BATMAKING

Phil Walker delves through the briar and bramble of an industry swaying into its third century

Inside the vast storage unit at JS Wright & Sons, where 400,000 clefts are produced per year

PHOTO BY OLI SCARFF

Deep in the thickets of the Essex countryside, a grand institution goes about its vast, mysterious business. JS Wright & Sons (JSW) is into its third century as the world’s principal provider of willow for cricket bats. In an average year, 400,000 JSW clefts are sourced and dispatched to all corners of the global batmaking market. That’s threequarters of the world’s cricket bats.

Wright’s dominate their part of the industry. They have working relationships with around 2,000 UK farms, providing willow to most of the UK’s batmakers. As one who has a longstanding relationship with them puts it: “The raw material controls the marketplace.”

The company sprang up by accident, on the back of a chat down the pub, when a local builder called Jessie Samuel Wright was asked by a bloke if he knew where the local willow trees were. Jessie did, and discovering an abundance of wood in the surrounding countryside, figured he could make more money dealing willow than laying bricks. It was 1894. Jessie was soon supplying wood for WG’s bats.

Remarkably, the fundamental dimensions of a cricket bat have barely changed since. While recent advancements in pressing techniques and wood-drying have seen the depth of bats expand to such an extent that in 2017 the MCC was forced to introduce restrictions, the width of the bat face itself, at 4.25in, long predates WG’s day.

As does the pre-eminence of English willow. “It’s the lightness in weight and the strength it has,” says Jeremy Ruggles, Jessie’s great grandson and now the main man at JSW. “It’s a soft wood with hardwood properties. It doesn’t take up moisture after it’s dried and has a good weightper-volume ratio.” Kashmir willow, he says, popularly used on the subcontinent, is heavier. “English willow is just the best, and luckily it only grows here.”

Ruggles explains how it works. “We cut down the best quality trees to ensure the best quality of willow. We take the branch from the tree, put a point on the end of that so it’s like a stake, then bang them into the ground at two-foot centres across an area of land.”