Yorkshire rolled for 40: 7 to 10 May 1967

After four days in which they had made it onto the field for a total of one hour Kent had a stellar third day at Bradford, skittling the champions for 40. Peter West, there for The Times, was a Kent supporter so would have enjoyed recording the carnage.

Cowdrey’s declaration at 93 for four was made in the hope of repeating the first-innings rout, but drying pitches lose their spite quickly, so it was easy enough for the champions to save the draw, if not their dignity. How The gnarly Yorkshire pros would have hated that happening against the jazz hats of Kent more than anyone else.

Geoff Boycott’s pair was the only one he suffered during his long career. It was Norman Graham who got him both times. Given his chance in the first game of the season at Trent Bridge, by the end of this match he had taken 15 wickets in not much more than three innings, securing the position of first-choice opening bowler, one that he held for the next decade. 

There was another close finish at Taunton, with Somerset left 12 short with one wicket left. There was no requirement in 1967 that a certain number of overs be bowled in the last hour, let alone the day as a whole; it was all on the clock. Here, and elsewhere as the season went on, there were accusations of time wasting. Carlton Forbes took so long to bowl the penultimate over, that it became the ultimate, though as John Woodcock writes, this was as likely to have cost his side the match as it was the opposition:

It was almost as close Between Essex and Glamorgan at Chelmsford, where Rodney Cass (who later moved to Worcestershire) played out Don Shepherd’s last over to secure a draw with one wicket left and 16 needed. At the Oval, there was a third exciting draw. Surrey were 28 short with two standing against Warwickshire.

Leicestershire and Middlesex both won and were two of six counties with 12 points at the top of the table. 

The more you look at the news of 1967, the more you see contemporary parallels. Prime minister Harold Wilson committed the Government to seeking entry into the Common Market, as the EU was then known. He opened a Commons debate on the issue with a speech that he told Dick Crossman was “Gladstonian length and consistency”. It didn’t match the five and six-hour duration of the Grand Old Man’s budget speeches, but was 90 minutes long, which would be unthinkable these days. The headline that I tweeted included a promise from Wilson that Brentry wouldn’t lead to devaluation of the pound. Within six months he was back on television announcing devaluation in his famous “pound in your pocket” broadcast, which started the subsidence of the currency that has peaked since the 2016 referendum.

Readers surprised by the inclusion of a New Zealand story will not be aware that I live in Wellington, capital of NZ. The talks referred to may well have taken place in the very rooms in which I spend the working day.

Deluge at Dartford: 3 to 6 May 1967

 “…three of the nastiest cricketing days even the hardiest of watchers could remember” was how John Woodcock summed up the experience of watching the opening match of the Indians tour at Worcester. The rain that swept away most of the programme over these three days would have come as a mercy to spectators, particularly those at Harrogate who saw Alan Jones and Roger Davis of Glamorgan face 11 successive maidens before the rain provided relief.

The only positive result was at Taunton where Hampshire beat Somerset in contrived circumstances, reported by a disapproving Alan Gibson.

The noteworthy thing here is that Gibson thought it unusual; another twenty years on and negotiated targets had become the usual way in which three-day games reached a definite conclusion

The outstanding cricket of these three days was provided by two South Africans whose stories between them were to write much of the history of English cricket over the next decade or so. Basil D’Oliveira had made his test debut the previous summer, 15 years after he might have done but for South Africa’s apartheid laws. Against the Indians he made the highest score of his career at that point, reported by the freezing Woodcock.

Meanwhile at Hove Tony Greig made an entrance to the County Championship that was as flamboyant and attention-grabbing as the rest of his career was to be on and off the field, inspiring this anonymous reporter to invoke Dexter, Fry and Ranjitsinhji (who he can't spell), all in two paragraphs:

I have made the point before that all the noise that surrounded Greig over World Series Cricket, and which came out of his mouth as a commentator, has obscured appreciation of what a wonderful player he was. Here, he came in at 34 for three against an attack of Statham, Higgs and Lever, England pacemen past, present and future and took them apart.

Nothing so exciting at Hesketh Park, Dartford, where Kent laboured to 199 from 110 overs. And there was time for 28 more overs in the Gloucestershire first innings on the first day before the rain washed away the last two days. 

Hesketh Park was the plain sister ground among the family of Kent beauties. It staged 33 first-class games between 1956 and 1990. I saw the last of these, against Leicestershire. It was an example of three-day cricket at its best, a tense battle of the spinners that ended in a Kent win in the last hour without the need for artifice. Yet the pitch was reported for turning on the first day, proving that the game could no longer tolerate the imperfection necessary for the three-day game to prosper.

A frosty beginning: 29 April – 2 May 1967

Notts v Kent scorecard

The correspondents of The Times found the first full weekend of the season a universally unpleasant experience. John Woodcock, at Lord’s for MCC v Yorkshire, found it “vilely cold, disagreeably noisy and intermittently wet”. The noise was from the building of the new Tavern Stand (the one before the present structure), which had displaced Sir Neville Cardus from his usual place on the promenade, forcing him to “sit huddled on the pavilion balcony”. 

Alan Gibson never much enjoyed Derby, where he saw the home side beat Leicestershire. His nemesis PJK Gibbs opened the batting for Derbyshire but escaped individual censure as the scoring rate remained at two an over throughout.  Play was interrupted by “a thick sleet near enough to snow to satisfy a journalist’s conscience”.

Snow also stopped play at Trent Bridge, where AA Thomson reported that the players “might have been emerging from an igloo rather than a pavilion”. The game was an attritional, low-scoring draw. Kent’s first innings 169 left them three short of a first-innings lead, so Nottinghamshire took the four points that went with that. The home side set Kent 174 to win, but they managed only 36 for four between the snow showers. 

Nottinghamshire were in a slump in the mid-sixties. They had finished bottom of the Championship in 1965 and 1966 and had the look of a team cobbled together from cast-offs and the discontented. They were led by Norman Hill, the closest rival to Colin Milburn for the title of England’s most rotund cricketer. AA Thomson reports that in the second innings “Hill advanced with what seemed undue deliberation towards his 50”.

Other than that, Nottinghamshire’s best performers were their two West Indians, Deryck Murray and Carlton Forbes. Murray kept wicket for the West Indies in 62 tests and is remembered as a Warwickshire player for several years in the seventies. He also had a couple of seasons at Trent Bridge as a batsman, (Roy Swetman kept wicket), topping the county’s averages in 1966 after coming down from Cambridge, where he had been captain. Later in life Murray represented Trinidad at the United Nations.

Forbes, a Jamaican, bowled left-arm pace for Nottinghamshire for more than a decade, taking 707 wickets as well as being a handy lower order hitter. His seven for 58 here launched him towards a hundred wickets for the season for the second successive year, a fine effort for a poor team.

Basharat Hassan, of the angular batting stance, made his debut, beginning a decade of conscientious service to the county. The Nottinghamshire side also included Mike Taylor, later of Hampshire and twin brother of Derek Taylor who kept wicket for Somerset. 

For Kent, John Shepherd made a Championship debut with the sort of performance that would be repeated over and over through the following 15 seasons, with three for 53 and a 55 that Wisden describes as “defiant”. Kent’s outstanding player was Norman Graham, whose breakthrough season this was to be. His match figures were 8 for 103, the responsive pitch ideal for Graham’s forensic probing from a great height.

As I wrote in the introductory piece, this project will keep an eye on what else was happening on these days fifty years ago, and will expand on some of the events referred to on Twitter (@kentccc1967). Saturday was FA Cup semi-final day, with both games kicking off at 3 pm along with the Football League programme. Geoffrey Green’s description of Jimmy Greaves’ goal for Tottenham against Nottingham Forest matches a great writer with a great footballer.

In the wider world, showing that there is nothing new under the sun, the big political issue was Europe (Brentry rather than Brexit). The cartoon shows, left to right, James Callaghan (Chancellor of the Exchequer), George Brown (Foreign Secretary), Denis Healey (Defence), Harold Wilson (PM) and Douglas Jay (Board of Trade).

The location of the third London airport was exercising the letter writers. Air Commodore JE Allen-Jones wrote to The Times to promote the Isle of Sheppey in Kent as the best location for an airport that could handle the 900-seater jets that would be the norm very soon.