by Tim Heald
Mr Johns is the doyen of tennis and a keen observer of the cricketing scene as well. Years ago he had a flat overlooking the ground. From it he could see the queues forming the night before the Australian Test match and he would watch early on the morning of the first day as MCC’s secretary Colonel Rait Kerr (who played Real Tennis for the club) came out and made a ritual presentation of two free tickets to the people at the very head of the queue. There were buskers to entertain the queue and vendors hawking food and drink. On the morning of the Eton and Harrow match Henry could see the flower sellers turning up at six and dyeing their carnations in the traditional light blue of Eton. (It was, as Etonians are always pointing out, Eton blue long before being appropriated by Cambridge.) Harrow wore dark blue cornflowers, and the nobbier supporters of both schools brought horse-drawn carriages which they parked at the Nursery End, where they picnicked on the grass.
The final of the Gold Racquet was moved from Oxford and Cambridge to Eton and Harrow at Douglas Jardine’s insistence (he was involved in both the Varsity match and the tennis final) and drew capacity crowds. Harold Macmillan always came; ladies were not allowed on the closely packed benches in the dedans but watched from the galleries high above the court. One year, just as Henry Johns was about to start the game, a lady dropped her handbag which burst open on the penthouse scattering its contents, including powder, all over the court. Henry had to postpone the tennis and get a step ladder to retrieve the bag. Even when the Gold Racquet was not being played it was customary for the Etonians and Harrovians to pause from their gentle amble round the ground and meet for a brief chat in the court. All changed now, however. In the shires, especially the north, men will mutter caustically about the feudal aristocratic traditions of Lord’s and say that the Eton and Harrow match is the high point of the year for the MCC committee, but it’s not true. The game nowadays is an anachronism and if the truth be told should really go the way of all those other anachronisms which were banished from cricket HQ years ago – Beaumont and Oratory, Clifton and Tonbridge. Yet they like to put on one public school match, and nowadays there are Lord’s games for representative sides of state schoolboys too.
Many of the Real Tennis professionals around the country are men who came to the Lord’s court from ‘the cricket side’ and were taught the game by Henry Johns: David Johnson at Queen’s (he won the bat for most promising young batsman three years running); Brian Church at Cambridge; Peter Dawes at Hayling Island. The present chief pro, David Cull, came over twenty-five years ago as a young medium-pacer and was quickly transformed by the coach Bill Watkin into an off-spinner.
‘I gave it a season,’ he says, ‘then I came over one day for a game of squash with the lads.’ He had scarcely heard of squash, let alone played it, but he thought it was fun and stayed through the winter as the most junior of four pros on the tennis side. He was supposed to go back to cricket next summer but stayed on behind the pavilion. He never told Gus Farley, the ground superintendent in charge of the boys, and got a rollicking from him.
He was so small then that he could barely see over the net. Indeed the assistant secretary of MCC, S.C. ‘Billy’ Griffith, had been seriously concerned about whether he could stand up to the workload. ‘These boys now have it so easy’ is David Cull’s verdict on the modern generation. ‘We had to get here at eight in the morning and sweep the whole ground. Then help the fellows with the roller. On match days you sold scorecards – you got a farthing for each one. Another thing I did was work in the scorebox. That was my bunce.
‘Crumbs, I loved it though. I remember when I first came here and I was the only boy without a bat and pads. They said get changed and I got changed and they said, “Where’s your bat and pads?” and I said, “I’m a bowler.” I mean I thought at Lord’s they’d provide all the gear. But my mother, she was so proud of me she found the money and got me the bat and pads.’
They run your bath for you at Lord’s, and Henry Johns and David Cull call their members ‘Sir’ and ‘Mister’. Nothing as familiar as a Christian name would ever pass their lips, and while at first I found this oppressive I got used to it after a while. They maintain that they have just as much fun with their members and know them as well as the pro’s do at places where they appear to be more egalitarian. I was reminded of something which Major Ronnie Ferguson once told me about his attitude to Prince Phillip when he captained him at polo. ‘You said exactly the same to him as to anyone else,’ he said. ‘You just put “sir” on the end.’
David Cull says, ‘I’ve never ever entertained the thought of leaving. It’s the atmosphere... the friendliness... You’ve still got your characters, and it’s still the same, because everyone who works here, they love it. It’s a great place.’
Sadly, however, his appetite for cricket seems to have diminished. ‘I used to watch from the pavilion,’ he says, ‘especially when Jack Robertson was batting. I remember Compton and Edrich and Warr and Moss. But nowadays half the time I couldn’t tell you who was playing. It was buzzing there around that time, but somehow it doesn’t buzz any longer.’
It was about that time that I first came to Lord’s. The family caught the train from Gerrards Cross to Marylebone and the tube from there to St John’s Wood. We sat in the Mound or somewhere near the Old Tavern and the Clock Tower restaurant. Certainly I remember Robertson well – rather upright, cap somewhat stiff. I saw Compton’s last appearance and was quite impressed by the speed of Warr and Moss, though they were nothing like Statham. I remember Statham zapping through three Middlesex or maybe MCC wickets for practically nothing. There was a buzz then all right. I got Denis Compton’s autograph, but missed out on David Lean who was chatting to him at the time. I had never heard of Lean then and was ticked off by an onlooker who thought David Lean a much more substantial figure than Compton. I would still rather have Compton’s autograph than Lean’s. I waylaid the Bedsers once and thought them horribly snubbing and offhand. Eric signed, but Alec didn’t. I have been prejudiced against him ever since, though, to be fair, he was much nicer and more relaxed the other day when he came in to the tennis changing-room to weigh himself on the jockey’s scales. He seemed quite pleased with the result.
For me Lord’s is the best of all cricket grounds because it was the first. I have been going there for over thirty years and I have been a member of MCC for more than a decade. I think the pavilion is one of the world’s most evocative buildings. It suggests elegance and escape and on big match days it and the whole ground still have a buzz for me. I love watching a great cricketer, past or present, making a stately progress during the lunch or tea interval. During the last of the England-Australia one-day matches I saw Colin Cowdrey, nut-brown and beaming, walking very slowly along the tarmac behind the pavilion and acknowledging greeting and reverence. And you could sense the crowd all thinking, ‘Ah, Cowdrey... if only he were playing.’
As it was, Gooch and Gower made hundreds, and although they were only playing for the plate, England thumped Australia. I was in the Long Room when Gower came in, bat raised high and punching the air with his fist. It was the end of an appalling run of low scores, and the members seemed as relieved by the century as the England captain himself. Often I have seen players come through the Long Room staring moodily at the floor or the ceiling, apparently determined to ignore the members. Too often there seems an unbridgeable gulf between the young professionals earning their living and the clubbable members taking time off to be spectators.
That day the place was so packed that the only place I could find was on the bridge between the pavilion and Q Stand. A lot of members aren’t really aware of this, because you have to go down a private-looking passage past the England dressing-room to get to it. The view is excellent, and that day it was full of serious and gossipy cricketers who were happy to fill me in on the proceedings so far, and particularly gleeful in describing how cross Phil Edmonds had been at being left out and how he had come straight out of the dressing-room looking like thunder and made a se
ries of phone calls. I would have played him myself because, like Randall, he is always doing something, even if it’s only chatting up the umpires.
‘I know you from somewhere,’ said the member on my left suddenly. ‘Where do you play your cricket?’
I said I hadn’t played cricket since my golden duck, opening the innings against Great Tew in 1965. He didn’t believe me.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You play for the Nomads. That’s it. You’re a Nomad.’
And try as I might, I could do nothing to shake this belief.
1985 was a surprisingly good Lord’s summer because, despite the pervading damp, the sun shone on St John’s Wood when it mattered. The Test was won by Australia by four wickets, a victory memorable chiefly for an innings of 196 from Border and for the fact that it was started on time. (Everybody was full of stories about how they had walked on to the outfield and found water coming over their insteps. Somehow the ground staff, working all through the night, managed to dry it out.) There was sun for the one-day Texaco which England won by eight wickets; sun for the Benson and Hedges final; and sun for the NatWest.
I quite enjoyed the Benson and Hedges, though it has never been my favourite final. There always seem to be more rowdies than usual, perhaps because the game is played so emphatically outside the soccer season. I always feel the crowd is nearer to a soccer one than on any other cricket occasion. More booze, more mindless shouting. Not that it was too bad this time, though for the first time in my life I was heckled under the Grandstand for wearing an MCC tie.
In this one Leicester beat Essex by five wickets with three overs to spare. It sounds easy, but it wasn’t until a fine sixth-wicket stand between Willey and the sprightly Garnham, a young wicket-keeper who soon afterwards announced a premature retirement, that the thing was settled. They made an unbeaten eighty together and got them in twelve overs.
The NatWest final was more exciting, carrying on into the murk of a September evening with Nottingham almost snatching an unlikely win over Essex. They were chasing 280, and got hopelessly behind the clock. Randall, at his most chirpy, almost pulled them back, but they still needed 18 off the last over. Despite the most defensive field imaginable he somehow took sixteen runs off Pringle’s first five balls, only to hole out off the sixth. There is nothing like being part of a Lord’s crowd on occasions like that.
Of course it is not everyone’s cup of tea. ‘It’s not Wembley,’ remarked Jack Bailey, MCC’s secretary, gazing across at the builders working on the new Mound Stand (courtesy of J. Paul Getty). But a lot of people think it is cricket’s Wembley and find it hard to reconcile the notion with the fact that MCC is a private club with a twenty-year waiting list. It seems rather strange to me too, but I find that I can accept the idea. But then, enjoying the privileges of membership, I would, wouldn’t I? On the other hand all county cricket clubs are private members’ clubs, it’s just that they don’t have the good fortune, like MCC, of being over-subscribed. You can hardly blame MCC for being desirable. And isn’t it better to have a club owned by several thousand members, none of them necessarily very rich, than a club owned by one millionaire and dictated to by a board of directors? Give me MCC and Lord’s rather than any soccer club in the League. Yet how often do you hear about Old Trafford or White Hart Lane being ‘undemocratic’?
In fact non-members have freer access at Lord’s than many county grounds. At Headingley and Northampton, to pick two at random, you are not allowed to walk right round the ground. But at Lord’s you can watch the teams limbering up in the nets at the Nursery End – there were huge crowds contemplating the Australians in their incongruous yellow-and-green tracksuits. And you can walk under the Grandstand and behind the pavilion, gawping as you go. The new Mound Stand, financed by Getty, has been designed with a special arched walk-way to maintain this principle. It’s just the pavilion which is a clubhouse. Only members are allowed in the pavilion, to snooze in the reading room, sit in one of the high chairs in the Long Room, or sample the seafood in the restaurant at the top.
You could write a book about Lord’s. Geoffrey Moorhouse did. Moorhouse is a Lancashire lad and not a natural MCC ally, but the book is scrupulously fair and meticulous, and by and large the club and ground emerge with credit. ‘If that’s the worst anyone can write about us then we’re not doing too badly’ was one mainstream MCC verdict I heard. For the 1987 bicentenary MCC has commissioned Tony Lewis, a former captain of Cambridge, England and Glamorgan as well as the Sunday Telegraph cricket man. (Moorhouse used to write for the Manchester Guardian.) Lewis is a more obvious choice but, as it turned out, the Moorhouse book was a wonderful piece of public relations. You expect an encomium from a fancy hat like Lewis. Not from a cloth cap like Moorhouse.
Lord’s does change, but it changes with measured tread. There will, for instance, be bucket seats in the new Mound Stand but not elsewhere. At least not yet. When I asked Jack Bailey about them he said that there was something to be said for bench seating. On a quiet day you could put your feet up, spread out, have room for the sandwiches and the scorebooks. And you can always hire a cushion if you have a sensitive backside. There will be ‘improvements’ at Lord’s but not much in the way of dramatic change. ‘It’s like buying a new pair of shoes,’ says Bailey. ‘The minute you’ve got them that serviceable old suit suddenly starts to look a bit shabby and you feel you have to get a new one.’ So the minute the new Mound Stand is finished people will turn their attentions to the newly evident tattiness of the Grandstand and the Nursery stands.
If you want chapter and verse about Lord’s you must refer to Moorhouse. Moorhouse has a map. And several pages devoted exclusively to Gubby Allen. And the precise number of pints consumed on Cup Final days.
For me, Lord’s has a special and inimitable atmosphere; a compound of personal memory and corporate nostalgia; of anachronistic hierarchies and deferences and rules; of the best cricket I ever watch; of a sense of occasion no matter if the ground is packed full of noisy partisans or if only a single slow handclap echoes round the stands. There is something about the place which is as timeless as a cathedral or a village green, and there is far more to it than cricket.
‘Inside the W.G. Grace gates,’ wrote Robertson-Glasgow, ‘I saw the same spectator whom I always see on my first day at Lord’s. He was waiting for his brother; who is always late. And there was the field itself. How green, after the huge, glaring, yellowy arenas of Australia.
‘But I missed the member with his telescope which he balances on the front rail of the pavilion, bending low to fix his eye on the footwork of the batsmen and the very texture of the pitch. He will surely arrive, when the sun is stronger, and he has finished cataloguing the ships at sea, or the stars in the May sky. He will, of course, bring his field glasses as well, for double verification.
‘In the afternoon sun the Tavern grew more argumentative. On the grassy plot behind the Rover stand, one man sat with his back to the match, achieving that elusive triumph of thinking of absolutely nothing at all. Another spectator lay fast asleep, content with the mere fact of cricket and his own absence from the roar of traffic, from invoices, or the blare of his neighbour’s radio. He would wake in an hour or so, and tell them all wrong, all about the cricket, when he reached home.’
The timeless continuity of Lord’s withstands all its changes. I’ve been going there so long that I feel it is always the same even when – in detail – it manifestly isn’t. I recognise the gatemen these days, and I look out for Henry Johns and David Cull standing in those ducky new white track-suits the tennis players now affect, guarding their territory behind the pavilion. I know where to look for Jonners and Blowers and the rest of the BBC commentary team as they scale the steps to their turret high above the play. I hope to see journalists like Mark Boxer, the editor of the Tatler, or Godfrey Smith of the Sunday Times or Michael Davie of the Observer, or the novelist Simon Raven; or the poet P.J. Kavanagh; or David Webb Carter, the Brigadier from Belize. I remember days with famil
y and friends; hundreds from Gooch and from Gower; pyrotechnics from Dexter and Richards and Botham; Brearley’s captaincy; Titmus’s spin; and Edmonds and Emburey; and Peter Parfitt and Don Bennett. I like to walk slowly round the ground, moving from rowdiness in the claustrophobic dark under the Grandstand to a murmur in the pavilion balcony and euphoric excess at trestle tables in the old arbours at the Nursery End. I always pause before that wonderful portrait of the founders of I Zingari and walk slowly through the Long Room, enjoying the ancient bats and balls in glass cases and the ancient members perched on chairs and tables.
It’s elusive, the true character of cricket, and you can find aspects of it everywhere the game is played and watched, but nowhere more than here at Lord’s, headquarters of the game, where they have been playing for almost two hundred years and are still going strong.
About the Author
Tim Heald is a journalist and author of mysteries. Born in Dorchester, he studied modern history at Oxford before becoming a reporter, and columnist for the Sunday Times. He began writing novels in the early ’70s, introducing Simon Bognor, a defiantly lazy investigator for the British Board of Trade. Heald followed Bognor through nine more novels, including Murder At Moose Jaw (1981) and Business Unusual (1989) before taking a two decade break from the series, which returned with Death In The Opening Chapter (2011).
Heald has also distinguished himself as a biographer, writing official biographies of sporting heroes like cricket legends Denis Compton and Brian Johnston among others.