The Hampdenshire Wonder. J. D. Beresford
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supplied by a brilliant imagination. Ten years ago Ginger Stott was on a pinnacle, there was a Stott vogue. You found his name at the bottom of signed articles written by members of the editorial staff; you bought Stott collars, although Stott himself did not wear collars; there was a Stott waltz which is occasionally hummed by clerks, and whistled by errand-boys to this day; there was a periodical which lived for ten months, entitled Ginger Stott’s Weekly; in brief, during one summer there was a Stott apotheosis.
But that was ten years ago, and the rising generation has almost forgotten the once well-known name. One rarely sees him mentioned in the morning paper now, and then it is but the briefest reference; some such note as this “Pickering was at the top of his form, recalling the finest achievements of Ginger Stott at his best,” or “Flack is a magnificent find for Kent: he promises to completely surpass the historic feats of Ginger Stott.” These journalistic superlatives only irritate those who remember the performances referred to. We who watched the man’s career know that Pickering and Flack are but tyros compared to Stott; we know that none of his successors has challenged comparison with him. He was a meteor that blazed across the sky, and if he ever has a true successor, such stars as Pickering and Flack will shine pale and dim in comparison.
It makes one feel suddenly old to recall that great matinée at the Lyceum, given for Ginger Stott’s benefit after he met with his accident. In ten years so many great figures in that world have died or fallen into obscurity. I can count on my fingers the number of those who were then, and are still, in the forefront of popularity. Of the others poor Captain Wallis, for instance, is dead—and no modern writer, in my opinion, can equal the brilliant descriptiveness of Wallis’s articles in the Daily Post. Bobby Maisefield, again, Stott’s colleague, is a martyr to rheumatism, and keeps a shop in Ailesworth, the scene of so many of his triumphs. What a list one might make, but how uselessly. It is enough to note how many names have dropped out, how many others are the names of those we now speak of as veterans. In ten years! It certainly makes one feel old.
II
No apology is needed for telling again the story of Stott’s career. Certain details will still be familiar, it is true, the historic details that can never be forgotten while cricket holds place as our national game. But there are many facts of Stott’s life familiar to me, which have never been made public property. If I must repeat that which is known, I can give the known a new setting; perhaps a new value.
He came of mixed races. His mother was pure Welsh, his father a Yorkshire collier; but when Ginger was nine years old his father died, and Mrs. Stott came to live in Ailesworth where she had immigrant relations, and it was there that she set up the little paper-shop, the business by which she maintained herself and her boy. That shop is still in existence, and the name has not been altered. You may find it in the little street that runs off the market place, going down towards the Borstal Institution.
There are many people alive in Ailesworth today who can remember the sturdy, freckled, sandy-haired boy who used to go round with the morning and evening papers; the boy who was to change the fortunes of a county.
Ginger was phenomenally thorough in all he undertook. It was one of the secrets of his success. It was this thoroughness that kept him engaged in his mother’s little business until he was seventeen. Up to that age he never found time for cricket—he certainly had remarkable and very unusual qualities.
It was sheer chance, apparently, that determined his choice of a career.
He had walked into Stoke-Underhill to deliver a parcel, and on his way back his attention was arrested by the sight of a line of vehicles drawn up to the boarded fencing that encloses the Ailesworth County Ground. The occupants of these vehicles were standing up, struggling to catch a sight of the match that was being played behind the screen erected to shut out non-paying sightseers. Among the horses’ feet, squirming between the spokes of wheels, utterly regardless of all injury, small boys glued their eyes to knot-holes in the fence, while others climbed surreptitiously, and for the most part unobserved, on to the backs of tradesmen’s carts. All these individuals were in a state of tremendous excitement, and even the policeman whose duty it was to move them on, was so engrossed in watching the game that he had disappeared inside the turnstile, and had given the outside spectators full opportunity for eleemosynary enjoyment.
That tarred fence has since been raised some six feet, and now encloses a wider sweep of ground—alterations that may be classed among the minor revolutions effected by the genius of that thick-set, fair-haired youth of seventeen, who paused on that early September afternoon to wonder what all the fuss was about. The Ailesworth County Ground was not famous in those days; not then was accommodation needed for thirty thousand spectators, drawn from every county in England to witness the unparalleled.
Ginger stopped. The interest of the spectacle pierced his absorption in the business he had in hand. Such a thing was almost unprecedented.
“What’s up?” he asked of Puggy Phillips.
Puggy Phillips—hazarding his life by standing on the shiny, slightly curved top of his butcher’s cart—made no appropriate answer. “Yah—ah—AH!” he screamed in ecstasy. “Oh! played! Pla-a-a-ayed!!”
Ginger wasted no more breath, but laid hold of the little brass rail that encircled Puggy’s platform, and with a sudden hoist that lifted the shafts and startled the pony, raised himself to the level of a spectator.
“ ’Ere!” shouted the swaying, tottering Puggy, “What the … are yer rup to?”
The well-drilled pony, however, settled down again quietly to maintain his end of the see-saw, and, finding himself still able to preserve his equilibrium, Puggy instantly forgot the presence of the intruder.
“What’s up?” asked Ginger again.
“Oh! Well ’it, WELL ’IT!” yelled Puggy. “Oh! Gow on, gow on agen! Run it aht. Run it AH-T.”
Ginger gave it up, and turned his attention to the match.
It was not any famous struggle that was being fought out on the old Ailesworth Ground; it was only second-class cricket, the deciding match of the Minor Counties championship. Hampdenshire and Oxfordshire, old rivals, had been neck-and-neck all through the season, and, as luck would have it, the engagement between them had been the last fixture on the card.
When Ginger rose to the level of spectator, the match was anybody’s game. Bobby Maisefield was batting. He was then a promising young colt who had not earned a fixed place in the Eleven. Ginger knew him socially, but they were not friends, they had no interests in common. Bobby had made twenty-seven. He was partnered by old Trigson, the bowler, (he has been dead these eight years,) whose characteristic score of “Not out … O,” is sufficiently representative of his methods.
It was the fourth innings, and Hampdenshire with only one more wicket to fall, still required nineteen runs to win. Trigson could be relied upon to keep his wicket up, but not to score. The hopes of Ailesworth centred in the ability of that almost untried colt Bobby Maisefield—and he seemed likely to justify the trust reposed in him. A beautiful late cut that eluded third man and hit the fence with a resounding bang, nearly drove Puggy wild with delight.
“Only fifteen more,” he shouted. “Oh! Played; pla-a-a-yed!”
But as the score crept up, the tensity grew. As each ball was delivered, a chill, rigid silence held the onlookers in its grip. When Trigson, with the field collected round him, almost to be covered with a sheet, stonewalled the most tempting lob, the click of the ball on his bat was an intrusion on the stillness. And always it was followed by a deep breath of relief that sighed round the ring like a faint wind through a plantation of larches. When Bobby scored, the tumult broke out like a crash of thunder; but it subsided again, echoless, to that intense silence so soon as the ball was “dead.”
Curiously, it was not Bobby who made the winning hit but Trigson.