The Mathematician on Cricket

Introduction

In a little-known work in a little-known volume called enigmatically The Saturday Book, Eighth Year, published in November 1948, C. P. Snow, scientist, Cambridge man and friend of G. H. Hardy (who should need no introduction to a mathematical reader), discusses Hardy’s great love for the game of cricket. There are sections that resemble his lengthy foreword to the 1967 edition of Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology, but here more detail is introduced in certain areas. In particular, it contains a number of amusing anecdotes and reported quotations not covered in the foreword. I reproduce it here as a contribution to the biography of Hardy contained on the Internet, which is sparse, to say the least: there is no biography of Hardy of sufficient length and detail to do justice to the man and his mathematics. For his mathematics, Titchmarsh’s obituary is substantial, but for the other side, his cricket, there is only the Foreword and this.

The task of biography of Hardy is complicated by his favourite method of long-range communication being the post-card: his correspondence is therefore scattered in many other mathematicians’ collections. Our view of the man is hence lopsided; it is hoped that this essay is a useful window onto the other half of Hardy (as well as being very amusing at times, especially for those who speak Cricket). The author feels that this reproduction is fair use since The Saturday Book is both long out of print and highly obscure, and no profit is derived from its publication here.

In its original, the essay is accompanied by two yellow-and-black drawings: one of Hardy, much cribbed from one of the famous photographs, reclining casually in a tennis chair with—most unusually—his back to the game at Lord’s, the pavilion sprawling majestically in the background; the other, clearly to anyone who has attempted the death-trap junction of Hills Road, Lensfield Road, Regent Street and Gonville Place (also known as Hyde Park Corner), is a view east-south-east from Fenner’s. Given the content, neither should strike the reader as surprising. I have added some nitpicking annotations, which are linked as footnotes. Therefore, here is the promised article:

The Mathematician on Cricket

by C. P. SNOW (Transcribed by R. S. Chapling, Trinity College, Oct. 2013. Any errors are my own, &c.)

[Drawing of Hardy at Lord’s]

Above all, G. H. Hardy was a man of genius. He was one of the great pure mathematicians of the world: in his own life-time he altered the whole course of pure mathematics in this country. He was also a man whose intelligence was so brilliant, concentrated, and clear that by his side anyone else’s seemed a little muddy, a little pedestrian and confused. No one ever spoke to him for five minutes without feeling that, whatever genius means, here was one born with it. And no one ever spoke to him for five minutes—not even serious-minded Central European mathematicians—without hearing a remark about the game of cricket. Others may have gained as much delight from cricket as he did; no one can possibly have gained more. His creative mathematics was, as he wrote himself in A Mathematician’s Apology, the one great sustained happiness of his life; but cricket, from his childhood until he died in 1947 at the age of seventy, was his continual refreshment.

It was to that fact that I owed my friendship with him. I remember vividly the first time we met. He had just returned to Cambridge to occupy the Sadleirian chair, and was dining as a guest in Christ’s. He was then in his early fifties, and his hair was already grey, above skin so deeply sunburned that it stayed a kind of Red Indian bronze. His face was beautiful—with high cheek bones, thin nose, spiritual and austere but capable of dissolving into convulsions of internal, gamin-like amusement. He had opaque brown eyes, bright as a bird’s—a kind of eye not uncommon among those with a gift for conceptual thought. I thought that night that Cambridge was a town where the streets were full of unusual and distinguished faces, but even there Hardy’s could not help but stand out.

As we sat round the combination-room table after dinner, someone said that Hardy wanted to talk to me about cricket. I had only been elected a year, but the pastimes of even the very young fellows were soon detected, in that intimate society. I was taken to sit by him—never introduced, for Hardy, shy and self-conscious in all formal actions, had a dread of introductions. He just put his head down, as it were in a butt of acknowledgement, and without any preamble whatever began:

‘You’re supposed to know something about cricket, aren’t you?’

Yes, I said, I knew something.

Immediately he proceeded to put me through a moderately stiff viva. Did I play? What did I do? I half-guessed that he had a horror of persons who devotedly learned their Wisden’s backwards but who, on the field, could not distinguish between an off-spinner and short-leg. I explained, in some technical detail, what I did with the ball. He appeared to find the reply partially reassuring, and went on to more tactical questions. Whom should I have chosen as captain for the last test a year before (in 1930)? If the selectors had decided that Snow was the man to save us, what would have been my strategy and tactics? (‘You are allowed to act, if you are sufficiently modest, as non-playing captain.’) And so on, oblivious to the rest of the table. He was quite absorbed. The only way to measure someone’s knowledge, in Hardy’s view, was to question him. If he had bluffed and then wilted under the questions, that was his look-out. First things came first, in that brilliant and concentrated mind. It was necessary to discover whether I should be tolerable as a cricket companion. Nothing else mattered. In the end he smiled with immense charm, with child-like openness, and said that Fenner’s might be bearable after all, with the prospect of some reasonable conversation.

Except on special occasions, he still did mathematics in the morning, even in the cricket season, and did not arrive at Fenner’s until after lunch. He used to walk round the cinderpath with a long, loping, heavy-footed stride (he was a slight spare man, physically active), head down, hair, tie, sweaters, papers, all flowing, a figure that caught everyone’s eye. (‘There goes a Greek poet, I’ll be bound,’ once said some cheerful farmer as Hardy passed the scoreboard.) He made for his favourite place, at the Wollaston Road end, opposite the pavilion, where he could catch every ray of sun—for he was impatient when any moment of sunshine went by and he was prevented from basking in it. In order to deceive the sun into shining, he brought with him, even on a fine May afternoon, what he called his ‘anti-God battery.’ This consisted of three or four sweaters, an umbrella belonging to his sister, and a large envelope containing mathematical manuscripts, such as a Ph.D. dissertation, a paper which he was refereeing for the Royal Society, or some tripos answers. He would then explain, if possible to some clergyman, that God, believing that Hardy expected the weather would change and give him a chance to work, counter-suggestibly arranged that the sky should remain cloudless.

There he sat. To complete his pleasure in a long afternoon watching cricket, he like the sun to be shining and a companion to join in the fun. But he was never bored by any cricket in any circumstances; he was fond of saying that no one of any vitality, intellectual or other, should know what it was like to be bored. As for being bored at cricket, that was manifestly impossible. He had watched the game since, as a child, he had gone to the Oval in the great days of Surrey cricket, with Tom Richardson, Lockwood, Abel in their prime: as a schoolboy at Winchester, an undergraduate at Trinity, with W. G. in his Indian summer and Ranjitsinjhi coming on the scene: through Edwardian afternoons, when Hardy was already recognized as one of the mathematicians of the age: in the Parks at Oxford after the first war, the serenest time of his whole life: and now in the ’thirties at Fenner’s, his delight in the game as strong as ever.

His first interest was technical. He was secretly irritated when people assumed that he knew every record in cricket history; in fact, his book-knowledge was considerable but in no way remarkable; it was greater than mine, but less than that of several acquaintances. He had been a creative person all his life, without the taste for that kind of recondite scholarship. His interest was primarily a games player’s, and not a scholar’s. He himself had an unusually fine eye, and when well into the sixties could still offdrive or make an old-fashioned square leg sweep with astonishing certainty. Asked who lived the most enviable of lives, he would have said, quite simply, a creative mathematician—for he knew that no one could have led a life more creatively satisfying than his own. His second choice would not have been a scientist (for science he had surprisingly little sympathy): I think he would have said instead a first-rate creative writer. And I am sure his third choice would have been a great batsman.

His second interest was in tactics, in that whole area of small decisions—about bowling changes, field-placings, batting orders, and the like—in which cricket is so rich. This was an interest which in exciting matches sometimes occupied him entirely. He used to say that P. G. H. Fender’s famous passage about the last day of the Fourth Test in the 1928-9 series was the finest expression of sheer intellectual agony in any language.

The point was this: there was nothing in the game, Australia needed about 100 to win with 5 wickets to fall, and J. C. White was the only effective bowler on the English side. White was bowling, of course, slow left arm, pitching on the leg and middle and going away a bit. Chapman had set a field with a fine leg to stop the glance for a single, but with no short leg to stop the push. The Australians kept making these safe singles. Fender’s agony grew. Why could not the captain see that, if one cannot block both places, one should in all sanity block the safe push and leave the glance open, when it is the riskier of the two strokes against a bowler as accurate as White? Fender was, naturally, worried about the result as the singles kept creeping up: but chiefly he was dismayed by anyone missing such a pure intellectual point. At last lunchtime came. It is not stated in the book, but one imagines a desperate piece of lucid exposition from Fender. After lunch there was a short leg instead of a fine leg. Fender settled down in intellectual content; in the description, it comes almost as an anti-climax when England win by 11 runs.^[1]

With Hardy, it would have been just the same. I have sat by him, and seen him distressed for half-an-hour over some similar tactical blindness. How was it possible for a sentient human being to miss such a clear, simple, beautiful point?

Everything Hardy did was light with grace, order, a sense of style. To those competent to respond, I have been told, his mathematics gave extreme aesthetic delight; he wrote, in his own clear and unadorned fashion, some of the most perfect English of our time (of which samples can be read in A Mathematician’s Apology or the preface to Ramanujan). Even his handwriting was beautiful; the Cambridge University Press had the inspiration to print a facsimile on the dust-jacket of the Apology. It was natural that he should find much formal beauty in cricket, which is itself a game of grace and order. But he found beauty after his own style, and not anyone else’s. He was deeply repelled by all the ‘literary’ treatment of the game; he did not want to hear about white flannels on the green turf, there was nothing he less wanted to hear; he felt that Mr. Neville Cardus, despite gifts which Hardy was too fair-minded to deny, had been an overwhelmingly bad influence on the cricket writing of the last twenty years. Fender, analytical, informed, alive with intellectual vitality and a nagging intellectual integrity, was by a long way Hardy’s favourite cricket writer. Fender has an involved and parenthetical style, which bears a faint family resemblance to Proust and Henry James. Hardy commented that all three were trying to say genuinely difficult things, but that Fender, like Proust and unlike Henry James, had within his chosen field an instinct for the essential.

[Picture of Fenner's, looking ESE]

technique, tactics, formal beauty—those were the deepest attractions of cricket for Hardy. But there were two others, which to many who have sat within earshot must have seemed more obvious. Of these minor attractions, one was his relish for the human comedy. He would have been the first to disclaim that he possessed deep insight into any particular human being. That was a novelist’s gift; he did not pretend to compete. But he was the most intelligent of men, he had lived with his eyes open and read much, and he had obtained a good generalized sense of human nature—robust, indulgent, satirical, and utterly free from moral vanity. He was spiritually candid as few men are, and he had a mocking horror of pretentiousness, self-righteous indignation, and the whole stately pantechnicon of the hypocritical virtues. Now cricket, the most beautiful of games, is also the most hypocritical: one ought to prefer to make 0 and see one’s side win than make 100 and see it lose (J. B. Hobbs, like Hardy a man of innocent candour, remarks mildly that he never managed to feel so). Such statements were designed to inspire Hardy’s sense of fun, and in reply he used to expound, with the utmost solemnity, a counter-balancing series of maxims.

‘Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.’

‘If you are nervous when you go in first, nothing restores your confidence so much as seeing the other man get out.’

‘After a pogrom, the Freshman’s Match is the best place to see human nature in the raw.’

No match was perfect unless it produced its share of the human comedy. He liked to have his personal sympathies engaged; and, if he did not know anyone in whom to invest either sympathy or antipathy, he proceeded to invent them. In any match at Fenner’s, he decided on his favourites and non-favourites: the favourites had to be the under-privileged, young men from obscure schools, Indians, the unlucky and diffident. He wished for their success and, alternatively, for the downfall of their opposites—the heartily confident, the overpraised heroes from the famous schools, the self-important, those designed by nature to boom their way to success and moral certitude (‘the large-bottomed,’ as he called them: the attribute, in this context, was psychological).

So each match had its minor crises. ‘The next epic event,’ Hardy would say, ‘is for Iftikar Ali to get into double figures.’ And the greatest of the minor joys of cricket for him was the infinite opportunity for intellectual play. It happens that unlike any kind of football or the racket games, cricket is a succession of discrete events: each ball is a separate mark in the score-book: this peculiarity makes it much easier to describe, talk about, comment on, remember in detail. (Incidentally, it is this peculiarity which makes its great climaxes so intense). It could not have been better suited to the play of Hardy’s mind.

‘Cricket is a game of numbers,’ said Hardy cheerfully to those who wanted to compare an innings to a musical composition, and asked them what was the maximum number of times the same integer could appear on the score-board at one instant in the innings. (The integer is 1; one batsman must have retired hurt: the score is 111 for 1, batsmen 1 and 11 each 11, bowlers 1 and 11, last player 11, caught by 11). As his professional life had been devoted to the theory of numbers, he could see something interesting in any score-board at any time.

Any newspaper in the cricket season had the same interest. Numbers, the structure of a score, the personal fate of clergymen, against whom he carried on an ironical personal war: few things gave him more mischievous glee than to read that a clerical batsman had been run out. His great triumph in that direction, however, was a little different. It happened in a Gentlemen v. Players match at Lord’s. It was early in the morning’s play, and the sun was shining over the pavilion. One of the batsmen, facing the Nursery end, complained that he was unsighted by a reflection from somewhere unknown. The umpires, puzzled, padded round by the sight-screen. Motor-cars? No. Windows? None on that side of the ground. At last, with justifiable triumph, an umpire traced the reflection down—it came from a large pectoral cross resting on the middle of an enormous clergyman. Politely the umpire asked him to take it off. Close by, Hardy was doubled up in Mephistophelian delight. That lunch time, he had no time to eat; he was writing post-cards (such post-cards as came to many out of the blue) to each of his clerical friends.

But in his war against clergymen, victory was not all on one side. On a quiet and lovely May evening at Fenner’s, the chimes of six o’clock fell across the ground. ‘It’s rather unfortunate,’ said Hardy with his usual candour, ‘that some of the happiest hours of my life should have been spent within sound of a Roman Catholic Church.’

sometimes, not often, his ball-by-ball interest flagged. Then he promptly demanded that we should pick teams—teams whose names began with HA (first wicket pair Hadrian and Hayward (T.)), LU, MO—the combinations of any of our friends round us, the all-time teams of Trinity, Christ’s (first wicket pair Milton and Darwin, which takes a lot of beating), team of humbugs, club-men, bogus poets, bores. . . . Or he ordered: ‘Mark that man,’ and somebody had to be marked out of 100 in the categories Hardy had long since invented and defined: stark, bleak, ‘a stark man is not necessarily bleak: but all bleak men without exception want to be considered stark,’ dim, old brandy, and spin. There were other categories which cannot be printed; of the five above, stark, bleak, and dim are self-explanatory, spin meant a subtlety and delicacy of nature that Hardy loved (‘X may not be a great man, but he does spin the ball just a little all the time,’) and old brandy was derived from a mythical character who said that he never drank anything but very old brandy.

So, by elaboration, Old Brandy came to mean a taste that was eccentric, esoteric, but just within the confines of reason. To say that one would rather watch Woodfull than any other batsman would be a typical ‘old brandy’ remark. But one had to keep one’s head in all these games with Hardy. Claiming Proust’s novels as the best in the world’s literature came within the permissible limits of old brandy: but a young man who did the same for Finnegans Wake would be dismissed as an ass. ‘Young men ought to be conceited, but they oughtn’t to be imbecile,’ Hardy grumbled afterwards.

Walking home after the close of play, he would maintain the same flow of spirits. At half-past six on a summer evening, Parker’s Piece was crammed with boys’ matches, square leg in one game dangerously near to cover in the next.

‘I’ll bet you sixpence that we see three wickets fall. Another sixpence that one chance is missed.’ That bet meant that we had to keep a steady walking pace; as a rule, he wanted to stop and study any conceivable kind of game. He was too shy to offer to umpire, but if the boys invited him he settled down to an hour’s entertainment.

Safely across the Piece, he would have some new concept, such as persuading me to stay in some dingy hotel. ‘How much should I have to pay you to spent a night there? No, a pound is excessive.’ Then the last excitement of the day’s cricket, as he bought a local paper by the side of what was then the New Theatre. Stop press news and Surrey first: I can still hear his cri de coeur, some time in the middle ’thirties, when Lancashire were playing Surrey, and most of the present test team unknown. ‘Washbrook 196 not out. Washbrook! Who the hell is Washbrook?’^[2]

the summer days passed. after one of the short Fenner’s seasons, there was the University match; arranging to meet him in London was not always simple, for he had a profound suspicion of any mechanical contrivance such as a telephone. I do not think he ever used a fountain-pen: while in his rooms at Trinity or his flat in St. George’s Square, he used to say, in a disapproving and slightly sinister tone: ‘If you fancy yourself at the telephone, there happens to be one in the next room.’ His idea of communication was, if possible, to call in on foot: as a second line, to write a postcard.

Yet, punctually, he arrived at Lord’s. There he was at his most sparkling, year after year. Surrounded by friends, men and women, he was quite released from shyness; he was the centre of all our attention, which he by no means disliked; and one could often hear the party’s laughter from a quarter of the way round the ground. Having been a professor at both Oxford and Cambridge, he reserved the right to sympathize with either side; but in fact, except when his beloved friend John Lomas was batting for Oxford, his heart stayed more faithful to Cambridge than he liked to admit.

In those years, I used to go abroad soon after the University match, and to villages round the Mediterranean and Adriatic arrived post-cards in a beautiful hand, often mysteriously covered with figures. Those post-cards marked Hardy’s August progress, Oxford, the Oval, Folkestone. Sometimes they contained nothing but a single sentence. ‘How does N. F. Armstrong of your county hit the ball so hard without moving his feet, arms, or even apparently his bat?’ ‘Bradman is a whole class above any batsman who has ever lived: if Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss remain in the Hobbs class, I have to admit the possibility of a class above them, which I find difficult to imagine.’ ‘The half-mile from St. George’s Square to the Oval is my old brandy nomination for the most distinguished walk in the world.’

In 1934 he sent me a large exercise book. On the left-hand pages he had written an over-by-over account of the fifth Test; on the right hand, he had spread himself in disquisitions on the players, cricket in general, human nature, and life. Maddeningly, I lost the book in a move during the war, or it would give a better picture of him than any second-hand account. He promised that, when he had finished completely with creative mathematics, he would do something in the same form, but on a more ambitious scale, as his last non-mathematical testament. It was to be called A Day at the Oval. It would have been an eccentric minor classic; but it was never written.

Almost up to the end, I hoped that he would do it. His creative power left him, much later than with most mathematicians, but still too early: how harsh a deprivation it was for him, anyone can read in his Apology, which, for all its high spirits, is a book of intolerable sadness. His heart was failing: he took it stoically, but he had always been active, his enjoyments had been those of a young man until he was sixty, and he found it bitter to grow old. All this happened during the war: he hated war, not as we all do, but with a personal and desperate loathing. The world had gone dark for him, and, because of the war, there was not much cricket for him to watch, which would have been an amelioration, which would, at least for occasional afternoons, have made him gay again.

So he never wrote A Day at the Oval. In his last illness, in the summer and autumn of 1947, he thought of it again, but he could not make the effort. Yet cricket, during those last months of his life, was his chief, almost his only, comfort and interest. His sister read to him every scrap of cricket news that she could find. Until the end of the English season, there was plenty of material, bat after that she had to fill in with World Series Baseball before the Indians started their tour in Australia. That was his final interest. I had left Cambridge some years before, but during those months I went to talk cricket with him as often as I could get away; in each visit, he liked to spend a few minutes discussing death, and then hear everything I could tell him about the latest cricket gossip. Edrich was a particular favourite of his, and he showed all the old delight when I brought the news that Edrich had, right on the post, passed Tom Heyward’s record. The last conversation I had with Hardy was four or five days before he died: it was about Vinoo Mankad: was he, or was he not, an all-rounder of the Rhodes or Faulkner class?

It was in that same week that he told his sister: ‘If I knew I was going to die to-day, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.’

Each evening that week before she left him, she read a chapter from a history of Cambridge cricket. One such chapter was the last thing he heard, for he died suddenly, in the morning.