It’s early February, the depths of winter (or at least it’s supposed to be), and that can mean only one thing: cricket. Well, this is at least true for the residents of St Moritz, home of the annual Cricket on Ice Trophy, where this shortest and surely most miserable of northern hemisphere months marks the pinnacle of the cricketing year.
In Britain – apart from a famous day in June 1975 when play between Essex and Kent at Colchester, and Lancashire and Derbyshire at Buxton, was interrupted by rogue summer snowfall (coincidentally the day after Sussex’s John Snow had been recalled by England) – the only history of cricket-ice interaction is of the very distant kind. Happily, that is often the best kind of all.
In February 1838 some 300 people congregated on the Harewood House fishpond, just outside Leeds, to see Harewood score a remarkable 447 runs, with Hugh Barrett at one point scoring 13 with a single shot.
“The pond is 48 acres, and the ice that day was as smooth as glass,” Barrett later recalled. “We had a board for the wicket, with bails on the top, and fine sawdust strewn all about the wickets and the 22 yards.”
At stumps their opponents, the neighbouring Stank CC, were on 213 for four, with Holdsworth on 93 not out and the game due to resume the following morning, but an overnight thaw ensured there would be no more play on the fishpond that winter.
In early 1867 Robert Carpenter, one of the great batsmen of his age, starred in a match played in far from ideal conditions in Cambridge. “Some part of the ground, or rather the ice, was covered with water, and a genius proposed to make a hole to draw it off,” reported the Sportsman. “Of course the proposal had the contrary effect, the weight of the skaters causing the water to pump up from the breakage.
“Doubts were now entertained by many as to the match being played, but, nothing daunted, the game was commenced in a fair inch of slush, some parts of the ice looking very much like sodden lump sugar.” (That day’s paper also contains a news story about “an ordinary-sized orange” purchased in Dundee that contained “another orange of a smaller size inside, perfectly formed”.)
A couple of weeks earlier (it sounds like a cold month) many of the great figures of Nottinghamshire’s early years were involved in a game played entirely on skates. Jemmy Grundy, who represented the county for more than 20 years – playing his final first-class fixture in 1873, the year he died of gout aged 49 – organised (not very well) and played (only slightly better).
“With the usual amount of blunder at the ball, owing to all using skates, the game proceeded merrily for an innings each,” wrote the Nottingham Journal, “the only interference being that several of the numerous bystanders kept fielding the ball, and on the second innings being commenced many began sliding near the wicket, and the game had consequently to be abandoned.”
Charley Brown was on the other side and, according to the Sporting Life, he “kept the players and spectators (of whom there were many) in very good humour, by his rough but lively jokes”. Brown, commonly known as Mad Charley, was a genuine one-off, a wicketkeeper who could bowl, fast and accurate, by whipping his right arm behind his back to propel the ball from somewhere near his left armpit. His hands were said to be so swift that sometimes, when the ball narrowly missed the stumps, he could flick off a bail without anyone seeing a thing.
Brown was a dyer by trade, but his employers found – according to his former teammate Richard Daft – that when cricket was discussed at work “Charley got so excited that he would splash a lot of his dye into the tub of his fellow workman, whose cloth in consequence would come out a most remarkable colour”. He was eventually told that he had to give up either his cricket or his job, and dumped the job.
In January 1880 Swansea and Cadoxton played on a frozen pond near Neath; Swansea were soundly beaten, and one member of the victorious team earned particular praise for his fielding: “Not less remarkable than a cricket match on skates is the participation by a retriever in the game,” read one report, which noted that Cadoxton “were much assisted by the admirable fielding of their canine comrade” (Bob the Retriever appears on the scorecard as their No 11; he was dismissed without scoring).
On New Year’s Day 1929 the journalist and writer JC Squire organised a game at Hambleton between his literary team, the Invalids, and one called the Hampshire Eskimos, in protest at the idea of football being played in August. Play was disrupted for a while by the Hambleton Hounds, who passed across the wicket while on a fox hunt.
The Athletic News cricket correspondent, an ex-player known cryptically as the Gentleman in Black, was a particular fan of ice cricket. “My experience of such events is that play generally proceeds in an unbroken roar of laughter, for in no other phase of the game is ‘the glorious uncertainty of cricket’ so much in evidence,” he wrote. “Fieldsmen, without the slightest warning or intention, are apt to stand suddenly on their head; a bowler, when delivering, is almost as likely as not to arrive before the ball at the striker’s wicket; and the efforts of the batsmen to turn in an attempt to gain a second run for a hit are generally mirth-provoking.
“Matches in the depths of winter may not appeal much to our leading critics, yet they involve plenty of exercise for the players, provide fresh air for the lookers-on, who might otherwise be at home studying their favourite classics in a stuffy atmosphere, and – last, but by no means least – they give one an excellent opportunity of meeting old friends.”
Yet, despite all of that, ice cricket has all but disappeared from Britain. Perhaps it’s because public interest has cooled, perhaps because the climate has warmed, most likely a combination of the two, but these days anyone tired of studying their favourite classics in a stuffy atmosphere has little choice but to look to St Moritz instead.
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