Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat were two English film-makers who maintained a steadily consistent presence in the British cinema between the 1930s and the 1970s. Launder and Gilliat’s creative film roles, whether as writers, directors or producers (or as all three), contributed to over 100 British films in that era, including nearly 40 together as co-writers and producers.
The two co-wrote The Lady Vanishes, a 1938 mystery which was a breakthrough feature for Alfred Hitchcock❈. Interestingly Launder and Gilliat (hereafter L & G) had their (separate) starts in the film business composing inter-titles (title cards) for silent movies in the late 1920s, the same industry beginnings undertaken by Hitchcock several years earlier. L & G combined their talents behind-the-camera together for the first time from the mid 1930s. The L & G partnership had a flexibility and a particular pattern to it … invariably they would jointly produce films and/or also co-write screenplays (although on other occasions either man would co-write films with various other collaborating screenwriters). But almost with very few exceptions one or the other would direct a specific film singly – this was done apparently to avoid confusing the actors[1].
A versatile¤ and fecund partnership
As well as being prolific contributors to the creation of British films for such a long period, L & G’s film output spanned a range of genres … from thrillers and ‘whodunits’ like Green for Danger (1956) and Secret State (1950) to WWII social-realism films such as Waterloo Road (1944) and Millions Like Us (1943) to romance/adventures like The Blue Lamp (1949) to historical dramas such as Captain Boycott (1947) to farces like The Green Man (1956) and light comedies such as The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), a precursor to a popular series of movies set in a girls’ boarding school immobilised by riotous juvenile anarchy – starting with The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954) which spawned a string of increasingly predictable sequels.
“Journeymen auteurs?”
The Times of London described the Gilliat/Launder team as “one of the most sparkling writing, directing and producing partnerships in postwar British cinema”[2]. Notwithstanding such praise, L & G’s body of work has tended to be undervalued by the bulk of film critics … at times eliciting back-handed appraisals from critics such as “toilers in the British comic tradition”; (their films at best exhibiting) “unfailing good humour and the occasional brainy prankishness”[3]. Certainly, technical innovation and self-conscious artiness was not Gilliat and Launder’s style, but they never managed to garner anything remotely like the prestige or critical approval that was lavished on other contemporary British film-makers, eg, Powell and Pressburger, Carol Reed or the Boulting brothers. Bruce Babington has attributed this in part to L & G’s ‘reticence’ as film-makers, the way that they declined to project themselves forward and intervene in controversies and debates of the day, unlike say, their contemporaries the Boultings[4].
Enlistment in the production of propaganda vehicles
So closely did the personal film-making styles and interests of the two collaborators align, many people found it hard to distinguish between a Launder-directed picture and one directed by Gilliat … most L & G films tended to resemble the fruits of their combined efforts. Or as Adair and Roddick put it, “it would take a lynx-eyed buff to be able to distinguish one from the other”[5].
The war-time pictures, Millions Like Us and Two Thousand Women can be identified as reflecting in particular Frank Launder’s preoccupation with the portrayal of strong, defiantly independent women[6]. These films were commissioned by the UK Ministry of Information to counter the prevailing low recruitment and morale of women in war-time factory work. Millions Like Us, as Judy Suh has noted, conveyed the “double valence of women as productive workers and domestic symbols of national unity”. L & G’s social-realist films, though propagandist in purpose, posed questions of gender and class whilst depicting the routine of ordinary people at work. The necessities of war-time brought out the conflicting roles and identities of women in such an out-of-the ordinary circumstance, as well as the existence of crossings of class boundaries[7].
/www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/image-5.jpg”> Hockey stick-wielding private schoolgirl anarchists
After[/caption]After the war, witty and farcical, albeit slight, comedies were their forte (with the occasional thriller thrown in). Like other high-profile international film-makers L & G had their favourite performers that they liked to work with. L & G got the best performances out of British actors like Alastair Sim, Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell, Rex Harrison and George Cole. Of these luminaries it was Alastair Sim whose star shined most brightly under the direction of L & G. Sim appeared in at least ten L & G movies and his deliciously roguish star turns as a middle class word-spinning con-man were pure gold. George Cole, who also had a regular gig in the St Trinian’s cycle as the ultra dodgy spiv Flash Harry◘, described working with Gilliat and Launder (and Sim) … to Cole (later himself to find TV fame as consummate, malapropistic con-man ‘Arfur’ Daley in Minder) their films meant:
“Good scripts but terrible money. If Alastair was in the film it was even worse because he got most of it. But they were wonderful people to work with”[8].
In the 1940s Launder and Gilliat formed their own production company, aptly named Individual Pictures, at this time they were contractually engaged by Gainsborough Pictures … in 1958 the partners took charge of the production side of the struggling independent studio British Lion. By the 1960s both the quality and quantity of Gilliat/Launder productions had receded. In 1980 Launder went once more to the St Trinian’s well❃ with yet another sequel, Wildcats of St Trinian’s … unwisely so as the novelty of L & G’s feature films based on Ronald Searle’s charming cartoons of feral schoolgirls had long since lost their appeal.
PostScript: The Charters and Caldicott characters trope – antiquated, old school Englishness
L & G wrote into The Lady Vanishes two minor characters that were to become iconic, background characters in British cinema. Played by actors Basil Radford and Naughton Wayne, the two incidental supporting figures are singleminded cricket enthusiasts (“cricket tragics” as one recent Australian PM was dubbed) trying to hurry back to England to see the last days of the Manchester test match. The popularity of the characters saw them reappear in other L & G movies (including Night Train to Munich, Millions Like Us and in the 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes), and in several other non-L & G films, eg, the Boxs’ A Girl in a Million and (appropriately enough) It’s Not Cricket. Charters and Caldicott were also reprised for several radio series, and for a 1985 television series. Charters and Caldicott’s fame also extended to their inclusion in a series of Carreras Cigarette cards in the 1950s.
The gormless pe[/caption]The gormless personalities of Charters and Caldicott, a couple of blithering “Colonel Blimpish” snobs, was a comical throwback to a past England with ‘proper’ gentlemanly good manners and standards of dress[9]. Matthew Sweet saw the two blunderers (in their 1938 incarnations against a backdrop of appeasement) as symbols of “a peculiarly British obstinacy in the face of Nazi aggression” in Europe[10]. Their apathetic dispositions and complete lack of perspicacity about the momentous events happening around them also puts one in mind of Tom Stoppard’s two artless and aimless courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern roaming through Elsinore, ‘Everyman’ figures in the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
venturer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/image-4.jpg”> The familiar picture of the familiar team
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❈ The Lady Vanishes helped open Hollywood doors for Hitchcock … after ‘Hitch’ completed Jamaica Inn in 1939 (written by Gilliat et al) he set sail for America (for good), inviting Gilliat to join him however the Cheshireman declined the offer, preferring to stay in the smaller and infinitely less lucrative pond that was the British film industry (Babington, 2002) ¤ “Versatility” Gilliat once said, “was always our curse”, but as Gilbert Adair remarked in a 1994 obituary for the film-maker, “it was also their own form of individualism”
◘ Cole as well appeared in nine of L & G’s films
❃ this was twice too often to the well as the preceding Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery (1966) was also a lame effort at rehashing the by now decidedly stale formula
[1] although such was the working symbiosis between the two that the non-directing partner would in all likelihood make suggestions for improvements to the designated director where necessary, B Babington, Launder and Gilliat (2002)
[2] quoted in The Age (Melbourne), 08-Jun-1994
[3] G Adair & N Roddick, A Night at the Pictures: Ten Decades of British Film, (1985)
[4] Babington describes Launder and Gilliat as “modest auteurs”, Babington, op.cit.
[5] Adair & Roddick, loc.cit.
[6] ‘Launder and Gilliat’, BFI Screenonline, www.screenonline.org.uk
[7] J Suh, ‘Women, Work, Leisure in British Wartime Documentary Realism’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 40(1), 2012
[8] ‘Obituary: Frank Launder’, The Independent, 24-Feb-1997, www.independent.co.uk
[9] ‘Charters and Caldicott’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘Charters and Caldicott’, www.chartersandcaldicott.co.uk
[10] M Sweet, ‘Mustard and cress’, The Guardian, 29-Dec-2007, www.theguardian.com
❝ We had to prove that women were as good pilots… in an age where some men didn’t think a woman should drive a horse and buggy, much less drive an automobile, it was a job to prove that females could fly.❞
~ Louise Thaden[1]
⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ✈️ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆ ⍅ ⍆
The other afternoon the resident afternoon ABC evangelist on the wireless was rabbiting on that the PC word to describe female pilots, especially those early pilots of the airways, was aviator … he was saying that the term aviatrix was de rigueur, we should use only the ‘correct’ gender-neutral term ‘aviator’ which doesn’t make a distinction between the two sexes, etc, etc.
And in a purely technical sense the government-sanctioned radio evangelist is right, the name ‘aviator’ does better represent the spirit of our contemporary times, after all no one (hardly anyone, right?) these days uses poetess or even authoress – these descriptors sound a bit cumbersome and more than slightly ridiculous in 2017 … although I note that the staunchly conservative Oscar ‘cinemarati’ dole out prizes to screen actors every March for what they still insist on calling the “best actress” and “best supporting actress”. Notwithstanding all this, my preference to describe those pioneering women of the skies is for ‘aviatrix’, quaintly old-fashioned as the term may be … to me it does set them apart, identifying the uniqueness of their important role in the evolution of aviation history and as pathfinders for new female work roles, and in doing so, demonstrating that women were capable of doing anything than men could do.
The internet is awash with studies and information on untold number of pioneer aviatrices. A casual googling of “aviatrix history” will turn up a host of sites with titles like “Harriet Quimbey – First U.S. Aviatrix”, “Lores Bonney – the forgotten aviatrix”, “The History Chicks Aviatrix Archives”, “LadiesLoveTailDraggers | Aviatrix History”; “Aviatrix – Sheroes of History”, “BBC – Forgotten record of aviatrix Beryl Markham”, “Aviatrix You Should Know: China’s Amelia Earhart” and “Our History | Women in Aviation History | “Sharpie: The Life Story of Evelyn Sharpie – Nebraska’s Aviatrix”. Clearly, most who write on the subject, on the World Wide Webosphere anyway, seem to concur with my preference for ‘aviatrix’.
Irish first wave aviatrix Lilian Bland
France gold, the US silver …
What becomes readily apparent when you delve into the history of the early, formative phase of aviation, is how internationally diverse the phenomenon of the aviatrix was. France and the United States led the way with the earliest pioneering achievements❈ – first woman to earn a pilot’s licence (Frenchwoman Baroness Raymondé de Laroche, 1910); first woman to pilot a motorised aircraft solo (American Aida de Acosta in France, 1903, in a dirigible owned by Alberto Santos-Dumont – six months before the famous Wright Brothers’ flight). Not to be outdone, women aviatrices in the English-speaking world were also quick out of the blocks – Anglo-Irish aviatrix Lilian Bland in Belfast 1910/1911 was one of the first to design, build and fly her own aircraft (which she called the Mayfly⌖)[2].
In the first 40 years of the 20th century the appearance of women pilots became a worldwide craze. Aviatrices took to the air in Belgium, Germany, Britain and Eire, Russia, Estonia, Argentina, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, Japan, China, Korea, Italy, Australasia, Canada, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Persia, in fact from any country that had a viable even if rudimentary aircraft industry.
Aviatrix “rock stars” The public at large is familiar possibly only with a few of these pioneer aviatrices, the “glamour-pus” headline grabbers like American Amelia Earhart and England’s Amy Johnson, or if you are from the USA you probably have also heard of Ruth Law, Louise Thaden, Jacky Cochran and Florence ‘Pancho’ Barnes. All of these high-flyers (literally) broke numerous records and won continent-to-continent, long-distance air races¤ and have been the subject of various biographies, television documentaries or biopics.
[Photo: www.airforcebase.net]
Barnstorming
There was a lot of women pilots by the twenties and thirties (especially in the USA), and the great majority of them weren’t as fortunate as Earhart and a select few of the elite aviatrices who could elicit sponsorship from newspapers and the like. There were few posts for commercial pilots available to women at the time (primarily due to systemic and deeply ingrained sexism), therefore many women pilots in the “Roaring Twenties” turned to barnstorming and if they could to working as a stunt pilot in the movies. Barnstormers moved around the country performing aerial tricks and manoeuvres, for audiences, either individually or in orchestrated clusters of Gipsy Moth type crafts (known as “flying circuses”). Barnstormers also made money by taking local townspeople up for joy rides[3].
Jean Batten (NZ)
“First-wave” Australasian aviatrices
Gladys Sandford was the first New Zealand woman to be awarded an air pilot’s licence (1925), but without dispute the Shaky Isles’ greatest-ever aviatrix was Jean Gardner Batten. After wrecking her first biplane Batten talked the Castrol Oil Co into buying a second-hand De Havilland Gipsy Moth, in which she was the first woman to complete the solo round trip between England and New Zealand. Batten also won the Harmon Trophy three times and achieved a world record for flying from England to South America. Later in the thirties the relentless Kiwi aviatrix Batten obliterated Amy Johnson’s England to Australia record, bettering it by more than four days![4]
Australia’s first female flyer in an heavier-than-air plane was Florence Taylor in 1909 at Narrabeen, NSW. Taylor’s flight was in a glider designed by her husband George (which he had adapted from Lawrence Hargrave’s cellular box-kite prototype). Prejudice from male aviators and the industry meant that women in Australia were prevented from holding a commercial pilot’s licence until 1927 (Millicent Bryant was the first to earn her Australian licence in that year)✪.
Other women soon took up the mantle of the earliest Aussie aviatrices, most prominent among these were Maude ‘Lores’ Bonney and the aptly named Nancy-Bird Walton. Lores Bonney, originally from South Africa, in the 1930s was “regarded as perhaps Australia’s most competent aviatrix”[5]. Bonney’s record-breaking feats started in 1932 when she became the first aviatrix to circumnavigate the continent of Australia (embarking on the marathon flight – the equivalent of Darwin to London in distance – after first gaining the permission of her husband). She was the first pilot of either sex to fly from Brisbane to Cape Town, and the first woman to fly solo from Australia to England.
Nancy-Bird Walton got her pilot’s licence at 19 and like Bonney and so many other early aviators (from Charles Lindbergh down) tried initially to make a living out of it through barnstorming. In 1936 Walton won the Ladies Trophy in the Adelaide to Brisbane air race in a record time. As the first woman commercial pilot in Australia Walton was responsible for the operation of a flying medical service in the outback (Royal Far West Children’s Health Service), using her own Leopard Moth as an air ambulance. During WWII she trained a women’s air corps as back up for the men pilots in the RAAF and in 1950 founded the Australian Women Pilot’s Association, paving the way for today’s female commercial pilots to make a career of the profession[6].
Hollywood ’Aviatrix’ Kate Hepburn, feet and plane planted firmly on the ground!
PostScript: Hollywood and the glamorous socialite aviatrix
In the golden age of aviation aviatrices like Jean Gardner Batten and Beryl Markham were not adverse to infusing a bit of glamour into their public personas. It certainly didn’t hinder their careers and sponsorship was often needed by the young female pilots to finance their attempts to win races and break records. In the twenties and thirties nothing personified the idea of the modern woman more than the aviatrix, she represented the height of glamour and daring … and of course the ubër glam-aviatrix in the world was Earhart whose image and media-savvy husband secured her income from promotional and speaking tours and from product endorsement [7].
It is hardly surprising then that from early on Hollywood took an interest in the aviatrix, and in the whole burgeoning area of aviation which provided film-makers with fresh new storylines with lots of breath-taking action and thrills. Several of the glamorous aviatrices had stints in movie acting. Ruth Elder for instance, (known as “Miss America of Aviation”) juggled flying with a (part-time) actress job and a (full-time) one as a serial ‘matrimonialist’ (Elder was married six times). RKO cashed in the vogue by casting an up-and-coming Katherine Hepburn as a socialite aviatrix in 1933’s Christopher Strong. Capitalising on the appeal of feminine good looks and the fearless reputation of women pilots, studio photographers cultivated the “glamorous aviatrix look” for movie publicity purposes[8].
———————————————————
❈ the very first experiments with flight involving women began in France – 1784: first woman to fly in a hot-air balloon, Marie Élisabeth Thible (eight months after the Montgolfier brothers’ first successful accent); 1798: first woman to pilot an airship, Jeanne Geneviève Labrosse (Mme Labrosse was also the first woman to parachute jump from a balloon, 1799), www.centennialofwomenpilots.com. So, in a very real sense aviatrices were in on the ground (umm, off the ground) in aviation from the get-go!
⌖ as in may fly, may not
¤ Earhart and Johnson were both fated to die in mysterious circumstances, tragically if heroically in pursuit of their addiction to flying
✪ although the first Australian woman to get a flyer’s licence was nurse Hilda McMaugh (1919) who achieved it in the UK…she would have been barred from flying if she had returned to her homeland afterwards
[1] ‘Aviation Pioneer Louise Thaden’, www.arkansasairandmilitarymuseum.com
[2] K Mitchell, ‘Lilian Bland: Ireland’s first female pilot, the world’s first aviation engineer’, Engineers Journal (Republic of Ireland), 31-May-2016, www.engineersjournal.ie
[3] ‘Barnstorming’, Wikipedia, http://em.n.wikipedia.org
[4] Ian Mackersey. ‘Batten, Jean Gardner’, from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand,http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/4b13/batten-jean-gardner(accessed 20 May 2017)
[5] K Alexander, Taking Flight: Lores Bonney’s Extraordinary Flying Career, (2016)
[6] ‘Nancy Bird Walton AO’, (Australian Museum), www.australianmuseum.net.au
[7] K Lubben Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, cited in ‘Why Amelia Bombed’ (V Postrel), 10-Nov-2009, www.vpostrel.com
[8] S Kelly, Aviators in Early Hollywood (2008)]
Considering the United States of America’s origins as an English colony it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that in the 18th century the English colonists brought their emblematically English game of cricket to the “Thirteen Colonies”. But it was American citizens themselves, albeit largely those of Anglo descent, who planted the foundations of the first cricket clubs and playing grounds all over the country and in particular the Eastern Seaboard. What might come as surprising is that in the land where baseball is THE bat-and-ball sport, quite a few of these have survived, at least in name, as cricket clubs.
The game of cricket itself brightly flickered (if not entirely thrived) in different pockets of the United States for long periods of the 19th century and even briefly into the 20th century. Cricket was rooted in America long before the game of baseball was even close to capturing the nation’s imagination. By the time of the Civil War at least 20 American states played the game of cricket✿ – active US cricket-playing cities included Baltimore, Savannah, Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and even as far away as San Francisco[1]. From about 1890 to the onset of WWI America experienced a “golden age” of cricket, with its epicentre revolving around the city of Philadelphia[2].
In Hollywood during the thirties and forties ex-pat film actors mainly from Britain but also from Australia (David Niven, Ronald Colman, Boris Karloff, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, etc) played for the Hollywood Cricket Club, a team formed by veteran Hollywood screen performer Sir C Aubrey Smith, a former first-class amateur player in the late 19th century who represented Sussex, the MCC and captained England in the inaugural test match against South Africa (1889).
In more recent times immigrants from the West Indies, from South Asia and elsewhere have been the lifeblood of the sport in the US, both playing and following the game … the series of exhibition matches in New York and elsewhere in 2016 between two international “All-Stars” teams, led by contemporary cricketing legends Sachin Tendulkar and Shane Warne, being an example of ongoing current interest within the US.
Despite the decline of cricket from having once been a national sport in the US❂ and its eventual replacement by baseball, a number of the old cricket clubs continue to exist, many transforming themselves into key venues for other mainstream sports and emphasising their social and commercial roles … what follows is a brief survey of the history of the more famous and historic American cricket clubs.
Staten Island CC of New York:
(Randolph) Walker Park (Livingston) is the home ground of the Staten Island Cricket Club (founded in 1872 as the Staten Island Cricket and Base Ball Club). The original club ground was the ‘Flats’ at St George (a different neighbourhood of Staten Is). SICC exists to this day as “the oldest cricket club in continuous use”[3]. And although world-famous cricketers such as Donald Bradman, Everton Weekes and Garry Sobers have played at the ground during visits to the US, it might be said that its fame in the US derives as least as much from its use as a tennis venue. The first national tennis tournament was held at the grounds in 1880, tracing its origins to the 1874 visit of a Staten Island resident Mary Ewing Outerbridge to Bermuda. Outerbridge observed this new game adapted by a British army major, W C Wingfield, in that North Atlantic Island. Returning to Staten Island with a net, balls and racquets, Outerbridge, with the assistance of her brother, created the first US (lawn) tennis court[4].
The Metropolitan Baseball Club used Walker Park cricket ground in the early days. The Metro BC later evolved into a baseball major league identity – first as the New York Giants and later after relocation as the San Francisco Giants[5]. These days it’s a common spectacle at Walker Park to observe cricket-obsessed immigrant club members from the West Indies, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, decked out in cream or coloured flannels, wielding their “paddle-like” bats and taking “bare-handed catches” on the Staten Island oval[6].
St George’s CC Prospect Park ground, NY
St George’s CC of New York:
Among the other clubs in New York, there was one, St George’s CC (later Manhattan CC)❦, which rivalled the illustrious history of Staten Is CC in pedigree stakes. From its founding in 1838 up to the American Civil War, SGCC was one of the powerhouses of New York and American cricket. St George’s CC’s Bloomingdale Park was the venue for what was arguably the world’s first international cricket (and perhaps any sporting) contest (USA V Province of Canada, 1844). Since 1865 the Club has continuously played the game based at its Prospect Park ground, its foremost cricketer in the late 19th century was bowling star M R Cobb (who also had a formidable stint spearheading the New Jersey Athletic Club attack)[7].
Philadelphia CC:
The Philadelphia Cricket Club (the celebrated “Philly CC”, one of the oldest clubs in the US, founded 1854), today is a private country club with two locations, Flourtown and Chestnut Hill✥ – the latter was the Club’s cricket venue from 1883. PCC involvement in cricket emanated from the enthusiasms of young men of English descent who had played the game at the University of Pennsylvania. For over 40 years PCC competed with other clubs in the region for the prestigious Halifax Cup … by 1924 however the cricketing activities of PCC had been overtaken by other pursuits and came to an abrupt halt (until happily revived in Philly by immigrants from the Sub-Continent of South Asia in 1998)[8].
Philadelphia Club of gentlemen cricketers
As part of its “extra-cricketular” activities Philadelphia Cricket Club early on established itself as a centre for the hosting of top-level tennis and golf events. PCC was a founding member of the US Lawn Tennis Association (today the USTA) and hosted the US Women’s National Singles Championship from its inception in 1887 through to 1921. In addition it hosted the national doubles title for women and the national mixed doubles title during this period[9]. PCC has similar bragging rights for golf, St Martin’s was home to the US Men’s Open in 1907 and 1910, whilst Wissahickon has hosted lower-level professional tournaments on the US PGA men’s circuit.
Germantown CC: Germantown CC is another pioneering cricket club which competed with PCC in the prestigious Philadelphia comp. Originally located in Nicetown, it relocated to West Manheim Street after merging with the Young America Cricket Club in 1890. Like a number of the other cricket clubs tennis overtook cricketing pursuits in the 20th century with GCC providing the venue for the US National Tennis Championship from 1921 to 1923. On the cricket front, by 1980 Germantown CC was one of only three surviving competing cricket clubs in the Pennsylvanian league.
Dwight F Davis, donor of the eponymous cup
The club’s main sporting activity these days is its tennis played in summer but it still fits in competitive cricket around the tennis (in spring and autumn). Tennis’ dominant position in the “cricket club” can be gauged by its total of 46 tennis courts on the complex, reflecting an important historic role played by GCC in the sport at the elite level – five times host of the Davis Cup Final, plus host of the 1964 Federation Cup (international women’s team tournament)[10].
Merion CC:
The Merion Cricket Club (Pennsylvania) played its first game in 1866 and in its early days repulsed an attempt to turn it into a baseball club. In the late 1890s-early 1900s the MCC’s Haverford ground was host to matches between the Gentlemen of Pennsylvania and Touring English XIs. But like PCC, the MCC from the 1890s moved inexorably to golf as its main sporting pursuit. Merion CC has hosted the US Men’s Golf Open five times (the latest in 2013). The Merion Cricket Club has also been the venue for elite tennis … in 1939 its Haverford courts hosted the Davis Cup (the premier men’s international teams event), the final between the US and Australia.
(J) Bart King
Belmont CC and Bart King: Belmont Cricket Club was one of the big four clubs in Philadelphia during the cricket “Golden Age’. Founded in 1874 Belmont CC survived only to 1914 when it was disbanded (despite having America’s greatest practitioner of the sport of cricket, John Barton (Bart) King, among the ranks of its players). Bart King played in the Pennsylvanian comp for the Belmont Club from 1893 to 1913 [see also Footnote 2]. King had a first-class career record which saw the right-arm fast bowler take 415 wickets at an exceptional average of 15.66 in only 65 matches! Philadelphian King’s tally of victims included an impressive 252 wickets over three tours of Britain (heading the 1908 English season’s first-class bowling averages for all matches!)
Longwood CC (Boston): Longwood CC was formed in 1877, some years later establishing its long-term cricket home ground at Chestnut Hill (Mass.). It was not long before tennis became the premier sport at Longwood CC (first lawn tennis court laid down the following year, 1878). That predominance of tennis was established when the Club held the first ever Davis Cup match (initially called the International Lawn Tennis Challenge) in 1900, and further consolidated by hosting the 1917 US National Doubles championship, the men’s US Pro Tournament (1964-1999), the women’s Fed Cup and 15 Davis Cup ties in total. The brothers Harry and George Wright, famous as baseball players and managers in the early professional baseball era, were also prominent in the Longwood cricket team in the late 19th century.
With the diminishing interest in cricket as an American pastime many cricket clubs including those mentioned above switched their participatory activities to the new emerging sports like golf and tennis. Other cricket clubs from the 1890s on transformed themselves into athletics clubs, eg, Longwood CC became the Boston Athletics Association. The New Jersey Athletics Association started its organisational existence as a cricket club. The Cresent Athletic Club in Brooklyn Hts (NYC) followed a different course … formed as an (American) football club in 1884, it developed multi-sport fields at its Bay Ridge location, including cricket and lacrosse. The Cresent AC hosted the second ever Davis Cup world team tennis challenge (1902)[11].
PostScript1: Cricket V Baseball
Sports historians and other interested individuals have put forward several theories as to why baseball ultimately eclipsed cricket in the US. Baseball’s rise to the status of national game was partly an unforseen consequence of the 1860s American Civil War – during the war it was difficult to get proper cricket equipment and to mark and maintain the pitch, so it was much easier for soldiers to set up simple games of baseball which they did increasingly during their ‘downtime’ from the fighting … post-bellum the game of baseball gradually took firm hold[12]. The elaborate accoutrement of cricket compared to that of baseball was part of the answer: for a baseball game to happen required very little – a smooth, wooden bat, a ball and a few weighted bags … and no field or ground preparation!
Brian Palmer et al has pointed out the role marketing played in advancing the cause of baseball after the Civil War. The promoters of baseball sensing an opportunity at a formative point in its development, established the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players in 1871. This unified the sport as well as professionalising it (refer also to PostScript 2 for more on this), meanwhile cricket stayed regionalised and amateur, a sport of and for gentlemen and their social strata✧. Many top cricket players made the switch to baseball and the fans followed[13]. Cricket historian Tom Melville contends that a secondary element in baseball’s meteoric climb was that whilst many of the top baseballers succeeded in cricket, the opposite was less inclined to be the case[14].
Once it caught on, other factors seem to have contributed to tilting the matter in baseball’s favour … baseball was seen as faster and shorter than cricket – which could drag on for up to four or five days, whereas baseball comprised nine innings each side (around three hours all up), so you could, and they did, play “double-headers” on the same day at the same ground! Cricket with its on-going stream of interruptions – lunch, tea break, drinks breaks, stumps – contrasts sharply with the continuity of baseball[15]. Are Americans temperamentally more suited to a game that is quick, dynamic and guarantees a winner? This is hard to argue conclusively for sports across the board, because although it fits the description of baseball and for matter basketball and tennis, American football with its stop-start, TV ad break-punctuated, drawn out nature, seems to refute this – as does Americans’ favourite individual sport, golf (a standard PGA golf tournament comprising 72 holes of play over four long days (4 x 18) is the antithesis of a rapidly achieved denouement).
The utter ‘Englishness’ of cricket figures highly in the explanations of some historians for its rejection by Americans. The embryonic seeds lie perhaps with the American Revolution. After the severing of political ties with Britain from 1776 a new-found patriotism led many Americans (loyalist Anglo-Americans aside) to distance themselves culturally from the mother country and some expressed this by jettisoning the most ‘English’ of games as well. Melville concludes that cricket’s British connexions contributed to the game’s demise in the US … cricket, according to Melville, ultimately failed to “establish an American character”[16]. The popularity of baseball saw it come to embody a spirit of nationalism that was idiosyncratically and unmistakably American.
The sport of baseball as it evolved had always tended to have a less complicated set of rules relative to cricket…rules in the latter game are officially and grandly called the Laws of Cricket¶. Tom Melville makes the point that as baseball evolved from its nascent, native state to something more standardised, its exponents and practitioners tended to ignore those rules which hindered “the spirit and fun of the game”[17]. Cricket’s laws with their British imperial remnants (nothwithstanding sincere efforts in recent times to free the game up more), for the most part has tended toward rigidity. Laws (rules) on stoppages due to bad light and rain are inherently not conducive to letting the game flow…nor is the recent innovation of umpires referring dismissal decisions to a video replay system for review.
AG Spalding
PostScript2: AG Spalding and the baseball origin myth
One of the most ardent advocates of professional baseball was Albert G Spalding. Spalding, a former MLB player and team manager, was a master of “spin-doctoring”, constantly preaching the merits of baseball and extolling its supposedly ‘democratic’ spirit, compared to the ‘elitist’ nature of cricket. In 1888 he organised an “All-Star” world tour, a series of baseball games between his Chicago White Stockings and an “All-American” side, aimed at popularising the game internationally. Spalding’s much hyped tour was personally rewarding to him as he used it to promote and sell the sporting goods that his company manufactured. Later, the influential baseballer-cum-businessman lobbied for the formation of a national commission to investigate and resolve baseball’s obscure origins (which were in dispute at the time). The Mills Commission, with Spalding’s guiding hand, erroneously credited an undeserving Union general from the Civil War, Abner Doubleday, with the invention of baseball. The myth has long been comprehensively deflated – the most likely candidates for baseball’s antecedents reside in either the archaic British game of rounders or the old monastic French game, la soule (D Block, Baseball before We Knew It)[18].
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✿ and/or the modified regional form of it known simply as ‘Wicket’
❂ international cricket’s inaugural governing body, the Imperial Cricket Conference (ICC), did nothing to aid US cricket’s development or popularity in 1909 by restricting test level cricket to member countries of the British Empire only
❦ the Manhatten Cricket Club building today is a bar in W79th Street New York, downstairs from an Australian-themed restaurant named “Burke and Wills” – after a couple of ill-fated explorers of the Australian continent in the 1860s
✥ and three golf courses, St Martin’s (in Chestnut Hill), Wissahickon and Militia Hill (both in Whitemarsh Township, Flourtown)
✧ this introduces a different factor contributing to baseball’s success, a class-based one. In becoming ‘universal’ the sport made an appeal to all Americans, to all classes – cf. the more restrictive social reach of US cricket
¶ this can be measured quantitatively as well – the MLB (Major League Baseball) has nine main rules (with subsets), compared to the MCC’s (Marylebone Cricket Club’s) 42 Laws. The “Laws of Cricket” which extend back to the 18th century tend also to have more arcane laws on its books
[1] R Noboa y Rivera, ‘How Philadelphia became the unlikely epicentre of American Cricket’, The Guardian, 28-Mar-2015, www.theguardian.com
[2] the Gentlemen of Philadelphia cricket team played first-class cricket for 35 years including three tours of England. The Philadelphians’ star player was fast bowler Bart King, a pioneering exponent of swing pace bowling. King, considered by most judges the best ever American cricketer, topped the English 1908 season bowling averages, ahead of all first-class bowlers in Britain (his record lowest average stood for 50 years!), ‘Philadelphian cricket team’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[3] as claimed by SICC, ‘Staten Island C.C. A Brief History’, (R Bavanandan), www.statenislandcc.org
[4] M Pollak, ‘Rocking the Tennis Cradle’, New York Times, 27-Aug-2006, www.mobile.nytimes.com
[5] ‘Staten Island C.C.’, op.cit.
[6] J Yates, ‘GET OUT: Swingers Club’, 12-Jun-2008, www.silive.com
[7] P David Sentance, Cricket in America, 1710-2000 (2006); ‘The Cresent Athletic Club’, (BrooklynBallParks.com-CAC), www.covehurst.net; M Williamson, ‘The oldest international contest of them all’, (Cricinfo), www.espncricinfo.com
[8] ‘PCC History by J S F Murdoch, Historian’, Philadelphia Cricket Club, www.philacricket.com
[9] ‘Philadelphia Cricket Club’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[10] ‘Germantown Cricket Club’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[11] Sentance, op.cit.
[12] J Marder & A Cole, ‘Cricket in the USA’, www.espncricinfo.com (Adapted from Barclays World of Cricket, (1980))
[13] B Palmer, ‘Why don’t Americans Play Cricket?’, Slate, 24-Feb-2011, www.slate.com
[14] In the second half of the 19th century there was a lot of crossover between cricket and baseball by the players (including composite matches incorporating both forms of the bat-and-ball contest), T Melville, The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America (1998)
[15] Palmer, loc.cit.
[16] Melville, op.cit.
[17] ibid.
[18] ET Smith, ‘Patriot game’, The Guardian (UK), 02-Jul-2005, www.theguardian.com; ‘Albert Spalding’, Wikipedia, www.em.n.wikipedia.org
The two co-wrote The Lady Vanishes, a 1938 mystery which was a breakthrough feature for Alfred Hitchcock❈. Interestingly Launder and Gilliat (hereafter L & G) had their (separate) starts in the film business composing inter-titles (title cards) for silent movies in the late 1920s, the same industry beginnings undertaken by Hitchcock several years earlier. L & G combined their talents behind-the-camera together for the first time from the mid 1930s. The L & G partnership had a flexibility and a particular pattern to it … invariably they would jointly produce films and/or also co-write screenplays (although on other occasions either man would co-write films with various other collaborating screenwriters). But almost with very few exceptions one or the other would direct a specific film singly – this was done apparently to avoid confusing the actors[1].
A versatile¤ and fecund partnership
The war-time pictures, Millions Like Us and Two Thousand Women can be identified as reflecting in particular Frank Launder’s preoccupation with the portrayal of strong, defiantly independent women[6]. These films were commissioned by the UK Ministry of Information to counter the prevailing low recruitment and morale of women in war-time factory work. Millions Like Us, as Judy Suh has noted, conveyed the “double valence of women as productive workers and domestic symbols of national unity”. L & G’s social-realist films, though propagandist in purpose, posed questions of gender and class whilst depicting the routine of ordinary people at work. The necessities of war-time brought out the conflicting roles and identities of women in such an out-of-the ordinary circumstance, as well as the existence of crossings of class boundaries[7].
[Photo: 
Brian Palmer et al has pointed out the role marketing played in advancing the cause of baseball after the Civil War. The promoters of baseball sensing an opportunity at a formative point in its development, established the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players in 1871. This unified the sport as well as professionalising it (refer also to PostScript 2 for more on this), meanwhile cricket stayed regionalised and amateur, a sport of and for gentlemen and their social strata✧. Many top cricket players made the switch to baseball and the fans followed[13]. Cricket historian Tom Melville contends that a secondary element in baseball’s meteoric climb was that whilst many of the top baseballers succeeded in cricket, the opposite was less inclined to be the case[14].