Monster Bat Incident of 1771 - The event after which rules were made on bat size

An imagination of the 1771 ‘Monster Bat’ incident

Many rules of the game of cricket as it exists today owe their existence to incidents from centuries ago, which in their time created more than a bit of sensation – sometimes being responsible for the scripting of an entire new law. In the earliest days of the sport, when there were no rulings on how the game was to be played, such creative innovations were what led to the evolving and continuance of the sport as a popular competitive sport.

Modern batsmen accept from their earliest days that their means of amassing runs will be a rectangular bat, of dimensions not to exceed 38 inches in length and 4.25 inches in blade width. But this has not always been the case.

In a 1771 cricket match between Chertsey and Hambledon in Surrey played over 23 and 24 September, a batsman appropriately named Shock White walked out to take strike for Chertsey with a bat as wide as the wicket. A record of how he played is unavailable, but his team lost by 1 run after Hambledon, batting first, had put up a score of 218.

His action, though a stroke of genius, was lambasted all around as being unsportsmanlike.

Shock White and his contribution to cricket

The enigmatic ‘Shock White of Reigate’, whose dates of birth and death are unknown, is known to have lived in Brentford and been a member of a local cricket club. He is immortal in the pages of cricket history as the culprit behind this incident, named the ‘Monster Bat incident of 1771’.

White’s action created a sensation that lasted well after the match, as the cricket world was – for the first time ever – forced to think about the nature of the cricket bat. For the 18th century British population just coming to terms with the non-existence of God, White’s gigantic bat had thrown the British consciousness into renewed crisis..

Legendary fast bowler Thomas Brett was on Hambledon’s side on that day, and was the leading voice in the protest that followed the controversy. He submitted a formal protest, signed by himself, his captain Richard Nyren, and the greatest batsman of the 18th century, John Small.

Administrators were quick to realise that uniformity of bat size was essential for having competitive cricket matches. Three years later in 1774, the Laws of Cricket were modified to adjudicate that cricket bats would be roughly parallel with a maximum width of 4.25 – a rule that stands to this date. Steel gauges were installed inside many British stadiums to check whether bats conformed to the new law.

The very first cricket bats

Interestingly, the straight bat technique – which has classically defined how a batsman should move his bat till the advent of the T20s when horizontal swishes have come back into fashion once again – became the dominant method of batting only after this 1771 incident.

Previously, bats were shaped more like hockey sticks, and the ideal method of connecting the bat with the ball (which it was legal to deliver underarm) was to move the bat horizontally and hit the ball with the bottom of the bat. Therefore, the ‘sweet spot’ of the bat, so to say, has moved from the bottom to a more central area as the game of cricket has evolved.

An illustration of the evolution of cricket bats – from the 1740s to the 1900s

Quite ominously, the first ever mention of a cricket bat is from an event surrounding a death of a fielder in 1624. An inquest was conducted after a fielder was killed during a cricket match, after a batsman had reportedly whacked the victim on his head with his bat to prevent him from taking a catch.

The bewildering 1624 incident is also possibly the root of Law 37 (obstructing the field), which has been in the news recently. There has been a debate on whether a batsman deserves to be given out in this fashion at all, but the unfortunate victim from 1624 would definitely not have taken Ben Stokes’ side.