Yorkshire firm still carves a living out of making cricket bats

Chris Kippax’s family business sees the game from copse to crease, nurturing and felling willow trees in local woodland and then hand-turning them into professional bats that command up to £500 each.

He sells 1,000 of them in a good year, but this year is anything but. Nearly 90 per cent of his sales have fallen away like leaves in autumn.

“March and April is Christmas for the cricket retailing business. But this year the market disappeared,” said Mr Kippax, whose late father, the former Yorkshire batsman Peter Kippax, founded the firm 44 years ago.

Like the willow trees it plants every year in Knaresborough and at Thorpe Underwood, north-west of York, the business is split down the middle. The manufacturing process, which accounts for around 60 per cent of revenue, has continued but the unsold end products are stacked like planks in his warehouse at Methley, between Leeds and Castleford.

“India is pretty much locked down as well, so we haven’t exported anything. The stocks are sitting here waiting to go but until they lift their restrictions and the economy starts to move again, they’re stuck here,” he said.

The late start to a truncated domestic season after lockdown stopped play had brought little relief, Mr Kippax added. Players had put off buying replacement bats until next year, preferring to have their old ones refurbished – a service Kippax Willow also provides.

“We’ll strip them and service them and put new labels on,” he said. “County players have three or four bats at any one time and they will number them and use them in rotation, Some players give their bats names.

“They grow acquainted to them and if they like them they will make them last as long as they can. But we’re hoping that they will at least come and buy new stock for 2021.”

Yorkshire is fertile territory for making bats from the ground up, with an abundance of wetland with clean running streams, in which willow trees grow best. After years of practice Mr Kippax can tell at a glance when each one is ready for felling.

“If you can touch your fingers when you hug the tree, then it’s big enough,” he said. “Then you look at the number of lengths you’re going to get out of it. We work on 30-inch lengths, so if you imagine the trunk as a tube of Rolos you can tell how many lengths you’re going to get.”

Having cut the trunk into sections, each one is then sliced like a pie into what are known in the trade as clefts – long wedges split along the grain, which form the blade of each bat.

Traditional manufacture like this is carried on at only a handful of sites around the country – the larger manufacturers preferring to buy their clefts from growers who plant and harvest them in vast numbers.

But it’s a model that has found favour with many players. The former England captain Graham Gooch voted Kippax Willow’s £380 Colossus bat, with its longer handle and shorter blade, his joint favourite.

Mr Kippax said the current climate did not mean the business could not continue “for the foreseeable future”.

But he added: “If it continues to impact into next year it gets more dicey. That’s true for everyone. We’re just praying that things get back to something like normal in 2021. In the meantime we’re working to the traditional British strategy of carrying on and keeping going.”

The making of willow cricket bats is considered an endangered craft. The Heritage Crafts Association, whose president is the Prince of Wales, lists it among the traditional English processes that are recognised neither as arts nor heritage and fall between the gaps of support and promotion organisations.

According to the Association, fewer than 20 people in the country now make their living from making bats – a craft which dates back to the 17th century.

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