The light fantastic

Tom Graveney: 'The bats got so heavy that the game lost all the top-hand players' © Hulton Getty

Two bats for the price of one: that was the closest the professional of the 1950s came to free kit. There was a blazer and sweater if he was capped and the rest came out of his wages.

Two bats were more than enough for Leicestershire's Brian Boshier. He did not score a run until his 10th innings of 1955 and his bat lasted years, with its distinctive legend on the back: `Running In - Please Pass'.

For some a personal bat was not important. Denis Compton picked up whatever was to hand. For others the state of the bat was everything. "Ron Headley wouldn't put his bat on the luggage rack in the coach," Worcestershire's Martin Horton says. "He said it might alter the balance. And it had to be absolutely white. We used to clean off the red marks, especially the ones on the edges - you might leave the ones in the middle - but Ron! He was out first ball once and he came in and spent half an hour sanding down his bat. He was lbw; he hadn't even hit the ball."

Most bats weighed about 2lb 3oz. "Billy Sutcliffe had a 2lb 6oz bat," Yorkshire's Bob Appleyard recalls, "and it had to be made specially for him. That was considered exceptionally heavy. One year Len Hutton and Norman Yardley played with harrow bats, which couldn't have weighed more than two pounds. They thought they had more control with a lighter bat."

"Len Hutton picked up one of Ian Botham's bats once," bat-maker Duncan Fearnley recalls. "He said it was the nearest he'd come to holding a railway sleeper."

"We were playing on uncovered pitches," Yorkshire's Ken Taylor explains. "The ball deviated much more and you had to adjust in mid-shot. You can't do that with a heavy bat. Once a three-pound bat starts coming down you've just got to go through with the shot."

"The bats got so heavy," says Tom Graveney, "that the game lost all the top-hand players. The top hand was always the guiding hand. You took the bat back towards the stumps and it came down like a pendulum. Now the bat is going towards third man. I could adjust my shot after the ball hit the seam and I'm sure I wasn't unique in that."

"It was a different game then," Bob Appleyard thinks. "The bats had a smaller sweet spot and there was little room for error. You had to time the ball. With these heavier bats, the wood is thicker all the way up. You can mis-hit the ball, and it still goes to the boundary. In a way it's easier to bat with a modern bat, though it probably wouldn't be on turning pitches."

Some say that the change came with one-day cricket, others that in the late 1970s the demand for willow became so great that it had to be force-dried, leaving the lighter bats too brittle. "We plant the trees closer together now," Carleton Wright, Britain's leading willow-grower, says, "so they grow more slowly. It makes a narrower grain. The wood is denser, stronger. It doesn't dry out so much."

"We used to store our bats in damp cellars in the winter," Appleyard recalls. " In fact there was a theory for a while that they should be left overnight in a bathful of water to stop them drying out. I don't know how they'd have survived with today's central heating." Wright says: "The bats are pressed much heavier now. They don't need the same knocking in."

"The players have more bats," Fearnley says. "Really a batsman needs only two bats and one will always be better than the other. Tom Moody at Worcester was the last one with the old approach. He'd say to me, `Don't give me two bats. It makes the game complicated.' He'd get a good one and he'd use it till it disintegrated. It's the tool of your trade, isn't it?"

"I used to be given two bats each summer by Slazenger," recalls Graveney. "Most years I used only one of them through the whole season, batting four times a week and having a net every day. I had only one pair of gloves too, and Robin Smith changed his three times a day."

Tom Graveney, scorer of 122 first-class centuries. What sort of money did Slazenger pay him? "My biggest cheque was for autographing some bats. I think it was £27 10s."