A historical pageant of cricket
I am a keen follower of cricket, and am fortunate that my father is a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). This year has seen many events to mark the bicentenary of the current Lord’s cricket ground – the home of MCC – including a match between MCC and Hertfordshire, on the exact anniversary of the first match in 1814, featuring the same two teams (in both instances, MCC won).
The final event was ‘Lord’s Tales’, a series of eight short monologues, mostly delivered in character by members of the MCC staff. The audience, numbering 120, were separated into groups of 15, and moved from room to room to see the performances one by one. This was performed four times, and my father and I attended the last one, on 25 November 2014.
We heard, for example, ‘A Young Cricketer’s Tale’, performed in the home dressing room by Kris de Souza, who works in the Estates Department of MCC. The ‘tale’ was based on the memories of Harry Lee, who joined the Lord’s groundstaff in 1906 aged 15 and had a long career as a first-class cricketer. In character, Kris told us about the unglamorous life of a young Edwardian cricketer and the duties of MCC groundstaff members in this period.
Another ‘tale’ was one of Thomas Lord, the founder of the ground, told by an MCC librarian Neil Robinson, in the character of a nineteenth-century MCC landlord. Neil told us about the life of Thomas Lord, and the early difficulties faced by MCC.
The women of Lord’s were not left out of the story either. We were reminded in ‘A Suffragette’s Tale’ that women could not become members of MCC until the 1990s. In ‘A Landlady’s Tale’, delivered appropriately from behind one of the bars by Rachel Pagan (PA to the MCC chief executive and secretary), we learned about the things that happened around the ground in the nineteenth century, and the many other sports that were played in and around Lord’s. One example was archery, which returned to Lord’s during the 2012 Olympics.
‘Lord’s Tales’ was not a historical pageant as such – its modest scale could hardly compare with the massive civic pageants of the twentieth century – but shared many features in common. For example, the performers were amateurs, but two professional actors, Johnny Dennis and Milton Johns, assisted with the production. Both are also match announcers at the ground. This model was used by pageants and community plays across the country.
For the cricket world, the pleasure of ‘Lord’s Tales’ was completely overshadowed by the injury to Phillip Hughes, which occurred shortly before the final performance. Phillip Hughes died on 27 November as a result of injuries sustained playing in an Australian state match.
Mark Freeman