Quotations from P G Wodehouse are copyright of, and reprinted by permission of, the Trustees of the Wodehouse Estate © 2012 The P G Wodehouse Society (UK)

The Flower Show Match; Matfield CC v George Sherston's XI on July 23rd 2008

On 23rd July members of the P G Wodehouse Society (UK) cricket team The Gold Bats and the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship cricket team combined to form the George Sherston XI. They played Matfield Cricket Club in the annual Flower Show Match.

The Flower Show Match comes from Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, the first volume of Sassoon's fictionalised autobiography, in which he calls himself George Sherston, and is a classic cricketing story widely anthologised.

Links here and here provide some interesting information about this important cricketing event:

Bob Miller is the Captain of the Gold Bats and also a member of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship. The Flower Show match in 2006 celebrated the 120th anniversary of Siegfried Sassoon and was organised by Bob.

‘…I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

and in ruined trenches, lashed with rain

dreaming of things they did with balls and bats…’

…Siegfried Sassoon ‘Dreamers 1916’

So rather poignantly read Dennis Silk on a glorious summer’s evening in the idyllic Kent countryside at the end of the third annual match between Matfield Village and George Sherston’s XI on 23 July.

The match is played each year in memory of Siegfried Sassoon and this year also in memory of his good friend and fellow war poet Edmund Blunden.

The extraordinary thing about these matches is the miles that are travelled by both players and spectators. The pre-match lunch is a mass of journey stories from Shropshire, Wales and the like. Fortunately, not too many got lost this year and the match started relatively promptly at 2 o’clock.

The Sherston’s captain (and driving force behind this fixture) Bob Miller, unfortunately having suffered a broken arm a week or two before, arrived to oversee proceedings in a sling. The honour of captaincy for some reason therefore fell to myself and with the unjustified worry of the team’s history of previous defeats in the fixture I broke with tradition and opted to field first.

15-year-old Alistair Jones from Wales and his elder opening bowling partner Nick Oulton started steadily enough before Matfield’s opener Peter Danby in particular proceeded to put bat to ball and before long the home side were 53 for 0.

Fortunately, one too many lusty blows by Danby and he was caught for 35. There then followed a series of unfortunate and unexpected batting errors and combined with some fine fielding and exceptional bowling, in particular from Martin Southwell and Richard Heard, this left Matfield in some trouble. One particular catch of note was the one-handed effort by Edward Blunden’s grandson, Ted Miller, close in, just after his captain had moved him to a precariously dangerous position.

Then, thanks to some late big hitting particularly from Simon Knott including one huge six off my own bowling Matfield managed 165 runs.

Tea, as always, is a highlight of village cricket matches and today was no exception. Grateful that the running around for most of the Sherston’s XI was over we tucked in heartily, feeling that for once we may be in with an outside chance of victory.

The second half of the match was as unexpected as it was glorious (at least for the visitors).

Ted (E Blunden’s grandson) again surpassed himself. Having mentioned that he hadn’t played cricket for years, I sent him in for a bit of fun to open with our usual man for the job Andrew Chapman (a steady influence if ever there was one). The rest, as they say, is history.

The ball was blazed to all parts of the village with regularity. 71 was established in no time before Ted was eventually out for 40. With a little help from Oulton and Heard, Chapman polished off the rest of the runs with an elegant innings from yesteryear making 79 not out and George Sherston’s XI had won for the first time.

There was something timelessly old-fashioned about the day, about the game of cricket in such a setting, played in the right spirit with such good people. For those ‘sport mad’ ones amongst us to have the great Derek Underwood in attendance made it special and any time spent in the company of Dennis Silk is time enriched.

But most of all we were playing in memory of those who had to stop playing to go and fight in France nearly a hundred years ago. A series of moving poems later and particularly Sassoon’s ‘Dreamers’ brought it home to us in the evening sun.

Here’s to next year.

Julian Hill