© Copyright Hulton Getty ESSAY THE HOBBS ERA THIRTY YEARS IN CRICKET by Jack Hobbs My career in first-class cricket having, after a very happy period, reached its end, I gladly comply with the request of the Editor of Wisden's Almanack to jot down some personal impressions which may be of interest to present and future readers of the book. The honour has been done me of referring to the period of my active participation in important cricket as The Hobbs Era, and I should like to say at once how mindful I am of this distinction. Roughly thirty years have gone by since I first played for Surrey under the residential qualification, and nothing has ever occurred to cause me the slightest regret that I took the advice of Tom Hayward and migrated from Cambridge to London. Without blowing my own trumpet I can say that when I went to the Oval I knew pretty well my own capabilities; it was just a question as to how great I should find the difference between first-class and Minor Counties cricket. The feeling was strong within me that I could make good, but I little thought then that I should achieve the success in an even higher sphere of cricket than that to which I was then aspiring, or that I should be the first man to beat the record of that wonderful batsman, W. G. Grace, in the matter of making centuries. However, this article is not meant to be a statement of what I myself have accomplished; the purport of it is to give in some slight degree my ideas on the changes that have come about in the game-whether of improvement or otherwise-and the points that have struck me as being worthy of mention. The era to which my name has been given by you, Mr. Editor, covers first-class cricket from 1903 to 1933. The War came to rob all of us of four solid years of the game, and although I played a little last summer I think that I really finished in 1933 when at 50 years of age after, roughly, 30 seasons at the Oval, I was beginning to feel that the strain of the game day after day was getting just a little too much for me. There was also the fact that younger players were knocking at the door, and that it did not become me, having had a longer innings than most cricketers of modern days, to stand in the way of promising recruits who wanted to feel that their positions in a county eleven were secure. So even though I scored one century last season I still fall short by three of the two hundred I had fondly hoped to obtain. Records after all are ephemeral; they are only made to be beaten by somebody else, and while it is nice to think that one has accomplished something out of the common there are other and more important considerations to bear in mind. The new leg-before-wicket rule, which is being tried experimentally may, if adopted, have a far reaching effect on batsmen, but at the back of my mind there is the impression that someone will come along one of these days and surpass the 197 hundreds which now stand to my credit. Before my time there were other epochs in our great game. The days of top-hats, when Alfred Mynn, the Lion of Kent and other famous men were in their prime, are now far distant. Then came the Grace period when that marvellous batsman stood out head and shoulders above everybody else; the Hon. F. S. Jackson, Ranjitsinhji, G. L. Jessop, Tom Hayward, C. B. Fry, A. C. MacLaren, George Hirst, J. T. Tyldesley, Victor Trumper, M. A. Noble and others too numerous to mention were contemporaries in what has been described as the Golden Age of cricket. It will be seen therefore that my own follows in a natural sequence in this recurring cycle.

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