The Master remembered

During Essex’s Alastair Cook and Middlesex’s Andrew Strauss mammoth 188-run opening partnership in the recent first Test of the Ashes in Brisbane they past a record many believed would not be broken. When Cook uncharacteristically snicked one through a gap at third slip he carried the pairing to the highest aggregate by any England opening partnership, eclipsing the figure of 3,249 amassed by Cambridge’s number one sporting son Sir Jack Hobbs and his partner Herbert Sutcliffe.

Born Brewhouse Lane, off Gwydir Street, in 1882, the eldest of 12 children, Hobbs learned his cricket on the hallowed greens of Jesus College and Fenner’s, where his father was on the ground staff, and Parker’s Piece where he later played First Class cricket for Cambridgeshire.

Largely self taught, Hobbs would practice cricket with his father’s work colleagues in the morning and then watch cricket at Fenner’s in the afternoon, where at the time the great Ranjitsinhji played whilst studying at Cambridge. Together with the wristy Indian, Hobbs other idol was a Cambridge man, Tom Hayward, then at Surrey, and to Hobbs’ delight it was Hayward who recommended Hobbs to Surrey at the tender age of 17.

In Hobbs’ first game for his new county he made 88 and was watched by another cricketing legend in W.G. Grace who wryly surmised: “He’s goin’ to be a good’un.” Little did Grace know that Hobbs would go on the smash Grace’s world record of 126 centuries, making 199 tons by the time he retired at the grand old age of 52 and still holds the record for the oldest man to score a Test hundred.

Like modern-day great of English cricket, Freddie Flintoff and and Kevin Pietersen included, it was the battles between the old enemy Australia that Hobbs saved his greatest performances where he scored over 3,600 runs including 12 centuries, which are both still records and probably will never be broken.

In a time when cricket was still dominated by the gentlemen amateurs, Hobbs was a professional, receiving his first payment of half a guinea per game whilst at Bedford Grammar. He would go on to the the first paid cricketer to be knighted.

Of course the enduring memorial in Cambridge is the Hobbs Pavilion on Parker’s Piece, built by public subscription in 1925 to celebrate Hobbs beating Grace’s record of centuries. To commemorate this and demonstrate his strong Cambridge roots, Hobbs brought a star studded team to play, including Sutcliffe and numerous internationals to play against a Cambridgeshire XI, raising £292 for Addenbrookes hospital.

It was fitting therefore that at the end of the current season a series of games were played on Parker’s Piece by Cambridge NCI, the current custodians of the cricket on the famous city centre green, to mark the 70^th anniversary of the Pavilion, and a collection was also made for the hospital.

The customary red-tape was cut by the Lord Mayor of Cambridge, unveiling a detailed display of Hobbs’ life and cricket career assembled by local historians, and was followed by two Twenty20 games of cricket, enthusiastically played by NCI players.

Despite the current accolades being paid to England’s Cook and his opening partner Strauss, Hobbs and Sutcliffe batted together for England on only 38 occasions, less than half of what it took the current incumbents to break the record, and the masters from yesteryear partnership average is over double their modern day counterparts (87.81 to 42.68).

There can be no better fitting tribute to Sir Jack that one of the 21^st Century’s icons of cricket, the illustrious Indian Sachin Tendulkar was nicknamed the ‘Little Master’ in homage to the stylish Hobbs who was and will be forever known as the ‘The Master’.