Kent trip up at Grace Road: 27 May - 2 June 1967

Leicestershire v Kent 31 May - 2 June 1967

There is no sentence that can tell us more definitively how different things were in 1967 than that which follows. For several hours on Saturday 27 May and again on Bank Holiday Monday 29 May, the only thing on television in much of the Britain was County Championship cricket. BBC 1 had Middlesex versus Sussex from Lord’s. Most ITV regions showed the Roses Match from Old Trafford, while BBC Wales covered Glamorgan against Hampshire. BBC 2 did not open up until the evening, so it was county cricket or nothing.

In the event, on Saturday it was nothing, as the early summer deluge continued. No county cricket was played anywhere on Saturday. Most matches got going on Bank Holiday Monday, but the rain returned everywhere but Trent Bridge on Tuesday. Kent’s fixture at Edgbaston was washed away completely.

In the absence of any cricket to write about, John Woodcock devoted his Monday piece in The Times to an interview with Frank Woolley, holder for ever more of Kent’s first-class run scoring (47,868), appearance (764) and catching (773) records. Not forgetting 1,680 wickets, bettered only by Freeman, Blythe, Underwood and Wright. There were plenty of people around the Kent grounds in 1967 who had seen Woolley play, and he was always their favourite, not for the weight of the statistics, but because of the style in which he made his runs. Woolley was left-handed, and those who were still going strong when David Gower appeared said that he was the nearest they had seen. Woolley lived in Canada by this time, but returned reasonably often. I remember him sitting in the President’s tent one Canterbury Week in the late sixties, and there is a famous photo of Woolley, Ames and Cowdrey together in 1973, Kent’s three makers of a hundred hundreds.

 

Egged on by Woodcock, Woolley criticised the growing commercialisation of cricket, this at a time when advertising hoardings around the boundary were still a decade away on the Kent grounds. What would he have thought of logo-laden shirts and outfields?

There was more substance in his complaint about the slow scoring of the modern game, of which there was much evidence this week, notably at Grace Road where on the first day against Kent, Leicestershire squeezed 155 runs from the first 90 overs. Peter West’s report notes the arrival of drinks as the highlight of the first session (West’s piece is a rarity in that it records a dropped catch by Alan Knott).

This exercise in reliving 1967 is unapologetically nostalgic, but that is not the same as saying that cricket was better then. A torpor could quite easily possess proceedings then in a way rarely seen now. When was the last time you heard a slow hand clap? It was common enough then. A day’s County Championship these days is likely to be more reliably entertaining than it was fifty years ago (though uncovered pitches would be fun).

Kent lost the game because Leicestershire outdid them in the very qualities that had served them so well so far in 1967. Their pace attack of John Cotton (19 overs off the reel) and Terry Spencer was more dangerous than Graham and Sayer, and Jack Birkenshaw followed a hat-trick at Worcester by being Underwood’s equal.

Leicestershire’s other advantage was Tony Lock’s captaincy. Lock was lured back to English cricket from Perth by the offer of the captaincy at Grace Road. By 1967, his third season, he had brought about something of a renaissance (or perhaps simply naissance). Ray Illingworth completed the job, with five trophies in five years in the seventies. Meanwhile, Lock repeated the trick in the southern hemisphere, leading Western Australia to their first Sheffield Shield in twenty years. In 1967 he was still good enough for Peter West to describe him as the finest slow left-armer in the country, and was to be called up to join the MCC party in the Caribbean in the winter.

Earlier in the week, Leicestershire visited Worcester where 22 wickets fell on the Bank Holiday Monday. Off spinner Birkenshaw took his hat-trick as Worcestershire were dismissed for 91. Len Coldwell and Jack Flavell then bowled 35 overs between them (though not unchanged this time), taking nine wickets as Leicestershire gained a lead of 20, which Worcestershire overcame by the end of the day, though with the loss of two further wickets only for the rain to return on the third day.

I tweeted the result of the second XI match between Kent and Worcestershire at St Lawrence. It is not the intention to make this a regular feature unless something noteworthy occurred, but I was there for the first afternoon and remember two things about it. First, I collected the autographs of some Worcestershire players, including Joe Lister and Jim Standen. Lister was Worcestershire secretary. That one man could run the club and still find time to captain the second XI goes some way to refuting Woolley’s view of a game being overtaken by commercial interests. Lister went on to be secretary of Yorkshire during Boycott Civil War. Standen was the most distinguished of the dwindling band of footballer-cricketers, having kept goal at Wembley in winning West Ham teams in the FA Cup in 1964 and the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1965. Another, Ted Hemsley—at that time Shrewsbury Town’s left back—was also in the Worcestershire team.

The other thing I recall was that I retrieved a ball that had been hit for four and returned it to the fielder, John Dye, something that, as a dweller of the upper decks of stands where possible, I have never done since, though I did once dive out of the way at Maidstone from a six that a braver man would have tried to catch. Glenn Turner made the highest score of the match, and I probably saw him do it, the first time I watched one of New Zealand’s finest.

The scorecard of that game reveals that batsman and former vice-captain Bob Wilson was in the Kent side, dropped from the first team for the first time in more than a decade. From then on he was a mere stopgap, and retired at the end of the season. I recall at Dover in late August somebody asking him if he was playing in the Gillette Cup Final a few days later, a question that even a child could spot as insensitive given that everyone knew that the answer was no.

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released that week, and received an intelligent review in The Times.

The Summer of Love was not a universal phenomenon. The war in Vietnam raged on, the Middle East was about to explode and now Nigeria found itself on the brink of a civil war. The coastal province of Biafra seceded from the rest of the country this week, a decision that resulted in the Blue Peter Christmas appeal of 1968 being devoted to easing its children's starvation.

In the Footsteps of Giants

Author's note: apologies for the small font size, which it is beyond my technical ability to enlarge. I advise readers having difficulty reading this post to buy a bigger screen.

As part of the desecration redevelopment of the St Lawrence Ground a walkway is to be built honouring twelve of the county's great players, chosen by a panel comprising Kent's long-serving statistician Howard Milton; Derek Carlaw, who has been contributing erudite and interesting features to the Kent annual for many years; and Tony Rickson, a journalist unknown in this part of New Zealand. A shortlist of forty was published in local papers and Kent followers were invited to nominate their chosen dozen, but this was purely advisory, and rightly so. A comprehensive knowledge of two centuries of cricket was needed to do justice to the task.

And justice to it they have done, selecting a twelve that tells the story of cricket in Kent as well as celebrating some of our finest. Of course, this task is easier than picking an all-time Kent XI, because so many of the county's great names were wicketkeepers or slow bowlers. Eleven of the names are the same as my selection, and I have no great quarrel with the twelfth.

But I do have a couple of small gripes about the shortlist of forty:

http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Kent-Legends-Walkway-choose-favourite-cricket/story-12002825-detail/story.html
First, Richard Ellison (11 Tests) or Mark Ealham, (eight Tests and 64 ODIs) would be a better representative of the 80s and 90s than Steve Marsh, who was, by our high Kentish standards, a mediocre keeper. What about Neil Taylor, who scored more centuries for Kent than Bob Wilson, Brian Luckhurst or Mike Denness? Or Dean Headley?

And what's this? No CJ Tavaré? David Gower was good on Tavaré during the recent Lord's Test, describing how the batsman who would block to order for England was known to the Kent membership only as a carefree shot player (Gower should be on the list too, having been educated in Canterbury, but he was allowed to slip away to Leicestershire).

Of the twelve, nine are obvious choices. Taking them chronologically:

Alfred Mynn

When John Woodcock (editor of Wisden and cricket correspondent of The Times for more than three decades; known to Alan Gibson's readers as the Sage of Longparish) ranked his hundred greatest cricketers in the mid-nineties he placed Mynn third, below only Bradman and Grace, who was seen as the new Mynn early in his career. As well as being the greatest all-rounder of his day, Mynn – three times bankrupt and over-fond of his ale – was just the sort of dissolute character that the public likes to have as a hero. It is as well that he had finished before the county club was formally constituted. The sort of people who have run it for most of its existence would never have approved of him.

Colin Blythe

It is Blythe who is bowling in the Chevallier Taylor painting of the Kent v Lancashire game of 1906 that captivated Duncan Hamilton when he visited Canterbury at the end of his journey around England in 2009.

http://mylifeincricketscorecards.blogspot.com/2011/04/harold-larwood-and-last-english-summer.html
It would not have been right for another bowler to have been its focus. Blythe's slow left-arm was Kent's paramount advantage in the first golden era of four championships between 1906 and 1913. At Northampton in 1907 he took 17 wickets in a day, match figures beaten only by Laker at Old Trafford, and he was as lethal on drying pitches as Derek Underwood. Like Freeman, he did not not transfer his county prowess to Tests, and was said to have suffered from epilepsy, brought on by stress. He lost his life at Passchendale in 1917, and a memorial stands to him at the St Lawrence Ground, untouched, I trust, by the developers.

Frank Woolley

In the late sixties and early seventies there were still plenty of people around the grounds who had watched Woolley and they would go all misty-eyed as they told you that they had never seen better. As well as the sheer weight of runs – he is Kent's top aggregate scorer with 15,000 more than next-best Wally Hardinge – he batted with sublime elegance. Allen Hunt said that the young Gower reminded him of Woolley, also a left-hander. There is also the small matter of 1,680 wickets (mostly as a slow left-armer, though he was quicker as a young player) and 773 catches, another county record. I saw him when he visited during Canterbury Week one year, a tall agile figure, even in his eighties. Kent's best.

Tich Freeman

Freeman's bowling record tests credulity. With his leg spin he took more than 200 first-class wickets in eight successive seasons, 304 in 1928, more than any bowler before or since. Even in an age when hapless amateurs filled places in most county sides, ready for harvest by Freeman assisted by Les Ames behind the stumps, these figures are unmatched. His career aggregate is second only to Wilfred Rhodes, whose career was more than ten years longer. But Freeman was the Graeme Hick of his time: superlative domestic figures, but little impact in Tests, something I have never heard explained satisfactorily.

Les Ames

Ames was a cricketer eighty years ahead of his time, a top-class wicketkeeper who was a Test-class batsman, the best until Gilchrist. With Woolley and Cowdrey he was one of Kent's trio of scorers of a hundred hundreds. But his contribution to the county was as significant after retirement as it had been on the field of play. As secretary-manager (about 27 people are now employed to do what he did alone) he was more responsible than anyone else for building the great team of the seventies. A professional cricketer (in the best sense), he commanded total respect in a county where amateurs (often not in the best sense) dominated.

Godfrey Evans

January 1999, 5^th Ashes Test, Sydney Cricket Ground. I am sitting next to two sisters and the husband of one of them (it is impossible to tell which, as he is largely silent, through habit). They all in their seventies and straight out of The Sullivans. They are up from the country for a day at the Test, an excursion they have made since the forties. The talk turns to favourite players. “Godfrey Evans” says one of the sisters, the name echoed by the other at once, “he was our favourite”. Ten minutes later I point out a familiar side-whiskered figure who has appeared a few rows in front of us and for a moment their smiles make them young again. I saw him play for the Cavaliers, and for Old England at the Oval in 1980 when, aged sixty, he executed a stumping so quickly that the ground announcer thought it was bowled, and in a first-class match, against Yorkshire at Canterbury in 1967 when Fred Trueman dusted the crease with his cap as Evans came into bat (Alan Knott had been picked for England and Kent was without a keeper). Godfrey Evans enjoyed playing cricket and liked people to enjoy watching him.

Colin Cowdrey, Derek Underwood and Alan Knott

I take these three together because their places in the chosen twelve need little justification, and because each warrant more detailed attention at another time, so important were they to my cricketing education. Suffice to mention that it was not so much the runs that Cowdrey scored, but the way in which he scored them that made him special to a generation of cricket supporters, and not only in Kent, or England.

To the Kentish, Knott and Underwood belong together like Astaire and Rogers for the way in which their talents combined to produce something beautiful. To opposition batsmen a more lethal pairing – Smith and Wesson say – would be a more appropriate comparison. Neither ever gave less than their all for the county, even at the peak of their international careers.

Those nine names would be on the lists of all informed Kent followers. What about the other three? The two names that my selection have in common with the official choice both come from the glory days of my youth, and those of at least two of the selectors, I suspect. I don't think that this is sentimentality; simply a reflection that this was the county's high summer.

Brian Luckhurst and John Shepherd

Mike Denness could fill a spot, as a fine batsman and winner of six one-day titles as captain; but no championships. Bob Woolmer described Denness as the best one-day captain he played under, but insufficiently imaginative in first-class cricket. Woolmer himself warrants consideration for his contributions with both bat and ball to the winning teams of the seventies. He should have been captain at some stage. But somehow he appealed to minds, not hearts (and I've never forgiven him for denying me the autograph that would have completed my collection in the souvenir Gillette Cup final brochure in 1971). I'd a hankering to pick Alan Ealham, our last Championship-winning captain, and the best outfielder I've seen, but that would have been sentiment.

But the choice of Brian Luckhurst will produce collective nodding of heads from those who saw him play. He scored 39 centuries and almost 20,000 runs and was of those who became a better batsman because of the need to adapt to one-day cricket. Luckhurst was a key member of the Ashes-winning team of 1970-71 and deserved a longer international career than he had. But his record on the field is only part of the story. After his (premature) retirement in 1976, he held a variety of posts at Canterbury, from coach to indoor school bar manager. At one time he sold scorecards around the ground on Sundays, and did so with the same dignity and good humour that he brought to every other role. Of the professionals, only Les Ames and Claude Lewis gave the county longer service.

John Shepherd is the current president of the club. When he joined the staff in 1965 the idea of a black president would have triggered mass coronaries in the Band of Brothers tent. That nobody thinks it now worth mentioning is a pleasing reflection of how far we have come, and of the contribution made by the overseas players who have played such an important part in Kent's history over the past half century, John Shepherd first among them. It seemed to me that Kent captains had an easier job than those of other counties. They simply put Shepherd on at one end in April and took him off in September. He was a genuine all-rounder and would have batted much higher for any other county. Runs were made when the top order had failed (a century against Middlesex in the Gillette Cup in 1977 a prime example) and often spectacularly (24 off an over from fellow Bajan Hallam Moseley one sunny Sunday in 1973). He could throw the ball from fine leg to the bowler's end with a flick of the wrist. Shepherd has also served as captain of Herne Bay Golf Club, which would have seemed an even more unlikely prospect in 1965.

And so to the last place. The selectors have given it to Doug Wright, who kept a poor side going in the fifties with his quickish leg spin, which was good enough to take a world record seven hat-tricks. There is no disputing Wright's status among Kent's finest. My issue is that, while the great era of the seventies has been given due recognition, this is not the case for the other period in which the county was the country's best: the years before the First World War, during which Championships were won in 1906, 1909, 1910 and 1913. So a representative of these years besides Woolley and Blythe is needed.

But who? Having looked at the season-by-season records two candidates are pre-eminent: Kenneth Hutchings and Arthur Fielder. Hutchings was an attacking batsman, whose driving was particularly strong. His best three seasons were all Championship-winning years, though he had finished by 1913. Like Blythe, Hutchings died on the Western Front.

Fielder was a fast bowler. According to his obituary in Wisden, he could swing the ball away and bring it back off the pitch, which might explain how he took 1,150 wickets for Kent in not much more than a decade as a regular player. He contributed strongly to all for Championships, particularly the first in 1906, when he took 172 wickets. Fielder gets my nomination, if only because Kent is not known for its fast bowlers, but I'll celebrate Doug Wright quite happily.

I look forward to walking the walkway, even if it is likely to be a dull day in November when I next visit the frozen north. It is good to know that the desperate measures that the club's financial crisis requires have not meant that its history or heroes have been forgotten.