The Cricket Magazines: December 1972

 

The first four pages of Playfair are, mystifyingly, devoted to a preview of the domestic season in South Africa, to be contested exclusively by white players, though the political context is referred to only obliquely. More commendably, The Cricketer had a correspondent on non-European cricket in South Africa, A Akhalwaya. He reports on the reaction to the end of Basil D’Oliveira’s test-match career in his homeland, reminding us how much it meant to the non-white population to have one of their own playing at the highest level.

Here in South Africa we found ourselves unabashedly supporting England. Whenever England played no more did we ask: ‘What is the score?’ Instead, it became ‘What did D’Oliveira score?’ or ‘How many wickets did he take?

…One wonders which country the schoolboys will now support.

The Cricketer has a review of the season by Tony Pawson that in structure is strikingly similar to Tony Lewis’s Journal of the Season in November’s issue. Could there have been a miscommunication that led Pawson to think that he was i/c the Journal in 1972? If so, it was a felicitous error, as Pawson was always worth reading. Occasionally, his path crossed with mine, for example in May:

Knott’s bewildering range of quick-footed shots brought him a century in each innings at Maidstone.

I was there for the second of these centuries. It was my first visit to Mote Park, a ground that became a favourite, the English venue that was most like our parkland grass bowls here in New Zealand. Pawson’s own batting for Kent, a generation earlier, was by all accounts similar to Knott’s in its fleetness of foot and scurrying between the wickets. Pawson also contributes portraits of Colin Cowdrey and Donald Carr.

Another day of fond memory is pictured, 10 September when Kent won the Sunday League by beating Worcestershire at St Lawrence. Guardian of the telephone in the Canterbury press box, Dudley Moore (who must have got tired of being asked where Peter Cook was) summed up Kent’s route to the title, culminating in chasing 190, the biggest target they faced all season. A century partnership between Luckhurst and Nicholls took them home.

David Frith made an early impression as Deputy Editor of The Cricketer by conducting an airmail interview with Clarrie Grimmett, the New Zealander who took 216 wickets with his leg spin for Australia. It’s fascinating. Grimmett says that his greatest regret was that he was not selected for the 1938 tour to England.

I had hoped to continue my great association with Bill O’Reilly; this breaking of our partnership was a terrific blow to both of us…The only reason I can think of for my omission is that I was thought to be too old.

As Grimmett was 46 at that time, he probably had a point. Though born in Dunedin, the leg-spinner learned his cricket at the Basin Reserve in Wellington, for whom he made his debut in the Plunket Shield when he was 17, leaving for Australia when he was 22.

Grimmett received an early lesson in the realities of Sheffield Shield cricket from New South Wales skipper Monty Noble, who berated him for getting through his overs too quickly (a six-ball over in a minute-and-a-half!) so not allowing the quickies a rest.

He nominates Stan McCabe as the greatest strokemaker he saw. Grimmett’s choice of the major batsman that he had a strong chance of dismissing is a surprise: Bradman.

          I always felt he was uncomfortable against good-length spin.

On modern cricket, he deplores short-pitched bowling, but blames the batsmen for it.

If they learnt correct footwork instead of ducking (and getting hit in the process) short bowling would die a natural death.

Both publications carry articles concerning Warwickshire’s Championship-winning captain AC Smith (the Edgbaston Smiths AC and MJK were known by their initials). Richard Eaton interviews him in Playfair, while The Cricketer piece carries Smith’s byline. Given his notorious statement to the media years later as CE of the TCCB: “no comment, but don’t quote me”, it is no surprise that Eaton’s is the more illuminating.

Warwickshire’s trip of brilliant West Indians, Gibbs, Kanhai and Kallicharran was supplemented mid-season by Deryck Murray who took AC’s place as wicketkeeper. Naturally, Smith turned to bowling instead.

I am a liquorice allsorts bowler. I think I can bowl cutters when the wicket is soft or broken, but I like to get the ball shone a bit and swing it on a good wicket,

He does not attempt to describe his bowling action, which was as chaotic as any I have seen, and accompanied by a pantomime villain’s grin at the point of release.

Mike Denness, in his Captain’s Column in Playfair, bemoans the travel demands made on county cricketers. One weekend began with a journey…

…from Folkestone on a Friday night to play Somerset at Glastonbury. On the Saturday night we motored up to Derby, returning on Sunday night to Somerset.

On the Tuesday evening we headed north to play Yorkshire at Bradford.

They played cricket on all these days, and the motorway network was nowhere near as developed as it became. It is surprising that there were not more injuries or deaths. As crowded as the fixture  list now remains, it is much more reasonable than it was.

This is the best edition of Playfair that I have come across so far. There is also Cardus on Ranji, Stephen Green on the Treasures of Lord’s and an interesting interview with the Glamorgan player Tony Cordle by Basil Easterbrook. Cordle was then about halfway through a county career that saw him take almost a thousand wickets, often in bowling partnership with Malcolm Nash.

He was one of the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean, and suffered many of the indignities of that community when he arrived in London. Relatives whisked him off to Cardiff, where, most fortuitously for Glamorgan, a job interview happened to be held overlooking the Cardiff Arms Park cricket ground. He decided to join the Cardiff club, despite, unusually for a Bajan, never having played in an organised game.

There is an interesting video on YouTube of a recent interview with Cordle by Glamorgan historian Andrew Hignell.

 

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.

 

 

Tony Pawson: Kent v Glamorgan, Sunday League, St Lawrence Ground, 3 August 1980

http://cricketarchive.com/Archive/Scorecards/40/40499.html

Tony Pawson, cricketer, footballer, fisherman and journalist, died this week at the age of 91, too old even for me to have seen him play for Kent, which he did as a batsman in the late forties and early fifties. I have his autobiography, Runs and Catches, published in 1980.

He signed it for me at Canterbury one day, helpfully dating the signature: 3 August 1980.

I find that Kent played Glamorgan in the Sunday League that day, recording a rare victory in a wretched summer. The great CJ Tavaré scored a century, and Alan Ealham followed a rumbustious unbeaten 81 with the only List A wicket he took in a 16-year career. Classy though—an Alan Knott stumping. As far as I recall, Ealham bowled off spin (though he might even have been a leggie) so slow that the batsman had forgotten he was in by the time the ball reached the other end. The reference to “Old Caps Day” means that there was a reunion of former players (but only those sufficiently proficient to have received their county cap, apparently[1]).

I flicked through Runs and Catches again after hearing that Pawson had died, and very entertaining it is. He was an amateur in the best sense; good enough to have played as a professional had he chosen to do so, not a dilettante taking a better player’s place in the holidays. He averaged 33 in 43 matches across eight seasons (on uncovered pitches, remember; add ten for comparison with modern players). Until his death he was one of the last left to have played against Bradman, which he did for Kent at Canterbury in 1948.

My friend Allen Hunt, an irrefutable source of information about the four decades of Kent cricket before I started watching, spoke of Pawson as an attacking batsman, part of a team that was fun to watch, if not that successful. Allen also said that in the field Pawson was as good as Ealham, Asif Iqbal and the other outstanding fielders in the great side of the seventies.

That he was one of Kent’s more athletic fielders is not surprising; he was one of the country’s leading amateur footballers in the immediate post-war years, an era when that meant something. He won an FA Amateur Cup winner’s medal playing for Pegasus (there’s a great name for a sports team) in front of 100,000 people at Wembley in 1951 and was good enough to play a few games for Charlton Athletic in the old First Division. He scored on debut against Tottenham Hotspur and the Charlton directors showed their appreciation by standing, turning to Mrs Pawson and doffing their bowler hats. Roman Abramovich ought to try that with the Chelsea wags. Pawson was selected for the Great Britain team in the Stockholm Olympics of 1952 (they lost to Luxembourg).

The “catches” in the title is a pun; it is a rule of publishing that all sports books must contain a pun in the title and this one is less excruciating than most. It refers to Pawson’s later career as a fly fisherman, which had not reached its apogee when the book was published. In 1983 he was a member of the England team that won the World Championship. There is also a chapter on his military career, fighting the Germans across north Africa and Italy.

After he finished playing he became a journalist, reporting on cricket and football for the Observer, combining the writing with a full-time career in industrial relations, one of post-war Britain’s more challenging vocations. He was still reporting on one sport or the other every weekend when I met him. Though more recent than his playing career, his description of the world of journalism would seem Dickensian to readers younger than 30.

Copy had to be dictated down the phone from the ground. The first problem was to find a phone. There was usually just one line to the press box, invariably guarded by the most bad-tempered of the local reporters. At Canterbury there was often a harassed reporter in the queue for the public phone box beside the pavilion; I was profusely thanked by Rex Alston, freelancing for the Daily Telegraph, when I let him in ahead of me one day in the late sixties.[2]

Reporting on a Northern Ireland v England international at Windsor Park, Belfast, Pawson had identified a post office near the ground and paid the postmistress to keep a phone booth free for him at full-time. He had not allowed for the line of policemen present at the end of the game to prevent anybody from going down the road in which the post office was located. Deploying the bodyswerve and turn of pace that had served him so well on the wing for Pegasus, he darted through the thin blue line and his report made the early editions.

Tony Pawson was very friendly that August day 32 years ago, and chatted for some time about the book and the Observer, the future of which was under threat. What a life he seems to have had, unBritish in the way that he showed that it is possible to do several things well.  He was given the OBE for services to angling. It could have been cricket, football, business or journalism.

I doubt that there is anybody left alive who played for Kent in the forties.

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[1] The awarding of county caps, a somewhat arcane system undermined by the frequent of movement of players  around the counties but retained by Kent, should be the subject of a post at some point.

[2] Rex Alston was the only man whose marriage was announced in The Times after his death, but that’s another story.