An Electric Sparkle

GH on an amazing discovery...and a terrific book

Tomorrow marks the 110th anniversary of the death of Victor Trumper, Australian batting’s pre-eminent pre-Bradman reputation, and arguably, still, our most uniformly loved cricketer of any age. No cricketer, however great, is without their critics. Yet Trumper’s status as a batter and his reputation as a sportsman appear to have remained unsullied in his lifetime, and their only enemy now is the relentless passage of time - checked somewhat by the existence of the game’s most famous and resonant photograph.

Here, however, is a photograph almost as remarkable, that has only just come to light.

It features in a brilliant new book by my friends Peter Schofield and Ric Sissons (disclaimer: I’ve written the foreword).

Substack, alas, cannot do the image justice - maybe if you try to widen it (?), I don’t know. Anyway, what I can tell you is that on the double spread of pages 220 and 221 of Trumper Across the Tasman, it looks amazing, especially when a look at the scoreboard reveals its provenance.

The snap was taken by an unknown photographer from the top of the old members’ stand at Lancaster Park on 28 February 1914 during a match between hosts Canterbury and the unofficial Australian team led by Arthur Sims, amid what remains the first-class record partnership for the eighth wicket: 433, between Sims, who finished on 184 not out, and Trumper, who made 293. It is the second-oldest wicket partnership record of all; it must be the fastest, for it took just 190 minutes. Schofield and Sissons quote the panting prose of the Press:

Those who went to Lancaster Park on Saturday got the cricket feast of a lifetime. There were probably very few in that big crowd that had ever seen anything like it, and doubtless the great majority will never see its equal again. There is only one Trumper in the world, and after watching him - for over three hours - execute his magic-like strokes all around the wicket, one could subscribe enthusstiastically to the sentiment conveyed in his being styled ‘the incomparable Victor’. Talk about the champagne of cricket! It was all that, with an electric sparkle running through it all the way. One might enthuse over it to the extent of columns, and yet not be guilty of exaggeration.

This privately-organised tour was Trumper’s last efflorescence. He was in his mid-thirties, an ailing man who had played his final innings in Australia, and who would die the following year. The team was sure enough of itself to regularly hold him back to bat for the Saturday crowd, which explains him batting as low as number nine here, and his captain’s determination to hang around. In the Trumper legend, the innings has a special place: it inspired, shortly after the great man’s centenary, that most delectable of collectibles, Great Knock (1978), which reprinted the Christchurch Sun match reports with a futuristic map of the innings’s boundaries.

Only three sixes, you’ll notice, but forty-four fours, starting at 2.23pm with the score seven for 209 and finishing at 5.46pm with the score eight for 642. That was pretty much what we had but, suddenly, thanks to this photograph with its amazing platinotype clarity, we can feel like eyewitnesses.

In Whitman’s words, ‘much unseen is also here.’ Trumper is about to pass Sims, to whom he’d given an hour’s head start. There’s a sense of the hopelessness of the bowling task and the weariness of the fielding effort. Look at those exhausted stoops - umpire and slip seem simply to be watching.

Trumper’s eye needed no assistance from giant sightscreens either - a flapping sheet would do.

The image comes from the vast collection of Ron Cardwell, friend of Cricket Et Al, and provoked an astonished recognition in the authors of Trumper Across The Tasman when they saw it. They also reproduce this priceless posed memento - once a standard practice for a historic innings or partnership, but precluded now by the size and elevation of scoreboards.

’A sight fit for the cricketing gods,’ said Dick Brittenden in his canonical Great Days in New Zealand Cricket (1958). Now we can partake of the sight of it too. I’ll write a bit more about this delicious book in due course, but you already know you want it, don’t you? Drop Peter a line. His email address is trumpervic@gmail.com. No, really it is!