If ever you are able to go behind the Woolley Stand and go in the door marked ‘Committee Room’, and then climb two flights of stairs to the very top of the inside of the stand, you will find a large, draughty and rather damp area where a vast collection of books, pictures, ledgers, cups, Championship pennants, bats, stumps, benefit brochures and Leslie Ames’ golf clubs have been stored for far too long. Over the past few weeks, a team of fit, ageless and particularly masochistic volunteers have been venturing into these murky heights to try to sort out the collection of Kent cricket memorabilia that is hidden up there, ignored if not forgotten over many years. The purpose of our strenuous and very dusty efforts is to sort the good from the bad, the interesting from the irrelevant, and to catalogue and preserve what we decide to keep.
Conditions up there are not good for storing anything at the moment, being too dark, too damp and too much the wrong temperature for anything fragile to last for long. Now that we have the space empty, we can work out how to redesign it so that we can keep out the draughts, keep the temperature and humidity at the right levels, and store what will be up there in a way that will give them all longer life expectancy and greater significance in our collection.
Mind you, there was a lot of tat up there which had to be disposed of. We filled seven skips with junk by the time we had finished. There were hundreds of Kent Annuals from recent years, all printed in rather optimistic quantities, and all in very heavy boxes. Carrying them down to the skip at the bottom of the stairs did wonders for our biceps. There were plenty of bats, some very interesting, signed by greats of the past, which of course stay in the collection; and there were others, unsigned, unusable and terminally uninteresting, which joined the Annuals in the skips. There were old and tarnished cups, plaques and assorted trophies from rivalries long forgotten; a box containing about 30 cheap candlesticks; far too many advertising photographs supplied by sponsors over the years, prints of all sorts, and boxes of head and shoulders shots of players of the not so distant past, not to mention two swords and a Fred Trueman LP, “The Umpire Strikes Back”, which has been passed on to Yorkshire CCC without any hesitation or regret.
The task now ahead of us is catalogue what we have found, if it is not already included in the inventory, and at the same time to fit out the space at the top of the Woolley so that it can house these treasures (everything that remains is classed as a treasure) in conditions of controlled heat, light and humidity. We are not yet sure how long this might take nor how much it is likely to cost, but we have a deadline: by the start of the 2018 season the Committee Room where we have temporarily stored much of the memorabilia, will have to be clear again so that the Committee and their guests from other counties will not have to have to decamp elsewhere.
The clean-up has raised a few issues too. For example, we found a small brass plaque, which read “Frank Woolley – the Great Cricketer, by Willi Soukop R.A.”, but no matching artwork to go with the plaque. Did we have a portrait of Frank Woolley once, and if so, where is it now? Certainly there was no record of anything in our inventory, however far back we searched. A bit of work on Google soon established that Willi Soukop (1907 – 1995) was an Austrian-born sculptor, who moved to Britain in 1934. We also discovered that a bronze bust of Woolley by Soukop was shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1975, and that a bust of Woolley by Soukop was given to M.C.C. by Woolley’s widow, Martha, some time after Woolley’s death in 1978. So it appears that M.C.C. have the bust, but why do we have the brass plaque that should accompany it? The obvious thing would be to reunite the two parts of the artwork, but whether the result of this pairing should be kept at Lord’s or Canterbury clearly needs further discussion.
Another item that intrigued us was a cutting from the Illustrated London News of August 25th, 1854, describing a match played on the Goodwin Sands. “The Goodwins, which have been from time immemorial associated with peril and destruction, have just been the scene of exhilarating sport. It appears that on the 120th inst a party – got up by Mr. Morris Thompson, Mr. Hammond and others, at Walmer – visited the sands for the purpose of playing a game of cricket.” According to the report, they began playing at about five in the evening, and play continued until sunset. The winning team – whether it was Mr. Thompson’s side or not is not disclosed – scored 57 runs. The ILN’s unnamed correspondent was obviously a gloomy fellow: his report included a “sad association of ideas” which “crowded the mind on looking over this awfully melancholy place. Here thousands of gallant fellows have been entombed – here millions of property have been engulfed; and here was a picture contrasting vividly with the present scene of pastime.” Luckily, “the party returned safely about ten at night.” Quite why this report, and only this one, is in our collection is hard to work out. Perhaps it records the first match ever played on the Sands, another subject for further research.
We hope that many of the items rescued from their hideaway at the top of the Woolley Stand will be able to be displayed around the ground over the coming season, but first there is a great deal of work to be done to create the right conditions for storing those items which will not be on show, and in cataloguing them all. As ever, volunteers to help are always welcome.