England: Hard lessons from Oatlands ground sell-up (27 Oct 1997)

ctober 1997

Hard lessons from Oatlands ground sell-up

Christopher Martin-Jenkins

I REPORTED at the end of last season that the attractive ground belonging to Oatlands Park Cricket Club at Weybridge in Surrey, the scene of good cricket since it was bought by the club in 1926 when Douglas Jardine was a member of the committee, had been sold and that the members stood to profit to the tune of some £50,000 each, writes Christopher Martin-Jenkins.

In fact, no sale has taken place, though it is imminent, and the amount in question is not yet known, though eventual proceeds for the 111 remaining members will be less dramatic.

This story, portrayed so far as being about acquisitive members putting profit before play, has been distorted, and it is time the truth was told.

The demise of Oatlands is a sad tale for those who knew and experienced club cricket in the South as it was before the leagues. The lesson to be drawn is a salutory one for similar clubs throughout the land.

Oatlands Park Cricket Club no longer exist for the purposes of playing matches. They were dissolved before last season, the victims of changing social trends. That was bad news in itself. I played there a few times in the Sixties and recall not just the prettiness of a ground surrounded by trees but the quality of the cricketers, who played there in exactly the right spirit - competitive, but chivalrous too.

Oatlands had been in decline for at least 20 years. Especially in the Sixties and Seventies - they won the old Surrey Cricketers League in 1972 - the club's strength was based on a continuing supply of good public school cricketers, a close link with Oxford University and contacts in New Zealand and Australia.

They ran a flourishing junior section which nurtured two county cricketers, Tim O'Gorman, of Derbyshire, and Will Kendall, of Hampshire. Several other members went on to play for their universities.

The arrival of league cricket in Surrey in the early Sixties was part of the drive for a more competitive club game in the South, inspired by Raman Subba Row among others.

Eventually this had a devastating effect on a club catering mainly for the highly mobile, well educated, relatively well-heeled young men who were needed to compete in Saturday afternoon league cricket, especially as many of them were also members of wandering teams who took their cricket rather less seriously than Oatlands were now obliged to do.

No longer would young members commit themselves to two games a weekend. Girl-friends or young wives would generally not permit it, and Sunday cricket, as in so many clubs, rapidly became weaker and harder to sustain.

A full Sunday fixture list for two teams became a shorter one for only one team and when the 1997 season started only one Sunday fixture remained. It was never played.

Other problems eventually became, in the committee's view, insurmountable. Members were reluctant to help with the management of the club and the ground. The junior section became defunct eight years ago.

New members were reluctant to pay the necessary subscription to fund the upkeep of a ground of the right quality. When the Surrey Championship was restructured, Oatlands, at one time in the top flight, rapidly dropped to the third division. Ambitious players looked elsewhere and it became difficult to raise a side at all.

Meanwhile, the square, never fully recovering from the drought of 1976, was deteriorating and in need of major overhaul. This deterred good players too. Ten years ago the committee decided that something drastic was needed. After a year's preparation the committee, led by Peter Silcock, Gary Lloyd and Peter Johnson, three long-serving members, proposed to the membership that the club should amalgamate with the Hawks hockey club and move to a much larger area which was available nearby.

The plan was to start afresh with two cricket squares, two all-weather hockey pitches and a brand new pavilion. All this was possible if the Oatlands Park ground was sold, and even these grandiose plans would have left over £1 million in the bank. But those living nearby the original ground were not keen, naturally enough perhaps, to see it sold for building. The committee's proposal was defeated by three votes.

"From that moment on the club was doomed," said Lloyd, a 53-year-old accountant who, like Johnson and Silcock, has held every voluntary post in the club during almost a lifetime's service to the game.

The ground will be sold, any day now, probably to Cala Homes South. Lloyd says that the £6 million, which has been quoted in the press recently, is "a wild exaggeration". The price depends entirely on planning permission for 21 homes.

Although a group of some 30 local householders has been trying to block plans for development for two years, others with houses on the edge of the five-acre field are in favour of what Lloyd calls "a really sympathetic, high-quality development".

He denied suggestions that any of the remaining members will get as much as £50,000 - they will benefit according to the length of time of membership - but he added: "It is our property and we are obliged to get a reasonable deal."

As final proof that all that has happened is viewed by old players less as a bonanza than a tragedy, several of the members are planning a charitable fund from sale proceeds to benefit junior cricket in Surrey and nationally.

Good may yet come, therefore, from the closure of a club first founded in 1867, but the harsher climate of club cricket now being encouraged in accordance with the ECB blueprint for premier leagues up and down the county spells danger for clubs like Oatlands.

Similar clubs, who prefer social to competitive cricket, may be squeezed out of existence.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)