Welcome to the Laver & Wood Cricket Bat Lore Newsletter

Each month cricket bat maker James Laver writes a passage about cricket bats and the lore that surrounds them. Please feel free to print all or part of this message in your cricket clubs newsletter. You may print any
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Here is an overview of cricket bat making in the early days and beyond taken largely from the publication Pod Shavers and Quilt Winders and written mainly in 1978 and about early batmaking starting in 1930.

'From first to last this is a craftsman's job - and what craftsman they are! Nobly they represent at the Court of King Willow the best and the highest traditions of English Craftmanship. Here England leads the World.'
Richard Kent's reaction to a visit to Gunn & Moore's cricket bat factory in Nottingham 1930. He called the splitting of the trunks into clefts 'riving', and he saw it being done with a 'beetle' and axe as 'Razor' Smith had been doing it in Stuart Surridge's yard at Clapham Park. He then saw them taking of the bark with a five-pound side axe.

These jobs of riving and barking call for a strong arm and steady hand. An equable temper too, for the fine edge of the axe may sometimes come to grief by meeting some unexpected obstacle embedded in the wood. Pieces of wire are often found and so are various types of shot from sportsmen's guns. It is less easy to understand why bottles become encased in trees. On one occasion it is reported, a scent bottle was extracted intact.

With a few deft strokes of his keen-edged knife the craftsman fashions the blade swiftly and with unerring accuracy - a masterly display of skill and judgment. The shaping of a bat calls for a high degree of skill and only after years of training can employees be entrusted with this vital task. The factory is staffed with men who have grown up with the firm. Some have been there for more than forty years and several for thirty and twenty. In this age of mechanical mass production it is good to know that there are a goodly number of English Yeomen who take a delight in fashioning things by hand and feel and a thrill of honest pride in the product of true craftsmanship.. Certainly this shaping of the blade can never become a mere routine. The willow varies considerably in density and two clefts, even from the same parent butt, may require entirely different treatment. Yet these experts with the drawknife never niggle or hesitate. With swift sweeping cuts they pare off the unwanted wood, leaving a true and finely balanced blade.

Like Bussey, Gunn & Moore had their own design of pressing machine, invented by William Sherwin - the only piece of machinery Richard Kent encountered.

The way cricket bat makers obtain their willow has changed little through the years. Some rely on timber agents who specialize in cricket bat willow to deliver wood ready cut into clefts - like Edgar Watts Ltd who describe themselves as the largest producers and exporters of cricket bat willow clefts in the world and J.S.Wright & Sons established in 1894 and are the largest suppliers of cricket bat willow worldwide today (2002). Others buy standing willow trees from farmers and landowners and arrange for them to be felled and delivered much as Ben Warsop was doing at the beginning of the century and George Bussey even earlier. Most, like Gray Nicolls, do both. In the covered sheds in the woodland setting of their Robertsbridge factory are stacks of neatly stacked cut clefts with both ends waxed which they have had from agents, and in the clearing opposite lie cuts from trees with the bark on, which they have bought direct. A Gray Nicolls buyer has inspected these trees and judged whether they had reached the right age for felling just by looking at them.

Today a willow with only twelve years growth could be ripe for felling, but it is more likely to have fifteen. By the time it is twenty years old its wood would be too hard. Gray Nicolls like the tree to be about 40 feet high of which the central ten feet for the trunk, starting at five feet from the ground, has been kept free of branches. It will be over four feet in circumference. This is sawn into four 'cuts' each two feet four inches long, from each of which come six clefts - six embryo cricket bats. The top and bottom cuts yield poor grade wood; best bats will come from the two middle cuts. Quality varies from tree to tree and it is up to the expert to detect where it lies. He negotiates a price before felling, as George Bussey had to do. He weighs up whether it is a tree which has grown slowly and become 'woody', or one that has grown relatively fast and so 'well'. He encourages the farmer to grow more willows by providing him with 'sets' to plant in place of the axed tree. Willows resent regimentation and need plenty of light.

Cleaving a cleft from the cross section, or cut, of the tree trunk is done with the grain by means of a beech wedge. The bark is then removed and the cleft sawn roughly into the shape of a cricket bat blade, graded according to its position in the trunk, and stacked with its fellows under cover in the drying yard for seasoning for between nine and twelve months.

James Laver
Senior Bat Maker - Laver & Wood
james@laverwood.co.nz
www.laverwood.co.nz

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Copyright 2001. Laver & Wood. This information may be published without the authors permission provided it is not for commercial gain, has the Laver & Wood web site address and James' email address on it, and is credited to James Laver. Please feel free to use the information from this message in your clubs newsletter.

 

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