After Ruddles, Barlow attended Pretoria Boys High, a natural choice for boys of his class and demographic origin. Sport was important there, but he also loved the annual productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas, particularly The Pirates of Penzance, appearing in one of them as a policeman. He didn’t have as strong a voice as Norman, but he received a nominal sum for appearing at weddings with the choir, so he usually turned out for practice. He was, according to his third wife, Cally, ‘moved to tears’ by ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
In his middle and later school years, he was part of a strong First XI, featuring Glen Hall, Neville Holmes, and John and Peter Corbett. He played for the SA Schools side in 1957–58 and, in the following year, went to the University of the Witwatersrand on a teacher’s bursary. He had wanted to be a vet, but no bursaries were offered for the course, so he made do. Meanwhile, Eddie met his first wife, Helen, in the first-year geography class (a subject he had favoured at school). She remembers going to the inter-varsity ball and visiting Johannesburg roadhouses and drive-in cinemas in Pops’s borrowed car. Sometimes, they travelled on Eddie’s new Vespa scooter. Other nights, it was dinner-dancing, where they swayed to Cole Porter records, she in ballroom gowns and long gloves.
Helen remembers Eddie’s political awakening, when the two of them joined the Progressive Party. ‘Eddie was taking Zulu as a subject in 1960 and his lecturer was Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the Pan African Congress. Sharpeville occurred on the 21 March that year and a State of Emergency was declared. Sobukwe was detained without trial along with many other black leaders. We both belonged to the liberal student union NUSAS [National Union of South African Students]. They organised a protest and we all marched, chanting slogans to set them free. We marched up to the Prison Fort to do this. The fort was topped by police armed and with dogs as I remember, and they were ready for us! We were tear-gassed and the protest was broken up. After Sharpeville, sadly, Wits was closed to other races. Eddie’s parents always voted for the opposition – the United Party led by Sir De Villiers Graaff.’8
At Wits, Barlow also met Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, playing in the same under-20 rugby team. The two remained friendly and, much later, in 1980, Slabbert asked him to stand for the Progressives in the Simon’s Town by-election. Barlow’s rambunctious home life and time at university predisposed him to politics, whether it was his involvement with the famous Newlands ‘walk-off’ anti-apartheid sports protest by white cricketers in 1971 or in arranging friendly matches across the colour line. Bing recalls a situation shortly after Barlow had arrived back from Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in which he tried valiantly to organise a game against a ‘non-white’ side led by Rushdie Magiet. ‘There was more than one game that didn’t take place,’ he remembers. ‘He liaised with the UCT vice-chancellor, Sir Richard Luyt, to allow them to use the UCT fields, and it was all arranged and then the opposition simply didn’t pitch up.’9
The high point of Eddie Barlow’s political career came when he campaigned for the Progressive Party in 1980, running against the National Party’s John Wiley in Simon’s Town. ‘It was a vicious battle with all the Nationalist big guns out,’ Eddie’s first wife recalls. She also remembers being taken ‘under her wing’ by the Progressive parliamentarian Helen Suzman, who ‘coached me in canvassing and answering questions from the public. There were 13 000-odd voters, mainly retired folk. On voting day, Eddie got 5 000 to John Wiley’s 6 000. Older folk set in their ways got their day. Eddie took it very badly but fought a valiant battle. During his public life as a cricketer he’d led his team out of a restaurant when they refused to serve one of his teammates who was of colour. My favourite anecdote he told me in the early 80s when he was the sports ambassador in London, was an advert he was keen to place in one of the London dailies. It read Apartheid Sucks! Full page he wanted! As I was still back in South Africa getting Susan through her final exams before I joined him, I am not sure it actually happened.’10
The fullest expression of the Barlow template came with him at the helm of Western Province, where he could control and cajole to his heart’s content. Rolling up his sleeves was interpreted literally (often to bicep height), and he arrived to join Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery, captaining a strong Maties outfit with Andre Bruyns in the side. When Eddie arrived, Province was still becalmed in the B Division of the Currie Cup, along with North-Eastern Transvaal, Transvaal B, Border, Orange Free State, Natal B and Griquas, although the cricket plates in the region were shifting. Provincial captain Lynton Morby-Smith was moving on, while Jimmy Pothecary and Bing retired in order to become provincial selectors, headed by convenor Jack Plimsoll. Robin Jackman remembers playing in a game for Cape Town Cricket Club against Barlow’s Stellenbosch University team and thinking that he’d made a smart move by heading south. ‘Somehow, Eddie had managed to twist Proccie’s arm into playing his club cricket at Maties, and they also had Andre [Bruyns] in the side,’ he notes. ‘Anyhow, we went out there and I thought to myself: “Hell, for club cricket this really isn’t bad.”’11
With Morby-Smith’s retirement, Barlow duly became captain. Chasing promotion during the 1968–69 season, he found himself in Kimberley for a match against Griquas in which Province had to gain at least maximum first-innings points. Bing, who accompanied the side as manager, tells the story that on the evening before play was due to start, he was taken aside by Rodger Symcox, former Griqualand West cricketer and umpiring father of the spin bowler Pat, who felt compelled to confess that he was standing in his very first game. ‘He pleaded with me not to tell the players because if I did he thought he’d be crucified,’ says Bing, adding that he quietly told Barlow anyway because it was the right thing to do. ‘Eddie said “fuck it, it doesn’t matter, we’ll beat them anyway”, and we did.’ As he recalls, ‘we had such fun’ going to Kimberley’s Riverton pleasure resort ‘on the Sunday because there was no Sunday play in those days. Hell, we played for the beer.’12
Promoted for the 1969–70 season, Barlow set about tweaking, tightening and polishing. He customised the art of the famous fourth-afternoon Barlow declaration (when asked how he did it, he often replied that he ‘could read’, a reference to him pulling the Western Province scorebooks) and making the team hungrier and fitter. Jackman tells the story of Gavin Pfuhl, the wicketkeeper, telephoning in one day to cry off from practice, preferring to stay at home instead of enduring an afternoon of running. Practice arrived and, lo and behold, the team went on a training run – not up Table Mountain as they often did, but past Pfuhl’s cottage after a run through the grounds of the Kelvin Grove Club and around the back of Newlands Stadium. As Barlow had sensed, Pfuhl was at home, lying on the couch with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. Barlow looked at his wicketkeeper, indicated that he should put on his kit and his takkies, and the entire team trooped back out of the door, with Pfuhl following shamefacedly behind.
Pfuhl was an important link in what was becoming a strong chain. Stephen Jones, the left-arm pace bowler, remembers being inspired by Barlow at a winter clinic held at the Goodwood Showgrounds in Cape Town’s northern suburbs shortly after he left school, and within a season or two he was bowling to a slip cordon that consisted of Barlow, Hylton Ackerman and Richard Morris standing to Pfuhl’s right at first, second and third slip, respectively. Jones says that the four were a formidable fielding cordon to bowl to, providing the team’s intellectual heartbeat. Jackman puts it more colourfully: ‘We called it “The Wall of Putty”, they didn’t miss a thing.’13
Crucial in Province’s transformation was its players’ learning to win on the road. They’d always been competitive at Newlands and had always been capable of posting a total. The problem was that they struggled to bowl sides out twice. Barlow, of course, helped in this regard, but so did the arrival on the scene of Garth le Roux, Peter Swart, Attie van Niekerk and spinners like Denys Hobson and Richard Morris to take over the mantle from the off-spinner Grahame Chevalier.
There were also some h
andy young batsmen stepping onto centre stage. Peter Kirsten made his debut under Barlow, as did Steven Bruce and Allan Lamb. Within a season or two of arriving, Barlow had transformed a plucky but largely underachieving provincial side that was always capable of being bullied, into a unit with spite and malice. Key to it all was the projection of confidence, but Barlow was also big on attention to batting and bowling detail. Ali Bacher remembers Barlow teaching him to watch in-swingers out of the hand, and Jackman was taught by Barlow (who didn’t particularly approve of overseas professionals, although he became one himself at Derbyshire) to bowl the slower ball. ‘If you bowled a no-ball you were told to go off and go and fix yourself,’ says Bing. ‘He was a real hard-ass. He played hard, trained hard and lived hard. You never knew when we went to Rhodesia whether you’d have eleven men take the field the next morning. They were wild buggers. You can do what you like but you’d better perform the next day, was his view. He’d have a bottle of wine and be in bed by eleven o’clock, so it wasn’t as if he was doing anything different.’14
The ‘away’ tour of Transvaal and Rhodesia often provided the pointer to the fortunes of Province’s season. Bing recalls one year when the team were deeply apprehensive about the dynamic Mike Procter – much to Barlow’s exasperation. ‘You are fucking cowards,’ he shouted at them. ‘You are worrying too much about Proccie. You guys are going to have no drinks tonight. Go home, get your head right, and come back tomorrow at 10 a.m. for a start at 11. Don’t worry about Proccie. I’ll take him on.’15
With good protocols in place – and having assembled a chirpy, talented side – in 1974–75, Western Province won their first Currie Cup since 1955–56 (they had shared the competition with Transvaal in 1969–70). Up in the Transvaal, Bacher had made way for Clive Rice, and New Year’s fixtures at Newlands became the stuff of legend. As if on cue, the visiting Rice would taunt the raucous crowd on the open grass area of the oaks, inviting a barracking. On one occasion, he met his match and the banter spilt over into nastiness. He refused to take the field after tea, and Bing had to placate the drunk and the restless. He did so conditionally, informing Rice diplomatically that he needed to stop deliberately provoking the rabble under the oaks. Rice played his part, and matters simmered down. Still, there was always needle – sometimes nasty – between the two sides. Natal had been eclipsed as a provincial cricketing powerhouse, and the traditional fixture between north and south had become the biggest game in town.
Barlow and Rice played their part in the pantomime, and the first couple of days of the fixture were frequently sold out, with the ground gates being shut by mid-morning. Western Province versus Transvaal also fuelled commercial expansion. Seven or eight chalets were built at Newlands, and Protea Insurance became a sponsor, as did Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery. Cricket suddenly became fashionable in Cape Town. It was largely Barlow’s doing.
Yet, for all the fact that these intense provincial fixtures were compared to war, there still remained an underlying cordiality to provincial cricket. ‘The side who had been in the field longest used to wait in their dressing-room for the opposition,’ notes Jackman. ‘We used to tell the girls to meet us at 9:30 because that was how long we needed for a couple of beers and finish off discussing the day’s play.’16
The post-play ritual of sharing a few drinks extended in other directions. Bad behaviour was generally left on the field, and Barlow was never one to linger over a ‘roughie’, believing it would even out in the end. A proud player, when called out he ‘walked’ more often than not, and he tended to encourage his players to do the same. His love of Newlands, its oak shade and the Western Province family was immense, even when he indulged in a little gentle ribbing of Boon Wallace, the Western Province chair, who had an unfortunate stutter. In his 2006 Eddie Barlow: The Autobiography, ghostwritten by Edward Griffiths, he relays the story of Wallace becoming exasperated by Peter Swart’s post-play antics, which often consisted of him becoming considerably worse for wear as a prelude to taking most – sometimes all – of his clothes off. ‘Now listen here ch-ch-ch-chummy, this sort of ca-ca-ca-caper with you taking your clothes off at fun-fun-fun-functions just has to st-st-st-stop.’17
One of Barlow’s great gifts was his eye for young players – sharpened at Western Province and upheld in his career at Derbyshire in England, where he played as the overseas professional for three seasons in the late seventies. Kim Barnett, who was floating around the periphery of the Derby set-up and was signed by Barlow for Boland in September 1978, believes that Barlow fundamentally changed the mindset of Derby players, such as the New Zealander John Wright and the Englishmen Bob Taylor, who was probably the best technical wicketkeeper in England during the period, Mike Hendrick and Geoff Miller. ‘He mentored me at Boland,’ recalls Barnett, who went on to play a handful of Tests for England, ‘and at the age of twenty-two he told me to go back to Derbyshire and take the captaincy. He did the unorthodox at Boland: he declared earlier than some would, and he set easier targets on difficult pitches to make the opposition think they could win when they couldn’t. Of course, he was humorous; he had a big personality. He was political on behalf of the down-trodden, but most of all he treated cricket with respect and made players around him understand hard work and some ethics in how to play the game and understand that you give your best, but you can’t win them all. He was for sure the biggest influence on me in my whole career. He would attack when defence was easier and even in his late thirties and early forties he could change a game he had no right to.’18
An eye for talent was undoubtedly one of Barlow’s most precious assets as a coach. A generation of players in the early 1990s – ranging from Hansie Cronje and Richard Snell to Steven Jack and (although he was older) Gordon Parsons – absolutely swore by him, with Parsons saying that ‘he was bigger and bolder than life itself’.19 It is often forgotten that this uncanny knack for fostering talent was most famously articulated in the case of Paul Adams, the funky local spin-bowling purveyor of the googly. Before his rise, Adams’s unorthodox bowling action was viewed as an embarrassment. He wasn’t chosen for his SA Schools side, and both Duncan Fletcher, the Western Province senior coach at the time, and Bob Woolmer, the then national coach, were sniffy.
Still, Barlow badgered. He rightly believed that Adams was something special and campaigned for him to receive the opportunities he deserved. When he was chosen for South Africa ‘A’ to play Mike Atherton’s 1995–96 England touring team in Kimberley, the batsmen Alec Stewart and Nasser Hussain were so befuddled by Adams’s action that members of the side went into the stands and trained binoculars on him. After a fine match in Kimberley, Adams was drafted into the Test side for what turned out to be a dull series full of safety-first cricket, full of attrition and mutual watchfulness. Adams, though, was a tonic. And his elevation wouldn’t have come to pass had the usual gatekeepers had their way.
For all of his capacity to inspire, Barlow’s post-Boland period (where he went after his time playing for Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the late-1970s) was characterised by restlessness. He coached at Orange Free State, Griquas, Transvaal and even Bangladesh, among others, often reshaping demoralised or underperforming sides. Equally, larger steps, involving a more holistic approach to all the cricket structures in a province, or more structured interventions, either didn’t interest him or were possibly beyond him. After boosting and patching up, he moved on.
Even as a player, Bing found Barlow difficult, explaining that he often delivered the goods, so it wasn’t as though he only ‘talked the talk’ – and this only compounded the relationship problem. ‘There is this image in my mind of Eddie as a bit of a mother hen,’ concludes Robin Jackman. ‘He walked a bit like that too, rolling his sleeves up tight around his biceps. As long as he had his brood around him he was great, but when that brood began to grow up and ask some questions, I don’t think he coped as well. Perhaps that’s why he moved so much. I tried to enter into cricket conversations with him when I was ol
der and I was just never right.’20
Barlow was part of a uniquely talented generation, in its own way deprived of its best cricketing years by South Africa’s politics, either in part or almost entirely – like Barry Richards, who played only four Tests. Such deprivations made them restless, sometimes destructively so. Graeme Pollock was restless, as was Peter, his brother; so, too, was Procter and the bitter Rice. Barlow undoubtedly shared some of their inability to find a secure post-cricket home. It wasn’t as pronounced in his case, but there was something itchy to his wanderings – his failed pig farm and wine farm ventures, his projects, all part of the increasingly sad arc of his frequent escapades.
There might, however, be a more straightforward explanation for his tinkering. As a cricketer, he was addicted to the drug of the moment, and his post-cricket life condemned him to thinking about a realm of time beyond the immediacies of the present. He was never entirely comfortable thinking about the future because, as a sportsman, he had little or no experience in that regard. Moreover, thinking about the future inevitably meant that he would be orbiting further and further away from playing the game he loved.
Whatever the reasons for his lack of direction in his later years, Barlow still takes on an almost mythic hue for many of a certain generation. Thirteen years since his death in 2005 on the Channel Island of Jersey at the age of sixty-five, he is a character out of epics and storybooks, his outline dimmed by the fact that the age in which he played seems so currently out of reach. That age continues to be recognised only reluctantly by the regime at Cricket South Africa, which today has yet to grapple meaningfully with the historic legacy of apartheid cricket, such as in the form of a national cricket museum. And so, Eddie Barlow – busy, swaggering, bolshy ‘Bunter’ Barlow – continues to slip from view. His match statistics remain enduringly impressive (five of his six Test centuries were made against Australia), yet they are no more than footnotes to a book in bold print. The story itself tells of a sporting icon, a proud South African who was adventurous in his cricket and who was never cowed nor apologetic in his world view. To all his varied teams, he brought that most intangible of assets: belief. Without it – and without him – South African cricket wouldn’t be anywhere close to where it is today.
Illuminating Lives Page 21