Britain has around 20 traditional English willow cricket bat makers left, with few younger craftsmen entering the workshop floor and a centuries-old hand-production method now at risk of disappearing. That is according to 69-year-old Wakefield bat maker Ian Sampson, master bat maker at Warrior Cricket and a 31-year Slazenger veteran, who warned in a news package published by the SWNS news agency on 3 April that the craft is dying out as modern firms move to assembling premade parts rather than making bats from scratch.
Sampson has handcrafted cricket bats since 1972, when a Slazenger apprenticeship advertised at his school saw him start at the Horbury Bridge factory the Monday after he left education. “I was taken on as an apprentice — everything I’ve done, my experience is to do with it,” he said of the start of what became a 31-year career with the brand.
His Warrior Cricket workshop — tucked behind the Elephant & Castle pub on Westgate in Wakefield — produces roughly two bats a day from clefts that Sampson handpicks twice a year at JS Wright and Sons, the Essex grower that supplies around 75 per cent of the willow used for the world’s cricket bats. Every blade moves through a hand-worked sequence that begins with cleft selection and ends at the sanding bench, using the same method Sampson has carried since his first week at Slazenger.
“Selecting the cleft is the first part of the working process. After the fitting, it’s left to set for 24 to 48 hours, and then [we shape] it — we shave. It is all done by hand,” Sampson said.
The Warrior client list Sampson named in the SWNS interview included West Indies great Viv Richards, South Africa’s Jacques Kallis, England wicketkeeper Alec Stewart, Mark Butcher, Mark Ramprakash and Paul Collingwood — all served from the Horbury Bridge Slazenger factory floor during his three decades with the brand. After Slazenger’s British production closed in 2002, Sampson and partner Fred Freshney established IF Cricket before taking over Richard Wensley’s independent Warrior brand, which is marking its 50th year in 2026.
The decline of Britain’s handmade bat trade is accelerating against a backdrop of rule changes from the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which in February ended its 120-year single-piece willow requirement for adult amateur cricket, as Wood Central reported. The ruling legalised Type D laminated multi-piece bats from October in direct response to tightening English willow supply and rapidly rising bat prices, and was one of 73 changes to the Laws of the Game approved by the game’s custodians in February.
Offshoring has compounded the pressure on British workshops, with India’s Meerut region and the 400-factory Kashmir manufacturing belt now accounting for the overwhelming majority of global bat volume. Sampson’s two-bats-a-day output stands against the roughly one million bats produced annually across Kashmir, where willow supply is itself under pressure from unchecked logging and competing poplar demand from the Indian plywood industry.
Sampson said he valued most the generational loyalty of the Warrior customer base in the workshop’s longevity. “I’m making bats now for juniors, I’ve made bats for their fathers and their grandfathers, and to see people come back and say, ‘I remember when you made this for me many years ago’ — it gives me a lot of satisfaction,” he said.
Sampson still travels twice a year to the JS Wright willow farms in Essex to handpick clefts for his Wakefield bench, which remains one of fewer than 20 UK operations still producing English willow bats by hand from raw timber to finished blade. SWNS reported that Sampson fears the centuries-old craft is dying out as few young people take it up, and that he still repairs Test players’ bats from the same Westgate workshop.
