The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  Bill was of course the definitive Somerset partisan. Was he being hard on his traditional West Country opponents? I arrived in Bristol in the mid 1950s, having by then rid myself, by the daily disciplines of my chosen craft, of at least the outer layer of cricket’s incessant romanticism. My kindly sports editor told me how difficult the revered Wally had been immediately after the war, and that there was a certain cold rigidity about the Gloucestershire hierarchy.

  This I was to discover for myself. Basil Allen, master of foxhounds and belonging to the old social tradition as captain, had just gone. So had Sir Derrick Bailey, a quaint choice, and Jack Crapp, a quiet, delightful man but misplaced leader. George Emmett was the next captain. He was a small man with a strong, leathery face and a military manner that reflected his background. He frightened a few of the young pros and maybe did them good. But I never saw him smile in the surrounds of the county ground. He was a martinet, making the rules as assertively as any amateur. Away from the ground I got on well with him, taking surreptitious looks at the wrists which mocked his size and magically created the most exquisite of boundaries.

  By now I was coming to the demoralizing conclusion that cricket wasn’t all fun. Those relaxed faces and twinkling eyes on the treasured cigarette cards, stacked with past issues of Radio Fun alongside my cosy cottage bed, had apparently deceived me all the time. I began the painful business of intensifying my research with as much dispassion as I could muster. There was, as a starting point, the case of Herbert Tremenheere Hewett.

  He had been an early hero of mine. It wasn’t just the grandeur of the name or the fact that he was born just outside Taunton. I knew he’d gone to Harrow and gained a blue at Oxford. Such things were of minimal interest in my youthful imaginings. But I did keep for years a faded print of him and Lionel Palairet, standing self-consciously in front of the scoreboard at the county ground on the day they scored 346 for the first wicket, against Yorkshire. It’s still a Somerset record. The stand, in 1892, took not much more than three and a half hours. Hewett, the pugnacious left-hander, was then bowled by Bobby Peel.

  I came to acquire all the most inconsequential, meaningless things about him: that he was known as ‘The Colonel’, that he was meant to go in for law, that he picked his teeth. Such relative trivia vied in my undimmed affection with the statistics. I assumed he was a fine captain; I knew he could drive, or more so pull, as well as anyone around in the West in those late-Victorian days (Grace and a few dozen others were not part of my self-chosen sporting education). It never occured to me there might be something odd about the fact that he played no more than fifty times for his county and then left abruptly.

  The truth came to me gradually. Herbert Hewett had been notorious in the Taunton dressing room for the acerbity of his tongue, the dogmatic nature of his opinions and the hypersensitive way he reacted to any critical observation. He could win games for Somerset by his powerful, exciting stroke play. But he also had a penchant for snatching up his belongings and leaving the ground in a huff when something offended him.

  He was very angry indeed about the manner he was blamed for the fiasco in 1893 when the Australians came to Taunton, were told conditions were unfit for play and went off for a picnic on the Quantocks instead. The umpires, under pressure – as hundreds of angry spectators waited impatiently for admission – reversed their decision, and play started in late afternoon. Hewett was the scapegoat, or so he considered, and he never forgave the county. He appeared to sulk when it was his turn to bat and gave his wicket away. Soon after that, he had resigned.

  My natural sympathies were with him for a long time. I saw him only thumping his fours through midwicket. Why not blame the rest of the Somerset committee or the umpires? Yet I was to discover that there was often fire in his nostrils. Two years after he left the county he was asked to lead an England side against Yorkshire in the Scarborough Festival. It was quite an honour for someone who had almost been forgotten.

  Just as for the visit of the Australians two years before, there was too much rain. The umpires looked at the puddles and said play was impossible. Hewett was more flexible this time. He accepted that the festival crowd wanted some cricket at the appointed hour but was overruled. The spectators turned on him. Explanations could doubtless have been given in the public prints the following day. Hewett had no intention to wait around. He changed and left the ground. F. R. Spofforth, ‘The Demon’ no less, took over.

  Was I, as a lad, needlessly selective in my reading habits? I simply took for granted that there could be no better life than that of a county cricketer. I was seduced by the iridescent caps, the freshly creased cream flannels, the observed ritual, the civilized applause; above all, the aesthetic beauty of the game. It left no room for malice.

  But alas, it was there all the time. The counties’ history books have since revealed the extent of peevish attitudes, pettiness, mean-spiritedness and even fisticuffs. In Victorian and Edwardian England, the poor old pros were paid badly and often drank too much. Theirs was a claustrophobic, frustrated world. Merit was apt to be squeezed out by social clout. Weary professionals were over-bowled and sweated in the outfield. At night, in the nearest sawdust bar, they occasionally got on each other’s nerves.

  There are tales of exchanged blows, most of them wisely undocumented. It is unlikely that many of the haymakers were in the class of the one the Aussie captain Clem Hill delivered at the expense of fellow selector Peter McAlister. Committee-room folklore suggests that moment of summary justice found plenty of approval.

  Threats to suspend fixtures with other counties were not unusual. Ask Yorkshire and Lancashire. And, of course, any side which had Archie MacLaren and Walter Brearley around at the same time could expect a few ructions. The handsome MacLaren was no favourite of mine because of the 424 he dared to score against my native county. Based on geographical allegiance and little else, I labelled him a self-opinionated authoritarian. But I knew he moaned a good deal, at times pedantically, and once refused to go on with a match against Middlesex at Lord’s over allegations of pitch damage. Once he huffed so much, too, that he was on the point of walking out on Lancashire to join Hampshire. As for the excitable Brearley, he bowled full tosses at Gloucestershire after one unseemly row. And, more dramatically than MacLaren, he was always threatening to resign.

  Who was the most tetchy first-class cricketer of all? Bob Wyatt, with his lugubrious features and taciturn approach, looked it. Shortly before he died, I was lucky enough to spend a day with him in his Cornish home. He was unwell, but the charm was boundless. We stopped for a tea interval: buttered toast and raspberry jam, served ritualistically by Molly, his devoted wife. ‘Bob had this reputation of being bad-tempered, I can assure you it was misplaced. The thing was he had this kind of permanent scowl on his face,’ she told me.

  I wasn’t present when Viv Richards made his unscheduled call at the press box at the Recreation Ground, St John’s, when he should have been leading out the West Indian team. I was around when Ian Botham made an impulsive diversion towards a taunting spectator, after being dismissed in a Somerset match. Momentarily I feared for the consequences. ‘Both’ was at a low point and the shot had been that of a neurotic batsman; my sympathies were with him entirely. It was right that the insensitive fan was made to apologize.

  His contemporaries, players and scribes, cited Sydney Barnes as ‘a very difficult customer’. He stood erect and intimidating, in expression alone. We ceaselessly argue, however skimpy the evidence he chose to give us of himself as a county bowler, that he was the best of all. He articulated his worth and one didn’t question it. S. F. Barnes was a respected rather than loved man.

  We could all compile lists of prickly cricketers, our judgements in many cases influenced by a personal experience or relayed tale. Some of the Middlesex players retained reservations about Walter Robins. It should have been a cordial occasion when the England team left for the 1959–60 tour of the West Indies on the banana boat from Avonmouth. The press
had been invited to wish the party, which included local boy David Allen, bon voyage. For some obscure reason, the manager, Robins, wasn’t enamoured of the idea. He was in a bad temper, and the memories for me of that tour were affected by that needless rebuff. The reporters were hustled off the boat, without explanation, work undone. It seemed to me poor psychology and poor manners on the manager’s part. Why were we asked on board in the first place?

  The lack of joy is something I continue to resent. It conflicts too drastically with the game that, in my innocence, I cherished so much. During the 1950s, when I first found myself regularly covering first-class cricket (and asked for nothing more from my profession), it bothered me when players recurrently nominated Surrey as their least favourite county. This was the Surridge era. They were winning a great deal and I suspected an element of envy. Then I saw them up close. They were noisy; several of their bowlers were excessive in the tone of their challenges. And I went off them.

  The captains, Surridge and then Peter May, would have justified that combative edge. But I remember one specific match involving Surrey on a lovely day under blue skies. For me there was no sunshine at all. Have any of us, I suppose one must ask, the right to ignore the vagaries of the human condition and hope for a permanently warm-hearted weather report?

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  Another county cricketer now, altogether more obscure than the ones previously celebrated. But this one gave his name to one of the most famous of all fictional characters. As the son of the man who ‘discovered’ Jeeves, Rowland Ryder is ideally placed to write about him.

  ROWLAND RYDER

  The Unplayable Jeeves (1995)

  In the late summer of 1910, my father, then Warwickshire secretary, was on a walking holiday in his native Yorkshire and stayed one night in the village of Hawes. Using his murderous cut-throat razor, he had mistimed a stroke while shaving; a visit to the local doctor was necessary. The doctor, having dealt with the cut, prescribed a visit to the afternoon’s cricket match, and here, on the lovely ground at Hawes, my father saw a young cricketer whose effortless grace as a bowler told something of his potential. At the end of the innings he said to him, ‘How would you like to play for Warwickshire?’ That was how the Jeeves saga began.

  In those days there was a two-year qualification period in force, so in 1911 – when Warwickshire won the championship for the first time – he played no first-class cricket. In 1912, the year of the Triangular Tournament, he played for Warwickshire against the Australians. He failed with the bat, making 1 (run out), and o, but did better with his bowling, taking 2 for 35. ‘Tiger’ Smith gave him his first wicket, snapping up the obdurate Kelleway.

  The seasons 1913 and 1914 were to be Jeeves’s years of glory.

  In 1913, playing in his first championship game at Edgbaston, against Leicestershire, he made 46 and 23. Opening the bowling with F. R. Foster he took 3 for 24 and 5 for 37, playing a major part in his team’s victory. This early-season promise was fulfilled. His fast-medium deliveries, with their lightning speed off the pitch, yielded a rich harvest: 106 batsmen, including J. B. Hobbs, were victims to his flowering genius. He was top of his county’s bowling averages, his wickets costing 20 runs apiece.

  In 1914 Percy Jeeves went from strength to strength. Playing for the Players against the Gentlemen he took 4 for 44, his scalps including those of Spooner and Fry. Michael Falcon, who played in the match, had vivid memories of Jeeves’s deliveries biting into the soft pitch, and throwing up pieces of turf – ‘I said ‘‘Hullo, here’s someone!’’’ In the last match that he ever played at Edgbaston, he took 5 for 52 in Surrey’s first innings, clean bowling Surrey’s opening batsmen, Tom Hayward and Jack Hobbs. He was showing marked ability, too, as an aggressive middle-order batsman; in a lively 70 against Yorkshire he hit one bowler out of the ground and into the Edgbaston road. Chief of all, it was expected that he would develop into a bowler of world class.

  Percy Jeeves became engaged to Annie Austin, younger sister of George Austin, the Warwickshire scorer. When war broke out against Germany, Jeeves joined the Warwickshire Regiment, and was killed in the battle of the Somme on 22 July 1916. Annie Austin, who lived into her eighties, never married.

  What is the connection between these two who share the name Jeeves, the inimitable butler – ‘Not the yellow spats, sir’ – and the splendid bowler? After forty years the question that had often been vaguely in my mind took definite shape: had P. G. Wodehouse chosen the name as a result of seeing Percy Jeeves in the cricket field?

  In 1967 I had adapted The Code of the Woosters into play form and was producing it at a school in Norfolk, and during the same period I was also writing a feature article for Wisden, ‘Warwickshire the Unpredictable’. It seemed at that time that I was perpetually face to face with Jeeves. Was there a connection? After all, Conan Doyle got the name for Sherlock Holmes from a Derbyshire cricketer named Shacklock; could not Wodehouse, who was in the Dulwich XI of 1900, have followed a similar course?

  If anyone knew it would be the Master himself, so I looked up his address in Who’s Who and wrote to him, asking if he had named Jeeves of the Junior Ganymede after Percy Jeeves of the Warwickshire Cricket Club. Back came the reply from Remsenburg, Long Island, almost in less time than it takes to say ‘How’s that?’:

  Yes, you are quite right. It must have been in 1913 that I paid a visit to my parents in Cheltenham and went to see Warwickshire play Gloucestershire in the Cheltenham College Ground.

  I suppose Jeeves’s bowling must have impressed me, for I remembered him in 1916 when I was in New York and starting the Jeeves and Bertie saga, and it was just the name I wanted. I have always thought till lately that he was playing for Gloucestershire that day. (I remember admiring his action very much.)

  Warwickshire did, in fact, play Gloucestershire at Cheltenham in 1913: Percy Jeeves took o for 43 in 17 overs, and 1 for 12 in 7 overs – evidently bowling without the luck that even the best player needs, but bowling well enough for P. G. Wodehouse to remember his action three years later.

  Excited at the news about Jeeves, I took the liberty of sending PGW a Warwickshire tie. In a delightful letter of acceptance he wrote that the tie was much admired in the family and that it is ‘the only one I wear nowadays’. Naturally, I thought that this statement was simply an example of Wodehouse’s courtesy. However, when Michael Davie went out to the States to interview him for the Observer colour supplement in connection with PGW’s ninetieth birthday, it was interesting to see from the photographs that he was indeed wearing the Warwickshire tie. Michael Davie noticed that the tie was a little worse for wear, having been singed in places by embers from the Master’s pipe. Hearing of this, Leslie Deakins, the Warwickshire secretary, sent him another tie, which was pleasantly acknowledged . . .

  He wore the Warwickshire tie for the remainder of his life; he sported it at his ninetieth birthday celebrations and, when he received a second one from the Warwickshire secretary, he had virtually become an honorary member of the club that played its home matches only an hour’s drive from the Cheltenham ground where he saw the inimitable Jeeves.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  Our next set of essays rehabilitates local heroes who, but for chance or history, could very well have become great stars. C. L. R. James writes of a Trinidadian batsman whose followers experienced an unspeakable sadness when he failed on his only tour of England. Matthew Engel remembers an altogether atypical English opener, a striker of fours and sixes, whose career was ended early by accident. In writing of the unfulfilled hopes of Dik Abed, Dale Slater also indicts the system of apartheid, which prohibited the emergence of black and coloured cricketers of talent. Finally, Philip Snow writes lovingly of an untrained but gloriously effective Fijian hitter, who in a more globalized world would have set Lord’s alight.

  C. L. R. JAMES

  The Most Unkindest Cut (1963)

  Wilton St Hill. In my gallery he is present with Bradman, Sobers, George Headley and the three Ws, Hutton an
d Compton, Peter May and a few others. To them he is a stranger. But when he takes his turn at the mythical nets they stop to look at him and then look at one another: they recognize that he belongs. That, however, is what I have to prove. I am playing a single-wicket match on a perfect wicket against a line of mighty batsmen. But great deeds have been done under similar conditions. This is my opportunity to make history. Here goes.

  W. St Hill was just about six feet or a little under, slim, wiry, with forearms like whipcord. His face was bony, with small sharp eyes and a thin, tight mouth. He was, I think the expression is, flatfooted and never gave the impression of being quick on his feet. His first, and I believe his greatest, strength was judging the ball early in the flight. When in form he could play back to anything, including George John at his fastest. He never got in front in advance, but almost as soon as the ball was out of the bowler’s hand he had decided on his stroke and took position. No one I have seen, neither Bradman nor Sobers, saw the ball more quickly, nor made up his mind earlier. Time; he always had plenty of time. From firm feet he watched the ball until it was within easy reach and only then brought his bat to it with his wrists. He never appeared to be flurried, never caught in two minds. With most of his strokes the only sign of tension or effort was the head very slightly bent forward on the shoulders so as to assist the concentration of his eyes riveted on the ball. But you had to be near to see that. I do not remember any more frightening sight at cricket than John running, jumping and letting loose at his terrific pace, and St Hill playing back as if he had known he would have to do so long before the ball was bowled and was somewhat bored by the whole business. You felt that he was giving the ferocious John legitimate reason to hurl the ball at him or take him by the shoulders and shake him. In all his strokes, even the most defensive, the ball always travelled. I have taken people who knew nothing at all about cricket to see him and as soon as they saw this easy, erect, rhythmic back stroke to the fast bowler they burst into murmurs of admiration. His right toe was always towards point, left elbow high and left wrist as a fulcrum.