On the Ashes

Victor Trumper

PRINTING THE LEGEND (2016)*

One of my first cricket books was a slim black Sun paperback called Great Australian Cricket Pictures (1975). When I retrieve it from the shelf now, it falls open at page 87, testifying to my boyhood fascination with the image thereon.

'Trumpered' read the bad-pun heading for the short caption, which described Victor Trumper as 'one of our truly great cricketers', told me that he was 'the first to score a century before lunch in a Test match', which proved to be true, and 'once hit the first ball of a match for six', which was not. So, in the context of assertion, fact and myth, was I introduced to the first cricketer of the past that ever registered with me and to what remains perhaps its oldest truly treasured image.

I had also, though I would be unaware of it for many more years, been introduced to the work of the pioneering Edwardian photographer George Beldam, in whose book Great Batsmen: Their Methods at a Glance (1905) the picture first appeared. Instead, as it usually is, the photograph of Trumper in Great Australian Cricket Pictures appeared uncredited, undated, unaccounted for, as though it had taken itself - or even as though it wasn't a photograph at all, but a keyhole vantage on the past. When not long after I commenced reading about Trumper, it can only have been with the image of him jumping out to drive in mind.

That was then, of course, although now may be less different than we think. Nobody's found a great many more photographs of Trumper, or at least thought to make the others that do exist more readily available to the online browser. Today's ten-year-old would encounter Trumper pretty much the same way as I did, simultaneously with his most famous pictorial representation: google 'Victor Trumper', and one is led to the image. For the more mature fan, meanwhile, the image attests the residual Trumper reputation, even if a good deal of the residual Trumper reputation is based on the image.

When in 2015 I first contemplated writing a book about Trumper, convention drew me towards a biography. Yet I also experienced misgivings. It was 113 years since his zenith when, on the 1902 tour of England, he made 2570 runs at 48.49 with eleven hundreds, including one before lunch on the first day of the Old Trafford Test: though perhaps no batsman had ever batted so brilliantly in a Test match, no eyewitness surived.

Of Trumper, three previous biographers had struggled to make much. The primary material was thin, the residual mythology thick. To write about any figure of the past is essentially to make a claim for them, to make a mission of substantiating their significance. In sport, the allure is of great deeds, stirring victories, public approbation. Yet legend is an uneasy companion of biography, if not an outright enemy. And to track the Trumper story through the standard sources is a little like entering a hall of mirrors. Everyone is quoting everyone else. Stories and their origins have long since parted ways. Did he really farm the bowling of Walter Mead to protect senior colleagues in his 135 not out in the Lord's Test of 1899? Did he really skewer Len Braund's leg-spin during his 185 not out in the Sydney Test of 1903? One channels, instead, impressions. My excellently iconoclastic friend Jarrod Kimber wrote about Trumper in Test Cricket: The Unauthorized Biography (2015) in terms of which Neville Cardus would not have disapproved - and let's just say that these two writers would not normally be thought of as kinsmen.

So I struck a kind of bargain with antiquity. Why not look legend in the eye rather than try to peer around it? Why not evaluate knowingly what a conventional biography would be unavoidably transacting in anyway? 'Fable is more historical than fact,' Chesterton reminds us, 'because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.'

That didn't mean ignoring fact. What became Stroke of Genius still needed extensive biographical underpinnings - partly to illustrate legend's deviations from them, partly because Trumper has been gradually winnowed away to a name and an image. But I was anxious to avoid what so many works about cricket history seem to become - chronologies of scores, transcriptions of match reports, recitations of anecdote. That's not only because these are seldom truly enlightening, but because so much now lies within reach of the interested reader. Want to find out Trumper's scores in 1903-04? Use Cricket Archive. Want to read what people said about these scores? Try Trove or the British Newspaper Archive. In some ways, those of us enticed by cricket's past have yet to adapt to the modern accessibility of informational riches. In any case, what differentiated Trumper was not his scores so much as their interpretation, the heights of lyricism ascended in describing him and the remarkable unanimity of opinion, so that their evocation by a single image did not in the end seem so unnatural - indeed, it would steadily become 'proof' of claims for his aesthetic superiority.

Heading down this track, I grew interested in how cricket was 'seen' before the First World War. Cricket, of course, is a challenging game to watch live, for reasons of distance and speed, without some kind of technological enhancement. Way back when, illustrative forms - painting, engraving, early photography - tended to reflect that. They hovered at the boundary edge, and perforce took in the whole scene. Classics of illustration like Mason's 'A Cricket Match' and Ponsonby Staples's 'An Imaginary Cricket Match' foregrounded the crowd and recessed the cricket. The Victorian Age's outstanding cricket photographic work, Alcock's Famous Cricketers and Cricket Grounds (1892), posed players for wistful portraits, provided venues as tranquil panoramas. Intimacy with action was undreamed of - until George Beldam.

Quite why Beldam is not better known amazes me. Perhaps it is because he is sui generis - he belongs to a leisure society swallowed up by the First World War. He was an amateur cricketer, for Middlesex and London County, who doubled as an amateur photographer: indeed it was one of the passing intrigues of researching my book to learn that photography underwent debates similar to those in cricket about amateurism and professionalism. A century on, we're apt to deem amateurism a kind of effete dabbling. In photography as in cricket, Beldam was a furiously industrious perfectionist. Between 1904 and 1908, he took thousands of photographs for eight works of sports photography, five of them substan tial: not just cricket, but tennis, golf and even ju-jitsu. Nor is this just a matter of versatility. He had the confidence of his caste and skill. It's not a coincidence that Beldam persuaded cricketers to do what they did for no other photographer: he was one of them, and, as an amateur, atop cricket's social heap.

Beldam had the further cachet of a creative partnership with the era's arbiter elegentiae, C. B. Fry. Not only was Fry the finest flower of English amateur sport - batsman, footballer, rugby player, athlete, scholar - but a prolific journalist and editor of an eponymous magazine of outdoor recreation. Fry had both the Victorian fascination with technique and the Edwardian infatuation with style - which he defined with a Ruskinian formulation about the maximum effect for the least apparent effort. Long entranced by the unique elan and deftness of his Sussex and England teammate Ranjitsinhji, Fry was captivated by a photograph that Beldam took of Ranji at Hove in September 1904.

These were not action photographs as we would now understand them. To bridge that abiding gap between boundary edge and action, Beldam circulated among his subjects during practice sessions and at intervals; sometimes he invited them to his home where he enjoyed the gentlemanly indulgence of an outdoor and an indoor pitch. Photography being such a novelty, and the idea of a glimmer of action so alluring, that few if any seemed to say no to him.

The photograph of Ranji was one of a portfolio collected after a Middlesex v Sussex county match, in which Beldam hit the winning run, put on his blazer, fetched his camera, erected his tripod, and pressed Ranji into going through his repertoire to Fry's bowling - not even Philip Brown has pulled that off. One of the images clearly anticipates the photograph Beldam would take of Trumper - Ranji is prancing out to drive, eyes flashing, front foot in mid-air. Fry, who had previously expressed reservations about photography, felt them give way: the image took up a full page of the next issue of C. B. Fry's Magazine of Action and Outdoor Life alongside an appreciative exposition.

Beldam's collaborations with Fry, Great Batsmen (1905) and Great Bowlers and Fielders (1906), signify such a breakthrough in the representation of cricket that they might almost have been of another sport, given their departure from the norms of the portrait and the panorama, and their accent on the capture of the figure in motion. They reverse, in fact, cricket's existing descriptive grammar. It was the first time cricketers had been shown in close quarters in the physical performance of their deeds; it was the first time image had taken true precedence over text, Fry's captions serving only to tease out...