The first of the great days: 15 to 21 July 1967

It was a great day, the first of the great days, the very day when Kent’s second golden age began. Wednesday 19 July 1967, the Gillette Cup semi-final between Kent and Sussex.

It was the first List A—one-day equivalent of first-class—game to be played at St Lawrence (though it’s a bit tough that the Cavaliers games had no official status). Just short of 17,000 of us crammed into the ground that day, double the current capacity. I began on the wooden benches at the Nackington Road End between the sightscreen and the iron stand, since renamed after Leslie Ames. Later in the day I moved to the boundary’s edge, or possibly beyond it; the boundary shrunk as latecomers took their places on the grass inside the white line. Traffic across Canterbury was gridlocked for much of the morning.

One of the first posts on My Life in Cricket Scorecards I described St Lawrence as it was that day. As I write this, I am watching a recording of a recent T20 game at Canterbury. So much has changed, but the winds of time have left enough in place to make it recognisable. It has not been spoiled, though basing the design of the new flats on the northern side of the ground on that of an East German prison is odd (as an aside, I had thought it impossible that there could be a worse cricket commentator than Danny Morrison, but I listen to Andrew Flintoff at the T20 and reconsider).

Sussex, or more precisely Ted Dexter, worked out the one-day game before anybody else and had won the first two Gillette Cups in 1963 and 1964. Before this season Kent had never beaten a first-class county, so Sussex were favourites. Dexter had given up the game (though was to return for Sussex and England the following year), but Sussex had John Snow, Tony Greig—who had appeared like a whirlwind in the county game that year—, Jim Parks and a team full of experience.

It is worth reproducing John Woodcock’s Times report in full. There is a joy about his writing here that had been absent from his reporting on the test series. It inspired him to reach the top of his game.

I do remember the trepidation caused by the early fall of Denness and the slow restoration of confidence during the second-wicket partnership between Luckhurst and Shepherd, whose contrasting styles Woodcock describes so well. Then, Cowdrey. Yes, he could be stodgy, but on those days when he eluded his captors of caution and reserve he was something to behold, and that day was one of them. His 78 took just 59 balls, and late on in the innings he and Knott made 58 in five overs. All this, bear in mind, with seven or eight fielders back on the boundary. Kent’s 293 was worth at least 350 in a modern 50-over game (the Gillette Cup was 60 overs). 

Woodcock is possibly a little optimistic about Sussex still being in the game until Parks was out; they were well on the way to defeat at 27 for three. This was probably the first time that I became aware of the tremendous feeling of being in control that Kent supporters had when Derek Underwood came on. It was like acquiring a superpower. Woodcock’s account of his defeat of Greig is magnificent; you didn’t trifle with Derek Underwood. 

I will get around sometime to writing about my ten best days at the cricket. The semi-final of 1967 will be one of them.

So to Lord’s, to play Somerset who defeated Lancashire convincingly on the second day after rain took away much of the first. The Palmer brothers, Ken and Roy, both test-match umpires in years to come, delivered the victory, along with Fred Rumsey, Bill Alley and Graham Burgess. Burgess was still there 12 years later on the day Kent’s golden age ended and as Somerset’s began: all out for 60 at Taunton.

Earlier in the week, the Championship game at Southampton (the old ground at Northland Road) vindicated John Arlott’s criticism last week of the points system, quickly becoming a dour battle for first-innings points. Richard Gilliatt, back from captaining Oxford University for the first half of the season, made 122 in six-and-a-half hours, in vain as Hampshire were bowled out four short of Kent’s total. 

David Turner, to become a regular for Hampshire over the next 20 years, scored his maiden fifty in this game. Later in the week he had more success, reaching the last eight of the National Single-Wicket Championship at Lord’s. He beat Hanif Mohammad and Kent’s Alan Dixon before going down to Harvey of Derbyshire. Garry Sobers won the final defeating Brian Edmeades of Essex.

The matches were eight-overs-a-man (they did change ends) but out was out, so some contests were very short. Fred Titmus took one ball to overcome Clive Lloyd’s eight-ball three. There was a full complement of fielders but no non-striking batsman. A batsman who crossed a line halfway down the pitch had to proceed to the other end and stay there until cleared by the umpire to return to the other end. 

It was the fifth year of the competition; apart from the first at Scarborough, all had been held at Lord’s. The following year’s contest, at the Oval, was washed out. It returned to Lord’s in 1970, Keith Boyce the winner and then it seems to have disappeared from the calendar. Previous winners were Ken Palmer, Barry Knight, Mushtaq Mohammad and Fred Titmus. 

In the wider world, Britain was obsessed with sonic booms. With the maiden test flight of Concord (the French imposed the “e” later) imminent, some feared that living in Britain would be like inhabiting the inside of a drum, normal conversation all but impossible because of the mechanical thunder and the sound of windows crashing from their frames. So the Government sent a couple of military supersonic planes to fly at maximum speed over the capital to see what happened. It certainly created a stir over the wider London area, with children in Billericay (and no doubt elsewhere) jumping and crying. The responsible Minister, Anthony Wedgwood Benn treated the matter with a good deal more levity than his later regeneration Tony Benn would have been inclined to, cheerfully telling the House that nobody would know what Concord would sound like until it took off. 

1967: Setting the Scene

Almost every Wednesday and Saturday from late April to early September a new round of County Championship matches would begin. Three-day games of course; another two decades would pass before a fourth day was added, even tentatively. The seventeen counties (no Durham as yet) each played 28 games, so would meet 12 opponents twice, and four just once, an imbalance reintroduced into division two of the County Championship in 2017. That all counties played the same number of matches was a recent development; as late as 1962, some had played 32, some 28. Gaps in the schedule might be filled with games against the touring teams or Oxford or Cambridge universities.

One-day cricket remained an afterthought. The Gillette Cup—60 overs a side—was a straight knockout; Kent played only four games to win the competition. But a quiet revolution was taking place on Sunday afternoons. The International Cavaliers played a 40-over game each week, live on BBC 2. The Cavaliers are a neglected part of cricket history, as proved by the fact that a Google search has a post from this blog, written in 2010, as the leading source of information on the Cavaliers apart from a brief and inaccurate Wikipedia entry. The Cavaliers are cricket’s North-west Passage, the missing link between the game as it had always been played and the brave new world of limited overs, world cups and Kerry Packer.

Cricket was not entirely the staid Victorian relic that it is often thought to have been at this time. Nineteen-sixty-seven was the second season with Sunday play in some games. Cricket was the first professional sport to toy with the wrath of the Almighty in this way. This was the last year of the old-fashioned points system, with eight for a win and four for first-innings lead. Bonus points came in 1968 and have been with us in one form or another ever since. It was also the last year in which no overseas player was allowed to play for a county without serving a residential qualification period.

Kent played at home on nine grounds (and the second XI on three more, including two in Sittingbourne). Most counties were peripatetic to some degree; only Middlesex and Leicestershire remained at headquarters for the duration. Among other places, Kent would visit Brentwood, Peterborough, Southport, Hastings, Leyton and Burton-on-Trent during the season. The intervening half-century has seen a slow but unstoppable move away from truly county cricket, culminating in the Birmingham Bears and the 2020 20/20 franchises.

Like most who watched county cricket at that time, I regret the end of the caravan era, but nostalgia makes the memory selective; some of the outgrounds were hardly up to staging a village fete let alone a professional sporting fixture. The pitches were of mixed quality too, though this was not a bad thing. What eventually did for three-day cricket more than anything else was that the pitches became too good, using the batsmen’s definition at least. By the mid-eighties the norm had become a two-day phoney war to occupy the time before a chase for an agreed target. Cricketers of the sixties will tell you that developing the survival skills necessary in such conditions made them better players

It was the time of uncovered pitches too. If the rain fell after play started, the pitch (but not the run-ups) would not be covered until the abandonment of play. This seems entirely counter-intuitive, incomprehensible probably; but if you watched cricket on a drying pitch you regret that the experience has gone. Snoozing old cats of pitches would become spiteful tigers while their fur dried out. It was another dimension to the game, and helped move three-day games along.

Yorkshire started the season as county champions, having won two more games than any other side in 1966. The playing staff (“squad” was not yet in cricket’s dictionary, let alone “group”) included nine England players and five more who would be. The restrictions on player movement and overseas players gave Yorkshire an advantage, though they did their bit to nullify that with their insistence on allowing only players born in the Ridings to wear the Yorkshire cap. They were led by the Old Bald Blighter (as Alan Gibson called him) Brian Close. Those who don’t know of Close should picture a rhinoceros charging a machine gun post to get a flavour of the man. He was the England captain and was to have a very strange 1967 indeed.

Kent were on the up. After a dismal 1950s during which they only once (and just at that) made it into the top half of the table, they had risen from 13^th in 1963 to seventh, fifth, and fourth in the following years. Leslie Ames must be given be given the bulk of the credit for this. He was appointed manager at the start of the sixties and as one of the county’s most famous players was the only man who had the reputation and character to assert professional competence over the amateur meddling of the committee. Colin Cowdrey had been captain for a decade, but was away with England for almost half of the Championship programme most years. 

Kent had seasoned professionals such as the South African batsman Stuart Leary and the vice-captain Alan Dixon, an all-rounder who could bowl seamers or off spin, and a group of talented younger players headed by the openers Mike Denness and Brian Luckhurst. And two of the all-time greats starting out: Derek Underwood and Alan Knott. It was a good time to start watching cricket in Kent.

Six test matches were scheduled, three against India and three against Pakistan, neither team expected to offer the excitement or quality of the West Indians of the previous season. England (or rather MCC) had not toured over the winter, though an under-25 team including Knott and Underwood went to Pakistan. It was captained by Mike Brearley (who was 75 yesterday). Near the top of the list of cricketing days I wish I’d seen was that at Peshawar on 1 February 1967 when Brearley scored 312 in a day, like one of those flowers that blooms once every fifty years. Alan Knott opened with him and scored his maiden hundred as they put on 208. According to Wisden, Brearley “annhihilated a fair attack which had little support from the field” (Intikhab Alam bowled more overs than anybody and he was a very good bowler).

There is much more to say about cricket in England 50 years ago, and about the world that it was played in. Stay tuned, as they used to say on the Light Programme.

The Summer of ’67: a project

There was scant evidence in Kent that it was the Summer of Love, and there were few with flowers in their hair, even during Canterbury Week, but the summer of 1967 is fondly remembered in the hop county. It was the year in which the Gillette Cup was won, the start of the golden era of 11 trophies in 12 years. Also, of my first Wisden and first visit to Lord’s. And 50 years ago, so worthy of commemoration. 

Which is why I intend to relive the summer of ’67 using media not conceived of then. 

The plan is to tweet (@kentccc1967) scores and highlights at the conclusion of the 50^th anniversary of each day on which Kent played, and follow it up with blog pieces after each match (or at least once a week). These will flesh out the story of the game, and cast an eye over other matches, both Championship and test. Tweets will imagine that it is 1967, while blog posts will use hindsight to reflect on events. By happy coincidence the dates fall on the same days of the week in 2017 as they did fifty years before.

Scorecards has always tried to be about not only the cricket, but also being at the cricket. What were the people around the boundary talking about in 1967? What music were they listening to, what were they watching on television or at the local Odeon? Both tweets and blog posts will look at what was happening in the world as the cricket was being played.

Wisden, the Kent Annual and CricInfo will obviously be essential sources, as will the online archive of The Times, which carried lengthy reports of most county games. John Woodcock—still writing occasionally for the paper today— was cricket correspondent, heading a talented team. Happily, it was the incomparable Alan Gibson’s first season as a regular writer, and reading new (to me) Gibson reports is already a joy. There was Charles Bray, who captained Essex before World War II and was a founder of the Cricket Writers’ Club, and AA Thomson, writing with waspish humour on cricket in the north. Peter West too, when television commitments allowed. The Times will also be a wonderful source of wider news and events. BBC Genome tells us what was on BBC radio and television, and which commentators were at which games. Collections of diaries and letters from 1967—from Barbara Castle to Kenneth Wiliams—will provide plenty of background material for specific days.

The Twitter account—@kentccc1967—has been set up, but I will blog on Scorecards, at least until I can think of a decent name.  I’m after something that is taken from the time with a cricketing twist, but the best I have come up with so far is “Closey in the sky with Double Diamond”, so the search goes on.

Kent’s season started at Trent Bridge on Saturday 29 April. I will post a scene setter before then.