The Cricket Magazines: December 1972

 

The first four pages of Playfair are, mystifyingly, devoted to a preview of the domestic season in South Africa, to be contested exclusively by white players, though the political context is referred to only obliquely. More commendably, The Cricketer had a correspondent on non-European cricket in South Africa, A Akhalwaya. He reports on the reaction to the end of Basil D’Oliveira’s test-match career in his homeland, reminding us how much it meant to the non-white population to have one of their own playing at the highest level.

Here in South Africa we found ourselves unabashedly supporting England. Whenever England played no more did we ask: ‘What is the score?’ Instead, it became ‘What did D’Oliveira score?’ or ‘How many wickets did he take?

…One wonders which country the schoolboys will now support.

The Cricketer has a review of the season by Tony Pawson that in structure is strikingly similar to Tony Lewis’s Journal of the Season in November’s issue. Could there have been a miscommunication that led Pawson to think that he was i/c the Journal in 1972? If so, it was a felicitous error, as Pawson was always worth reading. Occasionally, his path crossed with mine, for example in May:

Knott’s bewildering range of quick-footed shots brought him a century in each innings at Maidstone.

I was there for the second of these centuries. It was my first visit to Mote Park, a ground that became a favourite, the English venue that was most like our parkland grass bowls here in New Zealand. Pawson’s own batting for Kent, a generation earlier, was by all accounts similar to Knott’s in its fleetness of foot and scurrying between the wickets. Pawson also contributes portraits of Colin Cowdrey and Donald Carr.

Another day of fond memory is pictured, 10 September when Kent won the Sunday League by beating Worcestershire at St Lawrence. Guardian of the telephone in the Canterbury press box, Dudley Moore (who must have got tired of being asked where Peter Cook was) summed up Kent’s route to the title, culminating in chasing 190, the biggest target they faced all season. A century partnership between Luckhurst and Nicholls took them home.

David Frith made an early impression as Deputy Editor of The Cricketer by conducting an airmail interview with Clarrie Grimmett, the New Zealander who took 216 wickets with his leg spin for Australia. It’s fascinating. Grimmett says that his greatest regret was that he was not selected for the 1938 tour to England.

I had hoped to continue my great association with Bill O’Reilly; this breaking of our partnership was a terrific blow to both of us…The only reason I can think of for my omission is that I was thought to be too old.

As Grimmett was 46 at that time, he probably had a point. Though born in Dunedin, the leg-spinner learned his cricket at the Basin Reserve in Wellington, for whom he made his debut in the Plunket Shield when he was 17, leaving for Australia when he was 22.

Grimmett received an early lesson in the realities of Sheffield Shield cricket from New South Wales skipper Monty Noble, who berated him for getting through his overs too quickly (a six-ball over in a minute-and-a-half!) so not allowing the quickies a rest.

He nominates Stan McCabe as the greatest strokemaker he saw. Grimmett’s choice of the major batsman that he had a strong chance of dismissing is a surprise: Bradman.

          I always felt he was uncomfortable against good-length spin.

On modern cricket, he deplores short-pitched bowling, but blames the batsmen for it.

If they learnt correct footwork instead of ducking (and getting hit in the process) short bowling would die a natural death.

Both publications carry articles concerning Warwickshire’s Championship-winning captain AC Smith (the Edgbaston Smiths AC and MJK were known by their initials). Richard Eaton interviews him in Playfair, while The Cricketer piece carries Smith’s byline. Given his notorious statement to the media years later as CE of the TCCB: “no comment, but don’t quote me”, it is no surprise that Eaton’s is the more illuminating.

Warwickshire’s trip of brilliant West Indians, Gibbs, Kanhai and Kallicharran was supplemented mid-season by Deryck Murray who took AC’s place as wicketkeeper. Naturally, Smith turned to bowling instead.

I am a liquorice allsorts bowler. I think I can bowl cutters when the wicket is soft or broken, but I like to get the ball shone a bit and swing it on a good wicket,

He does not attempt to describe his bowling action, which was as chaotic as any I have seen, and accompanied by a pantomime villain’s grin at the point of release.

Mike Denness, in his Captain’s Column in Playfair, bemoans the travel demands made on county cricketers. One weekend began with a journey…

…from Folkestone on a Friday night to play Somerset at Glastonbury. On the Saturday night we motored up to Derby, returning on Sunday night to Somerset.

On the Tuesday evening we headed north to play Yorkshire at Bradford.

They played cricket on all these days, and the motorway network was nowhere near as developed as it became. It is surprising that there were not more injuries or deaths. As crowded as the fixture  list now remains, it is much more reasonable than it was.

This is the best edition of Playfair that I have come across so far. There is also Cardus on Ranji, Stephen Green on the Treasures of Lord’s and an interesting interview with the Glamorgan player Tony Cordle by Basil Easterbrook. Cordle was then about halfway through a county career that saw him take almost a thousand wickets, often in bowling partnership with Malcolm Nash.

He was one of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean, and suffered many of the indignities of that community when he arrived in London. Relatives whisked him off to Cardiff, where, most fortuitously for Glamorgan, a job interview happened to be held overlooking the Cardiff Arms Park cricket ground. He decided to join the Cardiff club, despite, unusually for a Bajan, never having played in an organised game.

There is an interesting video on YouTube of a recent interview with Cordle by Glamorgan historian Andrew Hignell.

 

The Magazines: November 1972

Cricketer’s November edition was always the Winter Annual in these years, a double-sized volume (though about 20 fewer pages than a standard copy these days) at the cost of 50p, or, as our grandmothers would have said at the time, ten shillings (the normal price was 20p). It is worth every p or d, with plenty of fine writing.

The centrepiece of the Winter Annual was always the Journal of the Season. A prominent figure would write a weekly summary of events, posting it to the offices of The Cricketer so as to avoid augmentation with hindsight. In 1972 it was in the hands of Tony Lewis, captain of Glamorgan but starting the transition into his subsequent career of commentating and writing.

Lewis followed the Ashes on television, declaring that he had become “a fan of Benaud, Laker and Dexter”, fortunately given that he was to spend almost 20 years in the professional company of the former. He had the distinction of recording his own appointment as captain of MCC and England on the winter tour of South Asia. Already, he had a pleasing turn of phrase. Dennis Lillee running in to bowl was “like a Welsh wing three-quarter in full flight”, high praise from a man of Neath. With the moustache in common, he must have had Gerald Davies in mind.

Some of the issues that Lewis discusses remind us of how much has changed. He describes seeing Ken Higgs playing for Leicestershire, and Bob Cottam for Northamptonshire as an “unreal” experience. Now, players shifting counties happens routinely from week-to-week. Both Cottam and Bob Willis (who had gone to Warwickshire from Surrey) had to miss the first couple of months or so of the 1972 season as their moves were contrary to the wishes of their former counties, a ruling that deprived the England selectors of two possible options for the Ashes.

I had forgotten that Fred Trueman turned out for Derbyshire in the Sunday League that year. If memory serves, he was joined by Fred Rumsey in a partnership that was redolent of the era of round-arm bowling.

The best Journals of the Season came in the late seventies when they were in the hands of Alan Gibson, who is given a page to reflect on the season in this edition. Gibson aficionados will be pleased to find that the first paragraph is devoted not to the cricket, but to his travails in getting to and from the cricket. Train strikes are not a new thing in Britain.

On several occasions I had the alarming experience of having to drive a car, something I do about as readily as riding a buffalo. At Pontypridd, I spent an hour and a half trying to find the ground. When I did get there, there was no play, and on departing I took a quite spectacularly wrong turn, and found myself some while later climbing a precipitous Welsh mountain…The following day, after triumphantly driving from Bristol to Swansea and back, I took a wrong turning within a quarter of an hour’s walk from home, and managed to cover another twenty miles before I arrived. The God in the machine is too strong for me.

Much of the article is a defence of three-day Championship cricket. A four-day Championship was being mooted, though it was not until the late 80s that it became more than talk. Gibson uses the Championship cricket he saw in 1972 to mount a case. I am a sucker for a Wilf Wooller anecdote and he refers to one of the best, Wooller’s offer over the PA system at Swansea (as Secretary of Glamorgan) to refund spectators their admission money as Somerset under Brian Close were being so boring.

The problems with three-day cricket were evident in 1972, and I think that its abandonment was correct, but we would all throw our hats in the air in celebration of Gibson’s final paragraph:

I do not get too depressed about the future of the championship, because however they pitch it, it has already shown itself to be a nine-lived sort of cat.

The Cricketer maintained an extensive network of international correspondents, the only source of news of overseas domestic cricket in the pre-internet age. RT Brittenden was their man in New Zealand. Later, it was Dave Crowe, father of Martin and Jeff. When he passed away suddenly soon after I moved to New Zealand, I emailed The Cricketer offering my services. They replied saying that they were wondering why they had not received his copy, and appointed Bryan Waddle.

In November 1972, Brittenden’s column was a profile of all-rounder Bruce Taylor. Hindsight can make fools of us all.

Taylor dearly loves a little flutter on the horses. When he takes a bet, the other runners might as well stay in their stalls. If there is a team sweepstake, Taylor will win it. In a mild sort of way, he has a Midas touch.

That may have been Taylor’s own view. Some years later he served a prison sentence for fraud as he attempted to service his gambling debts.

The Indian correspondent, KN Prabhu, has some advice for Lewis and his tourists that remains good today: “it is good to remember that what is funny in Coventry may not be as funny in Calcutta”.

The appointment of David Frith as Deputy Editor of The Cricketer was announced. Fifty years on, Frith described the circumstances of that appointment in the most recent edition of The Nightwatchman. It was partially due to Richard Nixon. A few months previously, Frith had written about tracking down the old Australian pace bowler Jack Gregory, who he located in Narooma, 100 miles south of Sydney.

Gregory was suspicious of journalists, having been stitched up years before. He was about to go fishing when Frith cold called, but was watching live TV coverage of Nixon’s visit to China, which gave Frith the chance to stay and interview Gregory without the subject being quite aware of it.

John Arlott secured Frith an interview/audience with EW Swanton, held behind the broadcasting boxes at the Oval during the final test. It turned out that Gregory was a boyhood hero of Swanton’s, and when the penny dropped that Frith was the man who had found him, the matter was settled.

Frith was the most significant figure in the world of cricket magazines for the next generation. He soon became editor of The Cricketer, and later founded the Wisden Cricket Monthly. I particularly enjoyed his book reviews, in which he would hunt down factual errors like a dog sniffing out truffles.

Tracking down fast bowlers was his speciality in 1972. In this edition it is Eddie Gilbert, the indigenous fast bowler who played for Queensland in the 1930s, but not Australia, despite being described by Bradman as the fastest bowler he ever faced.

This time, Frith thought that he was undertaking historical research; he visited a psychiatric hospital in Brisbane in the hope of settling the date of Gilbert’s death. Instead, he was astonished to be told that the bowler was still alive, and resident at the facility, to which he had been committed because of mental illness that was the consequence of alcoholism. This was a common fate among people who were treated deplorably by the Australian Government.

This was not a nostalgic meeting like that with Gregory.

He shuffled into the room, head to one side, eyes averted, impossible to meet…Five feet eight with long arms: the devastating catapult machine he must once have been was apparent.

‘Shake hands Eddie,’ his attendant urged kindly.

The hand that had propelled the ball that had smashed so many stumps was raised slowly; it was as limp as a dislodged bail. He was muttering, huskily and incoherently, gently rocking his head from side to side.

There is plenty more good writing in the Winter Annual. Alan Ross carries off the tricky job of reviewing the editor’s autobiography, Sort of a Cricket Person, with balanced aplomb. The farceur Ben Travers recalled his friendship with Vic Richardson, Australian captain and grandfather of the Chappells. Humphrey Brooke analysed Hammond’s tactics in the Oval test of 1938 (what distant history that seems, but the same in time terms as a feature on the 1988 summer of the four captains would be today). Chris Martin-Jenkins profiled David Steele, three years before he became the bank clerk who went to war and defied Lillee and Thomson.

Sir John Masterman, academic, spymaster and novelist, contributed a piece entitled “To walk or not to walk”. After a page of entertaining reminiscence of appalling umpiring, Masterman’s refreshing conclusion is that it should be left to the umpires. He calls walking “mistaken chivalry”.

Playfair, now only five issues from extinction, is thin by comparison, in both size and quality, though it does have Neville Cardus, who writes about cricket reporters, past and present. Cardus, somewhat improbably, claims to have been assiduous in recording the facts, making notes after each delivery, until…

I was observed by Samuel Langford, senior music critic of the Manchester Guardian, a Falstaffian man, unkempt, ripe with humour, and indifferent to the fact that frequently his flies were not buttoned. He saw me taking notes every ball. ‘What’s all that for?’ he asked. ‘Tear it up. Watch the game looking for character’.

This was advice that Cardus embraced with a convert’s enthusiasm.

Myself, I never once used the words ‘seamer’ or ‘cutter’ in all my Press Box years, writing 8,000 words every week, from May to late August.