Almighty Cricket

GH on the game and God

The latest edition of The Cricketer carries an interview with Rev Andrew Wingfield Digby, who for decade from 1985 was chaplain to the England cricket team. He tells a story of the 1992 World Cup, of that crucial game where England bowled Pakistan out for 74, but were prevented from chasing the target down by rain. ‘You’re useless you are,’ complained Ian Botham. ‘It’s raining and it’s your fault…It’s not surprising there’s a worldwide movement in favour of the Islamic faith.’

A joke, of course, but a secular age will give rise to a fairly transactional notion of divinity - we tend to think of cricket as having gods, sometime interventionist, rather than a God. But, of course, it was not always so. Just as cricket in India is commonly described as a ‘religion’ with Tendulkar its deity, so the prolific social historian Eric Midwinter believed it exerted a similar thrall in the nineteenth century. Eric died last August aged ninety-three having completed the ms for Christianity at the Crease, and by its publication achieves a temporary print resurrection. He saw his task as ‘unravelling the skein of two religions entwined’, cricket being ‘a cult as much as a game’. One need not go all the way with him to enjoy this lively monograph of 168 pages in which all Eric’s trademark even-handedness and erudition is on show, even if the exploration seems preliminary rather than definitive.

Eric’s argument is that Anglicanism was fundamental to cricket’s Victorian renewal after the gambling and corruption of the Hanoverian nobility had pushed the game nearly to extinction. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, says Midwinter, England went from being ‘a restlessly violent and chaotic society to one presenting as calm and polite if somewhat earnest and censorious.’ When the clergy found in cricket a game with the potential for moral education - outdoor, non-contact, rules-based, even eventually white-clad - they made it central to the church communities and public schools they were establishing. Together, Anglicanism and cricket formed part of the ‘jigsaw of Englishry’, fusing inseparably in the doctrines of ‘muscular Christianity’. ‘The game conduces not merely to physical but moral health,’ opined the Christian socialist Rev Charles Kingsley, ‘that in the playing field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance but, better still, temper self-restraint, fairness, honour…and that “give and take” of life which stand a man in good stead when he goes forth into the world and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and partial.’ It is so good a quotation that Eric drops it in twice.

Eric has some telling statistics too. One in three Oxbridge cricket blues in the Victorian era took holy orders, and he counted 147 men with the honorific reverend in The Who’s Who of Cricketers (1984) - Wingfield-Digby is the last. For more on this, by the way, I recommend two delightful volumes by Christopher Grey: The Willow and the Cloth (1999), a compendium of eighteenth century cricketing clergymen, and Parsons At Play (2013), which profiles sixty-five of that ilk, from Rev Edward Tyrwhitt Drake, ‘the Sporting Parson’ who under an alias swung a heavy bat for Middlesex and rode in the Grand National, to Rev Joseph McCormick, who played against the 1878 Australians and was a noted rower, boxer and alpinist - a volunteer in the party that recovered the bodies from Lord Francis Douglas’s doomed Matterhorn expedition.