The Old Century (almost)

I played my third match of this rain-spoilt season on Wednesday night and continued to confound bowlers around the land, adding a season's best score of nine not out to my nought not out and nought not in in the previous two matches.

The occasion this time was the annual Siegfried Sassoon memorial match on the village green at the war poet's pretty home village of Matfield in Kent, where the oak tree dedicated to Sassoon by his widow overlooks the outfield. The shortage of cricket-playing members of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship meant that the side, called George Sherston's XI after the poet's pen name, was largely made up of members of The Gold Bats, the PG Wodehouse Society team I play for, while the opposition were the local village side.

We were privileged to have Dennis Silk, in his capacity as vice-president of the Sassoon Fellowship, umpiring the game. Silk, now 75, played first-class cricket for Cambridge and Somerset and was later President of MCC and Chairman of the Test and County Cricket Board as well as Warden of Radley College for 23 years. A charming gentleman, Silk recounted how he had met an elderly Sassoon when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge.

"He was very shabbily dressed, with holes in his hat, holes in his shoes, holes in his coat. I thought one of my team-mates was playing a practical joke and had got a tramp to pretend to be Sassoon," Silk said. He became close friends with the ageing poet, who he said "was still haunted by what he'd seen in the trenches when we met in 1953", and recorded a series for Radio 4 of the poet, who died in 1967, reading his own work.

The game was played on a sticky wicket, with the ball coming very slowly on to the bat, which helped someone with as poor reflexes as me. Those faster members of the team found the ball kept on arriving on them late and the run-rate was a trickle before Julian Hill and Martin Southwell beefed up the score to 94 all out, yours truly stranded only 91 runs short of a maiden hundred. Yet in reply the home team were staggering at 39 for six before their seventh-wicket pair saw them home.

Tom Danby, Matfield's man of the match, received a copy of Peter West's book on the 1956 Ashes series and the prize of a hand-crafted plate was presented by Meg Crane (the Sassoon Fellowship president pictured here with Silk and Bob Miller, our captain) to Matfield, who had won the previous year's match by one run.

Comments

[Meg Crane]

The tree on Matfield village green was planted by Sassoon's mother (not his widow) on November 11th 1918 (or so we're told). His brother Hamo had been killed at Gallipoli, and his name appears on the village war memorial.

Meg Crane, SSF (the fat lady in the picture!)