The Willow of Wright

The story of the preferred variety of willow in cricket bats, begins in an Essex plantation of a family firm

The story of the preferred variety of willow in cricket bats, begins in an Essex plantation of a family firm

ASK THE world’s best batsmen what their bats are made of and you get a straight drive: English willow. Ask them which is the only company that turns willow wood into bats and many of them would be fending off a bouncer. The world’s only supplier of top-grade English willow is a company called JS Wright & Sons of good old England. As you drive through the plains of Essex along the bypass to Chelmsford, you begin to see rows of willows. Take one of the narrow turns into a remote village, Great Leighs, and look out for a small wooden sign that has been around 115 years to date.

A man in his 40s with a broad smile and a face tanned by being mostly out of the shade greets you. He is Oliver, the fourth generation Wright, great great grandson of Jessie Samuel Wright who founded the company in 1894. The only other fourth generation living Wright is Jeremy Rubbles, Oliver’s cousin. Between them, they supply willow shapes that are turned into bats not only for the Tendulkars, Pontings and Pietersens, but any of the millions who wield a bat just for the fun of it.

The mantle of fame weighs easy on Oliver, though he cannot but betray an irony: “For all the fame, no batsman has ever visited us even though it is our blades that helped heap them with records. All these years? Except Ian Botham who came here once. When he was England captain, Nasser Hussain used to live barely a mile away here. But never came here.”

The factory is a vast space surrounded by woods and willow plantations, containing sheds with equipment for sawing, drying and storing the willows. The Wright cousins and 30 odd employees make up the human resources. Oliver handles the market and supply, Jeremy focusing on quality control alone.

“Except modern technology, nothing much has changed over the years,” Oliver explains as he enters his office, decorated with black and whites of the willow processing over decades. “You want to know our history?” he asks and dives right down to business. In the late 1800s, a gentleman asked Jessie, then a builder, if he knew where willow trees were grown in the area. Jessie replied he did not. The gentleman left, but Jessie started looking for them anyway. Soon he found the willow, and came to know they made good cricketing bats. The rest is history.

The company grew as orders started coming from all over England, and as labour costs became dearer at home, from abroad. Today, 90 per cent of Wright’s blades are exported to India—to scores of bat makers in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, and in Punjab—and Pakistan. “Indian craftsmen are fantastic. Jeremy goes to Meerut every year for supply contracts. I go there once every two or three years.”

In the olden days, bats were made from alder and ash. The earliest known use of the willow—close grained red willow—was said to have been preferred by WG Grace and his contemporaries who found it easier to go for powerful drives and huge hits. In the latter half of the 19th century, willow bats became popular, with more batsmen preferring the white willow rather than the red one. This led to willow hybrids and what is called Salix Alba Caerulea—one of 600-odd varieties of willow. It is thought to have the best combination of ‘quickness of growth, straightness of grain and toughness of fibre’.

In England, Essex is the centre of cricket bat willow growing, as its climate and soil suit the tree better than any other place in the world. The lifecycle of a commercially grown tree is ideally 15-20 years. Willows grow to a height of 70-90 ft and 3-4 ft in diameter. The trees are generally grown in plantations, each 12 yards from the other, or 10 yards if they are on river banks. Trees grown for manufacture of cricket bats are felled when they reach about 58 inches in diameter. It is possible to obtain trees of suitable diameter with a 7-10 ft clear trunk in 18 years.

Oliver says their company has around 6,000 trees ready to cut every year. They plant around 16,000 trees annually. The trees are tended very carefully to check disease and defects; buds are rubbed off the stem regularly to prevent the formation of lower branches which causes knots.

“Trees are transported into our yard and are then cross cut into three or four 28-inch lengths. These logs are then cut length-wise into ‘clefts’, which is a large cricket bat-shaped piece ready to be shaped into a bat.” An average tree yields 3-4 bat lengths from which 38-40 ‘clefts’ can be cut. The ‘clefts’ then have their ends dipped in wax to prevent splitting, and are air dried to reduce moisture content and therefore weight. At JS Wright & Sons, the Special and Grade I ‘clefts’ are naturally air dried for a year, while other grades are kiln dried.

Oliver says, “We have 24 grades of blades, from specials to the lowest, depending on the width of the grains on the blade.” The ‘grains’ are natural wood lines running up and down a bat that represent one year of growth for that particular willow tree. A decent blade may have between 6 and 12 grains . “The density of the wood and consistency of the grain through the playing area of the bat is of vital importance to the end balance and performance.”

At Wright, gradation of the ‘clefts’ is done by company director Jeremy Ruggles himself. “The gradation depends on the straightness and the width of the grain, then its position in the tree trunk and then, any blemishes in the willow. Blemishes do not necessarily mean below-par performance of the willow. It’s just that top cricketers prefer cleaner blades.”

The Special, Grade I and Grade II bats are still almost all produced from English willow grown in Essex and the Thames Valley, cut and dried by the Wright cousins. And despite modern day advances the only one way to grade willow is to inspect it manually by hand and eye.

The job’s quite easy, isn’t it? “I suppose so, if you call having the patience to wait for 15 years to make a single blade an easy thing to do,” says Oliver. What about the fifth generation? “My daughter is only seven months old. Let’s see if she has the Wrights’ willow will too!”

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