INTRODUCTION

My mother has just spent a year teaching at Charterhouse School, Godalming (it moved to its present site from the original London Charterhouse in 1873), and the cricket coach there is the former Surrey and England quick Martin Bicknell who also happens to be the current captain of the Lashings World XI. Thus they came to Charterhouse on Sunday to play the school side in the morning and an adult team in the afternoon. I was there to see both games…

GETTING THERE

The journey from King’s Lynn to deepest Surrey (my mother had booked us two nights at an air bnb near Ockley which is roughly midway between Dorking (Surrey) and Horsham (Sussex), two places with fine cricketing connections. Dorking was the home town of Harry Jupp, an adhesive opening batter in the 19th century (when W G Grace clocked up his 50th first class hundred in 1875 Jupp was second on the list of first class century makers with 10). There is a story that once when playing in a benefit game at Dorking Jupp was castled by the first ball of the match and promptly replaced the bails, and when a fielder dared to ask “ain’t you going out Juppy” he said “No, not at Dorking I ain’t”. Jupp played for England in the first ever test match and found himself keeping wicket as well as performing his regular role because the tour party’s only specialist gloveman, Ted Pooley, was in a New Zealand prison after a ruckus involving a betting trick. Horsham meanwhile is associated with the Tate family who produced two England players, the ill-starred Fred Tate (one test appearance in which he dropped a crucial catch and was clean bowled with England a boundary hit short of victory, and the legendary Maurice, star of two successful Ashes series (1926 and 1928-9) and also a bit-part player in the 1932-3 triumph under Douglas Jardine. Here are some photos from the journey and of our accommodation:

THE DAY ITSELF

The weather was poor at first, and we retired briefly to a coffee shop in Godalming itself when  it was obvious that the first match would be delayed (since I am having an important operation on Friday – posting may be light in the near future – it was important that I should not over exposed to the cold and wet). We ended up missing the first four overs of a contest that had been reduced to 12 overs per side (the second match was played over the full 20 overs per side that had been intended). As captain of Lashings and coach of the school team Bicknell could not lose the first match. In the event the school side came out victorious, as Lashings were not at full throttle in that match. John Emburey, considerably older than most of the rest of the Lashings squad, took a particular hammering in that game.

This match was followed by a lunch in a marquee which featured an auction and a business card raffle (we used mine, as I was the only one of the three of us who actually had one, and we also used my email address as I am less bothered by spam, since I receive huge numbers of emails anyway). The auction items were ludicrously over priced even allowing for the fact that this was a charity event (I speak with a degree of knowledge given my occupation when well).

The afternoon match featured an adult team in opposition to Lashings, and this time Lashings did not hold back. They started by making 161 from their 20 overs (Faisal Iqbal 71), a very respectable total, which rapidly looked much more so, as Lashings opened the bowling with Sir Curtly Ambrose who bowled a couple of overs at something approaching full hostility – comfortably the quickest we saw all day -, on which the opposition could hardly lay a bat and Devon Malcolm who was also difficult to get away (after four overs the opposition had limped to 5-1 and the victory target of 162 looked very distant indeed. Even Emburey’s spinners had more zip to them in this game, and Lashings ended up winning by 54 runs. Among others who were involved for Lashings on the day were Bickers himself (of course), Chris Lewis (the shiny scalp, once a matter of choice, but now one suspects a matter of ,was in evidence!), Kabir Ali and Saqlain Mushtaq. An official report on these matches can be seen here.

The business card raffle draw came out in my favour – I won a bottle of wine which looks decidedly drinkable.

Finally, before my photographs from the day a note on a couple of Charterhouse’s own cricket connections: In a cricketing context undoubtedly the most famous of all Carthusians was Peter Barker Howard May, but the remarkable late Victorian figure of Robert Montagu Poore also merits a look.