by David Lloyd
Even when I wasn’t at a designated training session, I would be creating my own little practice routines, such as attaching a ball to a washing line and hitting it repeatedly, or going to the cricket club with just one cricket ball and bowling it hour after hour at a set of stumps. There was no need for an outside edge or a wicketkeeper’s gloves at the other end. I would go down there with not a soul around and literally bowl and fetch until my arm felt like dropping off. The only respite during marathon spells was the fifty-yard round trip in between deliveries to fetch the ball from the back of the net.
For a young spin bowler, doing the same thing over and over again, repeating it hundreds and hundreds of times, helped groove my action. There are no short cuts when you are trying to make it as a professional in any sport, and very few get there by luck or natural talent alone. It doesn’t happen by accident, aspiring cricketers have to put a lot of work in, and this was my homework during my formative years. I really enjoyed practising because I didn’t know anything else. I just knew that I loved playing sport. Even in my early teens, I had huge ambition to play professionally.
It might be said that my successes in cricket brought me out of my shell a little bit, although I would never claim to have been an outgoing sort of character. I remained relatively shy in public and ultra quiet in the house, mainly because of the hold that my mum had over me, although as the years went by I became less scared of her.
Funnily enough, in terms of my personality I have discovered that I am much more my mum than my dad. For a start, I possess her fiery temper. I’ve always had that short fuse and can go off if someone riles me, but I’m miles better now than I used to be, because in young adulthood I would be a bit like Vesuvius. It would take the slightest thing for me to go off. Now, on the rare occasions that I do flip my lid, more often than not I smile to myself: ‘That’s my bloody mother.’
All of my mum’s family was extremely supportive as I set out on my cricketing career. There were relatively few on my dad’s side, but there was still my Uncle Alf, my Uncle Harry and my Auntie Mary. I have goodness knows how many cousins scattered around Accrington but I’ve not seen most of them for years, because whereas they have stayed around the area they grew up in, my job has taken me all over the world. When we were all confined in this tight-knit community, things were different. We were all as much Accrington as the chimneys and cobbles.
One of my bugbears was being denied the opportunity of playing for Accrington at cricket once I had been signed on at Old Trafford. Like my colleagues, I fell foul of a rather silly league rule that did not allow players who made a living at Lancashire, even inexperienced kids like myself, to continue relationships at the clubs that had taught them the game. It seemed self-defeating in the greater scheme of things, because having absorbed everything I had been taught since the age of thirteen during my grooming for senior cricket, I was prevented from being able to help show others the way and repay my gratitude for the help.
This was all at odds with the Australian system which offers an almost polar opposite outlook. Over there, you move up and down cricket’s ladder from level to level, so that schoolboy cricketers can mix with first-class and Test players if they have the ability. Throughout the generations, it’s been known for Test cricketers to maintain their associations with the clubs that produced them by playing for their grade clubs whenever they’re able to do so – sometimes in the middle of an international series in which they’re participating.
Australian cricket treats itself as one big family, with no one ever too big or too good to play at club level. This philosophy of making each level as competitive as possible has maintained the highest standard in the preparation of players. The step up from a grade match on a Saturday to the Sheffield Shield in midweek, while not to be underestimated, has never been as great a leap as it might have otherwise. The benefits of youngsters playing alongside better players is fairly self-explanatory, allowing them as it does to pick up decent tips and good habits, yet the Lancashire League’s antiquated rules meant that only one paid player could represent each club at first-team level, and that invariably was the overseas import.
During my second season on the staff, Lancashire persuaded the league to make a dispensation so that I could feature and therefore get more cricket. Truth is, I loved playing sport in my local town. Although I have spent less time there and more in Manchester in later life, it’s still a regular pilgrimage for me to see my three lads, Graham, Steven and Ben, my daughter Sarah and the grandchildren. It was a moment of great pride to me in 2014 when one of the brood, Graham’s lad Joe, made his Accrington first XI debut. It’s nice to see that he’s carrying on the family business I founded more than half a century ago.
CHAPTER 3
Home Sweet Dogs’ Home
It was while we were on holiday at the Heysham Towers camp in Morecambe in late July 1963 that Dad spotted some news in the Daily Express that would change my life. There it was in black and white: ‘LANCASHIRE HAVE OFFERED APPRENTICE TERMS TO ACCRINGTON ALL-ROUNDER DAVID LLOYD.’
Lancashire, this great club for whom such wonderful players as Eddie Paynter, Cyril Washbrook and Brian Statham had turned out, wanted me on their books. I was sixteen years old and Old Trafford was to become my second home. We quit our holiday that very day of 25 July to return to Accrington on the bus and discover the finer details of my contract. The terms were enclosed in an envelope wedged behind the door when we got back to Water Street, laid out in a letter from Geoffrey Howard, the club secretary.
It shouldn’t have been the greatest surprise that Lancashire would make such an offer because I had been with the club throughout the summer as an amateur, playing club and ground matches on the back field at Old Trafford (which has since been tarmacked and made into a B&Q car park), bowling at the senior players in the nets and pocketing £7 a week to cover my travel expenditure. But you don’t want to count your chucks in sport, and I for one never wanted to believe it was happening until that Thursday evening.
This was the correspondence that would help me fulfil my dreams and map out a career path. Given my background and lack of other passions in life, this way into the real world of working for a living proved a godsend. It allowed me to put money into the family pot while being immersed in full-time professional sport. There was also a sense of both pride and achievement that Lancashire wanted me. Imagine my surprise then that this contract to upgrade me to fully fledged status saw me put down to £6 a week. Now, you didn’t have to be Archimedes to work out that things didn’t quite add up here. But losing a seventh of my income mattered not a jot to me. The financial aspect was not at the top of my agenda, and my weekly pay packet was more than what my dad was getting.
Instead, there was an excitement about getting started, one which seemed to be shared by the whole of Accrington. The local pride in producing a player was quite something in those pre-motorway days when the next town seemed to be in an entirely different time zone, and the number of well-wishers reminded me of just how many people had been batting for me and made it feel akin to a collective rather than personal achievement. It was a new dawn for me in a year that witnessed a new dawn for cricket. For it was in 1963 that the distinction between gentlemen and players was abolished. No longer did those from the upper classes, who were playing the game for fun, leave the field through a gate to be waited upon hand and foot by butlers while their fellow players, who relied on the game to pay the bills, sauntered off in a different direction.
Saved from becoming a plumber’s hand – a position secured with the local council through my first wife Susan’s cousin, Trevor – I took my apprenticeship in cricket, as Lancashire followed the lead of football clubs in offering such schemes. That experiment ended before the 1964 season, so the theme of ‘last in’ from my childhood was continuing to follow me.
Once again there was a hierarchical system that required getting used to. I had only ‘made it’ in a provisional sense, because as with all jobs I had
to start at the bottom and strive for further recognition. Only when you’ve earned your cap for Lancashire and the red rose is on your blazer, on your cap and on your chest, had you really earned something. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, annual appraisals tell you how the company rates you, but as a 1960s cricketer playing for Lancashire you were after one thing – because donning the red rose symbolised success.
It was far from easy being office junior. As a seventeen-year-old heading into that dressing-room environment at Old Trafford, life was tough. Suddenly, cricket wasn’t fun anymore; it had lost its recreational property and became the survival of the fittest. To a large degree this is a necessary evil, going with the territory of top-level sport, but it also created bitterness and niggle between colleagues.
Do not for one minute think that when people are in direct competition for places that everyone gets on. They do not and it means that, although you’re all trying to do your best for the betterment of both yourself and your employer, dressing rooms can be cruel. You share some wonderful moments of achievement – after combining in a match-winning stand your batting partner can feel like your best mate even if you have barely a thing in common – yet there is also a flip side. Whenever you throw a collection of alpha males together, it’s about asserting control, and some of that comes through the undermining of others.
Mickey taking – or banter, or even #bants in modern parlance – is a natural by-product of a dressing room. There’s a lot of time to fill, during which camaraderie and rapport are developed, but some of this can become quite harsh. My take on this might not align with the politically correct brigade, but I have always believed you accept it and get on with the job. Sticks and stones and all that.
You only have to consider nicknames. They’re rarely flattering, are they? Unless you happen to be Vanburn Holder. I know lots of ex-cricketers who wish they’d copped Hosepipe. Like Vanburn, mine was also handed to me for physical attributes but from another part of the body, and proved considerably less complimentary.
If you and I met in the street, chances are you would think of me as Bumble, not the name I was christened. Few people question why I’m called this or what it means, they just accept that’s who I am. These days, had I no wish to accept my fate, I could take my grievance to an industrial tribunal or make a case in the small claims court for loss of confidence. Suffering such an affliction may also have increased my chances of being successful in a PPI claim.
For this was the nickname awarded to me when I was accepted into the Old Trafford dressing room. Michael Bentine, one of the members of that great comic troupe the Goons, had taken his off-the-wall humour into the realms of children’s television by creating a weekly series about a trio of aliens called the Bumblies. These cheerful extra-terrestrials had arrived from the Planet Bumble to learn about the workings of Earth, after their flying saucer crash-landed in the garden of an absent-minded professor of astronomy.
Such behaviour does sound like me, but it was for their looks and not their actions that I became Bumble. You see, they all had long hooters for a start and, although I couldn’t see the resemblance myself, I just took the others’ word for it. Some nicknames stick and this was one of them. At first, I had no idea what they were on about, I’d just heard some of the others muttering ‘Bumblie, Bumble’. In a way it was a sign that this meek, unassuming lad from Accrington was being accepted and taken into Lancashire’s inner sanctum.
There had been no airs and graces to my cricket education. It had been a fairly successful three years for me since making my Accrington third XI debut. Things had gone pretty well from the first time I journeyed up Thorneyholme Road, which leads to the town’s cricket club, one I was to repeat hundreds of times on my bike every summer. Rather like most things in Accrington, it was functional rather than a picturesque retreat. An establishment with no more frills than a Quaker matron, it created the kind of environment to enforce principles of hard work and dedication to aspiring boys like me.
So the winter requirements of my new job at Old Trafford held no fears for me either. The club had resident electricians, plumbers and joiners, and I was seconded to the carpenters, which meant mending seats, building parts of stands, putting new doors on the toilet blocks, all that sort of thing. Having passed GCE Woodwork, it was appropriate that I was paired up with Ted, who was effectively head of joinery. The other bloke, Tom, always carried a bowl of putty around with him.
In subsequent years, after I was married, the winter job opportunities improved. To be fair, I had no desire to be a joiner’s mate in the long term and so other jobs were offered. The club’s idea for keeping the squad paid all year round – in those days you stopped in September and reconvened in the first week of April for a fortnight’s pre-season – was that members of the committee, if possible, would employ a player. Among those committee men was a really nice chap called Richard Bowman, who was the managing director of Dutton’s Brewery.
An Oxford University graduate, Richard also opened the bowling for Lancashire in first-class cricket, and did so while wearing a cravat. One of the last amateurs to feature for Lancashire, he got me a position with this brewery, which had been going since the eighteenth century, loading wagons and working in the wine and spirits department. It was flippin’ hard work, which required clocking on at six o’clock in the morning. Clocking off after a couple of hours’ overtime was not compulsory but became a regular occurrence.
Winter work away from the game was commonplace. If you were a county cricketer from 1963 up until the millennium, when the advent of English central contracts had the knock-on effect of counties offering ten- and twelve-month deals to players, there had to be a secondary income once frost lined the covers. You simply wouldn’t survive otherwise. Throughout my career you would be summer millionaires and winter paupers, although some engagements were better paid than others and came with their own particular benefits.
Not least jobs like mine at the Blackburn-based brewery that required a great deal of discipline. If you are going to be successful on the county circuit over a fifteen-year career, discipline is essential, with punctuality being key to the functioning of a successful team. It’s no good if one player turns up late for a net session, a team meeting or a bus departure time; because in that scenario, one slacker disrupts the functioning of the entire group. Dutton’s had a surefire way to prevent transgressors when it came to their daily shifts: clock on even a minute late and you automatically lost fifty minutes of your pay.
Equally, you needed to be fit and I would defy any modern player who claims to be fitter than I was back then. Loading beer wagons all day so they could set off to make their deliveries to the 500 or so licensed premises Dutton’s owned required the kind of physicality that would have challenged the biggest, hairy-arsed fast bowlers, let alone a slow left-armer like me. I was absolutely bolloxed by the end of a day.
Dutton’s was taken over by Whitbread in 1964 and Richard Bowman’s leaving present when he finally departed the company some time later was the tenancy of the Inn at Whitewell, in the Forest of Bowland, one of the best hotels in Great Britain. It ought to be; it’s owned by Her Majesty the Queen.
While I was grateful to the help of Bowman off the field, it was undoubtedly Geoff Pullar, Lancashire’s senior batsman, who took me under his wing when it came to support on the playing side of things. Geoff recently passed away, which got me thinking about his influence on me. When I was taken onto the staff, it’s fair to say he helped me out big time, but not always in a matey-matey way because that would have done a young player entering that competitive environment no good at all. Sometimes you need tough love, and as a senior player he would discipline me with a stern word if I was showing any sign of going off track.
Geoff was a wonderful player full of well-meaning advice given generously, despite the fact that it was obvious that improving a younger rival like me could hasten his own demise. Unbeknown to me, I was being groomed to replace him in t
he top three in the longer term, and there are few doubts he knew it. His work to improve me as a potential top-order county player spoke volumes for the kind of bloke he was. He would give me plenty of tips in the opening weeks and months I spent as a Lancashire squad player, and the well of knowledge did not dry up before I strapped on my pads for the first time in a County Championship match.
That moment came on 12 June 1965, against Middlesex, a fixture that coincided with Pullar and Tommy Greenhough being axed following an underwhelming start to the season that had witnessed half a dozen defeats in the first eight matches. Far from moping about, or playing the Big I Am given his pedigree, here was Geoff filtering twenty-four Tests of experience into my lughole as I prepared to go out and face his former England colleague Fred Titmus.
My debut innings lasted for a little more than an hour as Titmus, one of the greatest off-spinners produced by England, was thwarted over after over courtesy of Pullar’s apt assessment of how best to combat his threat. A success, you might think? Well, only in terms of delaying the inevitable.
Countering Titmus was all about getting in a good stride forward, Pullar told me, and making sure you played the ball with bat well in front of the pad to eliminate the chance of an inside edge deflecting to the posse of close catchers. It was no doubt a combination of lunging down the track and first-match nerves that led to me cramping up and requiring a salt tablet to carry on. Cramp can be bloody painful and has been known to force batsmen to retire hurt. I recall Andrew Strauss being unable to complete his innings in a one-day international versus India in Jamshedpur in 2006. He had been at the crease only a shade over two hours but it was a shade over 48 degrees, and left in no state to carry on he was escorted from the field and put on a drip in the dressing room to rehydrate.