The Character of Cricket by Tim Heald

Author:Tim Heald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2015-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

Torry Hill

There are still a few private gentlemen’s cricket grounds in England – the sort of place where you would expect to find R.C. Robertson-Glasgow explaining that ‘on the Saturday we always play Colonel Cochrane’s XI’, or speculating on the form of the local vicar.

One of the best known is at Torry Hill, near Sittingbourne in Kent, where Robin Leigh-Pemberton, Governor of the Bank of England, stages a few games every summer, perpetuating a tradition begun in the mid-nineteenth century when the first ever match of the Band of Brothers, the Kentish touring club, was held on the lawn in front of the family house. The Leigh-Pembertons made up half the founding membership, and even now the family can field a formidable combination if the Governor himself can be persuaded to put on his wicket-keeping pads.

I felt it was indicative of a proper sense of priorities when Mr Leigh-Pemberton agreed to talk cricket at the Bank one Monday afternoon. An audience with the Governor is rather like one with royalty. To start with you are handed, like a baton, from one flunkey to another in a relay that takes you along interminable corridors of power. These flunkeys have tail coats of a strawberry ice cream colour that seems too flamboyantly Cecil Beaton to be entirely authentic.

The actual introduction follows royal convention, too. With ordinary nobs you are ushered into their office; they rise; come out from behind their desk and shake your hand. Royalty and the Governor of the Bank of England cause you to be flunkeyed into an ante-room, then themselves enter the ante-room, greet you and conduct you into their inner sanctuary. Or something like that. The point seems to be that they must be the person doing the entering, not you.

His father, he said, laid down the ground in the thirties but it was used mainly by the village. It was the headquarters of the Torry Hill Cricket Club, but the village is very tiny and the ground is a mile away from it. There is not much scope for diversion for wives and children – not even a pub. Gradually the village players drifted away to other local clubs around Sittingbourne, until finally Torry Hill CC folded. The Leigh-Pembertons were determined to keep the ground up, however, and since then it has reverted to being a private country house ground.

As such its games are predominantly for what the old pros would call ‘fancy caps’. I Zingari, Band of Brothers, Harlequins, Eton Ramblers, Arabs – these are the sort of clubs that perform at Torry Hill. At the end of Canterbury Cricket Week Mr Leigh-Pemberton’s XI play the Old Stagers, who put on plays in the town all week. ‘That’s a bit of a mob game,’ says the Governor. ‘My sons and one or two of the oldest inhabitants. We do have men in their seventies who are quite capable of bowling a few people out.’ Each of the half-dozen wickets is used a couple of times a year, and the head groundsman is the Leigh-Pembertons’ retired gardener Mr Trinder.

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