The first image is of the ‘Johnny Walker Scoreboard’ placed on Weymouth beach during the first Test of the 1934 Ashes series between England and Australia. The match itself took place at Trent Bridge, Nottingham, from 8th to 12th June. Australia won the match by 238 runs to take a 1-0 lead in the series. The Southern Times and Dorset County Herald reported on it on Saturday, 16 June 1934:
It has been impossible to escape the test match fever this week – even in Weymouth. The special scoring board which a whisky firm installed on the sands, and which enabled thousands of people to watch, ball by ball, the tense cricket drama being fought out by England and Australia at Trent Bridge, provided a seemingly legitimate excuse for most people to knock off work for a spell, from the head of the firm down to the elusive errand boy, the two occasionally confronting each other under somewhat dramatic circumstances.
This new game of cricket on the sands may be also regarded as a present-day substitute for the televisor of the next series of cricket tests in this country.
It was a strange and thrilling experience to sit in a deck chair and watch the closing stages of one of the most exciting test matches in history, and when the last shutter snapped out its laconic “Out!”, distance was annihilated, and science and mechanics transported the final scene at Nottingham to a ring of cricket enthusiasts on Weymouth Front.
There is only one “snag” about it, and that is a fresh traffic problem, and what is likely to happen in regard to road traffic conditions in the vicinity if the final game at the Oval in August decides the “Ashes“ must be left to the Corporation and the police. But perhaps the scoring board will be moved a point or two in a N. by N.E. direction that will divert the crowd to the sands – and to the Corporation’s deck chairs.
‘Watching’ the match in the 1930s
The crowd were not watching moving pictures: television was still experimental in 1934, and cricket was not televised in Britain until 1938.
The Weymouth crowd was ‘watching’ the match unfold on the giant scoreboard. Scores and wickets would have been transmitted rapidly from Trent Bridge – most likely by telephone or telegraph – and attendants manually updated the players’ figures and total on the board. The photograph appears to show those changeable panels.
Radio cricket commentary did exist by 1934, when the BBC was beginning fuller ball-by-ball coverage. However, the newspaper specifically credits the board with enabling people to follow the match ‘ball by ball’. There is no indication that commentary was broadcast to the crowd.
