Dein erstes Forum » eras arbiter elegentiae, CB Fry. Not

One of the very first cricket books I was ever given, on the occasion of my tenth birthday, was a slim black paperback called Great Australian Cricket Pictures (1975). When I retrieve it from the shelf now, it falls open at page 87, corroborative of my boyhood fascination with the image it contains.Trumpered read the bad-pun heading for the short caption, which described Victor Trumper as one of our truly great cricketers, told me that he was the first to score a century before lunch in a Test match, which proved to be true, and once hit the first ball of a match for six, which did not. Such was my simultaneous introduction to the first cricketer from history who ever registered with me and to what remains perhaps its oldest truly treasured image, in the context of assertion, fact and myth.I had also, though I would be unaware of it many more years, been introduced to the work of the pioneering Edwardian photographer George Beldam, in whose book Great Batsmen: Their Methods at a Glance (1905) the picture first appeared. Instead, as it almost invariably does, the photograph of Trumper in Great Australian Cricket Pictures appeared uncredited, undated, unaccounted for, as though it had taken itself - or even as though it wasnt a photograph at all, but a keyhole view of the past. When not long after, I commenced reading about Trumper, it can only have been with the image of him jumping out to drive in mind.That was then, of course, although now may be less different than we think. Nobodys found a great many more photographs of Trumper, or at least thought to make the others that do exist more readily available to the online browser. Todays ten-year-old would encounter Trumper pretty much the same way as I did, simultaneously with his most famous pictorial representation: google Victor Trumper, and one is led to the image. For the more mature fan, meanwhile, the image attests to the residual Trumper reputation, even if a good deal of the residual Trumper reputation is based on the image.When last year I first contemplated writing a book about Trumper, convention drew me towards a biography. Yet I also experienced misgivings. Three previous biographers had struggled to make much of him. The primary material was thin, his period remote, his contemporaries long gone, and the mythology thick indeed.To write about any figure of the past is essentially to make a claim for them, to make a mission of substantiating their significance. In sport, the allure is of great deeds, stirring victories, public approbation. Yet legend is an uneasy companion of biography, if not an outright enemy. And to track the Trumper story through the obligatory sources is a little like entering a hall of mirrors. Everyone is quoting everyone else. Stories and their origins have long since parted ways. One channels, instead, impressions. My excellently iconoclastic friend Jarrod Kimber wrote about Trumper in Test Cricket: The Unauthorised Biography last year in terms of which Neville Cardus would not have disapproved - and lets just say that these two writers would not normally be thought of as singing from the same song sheet.So I struck a kind of bargain with the past. If dealing with legend was inevitable, why not look it in the eye rather than try to peer around it? Why not evaluate knowingly what a conventional biography would be unavoidably transacting in anyway? After all, its one of my favourite lines of Chestertons: Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.That didnt mean ignoring fact. What became Stroke of Genius still needed extensive biographical underpinnings - partly to illustrate legends deviations, partly because Trumper has been gradually winnowed away to a name and an image. But I was anxious to avoid what so many works about cricket history seem to become - chronologies of scores, transcriptions of match reports, recitations of anecdote. Thats not only because these are seldom truly enlightening, but because so much now lies within reach of the interested reader. Want to find out Trumpers scores in 1903-04? Use CricketArchive. Want to read what people said about these scores? Try Trove or the British Newspaper Archive. In some ways, those of us enticed by crickets past have yet to adapt to the modern accessibility of informational riches. In any case, what differentiated Trumper was not his scores so much as their interpretation, the heights of lyricism ascended in describing him, and the remarkable unanimity of opinion, so that their evocation by a single image did not in the end seem so unnatural - indeed, it would steadily become proof of claims for his aesthetic superiority.Heading off down this track, I grew interested in how cricket was seen before World War I. Cricket, of course, is quite a challenging game to watch live, for reasons of distance and speed, without some kind of technological enhancement. Way back when, illustrative forms - painting, engraving, early photography - tended to reflect that. They hovered at the boundary edge, and perforce took in the whole scene. Classics of illustration - like WH Masons A Cricket Match between the Counties of Sussex and Kent, at Brighton and Ponsonby Staples An Imaginary Cricket Match - foregrounded the crowd and recessed the cricket. The Victorian Ages outstanding cricket photographic work, CW Alcocks Famous Cricketers and Cricket Grounds (1892), posed players for wistful portraits, and provided venues as tranquil panoramas. Intimacy with action was undreamed of - until George Beldam.Quite why Beldam is not better known amazes me. Perhaps it is because he is sui generis - he belongs to a leisure society swallowed up by World War I. He was an amateur cricketer, for Middlesex and London County, who doubled as an amateur photographer: indeed it was one of the passing intrigues of researching my book to learn that photography underwent debates similar to those in cricket about amateurism and professionalism. A century on, were apt to deem amateurism a kind of effete dabbling. In photography as in cricket, Beldam was a furiously industrious perfectionist. Between 1904 and 1908, he took thousands of photographs for eight works of sports photography, five of them substantial: not just cricket but tennis, golf and even jujitsu. Nor is this just a matter of versatility. He had the confidence of his caste and skill. Its not a coincidence that Beldam persuaded cricketers to do what they did for no other photographer: he was one of them, and as an amateur, atop crickets social heap.Beldam had the further cachet of a creative partnership with the eras arbiter elegentiae, CB Fry. Not only was Fry the finest flower of English amateur sport - batsman, footballer, rugby player, athlete, scholar - but a prolific journalist and editor of an eponymous magazine of outdoor recreation. Fry had both the Victorian fascination with technique and the Edwardian infatuation with style - which he defined with a Ruskinian formulation about the maximum effect for the least apparent effort. Long entranced by the unique elan and deftness of his Sussex and England team-mate Ranjitsinhji, Fry was captivated by a photograph that Beldam took of Ranji at Hove in September 1904.These were not action photographs as we would now understand them. To bridge that abiding gap between boundary edge and action, Beldam circulated among his subjects during practice sessions and at intervals; sometimes he invited them to his home, where he had the gentlemanly indulgence of an outdoor and indoor pitch. Photography being such a novelty, and the idea of a glimmer of act