2 – 8 August 1975 “It's shapely, it’s masculine and it’s seen the last of its cricket for the day”

It is hard to see how Henry Blofeld could justify calling the second test “exciting”. Memorable, certainly, mainly for the benefits for national morale  of David Steele and Tony Greig showing that Lillee and Thomson could be resisted. As John Woodcock wrote “England will be feeling a lot happier. Aren’t we all?” Engrossing, possibly, but it was a low bar for “exciting”. On the Saturday England managed only 225 for the loss of two wickets. Woodcock again: “Six hours is an awfully long time to take making 104 not out on a good pitch and across a fast outfield; but that is Edrich’s way.” It was the way of many in that era.

On the final day Australia required 387 to win with nine wickets standing on a pitch offering little or nothing to the bowlers. The possibility that this might be pursued was barely discussed. It was all about the draw. Fifty years on, England made 367 in 85 overs in the fourth innings of the test match thrillingly completed this week, a rate of scoring that would have seemed fanciful in 1975. It is a great irony that test cricket’s future is under threat like never before when the cricket it produces has never been more entertaining.

Michael Angelow (which sounds like a name that Bertie Wooster would have made up after being arrested for stealing a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race night) woke everybody up on Monday afternoon by becoming cricket’s first and most famous streaker. He had the good sense or luck to do it while John Arlott was at the microphone: “It's shapely, it’s masculine and it’s seen the last of its cricket for the day”. Arlott added to the occasion by describing Angelow as a “freaker”.

At Canterbury, I missed Arlott on the freaker as I was at the ice cream van buying my fourth radioactive ice lolly af the day. It was so glorious a week that Kent’s disastrous performance against Middlesex did not bother us too much, even though it pretty much finished our championship chances.

There were a couple of notable statistical achievements by Middlesex batters. Mike (MJ) Smith made a century before lunch on the first day and Norman Featherstone made two unbeaten centuries in the match. I don’t think that I have ever seen the former feat achieved since, but the latter was bettered by Zaheer Abbas in Canterbury week the following year, with one of his not out hundreds being a double.

Kent did remain on the same points as Essex at the top of the Sunday League after their win over Sussex. Colin Cowdrey’s fine valedictory form continued with 58 not out to take the team home.

My future skiing instructor Barry Dudleston had a very good week. Mike Carey (whose appearance in the press box generally presaged an early dismissal for the Leicestershire opener) said that he was “at his most effervescent” in making 88 against Derbyshire. On Sunday he scored 152 (then the second highest ever in the Sunday League behind Barry Richards’ 155 against Yorkshire in 1970) of his team’s 235 for six, which must be pretty high on the list of proportions of a team’s total, and on that of big individual scores for the losing side as Lancashire won the game with a century from Clive Lloyd.

The heat appears to have encouraged high scoring on Sunday: Somerset made 243 (Viv Richards 119), Essex reached 283 and Worcestershire set a new Sunday League record with 307 for four.

Gloucestershire beat this in the 60-over Gillette Cup quarter-finals with centuries by their two Pakistan internationals Sadiq Mohammad and Zaheer Abbas. Leicestershire’s 282 in reply (another half century for Dudleston) would rarely have been a losing total in this era, but it was that day in 1975.

The big match of the round was at Old Trafford where the two teams at the top of the Championship met. The gates were shut at a capacity of 26,000, but Gerry Harrison in The Times reckoned that there were 30,000 in there “with those rehearsing for the football season still pouring in over the walls”. Incidentally, I am less sure that this is the same Gerry Harrison that was Anglia TV’s football commentator for many years. This one appears to have been based in the north-west.

A high-scoring draw was anticipated, but Hampshire were shot out for 98, four wickets each for Barry Wood and Bob Ratcliffe, and Lancashire reached their target with six wickets and 28 overs to spare.  

New Zealander John Parker made 107 in Worcestershire’s 257, but Middlesex strolled home by eight wickets. Clive Radley scored 105 with MJ Smith and Featherstone both continuing their good form with seventies.

Derbyshire, without a home headquarters at this time, were undergoing a mid-season resurgence sufficient to dispatch neighbours Nottinghamshire easily enough.

Some stories echo through the eras. Gloucestershire, in deep financial duress, were saved by an large input of cash from an external source. In 2025 this will be the ECB handout that will follow the sale of parts of the Hundred teams. Fifty years ago it was the Pheonix Assurance Co buying the County Ground in Bristol. I spent a lot of happy times there in the 19 years I lived in the city. Nobody would claim that it is a pretty ground, but it has soul and history, neither a commodity that can be moved to any new venue to the north of Bristol, as is being mooted.

The Yorkshire fast bowler Tony Nicholson retired this week. He took 879 first-class wickets at 19.76, all the more impressive when you consider that for the first half of his career Fred Trueman would have had choice of ends. Nicholson was particularly fond of bowling at Canterbury where he took 17 wickets across two games in 1967 and 1968. He has to have an early mention in any conversation about the best players of the era not to play test cricket. 

How Green Were My Pitches: 19 to 25 August 1967

The issues of the week were the England captaincy and the race for the County Championship. Kent had a double-header (as it was not known then) against Glamorgan, first in Gillingham and then in Cardiff. Yorkshire played Essex at Scarborough, finishing on Tuesday, then started a game against Sussex at Eastbourne on Wednesday morning, suggesting that the fixture schedulers lacked basic knowledge of the country’s geography (or that they all had chauffeurs). 

Kent and Yorkshire started the week level on points. Kent went ahead after a last-gasp win at Gillingham, while Yorkshire lost from a winning position at Scarborough. But resounding wins for Glamorgan at Cardiff, and Yorkshire on the south coast put Yorkshire on top by four points with a game in hand at the week’s end.

Bert Lock had a busy week. He was the groundsman who had restored the Oval after it had been a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. After retiring from Surrey he became the counties’ pitch inspector, in which role he visited both Kent v Glamorgan games this week. Lock could do little more than offer groundsmen sage advice after the event. There were no sanctions at his disposal other than recommending a ban on the venue for the following season (a sanction already imposed upon Hesketh Park, Dartford, though why that ground was singled out from minefields on which Kent played in 1967 is unclear). 

Both matches were played on pitches that would be inconceivable these days, particularly that at Gillingham. I have watched cricket at the Garrison Ground, Gillingham, a Sunday League game in 1972. I don’t recall much about the ground, but it must have been a squeeze to get 10,000 in. “The whole of Kent seemed to be there” according to John Woodcock, who was enjoying his work at last. Stoics they were, with a scoring rate under two an over across the game as a whole, but when 26 wickets fall in a day, as happened on the third day, it wasn’t unrelenting dullness. Derek Underwood took 11 wickets and the win came in the final half hour.

Modern crowds wouldn’t tolerate such laborious scoring, but would they have to? Players of that era say that those pitches created superior techniques. Of course, today’s batsmen would be at sea on pitches foreign to them. But, knowing that their lifespan would be short, they would not be prepared to wait cowering in the crease for the bullet with their name on it, but would have a go at charging the machine guns. A bold, edgy 30 would have won several games this week.

It was Sophia Gardens’ first season as a first-class venue, Glamorgan having moved from Cardiff Arms Park over the winter to make way for the redevelopment of the rugby ground, so the pitches were still bedding in (well enough for the home side to make 353 for nine, bracketed by Kent collapses). It was a homely, pleasant ground whenever I visited; since then it has been turned into an arena, no less, taking much of the charm away in the process, I would think.

DJ Shepherd took 15 wickets in the three innings he bowled in that week. Fifty years on, he is being mourned with affection, having passed away six days after his ninetieth birthday. I saw him play, but remember him more as a superb radio commentator on BBC Radio Wales on Sunday afternoons, which I would listen to in Bristol in preference to the inferior local offering.  Shepherd and Edward Bevan would have adorned Test Match Special had they been given the chance; thus his career off the field mirrored that on it in its lack of just national recognition.

Just as Don Shepherd is most people’s pick as the best bowler not have played a test for England, so Alan Jones is the best batsman in that deprived position. Jones has the sweater and the cap, but not the test status, which was removed from the England v Rest of the World series retrospectively despite it being as high a standard as any tests before or since. This week, he made 44, Glamorgan’s top score at Gillingham, and 60 at Cardiff, both innings worth centuries in their contexts. Alan Jones often did well against Kent; I saw him score centuries in Canterbury Week 1972 and again ten years later

Welsh folk might have hoped that the easier access to the valleys offered by the opening of the Severn Bridge the year before would bring the selectors to Sophia Gardens and St Helens more often, but this does not seem to have happened. Tony Lewis tells the story of Wilf Wooller, Glamorgan’s secretary, manager and self-appointed patron saint, receiving a letter from EW Swanton of the Daily Telegraph requesting information on the form of certain Glamorgan players and enclosing a stamped, addressed envelope for the reply. Swanton was hugely influential at that time, widely regarded as a fifth selector. When the returned envelope was opened a few days later it contained only a copy of the London to Cardiff train timetable.

Don Shepherd was not Glamorgan’s most successful bowler this week. Left-arm paceman Jeff Jones took 16 wickets, including six for 27 in the first innings in which he and Tony Cordle bowled 16 overs each, unchanged. Jeff Jones is best remembered as father of 2005 Ashes winner Simon Jones, who inherited his old man’s ability to bowl quickly as well as a frame that did not bear up well to his doing so.

Yorkshire also had a mixed week, but in reverse order to Kent’s. At Scarborough they contrived to throw away a lead of 127 to lose by nine runs to Essex, who were second-bottom. Spinners Hobbs and Acfield took eight between them, and bowled 52 overs for 68 runs, illustrating my earlier point about the general timidity of batsmen in those days. Batsmen sharing a car with Fred Trueman would have spent an uncomfortable eight hours or so on the way to Eastbourne

There was redemption at the Saffrons, with (speaking as we were of very good players who did not play for England) Tony Nicholson taking nine for 62

England were building a good lead at the Oval in the third and final test, but the press and public focus was on the Close question. On Wednesday the England captain was “severely censured” by the Advisory County Cricket committee (copying The Times’ deployment of the upper case) for his leadership of the go-slow against Warwickshire the previous week. The Thunderer thought the matter worthy of a leader, which came down on Close’s side for the captaincy to the West Indies, but unenthusiastically so. By Friday, down the front page was the headline “Things look black for Brian Close”. As chance would have it, Boycott’s late withdrawal from the test due to illness meant that Close opened with Cowdrey, the only alternative after the retirement of MJK Smith.

Times' leader

Kent all-rounder LJ (Leslie) Todd died this week in 1967. I knew the name but not much else. His obituary in Wisden is an unexceptional, largely statistical, record of a career that lasted from 1927 to 1950. Over the years, one has rarely turned to the Kent Annual for good writing, but Todd’s obituary in the 1968 edition is a cracker.

It was written by JGW (Jack) Davies, an off spinner who was a Kent contemporary of Todd’s. However, Davies was a jazzhat summer-holiday amateur of a kind that pros like Todd (especially Todd, it may be inferred) held in some contempt. It should be noted that Davies’s profession was psychology. The result is an obituary that tells us what sort of man he was, as well as what sort of cricketer.

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.