The Nightwatchman
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SAMPLE EDITION AUTUMN27 2019 THE NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY SAMPLER THE NIGHTWATCHMAN THE NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY ISSUE 27 – AUTUMN 2019 introduces issue 27 of the Nightwatchman Cricket’s past has been enriched by great writing and Wisden is making sure its future Matt Thacker will be too. The Nightwatchman is a quarterly collection of essays and long-form articles and MM Owen unravels his grandfather’s secret life in India is available in print and e-book formats. Peter Mason prefers team shots where there’s a bit going on Co-edited by Anjali Doshi and Tanya Aldred, with Matt Thacker as managing editor, The Nightwatchman features an array of authors from around the world, writing beautifully and Matt Appleby spots KP in a garden centre at length about the game and its myriad offshoots. Contributors are given free rein over subject matter and length, escaping the pressures of next-day deadlines and the despair Michael Simkins thinks he remembers the country’s first floodlit game of cramming heart and soul into a few paragraphs. Telford Vice is neither English nor Australian There are several different ways to get hold of and enjoy The Nightwatchman. You can subscribe to the print version and get a free digital copy for when you’re travelling light. Wisden-MCC Photograph of the Year If you don’t have enough room on your book case, you can always take out a digital-only believes Durham have been hard done by subscription. Or if you’d just like to buy a single issue – in print, digital or both – you can Stuart Rayner do that too. Take a look at the options below and decide which is best for you. Peter Hoare casts his mind back 40 years Neil Robinson on the ever-evolving tactics of 50-over cricket AUTUMN27 2019 SPRING5 2014 SPRING5 2014SPRING5 2014 Alex Bowden delves into the mindset of playing for the draw Full subscription Digital subscription NightwatchmanNightwatchmanNightwatchman THE WISDENTHE WISDEN CRICKET CRICKET QUARTERLY QUARTERLY Annual e-book only THE WISDEN CRICKETTHE QUARTERLY WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Annual print Nightwatchman Dave Edmundson insists free-to-air cricket is not the solution subscription (with subscription free e-book versions) £15 Neville Scott traces cricket’s decline through his family £29.95 (+P&P) Click to Buy Click to Buy Richard Hobson on Dick Barlow, stonewaller extraordinaire Oscar Ratcliffe lauds England’s fragile heroes The World Cup in pictures – England triumph at Lord’s Stephen Gregory sees a softer side to Fiery Fred AUTUMN27 2019 Alastair Glegg tries to practise what he preaches Digital single copy Single copy NightwatchmanTHE WISDEN CRICKET QUARTERLY Stephen Connor on an adult apprenticeship in Edinburgh Single issue Single issue (with (e-book only) free with free Matt Roller wonders how, and why, teams get their nicknames £4 e-book version) £10 (+P&P) Click to Buy Jarrod Kimber loves Kane Williamson Click to Buy THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET SAMPLER THE NIGHTWATCHMAN FLUTESONG OVER THE WATER MM Owen on how the game sweetened the discovery of his grandfather’s secret life in India All air, all sky shudders had declared that people should not with that flutesong over the water “countenance such amusements” as cricket “when the whole of the thinking Alas world should be in mourning” over My boat must be sailed now the global slaughter. Presumably the It’s getting too late to wait on the headmaster of Swanage Grammar shore School harboured similar feelings, Alas thought it bad form to indulge in games My boat must be sailed in the wake of such tragic death. – Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali As he trudged back inside, a knackered school bat tucked under his arm, my grandfather – Roy – It was a crisp morning in May of 1941 was 15. His home was a farm named when my grandfather’s cricket match Wilkswood, nestled in a rolling, half- was called off. He was at the crease wild corner of Dorset so placid that to – I picture it as stubbly but neat, the this day you can hear birdsong at any wicket at Swanage Grammar School hour. The family milked cows or made – when the headmaster came striding hay year-round, mumbling hymns on out, waving his arms. Someone must a Sunday. In his boyhood, cricket was have heard it come through on the probably the most exciting thing in radio: the pride of the British navy, my grandfather’s life – the woodslap HMS Hood, had been sunk. 1,415 British echo of a man with a sizeable paunch naval men were drowned. The previous but a good eye middling one into year, in faraway India, Mahatma Gandhi the long grass. By 1940, though, THENIGHTWATCHMAN.NET SAMPLER THE NIGHTWATCHMAN the Hardy-esque tranquility had cricket when there were no helmets, newspapers delivered a day late, by the umbrellas as bats in hitting elliptical evaporated. War was here. All three no limited-overs games, no ramp shots; local vicar, on his bicycle. balls stuffed with old rags and sewn of Roy’s older brothers had signed up when the players only ever wore white, by veritably useful cobblers” (in the for the RAF, and nine months before and it was still seen as unsporting to A couple of months later, his commission words of another Indian historian, the HMS Hood went under, the oldest, appeal with too much zeal. came through. The 5th Royal Gurkha Shapoorjee Sorabjee). Within three Dick, was taking to the skies during Rifles. It was real now – a stroll into generations, training dusk till dawn a training exercise at Stradishall in A few months after he turned 18, a Swanage, the toss of a coin, and here it on the Bombay esplanade, these local Norfolk when his bomber lurched to recruitment fair was held in Swanage. was. On the eve of his departure, how boys were reinventing spin bowling and starboard and crashed in flames. Dick Roy and his best friend walked the two did the family say farewell? Had they beating English touring sides at the was 31. Down the years, the family miles. Clustered around tables heavy stockpiled meat and cheese rations game believed, in the motherland, to account was that he had perished in with free tea and cake were teams of ahead of a last feast? Was there booze? be quintessentially Anglo-Saxon; rather the Battle of Britain. Fair enough. rock-jawed men in full uniform, invoking Did anyone say a few words? Whatever beyond the reach, in psychology and a heady mix of adventure and moral the nature of the goodbyes, the waiting sensibility, of brown folk. The teenage Roy, then, was well aware crusade. Decades later, Roy would tell was over. In October of 1944, Roy’s that his country was at war. With some his daughter, my mother, that he and father – himself a veteran of that earlier My grandfather’s boat docked in regularity, on their return from bombing his friend had been tempted by both war, the war that the people in charge Bombay’s Front Bay on 29 November raids of Liverpool and Birmingham and the Gurkhas and the Royal Marines. had said would end all wars – watched 1944 – the day of his 19th birthday. A elsewhere, yellow-nosed German planes The Marines would mean just across his fourth and final son go off to fight. few miles from the port was that very swooped over the Dorset coastline to the water, the Gurkhas would mean A slow, lonely bus to Southampton, and esplanade where, a century earlier, empty their remaining ammunition into the other side of the planet. Eventually, then at 18 years of age, having never Indian cricket had slowly been born. its tranquil fields. At school, Roy carried Roy and his friend tossed a coin. The travelled further afield than Somerset, It was there, in 1926, that CK Nayudu a gas mask in a box around his neck. Gurkhas it was. Roy boarded a ship bound for Bombay. smashed an English attack all over the To the south, the tiny cliffside hamlet In the era of the Raj, it was said that ground, announcing Indian cricket’s of Worth Matravers was acting as the He didn’t wait to be conscripted. Why colonial Brits, oppressed by the heat arrival with a hailstorm of boundaries. nerve centre of British early-warning the haste? Was his patriotism enflamed and the disease, tended to last for two It is doubtful, however, that my radar development; the 360-foot tower by the flood of posters declaring monsoons. My grandfather would stay grandfather had cricket on his mind was visible from the family farm. “Britain Shall Not Burn” and “Your in India for 40 years. when he walked down the gangplank Britain: Fight For It Now”? Did he wish to a swirl of impossible impressions: For the Nazis, sport was about one thing: to avenge Dick’s death? Or was it just • • • women wrapped in whirlwinds of shaping young men into Discobolus- a way to escape sleepy Dorset, get rainbow cloth; cows painted and esque specimens whose athletic the pulse going, witness outlandish According to the historian ribcage-skinny; statues with elephant prowess would translate into victory things? Whatever his reasons, Roy Ramachandra Guha, British sailors were heads; the air thick with the smell of on the battlefield. Hence Hitler hated signed up. By this point, the local mood playing cricket on Indian soil at least as turmeric and rotting bananas. The cricket, believing that with its leisurely was feverish. The Dorset peninsula far back as 1721. For a hundred years, glimmering jewel in the slipping crown pace and only sporadic exertions it offered the shortest sea route to though, India’s colonised indigenous of the empire.