My father used to talk in hushed tones of the graceful
elegance of the great batsman Prince Ranjitsinhji. There was no Indian cricket
team in Ranji’s day, so he played for England. In truth my father never saw him
play, except maybe briefly on a news report at the cinema in the 1920s.
But Ranji had been filmed earlier, much earlier ‒ in the nets in Sydney
during an Ashes test match in December 1897, a match in which he scored a
brilliant 175 runs in the first innings, the highest score yet made by an
England batsman in a test match.
There is some dispute about who made that brief pioneering
film. I had always assumed that it was the Australian photographer, H Walter
Barnett, briefly returned to Sydney after setting up his studio in London. But,
as Sally Jackson in Canberra shows in a current essay*, Barnett did not in
reality make that trip home, so the film must have been shot by someone else
associated with his business, Falk Studios, there ‒ perhaps Frenchman Georges Boivin, Sally suggests.
I was lucky enough to see the film at a presentation at the
British Film Institute some years ago, and to a cricket-lover it is
fascinating. Without the protection of either pads or gloves, Ranji plays with
the softest of soft hands, turning the ball deftly to fine leg. Of course, he
was the perfector of that stroke, the leg glance, now a standard part of every
good batsman’s technique.
Surely it’s time for this historic footage to emerge from
the darkness of the BFI’s archives into the public domain?
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