It Takes a Village

GH has a reading recommendation

Mike Atherton has written a lyrical and life-affirming piece in The Times about cricket in the village of Chardstock, Devon. The club was founded in 1887, and as its centenary approached was the subject of a joyful BBC documentary narrated by John Arlott, evoking its unchanging character.

Athers has retraced Arlott’s steps, and found that the intervening four decades have changed….virtually nothing. The population has swelled a little with a housing estate; the pub is off limits due to a development dispute. But the club remains ‘the heartbeat of the community’, along with the shop, the school and the fifteenth-century church, and the same man tends the pitch. Most remarkably, perhaps, the same man tends the square, having joined the club as a teenager.

The main character in Arlott’s film was Dick (“Dicker”) Parris, who ran a wholesale dairy business, selling milk, cheese and eggs. “When he speaks cricket, he speaks Chardstock cricket,” said Arlott of Dicker, who was the driving force behind the club, as player and much more besides. Aged 79 now, and in his 60th consecutive year — bar one — tending the ground, I find Dicker inspecting his pitch before the weekend match.

In the pavilion, Dicker points to a photograph of the Chardstock team from 1923, which includes four players with the surname Parris, all forebears. A Parris — Ben — played in the very first team recorded in the late 19th century and Dicker’s son, Stuart, now keeps the family tradition going. In the Arlott film, Stuart was the teenager pulling the roller in the opening credits; now 53, he is the team’s wicketkeeper, having played the odd game for Somerset Seconds back in the day.

Changes in the outside world express themselves in the players’ changing vocations: Chardstock’s inaugural team included included two shoemakers, the publican, the vicar, a wheelwright, thatcher and blacksmith; the team Athers sees go through its paces features three teachers, a plumber, an electrician, a master builder, a driver, a number of players of school age, and an air conditioning engineer who makes his first century. Otherwise, his message is quietly conveyed: ‘You can’t change much in the world, but you can make your own little patch.’

Now, in some ways this unchanging nature of vernacular cricket is an old message. The games we play, that we make for ourselves, have altered far, far less than those we watch, accelerated as they have been by the forces of capitalism and managerialism. The sleepy village of Tillingfold was depicted in just this way in Hugh De Selincourt’s classic The Cricket Match (1924); when he updated the story in The Village Cricket Match (1978), John Parker evoked the scene’s timelessness by borrowing from De Selincourt the same captain, the ageless Gauvinier.