The business began in a borrowed corner of a repair shop on the other side of the world.

Millichamp & Hall was founded in 1987 by Julian Millichamp and Jonathan Hall. Its own account, and that of the Somerset Cricket Museum, begins with an unusual export. “In October 1987,” the company says, the pair “sent 100 clefts of willow, their faces pressed, and handles fitted, to Perth, Australia,” where they worked on a bench in a repair shop using “drawknives, spoke shaves, even a horse’s shin bone.” Back in England they worked from “a backroom of Jonathan Hall’s home.”

That is pod shaving at its most literal: a cleft of willow, already pressed and handled, turned into a bat by hand with a blade drawn towards the body. It is the hand craft the English makers in this round claim for their top ranges, practised here without a factory at all. A cleft is the split section of a willow trunk, cut to the length of a blade, and English cricket-bat willow, its largest supplier says, takes twelve to twenty years to grow.

The founders are no longer there. The company says plainly that “Julian Millichamp and Jonathan Hall are no longer part of the team.” Production has been led for about twenty years by Robert Chambers, who holds the title “Master Pod Shaver.” The company that trades today, Millichamp & Hall Limited, was incorporated in March 2010 — twenty-three years after the brand began — and the register lists Chambers as its sole director and the holder of more than three-quarters of its shares. The name on the bat belongs to two men who have left; the hands on the drawknife belong to the man who owns it.

Millichamp & Hall says its bats went on a 1989 Ashes tour — wearing other companies’ stickers.

The company’s most striking claim is about anonymity. On the 1989 Ashes tour, the Somerset Cricket Museum’s history says, “11 of the 16 tourists were using Millichamp and Hall bats, albeit disguised with the labels of their better-known sponsors.” By 1990, the same account continues, the figure was “27 of the top 40 rated batsmen.” The museum page also names Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Justin Langer among its clients. All of these are the company’s and the museum’s own figures; we did not find independent confirmation, and we present them as claims.

Whatever the exact numbers, the practice they describe is documented across the trade. A player is paid to carry a brand’s stickers; the bat underneath may come from a specialist the public never sees. In 2015 The Cricket Monthly reported that MS Dhoni’s 2011 World Cup-winning six “came off a Reebok-branded bat that was made by SS.” Millichamp & Hall’s version of the story is the English one: a two-man workshop in Somerset whose bats, it says, were in the hands of the touring Australians of 1989 under labels other than its own.

There is an irony in that for a brand guide. For its most important early customers, the company’s own name was hidden. Today it sells under its own name, to anyone who walks into its shop at a county ground.

One workshop at a county ground, and a lineage that reaches New Zealand.

Today the company works from the Cooper Associates County Ground in Taunton, home of Somerset cricket, and lists satellite shops in Burnley, Oxford and Acton. It describes its willow simply as “the finest English willow,” and its site promises that “All our bats come oiled & knocked in by hand!” — the slow preparation, with linseed oil and a mallet, that hardens a new blade before it faces a ball. A recent first-class user, Somerset’s James Rew, has used its “F100” blade with what the company calls “velvet brown original decals.”

The workshop has trained others. James Laver, who founded the maker Laver & Wood in Napier, New Zealand, in 1999, says he “started at Millichamp & Hall in Somerset, England, and learned his craft there.” A craft learned in a Taunton workshop now runs in a Hawke’s Bay one — a reminder that, in hand bat making, the lineage that matters is of hands, not of names. Laver & Wood even states the sticker question outright: “Rather than spending vast amounts of money on sponsoring international players we choose to spend heavily on customer service.” The pupil turned the trade’s old habit of anonymity into a stated policy of not paying for fame.

There was a brief attempt to go further: a separate Millichamp & Hall International company was registered in 2019, with Chambers and a second director, and dissolved in 2022. The core business remained what it had always been: one workshop, a stock of English willow clefts, and the people who shave them by hand in Taunton.

The rules it works within are short. MCC’s Law 5 says “The blade shall consist solely of wood” and limits it to 10.8 centimetres in width, 6.7 in depth and four at the edges. The edge limit is recent: Wisden records that in 2017 MCC “responded to complaints that miscues were flying for six by limiting the edge to 4cm.” For a hand maker, those limits are where the craft lives — in how much willow can be left, and where.

Two surnames joined by an ampersand — the oldest kind of craft brand.

The brand is two surnames and an ampersand, the oldest pattern in the trade, and its lines are plain: “the finest cricket bats since 1987” and “Taking your game to the next level.” The decal on the bat is the one place its name finally appears in public — which, for a company whose early bats went out under other labels, is not a small thing.

For a designer, the lesson is the value of continuity over personality. The founders have gone; the name stays, because the name is now what customers recognise. Robert Chambers could have renamed the business; he has kept two other men’s names on his work, which is the clearest possible statement that the brand belongs to the bats, not the people.

For this guide we use a linseed brown and a pale willow with a bookish workshop serif. These are an unofficial interpretation, not Millichamp & Hall’s own colour values, and nothing of its mark or decals is reproduced.

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