A Canterbury week to remember: 6 to 12 August 1967

It’s been a bit sad this week keeping an eye from afar on Canterbury week, cricket’s Royal Ascot now more by way of an autumn meeting at Pontefract. The main attraction was a three-day game against the West Indians, once a cast of legends, their roles now filled by understudies. Kent rested a number of players, so I trust that the club didn’t have the gall to charge extra just because it was Canterbury week, as has been recent practice. The T20 games that bookended the week will have got people through the gates, but not in the numbers that they came in 1967.

The Times said that almost 40,000 attended the week, and I suspect that this does not include members, who were not counted as we passed through the members’ gate on Old Dover Road. If this is so, 50,000 would be a better estimate.  The attraction? Kent, leading the Championship, were playing Leicestershire (second), then Yorkshire (third). 

I was there for the first four days. I’m certain of this as I remember that sort of thing, but was puzzled that I couldn’t recall much about the Leicestershire match. Reading John Woodcock’s reports, all was explained. It was as unmemorable a game as was played all season. As the week went on, Woodcock was to become increasingly exasperated with the low-entertainment value of the cricket about which he was writing. As early as Monday he was calling Colin Cowdrey “pensive”, and reporting with an undertone of surprise that the crowd accepted the slow batting in silence. The following day he described Lock’s decision to settle for a draw as “baffling”, given that Leicestershire had played two more games than Kent and three more than Yorkshire.

The game was Stuart Leary’s benefit match. Leary was the epitome of the long-serving professional for whom the benefit system had been designed in an age of poor pay and no retirement provisions. Leary’s winter career as a footballer with Charlton Athletic and Queen’s Park Rangers was over by 1967. It had mostly taken place in the maximum wage era, and even after Jimmy Hill’s successful abolition campaign, there were no crocks of gold in the middle divisions of the Football League. Leary was having a good season, chipping in when runs were most needed. He was often dogged, but could hit to effect when required. His benefit year returned £9,000, a fair sum in 1967 (my parents bought their semi-detached in Herne Bay for £2,500 in 1964).

Stuart Leary was a joker who would interact with the crowd; like many who cultivate a breezy persona, it was in part a disguise. He died by throwing himself off Table Mountain in Cape Town in 1988. There were rumours of Leary’s fears of vice squad investigations and AIDS, so it is important to note David Frith’s account in his book about cricketing suicides Silence of the Heart, in which he presents no evidence that such fears were anything other than the product of Leary’s own tormented mind.

The bored crowd at the Leicestershire game passed some of the time by generating a conspiracy theory. The England XII for the second test was announced on Sunday. Surprisingly, given that England had won three tests out of four so far that season, there were six changes from that picked for Lord’s. Colin Cowdrey, Alan Knott and Derek Underwood were three of the inclusions. Cowdrey was having a good year and remained one of the best batsmen in the country. Underwood was the leading wicket-taker and Knott, as we have seen, was attracting rave reviews from every reporter who watched him, so none of this trio was a controversial selection. But the Salem branch of the Kent Supporters’ Club has always been strong and for many the coincidence of a Yorkshire captain and three of Kent’s best being called into the nation’s service on the eve of a possible Championship decider was too much to bear, especially as Ray Illingworth, who had performed decently in the tests thus far, was dropped and thus available to play at Canterbury. 

Brian Close must have wished that he had such power. In fact, the last thing he would have wanted was Cowdrey, the establishment’s favourite, back in the test team, with the anointment of the captain for the winter tour yet to be made. It was the chairman of selectors, Doug Insole of Essex, who guided the choice. Insole died just last week, taking the story of the selection meeting for the South African tour of 1968 into the silence with him.

Kent needed a wicketkeeper, and thinking that experienced hands were needed in such an important contest, called Godfrey Evans back to the county colours for the first time since 1959. I’ve written before about watching Godfrey Evans that day and later. His return created a stir, with The Times carrying the story on its front page. He was one of that small band of cricketers who inspired lifelong adoration in a whole generation. You could see it at the SCG in the eyes of the elderly sisters in my earlier piece. Compton, Botham and Viv Richards were three others, but there aren’t many.

Once more, roads around Canterbury were jammed because so many people were going to the cricket. Instead of the blandness of the first game of the week, there was tension and incident throughout. We watched from the benches on the northern side of the ground, where the flats have been built. In Brian Close’s absence, Fred Trueman led Yorkshire and played the role of pantomime villain with enthusiasm. Just a year off retirement, Trueman had become a craftsman as skilled as any in the manipulation of the ball at medium-fast pace. But for a couple of overs when required he could roll away the years and bowl with pure speed. He was warned for persistent short-pitched bowling, but only after he had broken Brian Luckhurst’s hand in the opening overs. 

For the rest of the innings Kent mined for runs in difficult terrain: 42 for Denness, 66 for Leary. Evans got a hero’s welcome and Trueman dusted the crease with his cap as Evans reached the middle. The thing that people who were there remember most about the day was the hitting of Alan Brown, coming in at No 10. He made a quick 33 including 18 flayed (as Charles Bray reported) from four Trueman deliveries. When I was back at St Lawrence last year I saw Alan Brown walking around the boundary and went up to say hello. “I remember you hitting Fred Trueman into crowd” I said, pointing towards the Nackington Road End. 

“No” he replied. “Fred was bowling from the Pavilion End. I hit him into these seats here” (gesturing towards what was then the concrete stand). He was pleased to be acknowledged, even if inaccurately. 

It was probably true that the absence of the test players cost Kent the game, and perhaps the Championship. I wasn’t there for the last two days, but more to the point, neither was Derek Underwood, who might, on a sunny second morning after overnight rain, have cleaned up. Alan Dixon (the captain in Cowdrey’s absence) took seven, but at more than three an over, and he put down an easy catch that would have ended the tenth-wicket partnership and given Kent first-innings points. It seems very odd that the 85 overs of the Yorkshire innings were delivered by only three bowlers: Dixon, Brown and Norman Graham, who bowled 37 overs for 60 runs. Young off spinner Graham Johnson did not get a chance, and neither did John Shepherd. Bryan Valentine shrewdly noted in his President’s report on the season that Shepherd’s 54 wickets at 20 were all the more creditable given that he only got on when conditions favoured the bat. 

Kent “went to pieces” (according to the 1968 Kent Annual) in the second innings and were bowled out for 100. Only Bob Wilson, the end of his career just a few weeks away, resisted with any effect, making exactly half the total. Tony Nicholson took five for 37. Nicholson was the only member of the Yorkshire XI who would end his career without playing test cricket, and was a better bowler than some who did. His Wisden obituary says that “he swung the ball, had excellent control and was often found to be sharper in pace than the batsman expected”. We saw the best of him in Kent; the following year he was back at Canterbury and took eight for 22.

There was no way back for Kent. Yorkshire wrapped the game up on the third morning, and Leicestershire took over at the top of the table. Alan Gibson, who spent the latter part of the week at Lord’s watching the new leaders play Middlesex, was grudging:

Gibson was in peak mid-summer form. The first two paragraphs of his report on Sunday’s play at the Oval is a typical Gibson opening. 

If this exercise in retrospection introduces a handful of readers to the writing of Alan Gibson, my work will not have been in vain (they should get hold of Of Didcot and the Demon, Anthony Gibson’s collection of his father’s work).

Gibson’s colleague the Sage of Longparish (as he called The Times’ cricket correspondent John Woodcock) was moving ever closer to the end of his tether by the end of the week. Having become impatient at the slow going at Canterbury during the first half of the week, he was exasperated by events on the first three days of the second test, at Trent Bridge, by the end of which England had scored a morose 252 from 135 overs, against an Asif Iqbal-led Pakistan attack. Woodcock did not hold back:

Outside cricket, my eye was taken by a proposal to build a bridge across the Thames Estuary to the Isle of Sheppey, to take traffic from the north to the unbuilt Channel Tunnel while steering well clear of London. On a clear day this bridge would have been visible from our house further along the coast and it was a cracking idea, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it, so cannot have been taken at all seriously.

The playwright Joe Orton died at the hands of his lover Kenneth Halliwell (or “friend” as The Times called him, showing that there was still some way to go after the decriminalisation of homosexuality a few weeks before). I had forgotten that the pair had been jailed a few years before for defacing library books.

The Consumers Council proposed that food should be commonly served in pubs, a suggestion that to some was as if they had suggested holding bingo sessions in the nave of Canterbury Cathedral.

Watching Godfrey Evans

Following last week’s piece on one great Kent and England wicketkeeper, here is something about another.

I have seen Godfrey Evans play cricket. Proper cricket that is, a County Championship game. Given that Evans retired in 1959, I flatter myself that this would surprise acquaintances.  

It was Canterbury Week 1967. Alan Knott was to make his test debut at Trent Bridge, so Evans was called up to replace him in the second match of the week, against Yorkshire, the leaders. Kent were second in the table and as it turned out, this was the deciding game. Yorkshire’s seven-wicket win gave them 12 points; the margin between the two teams at season’s end was ten. Here’s the scorecard.

Perhaps it was the importance of the match that prompted Kent to recall Evans (47) to the colours, but it still seems a bit odd, given the presence of David Nicholls in the Kent team. Nicholls took the gloves for the following game, against Essex, and deputised for Knott most capably for the next ten years. Then again, Evans was the world’s most experienced international player with 91 tests (Colin Cowdrey would draw level with him at Trent Bridge the following day). He was demonstrating age-defying agility and co-ordination on television for the International Cavaliers most Sundays. For the biggest match that Kent had played since the First World War, why not choose experience?

I was there on the first day, a beautiful, blue-sky Wednesday, as all days of childhood summers are in the memory, in defiance of the historical record (it was the summer of love, probably because people needed something to do out of the rain). We sat on the benches on the Bat and Ball side of the ground. I haven’t watched from there since, not for more than a few minutes anyway.

The crowd was large, more than would be allowed in these days, though several thousand short of the number at the Gillette Cup semi-final a three weeks before, when the boundary shortened as the day wore on to accommodate the growing throng.

Brian Close was away, captaining England. He achieved five wins in six tests that summer, but had the captaincy taken away from him for the winter tour as a result of time-wasting at Edgbaston, or at least his cussed reaction to accusations thereof. The committee room at Lord’s hid well its disappointment at having to reinstate Colin Cowdrey (Tonbridge and Brasenose). Fred Trueman captained Yorkshire in Close’s absence. Seven of his team had played test cricket; three more were to do so and the eleventh, opening bowler Tony Nicholson, should have done. Trueman no doubt took the opportunity to drop into the Kent dressing room before the game to appraise them of this information. Perhaps Evans was there to redress the balance off the field as well as on it.

Guile and precision had long since taken the place of brutish pace in Trueman’s bowling, but he was still quick enough to break Brian Luckhurst’s hand in his opening spell. Stuart Leary dug in with a somewhat uncharacteristic three-and-half-hour 66 (a few weeks later he became the only batsman I ever saw clear the old lime tree), but the memory of the day that lingers is of Alan Brown tonking Trueman for 18 off four balls late in the innings.

Brown was a fast bowler with a dragging action, one of the last to carry this legacy of the backfoot lbw law. He played in two tests on Ted Dexter’s tour of Pakistan in 1961/2, when the prospect of playing cricket in south Asia did not have the attraction for the leading players that it does today. But it was Brown’s tailend slogging that caught the imagination of the boy on the boundary that day. The Kent faithful thought that in giving Trueman a sense of his own fallibility Brown was doing him a service, but two for 39 from ten overs shows how well the great bowler had bowled earlier in the innings.

Trueman greeted Evans’ entry at No 8 by doffing his cap and dusting the batting crease with it. Evans made ten before taking his position behind the timbers (as Brian Johnston used to say) for the final hour or so of the day. I have no specific memory of his keeping, but have no reason to doubt Wisden’s report that he “kept wicket superbly”.

Yorkshire won the game quite easily by seven wickets and took the second of a hat-trick of Championships. There is debate about whether the current Yorkshire team, attempting to emulate this feat this season, is better than that of the sixties. If they are, nobody will touch them.

The 1967 season ended happily for Kent nevertheless. Three weeks later the Gillette Cup was won at Lord’s and the glory years began.

Thirteen years later Evans gave an altogether more memorable display of his skill and extraordinary longevity. It was Old England v Old Australia at the Oval in 1980, played on the day before the centenary test began at Lord’s, a match now remembered for Dickie Bird’s fussiness over a damp patch in the outfield that denied a full house most of Saturday’s play.

The previous Wednesday was fine. It was nostalgic at the time. Reading the scorecard makes it seem all the more so in retrospect. It reminds me that I saw Neil Harvey play. One of the 1948 Invincibles. That’s quite something. He stood at mid on in sunglasses (long before this was customary) then finished the game with a composed 22 not out. It was the only time I saw Ken Barrington. He lifted a six onto the tin roof of the old stand beside the pavilion, an enormous hit. Little more than six months later he was dead, on duty as assistant manager with England in the Caribbean. A last chance to see most of the rest. All echoes of the players they once were of course, but an echo can carry sufficient cadence to identify the original tune.

Which brings us back to Godfrey Evans, by now 60. The card shows that he stumped both Australian openers off Fred Titmus. One was straightforward, but the manner of the other (Bobby Simpson I think), suggested that Evans had forsaken the hard stuff a while before and had instead been drinking exclusively from the fountain of youth. The ball slid down the legside, the batsman lifted his foot for a second, and with a blur of the gloves, the bails were off.

The PA announcer declared that the batsman had been bowled. There was confusion among the cognoscenti; we didn’t know whether to trust the evidence of our binoculars. But there it is on the scorecard. Stumped. The muttonchop whiskers might have belonged to a crewman of the Jolly Roger, but the feet and hands were those of Peter Pan.

Our story now moves forward to January 1999 and the Ashes test at Sydney. On the second day my seat in the Churchill Stand* was next to two elderly sisters and the husband of one of them. It was unclear to me to which he was married, and he seemed hazy on the matter too. They were up from the country for a day at the test, as had been their habit since the war (almost certainly the second one). Their dress and demeanor suggested that they had come all the way from 1948. I asked them about the players they had seen. The name that produced the broadest smile and a faraway look in the women’s eyes was that of Godfrey Evans. “Such a showman...the best wicketkeeper we have seen.”

During the lunch interval Evans, passing the winter hosting supporters’ tours, appeared in the stand. When I drew his presence to their attention, they sighed and become young again for a moment.

Godfrey Evans died just five months later, his ability to enchant unabated to the end.

*Named after the rugby league legend Clive Churchill. It would be frustrating being named Churchill and having something named after you. Nobody would realise it was about you.

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.