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.
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