The Golden Age & Bradman
With the spliced handle perfected and overarm bowling legalised, cricket entered its first commercial era. Dedicated bat-makers became national names, the first sponsorship deals were struck, and a small Australian rewrote what a bat could do.
Surridge, Grace and the first signature bat
Stuart Surridge opened in 1881 in south London and quickly became the bat of the first superstar. W.G. Grace, the bearded face of Victorian cricket, used Surridge blades through the late 1880s and 1890s — a relationship that effectively invented the signature endorsement model bat-makers still rely on today.
Surridge bats from this era are thinner than the modern profile, with a long, narrow blade and a small swell low on the back. They were pressed lightly, in keeping with the lower bounce of uncovered pitches and slower bowling speeds of the era.
Bradman, the Sykes Autograph and Surridge Jumbo
Don Bradman averaged 99.94 across 52 Tests between 1928 and 1948 — a margin of dominance that has never been approached in any major sport. He carried two bats most famously: the William Sykes "Don Bradman Autograph" through his early career, and the Stuart Surridge "Jumbo" through the late 1930s and the 1948 Invincibles tour.
Both bats were strikingly light by modern standards — around 2lb 2oz — with a low middle and a short blade. Bradman believed the lighter pick-up gave him an extra fraction of a second to read length, and the numbers suggest he was right.
Nottingham and the Gunn & Moore era
Test cricketers William Gunn and Thomas James Moore founded Gunn & Moore in Nottingham in 1885. The Colwick factory pressed bats for the Trent Bridge dressing room and across the Midlands counties, and by the 1930s GM was a serious commercial rival to Surridge. Sykes, Surridge and Gunn & Moore between them supplied almost every bat carried in Test cricket before the Second World War.
Bat-making was still, fundamentally, a craft. Cleft selection, pressing, splicing and shaping were all done by hand on the same benches. The factory production methods that would arrive from Meerut in the post-war decades were still a generation away.