Early adventures in autograph hunting

The two Kent junior membership passes pictured both cost a guinea, or a pound and a shilling, or one pound five pence, for which the keen young cricket fan got entry and a seat in the stand at all Kent’s home games bar tourist and Gillette Cup matches, for which ground admission had to be paid. The 1966 pass was my first.

They could also be used as impromptu autograph books. Below are the back two pages of the 1966 edition. Clockwise from the left are the signatures of Colin Cowdrey, Garry Sobers, Alan Knott and David Nicholls. 

The first two were collected on Monday 11 July, the second day of the match between Kent and the West Indians. I was there on a school day because I was recuperating from the measles, which dates me pretty effectively. It was a cautious first expedition outside home for a few hours in the afternoon. 

It was the match in which Sobers took his career-best figures of nine for 49, in slow left-arm mode. One of these was late on that second day, so I assume that I saw a small part of the great man’s best bowling, but I have no memory of doing so. An amnesiac reaction to Sobers will become a theme of this piece, as you will see.

The West Indian captain’s signature must have been secured after the close of play, given that he would have been on the field throughout the afternoon (there was no racing on the TV—I checked). My memory is that Cowdrey signed earlier, on the spot where the Cowdrey Stand was built two decades later. Cowdrey was England captain at that time, having replaced MJK Smith after the first test before handing over to Brian Close for the fifth.

Of these four names, David Nicholls is the only one that will require introduction to the general reader. Three years previously, as a nineteen-year-old, he had made a double century, a rare thing in the three-day era. But there had not been much since then, and he had become a fringe player. 

I assume that Nicholls also signed earlier in the day. If it was at the close it says much for his well-known affability, as he got his second duck of the game shortly before. The following year, he found the role in which he served the county well for the next decade; that of stand-in keeper when Alan Knott was playing for England, which gave him a place in the team for half the season.

I see from the TV listings that England played Uruguay in the opening game of the World Cup that evening. It was a dull nil-nil draw that could not compare watching the West Indians play cricket.

Knott’s autograph was added a few weeks later, on August Bank Holiday Monday. It was a wet day, as public holidays invariably seemed to be when we were young. Kent were hosting Nottinghamshire at St Lawrence. An on-off, interrupted day ended just before tea, by which time most of the spectators had drifted away. My mother and I went to the back of the pavilion to collect a few autographs as we waited for my father to pick us up. 

Cowdrey came out. Thank you, but I had his autograph (membership card proffered as supporting evidence). Was there anyone else I was waiting for to sign? Alan Knott. Wait there.

Cowdrey returned to the dressing room and a minute later a beaming Alan Knott appeared, as if there was nothing he wanted to do more than leave the warmth of the pavilion to stand in the rain signing a raggedy card. Cowdrey was a flawed individual in some ways (see the D’Oliveira affair), and he lumbered us with the ridiculous Spirit of Cricket in the laws but his kindness that day made a big impression on a seven-year-old. It presented cricket as a game with a heart, as a place of safety where you would be looked after. 

The 1970 signatures were all secured at the Oval on the second day of the fifth and final match in the series between England and the Rest of the World, a replacement for the cancelled tour by white South Africa. In my last piece I bemoaned that the series was retrospectively stripped of test status when the cricket was of a quality rarely equalled and never surpassed in my time. 

Not that it was all brilliant. On the first day, 115 overs had been bowled, almost a session more than the sedentary over rates of the 21st century. But look at the score: 229 for five—a fraction under two runs scored in each of those extra overs. In The Times, John Woodcock blamed the Kent captain: “What had promised to be a classical innings by Cowdrey was beset by apprehension”. 

Things went a little more quickly when we were there on Friday, as they tended to when Alan Knott was making a half-century. But a slow pitch meant that, until tea, great players—Barry Richards, Eddie Barlow, Rohan Kanhai—struggled to be more than mundane. 

Then, something special happened, as Woodcock reports:

Here were the two great left-handers of the age together and at their best, since equalled, but not surpassed, only by Lara and Sangakkara. More than that, it was a partnership between two men who could not have shared the same railway carriage or used the same bathroom in the homeland of one of them. How Vorster must have choked on his breakfast biltong as he read the reports on the South African papers the following morning. 

This should surely make the top ten of my personal cricket-watching list. Trouble is, I can’t remember any of it. I was certainly there, as the autographs in the member’s card testify. It must have been Friday, as that was my mother’s day off from the china-and-glass department. We would not have left before the end. I recall sitting in the Vauxhall Stand, and certain details, such as Don Wilson’s return catch to dismiss Kanhai. But nothing of two great players nearing perfection. 

Though too young to provide analysis or useful insight, I have impressions of everything significant that I had watched up to that point—Cowdrey in the 67 Gillette semi-final; the whole course of the  final that year; Denness’s painful debut innings against New Zealand. Much that was insignificant too, like slow-left-armer Andy Hooper’s first five overs in first-class cricket being maidens in 1966. So why not this? Maybe Kent players not being involved? 

I do remember waiting at the back of the Oval pavilion to collect the autographs shown above. Garry Sobers (my annotation is badly spelt) shows consistency of signature over the years. Deryck Murray uses his initials, as befits a Cambridge man. Dennis Amiss was that year’s victim of Oval-test syndrome, where the selectors based their selection of fringe players for the winter tour just on performance in that match. In the second innings he made 35, but Fletcher scored 63, so got the place on the plane to Australia.

I intercepted EW Swanton as he left the pavilion having delivered his summary of the day’s play on Test Match Special (for those too young to have experienced Swanton’s daily address, it was like the Queen’s Christmas message, but in the summer). Given the fun I have at Swanton’s expense in the monthly cricket magazine pieces, I should report that he was charm itself, saying “happy to oblige a Kent man” with a beaming smile as he returned the card. 

The Cricketer, June 1973

 The Cricketer, June 1973

This month’s edition was likely in my bag when I spent three days at St Lawrence in the late-May half-term holiday for a three-day game between Kent and MCC. Matches between these sides have an interesting history. If I had a cricketing time machine, one of the first places I would head would be August 1876, to see WG Grace score 344, to this day the highest individual score made at St Lawrence. What’s more, MCC were following on, and WG had bowled 77 overs in Kent’s innings. These were probably, but not certainly, six-ball overs. Six was the norm, but could be varied by agreement of the captains. Over the three days, 398 overs were bowled, 130 or so a day not being excessive for the time.

By the seventies, MCC usually only played a county in the season opener against the champions, so this fixture is a curiosity. Apparently, it came about because of concern of lack of first-class cricket early in the season. Kent fielded a full-strength side, lacking only the injured Brian Luckhurst. Led by Intikhab Alam, half MCC’s side might have been contenders for the test side given a good season. Frank Hayes scored a century on debut against West Indies a couple of months later, and Jackman, Stead, Edwards and Harris were among the better county players of the time. Younis Ahmed added some class. Bob Carter of Worcestershire was notable for an idiosyncratic running style, with arms flailing, that attracted the scorn of the younger element of the crowd. Kent topped the team up with Dave Nicholls, and Peter Topley, slow left-armer and brother of Don. Modern players would be horrified that pacemen Stead and Jackman considered 20 Championship games as insufficient opportunity to display their craft, and were keen to bowl another 33 and 39 overs respectively, and that their counties were happy for them to do so.

The match was played seriously, but just a degree more carefree than a Championship game. I remember it most for Asif Iqbal’s 72-minute hundred on the last morning, all road-runner feet, and laser driving. Of all Kent’s talented, attractive batters, Asif was the most joyous. He was 80 the other day. Happy birthday. The finish, an eight-run win for Kent with nine balls left, was as close as I had seen. 

The cover star this month is Glenn Turner, touring with the New Zealanders and on his way to a thousand runs in May, the last to do this except Graeme Hick in 1988. The exiling of the County Championship to the extremities of the season makes this one of the few old records that are more likely to be achieved these days. 

EW Swanton, now editorial director, laments the lack of young talent in the English game. 

How many young men of Test potential have come onto the scene in, say, the last five years? The sombre fact is that of those who went with MCC to the East last winter…only Tony Greig and Chris Old might not equally have been representing England in 1968. 

Swanton makes a good point. Of the Kent XI that played MCC, only left-arm quick Richard Elms was under 25 and qualified for England. Most counties were the same. This may have been no more than a glitch in the timeline; just three years later Botham, Gooch, Gatting and Gower had all emerged from an unchanged structure. 

Swanton identifies other reasons for this dearth of precocious talent.

It’s impossible for anyone in regular touch with the county to be impressed by the ability of most of the official coaches. One hopes that the calibre improves as the jobs become better paid.

He regrets that counties favour the skills likely to bring success in the one-day game, but chooses an unfortunate example as illustration.

A team of [Keith] Boyces would not, however, have much chance in a five-day test match.

Within three months Boyce was leading wicket-taker and decisive performer in West Indies’ two-nil test series victory over England. The Great Pontificator’s conclusion will still resonate with county cricket’s many supporters with only minor adaptation.

…the one institution suited to producing the complete and balanced England XI of the future remains the County Championship. The one-day competitions…do not produce players, they only exercise those who have been brought on by the traditional system.

Tony Cozier reports on the final two tests of Australia’s visit to the Caribbean, in which Boyce and his colleagues were less successful than they were to become. The fourth test was lost by ten wickets, despite Clive Lloyd’s hometown 178. The fifth was drawn with Australia a session away from making it three-nil. 

Cozier will have re-used his description of the defeat in Guyana time and again over the following two decades, substituting the names of the home team and its players.

Indisciplined batting against spirited fast bowling by Hammond and Walker backed by aggressive out-cricket resulted in a comfortable Australian victory…

Alan Ross reviews the 1973 Wisden, and reproves editor Norman Preston for including the 1970 series between England and the Rest of the World in the test records after the ICC had declared otherwise. Here, I am on Preston’s side. The cricket in that series was of a quality rarely equalled before or since, and we regarded them as tests at the time. Anyway, why should a governing body determine how data should be sorted? Statisticians should feel free to be creative.

A more recent example is the directive to include all international games in T20 records, which has rendered them meaningless (what is the second highest score in a T20 international?; the Czech Republic’s 278 for four against Turkey in 2019, of course). So the Scorecards database says that Derek Underwood has 304 test wickets, not 297, and will not enter into any correspondence. 

Speaking of Underwood, the News of the Month records that the great man took eight for nine at Hastings against Sussex, who were skittled out for 54. Not mentioned is that these were not Underwood’s best figures at this ground. For those not familiar with the geography of south-east England, Hastings is in Sussex, so it was an away ground on which Underwood would play once a year, if that. In 1964, he took nine for 28, three years later 14 in the match. Fast forward to 1984, when he made his only first-class hundred there, the day after he took six for 12, his best performance in the Sunday League. 

It wasn’t just Hastings; Deadly was partial to Sussex grounds in general. In 1977, when they came up with the cunning plan of moving the game to Hove, he took the only hat-trick of his career (I was there for that one). 

In checking a couple of facts for this piece, I discover that Underwood was the retrospective No 1 ranked test bowler from September 1969 to August 1973. So he must have been selected for the test team in June 1973? He was not, Ray Illingworth’s curious preference for Norman Gifford (none for 142 in the first two tests) triumphed again. 

Gifford was in charge of The Captain’s Column this month. A topic of the time was the requirement to bowl 18.5 overs an hour (or 111 overs in a six-hour day). Gifford asks for the co-operation of spectators behind the bowler’s arm. He would have loved me. On my headstone will be the inscription “He never moved behind the bowler’s arm”.

The Cricket Magazines: January 1973

Playfair Cricket Monthly was now only four editions away from oblivion. The January 1973 cover gives us some idea of why this was. It features, in black-and-white, five blokes in suits standing about. True, one was the current England captain, another one of the greatest of all off-spinners (revealed to have a shocking taste in shirts), but this was not a presentation that would leap off the shelves of WH Smith into the hands of the discerning cricket reader.

In contrast, the cover of The Cricketer is in colour, and captures the bowling action of Bishan Bedi, a thing of beauty in itself. In mid-winter, this would have been a promise of sunshine that was irresistible (I think that umpire is David Evans, but I’m not certain).

Spin bowling is something of an undeclared theme in this edition. There is a conversation between Jim Swanton and the Essex leg-spinner Robin Hobbs. It was compulsory in cricket magazines at this time for there to be at least one article presaging the death of leg-spin. You want to take them aside and say “it’s ok, there’s this three-year-old in Melbourne…”

Chris Martin-Jenkins interviews Derek Underwood, who is interesting on the question of the pace of his bowling. Critics were fixated on the need for him to slow it down and toss it up.

“If I tried to learn the art of tossing the ball up temptingly it would take me five years…Those five years would probably see me out of the England side for good.”

Underwood reports that there were two thoughtful dissenters from the consensus on this matter.

“[Ray Illingworth] told me that if I’d got a thousand wickets by the age of 26, there couldn’t be much wrong with my basic style.”

“Knottie [sic] is always on at me to push it through quicker, the complete opposite of my critics.”

There is also a profile of BS Chandrasekhar and reflections of the recent Australian tour of the UK by their off-spinner Ashley Mallett, in which he does not mention the Headingley pitch. Mallett, who was to become one of Australia’s best writers on the game, criticises England’s selectors for undermining the confidence of Keith Fletcher and Dennis Amiss. Of the young bowlers, he rates Chris Old highest.

Irving Rosenwater, BBC TV scorer for many years, gives us something different. The writer Daniel Farson had recently named Montague Druitt as Jack the Ripper. Rosenwater does not tell us why, but Google suggests that this was based on little more than Druitt’s frequent presence in Whitechapel and that the murders stopped after he committed suicide in 1889.

Druitt was a regular for a number of amateur teams of the team, such as Incogniti and Gentlemen of Dorset, as well as his local club Blackheath, whose Rectory Field ground was a regular venue for Kent for many years. Rosenwater traces Druitt’s movements during the cricket season of 1888 using the scorebooks of the time. He finds some correlation between Druitt’s whereabouts and the location of the murders, but he lived in the general area, so that comes as no surprise. There is no undiscovered alibi of a match away from London at the time of a murder.

The Cricketer had Alan Ross as book reviewer and we find him in a grumpy mood. John Arlott had compiled a book on the recent Ashes series based upon his reports in The Guardian. For Ross, the master of the tour book, this is not enough.

Arlott has written too many potboilers for his own good, which is a pity, because particular gifts and in The Ashes 1972 none of them are realised.

As a freelancer almost throughout his writing and broadcasting career, it was precisely for his own good that Arlott kept the books coming. He had a family and a large cellar to support, so literary excellence had to be compromised from time to time.

Arlott’s treatment was like a couple of gentle on drives compared to Ross’s bazballing of RS Whitington’s Captains Outrageous.

I have the illusion Whitington wrote quite decently at one time, but his style now is quite abominable ­– cheap in its effect, falsely pepped up and without dignity or decency.

and

It may seem not worth the space dealing with such an indifferent book, but the fact is that bad cricket books damage good ones, for they devalue the whole genre, and a market flooded with shoddy goods is no use to anyone. Just as bad first-class cricket makes for bad habits in the young, so do crudely contrived and presented books blunt the sensitivities of young readers.

An altogether more enthusiastic review could be found in Playfair, where Neville Cardus devoted his column to JM Kilburn’s Thanks to Cricket.

Kilburn writes admirable English, never overwriting in the recurrently lavish way which occasionally embarrasses me whenever I return to the early works of Cardus.

He and Kilburn had humble origins in common. Kilburn writes “Many of the books on our household shelves were marked with a second-hand price representing lunch foregone or tram-fares patiently saved by walking to work”. Cardus adds “I could easily have written that sentence myself”.

The forthcoming demise of Playfair Cricket Monthly meant that this was one of Cardus’s last published pieces.

There are plenty of reminders of how much has changed between then and now. Dr M Ijaz writes to The Cricketer to note that all the test-playing nations of the time, numbering six, would be playing in the 1972-3 season. He asks if this is a first. Now, it might be unusual to find a month in which any did not play in one form or another.

The Cricketer has summaries of the pre-test matches played by Pakistan in Australia and MCC in India, proper first-class games against strong opposition. Dennis Lillee was taking it seriously; he took six for 30 as Western Australia beat Pakistan by eight wickets.

Playfair lists all first-class and what we now call List A fixtures for the forthcoming season. On a rough count, there are 45 grounds that will not feature in the 2023 list, the great majority in towns that no longer see county cricket. Particularly evocative for me are the Crabble Ground in Dover, Folkestone’s Cheriton Road, Mote Park in Maidstone, and the Recreation Ground, Bath.

         

         

The Cricketer August 1972

The Ashes of 1972 was one of the best: four positive results out of five (there had been just nine in the previous 26 Ashes tests), some fine cricket directed by a couple of great captains, and, best of all, a couple of conspiracy theories that provoke anger and resentment to this day.

Mention Headingley ’72 to an Australian and watch their brow furrow and the phrase “doctored pitch” form on their lips. England fans of that era will reply with a question: from where did a bowler from the dry air of Perth summon a degree of swing of which Sinatra would be proud to take 16 wickets in his debut test?

Bob Massie was the bowler and it earned him a place on the cover of the August edition of The Cricketer. John Woodcock, reporting from Lord’s on the second test, supplied various explanations. The atmosphere was “heavy and humid” for the first three days; Massie “confounding England’s batsmen by bowling round the wicket at them” (the bounder); England replaced an unfit Geoff Arnold with JSE Price, a paceman, instead of Tom Cartwright, or another bowler better suited to the conditions.

But for Woodcock the main reason was a failure of batting.

And at no time did England’s batsmen bat as England batsmen are meant to.

He lists the most recent individual scores of England’s top three, Boycott, Edrich and Luckhurst, all Ashes winners 16 months previously, and finds only one century and three half centuries in 34 visits to the crease.

It was possible to bat on the Lord’s pitch. Greg Chappell did so sublimely, making 131 in what he rated his finest test innings. For Woodcock:

It was a superbly judged piece of batting, and technically of the very highest quality.

Richie Benaud profiled Massie in August’s Cricketer. Benaud is renowned as cricket’s finest commentator, but this piece reminds us that his profession was not leg spin, but journalism. It makes us regret that his writing was mostly limited to the News of the World. It is superb, the best thing in the magazine.

Benaud does not share Woodcock’s critical view of the English batting.

I derived some amusement that day from the people who besieged, perhaps attacked is a better word, me, with advice as to how the England batsmen should have countered Massie’s bowling. Had that advice been conveyed to them and had they acted on it, we would have watched a wonderful spectacle: batsmen allowing the outswinger to pass and hitting the inswinger, or allowing the inswinger to pass and smashing the outswinger over cover point. In addition, they would have had to take block outside the leg stump, and on the leg, middle and off stumps; kept side-on in the stroke and opened their stance à la Barrington when the bowler operated around the wicket.

Massie’s 16 wickets at Lord’s constituted just over half the total of his whole test career. His star shot across the sky but, without the heat and humidity of Lord’s to keep it flying, it fell to Earth once more.

Some parts of the 1972 Cricketer could be inserted into the 2022 magazine with minimal alteration. Here is the opening of Jim Swanton’s editorial, headlined, with a topicality undimmed by the years, The Shape of County Cricket.

To say that everyone in county cricket is exercised about finding the best programme formula for the future may be stating the obvious; but it seems worth stressing, seeing how many people are dissatisfied with the fixture list à la 1972, with the Benson and Hedges Cup now brought in to make a fourth competition, and the average follower much muddled as to who is playing whom in what, and for how many overs. Ideally there should not be four competitions, but – but ideally county cricket should pay for itself.

With Swanton involved, the August edition was indeed august.

I am pleased to report that the great CJ Tavaré continued to score runs with abandon, with an unbeaten 152 for Sevenoaks. Other successful schoolboys who would later make cricket their career were Jeremy Lloyds (eight for 13 for Blundell’s) and Alistair Hignell (a century for Denstone).

Gillette Cup quarter-final Essex v Kent

This edition of the magazine is a touch more weathered than the others that have featured in earlier pieces. I think that is down to it being well-travelled. It would have been in my bag when I went to Leyton for the Gillette Cup quarter-final. There’s a sentence that sounds as if it comes from the Old Testament.

Essex was still an itinerant club in those days, pitching up somewhere for a week, then moving on. The caravan, including the scoreboard on the side of a truck, happened to be at Leyton when Essex were drawn at home against Kent, so that’s where the match was played, in the first week of August. It seems odd that, at the stage of the season when many counties headed for the seaside, Essex took themselves into London. The Hundred has adopted this counter-intuitive scheduling half a century later.

Leyton hasn’t seen any county cricket since 1977, but Google Maps still calls it the County Cricket Ground, and it has featured on cricket Twitter this very week, with the Cricket Writers taking on an ECB XI there. As an unusual 13-year-old who knew a surprising amount of cricket history, I was aware that it was the site of Holmes and Sutcliffe’s partnership of 555 for Yorkshire in 1932, and of the run that was lost, then found again to ensure that they had the record. It was Jim Swanton’s failure to meet his Evening Standard deadline to report the record that lost him the trip to cover what became the Bodyline Tour, thus removing a key peacemaker from the scene. According to Swanton, at least.

The Cricketer and I actually went to Leyton twice, by East Kent coach; it rained on the first day, and Wednesday’s soaking no doubt influenced what occurred on Thursday.

In 110 overs the two teams scored 264 runs between them, a substantially slower scoring rate than most test matches now produce. For the greater part of the game, defeat for Kent appeared inevitable. But just a few weeks before, I had been at Folkestone for the Sunday League game in which Kent’s last four wickets fell for no runs when two were needed for victory, so I knew that hope and despair should be kept close right to the last ball.

That Kent got as many as 137 was largely due to Asif Iqbal, who played the most out-of-character innings of his career, 52 in 39 overs. He was well supported by Woolmer and Shepherd. The margin of victory was the same as the tenth-wicket partnership between Underwood and Graham. The latter made four, in which I suspect that the edge of the bat played a critical role.

In those days, if you had 60 overs to chase a total it was considered proper to use most of them up. People would have fallen over in a faint had Bazball been explained to them.

In this spirit, openers Edmeades and Wallace put on 55 in 25 overs. There was method behind this caution. Derek Underwood, just back from taking ten wickets in the fourth test, came on as first change and the intention was to see him off. This was achieved. He conceded only 12 runs from 11 overs, but did not take a wicket.

It was John Shepherd who prised Essex open. His first five overs were all maidens, during which he took four wickets, all to catches at slip or behind. The last of these was that of Keith Boyce who had come from Barbados with Shepherd seven years before. Les Ames and Trevor Bailey had spotted the pair on a Cavaliers tour. Both became beloved by the supporters of their counties. Boyce, the pacier bowler, had a more successful international career with 21 tests against Shepherd’s five. Their post-cricket lives were contrasting. Boyce died of cirrhosis at 53, while Shepherd is still hitting golf balls 50 yards further down the fairways of north Kent than might be expected of a man in his late seventies.

Five wickets fell for 14 runs, but 69 at two an over with five left was not hopeless. Nowadays, there would be an attempt to hit bowlers off their line on the basis that the fewer balls that were faced the fewer their opportunities were to take wickets. In those more deferential times bowlers could maintain an undisrupted line and length and let the pitch do the rest.

The report in the 1973 Kent Annual says that “Asif was one of several outstanding Kent fieldsmen, urged on and inspired by Denness to rare brilliance”. This was one of the many attractions of being a Kent fan at that time.

From the fall of Boyce on, we felt the game to be in Kent’s hands but the later Essex order were determined, and a last-wicket stand of 19 between East and Lever had us holding our breaths once more.

Ever since those two games, at Folkestone and Leyton, I have regarded low-scoring one-day games, with runs had to mined rather than gathered where they fell, to be the best of the genre.

Canterbury Cricket Week

Regular readers of Scorecards will know that I am not sentimental about three-day cricket. As the years went on it became more-and-more two days of going through the motions with a contrived run chase on the third. But it could be wonderful, and the August 1972 Cricketer would have been with me at St Lawrence for a week of three-day cricket as good as you could wish for. It was the first time since 1938 that Kent won both matches at Canterbury Week. The opponents here were Glamorgan and Sussex.

It was Bob Woolmer’s week. He is remembered as a ground-breaking coach and a classy batter, but for Kent in 1972 his main role was as a medium-pace bowler, a designation that he never carried out more effectively than here, with 19 wickets in the week. Nine of these were bowled or lbw, five caught behind, three in the slips, so he was clearly dropping it on a sixpence. There was some assistance from a drying pitch in the Glamorgan game, always helpful in moving a game on, but both Alan Jones and Mike Denness made 150s, so it was not treacherous.

Both games followed a similar pattern. The visitors batted first, Glamorgan more effectively than Sussex. Kent replied with a score over 300, before dismissing the opposition cheaply, leaving a chase on the final afternoon. As well as the centuries there were fifties from Colin Cowdrey, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal, Brian Luckhurst, Graham Johnson and Malcolm Nash. Underwood took five wickets against the Welsh (most of them were Welsh unlike the ersatz version in the Hundred), and Alan Knott kept wicket sublimely.

What a place, what a time, to learn to love cricket.

 

 

 

 

The Cricketer: July 1972

 

The Ashes were the main attraction of 1972 and The Cricketer was fortunate to have John Woodcock as its test match reporter. The July edition carried his account of the first test, played at Old Trafford in early June.

England won a seam-dominated match by 89 runs. John Snow took eight wickets, backed up by Geoff Arnold and Tony Greig with five each. Greig was making his test debut, though this would have come as a surprise to him, given that he had appeared four times for England against the Rest of the World in 1970, contests that were regarded as test matches at that time. He was also ever present in the Rest of the World team that had played in Australia the previous winter, matches that were never categorised by the Australians as tests, though, as discussed here previously, they were manifestly of test quality. Greig also made two half centuries at Manchester.

Anybody who has read much of this blog will know of my admiration for John Woodcock, but he did have a blind spot when it came to the nationality qualifications of England cricketers in general, and of Tony Greig in particular. It will be remembered that he wrote that one of things that explained the Packer schism was that Greig was “not a proper Englishman”. His report here develops this theme.

The ideal England team would be composed of Englishmen, pure and simple. One might have said the same when Ranji, Duleep or Pataudi were playing, or when D’Oliveira was first picked. If I were an Australian I might wonder about the fairness of it all.

But then I might count up the number of Aborigines in the Australian team, find that there were none, and reflect that my team consisted entirely of players who were, in the great scheme of things, recent immigrants themselves.

Woodcock reports that only 36,000 attended the test, which lasted well into the fifth day. That is less than a third of those who went through the gates of Old Trafford for the equivalent fixture in 2019, a comparison that those who argue that test cricket is on permanent decline should note.

Alex Bannister, long-serving Cricket Correspondent of the Daily Mail (and no relation of Jack Bannister, as far as I know) had a series running featuring a different county each month. In July it was Worcestershire. The article ranges between the past and the present in a pleasing way. I learned several things, including that county secretary Mike Vockins was an agricultural biochemist (which might have come in useful when the Severn made one its regular visits to the Worcester outfield), and that the Nawab of Pataudi senior (the same as cited by Woodcock, above) became a Worcestershire player only after having been turned down by Kent. This would have been around the time that Lord Harris insisted that Walter Hammond had to serve a two-year qualification for Gloucestershire because he had been born in Dover while his soldier father was stationed there, so perhaps embracing Pataudi would have been a double standard too far, even for that scion of the aristocracy.

Bannister rated the 25-year-old Glenn Turner highly.

There are two Turners – one intent on crease occupation; the other a magnificent strokemaker. In either mood – and I prefer the latter – he is one of the world’s leading batsmen.

Another New Zealander, John Parker, was on the Worcestershire staff in 1972. Years later, when I was writing for CricInfo, Turner and Parker joined us in the press box at Seddon Park in Hamilton and reminisced about their New Road days. The conversation turned to the use of statistical analysis in modern coaching. One or other of them said something along the lines of:

We had a computer that gave feedback based on the study of the available data. It was called Norman Gifford and it used to stand at short leg giving insightful readouts such as “what the eff are you bowling that effing crap for?”.

I am writing on T20 Blast finals weekend, against which the ECB have scheduled an ODI against India, thus depriving the participating counties of their international players. A similar issue half a century ago saw the boot on the other foot. Surrey and Sussex both refused to release their players to appear for MCC against the Australians in the traditional pre-tests fixture, preferring to retain their services for the Benson and Hedges Cup. I generally avoid a romantic view of cricket in those days, but a time when counties could tell Lord’s to stuff it was a great one in which to be alive.

Denis Compton and John Snow both defended the decision, but the majority of the cricketing establishment was outraged. Crawford White of the Daily Express wrote that “as a member of Surrey for 20 years and more, I think that this is a disgraceful decision”.  MCC Secretary Billy Griffith called it “absolutely deplorable”, while EW Swanton, as Bryon Butler put it in his monthly press review, “drew his sword”.

History of a most regrettable sort has been made…It never occurred to me for a moment that this fixture would not be held sacrosanct…In football, one hears, England suffers from the selfishness of clubs. That is football’s affair. It is cricket’s affair to put country first rather than the short-term financial advantage of a sponsored competition, however good in itself…cricket has been done a grave disservice, which is sure to have strong repercussions.

This is vintage Swanton. “Football” and “sponsored” become terms of abuse. MCC is awarded dominion status. We see in our mind’s eye the oafish member of the lower classes to whom he slips sixpence for furtive news of the association game. And he gets it completely wrong. By the way, that whirring noise is Swanton turning like a rotisserie chicken at the news that the Varsity match has been exiled from Lord’s.

John Arlott profiles Peter Lever. His opening paragraph will move any of us who treasure county cricket.

The heart of English cricket is the county game; and the essence of county cricket is not the Test star who dominates it but the ordinary county cricketer who is there every day and gives it his constant and fullest effort. He does not, like the representative players, miss a dozen county games a year to play for his country. He is a man for all seasons; county cricket is for him an achieved peak and a fulfilment.

But the highlight of the July edition comes in the School Review. It is the historic first appearance in the press of the great CJ Tavaré. Then captain of Severnoaks School, he made 116 including 12 fours and—wait for it—ten sixes.

No doubt this news will provoke ill-judged and distasteful remarks from the class of person who in earlier times would have earned a crust by slipping news of Aston Villa’s away form to Swanton, and who know Tav only as the obdurate fellow who was the tax manual of England’s batting in the early eighties. But it will come as no surprise to those of us who knew the Sunday Tavaré, the man who would dismantle any attack in the country over 40 overs. Three of the Australians at Old Trafford would still be around in 1982/3 to play tests against Tavaré.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket

In the same package as this year’s Wisden, there arrived Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket, co-authored by Stephen Fay and David Kynaston. The book is part biography, and part history of post-war English cricket. 
 

John Arlott and EW (Jim) Swanton were the two most influential cricket writers and broadcasters from the forties to the seventies.  Arlott didn’t miss a home test for the BBC from the 1946 series against India (for which he was borrowed from his role as poetry producer on the grounds that he would pronounce the names of the tourists without causing offence in the lead-up to independence) until the Centenary Test of 1980. From 1968 he was also cricket correspondent of The Guardian.

Swanton occupied the correspondent’s seat at the Daily Telegraph for thirty years, like Arlott combining writing with broadcasting. By the time I came across him in the sixties he was delivering close-of-play summaries with a gravitas that made news reports of death in Vietnam and Biafra appear frivolous by comparison.

Fay was the last editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly in its previous incarnation, but has a cv as a journalist of which cricket is only a small part. David Kynaston is a historian best known for his work on post-war Britain, but has written about cricket too, including Archie’s Last Stand, an account of MCC’s 1922/3 tour of New Zealand. Also on the shelves of the library at Scorecards Towers are two volumes of Kynaston’s excellent Tales of a New Jerusalem series in which he uses a vast range of sources to recreate life in post-war Britain. 

A similar approach is taken in this book. The writing and (where recordings exist) broadcasting of Arlott and Swanton are used to tell both their own stories and that of English cricket in their time.

It would have been interesting to know how Fay and Kynaston divided their labour, but they choose not to tell us. Certainly, they have achieved a continuity of style that makes it impossible to tell who wrote what. They refer to themselves as the older (Fay) and younger (Kynaston) authors, in the manner of the Mr Graces in Are You Being Served?

I didn’t learn much new about Arlott, which is more a measure of how much I have read about him than any omission on the part of the authors. For readers coming to him fresh, there is plenty to amuse, and to help them understand why Arlott in such affection by those of us who heard and read him (but particularly heard) at the time. For example, his irritation at hearing a repeat of his first broadcast. “They’ve got this country chap reading it”, he told his wife. “That’s you, fool”, she replied.

I have not yet read David Rayvern Allen’s biography of Swanton, so learn more from the material that Fay and Kynaston take from it, particularly his horrific experiences as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, where he was the subject of “animosity and ridicule” from his fellow prisoners. 

The idea that a social history of the post-war game could be written balancing the different perspectives of Arlott and Swanton is appealing. Arlott, the self-educated radical contrasted with Swanton the establishment man, though Swanton was more petit bourgeois than the impression he gave the world. These authors give his birthplace as Forest Hill, though another source says this was Swanton’s preferred description of Catford[1]. His public school, Cranleigh, was distinctly minor, founded as recently as 1865 “to provide a sound and plain education, on the principles of the Church of England, and on the public school system, for the sons of farmers and others engaged in commercial pursuits”. There was no university education for the man who became so fond of reporting the varsity match. 

But as this book points out, the differences between the two were less straightforward than the stereotypes. As many of us can attest, being to the left politically does not preclude conservatism in cricketing tastes, or vice versa. Few of those behind the Hundred will be voting for Mr Corbyn, any more than Kerry Packer would have. 

Both Arlott and Swanton were traditionalists. From 1964:

Knock-out cricket can never be real cricket. It is a contradiction of that game when the fielding side do better to confine their opponents to 100 for no wicket than to bowl them out for 101.

That’s Arlott. Swanton’s view was pretty much the same. 

More surprisingly, they were much closer than might be expected on the issue of South Africa. Arlott announced in 1970 that if the tour by South Africa went ahead he would not commentate on it. I didn’t know that Swanton had not covered MCC’s tour of the Republic in 1964/5 because of his “distaste for apartheid”. However, in 1968 he worked behind the scenes to save MCC’s tour of the Republic after the late selection of Basil D’Oliveira led to its cancellation.

I tried to fulfil, but with scant success, some sort of catalyst function between the Establishment and its critics.

By this stage of his career, this was probably not self-aggrandisement, though earlier on Swanton was prone to over-estimating his importance. He went to his grave believing that Bodyline would not have been as ugly had the Evening Standard sent him to cover it.

Earlier in 1968 Swanton had written to his own newspaper a condemnation of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech:

If ‘Enochism’ were ever to win through there would surely be a migration from this once-great nation of white as well as black.

This would have provoked breakfast-table harrumphing across the shires. Swanton was to enrage them further two years later by calling for the cancellation of the tour by South Africa in the sports pages while the opposite line was being taken in the leaders. He took this position more because it would be unseemly to play cricket behind barbed wire rather than any moral objection, having got nowhere with the politically naïve suggestion that South Africa send a multiracial team. 

That he was able to be so contrary to the Telegraph line says something about his status, though his editor’s opinion of his worth was unlikely to outstrip that of Swanton of himself. I recall a TV interview he gave to Tony Lewis during a rain break in an early season one-day game at Canterbury in the late eighties. The issue was coloured clothing. He pronounced that he was willing for there to be a trial of coloured piping on white clothing, but did so with a tone that the Pope might adopt if announcing a Vatican-branded range of contraceptives. Lewis and the other interviewee (possibly Chris Cowdrey) suppressed giggles.

Fay and Kynaston understandably do not touch much on Swanton’s role on the Kent committee in retirement. In Clive Ellis and Mark Pennell’s Trophies and Tribulations: Forty Years of Kent Cricket Swanton is the chief villain of the story of Kent’s eighties decline. They relate that in 1996, when Matt Walker was approaching Frank Woolley’s Kent record 270 at St Lawrence, Swanton entered the dressing room, demanding a declaration so that his hero’s record would stay intact.

Arlott spent his retirement in Alderney, away from the game but making the occasional television or radio appearance. The last of these that I recall was a TV programme on an Aboriginal touring team visiting Alderney sometime in the late eighties. They met Arlott. By that time the famous voice had become a high-pitched parody of its former self, but the wit was still there. “My word”, he said “in those baggy green caps I might have mistaken you for the real Australian team if only you hadn’t been so damn polite”.

Fay omits a story from his own obituary of Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The Independent. There he says that when assistant editor of The Cricketer, CMJ’s football reports for the Daily Telegraph had to be written under the byline Christopher Martin in order to avoid Swanton’s decree that no staff member of the magazine should ever write about football (or association football as Swanton would have called it—football was played with an oval ball, as he spent many winters reporting). A good story, but if true it would have been a disappointment to Swanton that both Tony Pawson and Bryon Butler were regular contributors to The Cricketer at that time while being among the country’s leading football journalists. 

It is a well-known part of Arlott’s story that he reported football in print (only a last-minute swap meant that he was not on the plane that crashed in Munich carrying the Manchester United team in 1958) and gave full-time reports for Sports Report. I discovered only recently from BBC Genome that Arlott had also commentated on football, initially in the late forties then again in the early sixties, in the latter period usually in partnership with his friend Maurice Edelston, presumably from south coast grounds. How wonderful it would be if examples of those commentaries were to be discovered an attic somewhere. How did the measured delivery, the wit and the pauses adapt to the faster pace and looser structure of the soccer field?

Here and there, there is a little avoidable factual imprecision. The authors say that it was “probably by the early 1970s that he [Arlott] was starting to scale down the frequency of his twenty-minute spots on TMS”. This occurred from 1973, when he went from six commentary stints to three so that he could focus on his Guardian report (and, no doubt, work his way through a couple of bottles of red) for the rest of the day. BBC Genome verifies this, listing three ball-by-ball commentators (Arlott, Johnston and McGilvray) throughout the 1972 Ashes, but always four from the following season. 

They say that Brian Johnston “joined the radio commentary team in the early 1970s”. Johnston moved to radio full-time in 1970, but had alternated between radio and TV for tests since 1966 (see BBC Genome or CMJ’s Ball By Ball). As cricket correspondent he had been commentating on county games for the radio on Saturdays when there was no cricket on TV since the fifties. Johnston himself related the switch as being more sudden than it actually was. 

In researching this piece I came across extracts from Arlott’s last day of commentary, on the Gillette Cup final of 1980, providing plenty of evidence that he left while still better than everybody else. 

Both authors declare themselves Arlott men, but that writing the book has increased their admiration for Swanton. I am certainly an Arlott man, and though I can’t say that reading this book has provoked any admiration for Swanton, I will blow the dust of a couple of his books that I have.

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[1] Hugh Massingberd, reviewing the Rayvern Allen biography in 2004 for the Daily Telegraph. A defender of Swanton, he nevertheless says “he could be overbearing, pig-headed and a bit of a bully. He was a shameless looker-over-the-shoulder and a fantastic snob”.