Hairdryer treatment and other fads: a history of cricket pitch-drying ideas

In 1903 a poem was published in the popular magazine Truth about the English cricket season:

Sing a song of fixtures, of wickets never dry,Two and twenty cricketers with visages awry;Even when the rain stops play is not allowed;Isn’t that the sort of thing to rile a British crowd?

The crowd waits in the beer-house, telling stories funny;The teams stay in the club-room, grudging loss of money;And so the county season swiftly ebbs and flows,Till up comes the autumn to bring it to a close.

There’s nothing remotely funny about watching grass dry, a pastime frustrating enough to have triggered the inventive streak of generations of cricket lovers. On the anniversary of the first and so far as we can tell only trial of perhaps the most outlandish and ambitious solution of all, it seems as good a time as any to run through a few of their most memorable ideas.

We start in the 1930s, perhaps the golden age of quick-drying gadgetry. In the second year of the decade the MCC experimented with “a large box-like arrangement with a powerful electric fan, that is run up and down the pitch on a small truck” and also featured “a tapering funnel”.

The idea had been dreamed up by its clerk of works, RF Cotterell, and then pitched to the Sturtevant Engineering Company, “manufacturers of blowing and exhausting fans for all purposes”, who put together a prototype. “So great was the force of the air current that after 16 gallons of water had been poured on the pitch the moisture was entirely dissipated in half an hour,” it was reported. It created a hurricane of wind and of publicity, but little was heard of it thereafter. Presumably when it came to this idea the MCC was not, in the end, big fans.

The following year, Surrey experimented with a