The Green Pitches of Dover: 26 August to 1 September 1967

Kent played their final two Championship games of the season at the Crabble in Dover, as attractive as any ground in the county. It has not hosted county cricket since 1976, but on a visit to England in 2011 I returned there for a look around: In Search of the Crabble.

Kent finished on the charge, with two wins, the first with just two minutes remaining, the second with a day and a half to spare. We will begin with Peter West’s report on the half day’s play that ended the week. 

It’s funny reading that report now, fifty years after I watched West write it. As recorded in the earlier piece, that day the Crabble became the second ground on which I watched county cricket. With game over in mid-afternoon and my Dad not picking us up until later (in our brand new Ford Cortina: I had watched him write a cheque for £700 for it at the start of the month and could barely believe that there was so much money in the world), hanging about for autographs passed the time satisfyingly. Norman Graham signed after passing a hundred wickets for the season while taking 12 for 80. Bob Wilson also did so, but was rueful when asked by another hunter if he was playing at Lord’s in the final on Saturday. “I don’t know” he said, but he did, and he wasn’t. In fact, a second-innings duck in the Warwickshire game had been the last of 647 innings that brought just short of 20,000 runs with 30 centuries.

With the players gone, my attention turned to the press box, a standalone hut on one of the terraces, painted in green and white stripes. West politely rebuffed someone trying to have a chat, explaining that he had a report to write. So I observed as he wrote the piece in longhand, then listened as he phoned it through to the copy desk at Printing House Square. Work done, Peter West (one of television’s best-known faces in 1967) was happy to add his name to the autograph collection (which I still have but can’t find). 

The thing that did for Dover in the long-term, besides the reduction of Championship fixtures, was the poor quality of the pitches. West’s judgment that the pitch for the Essex match “cannot have failed to implant a sense of insecure tenure” identifies him as the Ishiguro of the sports pages in his use of understatement. Its nature may be gleaned by the fact that Underwood—the country’s leading wicket taker—bowled not a single ball in the game. Six of the second-innings wickets that I saw fall on the second day were caught either behind or at first slip as the ball seamed as if from Saville Row. Not many matches are won by as comfortable a margin as nine wickets by a team that has not scored 200 in the match. 

The pitch for the Warwickshire game was also green, more of a risk when the opposition included Tom Cartwright, who duly took ten in the match. A fine 86 not out by Mike Denness got Kent home. The schedulers were, as discussed last week, either sadists or geographical ignoramuses; Warwickshire finished at Dover later on Tuesday afternoon then had to drive to Middlesbrough to start a new game against Yorkshire the following morning.

Leicestershire also won twice this week to finish their season, but in vain as Kent’s extra win kept them ahead with the teams level on points. Alan Gibson described them as the team that had most the most of its talent, thanks to the captaincy of Tony Lock, who bore a strong resemblance to Brian Close, both physically and in his bugger-them-all approach. Lock did not return in 1968, but Leicestershire made another from the same mould when Ray Illingworth joined them in 1969. 

Yorkshire’s draw at Trent Bridge early in the week mean that Kent finished the week at the head of the table, hoping either that bottom-of-the-table Gloucestershire would gather themselves for a redemptive win at Harrogate the following week or, more likely, that the northern weather would wash the Championship pennant to Canterbury (a pennant was all the winners got, by the way; there was no trophy then). 

Brian Close’s 98 put Yorkshire in a winning position against Warwickshire in their second game of the week, a heroic performance on the day that he was defrocked from the England captaincy. If a Times leader couldn’t sway the establishment in his favour, nothing could. Later in the week one of his businesses went into liquidation.

Given Colin Cowdrey’s fortuitous inheritance of the captaincy it is odd that The Times ran this headline on Wednesday:

It is interesting that the selectors supported Close, but it was the MCC Committee—a body including six knights of the realm, two of whom were generals—who signed the execution warrant, declaring the future MCC President as his successor. Amateurism may have been abolished on the field, but it remained the creed of the committee room, in all its senses.

Derek Underwood was the surprise omission from the touring party, despite taking eight wickets at a cost of 16 each in the two tests in which he had played. Titmus, Pocock and Hobbs were the selected spinners. Perhaps Underwood suffered from being regarded as not a proper spinner. John Woodcock continued to him as a cutter, and EW Swanton was forever saying that he should give the ball more air. A season’s haul of 136 wickets at 12.39 were not enough. Geoff Arnold’s fine performance in the final test was also ignored.

The final day of the test series produced the most entertaining international cricket of the season: a joyous world-record partnership of 190 for the ninth wicket between Asif Iqbal and Intikhab Alam. I recall watching this on television and wanting it to go on and on. It was the first time I watched Asif’s Road Runner footwork, enjoyed from slip by Colin Cowdrey. So when it became known that each county would be able to recruit an overseas player without a qualification period for 1968, it was Asif Iqbal that Kent went for, and joyously so.

Outside cricket the story of the week was the death of Brian Epstein at 32. 

The letter of the week in The Times (for me anyway) was this reminiscence of WG Grace:

And so to Lord’s for the Gillette Cup Final.

How Green Were My Pitches: 19 to 25 August 1967

The issues of the week were the England captaincy and the race for the County Championship. Kent had a double-header (as it was not known then) against Glamorgan, first in Gillingham and then in Cardiff. Yorkshire played Essex at Scarborough, finishing on Tuesday, then started a game against Sussex at Eastbourne on Wednesday morning, suggesting that the fixture schedulers lacked basic knowledge of the country’s geography (or that they all had chauffeurs). 

Kent and Yorkshire started the week level on points. Kent went ahead after a last-gasp win at Gillingham, while Yorkshire lost from a winning position at Scarborough. But resounding wins for Glamorgan at Cardiff, and Yorkshire on the south coast put Yorkshire on top by four points with a game in hand at the week’s end.

Bert Lock had a busy week. He was the groundsman who had restored the Oval after it had been a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. After retiring from Surrey he became the counties’ pitch inspector, in which role he visited both Kent v Glamorgan games this week. Lock could do little more than offer groundsmen sage advice after the event. There were no sanctions at his disposal other than recommending a ban on the venue for the following season (a sanction already imposed upon Hesketh Park, Dartford, though why that ground was singled out from minefields on which Kent played in 1967 is unclear). 

Both matches were played on pitches that would be inconceivable these days, particularly that at Gillingham. I have watched cricket at the Garrison Ground, Gillingham, a Sunday League game in 1972. I don’t recall much about the ground, but it must have been a squeeze to get 10,000 in. “The whole of Kent seemed to be there” according to John Woodcock, who was enjoying his work at last. Stoics they were, with a scoring rate under two an over across the game as a whole, but when 26 wickets fall in a day, as happened on the third day, it wasn’t unrelenting dullness. Derek Underwood took 11 wickets and the win came in the final half hour.

Modern crowds wouldn’t tolerate such laborious scoring, but would they have to? Players of that era say that those pitches created superior techniques. Of course, today’s batsmen would be at sea on pitches foreign to them. But, knowing that their lifespan would be short, they would not be prepared to wait cowering in the crease for the bullet with their name on it, but would have a go at charging the machine guns. A bold, edgy 30 would have won several games this week.

It was Sophia Gardens’ first season as a first-class venue, Glamorgan having moved from Cardiff Arms Park over the winter to make way for the redevelopment of the rugby ground, so the pitches were still bedding in (well enough for the home side to make 353 for nine, bracketed by Kent collapses). It was a homely, pleasant ground whenever I visited; since then it has been turned into an arena, no less, taking much of the charm away in the process, I would think.

DJ Shepherd took 15 wickets in the three innings he bowled in that week. Fifty years on, he is being mourned with affection, having passed away six days after his ninetieth birthday. I saw him play, but remember him more as a superb radio commentator on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday afternoons, which I would listen to in Bristol in preference to the inferior local offering.  Shepherd and Edward Bevan would have adorned Test Match Special had they been given the chance; thus his career off the field mirrored that on it in its lack of just national recognition.

Just as Don Shepherd is most people’s pick as the best bowler not have played a test for England, so Alan Jones is the best batsman in that deprived position. Jones has the sweater and the cap, but not the test status, which was removed from the England v Rest of the World series retrospectively despite it being as high a standard as any tests before or since. This week, he made 44, Glamorgan’s top score at Gillingham, and 60 at Cardiff, both innings worth centuries in their contexts. Alan Jones often did well against Kent; I saw him score centuries in Canterbury Week 1972 and again ten years later

Welsh folk might have hoped that the easier access to the valleys offered by the opening of the Severn Bridge the year before would bring the selectors to Sophia Gardens and St Helens more often, but this does not seem to have happened. Tony Lewis tells the story of Wilf Wooller, Glamorgan’s secretary, manager and self-appointed patron saint, receiving a letter from EW Swanton of the Daily Telegraph requesting information on the form of certain Glamorgan players and enclosing a stamped, addressed envelope for the reply. Swanton was hugely influential at that time, widely regarded as a fifth selector. When the returned envelope was opened a few days later it contained only a copy of the London to Cardiff train timetable.

Don Shepherd was not Glamorgan’s most successful bowler this week. Left-arm paceman Jeff Jones took 16 wickets, including six for 27 in the first innings in which he and Tony Cordle bowled 16 overs each, unchanged. Jeff Jones is best remembered as father of 2005 Ashes winner Simon Jones, who inherited his old man’s ability to bowl quickly as well as a frame that did not bear up well to his doing so.

Yorkshire also had a mixed week, but in reverse order to Kent’s. At Scarborough they contrived to throw away a lead of 127 to lose by nine runs to Essex, who were second-bottom. Spinners Hobbs and Acfield took eight between them, and bowled 52 overs for 68 runs, illustrating my earlier point about the general timidity of batsmen in those days. Batsmen sharing a car with Fred Trueman would have spent an uncomfortable eight hours or so on the way to Eastbourne

There was redemption at the Saffrons, with (speaking as we were of very good players who did not play for England) Tony Nicholson taking nine for 62

England were building a good lead at the Oval in the third and final test, but the press and public focus was on the Close question. On Wednesday the England captain was “severely censured” by the Advisory County Cricket committee (copying The Times’ deployment of the upper case) for his leadership of the go-slow against Warwickshire the previous week. The Thunderer thought the matter worthy of a leader, which came down on Close’s side for the captaincy to the West Indies, but unenthusiastically so. By Friday, down the front page was the headline “Things look black for Brian Close”. As chance would have it, Boycott’s late withdrawal from the test due to illness meant that Close opened with Cowdrey, the only alternative after the retirement of MJK Smith.

Times' leader

Kent all-rounder LJ (Leslie) Todd died this week in 1967. I knew the name but not much else. His obituary in Wisden is an unexceptional, largely statistical, record of a career that lasted from 1927 to 1950. Over the years, one has rarely turned to the Kent Annual for good writing, but Todd’s obituary in the 1968 edition is a cracker.

It was written by JGW (Jack) Davies, an off spinner who was a Kent contemporary of Todd’s. However, Davies was a jazzhat summer-holiday amateur of a kind that pros like Todd (especially Todd, it may be inferred) held in some contempt. It should be noted that Davies’s profession was psychology. The result is an obituary that tells us what sort of man he was, as well as what sort of cricketer.

The captaincy question: 12 to 18 August 1967

This was the week that Brian Close lost the England captaincy. Not at once; he was to lead the side at the Oval in the final test, but the events of this week meant that Colin Cowdrey, not Close, would take MCC to the Caribbean. I had always thought of this as the establishment using a flimsy excuse to reinstall its own man, but having watched the story develop through the week as it happened it does seem that Close had much more of a case to answer than I had thought.

That an England captain should be replaced after winning five out of six tests seems incomprehensible now, but India and Pakistan were poor sides. Both had talented batsmen, but their bowling attacks were weaker than those of most counties. Despite this, at times England’s approach was absurdly cautious, treating jelly babies like gelignite. Geoffrey Boycott’s 246 at Headingley set the tone. Close (who, let us recall, had reportedly demonstrated impatience with Boycott a few years before by picking him up and hanging him on a coatpeg) did little to hurry Boycott up.

This week, at Trent Bridge, Ken Barrington, assisted by his captain, laboured his way to a century that was “careworn and comfortless” according to John Woodcock in The Times. 

That Monday’s play was washed out would have come as a relief to Woodcock, who used the free column inches to question Close’s approach: “why…did the full toss become inviolate?”.

England completed a win on the fifth day, and how pleasing it is to find “mettlesome” in a Times headline, referring to the pitch. But the victory did not lift Woodcock’s dark and unforgiving mood, so it was unfortunate that his assignment for the second half of the week was to follow Close to Edgbaston for Warwickshire v Yorkshire (who were now the Championship leaders). When as fine a writer as the Sage of Longparish deploys punctuation sarcastically—Boycott spent all day in the pavilion with a “bruised” toe—trouble is in the air (there were no restrictions then on where in the order absent fielders could bat, so Boycott opened without a runner; an all-run four did nothing to foster the illusion). Woodcock pointedly notes how comfortable those Yorkshireman who had been captained by MJK Smith were in the Warwickshire captain’s company when he was batting. Smith was sixth in the batting averages at this point, so the form that partly caused him be dropped as captain after one test in 1966 was no longer an issue.

On the third day, the implicit advocacy of Smith became explicit after county cricket’s most notorious time-wasting incident.

All this was for just two points that Yorkshire obtained from the draw.[1] Woodcock’s push for Smith was soon to be revealed as futile as Smith was about to announce his retirement (though he returned after a couple of years and played again for England in 1972).

As we know, the Oval test the following week was Close’s last for nine years, until he was recalled as a human sacrifice, offered to pacify the West Indies quicks. It was Colin Cowdrey who led MCC on tour. Of course, we in Kent were delighted with this outcome, though if positivity was what was being called for, Cowdrey was an unreliable choice. 

Knott and Underwood performed splendidly in the test, though Underwood’s five wickets were not to be enough for him to join Cowdrey in the Caribbean. Titmus, Pocock and Hobbs were selected, with Lock following when Titmus lost some toes in a boating accident. Woodcock was still writing a touch dismissively of Underwood’s “cutters”, so in some quarters he was not regarded as a proper spinner. Maybe the selectors thought better than pick another Kent man. 

In the County Championship Kent travelled this week to two grounds long since disappeared from the circuit: Leyton and Burton-upon-Trent (I have watched cricket at Leyton: the 1972 Gillette Cup quarter-final, won by Kent by 10 runs). With wins urgently needed after a draw and a loss at Canterbury, it was a frustrating week: two more draws, just a few wickets short of a win in both cases.

With Underwood missing at Leyton, it was John Shepherd who bowled most overs this week, which was pretty much how things were to be for the next 15 years. It seemed that Kent captains would put Shepherd on at one end in April and take him off in September. He took five in the first innings against Essex and against Derbyshire bowled 49 overs in the first innings, finishing with six for 71. An oddity is that Underwood bowled only three overs. It was a green seamers’ surface, but worth giving the country’s leading wicket-taker a try, surely.

Kent’s first-innings 159 came from 84 overs, Derbyshire’s 154 took 102. Just as well that John Woodcock was not there, but a bit of a shame that neither was Alan Gibson, who would be moved to lyricism by a backs-to-the-wall effort by PJK Gibbs. Instead, The Times sent Peter West, who was mild in his criticism (“Hard grafting indeed!”). Perhaps as a Kent supporter he was prepared to sacrifice aesthetics for outcome; if so he came away with neither. 

Slow batting had also lost Kent time at Leyton. So often in 1967, timidity was the default reaction to difficulty or challenge. Perhaps, much more than those of us who were then children realised, we were still living in the shadow of the World Wars, and the fear that came from them. I have been reading Julian Barnes’ The Sense of An Ending. He wasn’t writing about the County Championship, but he could have been: “But wasn’t this the sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country”. I think he was referring to the minor counties.

With Godfrey Evans unable to extend his return to first-class cricket, the gloves were handed to David Nicholls, who thus, almost accidentally, began a decade as Alan Knott’s stand-in, a role he performed most capably and jovially until Paul Downton came along.

It was the end of pirate radio this week, or was supposed to be. Radio London shut down, but Radio Caroline carried on, Johnnie  Walker was cast in the press as an international fugitive, the Scarlet Pimpernel of the airwaves. As Walker has since recounted, before long he was returning home regularly, intercepted at the border only once and then for an autograph for the immigration officer’s daughter.

René Magritte died in an appropriately surreal week.

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[1] It was as a result of this incident that a minimum number of overs in the last hour of Championship games was introduced. In 1967 it was still by the clock.