The correspondents of The
Times found the first full weekend of the season a universally unpleasant
experience. John Woodcock, at Lord’s for MCC v Yorkshire, found it “vilely
cold, disagreeably noisy and intermittently wet”. The noise was from the
building of the new Tavern Stand (the one before the present structure), which
had displaced Sir Neville Cardus from his usual place on the promenade, forcing
him to “sit huddled on the pavilion balcony”.
Alan Gibson never much enjoyed Derby, where he saw the
home side beat Leicestershire. His nemesis PJK Gibbs opened the batting for
Derbyshire but escaped individual censure as the scoring rate remained at two
an over throughout. Play was interrupted
by “a thick sleet near enough to snow to satisfy a journalist’s conscience”.
Snow also stopped play at Trent Bridge, where AA Thomson
reported that the players “might have been emerging from an igloo rather than a
pavilion”. The game was an attritional, low-scoring draw. Kent’s first innings
169 left them three short of a first-innings lead, so Nottinghamshire took the
four points that went with that. The home side set Kent 174 to win, but they
managed only 36 for four between the snow showers.
Nottinghamshire were in a slump in the mid-sixties. They
had finished bottom of the Championship in 1965 and 1966 and had the look of a
team cobbled together from cast-offs and the discontented. They were led by
Norman Hill, the closest rival to Colin Milburn for the title of England’s most
rotund cricketer. AA Thomson reports that in the second innings “Hill advanced
with what seemed undue deliberation towards his 50”.
Other than that, Nottinghamshire’s best performers were
their two West Indians, Deryck Murray and Carlton Forbes. Murray kept wicket
for the West Indies in 62 tests and is remembered as a Warwickshire player for
several years in the seventies. He also had a couple of seasons at Trent Bridge
as a batsman, (Roy Swetman kept wicket), topping the county’s averages in 1966
after coming down from Cambridge, where he had been captain. Later in life Murray
represented Trinidad at the United Nations.
Forbes, a Jamaican, bowled left-arm pace for
Nottinghamshire for more than a decade, taking 707 wickets as well as being a
handy lower order hitter. His seven for 58 here launched him towards a hundred
wickets for the season for the second successive year, a fine effort for a poor
team.
Basharat Hassan, of the angular batting stance, made his
debut, beginning a decade of conscientious service to the county. The
Nottinghamshire side also included Mike Taylor, later of Hampshire and twin
brother of Derek Taylor who kept wicket for Somerset.
For Kent, John Shepherd made a Championship debut with
the sort of performance that would be repeated over and over through the
following 15 seasons, with three for 53 and a 55 that Wisden describes as “defiant”. Kent’s outstanding player was Norman
Graham, whose breakthrough season this was to be. His match figures were 8 for
103, the responsive pitch ideal for Graham’s forensic probing from a great
height.
As I wrote in the introductory piece, this project will
keep an eye on what else was happening on these days fifty years ago, and will
expand on some of the events referred to on Twitter (@kentccc1967). Saturday
was FA Cup semi-final day, with both games kicking off at 3 pm along with the
Football League programme. Geoffrey Green’s description of Jimmy Greaves’ goal
for Tottenham against Nottingham Forest matches a great writer with a great
footballer.
In the wider world, showing that there is nothing new
under the sun, the big political issue was Europe (Brentry rather than Brexit).
The cartoon shows, left to right, James Callaghan (Chancellor of the Exchequer),
George Brown (Foreign Secretary), Denis Healey (Defence), Harold Wilson (PM)
and Douglas Jay (Board of Trade).
The location of the third London airport was exercising
the letter writers. Air Commodore JE Allen-Jones wrote to The Times to promote
the Isle of Sheppey in Kent as the best location for an airport that could
handle the 900-seater jets that would be the norm very soon.
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