Every six months or so, at the beginning and end of each season, those people who spend their days helping with the heritage and history of cricket in their counties get together to chew the cud and discover what works and what doesn’t in trying to preserve, catalogue and display our collections. We call it the County Cricket Heritage Forum. Fifteen of the counties, plus MCC, were involved in the most recent meeting, held at the Kia Oval at the beginning of March.
We are practically all volunteers, and most of us have a reasonable knowledge of the history and heritage of cricket in our counties, but far fewer of us are expert in keeping a collection in good condition and well presented. And at a time when the ECB seems hell bent on breaking completely with the traditions of county cricket, it is all the more important that the counties focus on making the past relevant to the present, and indeed to the future.
Some counties have already got themselves well set up, with museums, libraries and other permanent display centres. Somerset, Sussex and Glamorgan are among the pace-setters in this area. Some counties have been successful in gaining funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Many counties have set up, or are in the process of setting up, separate trusts to manage, and in some cases, own, the county’s memorabilia. Some counties are just in the early stages of realising how much there is still to be done to protect and manage the collections properly, and just as importantly, to make their collections fully available to the general public.
The main issues on which we all seem to agree are, firstly, that we are not experts on collection management, and therefore it is very important to establish links with local museums, even if they are not sports related, or with universities which run courses in the many aspects of collection management. At Kent, we are conscious that this is an area where we could do much better. We have talked with both the University of Kent and Christ Church Canterbury University (which sponsors our all-conquering women’s cricket squad), and to Belmont House, the ancestral home of Lord Harris, the grand panjandrum of Kent cricket in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but we need also to get in touch with the County Archives at Maidstone and probably several other institutions who could be of great help to us.
The second area of concern is a rather more sensitive one – who should own the collection? Some counties – Sussex for example – have handed over their collection to a Heritage Trust, which now owns as well as manages it. The advantage of separating the ownership of the collection from the county club is that if the county runs into financial difficulties, then the club would not be able to sell off its heritage to help pay its debts, and this would keep the collection safe. Yorkshire are already trying to sell their collection and hoping that a newly formed Yorkshire Cricket Foundation will be able to find the money to buy it. Effectively, though, what any lender or donor to the Foundation would be doing with his or her money is bailing out Yorkshire CCC, who could then perhaps spend the money on something quite different, such as more players or better conference facilities – which would not be the point of the donation. But if our collections are bought by private collectors, the risk is that much of the history of our great game will be lost to the general public, which would be a great shame.
Among the disadvantages of a separate Trust owning the county collection is the fact that the Trust would then have to shoulder the full responsibility for storage, insurance etc., which most trusts at this stage cannot afford. In general, I believe that a charitable trust rather than the county club should own the county’s cricket heritage, not only to ensure the financial security of the collection, but also because what we are building is not just the history of the professional game, but of all cricket at all levels within our counties. At Kent I expect it will be a long road to follow before we reach the moment when the Trust is seen as the obvious and logical owner of the collection, but in the meantime we manage it. Most of the collection is owned by the county club, but some has been donated to the Trust rather than the county, and some is on long-term loan, so the ownership remains with the people who loaned the item.
This too is fraught with problems, as Derbyshire have recently found out. One person who loaned an item to the club in 1976 now wants it back, but such were the records of Derbyshire at the time (and I expect of every other club apart from MCC) that they have no record of this item and no idea where it might now be. The problem remains unsolved. MCC advise us all to avoid long term loans like the plague.
Perhaps the answer at present is the one that Gloucestershire have come up with. The GCCC Heritage Trust does not own the items it manages, but has an agreement with the county club that nothing can be sold from the collection without the agreement of the Trust. This still begs the question of what would happen if the club went into administration – the creditors would have first call on anything that could raise money to pay off the debts – but taking the slightly risky assumption that county clubs are generally unlikely to go to the wall, then this is a reasonable compromise. On the other hand, given the way the ECB appears to be risking everybody’s financial security with what looks more and more like an ill-considered venture into a Big Bash/IPL style T20 competition, nobody should be complacent.
The County Cricket Heritage Forum serves a very useful purpose in reassuring us all that the problems we face are not unique: everybody has their backs to the same wall at some time or other. What it also does is allow counties to swap items of memorabilia. Yorkshire very kindly gave us a photograph taken at Headingley of the Kent team walking out onto the field. It was captioned “Kent at Headingley v Yorkshire 1930s?” Thanks to a bit of research by Derek Carlaw, we think the match was played in 1934, and that the team, which drew this game after gaining first innings lead, was, from left to right: C. Lewis, W.H.V. Levett, A.E. Watt, A.P. Freeman, L.J. Todd, A.P.F. Chapman, F.E. Woolley, A.E. Fagg, I.D.K. Fleming, W.H. Ashdown, D.V.P. Wright. If you can prove us wrong, please let us know.
Have an autonomous Charitable Trust establiched as a separate entity under the auspices of the County Club