125 Not Out: A History of the Manawatū Cricket Association, 1895–1920 by Murray Brown and Alec Astle (review)

THIS IS THE LONGEST and heaviest institutional sport history I have encountered. It is certainly not easy to read in bed. The appeal of such minutely detailed histories generally rests with those for whom the players, teams, clubs and rivalries involved have some personal connection. But this book more than most is worth mining for the valuable themes and contexts it provides towards a broader historical understanding of sport in New Zealand.

While much of the historiography of New Zealand sport is inevitably focused on the main centres, where larger populations produced greater continuity of competition and administration, this book focuses on a provincial setting where the resources and logistics were not so easily maintained. Indeed, the determination to sustain cricket in Manawatu during the nineteenth century is reminiscent of Keith Sandiford and Wray Vamplew’s argument for the ‘peculiar’ economics of English cricket, in that the esteem in which the game was held in Victorian society dictated that emotion generally triumphed over the pragmatism and economic reality confronting it. But the difference was that Manawatu did not possess aristocratic benefactors or the finances from football club partnerships to periodically bail out its cricket clubs.

The 15 chapters follow a mainly chronological structure revolving around themes of administration, club and representative cricket and ground developments. Beyond the traditional core of the game in ‘elite’ men’s clubs dominated by professional occupations and office workers feeding into representative teams, there are important details of mid-week mercantile competitions, umpires and coaches, and separate chapters on the frequently contested emergence and growth of girls’ and women’s cricket, and on the crucial role of Palmerston North Boys’ High as a nursery and cornerstone of the local game. Extensive illustrations, profiles of prominent administrators and 98 pages of detailed appendices reinforce the narrative.

But as much as this is a celebratory history in the sense of chronicling 125 years, it is also refreshingly honest in detailing difficulty and dissension. Cricket clubs were always at the mercy of working hours, entrenched opposition to Sunday play, a transient population, limited transport networks and a lack of finance to develop grounds that needed to be more manicured than those for rugby. While growth came during the 1880s and 1890s in parallel with the expansion of the railways, through which Manawatu was better served than many parts of the country, such advantage and the efforts of the Manawatu Cricket Association (MCA) to assert control from 1895 were frequently undermined by internecine conflict between Feilding and Palmerston North. Much as there was a diversity of clubs by the early twentieth century, based on geography, workplace and, by extension, class alignments, most had very sporadic careers. By 1902, the MCA included a ping pong tournament among its efforts to raise funds. In 1936, its challenge was a hurricane that caused severe damage to the grandstand at the Palmerston North Showgrounds only two days before a fixture against the touring Marylebone Cricket Club team. Even in the 1990s, as New Zealand cricket began to embrace the professional era, the authors bluntly outline an inefficient administrative structure and a complete breakdown of trust between key administrators. These and other problems are too often neglected in accounts that deploy sport as part of apparently unifying national narratives.

Notwithstanding one Auckland administrator dismissing the ambitions of the MCA during the 1930s as ‘impertinent’, Manawatu emerged as the strongest minor cricket association in New Zealand, with frequent success in the Hawke Cup. From this base, it was integral to efforts to move cricket further beyond the main centres, with the eventual acceptance of Central Districts as a fifth first-class team from 1950. Thereafter, despite enduring challenges, such as the impact on sport from the economic downturn of the 1970s and the need to navigate changing work and leisure patterns from the 1980s, cricket in Manawatu has prospered, not...