Chapter and verse: A history of cricket’s rhymes and poems – Almanack

What would the Victorians and Edwardians have made of James Anderson? They would have marvelled, of course: younger than WG Grace or Wilfred Rhodes at the end, though a veteran of many more Tests. How would they have marvelled? For better or worse, they’d have turned to verse.

Poetry was habitual in 19th-century cricket writing. Much of it was mediocre – lame, we might say now – though fascinating. There is no such thing as a bad poem, only a great poem gone horribly wrong.

In the early years, admirers reached for the Classics: William Goldwin compiled a 1706 match report in Latin, while in 1744 James Love composed Cricket: An Heroic Poem; in 1773, John Duncombe wrote Surry Triumphant: Or the Kentish-Mens Defeat (prompting a quick response from John Burnby, who wrote The Kentish Cricketers). A century and more later, there followed two poems, each containing a familiar refrain: Francis Thompson’s At Lord’s (“O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!”) and Henry Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada (“Play up! Play up! and play the game!”). There was also plenty of low-key bombast.

Those who wrote about cricket before the Great War were of an overwhelmingly literary bent. Cricket: A Weekly Record of The Game had a masthead that quoted Byron, while a regular section, Pavilion Gossip, took its subhead from Hamlet: “The abstract and brief chronicle of the time.” These pages proved a regular outlet for versifiers such as Walter Bettesworth, Norman Gale, Edmund Christian, Alfred Cochrane and Edward Lucas (either in anonymity or under noms de plume) to dash off words that rhymed.

There was no limit to what could inspire verse, or in what manner. Acrostics, ballades (with climactic envoi), limericks, sonnets, quatrains and sestains, celebrations and laments on defeats, draws and victories, ducks, rain, law changes, chucking, cricketers playing golf (ahem), the coming of May and the departing of September – even a plea for women players, and the boredom of watching Eton versus Harrow. Bats, balls and stumps were addressed or personified, as was the sport itself, in the regal form of King Willow. In Shakespearean parodies, Henry V orated on St Willow’s Day, and the three witches of Macbeth became Test selectors.

The chief muses were the men who played the game. Bobby Abel’s surname was irresistible to those with a penchant for wordplay. Hugh Trumble had a good show because of the opportunity for rhyme (The Australasian deployed stumble, mumble, fumble, grumble, humble, tumble, rumble and jumble). So did Dick Pougher (bluffer, cuffer, gruffer, huffer, suffer, duffer). Tom Hayward (“never wayward”) could rest easy. But, oddly, Victor Trumper proved trickier:
But there is one Australian
Whose praise few poets sing,
Because his name is alien
To almost everything.
Unjust it is, I know it,
But he must yield his claim–
The most perspiring poet
Can hardly rhyme his name.

William Scotton was the late-19th-century antithesis of Bazball, his stonewall technique spawning a Tennysonian send-up in Punch (“Block, block, block / At the foot of thy wicket, O Scotton!”). In the 67 minutes he went without scoring at The Oval, Gilbert Jessop reached a century. The American journalist Ralph Delahaye Paine wrote:
At one end stocky Jessop frowned
The human catapult
Who wrecks the roofs of distant towns
When set in his assault.

The greatest cricketers were the stimuli for the greatest body of eulogy. Grace, dubbed by an “Old Admirer” in Punch as “my black-bearded, cricketing Titan”, was eternally a guiding genius, be it his double-century at Hove or a six he hit out of The Oval. Bettesworth even devoted lines to news that Grace had joined a ping-pong club in Crystal Palace.

When WG scored 1,000 runs in May 1895, Truth (a periodical founded in 1877) published lines calling for a knighthood, the author affronted that his hero had, unlike the actor Henry Irving, been ignored:
One nightly plays upon the boards, one daily on the grass.
Then why should only one of these receive a knight’s award,
And wherefore should the boards be held as better than the sward?

Ranjitsinhji, too, was a source of inspiration, and was welcomed back to Sussex with a poem in the style of “Willie We Have Missed You” (a song written by the American Stephen Foster in 1854). By September 1900, Ranji had made 6,224 runs in his two most recent English summers, and his dashing style was widely admired. This was GHT, writing in the Sussex Evening Times:
Long may you flourish, Sir, to brighten
Thro’ your example’s lively medium
The glorious game which serves to lighten
The cares of life, its gloom and tedium.

The paeans speak of invincibility and immortality, and also of vincibility and mortality. The elite are not perfect, but they are bad less often. “If you perchance should fail to score / Grace has done it / Or be dismissed for leg-before / Grace has done it,” consoled Sidney T Lucas. Cricket as metaphor for existence was fertile soil, with long lives and good innings intertwining to this day. Harry Jupp, Tom Richardson and Arthur Shrewsbury were among those who had obituaries in rhyme:
Fast on many a summer’s day, crashed the wickets down,
Before the battery of your swift attack.
Soon green turf shall cover you, bowler of high renown,
Rest in peace, Tom – mourners you’ll not lack!

Verse would still pop up after the Second World War. When Jack Hobbs turned 70, John Arlott wrote:
The game the Wealden rustics handed down
Through growing skill became, in you, a part
Of sense, and ripened to a style that showed
Their country sport matured to balanced art.

It was given a new, melodious tenor by the likes of Egbert Moore, aka Lord Beginner, who immortalised West Indies’ spin-bowling duo of 1950 – “with those little pals of mine, Ramadhin and Valentine” – in “Victory Calypso”. The calypsonians did not limit themselves to West Indian victories, also paying homage to Frank “Typhoon” Tyson and Sunil Gavaskar. Written down, they were no different to the earlier poems, and were often elevated by their performance.

The tradition continued during the 1990s floruit of Brian Lara, whose dashing style yielded all manner of verse, such as Jean Binta Breeze’s “Song for Lara”:
Is a young generation
Comin dung sweet
Nat in awe of Wisden
Nat studying defeat
A fresh clean page
From an islan of dreams
A bat in han an
Burstin at the seams.

The verse tradition lingers in cricket’s finest prose, but let’s bring back unashamed, unadorned, franchise verse: ode to the CEAT Tyres strategic timeout, perhaps; or a lament for the poorly disguised slower ball. It doesn’t necessarily have to be good. Even the oldies were happy to call a spade a word that rhymes with spade. During his editorship of Cricket in 1912, JN Pentelow referred to “such utterly unreadable stuff as the Rev. James Love’s concoction”; after listing those he rated, he said “the rest is utterly null and void”.

A century later, Andy Bull wrote in The Guardian: “Poets have been trying, and failing, to capture the game on the page for almost as long as people have been playing it.” He was reminiscing about a meeting with Harold Pinter, who had committed the nine lines of Alan Ross’s “Test Match At Lord’s” to memory. But Pinter outdid him for brevity with his own “I saw Len Hutton in his prime / Another time, another time.”

Even when passion is obvious, poetry can struggle for a good showing. Shane Warne inspired Victoria Coverdale, a fictional character created by Annabel Tellis, to write 28 poems about the great leg-spinner. She had to self-publish after her tongue-in-cheek tome was rejected by one publisher with the words, “I’ve never seen anything so singularly obsessive.” How could they opt against “And Mike Gatting’s mouth became an O, / With a single delivery that changed the world, / Mike’s, Shane’s and mine, you know”?

When England’s Tests are on, rhythm is all around. Scribes once imitated Gilbert and Sullivan, and Shakespeare. The Barmy Army in the Hollies Stand take from the Beatles (Joe Root) and Depeche Mode (Jofra Archer). The slander of Steve Smith crying on the telly and Mitchell Johnson’s misfiring aim may be indecorous, but it is the modern variant of the words that adorned pages 130 years ago.

“Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy! Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy Anderson” may not be as magniloquent as “Perpend! hast heard of Surrey, boy? Ay, Surrey used to be / A County of as rare a sort as ever man might see”, but it is all there. The vocative, the repetition, the prospect of rhyme (No, Jimmy; woe, Jimmy; don’t leave us with a faux Jimmy). The use of metre and prosody to venerate line and length.

For seven years, I have been tempted to compose a cricket report in verse. For seven years, I have seen sense. One day, the urge will grow too strong, and I will be proven wrong. Leave verse to the pros, O foolish Alderman.

Elgan Alderman is a sportswriter for The Times.

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