The Cricketer. December 1973 and January 1974

These days there is cricket everywhere you look. A few days ago here in New Zealand we could watch great finishes to simultaneous test matches overlapping with the finals of the domestic T20s (we are spared coverage of the franchise competitions in South Africa and UAE). 

It was not always thus. The Cricketer for December 1973 has virtually no cricket on which to report. The only account of a match is Alan Gibson’s on the final of the inter-diocesan Church Times Cup (triumph for the Gloucester diocese), though John Edrich files from South Africa on the tour of DH Robins’s [sic] XI of which he was a member. This report is notable for the absence of the word “apartheid”, a triumph of omission as striking as Basil Fawlty’s failure to mention the war, or the sabbatical taken by “sandpaper” during the recent canonisation of David Warner as he ended his test career, 

The magazine struggles to fill its 32 pages, and the grainy photo of Keith Fletcher is well below the usual standard for covers. The contents page contains promise, but this rarely translates into anything memorable. I was naturally  interested in Colin Cowdrey’s piece on Kent’s season, with wins in the 40 and 55-over competitions, but it was no more than an efficient summary that arranged the obvious into a cogent order. 

Much the same applies to Gordon Ross’s look at 11 seasons of the Gillette Cup, in which the first person singular shoulders far too much of the burden. 

There is a note from Australia on the waiting lists for membership at the MCG and the SCG, respectively 55,000 and 15,000 at that time. Those numbers have increased in the intervening half century; more than 200,000 now await their MCG member’s pass. A friend of mine had an application form for Melbourne Cricket Club membership filled in on his behalf as an infant, as so many Victorians do. Years passed. When he was 18 his mother rang him, distraught. She had found the application form, unposted, in a draw. This is the saddest story I know. 

There is poignancy aplenty in this edition. Jack Iverson’s death would feature in David Frith’s chronicling of cricketing suicides, but Frith does not mention cause in his obituary of the ultimate mystery spinner here. Sir Leonard Hutton contributes a coda in which he does not overwhelm Iverson with praise. The key, according to Hutton, was to play Iverson as an off spinner. He says that “most of our batsmen found themselves over-positioned to cope with this type of bowling” so does not appear to have shared this insight with teammates. 

David Frith interviews Colin Milburn, who had returned to county cricket in 1973, four years after the car crash that cost him an eye. The tone is optimistic, but there are enough portents that there would be no happy endings to the story of Milburn’s cricket, or his life. 

 

Back in the Northamptonshire middle order, there were a series of 30s and 40s, but not until the final game of the season did Milburn pass 50 for the first time, scraping an average of 20, which was double what he managed in 1974. He told Frith that batting at No 6 made things difficult and that he did better when opening because the shiny new ball was easier to see. In Perth when interviewed, Milburn hoped that the bright Western Australian light would have the same benefit and had hopes of playing in the Sheffield Shield, a fanciful notion even in a place where he was as much a hero as he was in Northampton.

Milburn was part of the BBC TV commentary team in 1969, when he must have still been in some sort of trauma following the accident, but was not asked back (though he was an occasional summariser on BBC Radio in the late 80s). At the time of the interview he was recently engaged, but that came to nothing. The considerable sum for 1973 of £19,000 from his testimonial was in trust: “on his own admission it would have been ‘chaotic’ to have given him the lump sum”, another sign of future troubles. 

In 1988, when I worked occasionally for Cricketcall (I had turned down the Gloucestershire contract, but that’s another story) one of my colleagues had recently worked with Milburn and reported that he gave the impression of having slept rough. He died in a pub car park in 1990, having inspired a love of cricket in so many so saw him play.

The January edition has tributes to Howard Marshall from EW Swanton and Alan Gibson, following a three-paragraph obituary in December. As Gibson says, had Marshall died in 1938 “there would have been a headline about him on the main page of every newspaper”. Marshall was then one of the BBC’s best-known voices, and was the leading commentator on cricket, rugby and ceremonial occasions. He was the first to give extended ball-by-ball commentary, famously on Verity’s match at Lord’s in 1934. 

Marshall devised the grammar of cricket commentary, and did the same for radio news reporting as the head of the BBC’s war reporting unit. He reported from the Normandy beaches on D-Day. But after the Victory Tests of 1945, and the occasional ceremonial commentary, he gave up broadcasting in favour of a career in commerce. He might have continued for another 25 years. 

Howard Marshall deserves a biography; he is important enough as a broadcaster and led an interesting private life. He left his first wife for the film critic Nerina Shute, who later deserted him with their French maid. 

The January edition is richer in content than its predecessor, and includes a couple of interesting investigations into cricket history. Gerald Brodribb, whose niche was the evolution of six hitting, questions the veracity of what the Guinness Book of Records and Wisden long accepted as the longest hit with a cricket bat, Walter Fellows’ 175-yard smite during practice at the Christ Church Ground in Oxford in 1856. Brodribb looks for evidence that the hit was measured properly and verified, and finds none.

David Frith’s ability to find sad stories in cricket’s past is further illustrated. Here, his subject is Billy Bates of Yorkshire and England. Bates toured Australia with great success. At Melbourne in January 1883 he made 55 at No 9, then took seven wickets in each innings as Australia followed on, taking the first English test hat-trick in the process. His name appears  on the Ashes urn, presented to the England captain, Hon Ivo Bligh, after on the tour. 

Bates’ first four tours of Australia were all successful. It was on the fifth that his life went suddenly wrong. He was hit in the eye in the nets, an injury that ended his career at the top level. There are parallels with Milburn here. The rest of Bates’ life was a struggle. He died at 44. 

On Scorecards, we have often talked about the Rest of the World series in England and Australia in this era. The January edition reminds us of a third, consisting of two matches in Pakistan to raise funds after devastating flooding. The World XI was a mix of English and West Indian players, topped up by a couple of locals. The Caribbean contingent were mostly world-class, or something near it, but has an unexpected opening partnership of Mike Brearley and Harry Pilling. Keeping was Keith Goodwin, then Farokh Engineer’s deputy at Lancashire.  

There were centuries for Brearley, Kallicharran, and Asif Iqbal, and two for Zaheer Abbas, as well as attractive innings from Clive Lloyd, Rohan Kanhai and Colin Cowdrey, though the fact that Cowdrey’s rarely seen leg breaks nabbed two victims suggests that the level of competitiveness waxed and waned. Pakistan won both games.

The Cricketer, July and August 1973

 

The covers of The Cricketer at this time were often things of some beauty. Perhaps colour printing on good-quality paper at that time precluded too much overlay of text on image. Maybe it was the good judgement of David Frith, from August acknowledged on the masthead as editor. He knew how to make the most of photographs having put together several compilations of them, sometimes with Patrick Eagar, who was responsible for both these covers. 

What we have here are two character studies, framed and drawing us to the subject without distraction. West Indies’ captain Rohan Kanhai signs an autograph, the silver hair of the old campaigner contrasting with the greenness and heat of the Caribbean setting (Queen’s Park Oval in Trinidad, I think). A few weeks later, Kanhai was to make one of the best hundreds I have seen, at Lord’s in the third test.

John Snow, perhaps a little weary, turns at the end of his run up, which had an aesthetic appeal rivalled in the seventies only by those of Holding and Lillee. Does this photo look as dated as one of Rhodes or Woolley would have done to us then? The unadorned whiteness of the kit might make it so. Perhaps the ersatz patriotism of Jerusalem was not necessary when the crown and lions had the entire sweater to themselves. Rolling your sleeves up was more than a metaphor then too. 

Snow had just published a book of poetry, his second collection. It was  reviewed in the August edition by cricket’s most renowned poet, John Arlott, whose reviews were invariably kindly, as evidenced by his annual survey of cricket books in Wisden. Criticism is sugared.

The argument of these uneven, almost haphazard pieces is that, one day, John Snow is going to surprise many people – but not himself – with some highly perceptive writing.

Arlott puts Snow’s achievement in its historical context.

John Snow is the only Test fast bowler to utter a book of verse. Fred Trueman has been known to repeat some pungent rhymes but, as a composer, has always tended to a certain monotony of adjective.

The Captain’s Column had been inherited from the Playfair Cricket Monthly, and reverted to the original practice of featuring a different county skipper each month. In these two editions, Tony Greig was followed by Ray Illingworth. 

They disagreed about the structure of the Championship season. Greig favoured 16 fixtures (there were 20 in 1973). Illingworth favoured the status quo.

To reduce it to 16 would be taking away the chance of eight possible innings for our batsmen and I feel they get insufficient opportunities of playing natural cricket even today.

Both saw these as three-day games, but agreed that the playing day could be extended by an hour on each of the first two days. In Greig’s words:

 

On a full first day this should produce at least 126 overs. I believe a longer day would bring back more spin bowling.

That would have meant that two days’ of Championship cricket would have seen more balls bowled than three days of tests do now. It is worth noting that in 1973 ten of the 17 counties had at least half their games finish in draws. 

Another of David Frith’s specialities was interviewing old cricketers. In July it was the Leicestershire all-rounder George Geary. The result is a fascinating account of cricket between the world wars, and we learn that players leaving the field to freshen up happened long before Dennis Lillee did it. In the Adelaide test in 1928/29 Geary, prone to cramp, went off for a massage. 

 

Then an Australian official came into the dressing room and said he would not be allowed back on the field after treatment.

‘I didn’t know who he was. I offered to snap him through the bloody window. Later a taller man came in but I wasn’t afraid. Syd Barnes used to do it. He even went off for a bath sometimes when he felt like it!’

In August, JM Kilburn farewelled Bramall Lane in Sheffield as a cricket venue. A test venue once, in 1902, the ground doubled as Sheffield United’s home (which it still is), and a stand was about to be built across the square. Kilburn is nostalgic, presenting its golden age as being the years before and after the First World War, but the winter game’s encroachment and the decline in cricket-watching from the 1950s on means that he does not lament its passing. 

 

When spectators could be numbered in tens of thousands they generated a vitality of atmosphere to obliterate the inconveniences, not to say hardships, of watching. Numbered in tens, spectators made the cricket look forlorn and its setting grimly uninviting.

Kilburn lists his own memories of the ground, as we all might of our favourite places.

In my Bramall Lane a young Herbert Sutcliffe will for ever be racing in front of the pavilion rails to hold a breathtaking catch for ER Wilson; a perspiring and grinning Maurice Tate threatens mock strangulation for a downcast wicketkeeper who has just dropped three catches forced by wonderful new-ball bowling; Cameron of South Africa is bombarding the pavilion roof with mighty straight drives; Trueman and Peter May are locked in titanic combat for an hour; Bowes is confusing Bradman; and  AB Sellars is signalling heartbreak with ‘Match Abandoned’.

John Woodcock reported on the first two tests against New Zealand, the first an England victory by 38 runs, the second a draw with New Zealand in the driving seat. Both had featured 170s from Kiwi skipper Bev Congdon, supported in both cases by centuries from Vic Pollard. At Trent Bridge the visitors looked as if they were going to chase down an improbable target of 479. Had they done so, it would have been a record still. At Lord’s the game finished with England nine down and only 165 ahead. New Zealand’s first win over England would come five years later at the Basin Reserve; five years after that they registered the first as tourists, at Headingley. 

In the July edition, Alan Gibson reviewed The Hand That Bowled Bradman by former Somerset player Bill Andrews, who for many years would greet people with an invitation to “shake the hand that bowled Bradman”, the boast uninhibited by the fact that the Australian was on 202 at the time. 

Andrews had the distinction of having been sacked four times by Somerset, twice as a player and twice as coach. Gibson knew him well.

 

There is no malice or guile in him, though he is at times capable of a certain low cunning, of a kind that would not deceive an infant. Despite his ups and downs he has many more friends than foes. Indeed, anyone who told me that they did not like Bill would go down in my esteem (though anyone who told me he had never been irritated by him would go down too, for quite different reasons).

Gibson reports that at the time of writing, Andrews hoped to be re-employed by Somerset, so that they could sack him for a fifth time.

 

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.

The Cricketer, May 1972

 

Continuing the new series looking at The Cricketer from 50 years ago.

The cover of The Cricketer was usually graced by a photo from Patrick Eager, cricket’s greatest photographer. In what was still a largely monochrome era, the action shot on the cover of this edition was something of a novelty. It is described simply as “Richard Hutton bowls watched by Alan Knott”. It was almost certainly taken at Scarborough the previous September, when Yorkshire played Kent in the Fenner Trophy, a four-county knockout played over three days as part of the Festival. The uncredited batter is Derek Underwood.

EW Swanton returned to the editorial page. For those unfamiliar with the Great Pontificator’s style, the opening couple of sentences offer a primer.

Ian Chappell, we notice, remarks from Adelaide that he considers that in the advance notices his team has been underrated. In the Australian vernacular ‘Good on him’ for that.

Swanton was not afraid of the regal plural.

One aspect of the selection disturbs us; the over-weighting of the attack in favour of fastish bowling at the expense of spin.

Despite sympathising with Chappell, he does not dissent from the general view that this is an underwhelming Australian selection.

The green caps have the same magic about them, even if for the moment they do not inspire quite the old dread.

The visitors proved to have plenty of quality. After the moribund 1964 series and the damp, dull contest of 1968, the ‘72 Ashes were outstanding, a two-all draw full of memorable, top-draw cricket.

On the same page, Tony Pawson welcomes the Benson and Hedges Cup, the 55-over competition with the midsummer final that was to be become a favourite of the fixture list for the next three decades.

Does it remind you of anything? There was no great demand for it, but the marketing people at Lord’s thought that it would be a new source of revenue. It cut into the County Championship programme. In 1968, before the introduction of the Sunday League, each county played 28 three-day matches. In 1972, this was cut to 20, which adds up to only four more potential playing days than the 14 four-day contests of 2022.

But unlike the Hundred, the shorter form then took the early weeks of the season (which were the last week of April and May, rather than the tail end of Christmas as is now the case) leaving high summer to the Championship. Whether it was the different climate patterns, or that the cricket fields of that time were the least porous materials known to science is unclear, but only one of the ten games in the south group finished on the first of the scheduled three days.

I saw no games in the new competition that year. Kent played their two home group games at Blackheath and Tunbridge Wells and did not make the knockout phase.

There was a cracker at Lord’s. Colin Cowdrey, batting at No 3, made an unbeaten 107. Wisden said

Cowdrey batted with all his old mastery, grafting on to his vintage ability the urgency needed in limited-overs cricket.

He hit three sixes, and with Asif Iqbal but on 70 in 30 minutes. I have written before that when Cowdrey escaped the prim prison of his background and character and batted like a free man­­--a cricketing Brigadoon in its own way--it was a grand day to be at the cricket.

In that era, 234 would usually have been enough to secure a comfortable victory, but here a well-measured reply, led by MJ Smith’s 73, took Middlesex home with eight balls to spare.

Leicestershire won that inaugural competition. Yorkshire prised free 136 from 55 overs (no blaming Boycott, who was injured) and Leicestershire took 47 overs to get them. It was the worst of the B&H finals, with the possible exception of that of 1984 when Lancashire took 43 overs to chase 139 and Peter May gave the man-of-the-match award to John Abrahams, who made a duck and did not bowl. It was Leicestershire’s first trophy, one of four that Illingworth would lead them too.

The most interesting article in the May 1972 edition was a piece of journalism/stalking by David Frith. Presenting himself as an autograph hunter with a few books for signing, Frith drove 200 miles, to see a man, who he describes thus:

Jack Gregory, First AIF, New South Wales and Australia fast bowler who made even Walter Hammond blanch, scorer of the fastest-ever Test century, arguably the greatest of slip fieldsmen, was not discernibly pleased to see me.

Gregory played in all of Warwick Armstrong’s eight successive wins over England in the consecutive Ashes series of 1920-21. With Ted McDonald he formed the first of Australia’s great fast-bowling partnerships.

Frith managed to get to Gregory’s kitchen table, but his description of the great bowler as “Garbo-like” indicates that he didn’t get any revelations out of him, though it is interesting to learn that Gregory bowled off just 12 paces, and did not share the contempt that most of his generation of cricketers had for one-day cricket.

“By jove, I like that 50-overs stuff…They have to get on with it. I liked to hit hard myself, because I love the game and I tried to amuse the public. They like to see bright cricket.”

I bought a recent edition of The Cricketer the other day. David Frith had two pieces (both obituaries) in it. Only Swanton  has had a longer association with the magazine, though as founder of the Wisden Cricket Monthly, a good deal of the interim was spent with Frith in competition with it.