More Than a Game: The story of cricket's early years, by John Major

With the exception of his fling with Edwina Currie, John Major is probably the least exciting and controversial of all our post-war Prime Ministers, except perhaps Clement Attlee. Attlee, on the eve of his installation as a Knight of the Garter at Windsor wrote some amiable doggerel: "Few thought he was even a starter. / There were many who thought themselves smarter. But he ended PM, CH and OM, / an Earl and a Knight of the Garter."

On leaving office, Major accepted a CH and the Garter but resolutely turned his face against the available peerage and left politics on his electoral defeat in 1997 saying, as he vacated Downing Street, that he was off to watch cricket.

"Since leaving office," he writes here, "I have been able to step back into the pleasures of cricket as if it had never been interrupted by the rude reality of politics." He keeps himself busy, and presumably highly paid, with various directorships and consultancies, but cricket is still an abiding passion and he has served on the MCC Committee and been President of Surrey County Cricket Club. While Prime Minister he was assumed by the media to be so dull and dull-witted that one cartoonist produced an entire book of caricatures entitled 101 Uses for a John Major. But, as with Attlee, he was much shrewder than he seemed and, with this book, has exercised a fine sense of timing in choosing a publication date so close to the abdication of his successor, to the beginning of the first class cricket season and the start of the Test series against the West Indies and also a period when, it must be admitted, England's cricket standing is at a particularly low ebb.

In a brave act of self-censorship Major restricts himself to the history of cricket up to 1914, devoting his last chapter to a moving account of the outbreak of World War I and the deaths and career-ending injuries of the many great cricketers who fought in it. He deals fairly with the history of the Hambledon Club, being sceptical of the some of the mythology surrounding it and the genesis of the game we follow so avidly today. What will be new to most readers is his often dryly witty treatment of the game's medieval origins and its later victimisation by a puritanically over-zealous Church.

He is scathing about both the lay and ecclesiastical courts who prosecuted, and heavily fined, those - including children - who broke the Sabbath laws by playing the game, often on private land, on Sundays. Public penance was also often inflicted: "Whereas I have heretofore highly displeased Almighty God in prophaning his holy Sabbath by playing at Crickett thereby neglecting to come to Church to devine [sic] service."

Major has a sharp sense of history and one cannot but warm to a man who, while speculating about who first put bat to ball, quotes William of Occam: "Things not known to exist should not be postulated as existing." Donald Rumsfeld, eat your heart out. He resorts to sound etymology to scout the notion that cricket was invented by the French, pointing out that criquet is the French equivalent of the grasshopper-like insect, the cricket. He does however concede that a French artist, Gravelot, who taught Gainsborough, produced the first known cricket engraving.

There are good potted histories of how cricket became a predominantly county game, following two centuries of village, club and privately organised matches, often for very high stakes - up to around £100,000 in today's money - set up by rich landowners with high enthusiasm for the sport. He is also lucid on the development of the game from two stumps with one bail at one end only, club-like bats, underarm bowling, vilely unprepared and hence dangerous pitches, to the infinitely more complex, sophisticated, rule-dominated game we have now.

Major is thoroughly even-handed about the sharp conduct of some of the early impresarios of the sport like William Clarke and the shabby treatment of some of the great professional cricketers. He's acute about the input of the aristocratic and autocratic amateurs who dominated the running of the sport, notably Lords Hawke and Harris, both, in their way, snobbish monsters, both passionate and dedicated aficionados who were instinctive and gifted leaders of men and did much for the game and the conditions of the professional players they commanded.

Given how many books have been written about W G Grace, Major is both succinct and illuminating, stressing his genius, his almost incredible feats with both bat and ball, his familial heartbreaks, his status as the most eminent of Victorians. Yet he also makes clear that Grace could be a bully, was dedicated to lining his pockets, frequently at the cost of fellow players, and turned elaborate gamesmanship into actual cheating, once running six runs while, for three of them, the ball was trapped inside his shirt and thus beyond the fielders' reach.

This is not a perfect book. There is no bibliography although the frequently entertaining notes are where they should be, at the foot of the relevant page. The excellent historical illustrations are, while credited to their providers, for the most part not identified as to who painted them, something to be put right by the publishers in the subsequent editions which will doubtless follow.

The great C L R James famously wrote: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" As this book makes clear, John Major knows a lot about cricket and a lot of other things too. He ought to be appointed to some appropriately high office at the English Cricket Board or, better still, the International Cricket Council. He couldn't do any worse than the present somewhat extravagant and overstaffed bosses.

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