A favorite long-time joke

For many years I have often joked that the next new Melbourne suburbs should be called “Wass”. I have even joked that there is no suburb called “Wass” when there is a suburb called “Hallam”.

This joke is funny to me because “Hallam” and “Wass” are obviously linked to me in a way that is not comprehensible to those who do not know old county cricket well. A relative of mine said that if Hallam was in the east, “Wass” should be in the west of Melbourne, though I have not myself imagined it this way.

In the 1907 County Championship , Nottinghamshire achieved, on paper, the best record of any team since 1889. They won fifteen games, lost none, drew four, and had one abandoned without a ball bowled. This extraordinary record was almost entirely due to the bowling of Albert Hallam and Thomas Wass, who in the twenty games took 298 wickets out of 348 taken by Nottinghamshire (whose two matches with Yorkshire saw all but ninety minutes cricket washed out by rain). No one else except John Gunn did any serious work, and Gunn took just 25 wickets at more than twice the price of Hallam’s or Wass’ wickets.

Despite on paper an unparalleled record, even at the time Nottinghamshire were seen as flattered by not playing equal-second-placed Worcestershire — who had the most powerful batting team in the country due to three Foster brothers playing frequently — and effectively not playing equal-second-placed Yorkshire. Wisden in fact said that Surrey, who won only twelve of twenty-eight games and lost four, were a better team on hard wickets than Nottinghamshire. The problem, of course, is that in an extremely cool and damp summer (the coolest since 1889 in England) only one Nottinghamshire game — against Essex at Trent Bridge — was played throughout on a pitch unaffected by rain. On these wet pitches Hallam and Wass were unstoppable. Nevertheless, they were never even considered for the following winter’s controversial tour of Australia, for which many key players were either unavailable or refused the terms offered them. This suggests that the “extraordinarily good” bowling attributed to Hallam and Wass by Wisden really meant “extraordiarily successful” regardless of quality. I have emphasised that almost every English spinner of the twentieth century was a total failure in Australia, almost certainly because they learned bowling on soft, parkland pitches where extremely gentle finger action produces vicious spin. This same action on the ancient Australian soils yields a harmless straight slow bowler. It is almost certain that before they even entered county cricket, those old English spin bowlers had lost any potential ability to learn the much more vigorous finger and wrist action needed to get the smallest turn in Australia. Many, of whom Hallam was almost certainly one, lacked the natural finger strength to do this anyway.

The Melbourne suburb of Hallam, of course, cannot have anything to do with a cricketer who never visited Australia! It was actually named after the businessman William Hallam, who could conceivably be related to the cricketer given that his full name was Albert William Hallam, but I doubt it very much.