Swards of honour

Our independent schools have a proud tradition of cricket — and cricket grounds.Former England batsman (and Old Tonbridgian) Ed Smith picks his favourites 

 The excellence of the cricket grounds of England’s independent schools is a double-edged privilege. On the one hand, they are some of the most beautiful grounds on which to play and watch cricket anywhere in the country. On the other, the public schools contribute an increasingly high proportion of England’s professional cricketers. That’s great for the public schools; not so great for everyone else. In recent decades English sport has improved in many respects, but it’s hard to argue that meritocracy is one of them.

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Ed West

Trump is going to give us a thousand years of woke

My dad was a teacher at Tonbridge School — had he not been, I would have gone to grammar school, as my sister did. I was doubly lucky at Tonbridge. First, we lived on a house that backed on to the school playing fields and my parents had to come up with very inventive excuses or else I would have them bowling at me in the nets. Secondly, I was exceptionally lucky that Tonbridge is such an outstanding cricket school. Looking back now I’ve retired, I can see that I was in the right place at the right time and how much that helped me. It is an uncomfortable truth that Tonbridge’s cricket facilities were as good as if not better than any I experienced in my professional career.

My favourite school grounds are inevitably skewed by personal bias. I’ve tried to avoid only choosing grounds where I scored runs. But I can’t help selecting grounds in the south because that was the circuit where we played out matches. There are lots of attractive grounds farther north that I never got to know.