The little club that could
Whichever way you travel to the little village of Bardwell you’ll go by a series of roads each tighter than the last, the final one so skinny that the bushes brush your windows as you pass oncoming cars. Bardwell, its signposts obscured by great thickets of stinging nettles, is 10 miles north-east of Bury St Edmunds, and has a population of 700. They support two pubs, a post office, a tithe barn, and a 15th century flint-rubble church, St Peter and St Paul, which Nikolaus Pevsner praised for its rare hammerbeam roof. A short walk past the graveyard is the village’s four-storey windmill, only recently restored. Both windmill and church are portrayed on the ornamental sign that hangs proud by the pond on the village green.
Around the back of the mill there is an information board with a map, put up by local historians for the few passing tourists. “Too often today villages are being swamped by the present with scant regard for the past,” says the caption. “This is very sad because a village that loses its past, loses its roots and identity …” Perhaps 30 or 40 houses have been built in Bardwell in the last five years or so, and six new semis are under construction down Quaker Lane, where one thatched cottage has a blackboard out offering “Home Made Preserves & Marmalade”. Unlike No1 Quaker Lane’s cucumbers, the village isn’t pickled. It is still growing. But it hasn’t lost anything of its identity. Rather, it has gained a lot.
Bardwell is so close to the ideal of an English village, to John Major’s England of “long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers”. They even filmed several episodes of Dad’s Army here at the Six Bells. But of course that chocolate box imagery is misleading. The same tensions are at play here as in the rest in the country, and in the recent referendum Bardwell voted for Brexit by 57% to 43%, against the advice of its MP. And besides, for much of its history there was at least one thing missing, an essential component of any quintessential village community. It didn’t have a cricket club.
They used to play here, back at the beginning of the 20th century. But sometime in the 1920s football took over, and the wicket on the playing field disappeared. By the 1960s only Bardwell’s oldest residents could recall the “tremendous cricket matches” that they once held here, “with huge marquees and teas”. In this at least they were ahead of the times. Last December The Spin travelled to Winslow, in Buckinghamshire, to report on the slow death of their cricket club. Since then, Winslow have received help and now have some hope. But around the country many other small clubs are struggling as playing numbers fall away, down by more than 60,000 according to the ECB’s own 2014 participation survey.
It was soon after that article that I first heard from Stephen Larder. “I’m not writing to brag,” he said in an email, “but I wish to illustrate there are different experiences out there.” Six months later, I meet Stephen in the car park by Bardwell’s playing fields. He is a large, likeable, man with far more hair than anyone who runs a cricket club has a right to have, the strain of organising games being one of the quickest ways to go bald because you end up tearing so much of it out. You wouldn’t necessarily guess it to look at him now, but in his day Steve was a good player, a left-hand bat and swing bowler who spent a season or two playing with Somerset’s Second XI in the late 1980s.
In the early 2000s, Steve moved back Britain from the USA and settled in Bardwell. In 2007 he was at the village fete when he heard an announcement over the PA. Another newcomer to the village, Ted Gear, was thinking of starting a cricket team, and “would anyone interested please get in contact”. There were six of them, at first, just enough to fill the middle table in the lounge bar of the Dun Cow. Ted, Peter, Steve, Paul, Craig the landlord’s son, and his ex-girlfriend, “who was a very good scorer, so I was sad when she broke up with him”. But soon enough they had cobbled together an XI, Bardwell CC, and set out playing friendly games around and about.
Only two of the team had ever really played serious cricket before, and Bardwell didn’t win a single match in either of their first two seasons. In the meantime, the village football team had folded, so the playing fields were free again. And Steve, who had been elected chairman, was developing grand plans. In 2009, Bardwell CC entered Division Five of the Hunts County Sunday League, because, Steve explains: “If we didn’t develop, we’d lose too many people’s interest. We needed to get into some sort of structured cricket.” He has a background in computing, and mentions Moore’s Law, the observation that over recent history the processing capabilities of computer chips have approximately doubled every two years.
The graph of Moore’s Law could also map the growth of Bardwell CC. That same Sunday team have gone from Division Five to Division One. The club also have an Academy XI playing in Division Four, a Saturday team in the Two Counties league, a midweek team, a friendly team, a women’s team, two under-16 teams, two under-13s, an under-11s, and an under-nines. Altogether they have 160 members, and almost 100 registered junior players, most of them from the nearby state schools, Ixworth Free and Thurston College, where this year the entire first XI is made up of Bardwell CC players.
It spread, Steve says, by word of mouth. The village’s boys and girls bought along friends from school. Fathers who had long since given up the game started playing again (one of Bardwell’s teams is a “kids and codgers side” that features four pairs of fathers and sons). Some of the mothers reckoned it looked a fun way to keep fit, so formed their own XI. One of Bardwell’s players, Gary Howard, hadn’t picked up a bat since he was at school. He explains that Bardwell is a club that “has no barriers”. Anyone who wants to play is welcome. Which was one reason why, without ever targeting other local clubs, Bardwell have pulled in a lot of occasional players from the surrounding area, people who only want, or only able, to turn out every now and again.
“We’ve never taken ourselves too seriously here,” Steve explains. “That atmosphere appeals to people.” More importantly, they’ve kept the fees low. Where some clubs in the area will charge up to £40 a year, and £3 per game, Bardwell charges £15 a year for the first child from each family, £10 for the next, and has no match fees. At the same time, the ground has grown by two and a half acres, so there is now room for two strips of wickets and a football pitch in winter. There’s a new set of nets in one corner, a new electronic scoreboard in another, a new set of covers in the third, and a new roller in the fourth. Plans have just been drawn up for a new pavilion, with work due to start next spring.
Those sums shouldn’t add up, but Bardwell runs as a volunteer operation. One member, a retired army officer, who they all call Captain Mainwaring, put himself forward to be the groundskeeper. Others have been off on ECB coaching courses, others do the scoring and umpiring. But more than that, the village has rallied around. A local architect designed the pavilion, and a local quantity surveyor is helping to oversee the costs, and a local builder will do much of the construction. The pavilion should cost around £500,000, but Bardwell hope to be able to bring it in for around 60% of that because of all the volunteer help. Even the bread for the sandwiches is provided by a local sponsor, the two brothers who run the bakery attached to the mill.
And everyone kicks in for the club’s big set piece, the music festival they hold on the outfield every summer: Bardfest. “That began as two barrels of beer and one bloke with a guitar,” says Howard. But, like the club, the festival has grown. So much so that for this weekend’s Bardfest 2016, they expect over 3,000 paying visitors. They have booked in a couple of covers bands, The Rolling Clones for the Friday, and Retake That for the Saturday afternoon, a real ale tent, a funfair. It’s a huge risk – they’re in for almost £30,000 – but it means that the club is effectively self-financing, so able to subsidise everyone’s cricket. There’s a rota up on the wall, showing who’s volunteering for what, dozens of names divided up for duties in the bars, car parks, and children’s areas.
At the club, no one talks politics. But Howard admits that he is “a Guardian reader”. He says Bardwell reminds him of “David Cameron’s Big Society idea, but I’ve never liked Cameron, so I wish there was another name for it”. Perhaps there is. In 1941 JB Priestley, who would have loved this village, laid out his vision for post-war Britain. He believed in a more participatory, less centralised, society. For “while a council can take charge of the larger questions, we should take care of the smaller, more local ones ourselves,” Priestley wrote. “Being a heritage, the beauty of this island is also a trust. Our children and their children after them must live in a beautiful country. That is something we can all leave them, if we fight to preserve it now.” The metaphor Priestley used to represent this ideal, in his book Out of the People, was the village cricket club, in which there are “more in the field than round it”.
We’ve been talking so long it is getting on to for 6pm. The parking lot has filled up. Bardwell are hosting two games that night, side-by-side, one for under-nines, another for under-16s. Add in the little kids mucking around with bats and balls around the boundary, and there must be 50 children, all playing cricket at once. Before I leave, one of the last things I ask Steve is how much help he’s had from the ECB. It provided a grant for the covers, he says. But otherwise, the answer is none too much. And while Bardwell have had a lot of support from the Suffolk Cricket Board, they’ve also had some criticism because other clubs say they are under-charging, that the coaching is worth more than Bardwell’s kids are paying for it. I sigh. He laughs.
Steve demurs. He doesn’t want to annoy anyone. But he says that he thinks the ECB has been a little bit wary of Bardwell because it is worried it might just be a fad. He expects this will change. He explains that Suffolk Cricket Board has ensured that the club have been shunted up on to the ECB’s priority list, that he hopes to hear from it soon. It seems to me that it should be the other way around, that Bardwell shouldn’t be waiting on the ECB’s help, but instead the men and women who run the game should be coming to them, along those narrow and overgrown country roads, to see what they can learn from this village club. Because in this little corner of England at least, cricket is thriving.
• This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe just visit this page, find ‘The Spin’ and follow the instructions.
