Hunts County’s slogan is a pun, and also a claim about continuity.

Hunts County tells its origin in a single paragraph. “County Bats were first made at St. Neots in Huntingdonshire by the Trimmins family in 1904. Production continued here until the factory moved to Huntingdon in 1983. The craftsmen from St. Neots are still making bats at Huntingdon which enables us to use the slogan ‘bats made for centuries’.” It is a good line — a cricket century and a calendar one in the same three words — and a rare slogan that is also a dated claim.

The company register supplies the modern frame. Hunts County Bats Limited was incorporated on 21 April 1983 — the same year, by the company’s own account, as the move to Huntingdon. Its current directors are Martin Stephenson and Stephen Turnock, both recorded in office since at least 1992. How the business passed from the Trimmins family to its present owners is not recorded in anything we could find, and we do not guess at it. The register does show a separate Hunts County Bats (Western) Limited, incorporated in 1986 and dissolved in 2005; it does not say what that company did, and neither do we. Hunts County says it now produces and supplies “over twenty thousand cricket bats worldwide” each year.

Its willow line is a cheerful one: “Yes, our bats do grow on trees! Salix Caerulea to be precise.” And its mark has a long television history. Writing for cricket.com.au in 2022, Andrew Ramsey listed “County’s encircled ‘C’” among the bat logos familiar to viewers from the 1960s onward, alongside Gray-Nicolls’ sword and Duncan Fearnley’s wicket.

Two famous brands of the 2000s were Hunts County bats underneath.

Hunts County is this round’s maker behind other stickers. When the Woodworm brand began in 2001, Cricinfo reported, its founder chose Hunts County to build its bats — “unwittingly makers of the prototype,” since the old bat that started the story had been one of theirs. Woodworm went on to put its name on Andrew Flintoff’s bat through the 2005 Ashes. When Mongoose launched its long-handled bat in 2009, a member of its team later said, its contracted makers included workshops in Sussex, in Meerut — and in Huntingdon, at Hunts County. Two of the most talked-about English bat brands of the decade had, in part, the same maker.

The postscript is telling. The original Woodworm company entered administration in 2008 and was dissolved in 2013; the first Mongoose company entered administration in 2011 and was dissolved in 2014. Hunts County Bats Limited, incorporated in 1983, is still active. The brands with the famous faces came and went; the workshop that made their bats stayed open, and is still making them today.

The BBC caught the human side of that arrangement in 2010. It visited Martin Berrill’s workshop in Gloucester, which it described as “one of two making bats for Hunts County Bats of Cambridgeshire,” and reported that he could make a bat in seventy minutes. Berrill had made bats for England’s bowlers Ashley Giles and Matthew Hoggard in the 2005 Ashes — two lower-order batsmen, but Ashes bats all the same. His description of the trade is the best sentence in this whole round: “They’ve got somebody else’s stickers on but you know deep down that you’ve made the bat.”

That BBC piece also corrects an error: English Wikipedia describes Hunts County’s two workshops as both being in Cambridgeshire, but the one the BBC visited was in Gloucester. The company’s own production, by its account, is in Huntingdon; it has also used outside workshops. A bat “made by Hunts County” can mean several pairs of hands.

Under the rules, the sticker on the face is the maker’s. The sticker on the back can be anyone’s.

The International Cricket Council’s clothing and equipment rules explain why a maker like Hunts County can be invisible on television. The face of the bat — the side cameras see as a batsman walks out — is reserved for manufacturer’s marks, within the top nine inches. A sponsor’s logo, the “Player’s Bat Logo,” is limited to a single patch of ten square inches on the back. The regulations say bat advertising exists “to allow an opportunity for players to obtain some revenue from controlled bat advertising.” And the Laws of Cricket cap any such identification at 0.02 centimetres thick.

What those rules do not do is require the name on the face to be the name of the workshop that shaped the willow. A brand that markets the bat takes the face; the workshop that made it may appear nowhere. That is how Woodworm and Mongoose could carry their own names while Hunts County craftsmen made the bats — and why Berrill’s “somebody else’s stickers” is not a complaint but a description of an industry.

The bat itself is the same regulated object as every other. MCC’s Law 5 says the blade “shall consist solely of wood” and caps its width at 10.8 centimetres, its depth at 6.7 and its edges at four; the handle may be no more than 52 percent of the bat’s length, a rule introduced in 2008 to curb the extra power of carbon-filled handles. Within those limits, the craft of shaping a cleft — Berrill’s seventy minutes — is where one maker’s bat differs from another’s.

One letter in a ring — the shortest bat logo of its era.

Hunts County’s mark, as cricket writers remember it, is an encircled “C” — for County. It is a model bat logo: a single letter, a single shape, readable from the far side of a ground and on a small television screen. Australian batsman Dean Jones, cricket.com.au recalled, used a County bat early in his career, including at the 1987 World Cup.

The brand lesson is unusual. Hunts County has two identities — its own, on its own bats, and an invisible one, inside other brands’ bats. The first is a heritage name with a good pun; the second is a reputation among the people who commission bats. For a craft workshop, the second may be worth more.

For this guide we use a County red and a pale willow tone with a sturdy heritage serif. These are an unofficial interpretation — we could not confirm the company’s current logo file — and nothing of its mark is reproduced.

Keep Hunts County’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.