Newbery Cricket

English Willow Cricket Bats, Hand-Pressed in Sussex Since 1919.

Right. So. Newbery Cricket is one of those properly venerable English heritage businesses one rather hopes still exists and is, against the odds, alive and quietly thriving. The story begins in the early 1900s in East Sussex with Len Newbery — a master bat-maker working within the long Robertsbridge bat-making tradition that has, for reasons of climate and geography and possibly stubbornness, made that small corner of Sussex the global centre of English-willow craft for most of the past century. Len passed the trade to his only son John, who founded John Newbery Ltd in 1981 and proceeded to do various interesting things to the cricket bat — including the steel-spring handle, a genuine technical innovation at the time — earning himself, at the height of his career, the slightly extravagant industry nickname "the Picasso of cricket bats." John died in 1989, aged just fifty; the brand carried on without him, and in 2022 relocated to a properly modern facility in Lancing, West Sussex — showroom, cricket centre, three-thousand-square-foot warehouse — from which it now supplies the England & Wales Cricket Board across the professional game.

The craft itself is what one comes for. Newbery's bats are made from the top one per cent of Grade 1 English willow, hand-pressed by master batmakers in the UK using the company's signature processes — the pressing of the willow being the genuinely-distinguishing bit, with every individual cleft requiring its own particular pressure-per-square-inch judgement to draw the optimum performance out of each piece. Shaping and balancing is done by hand and eye, which sounds slightly mystical and, in the way of these things, to a degree is. The current line covers the Heritage flagship, the Centurion, the Legacy Pro, the Master 100, the Kudos, the Navarone, the Velo and the Blitz — and for those who want to push the thing further, Newbery's bespoke service lets one design one's own bat with the master batmaker from scratch, which is a genuinely lovely experience to give as a present to the cricket-mad. Beyond bats, the brand makes cricket balls (manufactured in India under ethical-standards agreements with regular quality-assurance visits, the company being unusually candid about this rather than slapping a minimal UK finish on imports and calling them British-made — a degree of supply-chain honesty that, in this corner of the trade, is properly rare), plus soft leather goods, teamwear, and the various accessories one wants in a kitbag. Bats arrive knocked-in, ready to face an old ball in the nets, though as the company gently advises: further knocking-in is always wise.

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