“Ranji” laid the foundation of his cricket career in India, but he perfected himself in England. It was at Rajkumar College at Kathiawar that he learned the rudiments of the game, but it was on Parker’s Piece at Cambridge that he acquired the different strokes, unerring judgment and faultless style which have made him famous.
WG Grace – Cricketing Reminiscences & Personal Recollections – The Hambledon Press, 1980 (first published 1899) Cambridge has many strangely named greens. Some, like Midsummer Common, hint at the city’s historical depths; others, such as Jesus Green, Paradise, and the exquisitely named Christ’s Pieces, suggest an ancient collegial-ecclesiastic world that could only survive in a university city such as Cambridge. However, Parker’s Piece, which was traded by Trinity College in 1613 for Garret Hostel Green, a small island on the Backs which now hosts the magnificent Wren Library, is the most famous. It was named after Edward Parker, the tenant who had previously farmed the land. He was a cook who also did some farming on the side and is now immortalised only in the name of the piece of land he lost.
Parker’s Piece soon became a significant site for local and national celebrations. In 1838, for example, the city celebrated Queen Victoria’s coronation with an enormous banquet of 1,608 plum puddings, 1,029 joints of meat, 99 barrels of best ale, and 4,500 loaves of bread. 17,000 Cambridge citizens ate the meal but, more strikingly, another 15,000 watched. Surely there must have been better ways of spending one’s time, even in 1838?
But the reason Parker’s Piece really matters is because of the sports that were, and continue to be, played on its broad green expanse. Football, in its modern form, can be traced back to the green, for it was “here on Parker’s Piece in the 1800s,” a small plaque attached to a Silver Lime tree in the corner of the green announces, that “students established a common set of simple football rules emphasising skill above force, which forbade catching the ball and ‘hacking.’ These ‘Cambridge Rules’ became the defining influence on the 1863 Football Association rules.”
Parker’s Piece may have a rich footballing heritage, but its cricketing past is even more significant. Before Fenner’s opened in 1846, virtually all Cambridge’s cricket was played on Parker’s Piece. More than a contemporary cricket ground, it resembled an Indian maidan with several matches taking place at any one time on different parts of the common. Games often merged into each another as boundaries were obscured or ignored altogether. It was not uncommon for batters to run eight or nine runs in those early matches.
Because cricket as an organised sport was often associated with the universities, it is no surprise that Cambridge produced a number of world-class cricketers in the nineteenth century. Some, like CT Studd, who played in the Test match which led to the creation of the Ashes and who later became a missionary to China, were products of the public schools and the University, while others, like Jack Hobbs and Tom Hayward, grew up in the town.
Born into an ordinary family in nearby Brewhouse Lane, Sir Jack Hobbs played for Cambridgeshire, Surrey and England and was the first professional sportsman to be knighted. This humble, gentle man, whose father was a slater’s labourer before he got a job at Fenner’s, scored a phenomenal 61,237 runs and 197 centuries in first-class cricket and also played 61 Test matches for his country, the last at the age of 47. But his cricketing career started on Parker’s Piece.
As John Arlott explains: “At 13, he left school to work as a college servant for seven-and-sixpence a week. There was compensation in slow progress towards the career which he felt called him; and, in his enthusiasm, he used to get up at six in the morning and walk to Parker’s Piece for a practice session.” Spotted first by Surrey, he was soon picked by England and then became one of the greatest batters the world has ever seen: “Others scored faster; hit the ball harder; more obviously murdered bowling. No-one else, though, ever batted with more consummate skill than his, which was based essentially on an infallible sympathy with the bowled ball. Although he could improvise with quite impish virtuosity, it is no exaggeration to say that frequently – even generally – the spectator felt that the stroke he played seemed so natural as to be inevitable – or as if a choreographer had designed it as the rhythmically and poetically logical consequence of the bowler’s delivery.”
Tom Hayward, though now largely forgotten, was another product of Parker’s Piece and one of the most remarkable cricketers of his time. It was Tom Hayward who discovered the young Jack Hobbs and secured a trial for him at Surrey after an intensive net on Parker’s Piece (which was run in those days by Hayward’s father) during which Tom Hayward himself and Bill Reeves of Essex failed to get the young Hobbs out.
In Cambridge today the Haywards are chiefly commemorated in The Cricketers Pub, which is tucked away behind Parkside Community College, a few yards from Parker’s Piece. A notice on the wall of the pub proudly, but erroneously, announces that “members of the famous Hayward cricketing family, three of whom played for England, were the pub landlords.” In fact, only one of them played for England but I’m sure they were great landlords. And as Tom, the Hayward who did play for England, was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, batter of his time, it seemed only right that I should pay a visit to The Cricketers and honour his memory with a drink.
I took my pint into the Hayward Room and scanned the pictures and articles on the walls. There was an extract from the (Cambridge) Graphic of 21 April 1900, which explained that, “like many others who have become famous on the cricket field, Thomas Hayward learned all his cricket on Parker’s Piece, where he showed such exceptional form for a youngster that good judges declared that, given the opportunity, he would make a name in the cricket world.”
There was also a photograph of the English cricket team that had faced Australia in 1899, a team which contained three of the greatest sportsmen of the late Victorian era: Tom Hayward (who was sporting a magnificent moustache); CB Fry (the footballer, cricketer, and world champion long jumper who was later in life to be offered the throne of Albania); and Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji.
Ranjitsinhji is one of my favourite cricketers. He invented the leg glance (by having his right leg pinned to the ground while netting on Parker’s Piece) and he was the first player to score 3,000 runs in a season. In 1897 he hit what was then the highest English Test score of 175, and in the 1899–1900 season he scored five double centuries. His career average of 56.37 was the highest for a batter based in England until Geoffrey Boycott retired in 1986 with an average of 56.84.
However, Boycott didn’t play his last first-class matches with only one eye as Ranjitsinhji did, after a horrendous shooting accident in 1915.
Born in Sarodar in 1872, Ranjitsinhji learned his cricket at Rajkumar College, a school in which many of the local elite were educated. As a pupil of such a prestigious college he was also, whether he liked it or not (and he soon came to like it very much indeed) part of Britain’s grand, imperial project. The British had already exported their anti-intellectual, sports-based ideal to other parts of their Empire but nowhere was this more evident than in India. And in India nowhere was the ideal more evident than in the country’s Anglo-Indian schools, schools which had been set up by the government specifically to “fit the young chiefs and nobles of India physically, morally and intellectually for the responsibilities that lay before them.”
“For the British in India as in England,” as Satadru Sen puts it in his magisterial study of Ranjitsinhji in his imperial context, “sport – especially cricket – was heavily loaded with Victorian ideals of class, moral behaviour and national identity.” Or as CE Tyndale-Blescoe, the principal of the Church Missionary Society’s school in Srinigar, put it: getting his students to take up cricket, football, boxing, swimming and boating was a way of “putting backbone into jellyfish”.
When Pascal Khoo Thwe came to Cambridge from Myanamar a century later he could not at first understand why he was having so many nightmares and why he was feeling depressed. “I began to get to the root of my problem,” he wrote, “when I realised that I could not understand the Western enthusiasm for physical exercise… Traditionally, my people engage in physical exertion only out of necessity – ploughing, sowing, cutting the jungle. They never do it for health alone. I would have been perfectly happy doing nothing. The cult of exercise and athletics struck me as an extension of the competitiveness that I found all around me. It seemed that in the West – and especially in a super-competitive place like Cambridge – you had constantly to be making and remaking yourself; you could not simply be. Individualism was forced upon you.”
Ranjitsinhji understood this perfectly. As a citizen of Empire, he knew that by mastering the English game of cricket he had as much chance as he ever would have of being accepted, not as an Englishman, but as an equal in the British Empire. In a speech in 1893 he said: “I do not consider myself a foreigner in Cambridge. I don’t think Indians are foreigners in England; that distinction has passed away long, long ago and I think that in time to come we shall look upon each other as absolutely the same subjects under Her Majesty the Queen.”
The Cambridge Weekly News was less sure: “Englishmen can appreciate and admire the qualities that have won for Mr Ranjitsinhji his Blue,” it opined, but “although it is too much to expect that he is typical of his race it proves they have qualities dormant but which only need stimulating.”
So when Ranjitsinhji came to England in 1888, it was no great surprise that he chose to play cricket on Parker’s Piece, “perhaps the best cricket-ground in the kingdom,” as the admittedly biased Pictorial Guide to Cambridge called it in 1847; nor was it any great surprise that his talents were ignored at first by the English cricketing authorities. There is a famous story told by Stanley Jackson, the University captain who admitted to not having “a sympathetic interest for Indians” but who went on to play for his country in the same team as Ranjitsinhji: “one day in 1892 on my way up to Fenner’s,” he recalled, “I noticed a match in progress on Parker’s Piece, and seeing a rather unusually large crowd of spectators I stopped to watch. As luck would have it Ranji was at the wicket. After a short exhibition of brilliant and certainly unorthodox strokes I thought Ranji was stumped, but much to the satisfaction of the crowd, the umpire decided in his favour. I left the scene not particularly impressed.”
Whatever Jackson thought, Ranjitsinhji’s phenomenal achievements in amateur cricket, played largely on Parker’s Piece, meant that he eventually won the place he rightly deserved on the University team. From there he progressed to Sussex where, in due course, he became county captain before seeing his progress stall again. By 1896 he was clearly the best batter in the country, “a ‘black man’,” as Lord Salisbury put it, “playing cricket for all the world as if he were a white man”, and yet the selectors still would not pick him to play for the England team.
Incorporated into the Empire, Indians were not supposed to usurp their masters; jellyfish could develop backbone but they could not be allowed to evolve into England batters. Fortunately for Ranjitsinhji and for England, it was the counties who had the final say in the selection process and so, despite having been passed over for the first Test at Lord’s, Ranjitsinhji was picked for the second against the Australians at Old Trafford. He had a triumphant debut, scoring 62 and 154 not out, though it wasn’t quite enough to prevent an Australian victory.
Jack Hobbs, Tom Hayward, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji: for each of these world-class cricketers, Parker’s Piece was of pivotal importance at the start of their careers. But the Piece has also shaped the views of many other cricket lovers.
In his hauntingly sad introduction to GH Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology, CP Snow writes of his friendship with the great scholar, a friendship which began because of cricket. Hardy was obsessed by the sport – he once wrote that his main ambition, after solving the Riemann hypothesis, was to score 211 not out in the fourth innings of the last Test match at the Oval – despite having blinded his own sister with a cricket bat as a child.
In the most moving of all the passages in his bitter-sweet celebratory essay, Snow encapsulated the horror of Hardy’s last days with an image he had already made great use of in The Light and the Dark, a novel in which the long walk home across Parker’s Piece, to a lesser extent, and cricket, to a greater, are symbols of order and continuity in a slowly disintegrating world. Acutely aware of his failing mathematical power and poor health, and depressed by the death of Ramanujan, the Indian mathematical genius whom he had brought to Cambridge, Hardy lived out his last years in deep unhappiness: “I visited him several times in 1946,” Snow wrote. “His depression had not lifted, he was physically failing, short of breath after a few yards walk. The long cheerful stroll across Parker’s Piece, after the close of play, was gone for ever.”
There is a great deal more that could be said about Parker’s Piece – its connection with Charles Darwin; its place in literature; the day it was used as an emergency landing strip by a small plane – but it is this image of Hardy strolling across it at the close of the day’s play that I find most moving. Is its cricketing day done, I wonder, or is it, even now, nurturing future cricketing greats? Shadows lengthen; the groundsman returns to Hobbs Pavilion; only time will tell.
