Every year in mid-December, a decidedly old-school dining club meets at the Oval to celebrate Sir Jack Hobbs’s birthday. Established by John Arlott in 1953 – after a fine lunch with Sir Jack, Alf Gover and a couple of friends – it continued after the Surrey and England player’s death as a tribute to his legendary career.
Each year the Master’s Club invites a different speaker to give a toast to Hobbs, and in 2023 it was me. I’m not the only woman to have the honour but I was the first to notice that the club’s only rule – that members wear their club tie to the lunch – wasn’t entirely inclusive. This year we were given lapel pins.
My speech began with the admission that my home ground was Lord’s, to pantomime boos and hisses. And then, that the recent arrival of Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor in Doctor Who had caused me to notice something for the very first time. Lord’s has the Grace Gate. The Oval has the Hobbs Gate. One club’s entrance is dedicated to a cricketer known as the Doctor, the other’s to a player known as the Master.
Either Doctor Who’s screenwriters have a keen sense of cricketing history or something else is going on. Given my love of sci-fi I like to imagine it’s this: there’s an alternate dimension where WG Grace and Jack Hobbs are both Time Lords, locked in an eternal celestial combat where the playing field is the whole of space and time and the planets are mere cricket balls.
After all, in Doctor Who lore, the Master is the only person with the same otherworldly talents as the Doctor, or capable of surpassing his brilliance. Grace held the most first-class centuries and first-class runs until Hobbs overtook him. Wisden declared that of all the batters to follow Grace, Hobbs alone exerted the same creative influence.
Anyway, the Master’s Club members didn’t need reminding of Hobbs’s achievements, given that they gather each year to celebrate them. Hobbs’s record 61,237 first class runs will always be with us: a fixed point in time and space, like the destruction of Pompeii or the elongated lifespan of Captain Jack Harkness. His 197 first-class centuries echo down the years like the sound of the Tardis in flight.
But what do we know of the Master’s early life? Hobbs was born in 1882 in Cambridge – not as peerlessly beautiful as the Citadel on Gallifrey, but still a majestic and historic seat of wisdom. Yet it was also, at that time, a squalid conurbation where a cramped workforce lived in chronic overcrowding and grinding poverty. Two differing things can be true at the same time, something the Doctor constantly reminds his companions. Humans like to think in binary terms, but we live in a world of wibbly-wobbly contradictions.
Hobbs is the grandson of a shoemaker, the son of a man who fixes slates on to roofs, and an only child – when he’s born, anyway. By the time he’s 19 he’ll have 11 siblings. His parents have very little, but their children never go without. Hobbs calls it “a happy childhood” yet is always conscious of his family’s humble circumstances. “I detested the back road where we lived,” he later wrote, “and I envied those who had big houses and who could hold their heads up in any company.”
His father gets a job within the Victorian era’s burgeoning cricket industry, net bowling and umpiring for undergraduate students at Jesus college. Hobbs grows up in the shadow of the university, a place of inordinate and timeless privilege, where you don’t just need brains to belong, you need wealth and social rank too. The Master’s own schooling ends at the age of 12, which sounds young. But Hobbs was one of the first generation to finish a compulsory elementary education. Britain’s class structure was rigid, but its empire-building demanded reform.
He inherited his father’s passion for cricket, although there was no suggestion he had enough talent to get paid for it. “He could not be described as a prodigy,” writes Leo McKinstry in his biography. “No first-class teams tried to recruit him. No top coaches took an interest in his performance.” Hobbs worked as a domestic servant instead, then apprenticed as a gas fitter. Without the intervention of Surrey’s Tom Hayward, Hobbs might never have had a professional sporting career. In a parallel universe he lives his life under the shadow of a gasometer far away from the Oval.
Cricket has always been a place of alternate realities, of utterly opposing experiences. The gentlemen and the players. Lord’s and the ladies it wouldn’t let through its doors. When we’re told by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’s report that our game is rife with racism, sexism and elitism, we resist the thought of anything so uncomfortable today. Partly because we hope we’re better than that, but mostly because our own experience of cricket has been welcoming, meritocratic, transformative.
Two things can be true. It’s the most ancient wisdom in the universe. Sir Jack Hobbs knew about the enduring divides of human existence: he lived on the fault line. He came from humble, marginalised beginnings, and worked in a sporting environment that consistently discriminated against him because he wasn’t born rich, or posh. He knew what it was to live in a world where inequality was ignored, accepted, costed in to human existence by those who have the most. Then he became only the fourth English cricketer to have been knighted.
The Master lived – in this universe, at least – for more than eight decades, and saw the world change for better and for worse. Perhaps, come the permissive, swinging 60s, he may have struggled with the way that society was changing around him into something he didn’t recognise, that seemed to be moving on without him. But he was well known for his grace and kindness, his modesty, his disinclination for criticising or confronting others.
“His generous spirit always triumphed over any sense of grievance,” writes McKinstry. I imagine Hobbs would be proud of the work Surrey and the ACE programme are doing to reach out to the Caribbean communities that cricket has lost over the past two decades. That he would applaud the passion for the game that British Asians are inspiring in clubs and parks all over the country. There’s something about it that feels like regeneration.
And I promised the room that was my last Doctor Who reference, and invited them to raise their glasses to the Master.
