Rhubarb

St Edward’s r h u b a r b

15

f e a t u r e s

the Chronicle that ‘the club is still in action and is a force to be reckoned with. The emphasis is on participation and keeping everyone interested in the game and that often includes the opposition’! A trip to play the garrison in Berlin was also on the cards - this match sadly didn’t materialise. The club was still active well into the 1990s but with little mention in the archives of the time - certainly in 1995 it celebrated its first unbeaten season ever with an ‘unusual amount of boys being kind enough to play’ which ‘added athleticism in the field’ and was thought to be a key factor. The club still exists today and since the nineties has been in the capable hands of various members of the Common Room including Miles Peregrine, Edmund Hunt and more recently James Gaunt. The pattern has changed somewhat (usually involving local schools’ Common Room groups these days but also including a Jazz Musician group XI in 2006 for a 20/20 game!) and few away games are now undertaken. However the spirit of the club persists with Edmund Hunt recalling that ‘we always tried to balance the game so that it lasted until the final over, and provided a good tea for our visitors and enjoyed the Woodstock Arms afterwards’! A series of statistics have survived up to 1977 noting every player, individual highest score and bowling averages, catches held, matches played, clubs contested with, record partnerships and so on. It also lists that up to that time 209 masters and senior boys had participated ‘against local clubs and villages’. The club had flourished under the Presidency of Fran Prichard and another founder, Brian Gale, who was quoted as having said that qualification for Corfe was ‘To be a good chap - you don’t have to be able to play cricket’. Amen to that.

for those approaching or have already passed senility!’ By 1966 tactics had come into play; ‘trying to field first whenever the toss was won. How often does it turn out in these circumstances that the opposing tea urn has not quite come up to the boil, slowly working up its pressure as we endure this first four dangerous overs?’ Warden Frank Fisher’s first appearance in the side in 1970 resulted in a personal half century against Bedlow, but witnessed by no-one as it clashed with the England versus Argentina soccer match (the ‘Hand of God’ game) on television! The club continued and thrived into the 1970s with a ‘full’ set of fixtures of around 12 matches per season including entry into the Oxfordshire Cup competition - even reaching the semi-finals in 1979, a season when seven victories were achieved and necessitating the ‘talents of no less than thirty-three school dignitaries’. The following season, and in direct contrast to the fortunes of the school’s own teams, they were almost unbeatable with only one defeat in the whole season and that by three runs - all achieved ‘with the usual mixture of Common Room, miscellaneous boys and other interested parties!’ The 1980s was a continued era of Corfe CC activity, summer after summer, not necessarily very successful on the pitch but much enjoyed by those involved. ‘If we happen to win it is a pleasant bonus’ was a statement made in 1983. A year later the team again reached the semi-finals of the Oxfordshire Cup, no mean feat in a competition entered by higher classes of opposition, with ten members of the Common Room taking part during the campaign. This was a welcome change at a time when the school’s own cricketing success was lacking and which was only really reversed in 1986. The Corfe Cricket Club announced in

when ‘a loyal member had torn his flannels on barbed wire for the sake of the club!’ The Chronicle even got in on the act and in 1963 printed a column about their season just past, including the idyllic description of the Baldon’s ground: “trestle tables under a hot sun, and struggling back somewhat reluctantly to resume the contest, one felt that there could hardly have been a more delightful end of the season. Here is a ground typical of the English scene. Deep mid-wicket, usually kept busy, enjoys the bowling from one end a view of the ‘Seven Stars’ and the old church behind it, and from the other the hazards of the main highway between his outpost and the centre of operations.” By 1964 the club headquarters ‘have moved to the Piggeries Pavilion’. A year later traditional opponents of the Corfe Cricket Club were included in Martyrs Week for the first time who would ‘guarantee occupation