clark Gable on the occasion

of the Hollywood star’s wartime visit to the School in 1943),

R.A.A. Beresford’s undefeated 307 in a house match back in 1888

was eclipsed by his own son Marcus – Spragg’s successor after

the Second World War – who clobbered 317 for School House

against Grafton, paving the way for a victory by 449 runs. The

vanquished boys must have emerged from ‘the game from hell’

(486-3 declared plays 37 all out) experiencing their own limited

version of the Great Depression then taking hold in the wider

world. Nor did Marcus ease up on his fellow pupils that season,

The Laxtonian recording his double-century against Dryden and a

hundred in each innings at the expense of Laundimer. Spragg

was perhaps better known as a rugby man; fellow Master Arthur

Marshall described him as ‘a genius (who) rapidly became the

scourge of the Midlands. Bedford fell before our boots.

Uppingham crumbled. Rugby, who may have invented the thing

but couldn’t always win, succumbed. Haileybury hung their

heads…’ Sport at the School, Marshall recalled, was ‘hurry and

bustle and drive.’ Writing in 1937, E.W. ‘Jim’ Swanton ventured

the opinion that ‘to be frank, one has come to regard Oundle as a

first-rate rugger school and to remain, perhaps, just a little

sceptical about their cricket’ – but Spragg worked hard to achieve

excellence in both.

A two-day cricket fixture against Stowe School at The Oval in July

1934 (the first of five such meetings between the two schools on

Surrey’s home ground, with Oundle boys filling a special train to

London) offered Spragg’s batsmen the chance to fill their boots

on a pitch prepared lovingly by groundsman ‘Bosser’ Martin and

traditionally offering precious little help to the trundlers. Stowe

piled up 323 all out but the School responded with 432-9

declared – the total bolstered by centuries from K.A. Payne and

A.D. Newsholme. It’s worth remembering that four years later

England, with lots more time available to bat, reached 903-7

declared against Australia on one of Martin’s shirtfronts with Len

Hutton contributing 364. Perhaps the most bizarre inter-war

individual performance, though, came from Maurice McConnell,

who in 1939 claimed three separate hat-tricks in the same

innings, bowling for Laxton in a house fixture. Legend has it that

McConnell – not the most enthusiastic cricketer in the School –

went straight from the field to the river to get in a spot of rowing,

which was much more in his line. A unique achievement in

cricket history? It would seem not. Those who keep records of

such things list three other instances, the first of them by a man

named Oldham for Penge (a place forever associated with Horace

Rumpole’s greatest courtroom triumph) against Croydon Revellers

in 1887. As Michael Caine didn’t say – not a lot of people know

that.

As the game prospered at Oundle School, so times remained a

mite tougher for OTCC – notwithstanding the odd successful

social event like the New Year’s Eve bash which saw 200 people

dance their way into 1927 to the music of Wally Stafford’s band in

Victoria Hall. On the field, an obvious bright spot was the

emergence of Jack Buswell, born in Barnwell and the son of

Oundle’s postmaster – also a Town stalwart who captained the

team – Percy Buswell. Jack not only demolished opposing sides

with his pacy bowling, snapping up 7-43 against Burghley Park in

May 1934, but also became the club’s Honorary Secretary and

Treasurer. He attracted interest from Northamptonshire – then in

the midst of their four-year ‘lean spell’ without a single first-

class win – and played the first of his 61 games for the County

against Leicestershire at Aylestone Road in 1936. Granted,

Oundle Town had known some grim days, but things were even

more shambolic than usual at Wantage Road that year with five

different captains taking charge of the side at various times, after

the initial appointee Geoffrey Cuthbertson had departed for the

United States! Buswell finished with 172 first-class wickets to his

name, including 7-61 at the expense of a strong Lancashire outfit

at Northampton in 1938:

C. Washbrook b Buswell 11

J.L. Hopwood b Buswell 48

J. Iddon b Partridge 2

N. Oldfield b Buswell 2

A.E. Nutter c Davis b Partridge 0

W.H.L. Lister c Dunkley b Buswell 1

E.W. Greenhalgh run out 5

W. Farrimond c James b Buswell 0

J.B. Bowes c James b Buswell 39

R. Pollard b Buswell 0

L.L. Wilkinson not out 0

Extras 8 Total: 116 all out

Buswell 18.2-2-61-7, Partridge 16-2-41-2, J.E. Timms 3-1-6-0.

Seven past, present or future Test cricketers in that Red Rose

side, and his success all the sweeter for coming in tandem with

his good friend Reg Partridge from Wollaston. Buswell was also

present the following year when history was made – yes,

Northamptonshire actually won a game. Buswell claimed three

scalps in each innings – bowling opener Les Berry twice – as

Robert Nelson’s side trounced the ‘Woollybacks’ by an innings

and 193 runs in front of a bank holiday crowd of 5,000, many of

whom gathered in front of the pavilion and demanded a speech

from the captain. As a bowler the former OTCC man wasn’t in the

class of Edward Winchester ‘Nobby’ Clark, the fiery left-armer

from the village of Elton – barely six miles up the road from

Oundle and just over the county border in Huntingdonshire – who

played eight Tests for England and captured 1,102 first-class

wickets for Northamptonshire between 1922 and 1947 (his

Wantage Road career punctuated by frequent rows and fall-outs

with the committee), still a record to this day. But Buswell ‘did a

job’ at a difficult time and helped to keep the County afloat.

Sadly, he was obliged to get through an awful lot of overs in a

side with limited bowling resources, and maybe his longish run

didn’t help; ‘a victim of unavoidable overwork’ according to

Northamptonshire historian Jim Coldham. He dropped out of the

side before the end of 1939, played no first-class cricket after the

war and died in Yorkshire in 1992. Elton was also the birthplace

of Frank Chamberlain – an occasional Northamptonshire amateur

in the late-1940s and subsequently chairman and president of

NCCC who also chaired the national governing body, the Test and

County Cricket Board (TCCB), from 1990 to 1994.

With Buswell taken by the County his old club battled on, and

made a concerted effort to put itself on a more secure financial

footing in 1937. Fund-raising events included the jolly old

favourites – a jumble sale, a dance in the town’s Victoria Hall

(admission two bob) and a grand draw to win a bottle of port and

a box of chocolates. The generosity of Mr North secured a new

sightscreen and the club also invested in some new bats and

gloves; a reminder of the happy days of the ‘club bag’ when the

trick was to avoid the pad with a strap missing, the imperfectly-

sprung bat or the gloves that old so-and-so had just taken off,

especially on a hot and sweaty day. But occasionally the accounts

still looked a bit sick, and in 1938 it took a personal donation of

£8 5s 9d from the president, Brigadier-General Algernon Francis

Holford Ferguson - late of the 2nd Life Guards and then living at

Polebrook Hall – to clear the debts. Then as now, a club could not

thrive by jumble alone.

By the summer of 1939, Oundle had decided to enter the Jaidka

Cup - a midweek Twenty20 (before it was called that) competition

for teams from the Peterborough area, named after a surgeon at

the city’s hospital, Karam Chand Jaidka FRCS. It is still contested

to this day, and OTCC re-entered it in 2016. This decision in ’39

meant some extra travelling for the players and arrangements for

a bus were made with Mr Howard. Transport could be a tricky

business for clubs in the days before most players had their own

cars, and how members got to and from matches would occupy

many committee hours at Oundle in the years to come. In June

1939, Town (D. Coleman, W.J. Hurry (captain), F.M. Wood, A.

Meunier, J. Baxter, B. Kisbee, A.W. Tansy, D. Laxton, E. Streather,

G. Mould and A. Collard) drew with Wellingborough, reaching

134-7 in reply to the opposition’s 153-7 declared. One member

of that side, Bernard Kisbee, put in many hours’ work on the

club’s behalf, he and his wife spearheading the ‘Entertainment

Committee’ in later years to raise much-needed funds so the likes

of General Ferguson wouldn’t have to keep dipping into their

pockets. But cricket was about to take a back seat again as

Neville Chamberlain announced one Sunday morning that this

country was at war with Hitler. Unlike the game’s delayed

response in 1914, the County Championship ended immediately;

Northamptonshire lost to Somerset in two days at Taunton and so

headed home the day before the Nazis invaded Poland. As Sir

Home Gordon wrote in The Cricketer: ‘England has now begun

the grim Test match against Germany.’

Oundle Town remained active at least in the early stages of the

conflict, playing Bourne in the Yarnold Cup in June 1940 as the

nation breathed a collective sigh of relief after Dunkirk but braced

itself for the seemingly inevitable invasion from across the

Channel as German troops occupied Paris. A. Meunier top-scored

in a disappointing Oundle total of 71 all out, one C. Pond proving

their nemesis with figures of 8-34. Bourne got home by five

wickets, boosted by a tally of 23 extras; all this reported in the

Grantham Journal under a large advertisement telling everyone

how to use their new ration books correctly. They also lost to the

School by three wickets in July. After that it looks as though the

club – ignoring the prevalent advice to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’

- went into cold storage for the duration.

Up the road, though, it was a very different story. Indeed, within

a few days of Japan’s surrender in August 1945 one of the

School’s pupils, Michael Hardy (who later appeared for

Buckinghamshire, Middlesex Second XI and Rovers), was picked

for Young Amateurs of Northamptonshire against Captain ‘Bertie’

Bolton’s XI as the County club began to prepare itself for

peacetime cricket; a welcome harbinger of returning normality, as

in 1919. A busy programme of fixtures was maintained at the

School throughout the war and results were impressive, due

initially to one of the most respected and durable figures ever to

wear Oundle’s colours.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful

over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things…’

(Matthew 25:21)

Some cricket historians maintain that Don Bradman’s 1948

Australians were the best team of all time; at any rate, the best-

equipped to beat what was put in front of them. Not overly

strong in the spin department, perhaps, but with a hugely

powerful batting line-up and three pace bowlers – Ray Lindwall,

Keith Miller and Bill Johnston – who made mincemeat of England’s

finest on a daily basis. They won 23 of their 31 first-class

matches, drawing the rest, and the last surviving captain to lead

an opposing side against The Don’s ‘Invincibles’ was John Michael

‘Mike’ Mills of Cambridge University and Warwickshire…not

forgetting Oundle School, Oundle Rovers and Oundle Town.

There is, as they say, a theme there.

Mills – born in Birmingham – came to the School as a pupil in

1935. His final season in the Eleven, 1940, saw him wreak havoc

with his leg-breaks and googlies (46 wickets at less than 13 runs

apiece) as well as notch 461 runs with the bat: ‘He kept an

extraordinarily good length for a bowler of this type,’ noted The

Laxtonian. In one of his final matches in School colours, against

OTCC, he dominated proceedings with six wickets for 43 and 64

runs. School days over, he volunteered for the Indian Army and in

an interview with the author on the occasion of his 85th birthday

in 2006 claimed he had experienced ‘a very cushy war’ – although

that involved an unpleasant bout of the tropical disease Sprue.

Early in his service career he had been advised to expect ‘a very

dull war’ if he didn’t smoke, and a pipe became his regular

companion thereafter.

Taking up his place at Cambridge aged 24 he wasted no time

making his presence felt on the cricket field. Lancashire and

Yorkshire both visited Fenner’s in May 1946 and against the latter

he took 7-69 from 25.5 overs, the best figures by an Oundelian

in first-class cricket until Ian Hodgson surpassed them, also for

the Light Blues, 36 years later. Len Hutton’s wicket may have

eluded Mills on that occasion but those of four England players –

Paul Gibb, Wilf Barber, Maurice Leyland (he of the racing tips) and

Frank Smailes – didn’t:

‘I can remember thinking that Maurice (Leyland) had aged a lot

during the war, and also nearly losing a finger trying to catch

Smailes when he belted one back at me! I think I was too excited

at that time to be worried about life. These days, of course,

everything worries me, but then I was very carefree and just

thinking how lucky I was.’

Yorkshire

L. Hutton b Hobson 10

P.A. Gibb c Mischler b Mills 50

W. Barber c Bodkin b Mills 31

M. Leyland c Bodkin b Mills 5

N.W.D. Yardley c Conradi b Hobson 24

A.B. Sellers c Haynes b Mills 44

T.F. Smailes c Conradi b Mills 56

K. Fiddling b Hobson 25

E.P. Robinson b Mills 15

W.E. Bowes not out 14

A. Booth c Mischler b Mills 2

Extras 15 Total: 291 all out

Haynes 10-3-34-0, Hobson 29-8-80-3, Bodkin 28-8-64-0, Mills

25.5-7-69-7, Trapnell 7-0-29-0.

Note a couple of catches in the innings for another Oundle old

boy, Eric Conradi, who scored heavily for Cambridge in wartime

games, while Barry Trapnell also featured in the students’ attack.

An old boy of University College School, Trapnell represented the

Gents against the Players at Lord’s that summer, shared the new

ball with ‘Gubby’ Allen for Middlesex against Yorkshire at Bramall

Lane, Sheffield – and served as Headmaster of Oundle School

between 1968 and 1984. For his part, Mills turned out four times

for Warwickshire in ’46 and by May 1948 was leading Cambridge

against the Aussies – although his opposite number over the

three days was the tourists’ vice-captain Lindsay Hassett rather

than Bradman himself:

‘Obviously it was a thrill to play against them. At lunchtime on

the second day I was trying to persuade Lindsay to go on batting

because otherwise the game would have been over very early!

Fortunately they were keen to get their opener Bill Brown back

into form, and he took ages and ages to score 200. So at least we

didn’t get carted around the field.’

Mills claimed the much-prized wicket of Arthur Morris (who

scored nearly 2,000 runs on the tour), and although beaten by an

innings the students – with Trevor ‘Barnacle’ Bailey holding out

for two-and-a-half hours to make 66 not out – managed to take

the match into a third day, and nearly 25,000 people turned up to

watch. A far cry from the average Fenner’s crowd of today. Bailey

was one of four future England players in Mills’ side that year –

along with John Dewes, Hubert Doggart and Doug Insole – and

they somehow ended up losing to Oxford at Lord’s by an innings

and eight runs! That was his final first-class match, but far from

the end of his active cricket. The likes of Free Foresters, Cryptics

and, of course, both Rovers and Town benefited from his

presence after he returned to Oundle to teach, eventually taking

over from Marcus Beresford as Master-in-Charge in 1961. He

worked closely with Arnold Dyson and Allan Watkins and could

take the credit for bringing both those professionals to the

School, courtesy of a chance encounter on the field in 1946:

‘One of the Championship matches I played for Warwickshire was

against Glamorgan who had Austin Matthews, the ex-Northants

bowler, in their team. I’d met him before the war when he

coached and umpired at Stowe School. Austin said he knew that

Oundle didn’t have a cricket pro and he knew someone who

might be interested. That was Arnold, who duly came. And

because he was there, Wilf Wooller (Glamorgan’s long-serving

and often controversial captain/secretary) sent his two boys to

the school. When Arnold retired I remember having an argument

with the bursar about who might follow him. He didn’t think we’d

find anyone but I asked him to let me try. Anyhow, Wooller said

that if we wrote to Framlingham we might persuade Allan to

come, which he did. And that all stemmed from that one match

in ’46.’

Shortly after coming back to the School from Cambridge, Mills

became secretary and treasurer of the Rovers – and remained in

post for the best part of six decades. In the course of our

interview he paid a touching little tribute to Reade and Winch who

began the whole thing way back in 1881: ‘God bless them for

starting it,’ he said. Similar sentiments would be expressed by

many to J.M.M. for keeping it going through thick and thin; the

torch has now passed to Tony Howorth, helped by Jimmy Nicholls,

and the Rovers continue to log some excellent results in the

annual Cricketer Cup tournament – even if the traditional ‘Week’

has added a few extra grey hairs to Howorth’s head each year.

And what should always be the core cricketing values remained

important to Mills:

‘There’s immense enthusiasm and a procession of really talented

players (at Oundle) and the percentage of matches won over the

last few years really speaks for itself. I do enjoy watching the

modern generation although as a very ancient fuddy-duddy I do

wish there was less noise going on most of the time!’

Mike Mills passed away in November 2014, aged 93. His long life

bridged David Lloyd George and David Cameron, Lionel Tennyson

and Alastair Cook, the cat’s whisker and the iPad. Like E.W.

Swanton he was ‘sort of a cricket person’ – even fitting his

honeymoon arrangements around the Cryptics two-day fixture

against Cambridge University at Fenner’s in 1957 - but so much

more besides. His son Peter provided the perfect epitaph at the

end of a heartfelt but entertaining address during Mike’s

memorial service in the School chapel:

‘Over the last few weeks of his life, my parents would take the car

up on to the School playing fields and have a very gentle walk.

My father therefore saw the demolition of the old cricket pavilion

and the foundations of the new one…which the School have very

kindly named after him. For his many friends and particularly for

his family it will be a permanent and reassuring reminder of his

immense contribution. He was a wonderful husband, father and

grandfather – a great man that typified the spirit of all that is

good of Oundle.’

No account of Oundle Rovers cricket can overlook the immense

contribution of Lovel Garrett, another remarkable personality who

played a key role in reviving the team after the war. It was fitting

that when the Rovers held a special centenary dinner in 1981

Lovel and Mike Mills should be joint-presidents, with the former

chairing the event. Arriving at the School in 1925, he went on to

captain one of its best-ever rugby sides – the unbeaten XV of

1929 – and was also secretary of cricket. After Cambridge he

taught at Cranleigh School, although his tenure there was

interrupted by army service which saw him spend nearly five years

as a Prisoner of War, captured at St Valery in the summer of1940

(following a gallant rearguard action against impossible odds) by

a certain General Erwin Rommel; as Lovel recalled, he could only

counter the future Desert Fox’s state-of-the-art tanks with ‘an

empty revolver and one Mills bomb’ leaving him ‘at a distinct

disadvantage.’ His fascinating letters home from Oflag VII – an

antidote to the rather ‘gung-ho’ view of POW life often portrayed

on the screen – are preserved in the Oundle School archives and

contain reassuring references to reading Wisden and The

Laxtonian (“I hear young Bennett played for The Rest versus

Lord’s Schools”), whilst trying to make the best of a long and

tedious incarceration. Notwithstanding this unhappy experience,

he wore his Royal Northumberland Fusiliers tie frequently and

proudly. Later, he was a familiar figure at Rovers Week and

actually returned to Oundle as a master for seven years before his

retirement in 1971. As well as his sporting activities he is

remembered fondly for forays into amateur dramatics: ‘As an

actor in low comedy…characterised by a resolute refusal to learn

his lines, which necessitated the carrying of a series of

improbable ‘props’ behind which to conceal pieces of paper.’

After living for many years in the village of Sudborough, and

serving as a local councillor, he died in 1995 aged 83. The

Laxtonian noted: ‘His love of Oundle and his readiness to “repay

his nurture” have been conspicuous throughout his life.’

Mike Mills features in several of the OTCC match reports from

1950 - the summer of those little pals of mine, Ramadhin and

Valentine - which looks to have been something of a vintage year

for the club. It fielded two teams most weekends and a full

fixture list featured Ramsey, St Neots, Quorn, Uppingham,

Rushden, Higham Ferrers, Huntingdon and Kimbolton as well as

the regulars like Wellingborough, Burghley Park, Barnwell, Bourne

and Oundle Rovers. They also tackled Brush Sports from

Loughborough for the first time, and a team photograph from

that match has the Oundle players posing in front of the Milton

Road scoreboard which shows a total of 238-3, with 107 to

batsman number three and the last man out for 52.

The century-maker was J.S. ‘Jimmy’ Lowe – local schoolteacher,

Oundle Town’s secretary-cum-general factotum for 38 years and,

according to former team-mates, a skilled enough batsman to

have scored runs at a much higher level. Hailing originally from

the Liverpool area, Lowe moved down to Oundle after war service

– drawn by its relatively favourable summer weather statistics,

which he felt would ensure him plenty of cricket in his holidays

from the town’s Secondary Modern School! Stephen Radcliffe,

who taught with him, recalls Jimmy spending time in the staff

room sorting out his weekend teams (no selection committee

then) using criteria rather different to those employed in the first-

class game: “His wife is doing teas, so he’s got to play…he’s only

available one day this weekend, and he’s paid his sub…he’s been

away on holiday and needs a game.” Once the permutations had

been sifted and sorted he would write out the team-sheet and

stick it in the window of a baker’s shop in the town’s Market

Place. A great servant to the club, and anyone scoring a match at

Milton Road today will, in all probability, sit on a wooden bench

that bears Jimmy Lowe’s name. Bob Barton, who had made the

club’s previous three-figure score in 1948, notched the fifty that

afternoon. When term was over at the School and Mike Mills was

available, he immediately made his presence felt with 68 at home

to St Neots and then 6-46 against Brotherhoods from

Peterborough on successive weekends.

Others to figure prominently included Mike Amps, whose family

business has been keeping Oundle folk well-stocked with fine

wines and other comestibles – possibly even ‘a rump and a

dozen’ - for over a century. He was still a regular and very

welcome spectator at Oundle to the end of the 2014 season after

a prolific career with OTCC, Northampton Saints, Northants

Amateurs and the County’s Second XI. In 1954 Amps batted

number four in a Championship game for the ‘stiffs’ against

Lancashire at Wantage Road – following Vince Broderick, Brian

Reynolds and Peter Arnold in the batting order! Sadly, Mike died

in February 2015, coincidentally just a few days after Reynolds.

And then there was the remarkable Doctor E. Donovan ‘Don’ Tagg

– a long-time Master at the School and a good enough leg-

spinner (“turned it square” according to a former OTCC team-

mate) to play for Chorley in the Lancashire League and also for

Cambridgeshire – who in 1950 demolished Kimbolton with a haul

of 7-46. Tagg, who had taken notes at a lecture given by Albert

Einstein at Princeton University before the war, was a pioneer in

the teaching of computing and an early proponent of metrication

after calculating in the 1950s the amount of time wasted in

educating pupils in the complexities of pounds, ounces, chains,

yards and Fahrenheit. A committed pacifist, he cared deeply

about social issues and once remarked: “I was born just before

World War One and got married just before World War Two, so I

dread to think what’ll happen when I die!” For the record, he

passed away in 1988 with his old club (which he served as

President in the 1960s) in a decidedly dodgy state. After reading

about Tagg’s life and work in a fascinating tribute put together by

his son Phillip, John Wake declared: “I would have loved to share a

common room with him” – not least to exchange favourite lines

from the classic films of the Marx Brothers, a mutual pleasure.

The 1950s also brought Godfrey Pumfrey – another cricketer of

outstanding pedigree – to the Town club. Back in 1938 he scored

111 for Northamptonshire’s Second XI against Worcestershire

Colts in the shadow of the cathedral at New Road, and not

surprisingly the County’s committee was keen to see more of

him. He duly received a letter from NCCC secretary Eric Coley,

but Godfrey’s ‘day job’ with the National Provincial bank probably

paid better and was certainly more secure employment than the

County could offer in those days. He turned out for

Northamptonshire in wartime matches, though, and lined up

alongside three past or future Test cricketers – Dennis Brookes,

‘Nobby’ Clark and New Zealander Bill Meritt – against the British

Empire XI in 1942. Nine years later, for Old Northamptonians

against Vallence at the now-built-upon Spinney Hill ground, he

conjured up one of the bowling performances of the season:

seven wickets for just three runs to secure a big victory. His

banking experience subsequently made him an obvious choice as

OTCC treasurer and he continued to represent the club until, as

his son Robin (an Old Laxtonian who also appeared for the Town

in the 1950s) relates, he called it a day – “That’s enough, boy” -

after hitting a century against Thrapston in a match that also saw

Dr Tagg claim a hat-trick. Unfortunately, he didn’t enjoy a long

retirement from the game and died in 1961, aged only 53.

It says a great deal for the resilience of OTCC – and the

enthusiasm for the game in Oundle generally – that the

organisation had rallied and rebuilt so swiftly after the Second

World War. One tangible sign of this is the number of OTCC

fixture cards printed; just 100 in 1938 but 250 by 1952, when

the Sunday side played four ‘all-day’ matches. In 1947 a stock of

caps were ordered in the traditional colours of red and black, but

they don’t appear to have proved bestsellers and those remaining

in stock in 1950 were sold off at five shillings a time! Around the

same time the committee debated the local rule that to score six

runs the ball must clear the old wall around the ground, and there

was also much discussion on the subject of a new pavilion. As

Robin Pumffrey remembered:

‘The old wooden one was a little bit of an embarrassment really.

We didn’t have a bar and used to pop over to the Wagon and

Horses (in West Street) for a drink. But visiting teams wanted to

have a wash and they’d just have a basin of water in the dressing

room! A quick splash and then off to the pub. You must

remember, though, that it was only a few years after the war and

people were perhaps a bit more prepared to tolerate that sort of

thing. The cricket at Oundle was always good and played in the

right spirit.’

An estimate for something a little grander was sought and

provided, but £300 was beyond the club’s means and the idea

had to be shelved for the time being. However, ‘new’ – after a

fashion – toilets were provided, one of them purchased at a sale

after the former Workhouse was shut down. Four garden seats

were also bought, not to mention (in 1951) crockery and a tea

urn, and to pay for all these ‘mod cons’ subscriptions were a

guinea (21 shillings or £1.05) a year, plus a match fee of 1/6d.

The club’s fundraising efforts didn’t always go according to plan;

in May 1957 the police were called to an OTCC-organised dance

at the Victoria Hall which had to be halted just after midnight

(rather than the scheduled finishing time of 1am) amid reports of

bottles being thrown. Around 100 people were left standing in

the street and ‘American servicemen’ were blamed for the fracas.

If they had been invited in the first place, one assumes they

weren’t again.

Oundle Town were not playing league cricket at this stage – but in

1950 moves were afoot to launch a Northamptonshire County

League, instigated by the County’s (and shortly England’s)

energetic John Bull of a captain, Freddie Brown. He arrived at

Wantage Road in 1949 and immediately revitalised the County,

whilst expressing concern at the lack of home-grown cricketers

making the grade. ‘The main reason for failure in the past has

been that a larger gap existed between county and club cricket

here than anywhere else,’ he wrote. ‘There is no doubt that

Yorkshire’s consistent success is due to the standard of the

league cricket there.’ And so, on March 13 1950, representatives

of a handful of clubs were invited to a meeting in the canteen at

British Timken – the roller-bearings manufacturer in Northampton

who employed a large number of Northamptonshire players,

including Brown – to consider the proposition. The County

skipper told the gathering he was ‘flat out for the project

and…convinced it would do a great deal towards putting us on a

firmer footing.’ But who should be invited to join?

Suggestions were asked for – and among the clubs mentioned

was Oundle Town. This was not, perhaps, a major surprise, given

that both Wellingborough and Rushden had representatives there

on the night and were due to play OTCC during the 1950 season.

Further debate weeded out one or two of the possibles, including

Stewarts and Lloyds and Market Harborough, but those present

agreed that a provisional committee should be set up – chaired by

Brown and with Timken’s Tony Stewart as secretary – with a press

announcement put out, a further meeting scheduled for May and

the following clubs to be approached: Kettering Town,

Northampton Brewery Company, Old Northamptonians, Vallence,

Bedford Queens, Bedford Town, Finedon Dolben, NCCC (who, it

was envisaged, would enter a Colts or Club and Ground

side)….and Oundle Town. This was duly minuted and signed by

F.R.B. himself. With the three clubs involved that evening –

Wellingborough, Rushden and Irthlingborough – it would have

made a league of 12 teams; the same number that contests the

Northamptonshire Cricket League (NCL) Premier Division today.

And yet, when the next meeting was convened at the same venue

(just imagine the smell of chips, cabbage and stewed tea!) on May

17, there was no-one there from OTCC and no mention of the

club in the minutes of a long conflab covering such burning

issues as gate money, umpires, professionals (‘no bar on them

playing in the league’ which one or two clubs have taken to

extremes in recent seasons) and match balls. When, many years

later, the author asked the late Harry Johnson - a great man of

local cricket and the last survivor of those present at the early

deliberations - about the situation regarding Oundle, he admitted

he couldn’t remember them ever being considered for a place. So

was the invitation extended? And if it was, why did the club

decline? The Northamptonshire County Cricket League duly came

into being with nine teams – Oundle not among them – and the

first round of matches was played on April 28 1951, when snow

fell in some parts of the country. It would take over half-a-

century for the Badgers to finally enter the Northamptonshire

‘pyramid’ – although when they did, as we shall see, they wasted

no time in showing the rest what they’d been missing all these

years.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘I don’t want to change the world,

I’m not looking for a new England…’

(Former Oundle resident Billy Bragg)

In June 1962, Oundle Town put out a side, including the

ubiquitous Jimmy Lowe, against Stewarts and Lloyds, and lost by

six wickets. This entirely unremarkable fixture warrants a

mention only because it was played in the month of the author’s

birth. The 1950s had seen the accustomed mix of good and

less-good at Milton Road; a rare 200-plus total against

Wellingborough Priory in 1955; Bob Barton smashed 145 – and

the windscreen of a car parked in the road – against Leicester

Banks that same year; and an enjoyable Sunday fixture with

Quorn CC the following summer, including a 12-a-side beer

match (which Oundle won) after the main business of the

afternoon was concluded early. There was also tragedy when, in

November 1957, Frederick William Mycroft from Benefield – a

successful bowler for the Town who also represented Northants

Amateurs – was killed when a Bristol Britannia airliner crashed on

a test flight. Mycroft, an electrical engineer, was one of 15 men

on board to die. By a macabre coincidence, the plane came down

near the village of Downend – birthplace of WG Grace.

At the School, meanwhile, the Eleven had emerged from a lengthy

barren spell (only 14 wins from nearly 100 games during the first

eight post-war seasons) in the wet summer of 1956, when John

Doubleday led a side including John Minney to six victories in

their 12 matches. It coincided with the building of a new pavilion

to replace the 1895 Tuckshop-funded model, designed by Peter

Bicknell and opened by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to

mark the School’s 400th anniversary. Finedon-born, Minney was

to enjoy an unusual career with Northamptonshire; three matches

in 1961, his final year at Cambridge, including a debut against

Yorkshire at Wantage Road, and then nothing until 1967 when he

turned out twice more. One of the County’s last first-class

amateurs, he died in 2015. Minney’s business interests in the

shoe trade once prompted him to invite the pop group

Showaddywaddy to their factory in Finedon after someone noticed

the retro rockers wearing a pair of the company’s shoes on TV. A

near-riot ensued.

The immediate post-war period at the School gave rise to one of

Oundle cricket’s most enduring and endearing features. The

team of 1949 were a happy bunch who got on well together and,

it seems, were popular even with the opposition; a team from

Sheffield’s steelworks played at the School that season and

commented in their local newspaper that the experience had been

‘a rare tonic.’ Realising that nine of them would still be around

the following year, it was decided to start their own touring team

– ‘The Assassins.’ Why that name? ‘I’ve no idea,’ founder

member Richard Botwood admitted to the author years later. ‘I

suspect we canvassed a lot of names and that sounded the worst!’

The nature of their meetings has changed down the years, from

full-blown cricket tours to a blend of golf and socialising.

Remarkably, six members of the original side attended the

Assassins’ 65th anniversary dinner in the new J.M. Mills Pavilion at

the School on a beautiful June evening in 2015 – while a seventh,

Pakistan’s former Foreign Secretary Shaharyar Mohammad Khan,

was ‘excused’ as he represented his country at an important ICC

meeting in the Caribbean in his capacity as chairman of the

Pakistan Cricket Board. Highlight of the occasion was John

Haines, captain in 1949, unveiling a new honours board alongside

his 2015 counterpart (and the first name on it) Ben Graves. ‘I

thought this might be the last Assassins gathering,’ said

Botwood. ‘But there seems plenty of enthusiasm for carrying on –

even though the balance between survivors and fallers-off-the-

perch is narrowing!’ Long may The Assassins continue to enjoy

themselves and perpetuate their shared love of good company

and Oundle cricket.

The School also did its share of ‘missionary work’ in the 1950s,

as recalled by Tommy Lowe – a talented cricketer who went on to

play with much success in the Northamptonshire County League

for Wellingborough and Kettering. But he hailed originally from

Aldwincle (the village that gave English literature the poet John

Dryden) whose club had an annual fixture against Oundle School

– ‘usually their fourths but sometimes the thirds if we had beaten

them the previous year.’ As he told the author in a letter in 2007:

‘Although my memory 50 years on is not crystal clear I still have

vivid pictures of 12 schoolboys plus umpire/Master in Charge

cycling through the village after the four-mile journey from

Oundle to be greeted by our primitive surroundings which

boasted a superb playing surface, considered to be the best

around at the time, (although) the outfield proved to be a great

leveller... The cattle and sheep-grazed grass ensured that the

dolly tubs and carbolic soap were always in demand - also the

more sophisticated laundries at the School would not be

redundant on a Monday after a visit to Aldwincle. I often wonder

how many of the lads went on to greater things on the sporting

field and if any made the First Eleven or even first-class

cricketers. I suspect not many as a lot of them seemed reluctant

participants, not very keen on cricket…’

From another of the surrounding villages, Barnwell, came Laurie

Owen. He also moved on to Wellingborough, like Tommy Lowe,

and became a County League stalwart after appearing for both

Barnwell (his father and mother both worked at the Manor for the

Duke and Duchess of Gloucester) and OTCC. He subsequently

enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the police force and

became scorer for Northamptonshire’s Second XI.

As the 1960s – the ‘swinging’ decade - wore on, John Poore

posted 672 runs in 1968 (the highest tally for the School since

the 1930s) and was also the first Oundle batsman since Sutthery

to be the team’s top run-scorer in three successive years; a

remarkable achievement. Poore went on to represent Middlesex

2nd XI and was also a Rover of note. Meanwhile, an OTCC fixture

card from 1966 shows two sides being put in the field each

Sunday – the firsts under Jimmy Lowe taking on prestigious

‘county’ opponents like Old Northamptonians, Wellingborough

Old Grammarians, Rushden, Kettering and Northampton

Wanderers, plus Market Harborough and Leicester Banks, while

the seconds tackled local villages including Glapthorn, Yarwell,

Wansford, Yaxley and Lutton. It suggests a busy club in good

heart.

Born in Glapthorn, Gordon Edwards brought a whiff of cricketing

glamour to Milton Road – but he had to switch from

Northamptonshire to do so. As a batsman/off-spinner he made a

couple of Second XI Championship appearances for the County in

1968, although it is possible no-one thought to tell skipper

Dennis Brookes that he could bowl! He was given just three overs

in the two matches – and eventually popped up in

Nottinghamshire’s ‘stiffs’ a few years later. They clearly thought

rather more of him and he played his first Championship game

against Derbyshire at Ilkeston in 1973. Walking out to bat, he

found himself joining his captain at the crease – said captain

being Garfield St Aubrun Sobers, later knighted and the pick of

many cricket fans as the game’s greatest-ever all-rounder,

although the big bearded chap who cracked a century at Oundle

School in 1901 may have had something to say about that.

Sobers made a hundred that day – showing ‘admirable discipline

and restraint, though clearly still troubled by his knee’ according

to Wisden - and the pair put on 90, of which Edwards contributed

21. A supporting role any cricketer would be deeply chuffed to

play.

In the return fixture at Trent Bridge a month later he claimed 5-

44, including the wickets of Brian Bolus and Bob Taylor – not a

bad return in what turned out to be his final first-class

appearance. But he did make it on to the telly – more than W.G.

ever did – and scuppered Barry Richards’ hopes of a John Player

League fifty at Southampton, trapping the brilliant South African

leg-before for 48. Another brush with the truly great. Oundle

team-mates recall Edwards turning up to play for the club, having

driven down from Nottingham in his Austin motor car, with kit in

a rather unprepossessing suitcase. Sometimes he did well,

sometimes he didn’t; for OTCC against Cambridge YMCA at

Fenner’s he was dismissed for a duck while Peter ‘Whippet’

Burnham – of whom more later – hit a century.

There must have been something in the air in 1976 – but it

certainly wasn’t rain in that summer of drought and Denis Howell.

Northamptonshire lifted their first major trophy (the Gillette Cup)

98 years after Reade and his fellow worthies got the County Club

properly up-and-running, and they also finished second in the

Championship to Mike Brearley’s Middlesex. Meanwhile, Oundle

School – with Jeremy Firth now Master-in-Charge - could boast

‘probably their best side since the war’ according to Rex Alston in

Wisden, going through the season unbeaten against other school

teams and, in total, winning nine of their 18 matches. No fewer

than four members of it went on to win Blues at Lord’s – Peter

Mills, Ian Hodgson and David ‘Doc’ Holliday for Cambridge, and

John Knight for Oxford. Knight’s father, Dick, was Headmaster of

the School from 1956 to 1968 and a good enough cricketer

himself to turn out for Wiltshire – ‘never happier,’ according to his

obituary in the Daily Telegraph, ‘than when watching the cricket

XI or the XV.’ Tony Murley, who topped 1,500 runs for the School

in three summers and earned praise from Alston as ‘a skilful

leader’, unluckily missed out on a Blue.

Mills junior opened the innings occasionally for Northamptonshire

and would have done so more frequently had he not found

himself at Wantage Road at the same time as ‘The Famous Five’ at

the top of the order – Geoff Cook, Wayne Larkins, Richard

Williams, Allan Lamb and Peter Willey. He did, though, take a

century off the touring Sri Lankans for the combined Oxbridge

team in 1981, and the following year emulated his father by

captaining Cambridge against Oxford, albeit in circumstances

that caused the odd raised eyebrow at the time. Derek Pringle

was the appointed captain but, as Wisden put it, ‘preferred’ to

play for England against India in a Test match at Old Trafford;

Mills took over, won the match on a declaration – the first

instance in 138 years – and avenged the heavy defeat his father’s

team suffered back in ’48. According to Mike, “he rescued the

family’s name!”

Peter Mills has written with great affection of the role cricket pro

Allan Watkins – and wife Molly - played in the success of that

outstanding Oundle side:

‘Allan’s great strengths were his enthusiasm, which was

infectious, and his deep knowledge of the game which he would

pass on with great care and skill. He was never over-technical

and allowed each individual to develop themselves without ever

inhibiting natural talent. He taught us how to play the game in

the spirit and manner in which he had played. The thing we loved

about Allan above all else was his fountain of stories! We lapped

them up as we heard at first-hand about the great players and

characters he played with and the England tours to India and

South Africa. He also had a lovely weakness for remembering

names, and hosts of forgotten people were simply referred to as

‘old doings’! But it really was a team – Allan and Molly. Indeed,

Molly ran the sports shop – a little wooden hut next to the cricket

nets which for us was a treasure trove of goodies. I think it was

Molly who had the business acumen too – she said that if she had

ever left the shop with Allan in charge he would give everything

away!’

Peter Mills is also full of praise for the team spirit fostered by

Watkins and Firth, which made long-lasting friends of young

team-mates. So much so that many of them continued to play

together for Oundle Rovers in The Cricketer Cup, a competition

they won three times in five years – in 1985, 1988 and 1989,

beating Repton Pilgrims in the final once and Shrewsbury

Saracens twice – much to the delight of Mike Mills, the team’s

enthusiastic manager. In the second of those triumphs, Andrew

Townsend joined an elite bunch of batsmen who have scored a

century in the final – in his case against a Shrewsbury attack

featuring former County seamer (and future Middlesex and ECB

supremo) Tim Lamb. The victorious Rovers, together with wives

and officials, were flown by sponsors Moet & Chandon to their

chateau in Epernay to sample the best hospitality imaginable,

including plenty of their world-renowned product; definitely a

prize worth winning.

Aside from the Varsity Match result there was a further link with

Mills senior in 1982. Coming on as first change for Cambridge

University against Glamorgan, Ian Hodgson collected 8-68 on the

opening day of the new season at Fenner’s – eclipsing J.M.M’s 7-

69 against the Tykes back in 1946 as the best first-class figures

by an Oundelian:

Glamorgan

A. Jones c Goldie b Hodgson 103

A.L. Jones c Goldie b Hodgson 24

R.C. Ontong b Hodgson 6

C.J.C. Rowe b Hodgson 23

M.J. Llewellyn c Henderson b Hodgson 2

G.C. Holmes st Goldie b Doggart 68

E.W. Jones c Henderson b Hodgson 0

B.J. Lloyd c Goldie b Hodgson 9

M.A. Nash b Hodgson 0

S.A.B. Daniels not out 30

S.R. Barwick not out 5

Extras 11 Total: 281-9 declared

Palmer 22-3-73-0, Dutton 6-0-29-0, Hodgson 32-12-68-8,

Doggart 20-3-55-1, Ellison 8-1-28-0, Henderson 4-3-6-0,

Boyd-Moss 8-3-11-0.

Hodgson was on for an ‘all-ten’ after picking up the first eight

wickets to fall, until off-spinner Simon Doggart intervened by

dismissing Geoff Holmes. It was also the best innings bowling

return for the Light Blues since Richard Hutton claimed 8-50

against Derbyshire 19 years earlier. Born in South Africa,

Hodgson played subsequently for Buckinghamshire, Oundle

Rovers and Hong Kong!

Another record fell a couple of years later, courtesy of the

aforementioned Townsend who became the first batsman to

reach 1,000 runs in a season for the School. He played a

captain’s part in 1984 with 1,005 runs at 83.75 (beating the

previous highest aggregate of 820 by C.R.H.M. Stuart in 1935)

and led the side to eight wins – the most since the golden

summer of ’76. Into this record-breaking environment came Rory

Jenkins, perhaps better known as a rugby player with Harlequins

and Wasps, not to mention England A – but his 134 wickets in

three seasons, between 1986 and 1988, made him the School’s

most successful bowler of the 20th century. He was a triple Blue

at Cambridge (cricket, rugby and athletics) before pursuing a

legal career.

In 1989, left-hander Tom Harrison twice set a new mark for the

highest individual score made for the School in the ‘modern’ era –

162 against Bedford and then 174 off the Blundell’s attack. The

latter stood as a record until 1992 when Alleyn Plowright hit 191

in the annual contest with the Rovers – whose team that day

included Harrison! He subsequently represented

Northamptonshire 2nd XI, scoring back-to-back centuries in 1994,

and Derbyshire, before a high-powered career with the ECB’s

marketing department (where he played a major role in the

development of Twenty20), ESPN Star Sports in Singapore and IMG

led to his appointment as chief executive of the national board in

October 2014. Old Oundelian feet in the corridors of cricketing

power…

Another significant cricketing chapter opened at the School in

August 1988 when the ground staged the first of its 15 (to date)

Second Eleven Championship fixtures, between Northamptonshire

and Worcestershire. Among the host of well-known names to

have trodden the turf for the ‘stiffs’ of various counties are

Ashes-winning (and Ashes-losing) England coach Andy Flower,

other Test players including Winston Davis, Blair Hartland, Paul

Taylor, Ronnie Irani and Ashley Giles, also Anthony Pollock – son

of the immortal Graeme – and future international umpire Richard

Kettleborough. More recently, Oundle has been the venue for

matches in the Second Eleven Trophy (one-day) and Twenty20

competitions. Reade would surely have been pleased to see the

County Club he helped to found using ‘his’ facilities. As co-host

of the 1996 Lombard Under-15s World Challenge and various

age-group international games, the Main has also seen the likes

of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Adam Gilchrist, Damien Martyn,

Shoaib Malik, Jonathan Trott (representing South Africa!), Alastair

Cook, Stuart Broad and Graeme Swann strut their teenage stuff.

Not forgetting off-the-field visits by a couple of all-time greats

from the West Indies – Sir Garfield Sobers, Gordon Edwards’ old

batting partner, and ‘Whispering Death’ Michael Holding, who

made the presentations when the School entertained young

cricketers from Holland, Denmark, Scotland and Ireland in a

European Cricket Council festival.

If everything was going swimmingly at the School in the decade of

yuppies and Loadsamoney, mullets and brick-like mobile phones,

it was proving altogether less cheerful – and less affluent – at the

Town club. More than three decades after the strange affair of

the County League, OTCC became one of the founder members of

the Rutland and District League along with Barnack,

Brotherhoods, Ketton, Market Deeping, Market Overton, Stamford

Town (then known as Priory Sports), Ufford Park and Uppingham.

It offered the club a useful focus and continues to provide

excellent competitive cricket on Sunday afternoons, generally

without the spikiness and ‘edge’ of the Saturday stuff. But

notwithstanding the efforts of fine cricketers including Rodney

Gilbert, Martyn Dobbs (later a respected Minor Counties umpire)

and Willy Ives, the 1980s were a period of decline at Milton Road

– that, at least, was the view of another club stalwart David

Marriott, known to all-and-sundry as ‘Fred’ and a former OTCC

chairman:

‘Our old but not unattractive pavilion gave up the ghost and was

replaced (in 1988) by a couple of second-hand portakabins with

no running water or WC! Things went downhill on the field too…I

vividly remember us being set 395 to win at Nassington and

being 0-2 in reply; a challenge with a full team of eleven players –

but we only had nine! Eventually the portakabins were becoming

semi-unusable and although we played our games at Milton Road

there was no formal agreement with the school for us to do so.

The lowest point I can remember was a meeting held in the back

bar of The Ship Inn. The club’s treasurer sent a letter of

resignation advising that we had insufficient funds to pay the

following season’s Rutland League fees – or indeed buy any balls.

So we had no real pavilion, just one team that was usually

supplemented by Joe Soap from the bar, and no money! It was a

simple decision – either fold or get some funds together to

continue. So at this meeting eight individuals each donated £25

to cover the shortfall and keep the club running.’

A nasty brush with cricketing oblivion – and yet there were still

some good players around, gracing the club’s fixtures against

Rutland League opponents, touring sides and even Cambridge

colleges. Ivan Wallis for one. A headline-writer’s dream – ‘Ivan

the Terrible’ didn’t need too much thinking about by the sub-

editors when he hammered an opposing attack into submission –

Wallis could smack the ball very hard and very far with his three-

pound willow cudgel. Even today, whenever a Town batsman

deposits one into a neighbouring garden or into the (former) Drill

Hall car park, it’s all Mayfair to a sherbet dab that one of the

long-time supporters on the red benches will begin a sentence:

“Ah, but I remember Ivan hitting it…” His six sixes in an over at

Milton Road (reportedly reducing the bowler to tears) is a

favourite post-match tale over a glass of NVB’s best bitter, while

Peter Mills recalls making his OTCC debut as a 14-year-old just

up the road at Ashton Wold, where the ground (no longer used for

cricket) formed part of the estate owned by the Rothschild family,

one of whose most famous members – Victor, 3rd Baron – played

for Northamptonshire between 1929 and 1931 after opening the

batting for Harrow with future playwright Terence Rattigan! On

this occasion Mills had a single to his name when Wallis joined

him at the crease – and was still on the same score when his

partner departed for 50-plus! But the brickie could be

temperamental, too. The story goes that a duck at Nassington

prompted Wallis to pile up his kit at the back of the pavilion and

set light to it, obliging him to buy a new set in time for the start

of the following season. A team-mate duly presented him with

what he claimed was an essential piece of additional equipment

for Ivan’s bag; a fire extinguisher.

Others made their mark at Milton Road around this time. Old

Bedfordian Mick Henderson – able to ‘bowl all day with a lovely

rhythmical action’ according to one his contemporaries –

captained the side and also tended the ground. His son Iain was

a day boy at Laxton, skippered Northamptonshire Under-19s,

gained his cricket Blue at Oxford in 1990, played Minor Counties

for Bedfordshire under John Wake’s captaincy, turned out for both

OTCC and Peterborough Town and became the only Oundelian to

win the President’s Putter – the annual competition for former and

current golf Blues contested at Rye in January. Then there was

Keith Thomson, assistant chaplain at the School and a hard-

hitting batsman. He too had a son – Chris – who appeared for

Oundle and Peterborough, after representing Northamptonshire

Schools.

Stephen Radcliffe, who shared a staff room with Jimmy Lowe, was

another to transfer his enthusiasm, wit and wisdom from the field

of play to the committee room (or whichever pub they happened

to be meeting in) as chairman, and today rarely misses a match at

Oundle with his wife Gwen – in charge of fixtures when business

was conducted by postcard rather than telephone or email, who

has also served as the town’s Mayor and remains the most

reliable scoreboard-updater in the club. At least until 2016 when

an electronic board was purchased! Gwen was one of the club’s

tea ladies in the days when the facilities comprised a kitchen in a

lean-to shed outside the old pavilion, and woe betide the person

who forgot to refill the urn after tea and condemned the washers-

up to do the job in cold water. Stephen, meanwhile, ran the

junior cricket pretty much single-handed through much of the

1980s and 90s. And then there was David Burnham – ‘Bunzy’ –

whose long involvement at OTCC has embraced playing, tending

the ground and discussing every detail of the match in progress

with relish and, preferably, a pint. His ‘double-act’ with the

erudite Alan Welsh - fellow groundsman and the current Fixtures

Secretary – never fails to amuse and delight. The summer of

1993 brought the inimitable Shaun Smalley to the club, a

wholehearted all-rounder whose match reports as captain of the

2nd XI in the era of social media justified single-handedly Mark

Zuckerberg’s Facebook experiment. The 2017 season will be his

25th in succession with the club.

Another long-serving OTCC man was Dennis Clark, who worked

in the School’s science laboratories. Joining the club as a

teenager in the 1920s and initially helping out the Wednesday XI,

he became scorer in 1949 – a worthy successor to Mr Canner –

and continued to keep the book until his death in 1991. Sadly,

neither he nor Jimmy Lowe lived to see the club made fit for the

21st century, thanks largely to Peter Burnham (brother of ‘Bunzy’)

after the portakabins went up in flames. As ‘Fred’ Marriott

recalls:

‘A decision was taken to commit to a development plan and build

a new pavilion. An agreement was negotiated with the school to

give us some security and lottery funding was secured. Around

this time I took a phone call from Peter, who was a self-employed

builder. He asked me if we had anyone to build the pavilion yet. I

told him we hadn’t. So he said if we could get the money he

would build it for us. I just had to ring him when we were ready.’

‘Whippet’ duly built the current pavilion (with the aforementioned

Stephen Radcliffe as one of his ‘labourers’ during school holidays)

in the winter of 1996-97. Although Marriott admits there were a

few heated meetings about urinals and removable partitions –

‘the voting process made FIFA delegates look like novices’ – the

job was done. Also important in the process was Clive Nield, an

international squash player known as ‘The Master’ – not least, in

this context, for his grasp of the paperwork associated with a

lottery funding application. A classy all-round cricketer – as

nippy in the field as around the court – he is the proud possessor

of one of the last ‘old’ Oundle Town caps (red and black hoops) in

captivity. One of those ‘remaindered’ by the club in 1950 at five

bob a time? Peter Burnham passed away not long after

completing the construction but his memory is perpetuated in the

annual match at Milton Road between a Club XI and a side raised

by the chairman which usually features a smattering of OTCC old

boys, happy to ‘bring auld acquaintance to mind’ – just like the

chaps in 1826 – and enjoy the best cricket lunch and tea in the

world. The culinary spirit of Lord Lilford lives on.

So, with much-improved facilities in place it was then a case of

‘Quo Vadis, Oundle Town?’ One of those to come up with an

answer had an accent – if not a surname – far removed from the

edge of the English Fenlands.

CHAPTER NINE

‘Now, plot or passion, love or strife,

For some of us make up the End of Life;

There be some who labour for wealth or fame,

But this man gave his heart to a game…’

(Alfred Cochrane – ‘The Enthusiast’)

Geographically, the town of Ashington in Northumberland is 218

miles away from Oundle. Culturally, the distance is perhaps

rather greater. Once described as ‘the largest mining village in

the world’ and boasting its own ‘Pitmatic’ dialect, the place has a

working-class sporting heritage second-to-none; footballers

Jackie Milburn and the Charlton brothers, Jack and Bobby, plus

Durham and England fast bowler Steve ‘Grievous Bodily’ Harmison

- who ended up managing the town’s soccer team - and the

much-imitated voice of darts, the irreplaceable Sid Waddell. But

pit closures in the 1980s hit the area hard. On the face of it,

Ashington doesn’t have a huge amount in common with Oundle’s

historic buildings (made of the beautiful and distinctive limestone

that bears the town’s name), public school playing fields and

‘county’ feel.

But from one to the other came John Wake, Master-in-Charge of

cricket at Oundle School between 1992 - when he succeeded

former Oxford University batsman Vince Cushing - and his

retirement in 2015, and undeniably a man with a mission; to

foster the game there and at the Town club (of which he was

vice-chairman for a number of years) through a strong, practical

and mutually-beneficial relationship. It’s said that Hereward – the

11th century leader of resistance to William the Conqueror in The

Fens – earned his tag ‘the Wake’ by virtue of being ‘watchful.’ His

present-day namesake has probably watched (and talked about)

as much cricket as anyone on the planet over the past couple of

decades, and his burning enthusiasm for it - and for his adopted

home town - remains undimmed. At the Great Hall dinner to

mark 150 years (in theory at least) since the School’s first

recorded match in 1855, Wake enlisted the services of a superb

classical pianist from the ranks of the School’s students to offer

Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ sonata between courses – “because,”

he insisted, “that’s what I want our cricket to be like!”

Some of his other sayings have become the stuff of legend.

Cricketers now in late-middle age, who turned out for him in

Northamptonshire Schools Cricket Association sides in the 1970s

and 80s, will still adopt the accent for “That was the most po-

ooor, and I mean po-ooor….” or “Pressure’s the name of the

game – you tie ‘em down, they take a chance, they’re on their wa-

aay…” at the slightest provocation, much as Monty Python fans

parrot the Parrot Sketch whenever two or more are gathered

together. Coincidentally, Sir Herewald Wake – donor of the Rural

Challenge Cup and supposedly a descendant of the English

freedom-fighter – was one of Reade’s colleagues on the first

NCCC committee in 1878.

A talented and combative player himself – one-time captain of

Bedfordshire, where team-mates including his great friend and

fellow north-easterner Ray Swann, father of Graeme and a former

batting coach at the School – John Wake taught in the state sector

before coming to Oundle and played club cricket for Northampton

Saints. And that breadth of experience fuelled his conviction that

outstanding cricketers can come to the fore by a myriad of

different routes, and at different speeds. Take his fellow

Ashingtonian:

‘We may have been 30 years apart but Steve Harmison played

cricket and football in the same streets and against the same

lamp-posts as I did when I was a kid, but (he) came to our game

relatively late. At Ashington he eventually got into the club’s first

team before he was spotted by Durham playing for

Northumberland’s Under-17s. At 17 years old he was six-foot-

four, could bowl a ball at 90 miles per hour and made his first-

class debut. Hardly surprising that Durham were asking where

he’d been hiding! When you consider Shane Warne – he was

playing ‘C’ grade cricket in Australia at 17 and 18, and didn’t get

into the ‘A’ grade until he was 20. But all the time he was getting

a long bowl and learning his art. His coach Terry Jenner said

there was a problem in this country because unless you’ve made

your mark by Under-19s level many counties will just abandon all

hope of you, and possibly the late developers are lost.’

And as an off-spinner – famously rated in print by Graeme Swann

as one of his ten favourite bowlers – Wake knows all about the

necessity of giving tweakers time to learn their craft.

Time is limited, of course, when it comes to working with young

cricketers at a school. At the age of 18 they move on elsewhere.

But the Wake/Howorth era saw Oundle’s cricketing profile raised

around the public schools circuit, and beyond – with overseas

tours (to locations including South Africa, Sri Lanka and the

Caribbean) exposing the youngsters to sport and life in different

cultures and climates. With an expanded fixture list, it was no

surprise to see the old record of 11 victories in a season –

achieved back in Reade’s day – broken, and that duly happened in

1995 when 13 games were won off the back of Jeremy Pilch’s tally

of 1,091 runs. He is a descendant of the immortal Fuller Pilch,

who had set new batting records of his own 150 years earlier.

The following summer, 1996, leg-spinner Jake Milton toppled

Sutthery and Badeley from their perch by claiming 75 wickets,

while the all-round return of David Walder (another prominent

rugby player with Newcastle, Wasps and England), who logged

682 runs and 49 wickets, was among the best-ever for the

School. Pretty well all of these outstanding performances were

dotted down in the scorebook by Edgar Edis, long-time scorer for

the Eleven until his death in 1997. The scorebox on the ground

has a plaque in his memory, while the trophy competed for

annually between the School and Oundle Rovers bears his name.

Edgar’s grandson Jack Roberts is an OTCC regular.

At time of writing – 2017 – Oundle School still awaits its first Test

cricketer, for all its past and present connections with the game’s

great and good. For a time it looked as though Will Jefferson – 6

feet 10 inches tall and both the son and grandson of first-class

cricketers – might break that duck. He topped 2,000 runs at the

School between 1995 and 1998 before joining Essex, and in 2004

became the first Oundelian to hit a double-century in first-class

cricket. The fact that Shane Warne featured in the Hampshire

attack off whom he made it – at Southampton – made the

achievement even more special:

W.I. Jefferson c Pothas b Taylor 222

A.P. Grayson lbw b Bruce 7

A. Flower c Warne b Mullally 32

A. Habib c Kenway b Warne 19

R.C. Irani c Pothas b Taylor 17

J.S. Foster c Brown b Warne 40

J.D. Middlebrook c Pothas b Bruce 0

G.R. Napier c sub b Bruce 8

A.R. Adams st Pothas b Warne 22

A.P. Cowan not out 21

D. Gough lbw b Warne 0

Extras: 28 Total: 416 all out

Mullally 20-6-72-1, Bruce 19-3-74-3, Mascarenhas 3-1-5-0,

Taylor 23-3-111-2, Warne 32-1-118-4, Clarke 6-1-24-0

Jefferson subsequently visited Bangladesh with England ‘A’,

moved on to Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire but was forced

to retire from the game with a hip condition during the 2012

season, aged only 32. He scored just over 7,000 first-class runs

at nearly 36 and his career is one of those that leaves you to

ponder on what might have been.

Even with Jefferson gone, the Eleven continued to meet and beat

some of the best around. In 1999, Stephen Lowe’s side reached

another high- water mark with 14 victories – the captain joining

the exclusive ‘Four-Figures Club’ – and in 2003 Mark Phythian’s

team matched that tally, including a memorable and hard-

working win over Sri Lanka’s Richmond College on the Test match

ground at Galle, overlooked by the old fort. The author had the

pleasure of accompanying that tour as scorer, press officer and

general confidant to the Master-in-Charge, and has enjoyed few

if any cricketing experiences more; not least the sight of Mr Wake

opting for sartorial ‘fusion’ by donning sarong and yellow nylon

shirt at the same time, after being refused entry to a top-end

Colombo hotel bar in sweaty cricket kit! Tony Howorth, long-

serving umpire Jack Bloodworth and Ken Lake MBE from the

English Schools Cricket Association (of which Wake is a past

Chairman) also made the trip and contributed much to its

success.

Phythian, Cameron Wake (son of John) and Patrick Foster all

graduated from Oundle School to Northamptonshire’s Academy at

Wantage Road, and all played first-class cricket for Durham UCCE

in the 2000s. Wake junior succeeded Phythian as captain and in

2004 the bar was raised again as 15 matches were won, none lost

and the Silk Trophy was secured by Oundle for the first time.

Wake and Rob Fahrenheim contributed most of the runs, and

Foster’s haul of 54 wickets was the best by a seam bowler at the

School since H.R. Palmer (a future Governor of Cyprus) bagged 58

way back in 1895.

That season was South African Merwe Genis’s first as cricket

professional at the School, succeeding Howorth who retired the

previous year – although he has retained an involvement with

some of the younger teams to the present day. Genis first

appeared in the county in 1998 as a development coach with the

new Northamptonshire Cricket Board and made his mark

immediately: ‘Merwe’s performance this year was outstanding,’

commented Aussie David Eland, then co-ordinating the County’s

youth coaching programme. ‘He impressed everyone with his

enthusiasm, outstanding communication skills and his obvious

knowledge and love of the game. Nothing was too much trouble

for Merwe.’ Before long, John Wake had secured his services for

Oundle – both the School and OTCC, where he now rejoices in the

title of Club Captain – and the qualities highlighted by Eland 16

years ago are still much in evidence on a daily basis during his

summer sojourns in England; likewise in his native country as he

works flat-out to bring cricket into township communities.

The cyclical nature of schools cricket suggested Oundle were due

for a ‘dip’ – but although results levelled out a bit there was still

talent aplenty on show. Greg Smith hammered four consecutive

centuries in 2007, joined Leicestershire and in 2014 took a

hundred off the Indian tourists at Grace Road. Rory Osmond

(Leicestershire again) and Harry Ramsden (Essex) also attracted

the attention of first-class counties, and in 2010 Jack Oughtred’s

name reached the pages of the national newspapers after

claiming 10-48 from 22 overs against the Perse School, the

match ball being preserved in the school archives. It was believed

to be the first ‘all-ten’ in Oundle colours since Winch (a master,

of course, as opposed to a pupil) did it twice in the 19th century.

‘It was a great way for Jack to make his cricketing mark with us a

few days before he leaves the school,’ Wake told the Daily

Telegraph.

At Milton Road, meanwhile, Sunday cricket in the Rutland League

had been Oundle Town’s main priority for a number of years. But

the efforts of Genis, the much-missed Colin ‘Riddler’ Davies, Ken

Collier, John Foster, future chairman Justin Jeffrey, Graham Dalley

and others to build up the youth section had prompted a re-think

within the club. They had plenty of good young cricketers

wanting competitive action – and for the vast majority of teams in

Northamptonshire, Saturday league cricket was the principal

focus. It could be a case of ‘use them or lose them’ – and the

latter was unthinkable. So in the summer of 2005, OTCC officials

took the momentous step of applying for membership of the

Northamptonshire Cricket League (NCL) which had been created

in 2003 by the merger of four existing leagues – Championship,

County (which Oundle hadn’t joined after all in 1951), Alliance

and Combination. The NCL was launching an expanded Division

12 comprising 18 sides, playing each other once, and Oundle

thirds – the two Sunday sides were still regarded then as the

club’s first and second teams – duly appeared in the handbook

with an opening-day fixture against Earls Barton 3rds on May 6

2006. The next awfully big adventure was at hand.

CHAPTER TEN

‘Hail Oundle, Hail! Place of my birth!

To me the dearest spot on earth.

The music of thy tuneful bells

With ecstasy my bosom swells,

Thy grand old church and lofty spire

Encourage lingering desire…’

(John Ireland – ‘Parson John – the Oundle Poet’)

‘You cannot write a cricketing script in advance that will have any

real comparison with what actually happens. I always felt,

therefore, that as cricketers we were artists and not scientists…’

(Sir Leonard Hutton)

The Northamptonshire village of Great Brington is probably best-

known in the wider world for its strong links with the Spencer

family. The 8th Earl Spencer – father of Diana, Princess of Wales –

is among those buried in the churchyard there. But on July 8

2006 an event of significance in this story occurred at the

village’s cricket ground, being used then as the host venue for

East Haddon CC’s 3rd XI:

J. Chambers c Watson b Small 266

T. Costello c Daniels b Streatfield 44

R. Hanson not out 60

B. Weatherington not out 8

Extras: 54 Total: 432-2 (45 overs)

S. Brooks, S. Matcham, T. Davies, N. Fox, M. Matcham, J. Costello

and D. Foster did not bat.

The bowling figures have been omitted on the grounds that

young or sensitive eyes may be reading this. They are not pretty.

Jimmy Chambers hit 17 sixes and 25 fours – a total of 202 runs in

boundaries – and it remains, at the start of the 2017 season, the

highest individual score ever made in the NCL. But it wasn’t even

his first double-hundred of the season. A month earlier, at

Milton Road, Chambers clubbed 201 off 124 balls at the expense

of West Haddon 2nds, sharing an opening stand of 310 with Tom

Costello as Oundle scraped home by 345 runs. The man you feel

sorriest for there is Ben Weatherington, whose family has done

and still does so much for the club in various capacities. Down at

number three, and suffering from a nasty dose of pad rash in the

pavilion, he fell for a third-ball duck! But Ben was still ‘hitting a

long ball’ in 2014 when, for OTCC 2nd XI against Podington, he

managed to clear Justin Jeffrey’s house in Spurlings, on the site of

the old orchard on the eastern side of the Milton Road ground. A

prodigious blow.

In 2006 the Town found themselves competing way below the

standard of cricket appropriate for the players they had; 13

victories in 17 matches, the division won by 52 points and

Chambers finishing just 16 runs short of 1,000 in only 13 knocks.

Was this – like the wartime railway journey on the famous poster –

really necessary? Surely Division 11 wouldn’t be much different?

Fortunately, fate intervened in the shape of Sharnbrook’s decision

to resign from the league for 2007. The NCL’s policy of obliging

teams to ‘work their way up’ was abandoned on this occasion,

mindful perhaps of the carnage wrought by Chambers and

chums, and the committee proposed to the autumn AGM at

Wantage Road that Oundle Town should replace Sharnbrook in

Division Four. Those with long experience of these meetings,

where parochial self-interest is generally the decisive factor,

weren’t certain what the outcome would be, but in the event

common sense prevailed and the clubs backed the committee by

a solid majority. The events of 2007 proved the point as Oundle

– boosted by South African Tennyson Botes with 722 runs and 42

wickets – topped the division comfortably, while the Saturday

seconds began their trek up the league ladder too. The club’s

global outlook has attracted some top-notch players – and people

– to Oundle in recent years, not least future West Indies Test

captain Denesh Ramdin and Middlesex batsman Dawid Malan

who’ve enjoyed Sunday cricket at Milton Road whilst turning out

on Saturdays elsewhere. Malan’s Oundle debut in 2006 ended

with a duck to his name, but he made amends soon afterwards

with 156 off 134 balls in a Rutland League fixture against

Rushton at Milton Road, hitting seven sixes sharing a 191-run

partnership with Justin Jeffrey. In 2016 he made England’s T20

squad and was an important member of the side that brought the

County Championship title to Lord’s.

The 2008 season brought former University of Pretoria student

Martin van der Merwe to OTCC, and he succeeded in bumping up

standards to a new level by passing 1,000 league runs in each of

his three seasons at the Town – and guiding the 1st XI into the

NCL’s Division One. A tall, powerful left-hander (who could also

bowl handy left-arm spin) he hit the ball ferociously hard and a

couple of examples are still talked about. No team from a club as

successful as Finedon Dolben needs any sympathy, but van der

Merwe’s unbeaten 213 off 125 deliveries – featuring 13 sixes –

against their seconds at Oundle in June 2010 was nothing short

of brutal. And later that season he showed off his talents on the

league’s Twenty20 finals day at the County Ground in

Northampton, peppering boundary boards, sightscreens and

spectators with thumping drives, pulls and cuts. Chatting ahead

of the final - to be played between Oundle and Burton Latimer –

with former Northamptonshire paceman John Hughes, in the

Burton side that day, the author was told they had been

encouraged to get in some extra fielding practice before the

decider. “It won’t be any good,” reckoned Hughes, “unless we’re

going to stand there while someone fires bloody cannon balls at

us!” Van der Merwe’s 23 off ten balls set the tone for a

memorable win to earn silverware for the NCL’s oldest club in the

game’s newest format:

Oundle Town

M. van der Merwe c Mansell b Hanney 23

C. Wake c Mansell b Shelford 61

M. Hodgson b Scully 21

H. Ramsden c Hofbauer b Scully 10

J. Chambers c Sanders b Gahagan 17

P. Adams c J. Hughes b Bell 4

M. Outar b Bell 7

S. Brooks not out 2

R. Cunningham not out 6

Extras: 28 Total: 179-7 (20 overs)

D. Foster and J. Jeffrey did not bat

P Hughes 2-0-21-0, D Hanney 4-0-42-1, M Bell 4-0-21-2, J

Scully 4-0-24-2, D Shelford 4-0-38-1, D Gahagan 2-0-17-1

Burton Latimer

M. Bell c Brooks b Wake 5

B. Mansell c Wake b Cunningham 44

G. Hofbauer b Foster 29

S. Sanders c vd Merwe b Foster 8

J. Hughes c Foster b Ramsden 12

D. Gahagan run out 3

D. Shelford c Chambers b Ramsden 5

A. McClure c Wake b Ramsden 2

P. Hughes c Adams b Cunningham 22

J. Scully not out 5

D. Hanney not out 2

Extras: 5 Total: 142-9 (20 overs)

Wake 4-0-40-1, van der Merwe 4-0-24-0, Cunningham 4-0-26-

2, Foster 4-0-32-2, Ramsden 4-0-20-3

Oundle Town won by 37 runs

This was a characteristically ‘Oundle’ success in many ways; the

emphasis on spin, which bore the unmistakeable hallmark of

Wake senior; the South African connection; and a contingent of

School boys doing it for the Town – Wake junior, Ramsden and

Michael Outar, whose twin brothers David and Jonathan (both

left-arm spinners) had also played for both sides a few years

earlier. A delighted John Wake was quoted in the local press: ‘It’s

been worth the wait!’

Qualification for the ECB’s national club T20 competition took

OTCC within touching distance of a place in the last four and an

appearance on Sky TV. Victories over Leicester Ivanhoe and

Cuckney in the regional stages sent the side to Norfolk and a

quarter-final against Swardeston. Andy Reynoldson – a Rutland

League regular replacing the ineligible van der Merwe – hit 61 and

Mark Hodgson a brisk 32 to lay the foundations for a score of

142-5; undoubtedly competitive but still a tad below

expectations. The home side’s reply ebbed and flowed but they

reached their target with three wickets and five balls to spare.

Disappointment for a sizeable travelling contingent although (the

result aside) a good day out was had by all.

Cup honours were all well and good, but the club was still aiming

for a place in the NCL’s Premier Division to prove that it had really

‘arrived’ in the Northamptonshire set-up. Cameron Wake’s

decision in 2009 to represent Oundle on Saturdays as well as

Sundays owed much to that often-stated ambition. Whilst at

school he had moved up through the age-groups at Wantage

Road and made it on to the professional books as an ‘Emerging

Player’ – also appearing for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and, as

already mentioned, the Durham UCCE side. But this intelligent

and competitive cricketer always retained a strong affinity to

OTCC, captaining them in the Rutland League, and duly left

Peterborough Town at the end of 2008 to shoulder the task of

getting his home-town club (for whom he had made his debut as

an 11-year-old at Whittlesey) up to where he believed it

belonged. In 2009 Oundle won NCL Division Three and also, for

the first time, the top division of the Rutland, as van der Merwe,

Wake and young Franco Marais piled up the runs; the following

season brought titles for all three Saturday sides, plus the T20

trophy. Just one step from the ‘Prem’ now.

But the winter of 2010-11 wasn’t a great one for the club’s

supporters, who learned that van der Merwe wouldn’t be

returning for another English summer, having obtained a teaching

post in Paarl. That removed potentially a large chunk of the

team’s runs and wickets, as well as an invaluable right-hand man

for skipper Wake and a marvellous coach and role model for the

young cricketers at Milton Road. Another South African, teenager

Leon le Roux, took over from van der Merwe for the Division One

campaign, and was ‘welcomed’ to the NCL with a golden duck

against old (if not recent) rivals Wellingborough Town at Redwell

Road as Karl Tapp claimed 10-33 for the home side, then a

league record. Le Roux had his revenge, though, in a sometimes

fractious return fixture at Oundle. Chasing 220, the hosts were

apparently out of the reckoning at 120-6 when David Foster

joined le Roux. With the former (who scored his own maiden

century at Earls Barton later that year before attracting interest

from Durham and then pursuing a coaching career in Yorkshire)

lending excellent support, the latter made a hugely-impressive

127 not out from 135 balls – concentrating on keeping his wicket

intact for nearly 40 overs before launching a savage assault at the

end to see his side home with seven balls to spare; a masterly

combination of caution and power. He notched 1,219 NCL runs

and earned the Clive Cross Trophy as the division’s cricketer of

the year.

Off-spinner Richard Cunningham, a club stalwart who takes his

cricketing pleasures seriously, also starred in 2011 with 43

wickets – while Peter Foster, younger brother of David, removed

54 batsmen for the 2nd XI and Matt Palmer hit the league’s only

double-century of the season for the thirds. The Premier Division

dream, though, was still just that going into 2012, and a points

deduction following the opening-day win at Kettering – thanks to

the kind of pettifogging bureaucracy that can give English

recreational cricket a bad name – made the OTCC faithful wonder

if it was going to be ‘one of those years.’ But the frustration soon

evaporated as Petrus Jeftha – the latest recruit from Boland –

ripped through sides to finish with 65 wickets at around seven

runs apiece, and victory over Wellingborough Indians on the last

afternoon on the campaign prompted celebrations….including a

noisy phone call to Genis, who was taking a year off from his

long-haul commuting between the Cape and Northamptonshire.

Seven-and-a-bit years after joining the NCL, Oundle Town had

secured a seat at the top table. To make it an even better

summer, they saw off Brixworth in a rain-affected final at

Northampton to win the T20 for a second time.

To say the maiden Premier Division campaign in 2013 didn’t go

entirely according to plan would be an understatement. After a

narrow defeat at Finedon, the second match - against Horton

House at Milton Road on May 4 - was won by five wickets,

proving it could be done:

Horton House

T. Leonard b Hussain 28

S. Jarvis b Hussain 24

A. Shah b Hussain 9

E. Ruff b Jeftha 1

A. Morrison b Ramsden 59

J. Green run out 0

A. Neate c Ramsden b Cunningham 2

W. Knibbs lbw b Ramsden 28

S. Jhala c Ramsden b Cunningham 5

S. Finch b Cunningham 2

D. Shah not out 0

Extras: 14 Total: 172 all out

Jeftha 13-3-52-1, Hussain 16-1-49-3, Cunningham 15.3-0-43-

3, Ramsden 8-1-24-2.

Oundle Town

A. Martin st Morrison b Jhala 35

H. Ramsden b Finch 10

C. Wake b Green 48

M. Hodgson run out 4

P. Jeftha b Finch 44

P. Adams not out 13

J. Robinson not out 13

Extras: 6 Total: 173-5

J. Bolsover, B. Hussain, R. Cunningham and D. Oldham did not

bat.

Finch 11.5-0-45-2, Green 12-2-44-1, Jhala 7-1-45-1, Neate 8-

0-33-0.

Both county town clubs – Old Northamptonians and Northampton

Saints – were also beaten, and a total of nine victories secured a

creditable eighth spot in the table. On the downside, a ‘beamer’

incident led to Jeftha being banned for the second half of the

season. Had he been available right through to September, the

final placing must surely have been higher. A severe biffing at

the hands of Peterborough – or, more specifically, their

buccaneering opener Asim Butt – meant defeat in the T20 final

and a ‘diminuendo’ feel to the closing weeks. There was good

news for the thirsty, though, with the opening of The Badger Bar

in the pavilion, manned by mine host Pip Weatherington and

selling ale from the Nene Valley Brewery in the town; the shades

of Smith, McKee, Beardsley and Henry Richards doubtless

approved. And in the Saturday thirds, Callum Greaves added his

name to Oundle’s other double-centurions with 203 not out off

118 balls against Abington, while David ‘Slappy’ Ryan’s haul of 47

wickets equalled the divisional record.

Returning in 2014 (with Phil Adams replacing Wake, now teaching

at Sherborne School in Dorset, as captain), Jeftha completed his

suspension and was back on parade in May as OTCC – with Guy

Bolsover installed as the new chairman - looked to improve on

their showing in 2013. They did just that, winning 13 matches to

finish fourth behind Peterborough, Rushton and Rushden - and

were deprived of a chance to beat and overtake the men from

Short Stocks on the final Saturday of the season when their pitch

was deemed too wet for play. No other match in any division was

called off. Conspiracy theorists at Milton Road had a field day,

and if nothing else it denied long-time scorer Kim Weatherington

a suitable send-off before her sabbatical from the coloured pens.

The present author agreed to keep the seat warm for her for a

year or two.

But that last-day disappointment couldn’t detract from an

outstanding collective team performance, led by the new-ball pair

of Jeftha and Bashrat Hussain who shared 89 ‘Prem’ wickets.

Hussain, formerly with Peterborough, brought the bowling skill of

a true craftsman and a keen cricket brain to the OTCC mix – one

of the few players to have Mike Brearley’s magnum opus ‘The Art

of Captaincy’ as his pavilion reading of choice. Youngsters Marc

Bell, Ben Groom and Ben Graves all made the mark in the top

division, and the efforts of left-arm spinner Graves – including a

‘five-for’ at Wollaston and a last-ball wicket to defeat Brixworth

in a thrilling finale that had the red-bench-sitters on their feet –

brought the story full-circle.

Appointed captain of the School in his Lower Sixth year – and thus

joining the illustrious company of other ‘two-year’ skippers

including Sutthery, Richard and Marcus Beresford, Mike Mills,

Murley and Phythian – Graves took (figuratively at least) the same

two-minute walk from Reade’s ‘Thirty Acre’ to old Mrs Curtis’s

back garden that so many had taken before. The Main and Milton

Road – the gentle hotbed was continuing to do its work.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will…’

(William Shakespeare – ‘Hamlet’)

‘You can’t have big stuff all the time. You must have some little

stuff in between.’

(‘Monsewer’ Eddie Gray)

Ben Graves was again the cricketing thread that bound together

School and Town in 2015. He scored an unbeaten century against

the Rovers to ‘christen’ the new J.M. Mills Pavilion on a

memorable Sunday in May – the opening ceremony performed by

Tom Harrison with members of the Mills family, and many of the

donors who had made the new facility possible, in attendance.

He signed off for the School with a superb 148 off 139 balls

under cloudless skies at Kimbolton, also taking hundreds off

Stowe and Uppingham en route to 894 runs with an average

pushing 70, plus 40 wickets at 15.30. ‘One of the best all-

rounders the school has produced, he led from the front, both on

and off the field,’ noted Wisden. No wonder his was the first

name on the Assassins’ board.

Curiously, though, the most remarkable performance of the

season barely featured him at all. The match at Loughborough

Grammar School looked certain to be rained off; only ten overs

were bowled, Oundle batting first having won the toss, before the

weather intervened. But they were able to get back on later, the

game reduced to 40 overs a side, and the opening pair of Tristan

Tusa and Simon Fernandes (Graves had been delayed on a train

from London and so wasn’t available to go in first) proceeded to

take the LGS attack apart. They posted a 311-run partnership

with Tusa smashing 203 off 136 balls, featuring 17 sixes and 15

fours – only the fourth double-century in the School’s history and

the first since Philip Mair plundered Lord Lilford’s XI in 1923.

Fernandes contributed 102 and Oundle went on to win, following

another rain interruption, by 102 runs.

Oundle School

S Fernandes b Chopra 102

T Tusa c Truss b Chopra 203

B Graves c Carmichael b Chopra 14

J Fischer not out 0

C Fletcher not out 1

Extras 24 Total: 344-3 (40 overs)

B Curry, F Johnsrud, T Lambton, H Lawes, H McLay and T Warner

did not bat.

Sheard 8-0-55-0, Royle 5-0-32-0, Lodhia 6-0-38-0, Carmichael

6-0-51-0, Chopra 7-0-62-3, Truss 6-0-63-0, Mike 1-0-22-0,

Nathwani 1-0-19-0

The efforts of Graves, Tusa and Fernandes made it a memorable

final season in charge for John Wake. His retirement was marked

by a host of official, semi-official and downright informal

occasions – the pick of which, perhaps, coincided with the annual

fixture against MCC. Many of his old charges came back to play

for the Premier club, including his son Cameron, and the lunch

interval was extended considerably beyond its usual length by an

emotional speech or two. There were more warm words at the

end of a closely-fought match, with headmaster Charles Bush

(also retiring from the School) and Ben Graves both hitting

precisely the right note. The outgoing Master-in-Charge was

presented with copies of Wisden’s Almanack covering his years at

the School and dry eyes were unsurprisingly conspicuous by their

absence. The former Cambridge University, Lancashire,

Hampshire and England batsman John Crawley – with over 24,000

first-class runs and 37 Test appearances to his credit – made the

short move from Oakham to replace Mr Wake, who agreed to

continue working with the School’s young cricketers in a part-

time coaching role.

The shortest form of the game suited OTCC down to the ground

in 2015. They successfully defended their Rutland League T20

title on finals day at Peterborough, and began an ultimately

successful campaign in the NCL’s Hevey Twenty Cup with a

staggering batting display against nine-man Weekley and

Warkton at Milton Road. Callum Greaves (97), Petrus Jeftha (69

not out) and big-hitting newcomer Zeeshan Manzoor (68)

boosted Oundle to 296-4 in their 20 overs, easily a competition

record. They won the match by 196 runs and then powered past

Raunds and Rothwell to book what should have been another

enjoyable day out at the County Ground in Northampton. Sadly,

rain prevented any cricket and the semi-finals and finals had to

be re-scheduled. In the semis, another destructive partnership

between Greaves and Jeftha – and four wickets for Colin ‘Sugar’

Ray – sank East Haddon, and Finedon Dolben provided the

opposition in an evening final at Overstone Park CC. The weather

relented just in time and Finedon’s 130-7 was chased down by

Oundle in the final over with six wickets in hand, Mark Hodgson

named Man-of-the-Match for his decisive knock of 55. Phil

Adams lifted the trophy in the gathering gloom – and the club

faithful could celebrate a third triumph in this competition in the

space of six years.

Ironically, the regional round of the national T20 tournament took

place at Finedon – and, despite the result of the county final,

officials at Avenue Road did a superb job of organising the day

and making Oundle’s players and supporters feel very welcome.

Adams’ big-hitting pulled off an unlikely win over Loughborough

Town before the side just ran out of steam against highly-fancied

Bury St Edmunds. But there was consolation for Oundle in the

spin bowling of young Jack Bolsover – son of the chairman – who

harvested 15 wickets in the last five rounds and impressed many

good judges with his flight, control and steely nerve.

With Manzoor and the consistent Alex Martin sharing over 1,300

Premier Division runs, seventh place in the table was a solid

enough return. But 2016 brought a halt – just a temporary one,

everyone at Milton Road will be hoping – to the club’s long run of

success in the NCL. Bashrat Hussain, the new skipper, found

himself having to contend with poor availability and (with Martin

and Manzoor, the two batting stars of 2015, both playing

elsewhere) a weakened squad. Graves showed admirable

commitment by travelling up from London for roughly half the

league games, and was comfortably the side’s leading run-scorer

– including a century against Wellingborough at Milton Road in

the first of two victories over the side eventually relegated. The

second fixture, at Redwell Road in August, was an understandably

nervy affair because defeat might have meant the end of Oundle’s

four-year stay in the top flight. Ben Groom’s 89 boosted his side

to 215 all out, but Wellingborough looked in good shape at 170-

4 until Jonathan Dalley held a crucial skier in the deep off Jack

Bolsover’s bowling. It triggered a collapse and the Badgers

prevailed by 18 runs with an over to spare. Dalley’s catch earned

him the ‘champagne moment’ accolade at the club dinner a few

weeks later. But the thirds as well as the firsts had to scrap hard

to stay up, while Rushden beat Oundle narrowly (reflecting the

two league meetings between the sides, when the margins of

defeat were two wickets and three runs!) in the first round of the

T20. Fortunately, the John Wilcox Cup provided a taste of

something much sweeter as Alex Martin’s cool head prevailed in a

feisty final at Barnack against a Grantham side who appeared to

some of the Oundle faithful to have been watching too much

football on television.

It wasn’t the only contentious match of 2016. The so-called

‘Battle of Bretton’ against Peterborough in May became a talking

point around the NCL; but there was, as the lawyers might say, a

spot of ‘previous.’ As far back as June 1898 a row broke out

when Oundle could only find ten players to face their local rivals,

and one of those pulled up injured early in the match.

Peterborough were dismissed for 86 and Oundle had put 80 on

the board when their eighth – and, it was assumed, last – wicket

fell. But the OTCC captain suddenly produced another cricketer

from somewhere and sent him to the crease, even though he had

taken no part in the match up to that point. That being so, ‘the

Peterborough captain objected to his going in,’ according to the

Stamford Mercury. ‘A heated discussion ensued, but there was no

further play and the visitors claimed the victory by six runs.’ And

no NCL Disciplinary Committee then to weigh the evidence. On a

brighter note, Mark Hodgson (voted in as Saturday captain for

2017) scored his 10,000th run for the club in all cricket during the

final Rutland League fixture of the summer – he and Peter Foster

(in prolific form on Sundays) both passing 1,000 runs for the

season overall.

The departure of Graves left, understandably, a large hole in the

School side but there was a major highlight at the end of the

season when Simon Fernandes – glimpsed previously playing a

supporting role to double-centurion Tusa against LGS the year

before – was named in the MCC Schools squad for their annual

contest against England Schools Cricket Association at Lord’s; a

considerable honour. Simon’s brother Charlie turned out

occasionally for OTCC on Sundays in 2016, while another Oundle

School pupil – James Esler, just 15 – made a highly-promising

debut for the club’s Saturday First XI, smacking a confident 47 off

59 balls against Northampton Saints. The links were cemented

further as John Crawley’s daughter, Ellie, made her mark in

Town’s Under-11s set-up, winning the age-group’s Top Batter

accolade, and appeared in the ground-breaking match between

OTCC’s women and an Oundle School girls side. ‘Start them

young’ remains the motto.

AFTERWORD

‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me…’

(Matthew 25:35)

‘Like Easter, it has no fixed place in the calendar. Sometimes it is

early, always with the possibility of it being a false alarm, and

sometimes it is an unconscionable time a coming; but come it

eventually does.’

(Henry Longhurst – ‘The Day’)

‘We’ll do the best we know;

We’ll build our house and chop our wood,

And make our garden grow.’

(Richard Wilbur/Leonard Bernstein – ‘Candide’)

There are plenty of precedents in literature, art and music for

portraits and impressions of particular places by outsiders, and in

truth that’s what this book is. Admittedly my great-great-great

grandfather John Goodman was born just up the road in the

village of Barnwell in 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo,

subsequently travelling to Northampton to find work in the shoe

trade and raising a family there. And the same arm of the

Goodman clan lived for many years in the village of Thornhaugh,

between Wansford and Stamford, about ten miles from Oundle.

But it’s taken us a while to return.

A few years ago, I found myself drawn increasingly to Oundle, its

cricket and cricketers, its beguiling blend of old and new, fired by

the infectious enthusiasm of the Wakes and Merwe Genis, old and

valued friends, and fuelled by any number of magnificent Coffee

Tavern breakfasts. Now my son plays youth cricket for OTCC,

proud to wear the cap recalling the founding fathers of 1826,

while the old wall at the north end of the Milton Road can act

simultaneously as wind-break and heat-reflector – a happy

combination for any spectator in an English summer – with the

masonry bees buzzing around and the occasional ‘Chad’ viewing

the action from the road.

From a journalist’s perspective it’s extraordinary to consider the

town’s links with the game at its highest levels – whether it’s

Oundelians Adam Chadwick tending the treasures as MCC’s Head

of Collections and Tom Harrison running the national governing

body, OTCC’s Alex Martin holding five catches at Headquarters in

the match between MCC (captained by Brian Lara) and

Hertfordshire in 2014 to mark the bicentenary of the present

Lord’s ground, Sir Michael Pickard (one of the original ‘Assassins’

and distinguished former Chairman of Governors at the School)

serving as President of Surrey CCC across the river, John Wake

managing England age-group squads or his successor John

Crawley bringing Test match experience to the task of developing

the School’s young cricketers.

And the town’s cricketing connections were strengthened further

in 2012 by the official launch (by Graeme Swann) of the Oundle

MCC Foundation Hub, establishing another valuable connection

with Lord’s and offering top-class coaching to a selected group of

young cricketers from state schools in the area.

The Oundle-born Royalist poet and playwright Peter Hausted

penned these lines in around 1632:

Have you a desire to see

The glorious Heaven’s epitome?

Or an abstract of the spring?

Adonis’ garden? Or a thing

Fuller of wonder? Nature’s shop displayed,

Hung with the choices pieces she has made?

Here behold it open laid.

I don’t believe the composer Ebenezer Prout, also born in Oundle

– and of whom it was said that he ‘heard pealing voices and

sounding glories in a generation (he lived from 1835 to 1909)

whose ears were tone-deaf to them’ – ever got around to setting

those words to music, which is a pity. It might have provided a

suitably stirring anthem for the town. Hausted may or may not

have had in mind the green fields upon which OTCC and the

School currently play cricket, but nearly four centuries later the

‘desire’ is still there in a big way; a remarkable symbiotic

relationship.

John Wake’s fellow Ashingtonian Sid Waddell once spoke

movingly of a ‘Darts Valhalla’ where it’s possible to sit in the

clouds sipping mead and watching the great ghosts play. The

eternal rightness of things suggests something similar for Oundle

cricket. Take a look around and see Don Tagg and Mike Mills

trying to out-spin each other; Bertie Grace still doing his

damnedest to impress Dad; Lord Lilford tossing himself a few

catches and dispensing celestial rosy red apples to outstanding

performers; Henry Richards, Wilfrid Timms and Godfrey Pumfrey

batting in the nets with Jack Buswell, Christopher Gimson and

Richard Winch slinging them down, as Bill Montgomery and Allan

Watkins offer a few tips at the back of the net; Jimmy Lowe

posting notices to ensure everyone is where they should be at the

appointed hour, in between discussing education matters with

Henry St John Reade; ‘Whippet’ Burnham, Mike Amps and ‘Riddler’

Davies keeping an eye on proceedings from the pavilion balcony;

Viv Weatherington cutting the heavenly cucumber sandwiches;

Mark Canner, Dennis Clark and Edgar Edis checking that the

scorebook adds up; and Arthur Marshall jotting down a few notes

for his next article. It was, is and hopefully always will be a

wonderful tradition to be part of.

Andrew Radd

February 2017.