Cricket memorabilia Society Auction March 2018
I arrived at Grace Road, home of Leicestershire County Cricket Club, in a blizzard. Wind howling, snowflakes swirling I tucked my hands in my pockets and walked past the David Gower and Illingworth Suites to the Charles Palmer Suite.
My Don Bradman signed drawings
take their place at the auction.
I was here to attend the March 2018 auction run by the Cricket Memorabilia Society. I had been in possession of some pencil drawings of Don Bradman signed by the man himself for some time. They were given to me by my father, Glamorgan cricketer Bernard Hedges. He had received them from a man who, I guess, would qualify for the title given to me by ex-Hampshire cricketer of the fifties and sixties Jimmy Gray. When I turned up at his house to interview him for my book (The Player from Ponty) about my Dad, he described me to his daughter as ‘one of those cricket nuts’. Douglas Davies was an avid follower of cricket and a Glamorgan fan. He had presented the drawings to my father after a long chat over the garden wall. They were swapped for a signature on a cigarette card. I think Dad got the better end of the deal.
Keith Hayhurst, President of the Cricket Memorabilia Society
Attending the auction was a new experience for me but not for the 40 or so others who had turned up. These were experienced collectors used to buying and selling cricketing memorabilia and knew their Woollers from their Washbrooks. If such devotion to gathering artefacts of the game makes people ‘cricket nuts’ then I had entered their asylum.
I was introduced to Keith Hayhurst, founder member of the Cricket Memorabilia Society, its current President and a significant collector in his own right. He told me only 12 members turned up to the first meeting of the memorabilia society but now, the magazine started by Keith is available in twenty countries.
Just some of the memorabilia available for auction
Memorabilia is a word that covers a multitude of different items. Books, magazines, scorecards, cigarette cards, bats, paintings and even lottery tickets and egg cups were on display for purchase. Signatures were almost every where to be seen, fortunately with printed names alongside or photographs underneath. We all must have had that horrible experience of getting several players to sign a programme and then, when you came to look at it, being unable to decipher the hieroglyphs of your heroes.
For all his thirty years hard work in promoting the society and its work, Keith is under no illusions about where the preservation of all of this cricketing history sits in the great scheme of things. ‘Heritage is important but it doesn’t bring you any money in’ he told me. When I asked him why heritage was important he told me how he had visited the home of the son of Herbert Sutcliffe and how he had purchased the bulk of the great England batsman’s personal memorabilia including an ash tray given to him by the captain of the Bodyline Tour of Australia in 1932/33, Douglas Jardine inscribed with the words ‘with grateful thanks. Jardine. Captain’. Behind this small item (only 12 of which were commissioned) and with these few words there hid a huge slice of cricket’s history. It was what collecting, for Keith, was all about. A chance to touch history rather than just watch it or read about it. A piece of evidence that pointed towards the truths of the time.
Just one of the Glamorgan items up for sale.
For Keith, and those like him, collecting was a habit with a philosophy of preserving memories of the past. He began by collecting his own Dinky metal car toys and values them still as ‘they brought me back to my youth’. As we get older, the past plays a more important part in our present. For many, gathered into the folds of dementia, it is the pre-eminent part. Our identity, even when we are still aware of it, becomes more dependent on who we were than who we are.
Inviting ex-players to talk about their careers at its events has become a natural element of the Cricket Memorabilia Society’s modus operandi. Today was no exception. Phil De Freitas and Tim Munton were on hand to provide stories from their past and comment on the game today. Both were asked whether they had any memorabilia of their own. Tim treasured his England blazer which is kept inside his wardrobe. Phil had a whole host of things including bats and pads. These were all kept hidden away in the loft, waiting for his sons to discover when time came for them to do so. I remembered my father and how his house bore no traces of the eighteen-year professional cricketing career he had had. Not a framed photo, autographed magazine or Glamorgan ephemera. In my younger years I used to think it was a lack of pride. Now I am certain that is not the case. Professional sportsmen, cricketers in particular, are extremely proud of their achievements but almost exclusively humble about sharing them. Their history is a badge worn on the inside and only occasionally paraded at talks or meetings like this one.
Tim Munton and Phil De Freitas.
Keeping their own memorabilia hidden away.
‘There’s always something that somebody is collecting’ Keith tells me and, in a way, I suppose he is saying that we are all collectors deep down. The pictures or ornaments that find a place in our homes tell us the story of who we are and who we were. The forest of photographs we keep capture moments in our lives and the lives of those we love. They are our attempts, often unwitting, to capture the past and keep it for posterity. Professional collectors are, in a sense, those of us who do this consciously and for people or organisations other than themselves or their families. They are, in sporting circles, the repository of a deeper knowledge that is increasingly forsaken in what Keith called the world of ‘instant’ access. In cricket, T20 seems to favour what happens now or next over what happened long ago. The world of the collectors is shrinking fast.
Keith makes the comparison between his love of playing the piano and the game of cricket. He once played a Bach fugue to an audience in which he hid the melody of God Save the Queen. Those listening, used to only hearing the surface melody could not identify the National Anthem and only heard it when they were directed towards it. This was cricket and, indeed, life for Keith. Something rather beautiful that is a reward for a more studied and intellectual approach. Something that gives the more you give to it.
I left soon after my interview was complete. My drawings fetched what they were expected to, between £30 and £50. There is a price, it seems, that can be put on history. Keith and his colleagues are used to doing that. But like cricketing Jedi, they are an order whose philosophy and traditions are viewed often with disinterest and, sometimes, with derision. Sadly, in the modern age, the price placed on history is all too cheap.