I entered Brian’s name in Google the other day, to discover this:
12/04/2010
Gloucestershire County Cricket Club regret to report the death of life member Brian Cheal. Brian was a hugely popular member of the club and will be sadly missed by all those who knew him. He was also President of local football club Ashley FC.
There will be a service held on Monday 26th April at 12:30 at Canford Crematorium. Brian requested no flowers but if anyone would like to make a donation, then please do so to St Peter’s Hospice, Bristol. After the service, refreshments will be available in the Grace Room at the County Ground, Bristol.
Both Brian’s parents died at around 60, and Brian reasoned
that genetics would probably account for him at about that age. He lived his
life according to that expectation and it seems that he was correct to do so.
This is not to say that he adopted a lavish or hedonistic lifestyle, far from
it. Rather, he was determined to gain full enjoyment from simple pleasures,
particularly jazz, non-league football, real ale and, above all, county
cricket.
For many years, these activities took up so much of his time
that he had none to spare to join the rest of us in the world of work. When his
inheritance ran out, he became a postman. Brian’s round was in Ashley Down,
where he lived, a short walk from the County Ground. I knew some people on his
route, and they regarded him highly, an old-fashioned postie who kept an eye on
those without anyone else to do so, though on days when the first ball was to
be bowled at 11, they would wake to the sound of the mail falling on the mat at
the crack of dawn.
Brian would return to Kent several times a summer, always to
the Nevill for Tunbridge Wells week, and usually to the Mote for Maidstone
week, where he would stay with Allen Hunt (it was through Allen that I got to
know him).
As the years went on, Brian was more inclined than me to
stay in the west when fixtures conflicted. He particularly enjoyed the
Cheltenham Festival and was a leading light of the 88 Club, a group of
Gloucestershire supporters united, for reasons that none of them could quite
remember, by their fascination for the number eight. The second day of the
Gloucestershire v Yorkshire match at Cheltenham in 1988 was to them as a total
eclipse of the sun might be to an astronomer, for it took place on Monday, 8
August 1988: 8.8.88. They convened in one of the marquees lining the boundary
at eight minutes past eight that auspicious morning and none could tell you the
score when they left the ground some ten hours later.
Brian was a knowledgeable and fluent commentator on the
Bristol hospitals radio service, which ran ball-by-ball commentaries on games
at the County Ground. I made occasional appearances in the commentary box at
his invitation. In 1991 we commentated together on the final overs of a NatWest
Trophy game between Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire that the Bristol
weather had strung out into the third evening. Eddie Hemmings scrambled a
last-ball single to give Nottinghamshire the game. Whether the effect of our
description on our captive audience in the Bristol Royal Infirmary, Frenchay
Hospital and elsewhere was restorative or otherwise, I don’t know.
Brian was a purist. When he joined Allen Hunt for weekend
jaunts to Kent away games, he and George Morrell would find a country pub for
Sunday lunch followed by an afternoon stroll instead of going to the 40-over
Sunday League game. Allen would go to the game, believing the most inferior
form of cricket to be superior to all other forms of human activity. Though I
was never able to discuss it with him, I will say with certainty that Brian scorned
T20.
I had always assumed that one day I would get back to the
County Ground during the cricket season and catch up with Brian. I will watch
cricket from the Hammond Room roof again, and when I do I will think of the
Bristolian Kentish man for whom cricket was at the centre of a happy life.
