“What’s he got against me?”: The Divisive Captaincy of Wally Hammond

Wally Hammond
by Bassano Ltd; half-plate glass negative, 10 September 1936
NPG x21815 © National Portrait Gallery, London

If Wally Hammond is universally regarded as a good batter, there is similar — albeit less complimentary — agreement about his captaincy. His overall record as a Test captain is poor: he led England 20 times, winning four games, losing three and drawing the rest. Worse than his record were the judgements against his leadership. Many journalists and many of those who played under him were scathing in their opinions. Yet a distinction should be made here. Hammond led England in three series before the Second World War and three after it. And it was the 1946–47 Ashes series which forced the conclusion that he was a poor captain. However, perhaps it is unfair to base judgement on a series when Hammond was mentally, physically and emotionally worn out, and he had a much better record (and reputation) as captain before the war. Perhaps his biggest achievement was to have led at all. He was the first professional cricketer to be captain England, although to do so he had to shed his professional status in a way which reflected poorly on Hammond and the system from which he emerged.

Hammond’s appointment as England captain was somewhat manufactured. Precedent, convention and outright discrimination meant that in this period, captaincy always went to amateurs. Although many arguments were trotted out to support such a position, the real reason was simple snobbery — the assumption that amateurs, who were almost always from the middle or upper-middle classes at this time, were superior to working-class professionals. Even at the time, many viewed such an attitude as outdated and there was growing opposition to the whole idea of amateurism. County captains were also generally amateurs, although there had been an abortive attempt to appoint Herbert Sutcliffe as Yorkshire captain (initially the plan was to have him “convert” to amateurism as Hammond did) in 1927 and Ewart Astill led Leicestershire as a professional for one season in 1935.

Therefore, in the ordinary course of affairs, Hammond, who for most of his career played as a professional (he played three games as an amateur immediately after leaving school in 1920 before signing a professional contract) had no chance of being appointed as England captain, even if he was by this time indisputably the best batter in the country. However, Hammond had social as well as cricketing ambitions. In his 1996 biography Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why, David Foot summarised the impression that Hammond gave his team-mates; he was always viewed as an overly ambitious social climber and an outright snob.

From his earliest days in the Gloucestershire team, Hammond had aspired to move up the social ladder and went to some trouble to “cultivate” influential amateurs. He preferred the company of the higher echelons of Bristol society to that of his working-class team-mates. According to Foot — in another of those passages where it is unclear how firmly rooted in historical fact we are — Pelham Warner suggested to him that he should find a job which enabled him to play as an amateur. Whether Warner would have been so open with a professional is perhaps doubtful.

Nevertheless, there were suggestions, as reported in the Daily Mirror in September 1928, that Hammond definitely planned to turn amateur. At the time, he was engaged to Dorothy Lister, whose father Joseph was a wealthy businessman. Perhaps Hammond hoped that Lister would support him financially, and the latter did not deny the truth of the rumours when questioned by the press. Yet following Hammond’s marriage in 1929, he continued to play as a professional. But his father-in-law’s wealth meant that he could afford to drive a car and wear fashionable clothes: in other words, to live an “amateur” lifestyle.

The Great Depression brought about the financial ruin of Lister, and meant that Hammond was unable to maintain such a lifestyle on the wages of a professional cricketer. In fact, he and Dorothy began to struggle, which cynics suggested as the explanation for why Hammond soon lost interest in a wife who no longer brought him financial benefit. At one point, Dorothy had to take a job, something which was still rare for married women. In 1933, Hammond was given a job as a sales promotion manager at the Cater Motor Company, a car manufacturer, for an annual salary of £1,000. The role was something of a sinecure and seemed to be more of a publicity stunt on the part of his employers than a substantial role. And as a salesman, he was not particularly effective. But it was a step in the right direction for Hammond’s social ambitions.

There were further rumours in August 1933 that Hammond would turn amateur if offered the England captaincy (as, according to the same story, Herbert Sutcliffe would have). The story appeared in an article written by “the Clubman” in the Daily Mirror (although the Gloucestershire Echo said that it was Lionel Tennyson who was the source).

And it seems that influential figures hoped to find Hammond a better-paying job which would allow him to do so. Foot suggests “a little coterie from the environs of Lord’s, headed by the unwaveringly loyal and effusive Warner, were busy sounding out people they knew in the City”, and that rumours were in full swing that Hammond planned to change his status. Even Gerald Howat, in his much drier 1984 biography of Hammond, hints at behind-the-scenes discussions: he suggests that business friends from Bristol, and his connections with men such as the Duke of Beaufort played a part. And he wrote how “influential members of the MCC” had approached Dunlop with a view to securing a directorship for Hammond to enable him to play as an amateur.

A photograph promoting Hammond’s appointment to the Board of Marsham Tyres
(Image: Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why (1996) by David Foot)

In the event, Hammond joined Marsham Tyres, a Bristol company, in November 1937. Advised by his business associates, he successfully held out for a place on the Board before accepting the role. His new job was widely reported in the press, as was the obvious follow-up that Gloucestershire had released him from his professional contract and that he would play as an amateur when the 1938 season began. Nevertheless, he dead-batted questions about whether he would be appointed England captain, even though it was clear to everyone what was going on.

Conveniently, this came at a time when the England captaincy was unsettled. After Bob Wyatt’s unsuccessful spell in charge, Gubby Allen led England against India in 1936 and against Australia during the 1936–37 Ashes, when England lost 3–2. Walter Robins led against New Zealand in 1937 but was not guaranteed a place in the Test team. Hammond had occasionally captained the Players against the Gentlemen, and had experience of leading Gloucestershire in the absence of the official amateur captain. Although he was generally considered to have done a sound job, he never stood out as an outstanding captain. His claims rested mainly on his status as the best batter in England.

Once Hammond entered the picture, most people therefore assumed that the role would be his. His only real rival was Gubby Allen; the latter made an effort to play regularly at the beginning of the 1938 season, something he did not always do. However, he was hampered by injury and when he was only made captain of “The Rest” during a Test trial at which Hammond was appointed as the captain of the England, he effectively sulked (although he claimed to be suffering from an injury) and pulled out of contention, not least because he was angry that Warner, the Chairman of Selectors, had not discussed it with him personally. Although he did not say so explicitly, E. W. Swanton was quite clear about what happened in his doting 1985 biography of Allen.

Therefore Hammond was named as captain for the 1938 series. He was the first former professional to captain England at home (although Jack Hobbs had taken charge mid-way through a Test during the 1926 Ashes when Arthur Carr was indisposed). The Establishment largely kept silent, although there were doubtless several eyebrows raised in private. Foot suggests that some critics were waiting to find fault with Hammond’s captaincy so they could blame his social status; he also records (without giving a source) one comment that “you couldn’t have a car salesman leading your country”, and another that Hammond “wouldn’t know which fork to use at the official banquets”.

Arguments were also rehashed about whether Hammond’s captaincy would be improved simply by his change of status. Hammond later betrayed some embarrassment at how the affair unfolded; Foot states that people who talked to him about the matter in later years got little out of him, and he “fidgeted without much comment”. In his own book, Secret History (1952), Hammond betrayed some confusion over his feelings towards amateur captaincy, suggesting both that it was illogical that he had been forced to turn amateur to captain England but also that all the best captains had been amateurs. But he later wrote that most amateurs did not understand the game in the same way that professionals did.

Unfortunately for Hammond, by the time he wrote those words, most critics had concluded that he did not understand the game either. By the time he left the role, a tired and disillusioned man, in 1947, his reputation as a captain had been ruined. But as with his batting, some distinction should be made between Hammond’s captaincy before the Second World War and after it. When he led England in Australia during the 1946–47 season, he was long past his best with the bat, rapidly became daunted by the scale of the task facing his underprepared team and was in the midst of intense personal strife as the failure of his marriage became public and the woman he intended to marry, Sybil Ness-Harvey, struggled to adapt to life in England while he was away. He was also palpably overweight, suffering from back problems and quite simply too old for the task. He came close to a breakdown and as such, was hardly in a fit state to captain. Although he should probably have retired beforehand, as long as he was available, he was the only realistic candidate to do the job. While the tour has its place in telling Hammond’s story, it should not in fairness form the basis of judgements on his ability as a captain.

Opinions on how he performed as captain before the war vary depending on how the person expressing them felt about Hammond. For example, E. W. Swanton wrote several disparaging pieces (mainly in later years) about him, but Swanton was extremely close to Gubby Allen. And even Swanton defended Hammond from criticism of his tactics during the 1939 series against the West Indies, in an article in The Cricketer that season. Charlie Barnett frequently tore Hammond’s captaincy apart in interviews, but the problems between the two men had far deeper roots than tactics.

Perhaps the fairest summary has been written by Alan Gibson in The Cricket Captains of England (1979) in which he observed: “[Hammond] won some praise for his captaincy before the war (not just conventional praise; [Jack] Fingleton, for instance, thought he was a good captain). After the war, he had some blame. Jim Swanton, in his later books, has been severe about him. I think it is fair to say that Hammond was not temperamentally well suited to the job.”

British Pathé footage of the first Test of the 1938 Ashes series, Hammond’s debut as captain

Hammond’s pre-war record was not too bad. He led England in three series in which he was undefeated: he drew 1–1 with Australia in 1938, defeated South Africa 1–0 in 1938–39 (on some horribly flat pitches) and won 1–0 against the West Indies in 1939. The latter two teams were stronger than they had been for most of the interwar period, and such results were not to be dismissed lightly. An overall record of three wins and one defeat from 13 Tests is very respectable. But even here, there were echoes of criticism.

Hammond’s biggest problem as captain was his inability to handle the different personalities within a team. Throughout his career, he had a reputation for being moody, difficult and unapproachable. He rarely gave advice or encouragement. In a team-mate, this was unfortunate but not disastrous; it was a source of regret rather than acrimony. But when he became captain, this was far more of an issue, particularly at Gloucestershire, where he replaced Basil Allen as captain for 1939. With England, he was surrounded by gifted players and, during home seasons, they were only around Hammond for a few days at a time. At Gloucestershire, a struggling county, he was with his team for six days each week. And many of his team-mates remembered his time as captain with considerable bitterness.

For example, A. H. Brodhurst, a Cambridge Blue who played for Gloucestershire in late 1939, was disconcerted when Hammond did not even speak to him as he was waiting nervously to bat in the middle of a collapse; nor did the captain offer any congratulations when he scored a fifty to rescue the team. George Lambert, Gloucestershire’s fast bowler, found Hammond difficult to play under. He told Foot how his captain would glare at him from slip if his line or length went awry, or if he conceded runs. Lambert also resented being over-bowled by Hammond, who would not allow him much chance to rest. He was heard to say several times: “What’s he got against me? When am I going to get a murmur of praise from him?” Barnett suggested in his own writing that Hammond was too curt and rude. Patrick Murphy, in his study of batters who scored a hundred first-class centuries, related how George Emmett once asked Hammond why he had been dropped from the team for a few games; the reply was: “Well, Emmett, you’re not a very good player, are you?”

And there are many more instances. Charlie Barnett suggested several times that Hammond would not accept advice from his team. F. R. Brown told Murphy that he thought Hammond was the worst captain under whom he had played: “He did everything by the clock, rotating bowlers at set stages.”

Not everyone was completely against him. The England wicket-keeper Les Ames had no complaints about his captaincy. Gloucestershire’s Reg Sinfield found him more approachable, and Hammond used to take him to inspect the pitch before the toss to ascertain his opinion over whether to bat or bowl. But even Sinfield’s reminiscences to Foot often ended with: “Such a great player — and such a bad captain.”

Perhaps part of the problem was that Hammond found captaincy difficult. He certainly felt the pressure as England’s pre-war captain; before Test matches, he went to stay with his friend and Gloucestershire team-mate William Neale to avoid the press, pacing up and down pondering selection problems and refusing to take phone calls. According to Foot, he also mentioned “feeling the strain” in one letter written before the war.

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Wally Hammond, the England captain (right) tossing the coin with the Australian captain Don Bradman (left) at the Oval in 1938, watched by the groundsman “Bosser” Martin (centre)

If the consensus was that Hammond could not really inspire or motivate his players, what about his approach on the field? There were varied opinions on his tactical ability, but the 1938 series raised one or two questions. In the first Test, he pursued a very unusual strategy. England scored 658 for eight declared (and Hammond rebuked Denis Compton for getting out after scoring a two-hour century), leaving Australia simply looking to avoid defeat. They scored 411, batting for more than 130 overs before being asked to follow-on. And in all that time, Hedley Verity, a big threat to the Australians, bowled 7.3 overs. The explanation offered in Wisden was that “the probability that he would be in a position to enforce a follow-on influenced Hammond to conserve Verity’s energies”, but in his absence from the attack, Stan McCabe scored a brilliant 232; it was Verity who finally dismissed him after a tenth wicket partnership of 77 (Hammond attempted to keep McCabe off strike, to no avail). And had Hammond been braver, McCabe might have made far fewer runs. When the Australian batter came to the wicket, Sinfield, playing his only Test, asked Hammond for three short legs; Hammond eventually agreed on two, but early in his innings, McCabe put the ball in the air to where the third one would have been positioned.

Australia batted out the game after following on, scoring 427 for six in 184 overs, of which Verity delivered 62 overs. Perhaps such tactics did not affect the result on a very flat pitch, but it may not have inspired confidence. The inevitable Charlie Barnett, who played in the game, later told Alan Hill, for his 1986 biography of Verity, that this was “appalling captaincy”.

The second Test featured a Hammond double century, but he had little influence on the game tactically, apart from possibly instructing his later batters to hit out in the first innings. But a careless dismissal in the second innings — a one-handed shot to a ball pitched outside leg stump — put England in danger of defeat until the later batters salvaged the innings. There was one other incident which some observers called astute captaincy but which the watching Bob Wyatt attributed to luck. Doug Wright had taken an early wicket and when Don Bradman came in, beat the bat with three out of four deliveries. Hammond then removed Wright from the attack and brought on Verity; not long after, Bradman pulled a wide ball from Verity onto his stumps and was out for 18. Wyatt, who argued that on a flat pitch Wright’s wrist-spin was more likely to cause problems, later spoke to Bradman and said that he was surprised to see him get out in that fashion and that he had been equally surprised to see Wright taken off; Bradman responded that he was “very relieved”.

But with the third Test rained off, the crucial game was the fourth, played at Headingley. The match, played on a difficult pitch, was a low-scoring one. Australia took a 19-run first-innings lead and then bowled out England for 123; Hammond made a first-ball duck. Needing 105 to win, Australia struggled; several critics, including Neville Cardus, thought that spin was the answer, and Wright took three wickets. But Hammond persisted with his fast bowlers Ken Farnes and Bill Bowes, and Australia won by five wickets. Cardus wrote: “Hammond’s faith in fast bowling rather exceeded his faith in the arts of Verity and Wright. The result was sad disillusionment.” Again, Barnett had plenty to say about this to Alan Hill; he said that Verity wanted to bowl over the wicket to aim at a patch of rough on leg stump but Hammond would not allow it. He argued that Hammond should have used Bowes at one end to dry up runs and allowed Verity to attack from the other. Bowes himself spoke of the matter over the winter, suggesting that Yorkshire would have adopted this approach; some newspapers interpreted this as a criticism of Hammond, prompting Bowes to instruct his solicitors to request an apology and to write a hasty letter to Hammond explaining what happened.

The final Test, at the Oval, was the game in which England scored 903 for seven and Len Hutton scored 364. Hammond had little to do as captain, but as the game was a timeless one (played to a finish however long it took), instructed his batters to take no risks. When Hutton, having reached three figures, began to hit out at one stage, Hammond gestured for him to continue playing safely. Aiming for a total in four figures, Hammond only declared after it became clear that Bradman would be unable to bat, having badly injured his ankle when bowling. England levelled the series, winning by an extraordinary margin of an innings and 579 runs, although Australia had retained the Ashes.

One other unusual achievement that summer was that when Hammond captained the Gentlemen against the Players, he became the only man to lead both teams in the fixture.

In the aftermath of a relatively successful season, Hammond’s captaincy was praised. In his notes for the 1939 edition, the Wisden editor Wilfrid Brookes wrote: “Hammond last summer showed unmistakably that he was well fitted for the post; indeed, having regard to his limited experience of leading an eleven before he took charge of the England side in all the Test Matches, he surprised his closest friends by his intelligent tactics. Undoubtedly Hammond proved himself a sagacious and inspiring captain.” This hardly suggests that Hammond did quite as bad a job as others subsequently argued.

Less has been written about Hammond’s captaincy in South Africa. This was the first time that England had sent a full-strength Test team for a series there, a reaction to South Africa’s 1–0 win in England in 1935. Usually, teams to South Africa were experimental, or rewards for long-serving professionals who would not otherwise have played Test cricket. But the 1938–39 team contained all the leading players. Even so, there was far less pressure than experienced during an Ashes series.

Les Ames told Foot that Hammond had captained “beautifully” in South Africa: “I spent a lot of time with the Kent amateur Bryan Valentine, on that tour. We found ourselves discussing Wally a great deal. And we couldn’t find any serious faults at all.” One anonymous member of the team told Howat that Hammond had on one occasion stepped between two bowlers, one from each team, and prevented an argument spiralling out of hand. And Bill Edrich, whom Hammond had persisted in selecting despite his complete failure in every Test until he repaid his faith with an innings of 219 in the final Test, said: “He was the perfect leader, perceptive and astute on the field and an ambassador of the highest order off it.” The South African captain Alan Melville thought he did a good job too, telling Howat: “[The fielders] kept their eyes on him and responded to slight indications by eye or finger.” South African journalists were generally complimentary. E. W. Swanton, writing for the Illustrated London News at the time said that he had been a “sagacious tactician”; however, in later years he was more critical retrospectively, saying that Hammond’s captaincy on that tour had made him “apprehensive” about how he would handle an Australian tour, largely because of his moods and frequent silences.

There was less scope for Hammond to display his tactical skills in a light-hearted and fast-scoring series against the West Indies in 1939. But his captaincy of Gloucestershire was praised in Wisden for his “enterprising cricket and a spirit of adventure”.

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Wally Hammond in 1946

Had Hammond stopped there, he may have retired with a good reputation as captain. Maybe not one of the best, but a respectable captain of England. But he continued, perhaps out of loyalty, perhaps out of desire to prove himself and beat Australia. His captaincy of Gloucestershire in 1946 was mixed: the team began well before running out of steam, and he missed several matches with back problems. This may have warned what was coming, but he continued as England captain: against India in 1946 (England won 1–0) and then for the ill-fated tour of Australia in 1946–47.

The tour was a terrible failure for Hammond. He proved a moody, unapproachable and uninspiring captain. He was distant from the players, travelling separately to games, and gave little useful advice when they were struggling. Even Wisden said of the 1946–47 Australian tour that he “was not the same inspiring leader as at home against Australia in 1938”. Criticised for his tactics by the press, he increasingly retreated into his shell. Part of the problem might have been the contrasting attitude between Hammond — who saw the tour as a goodwill gesture after the war and to be played on friendly terms — and his opposite number Bradman, who wanted to crush the opposition. This difference was made clear when Bradman was given not out after apparently edging to slip in the first Test, drawing an audible complaint from Hammond that it was a “fine fucking way to start a series” (although some versions suggest a “fine bloody way”). After that, relations between the teams deteriorated, Hammond became more and more withdrawn and defeated, not least as he could no longer bat in his old manner. And it was notable — as pointed out in Wisden — that when Hammond missed the final Test with ill-health, England played better under his vice-captain Norman Yardley, whose field-placing and tactics seemed better than Hammond’s. Even so, England still lost; realistically, an outmatched team had little chance against one of the greatest Australian teams to take the field.

But Hammond was universally judged to have made matters worse. Attacks came from everywhere. Brian Sellers, the Yorkshire captain who covered the tour as a journalist, was extremely critical of Hammond’s field-placing. Within the team, Denis Compton resented him and Paul Gibb felt that his presence in the team had a negative impact on him personally, as revealed in his tour diaries. It was, in every respect, an utter disaster and coloured all retrospective judgements of Hammond’s captaincy.

But perhaps it is unfair to use this tour as a way to judge Hammond as a captain any more than it would be fair to use it to assess his batting. He was not a great captain. But nor was he as terrible as history suggests.

The rest of Hammond’s life was a sad anti-climax. He moved to South Africa where he joined another car business, which later folded, and was forgotten, despite his long career and amazing batting record. That final tour cast a long and embarrassing shadow. His family — he and Sybil had three children — faced serious financial problems, and he took a job as a sports administrator at University of Natal. A serious car crash almost killed him 1960, and he never really recovered, dying of a heart attack in 1965.

“The most perfect batsman I’d ever seen”: How Good was Wally Hammond?

Hammond batting for the MCC against New South Wales in Australia in 1928; Bert Oldfield is the wicket-keeper (Image: National Museum of Australia)

Wally Hammond died in 1965, at the age of just 62. He had few friends, but his old team-mates for Gloucestershire and England, while acknowledging his moodiness and troubled personal life, were in no doubt about his worth as a batter. His obituary in the following edition of Wisden began: “The judgment of cricket history is that the greatest batsmen the game has known are — in order of appearance, only — W. G. Grace, Jack Hobbs, Walter Hammond and Don Bradman.” Even in 1965, that was a somewhat subjective judgement which has been further diluted since, but it demonstrates this esteem in which he was held. And Hammond continues to be ranked among the leading batters of all time. Modern writers have been practically unanimous in their praise. When he was chosen by a panel of writers in England’s “Best Ever Eleven” in 2009, Christopher Martin-Jenkins wrote: “A majestic batsman who dominated attacks wherever he played, [Hammond] was the supreme England player after Jack Hobbs.” In 2010, Steven Lynch wrote: “You could argue for Hobbs or Sutcliffe or Woolley or Grace or Boycott as England’s greatest batsman. But I have a hunch that it was Walter Reginald Hammond.”

The figures bear unquestionably bear this out. In first-class cricket, he is forever likely to be the third-highest run-scorer, behind Hobbs and Patsy Hendren, with 50,551 runs at an average of 56.10, including 167 centuries. He headed the English first-class batting averages for an unparalleled eight seasons in a row (1933 until 1946). In Tests, he scored 7,249 runs at 58.45; he was the leading Test run-scorer from 1937 until 1970 (which is the longest period anyone has held the record). His average is currently the tenth-best of all time (at the time of writing, Steve Smith is above him among current players) among those with at least twenty innings. If we only include the Tests he played before the Second World War, before age and ill-health robbed him of his effectiveness, he scored 6,883 runs at 61.45. And his average overseas was 66.32, compared to an average of 50.06 at home. Other highlights include his average at the Sydney Cricket Ground: in five Tests, he scored 808 runs at 161.60, with four centuries. And batting at number three, he averaged 74.78 in Tests, the third best in that position behind Bradman and Ken Barrington.

The records he set echo even today: his record of 22 Test centuries for England was not beaten until Alistair Cook scored his 23rd in 2012. His seven double centuries is still the equal-fourth best in Test history at the time of writing, over eighty years since he scored his last, behind only Bradman, Kumar Sangakkara and Brian Lara (although one more from Virat Kohli would push Hammond into fifth).

While these numbers are doubtless impressive, statistics are something of a modern obsession and it was not numbers which enchanted those who watched Hammond bat, and it was not his average which moved so many those who played alongside Hammond to describe him as the greatest ever.

Hammond batting against Australia in the fifth Test of the 1932–33 Ashes series (Image: Wikipedia)

Len Hutton — another candidate for the greatest of all English batters — always told David Foot that Hammond was “the most perfect batsman I’d ever seen”, an opinion shared by many others. Patrick Murphy spoke to many of Hammond’s former team-mates, as recounted in The Centurions (originally published in 1983 but updated several times) about batters who scored 100 first-class centuries. He concluded: “In the opinion of his contemporaries, [Hammond] was on a different plane — majestic, assured, poised, a devastating amalgam of the physical and mental attributes that makes up a great batsman.”

Those contemporaries could cite numerous examples of his mastery. They describe shots — sparingly played but perfectly executed — which would not be out of place in a modern game, such as cutting balls pitched outside leg-stump for four, or playing overhead shots. Many commented on how he seemed to middle the ball every time. Three men who played alongside him independently named the same innings as his best: an unbeaten 153 out of a Gloucestershire total of 284 in a 1939 match against Kent on an impossible pitch. The Kent leg-spinner Doug Wright took nine for 47 and when the opposition batted, Gloucestershire’s off-spinner Tom Goddard took seventeen wickets for 106 runs in a single day. Kent could only manage 120 and 124.

Reg Sinfield told Murphy of a time when Goddard had bowled out Leicestershire easily and Hammond, for some reason wanting to put him in his place a little, told him that he was not actually a good bowler. He offered to face him in the middle, using the pitch on which he had taken his wickets, with the rest of the Gloucestershire team fielding. Hammond then told him he would only use the edge of his bat, and proceeded to effortlessly play out an over. Similarly, he faced Charlie Parker, Goddard and Sinfield in the nets at Bristol, which had been doctored to offer more turn than usual. The other batters were helpless at the practice sessions. Hammond had no such problems, and to prove his superiority, picked up a baseball bat and used that to play the spinners until a frustrated Parker threw the ball straight at him. Hammond caught it, laughed and walked away; when he had gone, Parker said: “You have just seen the greatest exhibition of batting you will ever witness — but don’t tell him I said so!” Other Gloucestershire players recalled similar instances when Hammond faced his own bowlers using the edge only.

And it was this mastery against spinners on rain-affected or difficult pitches which placed Hammond in another realm compared to most batters. Even Donald Bradman, against whom he often suffered in comparison, could not match him in these conditions; perhaps the only one of his contemporaries who was Hammond’s equal was George Headley. The innings he rated most highly himself (as he wrote in his 1946 autobiography Cricket My Destiny) was a relatively modest score of 32 on an impossible pitch in Australia in 1936–37.

Wally Hammond; published by J. Millhoff & Co Ltd; bromide cigarette card, published circa 1930
NPG x196366 © National Portrait Gallery, London

But with Hammond, there is always something of a qualification. On paper, his figures are outstanding, but the sheer number of runs he scored masks a few weaknesses and inconsistencies. While it is certain that Hammond was the best batter in England for most of his career (although until Len Hutton emerged in the late 1930s, there were few rivals once Herbert Sutcliffe began to fade), there were reservations about him that never applied to Hobbs or Hutton. And Sutcliffe, nowhere near as accomplished a batter as Hammond from a technical or aesthetic viewpoint, had a better record at the highest level, and none of the inconsistencies or an apparent vulnerability to pressure which affected Hammond.

The first qualification was Hammond’s relative weakness against fast bowling. Part of this was self-inflicted. In two remarkable centuries for Gloucestershire against Lancashire in the 1920s, he freely and destructively hooked the short-pitched fast bowling of the Australian fast bowler Ted McDonald. But in later years he eliminated the shot from his repertoire. Partly, this was a reaction to the reduced number of fast bowlers operating; apart from the West Indian quicks, there were few fast bowlers at Test level capable of making the ball rear up dangerously. This was even more pronounced following the 1932–33 “Bodyline” series, after which there was an unofficial but definite policy that pace bowlers would not pitch short. Australia’s only genuine fast bowler before the Second World War who bowled at Hammond to any great extent in Test cricket was Ernie McCormick, who was injury prone, erratic and inconsistent. Against most bowlers, Hammond did not need to hook, but this could expose his limitations when facing extreme pace. Another reason he did not hook is that members of the “Establishment” — mainly Pelham Warner, who very much took Hammond under his wing once he identified his extraordinary potential — advised against it. And Hammond was not one to go against those who could help him socially.

But the result was a limitation on his batting. Foot wrote: “In an honest assessment it would be wrong to evade the suggestion, voiced in muttered asides or in some cases, more open public opinion, that he lacked the stomach to face the most hostile fast bowling.”

British Pathé footage of Hammond batting in the nets before the 1935 season

Charlie Barnett, who played alongside him for Gloucestershire and England before the two men fell out, wrote about how Hammond preferred to take a single and leave his partner to face fast bowling; Barnett claimed that the last time Hammond played well against pace was when he took on Harold Larwood at Trent Bridge in 1932, cutting the short ball continually. Joe Hardstaff, a team-mate of Larwood, told Patrick Murphy that the latter enjoyed bowling at Hammond because he felt he was apprehensive.

Hammond himself admitted in Cricket My Destiny that, when he played against Jack Gregory in 1921 as a 17-year-old, he was intimidated. And he wrote in his Cricket’s Secret History (1952) — a touch defensively — that he had been criticised for not hooking H. D. Read when the Essex fast bowler was pitching short in one game: “It was simply that I did not think the possible profit worth the risk, either of getting out or being injured. As I got older, I virtually abandoned the hook. I do not care for it and Hutton is just one who agrees with me.”

But Hutton was a little different. A serious injury he received training in a gymnasium during the Second World War left him with one arm significantly shorter and weaker than the other; hook shots became impossible to play safely. And Hutton survived long spells of persistent short-pitched bowling from Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller during the 1946–47 and 1948 Ashes series with his reputation intact, after a few scares as he worked out the best way to play the short ball after his injury. Hammond had no such success, and on the few occasions he faced such an attack, he failed.

Foot mentioned that, while recording a documentary about Hammond in the 1980s, Les Ames made several candid comments off-camera. He noted that, during Hammond’s incredible 1928–29 success, Australia had no fast bowler: Jack Gregory was long past his best and an injury during the first Test ended his career; Tim Wall played in the final game but was never an outright fast bowler. The remainder of the bowling was a succession of medium-pacers and spinners of varying ability. And Ames said: “When we came up against the West Indians, I did detect on Wally’s part a slight weakness against the really quick, short stuff. Yes, of course, [Manny] Martindale and [Learie] Constantine worried him a bit.” In fact, Constantine dismissed Hammond eight times in ten Tests.

Bob Wyatt also told Foot about an occasion when he opened the batting with Hammond in South Africa and the fast bowler Sandy Bell was making the new ball rise sharply; Wyatt was left to face the attack while Hammond largely made sure he was at the other end. He also recalled the Gentlemen v Players match at 1939 (by which time Hammond was an amateur and captained the Gentlemen) when Hammond “virtually threw his wicket away” while Bill Bowes and BIll Copson were bowling fast and in intimidatory fashion. Even Reg Sinfield, a huge admirer of his old team-mate, admitted in later years that Hammond, who occasionally opened the batting for Gloucestershire with him, preferred to leave him to face the bulk of the new ball.

There are two instances when he appears to have been particularly uncomfortable. At the start of the third Test of the “Bodyline” series of 1932–33, Australia’s Tim Wall was bowling very quickly on a first morning pitch which offered a little. Coming in after the fall of an early wicket, Hammond looked distinctly uncomfortable facing a series of bouncers from Wall. One ball forced him to duck but struck his bat. He was soon out to an uncontrolled shot which he edged behind. According to Bill O’Reilly, who was playing in the game, he muttered as he went off: “If that’s what the bloody game’s coming to, I’ve had enough of it.” But this may have been mischief on O’Reilly’s part to emphasise how unfair the short-pitched bowling in that series was (he said this in his 1985 autobiography, written when “bodyline” had become topical after its fiftieth anniversary), because Hammond also said something very similar when he was struck by a short ball from Martindale in the 1933 series against the West Indies.

And the West Indies were his weak-spot. In 1928, when he was still finding his feet in the England team, he scored 111 runs in three Tests at an average of 37.00, with one fifty. In 1933, he scored 74 runs in three Tests at 24.66. In 1934–35, he scored 174 runs in four Tests at 25.00 (for the last three Tests, the West Indies had a three-man fast bowling attack). In the latter two series, he failed to reach fifty once. His only century against the West Indies came against a much slower attack in 1939. In 13 Tests against them, he scored 639 at 35.50; against every other team, he averaged over fifty.

His other big weakness, surprising in a batter who was so effective in general, was a lack of leg-side shots. Australian bowlers, most notably Bill O’Reilly, discovered that they could reduce him to virtual strokelessness by targeting his leg-stump with the fielders carefully placed on the leg-side. A similar approach by the Australians in 1930–31 caused George Headley to modify his technique to open up the leg-side and overcome this restrictive approach to the point that his opponents later described him as one of the best on-side batters they had seen. Hammond had no such response. Gubby Allen told Murphy that the reason arose from Hammond’s positioning at the crease, which was set up to play through the off-side and meant that he was unbalanced for leg-side shots.

This limited him in 1932–33, but he averaged over fifty in the series, finishing second in the English batting averages, and had a strike-rate of 41.23 per 100 deliveries. Similarly, in 1937–38, he overcame the approach well enough to score 468 runs at 58.50 (and a strike-rate of 37.56). However, in England, the tactic was very effective. In 1930, Hammond scored 306 runs at 34.00 (sixth in the averages) at a rate of 33.44 per 100 deliveries, the slowest of England’s regular batters. Bradman scored 978 at 122.25, breaking Hammond’s record from 1928–29 for most runs in a Test series. And 1934 was a disaster for Hammond. His 162 runs at 20.25 placed him tenth in the English batting; he did not pass fifty and his runs again came slowly (although his strike-rate of 35.06 was not especially low compared to his team-mates). In that series, Bradman scored 758 runs at 94.75. It is not unfair to say that in these two series, in which he was overshadowed by Bradman, Hammond’s failures were the difference between winning and losing.

British Pathé footage of the second Test of the 1938 Ashes series, played at Lord’s; there are a few flashes of Hammond’s 240

When he was captain in England in 1938, Hammond had his best home series against Australia. His 240 at Lord’s came after England had collapsed to 31 for three to the fast bowling of Ernie McCormick. But this time Hammond stood firm. He also scored 76 on a difficult pitch at Headingley, but his dismissal (and his second innings duck) went a long way to securing Australia’s win that allowed them to retain the Ashes. But he averaged 67.16 (although the high-scoring nature of the series meant he was only fifth in the England averages) and he had a strike rate of 51.93, although he was inevitably beaten by Bradman’s average of 108.50.

Apart from the weakness of the Australian attack, there is another often-overlooked factor in his success in 1928–29. He scored runs largely through eliminating any risk. His long innings were scored slowly, and his overall strike-rate of 35.89 indicates a cautious approach. Sydney Southerton, writing in Wisden, observed: “Hammond did not bat as we had previously seen him do in England. He exercised a certain restraint without, however, ever becoming a plodder. He knew, as we all did, that if he stayed there the runs would come. He ran no unnecessary risk and yet all the time batted beautifully. Like many other English batsmen he found it hard to get the ball away on the off-side but, even with the field placed to meet his favourite shots, he discovered means of placing the ball through the covers in masterly style.”

The idea of Hammond at Test level as being a beautiful and destructive batter seems to be largely a myth based on his form at county level. His record against South Africa and New Zealand was immense; but these teams generally had weak attacks, allowing him to reproduce his county form. Perhaps his two centuries against a good Indian attack in 1936 had more merit; the opening bowlers Mohammad Nissar and Amar Singh were as good as any in the world. But more often, Hammond struggled to dominate against the best attacks.

The worst spell of his career came between 1933 and 1935, when he endured a run of 22 Test innings without a fifty and averaged 23.47 in 14 Tests across four series, two of which were against the West Indies. There were even calls for him to be dropped before he scored more heavily in the later part of the 1935 summer. The patchiness of his Test form — which was exacerbated, but not wholly caused by, health problems including recurrent sore throats and back trouble in the mid-1930s — was not found in the record of Hobbs, Sutcliffe or Hutton. But worse for Hammond, it was not found in the record of Bradman, with whom he was constantly and unfavourably compared, to his considerable irritation.

This fallibility is reflected in the 1936–37 series. An unbeaten 231 in the second Test (played at his beloved Sydney Cricket Ground) helped England to a 2–0 lead in the series before Australia won the rain-affected third match. In the fourth Test, England faced an achievable target of 392 in the fourth innings on a good pitch, which would have guaranteed a series win. They were 148 for three at the end of the fifth day (it was a timeless match so there was no possibility of a draw). Hammond was not out, the key to the game and therefore the Ashes. He was bowled third ball of the sixth morning; George Duckworth, watching from the dressing room, said: “We wouldn’t have got Don [Bradman] out first thing in the morning with the Ashes at stake.” As it was Neville Cardus who related this story, we should perhaps not treat it literally, but it reinforces a perception that Hammond did not have a reputation for success under pressure. Bradman, for example, scored 270, 212 and 169 in the crucial final three Tests but Hammond failed to pass 56. In contrast, Hammond’s English contemporaries — Hobbs, Sutcliffe and Hutton, or lesser batters like Maurice Leyland or Les Ames — at various times succeeded when everyone else had failed and when, under enormous pressure, they were all that stood between England and defeat. It is hard to think of many similar instances for Hammond at Test level.

Cardus, for all that he viewed Hammond as an incredibly good batter, and whose virtues he proclaimed from the first time he saw him bat, did acknowledge some of Hammond’s limitations. In Close of Play (1956), he discussed how Hammond changed his approach at Test level: “He merged into maturity just as Test matches were changing in temper and attitude”. Cardus observed that before 1928–29, no-one had batted in Test matches with the remorseless efficiency demonstrated by Hammond, and which would be taken to new heights by Bradman. As Cardus put it: “The greatest batsman for the purposes of Test matches … was he who stayed in for hours and complied large quantities of runs, not necessarily by commanding and beautiful strokes but by the processes of attrition.” Cardus preferred to remember the younger Hammond, the man who took those centuries off the Lancashire attack. For England, “Hammond fitted himself into the new economy and ethic of sport; and he lost nothing of the grand manner while making the adjustment and the ordered concession to the mathematical and the mechanical. He cut out all but his safest strokes; he became patience on a pedestal of modern concrete … He reserved for matches of lesser importance flashes or flickers of his proper brilliance.”

Cardus also wrote of another occasion where Hammond’s ability cost England. On a badly rain-affected pitch at Melbourne during the 1936–37 tour, Hammond scored those 32 runs when batting was almost impossible. He remained at the wicket for 80 minutes; his dismissal was the start of a collapse of six wickets for eight runs, and the England captain Gubby Allen declared on 76 for nine, 124 behind. But Cardus, while acknowledging Hammond’s brilliance, wondered if he would have been better to hit out and score his runs in a fraction of the time, allowing the English bowlers the use of the impossible sticky wicket.

Cardus also discussed how Hammond sometimes appeared bored: “Hammond in his pomp occasionally suggested that he was batting lazily, with not all his mind alert. When he at times scored slowly on a perfect wicket he conveyed to us an impression that he was missing opportunities to get runs because of some absence of mind or indolence of disposition. He once said to me after he had made a large score on a comfortable wicket, ‘It’s too easy.’ He preferred a worn dust-heap at Cheltenham, where he would put the most dangerous attack to the sword.”

Cardus concluded: “He was an artist of variable moods. But he was greater than the statisticians suspect … There were more things in Hammond’s cricket than are dreamed of in the scorebook’s economy.” And yet in a curious reversal, it is statistics which today preserve for Hammond a status which, under the harshest spotlight, perhaps he does not entirely deserve.

“I think he’s an absolute shit”: The Private Life of Wally Hammond

Wally Hammond in 1930 (Image: Wikipedia)

Of all the men to captain the England cricket team, few have been such complex figures as Wally Hammond. He has fascinated cricket followers since he first batted for Gloucestershire in the 1920s; even today, he is one of the few names from the past who is unquestioningly classed as a great batter. His average is among the highest of all time in Test cricket, and memories of his glorious off-side shots echo even now. No-one who had played alongside or against Hammond could resist talking about him (or writing about him), and he was the batting hero of many team-mates and spectators. Furthermore, he has been the subject of three biographies: by Ronald Mason in 1962, by Gerald Howat in 1984 and, most influentially by David Foot in 1996. The latter book is based on years of conversations with Hammond’s former team-mates in the Gloucestershire and England teams. But — and with Hammond there always seems to be a caveat — he was a solitary figure in the dressing room: admired as a cricketer but often disliked, and sometimes even despised, as a person. His personal life was messy and he had a (probably deserved) reputation among team-mates for promiscuity. He was also known to be a social climber, culminating into his manufactured ascent to the England captaincy in 1938. Why was there such a contrast between Hammond the cricketer and Hammond the person?

The story is fairly straightforward at face value, and quite well-known. Walter Reginald Hammond was the son of of William Hammond — a corporal in the Royal Garrison Artillery at Dover Castle — and Marion Crisp, but the date of his parents’ marriage, just six months before his birth in June 1903, suggest a somewhat enforced arrangement. Hammond’s early years were spent overseas as his father was posted to Hong Kong and Malta. They returned to England before the First World War, and Hammond was sent to boarding school. His father was killed fighting in France in 1918, and his mother appears to have been emotionally distant from her son. She was also, from all accounts of those who knew Hammond, a terrible snob and this may have rubbed off on her only child.

Hammond’s reputation as a school cricketer was good enough to interest Gloucestershire, and having played three games as an amateur in 1920, just after he left Cirencester Grammar School (having attended Portsmouth Grammar School for a time), he signed as a professional for the 1921 season. His first seasons were a challenge: he failed abysmally in his only two appearances in 1921, overwhelmed by the pace bowling of the touring Australian team, and an inconclusive start in 1922 was curtailed when the influential Lord Harris noticed his Kent birthplace and challenged his qualification for Gloucestershire under the County Championship rules in place at the time. He spent most of the 1921 and 1922 seasons working as an assistant coach under the former Yorkshire batsman John Tunnicliffe at Clifton College and playing football intermittently for Bristol Rovers. But once officially qualified for Gloucestershire, he began to make progress, with a century on his first appearance in 1923 and over a thousand runs in that first full season. His record over the next two years was unspectacular but clearly heading on an upward trajectory; critics purred at his technique and potential, while his bowling suggested an all-rounder in the making. And sometimes, he produced something very special indeed: 174 not out on a terrible pitch against Middlesex after Gloucestershire had been bowled out for 31 in their first innings; 250 not out in 1925 against a Lancashire attack including the Australian fast bowler Ted McDonald, whom he repeatedly hooked for four or six when he pitched short.

The next stage in his development was his selection for a strong, but by no means representative, MCC team which toured the West Indies in early 1926. In the first unofficial Test match against the full West Indies team, Hammond scored 238 not out, and clearly looked an England cricketer in the making. Then it went very wrong. He became seriously ill, and missed the entire 1926 season. At one point, his life was in danger and it was suggested his leg might have to be amputated. We shall return to this illness shortly, but after a winter convalescing in South Africa, he returned triumphantly in 1927, scoring over 1,000 first-class runs in May, only the second man to do so after W. G. Grace. He was selected to tour South Africa in 1927–28 with the MCC team, making his England Test debut in that series. He did well enough to be chosen in the fully representative England team at home against the West Indies in 1928, and although his Test record remained unremarkable, his weight of runs for Gloucestershire made him an obvious choice for Percy Chapman’s team which toured Australia in 1928–29. Any doubts about his ability were erased as he scored 905 runs at an average of 113.12; 779 of those came in five innings. He followed up with an average of almost 60 in the 1929 series against South Africa, and was clearly the best batter in the world.

Hammond batting in Australia in 1928; Bert Oldfield is the wicket-keeper (Image: National Museum of Australia)

But here we have another caveat because the problem for Hammond was that in 1930, Donald Bradman scored 974 runs at 139.14, and over the next decade proved himself almost unarguably (at least from a statistical viewpoint) the greatest batter of all time. And to compound the problem, Hammond’s form collapsed. While Bradman re-wrote the record books, Hammond averaged just 34 in the 1930 series. In 1934, Bradman averaged 94.75 while Hammond averaged 20.25, with a highest score of 43. Against the West Indies in 1933 (74 runs in three innings) and 1934–35 (175 runs in eight innings, average 25.00), Hammond similarly failed. His only real success against anyone other than New Zealand (a team with a somewhat weak attack) between 1930 and 1935 was in the Bodyline series of 1932–33, when he averaged 55.00 (still less than Bradman, who in his worst series averaged 56.57). Some of this was connected with ill health, and he gradually recovered his form in 1935 and 1936. It should also be stressed that throughout the 1930s, he remained supreme in county cricket, and topped the English first-class batting averages in every season from 1933 until 1939 (and again in 1946).

From 1935 until 1939, he averaged substantially over fifty in every series he played, including two against Australia, but never surpassed Bradman. In 1938, he became an amateur, a decision which cleared the path for him to captain England in the last three series before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Serving in the Royal Air Force during the war, Hammond did not see active service; he was mainly involved in welfare work. He was given easy and safe postings, and had time for a huge amount of charity cricket. He was also able to spend a lot of time in South Africa. He resumed his cricket with Gloucestershire in 1946, but was increasingly bothered by ill health. He toured Australia one last time in 1946–47, failed horribly and effectively retired afterwards, barring a handful of ill-advised later appearances.

That is the brief outline of Hammond’s career, although there is far more to be said about Hammond the cricketer. But what fascinated his team-mates, friends and later writers was not just what took place on the field. Other factors always bubbled away in the background. Foot records some of the many rumours that swirled around Hammond, amplified by the awe with which his contemporaries viewed his batting. The most important of these was connected to his serious illness in 1926. According to Foot in Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why, Hammond had contracted a sexually-transmitted disease, probably syphilis. The evidence — although purely circumstantial, far from conclusive, and sometimes overplayed — is reasonably convincing and Foot’s conclusions have been accepted by cricket historians. But this is not the only interpretation, as Foot acknowledged.

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The MCC team which toured the West Indies in 1925–26, pictured during the Jamaican leg of the tour, during which Hammond was already suffering symptoms of his mystery illness. Back row: L. G. Crawley, G. Collins. Middle row: F. Watson, C. F. Root, W. R. Hammond, E. J. Smith, W. E. Astill, R. Kilner, P. Holmes. Front row: Unknown, H. L. Dales, L. H. Tennyson, F. S. G. Calthorpe (captain), T. O. Jameson, C. T. Bennett.

Hammond’s explanation for the illness was a mosquito bite. He also wrote a letter during the tour in which he mentioned that he had received an electric shock through a ring on his finger before leaving England; the resulting burn had “turned to blood poisoning”. Others, including E. J. Smith (who was part of the team for that 1926 tour) and Alan Gibson, had dropped oblique hints about the nature of the illness before Foot wrote his book. Foot reports that others, off the record, were more explicit that Hammond had “picked up a dose”. And it seems to be these rumours which convinced Foot. But he also reports other rumours in circulation which he dismisses. For example, many of Hammond’s contemporaries thought that he was an alcoholic. Others hinted that he was of mixed heritage. Foot reported that many thought that he had Romani ancestry while he noted that Joe Hardstaff and Charles Barnett both thought — using offensive language — that he was mixed race. None of the rumours had much to support them (although he did drink heavily) and yet Foot accepted the ones about syphilis.

While the symptoms reported in Hammond’s case — including swelling and fever — would match those of syphilis or another sexually transmitted disease (and Foot did speak to medical experts in researching his book), they would also match a variety of other illnesses. When Roy Kilner died in 1928 of “enteric fever” (typhoid fever), no-one questioned how he had acquired it, even though it remained a mystery. The death of W. W. Whysall in 1930 was never attributed to anything other than the septicaemia caused when he injured his knee on a dance floor. But for some reason, Hammond attracted rumours just as much as he may or may not have attracted mosquitos.

A large part of Foot’s reasoning is that Hammond appears to have been far more moody and withdrawn after his return from the illness. This is not surprising: Hammond nearly died and his cricket career was endangered. But Foot attributes the change to Hammond’s treatment for syphilis, the most common medicine at the time being mercury. With no actual evidence, Foot suggests that Hammond’s apparent personality change was caused by mercury poisoning. This is probably the weakest part of his argument, not least because not many people to whom he spoke knew Hammond well both before and after the illness, but does not necessarily invalidate the idea that he was suffering from a sexually transmitted disease. And what is indisputable is that Hammond’s lifestyle put him at risk of acquiring such an infection.

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Hammond an an unknown friend in Australia, during the Queensland leg of the 1928–29 MCC tour of Australia

Foot spoke to several people who knew Hammond before his illness; most considered him quiet but likeable. They also noted that he liked to entertain women, although they were never too sure how far this went. Similarly Foot, along with Hammond’s other biographers, identified several girlfriends from this period, some of whom he became quite close to. Among these were Dorothy Oakey and Kitty Hall. Those who knew Hammond later suggested that women were the primary driving force of his life; one team-mate (unnamed by Foot) suggested that the “two ruling passions of Wally Hammond’s life … were his cricket bat and his genitals”. Or as Eddie Paynter, a frequent Test colleague of Hammond in the 1930s, put it: “Wally, well, yes — he liked a shag!” Always immaculately attired and a lover of fast cars, Hammond was doubtless quite an attraction for women as a famous cricketer. Foot believes that this lay behind the infection he possibly acquired in the Caribbean during the 1926 tour. He suggests that there would have been plenty of opportunity for Hammond to “indulge”, and records team-mates memories — although as ever with Foot it is hard to tell where his sources end and his imagination begins — of him slipping away from the group for an hour or so.

While recovering from the illness, Hammond had fewer girlfriends and appears to have had some intention of “settling down”. But there are suggestions that he had returned to his old ways, to some extent, in Australia. Ben Travers, a writer who accompanied the MCC team throughout their tour during 1928–29, later recalled how Hammond spent time during games perusing the “Ladies Enclosure” with binoculars. Whether anything came of this or not, there was a new development almost as soon as Hammond returned from Australia.

Footage of Hammond’s wedding at Bingley Parish Church in 1929

In a blaze of publicity, in late April 1929, Hammond married Dorothy Lister, the daughter of a wealthy Yorkshire textile merchant called Joseph Lister. Hammond had met Dorothy at the Scarborough Festival in 1927 but the couple cannot have spent much time together. Pathé cameras filmed the arrival of the bride, groom and guests, as well as huge crowds gathered outside the church in Bingley to be close to the wedding of the English batting hero from Australia. Afterwards, the couple had a brief honeymoon on the continent. But the marriage was never a happy one; Dorothy resented Hammond’s frequent absences through his cricket duties and was never a fan of the sport. People who knew the couple said that she could be difficult, and there are hints that she drank heavily (as did Hammond); he was certainly rarely an easy man. It cannot have been a pleasant atmosphere, and it was made worse when Joseph Lister died in November 1932. Following his death, his business failed when the price of wool dropped in the Great Depression, leaving Dorothy with no money — which cynics suggested was the main reason Hammond married her. In his biography of Hammond, Gerald Howat described how a friend of Hammond’s mother believed that it was “the warmth of the Lister household’s welcome rather than the attraction of Dorothy Lister which led him to marry into the family.”

The marriage foundered — and both Foot and Howat accepted that Hammond was primarily to blame, although they (unconvincingly) argued that Dorothy’s unwillingness to have children was also a factor — and Hammond began to see other women. When he was the MCC captain during the tour of South Africa in 1938–39, Dorothy travelled there in the middle of the tour in an attempt to save the marriage. But he had already met someone else: Sybil Ness-Harvey, generally described as a “former beauty queen”. He spent a great deal of time during that tour in her company, and they remained in contact afterwards. During the Second World War, when he was stationed for a time in Egypt, Hammond frequently travelled to see her. Dorothy realised that their marriage was over, sold the house and moved to the Isle of Wight. She later returned to Yorkshire.

Hammond and Dorothy Lister photographed in the 1930s (Image: Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why (1996) by David Foot)

Hammond with Sybil Ness-Harvey leaving the Registry Office after their wedding in 1947 (Image: Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why (1996) by David Foot)

Hammond’s relationship with Sybil Ness-Harvey continued after the war, and while he was captaining England to a heavy defeat in Australia in 1946–47, the press reported that he was attempting to divorce Dorothy. The resulting publicity caused him considerable stress, and once the divorce came through he married Sybil almost as soon as he returned to England. The couple eventually had three children and the family later moved to South Africa, where Hammond died in 1965.

If Hammond had an easy way with women, his relationships with men were more strained. While members of the Gloucestershire team were always in awe of his cricketing talent, and in later years younger players hero-worshipped him, he was not a good team-mate. He was happier surrounding himself with influential people or those who could help him with his ambitions. Contemporaries noted how he consciously copied the dress, style and manners of amateur cricketers such as the Gloucestershire captain Bev Lyon; he was close to very few professionals. Some Gloucestershire players actively hated him; other team-mates and opponents also had problems with him.

Learie Constantine was one such player, and wrote about this himself; he claimed that the pair had an ongoing feud on the field which arose from Hammond’s attitude towards him when the pair met during the 1926 MCC tour. Constantine believed that Hammond snubbed him owing to racism, having been friendly enough when they met during the West Indies’ 1923 tour. The result was a series of onfield encounters punctuated by hostility and short-pitched bowling. By Constantine’s own account, this ended when the pair shook hands during the second Test of the 1933 series in England; therefore the “feud” cannot have lasted long as they only faced each other in 1926 and during the 1928 tour of England.

Charles Dacre was a team-mate of Hammond in the Gloucestershire team; he and Hammond did not get along, although we only know this through the recollections of other players as retold by David Foot. Dacre was a New Zealander who remained in England after touring with the 1927 team to qualify for Gloucestershire. Foot wrote: “[Dacre’s] brash self-confidence and jaunty attitude towards going for his shots, not necessarily in the team’s interest, led to a number of bellicose exchanges with Hammond. ‘I just can’t get on with that bloody Kiwi,’ Wally would say. He bridled whenever Dacre’s name was mentioned.”

Confirmation of a kind came from Grahame Parker, who played for Gloucestershire in the 1930s; he recalled one match in which Dacre was keeping wicket and chose to stand up to the stumps when Hammond was bowling. Hammond bowled faster and faster, conceding numerous byes, forcing Dacre to stand further back and bowling wildly, making Dacre “more of a goalkeeper than a wicket-keeper” according to Parker. Reg Sinfield, who also played for Gloucestershire, also related to Foot how Dacre told him on one occasion that he got out to a loose shot simply so he would not have to bat with Hammond.

Others from the Gloucestershire team did not like Hammond; during a Gentleman v Players match at Lord’s, Pelham Warner was watching alongside Basil Allen, who played for Gloucestershire between 1932 and 1951, and captained the county in 1937 and 1938 when Hammond was in the team. Warner said at one point to Allen: “Basil, that Wally Hammond of yours really is a wonderful chap, isn’t he?” Allen responded: “If you want my honest opinion, Plum, I think he’s an absolute shit.” Foot claimed to have heard the story from “three impeccable sources”, but it does raise the question of who these sources might have been. Among the men who could have overheard such a conversation, all of whom would have been influential amateurs at the top of English cricket’s social tree, who would have been willing to pass along such gossip? Was there an actual witness, or was it just more rumours and second-hand gossip passed to Foot by his “impeccable sources”?

Perhaps the team-mate who had the biggest feud with Hammond was Charles Barnett. His contempt for Hammond, with whom he had once been close, poured from almost every interview he gave. His main issue was over Hammond’s treatment of Dorothy, but also over his apparent refusal to appear in Barnett’s benefit match in 1947. Some of his criticisms have validity, but others arose from blind hatred, making him an often unreliable witness. Another man who took issue with Hammond was Denis Compton, who played for England under Hammond’s captaincy. Many of his complaints concerned the disastrous 1946–47 tour of Australia, when Hammond was far past his best and extremely unhappy. And most of their contemporaries agree that Hammond disliked Bradman intensely, and the two men had a tense relationship throughout their careers.

In fact, there were few cricketers with whom Hammond had a close relationship, but those who liked him were very loyal, even to the point of protective defensiveness. Most describe a quiet, self-conscious character, completely at odds with the impression he gave on the field. While some saw him as aloof or self-absorbed, others perceived shyness. Players like his Gloucestershire team-mate Sinfield and his England team-mate Les Ames spoke very highly of him for the rest of their lives, as did Len Hutton, another England team-mate, to a lesser extent.

The overall impression, though, is clear. Hammond was not a popular man with many cricketers. His aspirations to reach a higher social class — culminating in his switch to amateur status — meant that he was never really “one of the boys” in the Gloucestershire or England team. But even those who actively disliked him had to admit that he was an excellent batter. However, looked at objectively, even here there were some qualifications…

Both a Gentleman and a Player: The story of Edwin Diver

Portrait of Edwin Diver from his interview in Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game, 21 December 1899

On 26, 27 and 28 April 1886, during Easter Week, a fairly unremarkable early-season cricket match took place at the Oval between Surrey and Gloucestershire. Surrey dominated and won by five wickets. But the scorecard conceals an unusual occurrence. Two former amateurs, Gloucestershire’s Walter Gilbert and Surrey’s Edwin Diver, were by coincidence both making their first appearances as paid professional cricketers. Neither man had an especially impressive match, although Gilbert took three wickets in one over, while Diver shared a fifty-run partnership with Bobby Abel, who scored a century. But their performances were a side-note as most of the interest in the game came from their almost unprecedented conversion from amateur to professional.

Walter Gilbert’s first-class professional career began and ended with this match. Before Gloucestershire played again, he had been arrested for theft and, after completing a 28-day sentence of hard labour, moved to Canada to begin a new life away from the scandal that brought his time in English cricket to a close. His spectacular fall has been written about several times.

Far less well-known is the story of Edwin Diver, the other debutant professional in that Surrey v Gloucestershire match. Diver was seven-and-a-half years younger than Gilbert and had a much more successful professional career. Unlike Gilbert, whose decision to become a professional was a desperate final attempt to overcome crippling financial difficulties, Diver arrived via a gentler route. He soon became only the second player, after Richard Daft, to play in the Gentlemen v Players match as both an amateur and a professional. And despite his switch of status, he remained highly regarded by the cricketing establishment – when he died, a generous obituary appeared in Wisden. However, Diver’s career came to a slightly untidy conclusion for reasons that are unclear.

Edwin James Diver was the nephew of Alfred Diver, a professional batsman who was a member of the first overseas team of English cricketers, which toured North America in 1859. Edwin’s father James was a college porter at Cambridge University; the family lived in various locations, so it is not clear at which college he worked, but they usually lived near Jesus College. Edwin was born in Cambridge a few weeks before the 1861 census, which records a midwife was still living with the family at their home on Upper Park Street. By 1871 the family, now living at Jesus Lane, could afford to employ a servant. Unlike the Gilbert family, there are no indications that they had financial problems.

At the time of the 1881 census, Diver was an Assistant Master at Wimbledon College in Surrey (although his name is almost illegible on the census return, it is certainly him). He had already established himself as a good cricketer. On one occasion, he scored 131 playing against his employers for the Stygians.

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The Surrey team in 1885; Diver, then playing as an amateur, is standing at the back, second from the left

Working at Wimbledon College allowed him to qualify by residence for Surrey, for whom he played as an amateur from 1883. He averaged in the mid-20s in his first season, playing during the school holidays, and scored five fifties, respectable figures at the time. In his Wisden obituary, the editor Sydney Pardon recalled his early days with Surrey:

“He will always be best remembered on account of his short but brilliant connection with Surrey … A most attractive batsman in point of style, with splendid hitting power on the off side, his success was immediate. Indeed, he created such an impression that in the following year he was given a place in the Gentlemen’s Eleven against the Australians at Lord’s.”

In that 1884 game against the Australians, Diver batted very well when he came in to bat in the second innings with his team needing 45 to win having lost six wickets. He and AG Steel knocked off the runs without being parted. Further recognition came for Diver that season when he was selected for the Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval (although he scored a pair). It is clear that, at this stage in his career, he was starting to position himself among the leading amateurs in England. He never quite progressed though. In his obituary, Pardon wrote: “It cannot be said that Diver ever improved on his earliest efforts for Surrey, but he held his own, playing many a fine innings”. But in fairness to Diver, this may have been owing to what was happening off the field. Around this time, Wimbledon College went bankrupt, leaving him without an income. Diver, like many amateurs, was left struggling to afford a cricket career.

In The Players (1988), Ric Sissons details what happened next. In September 1884, the Surrey Committee made the rather unorthodox decision to pay Diver, still nominally an amateur, £2 per week throughout the winter “as long as he remains in the county”. In cricket terms, this paid off as he scored over 900 runs in 1885, including his first century for the county. In August 1885, Surrey gave him £75 to mark his “retirement” as he gave up cricket apparently to work in an office.

But in April 1886, Diver wrote to the Committee, saying that he was “heartily sick of office work and extremely fond of cricket but not having private means to allow me to continue to play as an amateur”. Therefore he asked to join the Surrey ground-staff as a professional; the Committee consented, although giving no guarantees how often he would play. Diver’s father was irritated, complaining to the Committee who replied to him that “no encouragement had been given to EJ Diver to become a professional.”

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The Surrey team in 1886; Diver, now a professional, is seated third from the left

That season, Diver played 22 first-class matches, although he was less successful with the bat than in previous years. Nevertheless, he was selected once more for the Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval, this time for the professional team, making him one of the very few men to appear for both sides in this fixture, and only the second after Richard Daft.

However, this was Diver’s only season as a Surrey professional. Perhaps the wage paid by Surrey was not enough to make ends meet. But it also appears that he wished to continue working as a schoolmaster. When the season ended, he returned to Cambridge and opened his own school. Cricket wished him luck on his “return to his old vocation” and recorded that he had “taken premises in Trumpington Street”. Around this time, he also played with some distinction for Cambridge Victoria Cricket Club. He enjoyed a remarkable season in 1887: he scored 213 against Royston, then shortly after, in the space of a week, he scored 312 not out against St John’s College and 200 against Biggleswade. Some regret was expressed that Diver had been lost to first-class cricket.

But as recorded by Sissons in The Players, Diver continued to be associated with cricket. He later became the joint secretary and treasurer of Cambridgeshire County Cricket Club; Sissons does not say if this was a paid position, but it most likely would have been, which may suggest that Diver’s school was short-lived.

In 1891, Diver moved to Birmingham, where he played professional football for Aston Villa, appearing in three matches as a goalkeeper and seems to have remained on their books for three seasons. He also played cricket for Birmingham in the Midland League, although it is unclear whether he did so as an amateur or professional. Some clues about his status also appear in the pages of Cricket. In 1891, he played a first-class match for the South against the North; the scorecard omits his initials, indicating that he played as a professional. But at the end of the season, he appeared for “Eighteen of District” against “Eleven of Warwickshire” at Birmingham in a benefit match for AA Lilley. On this scorecard, he is given initials and so must have appeared as an amateur; Sydney Santall, another cricketer who played both as amateur and professional, played in this match as a professional.

In November 1894, Diver married Alice Beasley, the daughter of a publican, at Birmingham Parish Church; he listed his profession as “cricketer”. They had one child, Nora, in 1896 (although from what Diver said on the 1911 census, they may have had another child who did not survive and for whom there is no record). The couple managed hotels after their marriage, moving several times before settling at the Priory Hotel in Walsall.

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The Warwickshire team in 1898; Diver is seated on the far right, his fellow amateur-turned-professional Sydney Santall is standing in the centre of the back row

Living in Birmingham eventually gave Diver a residential qualification to play for Warwickshire, for whom he played before they achieved first-class status. He resumed his first-class career as a professional with the county from 1894, although he only appeared a few times in 1895, the club’s first season in the County Championship. Diver was reasonably successful for Warwickshire from 1896, when he appeared more regularly. He was second in the county’s averages for 1896, but was fifth or lower from then until his career ended in 1901.

Diver had his best season in first-class cricket in 1899, passing 1,000 runs for the only time in his career. His only century came against Leicestershire, but this innings of 184 – out of a total of 276 – was his highest in first-class cricket. The runs came in 155 minutes and he reached his hundred before lunch on the first day. His reward for this form was to be selected once more for the Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval.

At the end of the season, Diver became the first professional to captain Warwickshire when no amateurs were available for their match against Essex at Leyton. As there were so many professionals, the Essex Committee permitted the Warwickshire team to use the changing room for visiting amateurs, but told them they could not use the amateurs’ gate, and instead must take a circuitous detour though the pavilion to use the side gate; they were also not permitted to sit in front of the pavilion. Contemporary reports reveal that two Warwickshire players pointedly refused to follow the instructions, using the amateurs’ gate to cheers from the crowd, and Diver protested to the Essex Committee. Sissons wrote in The Players that Diver went further and led the players along the boundary to enter the field by the amateurs’ gate, leading to a complaint from Essex, the home team. Contemporary reports do not mention this, but do suggest that there was some minor controversy over the events of the game. Sympathy was largely with Warwickshire, and Essex apologised for their treatment of the professionals.

A feature in Sporting Life in December 1899 following his successful season said that Diver claimed of his switch to professionalism that “amongst gentlemen the change made has not altered his position socially”. The article also reported: “At the present time Diver is highly respected in and around Birmingham, being the proprietor of one of the most flourishing hotels in the Midlands.” These two suggestions appear somewhat contradictory: it is hard to see that leading amateur cricketers of the time – men like CB Fry, Lord Hawke or FS Jackson – would have wished to associate with a professional cricketer who was running a hotel.

Diver was also interviewed for a feature in Cricket that December. The writer judged that “Diver’s cricket is of the kind which everybody likes to watch. He does not play a rash game, but on the other hand he never misses a chance of scoring, and while he is at the wickets it is a certainty that there will be some altogether delightful hits.” He commented that Diver hit especially hard on the off-side. Despite his experience in the Birmingham League, he considered that leagues were bad for first-class cricket; he also criticised slow play and defensive batting.

Diver had a poor season in 1900, and played just once in 1901, his final season in first-class cricket. But it is not exactly clear why his career ended as he had only suffered from one poor season and he played a good innings of 31 during his only appearance in 1901. There are a few possible explanations, but it appears the choice was his own and that he was not dropped. Perhaps outside interests prevented him playing more frequently: in October 1900 he had been elected President of Walsall Football Club, which may have taken up his time. He also may have needed to give more attention to his hotel. Or it is possible that increasing financial worries occupied his attention.

The Priory Hotel, Walsall pictured in 1983; the building is now an outlet of KFC (Image: Black Country History)

The 1901 census records him still as the manager of the Priory Hotel in Walsall, with a live-in staff of eight, plus his wife, daughter, and a relative of his wife. But this state of affairs did not last. On 12 November 1901, Diver disappeared without saying goodbye to his wife. The only clue she had came from a guest who told her that “Mr. Diver was seen at Queenstown to go aboard a boat bound for New York”. Supported by their brewery, Alice Diver applied to have the licence transferred to her name, which was approved in court. At the hearing, she explained that Diver was in financial difficulties; she also reported that she had previously managed the hotel during his absences through cricket and had great experience of managing public houses (presumably through her father). She stated that she had no intention of allowing Diver to return. By the end of February 1902, when the licence was permanently transferred to Mrs Diver, she had still not heard from her husband.

It appears that Warwickshire had not entirely given up on the notion that Diver could still play for them despite his disappearance, but an early-season issue of Cricket in 1902 listed him as “not likely to play” during 1902. Instead, Diver surfaced in Norfolk, where he played cricket in Hunstanton during the 1902 season. Shortly after this, he moved permanently to Wales. He played as a professional for Newport in Monmouthshire (Cricket reported that he scored 138 for the club in May 1903), and represented Monmouthshire in the Minor Counties Championship between 1905 and 1914. He also represented South Wales in matches against several touring cricketing teams, including Australian sides.

The only time Diver got in touch with his wife was to ask her to “intercede for him with his late employer” – presumably the brewery – and he never asked her to join him or offered her any financial support. These details emerged when Alice Diver applied for a divorce in early 1909 on the grounds of desertion, and adultery with Mrs Ellen Williams (whose maiden name appears to have been Salathiel) between 1905 and 1908. Williams, who supported Alice Diver’s claim, told the court that she had married a journalist called Samuel Williams who, it transpired, was already married and who then abandoned her. It was after this that she became close to Diver, and he “visited her” several times over the following years. The divorce, and custody of their child, was granted to Alice.

According to an article in the Folkestone Express, Sandgate, Shorncliffe & Hythe Advertiser (7 December 1910), Alice continued to have financial problems after the divorce. In 1909, she moved to Folkestone where she attempted to establish her own boarding house but business was never good enough to keep it running. By the end of 1909, she was heavily in debt and had to close the establishment; in late 1910, she was declared bankrupt and moved to Canterbury where she once more became manager of a hotel. On the 1911 census Alice, calling herself widowed, was visiting the Falstaff Hotel in Canterbury but was still listed as a hotel proprietor. By 1918, she had returned to Birmingham and was managing the Pitman Hotel: a report in the Birmingham Daily Post on 18 June recorded that she had been fined for not keeping an accurate register of food served, and exceeding the allowed amount of fat in meals. On the 1939 Register, she was still a hotel keeper, living in Hereford. She lived until 1959. Their daughter Nora married in 1921 and appears to have moved to Canada.

Meanwhile, in 1911, Diver was living alone as a boarder in Newport, listing himself on the census as a “professional cricketer and Ground Manager” at Newport Athletic Club. He remained as a coach at Newport until 1921, when he moved to Pontardawe near Swansea. Soon after, he died of heart failure, being found in bed on the morning of 27 December 1924. His obituary in Wisden, part of the same edition that reported Gilbert’s death, observed that “without realising all the bright promise of his early days, [he] played a prominent part in the cricket field for many years”.

Unlike Gilbert, Diver appears to have been happy to become professional and did not try to remain as an amateur through hidden payments, other than for a short time after he lost his job as a schoolmaster. He never seemed to believe it had brought disgrace upon him. And despite his “conversion”, he was remembered with affection by the cricketing world, as was clear from his Wisden obituary. Sydney Pardon even wrote the entry himself, a courtesy he did not extend to Gilbert in the same edition. Whatever circumstances ended Diver’s first-class career and caused him to leave his wife – and these may have been financial – he continued to play professional cricket and seems to have managed well enough in his later years. But if Gilbert lived happily in Canada with his family and in a respectable new job, perhaps Diver never quite achieved this peace. Instead he died alone in Wales.

By the time Gilbert and Diver died in 1924, few other amateurs had followed them by becoming professionals. CJB Wood had “converted” to a professional, but later reverted to amateur status. FR Santall, the son of Diver’s old team-mate Sydney, played for Warwickshire as an amateur from 1919 until 1923, then as a professional until 1939. But two examples in the later 1920s made a greater success of their conversion than either Gilbert or Diver.

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  Laurie Charles Eastman
  by Bassano Ltd
  whole-plate glass negative, 25 July 1931
  NPG x150091
  © National Portrait Gallery, London

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  Charlie Barnett (Image: Wikipedia)

Laurie Eastman and Charlie Barnett, two amateur-turned-professional cricketers who played in the 1920s and 1930s

LC Eastman, known to the cricket world as “Laurie”, played for Essex between the First and Second World War. Other than his cricket, little is known about Eastman’s life. He was the fourth child of John and Mary Eastman; his father was a tea merchant in London, although between the 1901 and 1911 censuses, he appears to have been reduced from an “employer” to an employed clerk.

During the First World War, Eastman received the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Medal, but for reasons not made entirely clear in his Wisden obituary, the war ended his plan “to take up medicine as his profession”. Instead, he pursued an interest in cricket, making his debut for Essex as an amateur in 1920. In his first match, he took three wickets in four balls; in his third, he scored 91 batting at number ten against Middlesex at Lord’s. But these successes were not followed up, perhaps because, as his Cricketer obituary put it, his form was “adversely affected if the game was going against Essex”. Or in other words, he did not deal well with pressure on the cricket field.

Eastman played six times in 1920 and another six in 1921, presumably as he could not afford to play regularly. But from 1922, Essex followed the path taken by many counties to secure the services of amateurs with financial worries, and appointed him as their Assistant Secretary. From then on, he played regularly. After six years playing as an amateur, he became a professional from 1927, although there was little fanfare over this, and certainly none of the comment that followed the decisions by Gilbert and Diver in 1886. An aggressive batsman who often opened the batting, he was never a consistent performer. In 1929, he passed 1,000 first-class runs for the first time, a feat he repeated four times in the 1930s with his best return being 1,338 runs at an average of 32.63 in 1933. He never took 100 wickets in a season, his best being 99 in 1935, but generally took respectable numbers of wickets, first with medium-paced swing and later with spin. In the 1930s, he wrote several articles for newspapers in the 1930s without revealing too much or being in any way controversial. His career ended with the war in 1939, his benefit match being one of the last played. Injured by the force of a bomb while working as an Air Raid Warden, he never fully recovered and died after undergoing an operation in 1941.

Perhaps one of the most famous and successful “conversions” was Charlie Barnett. He was born in 1910, the son of a former Gloucestershire amateur who worked as a fish, game and poultry dealer. After being educated at Wycliffe, he first played for Gloucestershire as a 16-year-old amateur in 1927 and turned professional in 1929. In 1930, he married a widow who was 13 years his senior. According to his Wisden obituary, “Barnett retained a certain amateur hauteur in his cricket and his life; the supporters knew him as Charlie, but he always regarded himself as Charles. In the dressing-room he became known as The Guv’nor.”

Barnett was an extremely aggressive opening batsman and serviceable medium-paced bowler good enough to play for England in 20 Test matches. He made his debut in 1933, toured Australia for the 1936-37 Ashes series and scored 99 in the first session of the first Test of 1938, reaching his century from the first ball after lunch. Interestingly, on the 1939 Register, he listed himself not as a professional cricketer but as the manager and proprietor of a fish, game and poultry dealer. He briefly played for England after the war, and retired from first-class in 1948 when he went to play as a professional in the Central Lancashire League.

Unlike other ex-amateurs, we know more about Barnett as he lived until 1993 and was a frequent interviewee in later years, not least on the subject of Walter Hammond. And in many ways, he seems to have been an almost stereotypical amateur type; his Wisden obituary concluded:

“In retirement, he ran a business in Cirencester. A journalist called him a fishmonger. He wrote an indignant letter, saying he supplied high-class poultry and game, not least to the Duke of Beaufort. He maintained his amateur mien: he lived like a squire and hunted with the Beaufort and the Berkeley Vale, always, so it is said, with the uncomplicated verve he displayed at the crease.”

David Foot, in his 1996 book Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why had this to say:

“In the dressing room … Barnett was known as The Guvnor. This was because he’d been to a public school, had a better voice and more authority than most of the committee, and usually won an argument when he went striding in – on behalf of fellow pros with a legitimate grievance – to take on the county club’s management. He didn’t have a great sense of humour and was inclined to be bumptious … [He was] a Gloucestershire man of some social status who was not ashamed to play cricket as a professional … [He] lived in a fine Georgian house, hunted twice a week with the Beauforts and the Berkleys and didn’t stand any nonsense from anyone. The other pros very much respected him”.

But for all his impact, Barnett may be better remembered now for his abiding hatred of Hammond, with whom he had once been close. David Foot’s Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why contains a lot of Barnett’s views of his former captain. Even in the kindly hands of Foot, Barnett’s venom comes through; not a little of it appears to have been a slight sense of superiority, but his main grievance appears to have been how Hammond abandoned his first wife to have open affairs, and his unwillingness to play in Barnett’s benefit match in 1947.

Hammond himself famously switched from being a professional to become an amateur and captain England. But, overlooked by many, he actually began his career as an amateur, playing a few games for Gloucestershire in 1920 before signing professional forms for the following season. Hammond was not alone in switching from professional to amateur. Lancashire’s Jack Sharp did so, and subsequently became both Lancashire captain and a Test selector; Vallance Jupp likewise became captain of Northamptonshire after assuming amateur status. Warwickshire’s Jack Parsons went from professional to amateur, back to professional and finally became an amateur again. But perhaps these are stories for another time…