Cricket at Arundel
There can be few better places to be on perfect summer’s day than Arundel Castle to watch cricket. Somerset Maugham said that as we have so few of them it’s only right that an English summer’s day should be better than anyone else’s or some such words.
I had invited a local friend who was once a disc jockey. Evacuated in the war to a farm near Billingshurst he acquired the farm a few years ago from Junior Campbell of the Marmalade and Loving Freedom fame.
My other guest was my late mother’s first cousin, who had played cricket in the RAF and recalled the golden summer of 1947 when local boy and hero Denis Compton, born like my cousin in Hendon, scored over 3800 runs.
He also recalled being in Hove with his Uncle Max, a director of Miillwall FC when war was declared. A spritely 85 year old he drove to Arundel in his Mercedes sports car.
The ground is surrounded by trees, one venerable old oak must be 500 years old, with one gap which provides stunning view down to the Arun River and over the Downs. Oddly enough one site you don’t see is Arundel Castle in whose ground sit is situated.
Arundel was traditionally where touring international sides first played against Lavinia Duchess of Norfolk XI and Bernard the Duke managed the MCC tour to Australia of 1963 captained by Ted Dexter.
Now their cricket foundation is run by another Sussex ex-captain Jonny Troutbeck Barclay.
His Sussex side finished runner up in 1983. Jonny came over at lunchtime and epitomises the charming confident Etonian.
The match was between Sussex and South Africa A and in a sense irrelevant. It was almost like being on a village green with a pint of warm local ale at some lovely English hamlet in the fold of the Downs.
We were brought down to earth by the demise of England at the hands of Pakistan. The taxi driver, a massive Brighton fan, and I could not work out why David Stockdale should want to leave a Premiership side for Birmingham. We agreed our first game against Manchester City, who no doubt would have spent £100m plus over the summer, was a baptism of fire. Watching cricket on a June day in Arundel the Premiership seems a different world.
