Why do Test cricketers wear white?

New York Times

7 days ago

Cricket is a sport that clings to tradition. It's the reason some love it, the comforting and familiar sights and sounds representing a still point in a turning world.
The most visually immediate of those traditions — in multi-day red-ball cricket at least — is the white clothing. While most team sports mandate differing colours so spectators can tell the sides apart, for much of its history, cricketers have played some form of the game wearing all white. Or at least a sort of off-white/cream colour otherwise only seen on the walls of municipal office blocks.
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Note the use of 'much of its history'. It would be easy to think that white has been the prevalent colour from the very start of the game until the present day. But that isn't quite the case, and it actually took about 150 years to become uniform.
In the 1700s, the earliest days of what we would recognise as cricket now, a gentleman would dress for a game of cricket as a gentleman would dress for any aspect of gentlemanly life. Frilled shirts, silk stockings and buckled shoes, naturally.
As the game evolved further, white was worn, although reliable documentation about how prevalent it was is relatively tricky to find.
Still, in a book called 'Bat, Ball, Cricket And All', published in 1950, the MCC's first full-time curator and historian Diana Rait Kerr wrote: 'White has apparently been the prevailing dress of cricketers from very early times. Other fashions, as we shall see, intruded at later periods, but only to yield again to the blameless livery of old; indeed, one of the remarkable features of cricket has been the manner in which its milky costume has prevailed over all others.'
Poems, like 'Cricket, An Heroic Poem' written by James Love in 1744, refer to players 'in decent white, most gracefully array'd', while paintings like 'Cricket as played on the Artillery Ground' from 1743 (see above) depict the players in white shirts.
This was probably a consequence of the relatively ad hoc nature of cricket back then. Rait Kerr wrote that, when playing the game, gentlemen 'threw down their wide-brimmed hats, coats and smocks, and left them with the scorers, or their waiting companions, to take care of'. Or, to put it another way, remove their outer garments and play in their undershirts, which were usually white.
By the early 1800s, trousers had replaced breeches, but coats were still commonly worn, and top hats too, and colours started to creep in. The MCC initially adopted a light blue colour, before switching to the red and yellow that it is synonymous with today. Men would often wear sashes and colourful belts, and coloured shirts started to appear around the 1850s, players representing whatever institution they were most proud of coming from — public schools, universities — with shirts and slightly less formal caps.
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'If you go back to the 1840s, 1850s,' says Neil Robinson, the head of heritage and collections at the MCC, 'you'll see illustrations of what was the all-England XI, which was the first professional team that toured around the country, taking advantage of the new railway network to take high-quality cricket to areas other than the south east of England. They used to wear white trousers, but shirts with pink or red spots.'
It wasn't until the 1880s that, gradually, white shirts and trousers became the standard uniform for the respectable cricketer. But why?
It would be great to tell you some romantic or sentimental story behind cricketers wearing white. Perhaps it was in tribute to a lost love of an MCC member. Maybe it was a reference to moral purity, an early visual indicator of the spirit of cricket. Could it have been a royal decree, Queen Victoria deciding that she would like to see her cricketing subjects gleaming in the English sun?
Alas not.
The primary motivations behind the prevailing colour for cricketers' clothing being white are rather boringly practical. Cricket is a summer sport, thus, in theory, games take place in the heat. White is generally regarded as being the best colour to wear in hot weather because it reflects heat, while darker shades absorb it. So in the interests of protecting the players from elevated temperatures as much as possible, white became commonplace and, eventually, uniform.
That wasn't the only reason. White is also the best colour to contrast with the red ball. It is also probably the colour that most people had ready access to. It was also easiest to make uniform throughout the game. But broadly speaking, it became prevalent because of the heat thing.
But it's never actually been formalised. There's nothing in the laws of the game specifying that Test teams must wear white, and there never has been. It just became a convention that has stuck. 'There's not a great deal of written evidence as to why white came into popular use,' says Robinson. 'A bit like cricket itself, whites just evolved into the accepted format that we know today.
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'I suppose this reflects the fact that the game hasn't always been played in whites and the Laws in the modern era do not distinguish between limited overs and first-class cricket. They're meant to be applicable at every level, even those where players can't necessarily be expected to have access to proper kit.'
The good doctor, WG Grace, offered his own thoughts on how a cricketer should be attired in a book published in 1890 about cricket called, obliquely, 'Cricket'. Grace offers such sartorial notes as pointing out that 'braces are not worn when playing cricket', that 'nothing can look much worse in the cricket field than to see fieldsmen with their hands in their pockets' and that a jacket 'can be used when fielding, but certainly not when batting or bowling'. Take note.
But on the matter of clothing colours, he wrote: 'It was not an unusual sight 10 or 20 years ago to find an XI or county 22 dressed in all the colours of the rainbow. White is now usually worn, and it certainly looks better and cooler than any other colour.'
There, again, we have the point about it being a cooling colour. But is the theory sound? You can't necessarily blame the Victorians for not being fully across modern science, but the theory that white is better to wear in the heat is… a subject of debate, at least.
While it's true that dark colours absorb heat, that's as much a positive as a negative. They do absorb the light from the sun, but also absorb and take away heat from our bodies, thus cooling us down. So would black have been a better bet? Or at least, equally as good?
A study conducted in 1980 by academics from Tel Aviv University, who had observed members of Bedouin tribes wearing both white and black robes in the desert heat, suggested there was essentially no difference between the two in terms of keeping people cool. So if the Victorians did have access to modern science, and temperature was the primary motivator for their sartorial decisions, they might just as easily have chosen something much moodier.
Still, white was the choice, and remained so in all forms of cricket until the late 1970s and the advent of World Series Cricket (WSC) in Australia.
The great disruptive force in cricket's 20th century, WSC began as a power struggle between Kerry Packer's Channel 9 and the Australian Cricket Board over TV rights. When Packer didn't get them, he recruited the game's biggest names on much healthier wages — Test cricketers to that point having been paid a relative pittance in comparison to the money being made by the authorities — to play in his own series of games.
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But while the start of WSC might have been about economics, it did feature several innovations that have since become entirely normal parts of the game, one of which was a move away from all-white clothing, which, like the introduction of whites in the first place, was born of necessity.
Perhaps WSC's most successful innovation was day-night cricket, utilising the floodlights at VFL Park (an Australian rules football stadium that they were forced to use after being banned from all the major cricket venues in the country) to play at times more attractive to the paying public.
The problem was that a red ball would not have been practical to use as it would be hard to see against the night sky. So for these games, they used white balls, initially with traditional white clothing, but after a while, it became clear that some contrast was required there, too. So in the second year of WSC, coloured kit was introduced, the Australian team decked out in a striking yellow/gold, the 'Rest of the World' team in blue, while the West Indies wore a sort of salmon-pink.
This was regarded as a gimmick by many, not least by some West Indian players whose masculinity was challenged by their allocated colours, and for years afterwards, you would hear assorted bores refer to 'pyjama' cricket. But the gimmicks stuck, and those involved can legitimately claim to have been part of a revolution.
'What had gone before had all been so conservative,' said Tony Greig, a former England captain and one of the key recruits to WSC, in a documentary marking its 20th anniversary in 1997. 'We did bring it (cricket) to life: we turned on the lights, introduced the coloured clothing… they (WSC's critics) bagged us, they didn't understand what we were doing.'
Still, the outrage did not extend to all the expected sources.
Sir Donald Bradman, whose attitude to most things would generously be described as 'conservative', was prompted to comment on the coloured clothing by the Australian Cricket Board chairman Bob Parish. He replied, as recounted in Gideon Haigh's book about WSC, 'The Cricket War': 'Why should I? The Pinks played the Blues in Sydney in 1822. Coloured clothing means nothing.'
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He wasn't quite right because coloured clothing is now used in all forms of limited-overs/white-ball cricket, but it took a while to catch on and properly spread. It wasn't until 1992 that it was used at the World Cup, and England were still playing one-day internationals in whites as late as 1997.
Over the years, additions have been made — manufacturers' badges, sponsors' logos, squad numbers, players' names — to obscure the pure white of the shirts and trousers a little. But even now, England, India, Australia, the West Indies and the rest will turn out in their all-white clothing, just as they did over 150 years ago.
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