The dinner to celebrate Hampshire’s Championship victory of 1961. (From left to right) the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Ashburton and H.S.A.
H.S. Altham on the Heroes of Hambledon & Hampshire
After-dinner speech from 1961.
This transcription is from the “Hampshire Handbook 1962”.
“May I venture for a few minutes to dip into the long history of our county, and recall a few of the episodes and personalities that have contributed to it?
John Nyren has immortalised for all time the great figures of the Hambledon era: but will you forgive me if I quote just one paragraph from The Rev. John Mitford’s review of his book – his tribute to William Beldham.
‘Beldham was great in every hit, but his peculiar glory was the cut. Here he stood with no man beside him, the laurel was all his own – it was like the cut of a racket. His wrist seemed to turn on springs of the finest steel. He took the ball, as Burke took the House of Commons, between wind and water, not a moment too soon or too late.’
I doubt there is a better definition of timing whether it is Roy Marshall’s sixes over square third man or our captain’s sixes in a slightly different area.
But there was another contemporary of Beldham who does not enjoy the fame that is his due. Robert Robinson who, a hundred and seventy years ago, came out to bat in the first pair of pads that history records. They consisted of two wooden boards strapped at an angle across his shins, off which the ball ricocheted with such a resounding echo that he was, as we read, laughed out of his invention.
Then there was the donkey which in the very early days of our Antelope grounded here in Southampton was bought to pull the first heavy roller, and a year later, for some unrecorded reason, was incontinently sold for thirty shillings.
The Australian Aboriginal side visited us in 1868, and a gentleman called ‘Tuppeny’ had two real field days – against East Hants he took 9 for 9, and 9 again against the full strength of the county next day, though they made him pay 9 whole runs more for it.
If, as I like to think, the cricketers of past days can look down from their fields of asphodel on their successors of today, to no one surely can our success last year have meant more than to Russell Bencraft who, like Richard Nyren before him – and, if I may say so, Desmond Eagar to-day – was the head and right arm of the Club. For sixty years as player and administrator he served Hampshire cricket with all his heart, and I suspect he may still be the only medical student ever to have made a century on every day of his hospital cricket week.
( … ) Not long ago my wife and I were having tea with the High Steward of Hampshire, once the Warden of Winchester College, and so my Lord and Master. As we went out through his stable yard to get into our car, I saw chalked on a wall a wicket. Somehow the picture of that wicket has stayed with me ever since as a symbol of something almost as old, and almost as essentially English as Magna Carta, something which, whatever the challenge and stresses of this urgent world, remain unchanged and reassuring.”
… May we hope that when another hundred years are past, Hampshire boys will still be bowling at that wicket, giving to this game of cricket the best that they have in them, and getting from it in return the rich rewards it never fails to give.
