Bong! Two centuries for Majid Bong! Boredom at Neath Bong! News at Ten Begins: 1 to 7 July 1967

Kent v Pakistanis 1 – 4 July

It was a week off for Kent, in Championship terms at least, though the first half of the week was occupied by a game against the second touring side of the summer, the Pakistanis. Unlike the earlier game against the Indians, the opportunity was taken to rest three bowlers: Graham, Sayer and Dixon. David Nicholls came in for his first game of the season. A punchy left-handed batsman, Nicholls started with a roar in 1963 with a double century, but had not reached three figures since. He made a duck in his only innings in this match and might have been contemplating the possibility that this would be his last season, but an opportunity for a change of role was about to present itself that would keep him in the game for another 13 years.

Majid Jehangir scored a century for the tourists. We know him better as Majid Khan and he was to make another hundred in the second half of the week, against Middlesex. John Arlott-Silchester described him there as a “pleasantly extrovert batsman”. Unfortunately, Majid also opened the bowling, revealing that Pakistan would be no more able to field an opening attack of test class than India had been. At Lord’s Eric Russell and Mike “Pasty” Harris rattled up a Middlesex first-wicket record of 312 against them. The most significant action of the game at Canterbury was a breezy 41 from Majid’s new ball partner, one Asif Iqbal. That day may have been when the idea germinated that here might be a player who would enhance the Kent team and please its crowds when the overseas player rules were liberalised for the 1968 season.

Majid Khan became as popular at Glamorgan as Asif Iqbal was to be with Kent. They could have done with his strokeplay to liven up proceedings at Neath this week. As was so often the case, Alan Gibson’s report contained more to please than anything that happened on the field of play. 

On this occasion the Glamorgan secretary Wilf Wooller did not take to the public address to offer spectators their money back as he was to do on a later occasion when Brian Close was captain of Somerset. The game looked a certain draw when Tony Lewis put himself on and won the game with a little filthy legspin.

The big match of the week was at Grace Road where Championship leaders Leicestershire hosted second-placed Yorkshire, who reclaimed what everybody from Middlesbrough to Sheffield believed was their rightful place on top of the table. Ray Illingworth took 11 in the match to follow 14 over the first two tests, though John Woodcock was about to describe him as having a “limited future” as a test cricketer. Mike Brearley is the standard example of a player picked as a captain rather than on his own playing merits, but Illingworth would do just as well. Leicestershire were to wait another eight years for their first Championship, led by Ray Illingworth.

John Newcombe became the last amateur men’s singles champion at Wimbledon with an easy victory over Bungert of Germany. The men’s final was always played on a Friday in those days, with Ann Jones to play Billie Jean King in the ladies’ final on Saturday.

The first News at Ten was broadcast on ITV on 1 July 1967 presented by Alastair Burnet and Andrew Gardner. This was the first nightly news programme that had the space for longer reports and analysis, with journalists, rather than announcers, as presenters. It began the golden age of ITN during which it set the style of British TV news with the BBC catching up as best it could. 

Of course, news and current affairs were regarded as altogether different things then, and the BBC still had the lead in the latter field. Panorama was presented by Robin Day with a reporting team that included Richard Kershaw, James Mossman and Michael Charlton (who had been the guest Australian radio commentator on the 1956 Ashes series). The nightly Twenty-Four Hours programme was delivered by as rich a collection of presenting and reporting talent as there has been in a British current affairs show: Cliff Michelmore, Ian Trethowan, Robert McKenzie, Kenneth Allsop, Julian Pettifer, Fyfe Robertson, Michael Barrett, Leonard Parkin, and even the young Michael Parkinson (it was of Fyfe Robertson that Clive James once wrote “he described himself as an intelligent man in the street, which he proved half right by standing in a street as he said it”).

The reviewer of the first News at Ten in The Times was Michael Billington, also deputy to Irving Wardle as theatre critic. In 1971 Billington became the Guardian’s theatre critic, a position in which he serves still. Few have spent the half-century more enjoyably than Michael Billington.

This week, Leo Abse’s private member’s bill that decriminalised homosexual activity between consenting males over the age of 21 completed its passage through the House of Commons. It was read a third time at 5.50 am after eight hours of filibustering from the backwoodsmen, mining deep into their considerable reserves of malice and ignorance to keep proceedings going. Some of these splutterings might seem amusing now, but this week in 2017  here in New Zealand the House of Representatives passed a motion of apology to those men convicted before our law was changed, almost twenty years later than in Britain. The debate reminded us that thousands of decent men lived their lives in secrecy and fear because of the kind of ridiculousness that these fools expounded. So not funny at all.

Even Roy Jenkins, the epitome of the liberal Home Secretary whose initiative the bill was and who ensured that it was given sufficient parliamentary time to pass, referred in his third reading speech to “those who suffer from this disability” showing that the passing of the bill by the Commons was a beginning not an end.

Butterflies on wheels: 24 to 30 June 1967

Kent were second in the table by the end of this week after a rain-induced draw against Northamptonshire and a strange game at the Oval that was a two-and-half-day funeral dirge before becoming an Iron Maiden gig on the last afternoon. The Times correspondent, John Silchester, was impatient with Kent’s “care-worn, over responsible” approach on the first day:

On the second day, on which only 173 runs were scored, Silchester was prepared to make the “dully difficult” pitch take its share of responsibility. Like his colleagues around the country, he was impressed by Norman Graham:

Set 250 to win, Surrey batted with an aggression absent in the game thus far, a triumph of “mind over marl” for Silchester. Edrich and Stewart put on 133 for the second wicket, taking Surrey to a position of 111 to win from 95 minutes with nine wickets left. But no other batsman reached double figures as Underwood’s slide-rule accuracy and variations of pace removed both partners and three of the rest as those nine wickets mustered just 38 between them. 

Who was this John Silchester, with his shrewd observation and pleasing phrases? Why had I not heard of him before? It should have been obvious given that Silchester was a Roman settlement just north of Basingstoke, the home town of John Arlott, who took the name as his Times identity, the Observer having exclusive use of his real name. As a disguise it was as effective as a comedy moustache. It was in January 1967 that The Times had started giving its correspondents a byline. For the best part of two centuries before that they had been anonymous. Has there ever been a better collection of cricket writers on one paper at one time than Woodcock, Gibson, Arlott and Thomson? It was in the following year that Arlott became the cricket correspondent of The Guardian, under his own name.

As we approached high summer county cricket was becoming more peripatetic. This week Peterborough, Colchester, Bournemouth, and Lydney were among the Championship venues. Gloucestershire played at Lydney, the other side of the Severn in the Forest of Dean from 1963 to 1969. At least by 1967 the Severn Bridge was in place; before then it would have taken a couple of hours to drive there from Bristol.

Gloucestershire have long been cricketing missionaries, taking their message to new places in the county and beyond. During my 19 years in Bristol I watched them play at home at eight grounds, one more than Kent home venues at which I have got out the binoculars and scotch eggs. Those eight include Moreton-in-Marsh (another long drive from Bristol, especially for the one ball of a 1991 Sunday League match that they got in before the rain came), Swindon (in the shadow of the main stand of Swindon Town FC), the Wagon Works and Archdeacon’s Meadow in Gloucester, and three grounds in Cheltenham. Beside the College, there was the Victoria Ground against the Indians in 1986 and the Dowty Arle Ground for a Benson and Hedges zonal game in 1992, both because of building work at Bristol.

The defeat of Surrey moved Kent to second in the Championship, four points behind Yorkshire, who had a game in hand. Leicestershire slipped to third, drawing against Somerset thanks to a fifth-wicket partnership of 148 between Barry Dudleston and Jack Birkenshaw. Dudleston made the first of his 32 first-class hundreds. Regular readers of My Life in Cricket Scorecards will know that Dudleston was to become my personal ski instructor almost two decades later, so commemorating his maiden century is the least I can do. No cricketer has had his name misspelled more often than Barry and The Times marked the occasion by doing so in two different ways; Duddleston in the headline and first two paras and Duddlestone thereafter. 

England won the second test in four days despite losing two half days to rain. A first innings of 386 was enough for a winning margin of an innings and 124. On paper they don’t look a bad side, with Pataudi, Wadekar, Borde and Hanumant Singh among the batsmen and the quartet of four great spinners. But they were mostly at the start of their careers and inexperienced in English conditions; having no fast bowlers worth the name didn’t help either.

In the wider world the big news story of the week was the trial of Mick Jagger, Keith Richard and others on drugs charges. Jagger was sentenced to three months for the possession of four pep pills (as they were called then) which he had purchased legally in Italy, but which it was technically illegal to bring into Britain. This spurred the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg (father of Jacob Rees-Mogg) to write his most famous leader “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” in which he stridently condemned the sentence.

Fifty years later, today’s Times features an interview with Jagger in which he describes that edition of The Times being delivered to his cell: “The Times was thrown through the slot in my cell door, and thudded and hit the concrete floor of my cell and I thought, ‘What the f*** is that?’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s nice, they’re delivering me The Times’.” A lovely story, but had Mick scanned the front page more carefully he would have read an account of his release from Brixton prison on bail the previous afternoon.

Wimbledon’s first week was in progress. It was the last amateur championship and the first British outside broadcast in colour. This was independent of the black-and-white coverage and required its own commentary, which was provided, rather bizarrely, by the DJ Keith Fordyce. 

David Dimbleby was a Panorama reporter in 1967, though this didn’t stop him writing to The Times in support of Israel, a freedom of expression that he and other BBC presenters do not have today.

Tunbridge Wells Week: 17 to 23 June 1967

“…the Nevill Ground is looking at its midsummer best for cricket week. Kent is unusually rich in grounds…and many people vote the Nevill the pleasantest of the lot”.

That could have been written now, at the end of the nineteenth century or at any point in between. Certainly, it was my sentiment when I was there last July. Here, it was AP Ryan, reporting for The Times in 1967 on the perennial Tunbridge Wells fixture between Kent and Sussex, the county border separating the two being nearby, if not cutting through the ground as the story goes.

In 2017  there were problems with the preparation of the pitch, with talk of moving the game to Canterbury at the last minute. Standards are higher now than fifty years ago when 253 was the highest of the eight innings, and Brian Luckhurst’s 126 was the only individual score higher than 64. In comparison, 2017’s “questionable” pitch saw two 350-plus totals and a 298 for two declared. That doesn’t mean that the cricket is necessarily better, and a different balance between bat and ball was essential for three-day cricket to work.

Hero of the week was Norman Graham, whose 22 wickets took him back to top of the national bowling averages. UA Titley, taking up The Times’ pen for the second half of the week, said that Graham brought the ball down from a greater height than anybody since Farnes, the Essex quick bowler of the 1930s (Titley may not yet have seen Tony Greig). “He only takes seven real paces in his run-up, an economic approach, in direct contrast with others of about similar pace, which enables him to bowl for longer periods than most.”

Unusually, Derek Underwood did not bowl against Sussex, but had match figures of seven for 48 as Worcestershire were shot out for 106 and 73.

Kent’s two wins raised them to fourth place in the Championship, six points behind the new leaders Yorkshire, who beat Northamptonshire by an innings  thanks to a point-making unbeaten 220 from Geoffrey Boycott. In less than a fortnight the great accumulator had made two of only five double centuries made in 1967. In 2016 (when the Championship consisted of 16 games per team rather than 28 as there were in ’67) there were 26 double hundreds; four-day cricket and “better” (ie batsman-friendly) pitches the explanation. 

The second test at Lord’s was a Boycott-free zone, with Amiss coming in for him and Barrington moving up to open. India reverted to their first-innings form at Headingley and were skittled out for 152. John Snow and Warwickshire’s David Brown took three each. The pitch at Lord’s was fast enough for John Woodcock to be thankful that a really quck bowler like Charlie Griffith or Graham McKenzie was playing, though I think it would have been quite fun. Besides, I doubt that McKenzie was any quicker than Snow, than whom I have not seen a smoother or more rhythmical bowler play for England.

According to Woodcock, John Murray was standing further from the stumps than any English keeper since Evans and Andrew to Frank Tyson at his typhonic fastest in Australia in ‘54/5. Murray took a world-record equalling six catches, but there was a hurricane brewing to the south-east by the name of Knott that was to blow him out of international cricket within weeks.

I tweeted three general news stories this week. Paul Fox was appointed Controller of BBC 1. Fox was a—arguably the—founding father of televised sport in Britain and also edited Panorama. His six-year tenure of the role has a credible claim to be the golden age of British TV, as colour replaced black-and-white and programmes such as Parkinson, Dad’s Army, The Two Ronnies appeared, with Fox the midwife (there were a fair few stinkers too). But what caught my eye was his salary: £5,000 a year. The Bank of England’s inflation calculator tells me that is worth £83,000 today, healthy enough but not exceptional. The nearest equivalent role today—Director of Content—is paid £325,000. 

One of the most pleasurable things about rummaging through the pages of The Times for 1967 is the parliamentary reports, detailed accounts of the day’s debates. Such coverage has all but disappeared now, the press gallery apparently occupied only by the writers of spasmodically amusing sketches. This week the House was debating decimalisation, on the principle of which both main parties agreed, while still arguing about the detail. Iain Macleod, shadow Chancellor, wanted a ten-shilling base for the new currency, while Chancellor Jim Callaghan supported the pound (as he frequently had to in more substantive ways in years to come). 

If the decimalisation debate is a curiosity, that on Leo Abse’s private member’s bill to decriminalise homosexual activity between consenting adults is horrifying. The antediluvian attitudes that rumbled out from Tory knights of the shire on the backbenches were shameful.

One may feel nostalgic for three-day cricket on uncovered pitches, but, once more, a close look at 1967 shows that the present is a better place to be.