Early Cricket – John Arlott (1977)

From Arlott and Truman on Cricket. The first part of this book is a hundred or so page history of cricket up to the 1970s. Below are the two chapters that deal with early cricket. Arlott once called cricket ‘The Game the Wealden rustics handed down‘¹. His finely judged romanticism is never far away.

1. From his poem about Jack Hobbs entitled “To John Berry Hobbs on his Seventieth Birthday”. It was Arlott’s last poem, probably his best. ↩︎