Eagle No 5. Fireside Cricket

Got an email from Andrew Hopcroft this week about a game he played as a child from an old Eagle Annual (no 5.) that he got from his Dad. The game feels like Book Cricket, an age old game played by school kids everywhere (a relative, I suspect, of Chapel Cricket, which a colleagues father played during church services with his friends!). Following are the scans of the relevant page and some background from Andrew :-)

“As a child I ‘inherited’ from my father his old train set, numerous dinky cars and a collection of Eagle Annuals. In ‘Eagle Annual Number 5′ (1956) amongst the adventures of Dan Dare, a cutaway drawing of a ‘Britannia’ Class 4-6-2 Locomotive and highlights in the life of Denis Compton was a small article entitled ‘Cricket By The Fireside’! Subtitled ‘a realistic way of playing imaginary matches indoors’ the article presented a set of rules to play a match of cricket with a pen, some paper and a book.

I played many enjoyable matches under these rules between teams of actors (John Wayne always played a leading role), family and friends, artists, writers and cricketers of the day, Botham, Gower, Viv Richards and Bob Willis amongst others – on occasion the likes of WG Grace and CB Fry would get a run out. These all tended to be one-off matches, teams were constructed for the match and disassembled afterwards with no records kept, leagues unformed and trophy’s un-won. Eventually my alphabet cricket gave way to rules involving dice where national leagues were formed, internationals played and statistics obsessively poured over! Regards – Andrew Hopcroft”

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