Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  There was a meeting at Lord’s to persuade the campaigners to drop our demand for a costly special meeting of MCC members to vote on the issue. I was surprised when Pinter came in to the Long Room and immediately went to sit by my side. I whispered to him: ‘I thought we were enemies and not talking.’ He replied: ‘Some things are more important than others, and cricket is one of them.’

  At the special meeting, I quoted a comment by Sir William Haley, the former editor of The Times: ‘There are some things in this life that are evil, false and ugly, and no amount of casuistry can turn them into something that is good and true and beautiful.’ We won the vote in the hall, but lost overall because so many MCC members, who didn’t even bother to turn up for the meeting, sent in postal votes supporting the committee. Pinter’s widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, later attended a moving memorial meeting at Lord’s at which his writings on cricket were read out.

  • • •

  Len Hutton had some other surprising disciples. I remember being astonished at Lord Goodman’s seventy-fifth birthday party at University College, Oxford, where he was Master, to hear the great man – someone who had been loaded with virtually every honour available in British public life – declare that if he could have been someone else, ‘I would like to have been Len Hutton.’

  When John Major first met him at Lord’s, introduced by Jeffrey Archer, he was completely overawed by the experience. Later Archer said to Major’s son, James: ‘Did your father ever tell you he met Len Hutton?’ ‘Daily,’ replied the young Major.

  • • •

  Len sometimes surprised me with an unexpected telephone call that seemed to be motivated purely by goodwill. On one occasion, when I was engaged in a public dispute with Tiny Rowland, he rang up to say: ‘I’ve only got one word of advice: keep your eye on the ball!’ He had a great gift, certainly in later life when he had mellowed a bit after living half his life in Kingston-upon-Thames, for making everyone feel they were his special friend.

  He was amused when Tiny Rowland’s company, Lonrho, bought The Observer. The two men had met in 1948 on the Durban Castle taking the MCC team out to South Africa, when Rowland, having fallen out with the British tax authorities, was emigrating to Southern Rhodesia. Hutton later bought shares in his company. He recalled ‘a remarkably handsome blond giant’ who had placed wagers on the deck quoits and the squad’s other shipboard games. Rowland had given Hutton a gold watch in exchange for one of his bats. Len recalled this one day and added wryly: ‘Do you see him? Will you tell him the watch has run out?’

  When, as described earlier, I attracted some unwelcome personal publicity about an alleged liaison with Pamella Bordes, the glamorous girlfriend of Andrew Neil, Len ran up out of the blue to say: ‘Are you all right?’ That was all, but it was enough encouragement, as it had often been enough for the younger players in his England sides.

  • • •

  Part of the explanation for Len Hutton’s universal appeal relates to the circumstances of his legendary innings of 364 against Australia, when he beat Don Bradman’s record with the great man staring into his eyes from short mid-off. This innings made him an instant national hero and is still a record for an English player. The endurance of this apparently frail young man, just after his twenty-second birthday – at the crease from Saturday to Tuesday for a total of thirteen hours and seventeen minutes, the longest innings on record – captured the public’s imagination.

  The innings seemed to symbolise the tenacious spirit of the underdog, the boy on the burning deck, the bulldog breed incarnate. He became a household name, part of the national myth, like Sir Francis Drake. The words ‘Len Hutton’ became synonymous with cricket in the minds of British servicemen during the six years of war. His name was as much a part of my war-time childhood as Spam and ration books.

  He came to regret the fact that one single innings had dominated his life in this way. ‘I sometimes wonder’, he said, ‘if it was not the second worst happening of my career to become a record-breaking national celebrity at such a young age.’ Like other sporting and musical prodigies, Hutton had missed out on many of the normal pleasures of boyhood and youth, sacrificing them for the lonely hours refining his craft in the Winter Shed at Headingley. He said once: ‘Almost all of my boyhood was spent with older men.’

  The first ‘worst happening’ of his career was the appalling double fracture of his arm, just above the left wrist, while on commando training for the Dieppe raid in 1941. It happened when the mat slipped under him as he did a fly-spring in the gym. He returned to cricket two and a half years later, after several bone-graft operations, with the left arm – the guiding hand for a right-handed batsman – more than two inches shorter than before. The left arm was never again as strong as the right; it was thinner, with wasted muscles, as one could tell just by watching him use a knife and fork, let alone a cricket bat. No wonder it ached after a long innings.

  There were times when he and his doctors thought he would never play again. Even when he recovered, the injury imposed severe limitations on his batting – no hooking, a schoolboy’s bat, a restricted flow in stroke-making. Neville Cardus noted after the war: ‘All his hits leave an impression of power not entirely expended … The sadness is that physical disability struck his career in its prime.’ There are photographs showing him driving with the right hand alone when the pain was too much.

  His Yorkshire and England captain after the war, N. W. D. Yardley, said: ‘Had it not been for the war and the unfortunate injury to his arm, no record would have been beyond his grasp.’ Len told me himself in our TV interview: ‘I knew I wasn’t the player that I could have become had there been no war.’

  It wasn’t just the injury, of course, that interrupted his career. The war itself deprived him of six seasons at his peak – from the ages of twenty-three to twenty-nine, nearly a third of his professional span. Bradman, in the equivalent period of his life, scored seventeen of his twenty-nine Test centuries, including two over 300 and eight over 200 – which is some measure of the potential loss to Hutton and to cricket caused by the war.

  Len never betrayed any bitterness about the double deprivation he suffered, but once I thought I detected a faint sense of longing. It was over lunch at the Garrick Club, where a member had accosted him on the stairs and reminded him of a great innings he had seen Len play in South Africa in 1939. ‘Ah yes, 1939,’ he said wistfully as we sat down.

  Everybody remembers 1938, but I was actually better in 1939. I was nearly as good as Bradman. After the war, of course, I was a different man. I’ll never know how good I might have become in those lost years. I might not have got any better at all. The trouble is, you see, I’ll never know.

  • • •

  Alan Ross, the poet and a former Observer cricket correspondent, wrote when Hutton died in September 1990:

  There was about him always a wonderful stillness, an absence of hurry. The least theatrical of men, he nevertheless commanded attention in the way that a great actor does. You could not take your eyes off him, the slightly splay-footed, thoughtful walk, the nervous tugging of the cap peak, the fastidiousness of manner and line that marked his deportment and stroke-play as it does that of a dancer.

  The dancing analogy would have appealed to Hutton, for he had an obsession about feet. He once told me: ‘Bradman had us running all over the field for the whole of a day. Afterwards, on an impulse, I went into the dressing room and looked at his boots. Do you know, his feet were the same size as Fred Astaire’s!’ He used to propound the theory – how seriously I never knew – that the reason that players like Viv Richards and Colin Cowdrey, for all their talents, were not finally as prolific as Bradman was that they had big flat feet, which prevented them getting quite to the pitch of every ball and keeping it on the ground. Likewise, he thought the tiny feet of Sunil Gavaskar, the Indian batsman, were the source of his genius.

  Len’s own feet were ‘moving all the time’, said one former player. Another, Fred Trueman, said: �
��He was so quick on his feet, like a ballet dancer.’ Bob Appleyard, the former Yorkshire and England bowler, recalls walking behind Len down to a golf tee: ‘I suddenly got this feeling that his feet weren’t touching the ground.’

  Hutton also had an obsession about hands, as a result of his wartime injury, which forced him to think deeply about the role of the hands in all forms of stroke-play. I can still remember a day playing golf with him. He played straight and tidy golf, unlike mine, and was immaculate with his short game, but he was plainly handicapped for length by his bad arm and used only a three-quarter swing. As I sprayed the ball all over the Royal Wimbledon course that day (and sometimes beyond it onto the Common), I could hear that gentle Yorkshire voice of admonition in my ear: ‘It’s all in the hands, Donald.’

  Even now, nearly forty years later, when my golf has got even worse, I still hear that voice in my ear: ‘It’s all in the hands, Donald.’ He explained how great stroke-players like Graveney and Cowdrey had a superb touch with the irons. He dissented strongly from the view propounded by pundits like Henry Longhurst that the secret of golf lay in the legs: ‘It’s all in the hands, Donald.’

  Because of the problem with his arm, Hutton used bats weighing between 2lbs 2oz and 2lb 5oz, compared with the three-pounders wielded today. He once told me that he had been astounded to pick up Ian Botham’s bat after his spell in the nets: ‘It was like picking up a railway sleeper.’ Hutton’s relative lack of physical strength, compared with Hammond or Compton, denied him his full run-scoring potential. Even E. W. Swanton, a great Compton fan, admitted in Denis’s annus mirabilis, 1947, when he scored 3,816 runs and hit eighteen centuries: ‘If Len Hutton had been blessed with Compton’s physical strength and vigour this summer he might have made 4,000.’ Compton, always generous to Hutton, would not demur.

  • • •

  From 1963 until shortly before his death, he wrote a regular commentary in The Observer. One of Len’s early articles began: ‘I used to play this game a bit.’ A sub-editor, with the insensitivity of his breed, had crossed this phrase out, but it was lovingly restored by Makins, the sports editor, who brought it to me for approval.

  Many of Hutton’s Observer pieces contained phrases like this, on a leg glance by Graveney, that deserve a better fate than being lost for ever in a newspaper library: ‘This fine shot was played as a man would flick the ash off his cigar after a good dinner.’ Or this, on the portly Cowdrey’s temperamental reluctance to hammer the bowling: ‘Perhaps a little less lunch, or a little less breakfast, would do the trick.’ (As captain in Australia, Hutton once sent out the twelfth man with two bananas for Cowdrey just before lunch because he thought he was playing as if he must be feeling peckish.)

  David Gower caused him the most exasperation. He couldn’t understand how a man of such natural brilliance should fail to exploit his God-given qualities: ‘David Gower’s so talented he makes the game look easy, too easy. For me it was always very hard … The price he pays for that languid fluency is a firm-footedness that often defeats him.’

  His descriptions of players were sometimes like those of a quirky theatre critic, especially about West Indians: ‘He may be descended from cane-cutters and slaves, but this Richards bats like a millionaire, as if he owned six sugar plantations’; ‘Constantine’s limbs appeared boneless’; ‘Sobers and Kanhai play Calypso shots’; ‘Walcott is such a giant of a man his bat looks like a toy, a father playing on the beach with his children. But when he hits the ball, it’s like a punch from Joe Louis.’

  In real life, too, Len Hutton had an eccentric turn of phrase that was often even funnier when you thought about what he’d said. His friends treasured these ‘Lenisms’. Usually delivered deadpan with an unblinking stare from those wide-apart blue eyes, followed by a slow crease of a smile, they could be devastating. Take this one, for instance, repeated to me by Ted Dexter. Asked what he thought of a once fashionable England player, Len replied carefully, wrinkling what Russell Davies called his ‘knob of garlic’ nose: ‘Well, he lacks something at the highest level, some quality … there’s a word I’m seeking … it’ll come to me in a minute…’ Then, with a twinkle and a flattening of vowels: ‘I’ve got it. Ability … that’s what he lacks … that’s the word I’m looking for.’

  I went over to him at the last MCC dinner he attended at Lord’s and found him surrounded by Essex supporters, who were demanding that Len should give a public stamp of approval to their favourite Essex man. ‘You’ve got to accept, Len,’ one of them finally pleaded, ‘that he knows a great deal about the game.’ Len saw me approaching and winked. ‘The thing is in this life’, he declare

  • • •

  David Sheppard, now Bishop of Liverpool, who made a century opening partnership with Hutton for England in 1952, surprised me once when we met at a dinner party by saying that the clue to Len’s complex and elusive character was to be found in the Protestant movements of Bohemia. He was referring to his upbringing in the Moravian community at Fulneck, near Pudsey, Leeds. This sect, which had inspired John Wesley, was founded by Count Zinzendorf when he came over from Czechoslovakia in the 1730s.

  It provided an austere upbringing – ‘strict but caring’, as Hutton later described it. The Huttons had been part of the Fulneck community since the end of the eighteenth century, and the house in which Len was brought up dated from that time. His father Henry and his three brothers all played for Pudsey St Lawrence Cricket Club. Len joined them in the first XI at the age of fourteen. He had been given a cricket bat for his second birthday. ‘I took to this game’, he once said, ‘as naturally as a Sherpa to the mountains.’ He also showed an early talent for soccer, though his career was abruptly shortened when he cut a knee and his doting aunts, solicitous of his cricketing future, threw his boots on the fire.

  Fulneck would have instilled in him a stern sense of duty and social obligation that he carried into his cricket, qualities developed further in the austere rituals of the Winter Shed at Headingley. Graveney described Hutton’s absorption: ‘Len wasn’t on this earth when he batted. He was in a trance. During an interval, he would just sit down and drink his tea and look into space while someone else unbuckled his pads.’

  • • •

  I am still baffled by the end of a profile of Hutton which appeared in The Observer in 1951. Although it paid fine tribute to his play, it was cool about his personality – ‘He is the greatest living batsman and, behind this, he is the greatest living batsman’ – and concluded that, like the poet Milton, he was ‘not very lovable’, if only because he didn’t much care whether he was loved or not. As I wrote when he died in 1990, at the age of seventy-four: ‘I think he did care, though he needn’t have worried about it.’

  He found it hard, even as captain, to offer more than token encouragement to young Oxbridge graduates like May and Sheppard, despite the fact that they hung on his every word, just as in his own youth he had revered giants like Sutcliffe and Rhodes. When he said anything at all, he seemed to be speaking in riddles, never quite finishing a sentence, then saying: ‘See what I mean?’ (which, of course, nobody did).

  Len hardly ever spoke a word to his batting partner, but there are two known exceptions, both told to me by the men themselves. Peter May was batting with Len on the opening morning of a Test match in Jamaica when he ‘lost’ the ball completely as it left the bowler’s arm. He did what he had been told to do in such an emergency by his coach at Charterhouse, the former England player George Geary, and played hard through what he thought was the line of the ball. It went for six over the sightscreen. May remembers Len being appalled at such levity on the first day of a Test match. ‘He came up the wicket looking pale and asked in a sharp tone of rebuke: “What do you think you’re doing?”’

  Another was when Lindwall and Miller were giving Hutton and Compton the treatment at Lord’s in 1953. ‘For about an hour and a half,’ said Compton, ‘Len and I were subjected to the fastest sustained spell by two bowlers that I’ve ever experienc
ed.’ Much to his surprise, Len summoned his partner to the middle of the pitch for a word. ‘Yes, Len, what is it, old boy?’ Len replied: ‘Denis, I’ve been thinking. There must be a better way of earning a living than this.’ He then returned to his crease and scored 145.

  No wonder people found Len hard to make out. He was a bit of a mystery to himself at times and enjoyed people’s bafflement about him. Trevor Bailey’s verdict was succinct: ‘Beautiful batsman, difficult man.’ For Swanton, he passed two searching tests: ‘Would you choose to take him as a model for any young cricketer? And would he have been great in any era?’ Denis Compton, who played with him before and after the war, said: ‘He was the most beautifully balanced player I ever saw, never ruffled, never without dignity – it was the same in his life, I reckon.’ There was a kind of moral quality in the way he played and the way he approached the game.

  It is a mark of the enduring respect and affection for Sir Leonard in Yorkshire that an annual lunch in his honour at Headingley is attended by more than 200 people – sixty years after his retirement from cricket and a quarter-century after his death. When I was a speaker there a few years ago, I found myself addressing an audience that included Ray Illingworth, Brian Close, Len’s son Richard and others who had played with him for Yorkshire and England. It was rather intimidating to talk about Len, and even copy his accent in telling some stories, in front of people who had known him for much longer than me.

  It didn’t help either that the old geezer introducing me suddenly went blank and couldn’t remember my name. He stuttered and finally said: ‘Er, I hope he knows my name better than I know his.’ Then, after an embarrassing pause: ‘I know he’s some sort of journalist – Guardian, Sunday Times, one of that lot. Here, I’ve got it – his name is Dan Trelford.’ I was reassured when I sat down to hear from Close, a man not known for his generous attitude to southerners: ‘That was great. You got Len bang to rights.’