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I was on safer ground writing about cricket, but it was only a matter of days after Irving’s abrupt departure, which he assured me had nothing to do with my arrival, that someone rang up and asked a question about ‘Kortright’. ‘Do you mean Cartwright, Tom Cartwright of Warwickshire and England?’ I replied. ‘No’, he said with irritation. ‘Kortright. Haven’t you heard of Kortright?’
To my shame and embarrassment I had indeed not heard of Charles Kortright, the fastest amateur bowler of his (and W.G.’s) day. I resolved at once to read, mark, learn and try inwardly to digest my cricket history. I loved the game but knew insufficient about its legacy to be in the lucky position that I now found myself. Far too many pundits since have been ignorant of the past. Without a knowledge of those who went before your own era you cannot put modern players and events into perspective.
By reading and subbing the pieces of such gifted writers as the elegant and imaginative Neville Cardus – whose copy was always handwritten and by no means easy to discern in places – or the lighter but always readable and often amusing Ian Peebles, I learned quickly about former events and players, not to mention the art of writing.
Jim gradually trusted me to do some writing of my own, having covered his tracks by disassociating the magazine from some of my views in my first ‘feature’ piece for the magazine which, being entitled ‘In Defence of Professionalism’, was not entirely in accord with his own philosophy. Most of my early pieces were anonymous, under the title of ‘Cricketer’s Notes’ which allowed me to convey small items of news, mainly from the game’s lower reaches. Club cricket also came within my compass – all grist to the mill – although I did find myself having to produce something nearer the front of the magazine, in a hurry, very early in my editorial role.
At Jim’s insistence we had trumpeted the fact that in the 1968 Spring Annual Richie Benaud, revered Australian captain turned sharply observant journalist, would be assessing the newly selected Australia team to England. When the deadline for the piece came there was no sign of any copy from Richie and all my attempts to contact him failed. Jim must have been abroad or also out of reach for some other reason, so there was nothing for it but to delay publication, which would have been ruinously expensive, or to ghost a piece myself on Richie’s behalf. With what now seems to me like brazen presumption I duly did so, affecting a certain racy Aussie style and affecting also to give my opinion on players such as Doug Walters and Paul Sheahan, who were about to visit England for the first time and whom I had never seen play.
When the piece appeared Jim said nothing and apparently approved of what I had concocted. I felt obliged to own up. Richie never complained either, although whether he got paid and what had happened to delay his material I do not remember. I am sure that he would never knowingly have missed a deadline. As a broadcaster, of course, he became a legend, still going strong in Australia as I write, making his shrewd, wry comments on Channel Nine with measured poise and jutting lower lip, at the age of eighty. ‘Good bit of bowling that by Graeme Swann, that was the top spinner’, he would say, and, though Richie spotted more top spinners than most, invariably the observation would be sagacious. Unlike almost all the other TV commentators, Richie understands the value of silence; of letting pictures speak for themselves.
It was, I believe, Tony Greig, guaranteed a job for life by Kerry Packer, who prompted the changed methods of those who followed. For a time Channel Nine toyed also with a challenge to the ABC on radio and, no doubt as a consequence, I remember him saying to me with typical candour: ‘We TV blokes have got to be more like you guys on radio.’ The Greig/ Bill Lawry banter on Channel Nine, so brilliantly, albeit crudely, played up by the Australian comedian Roy Birmingham, can certainly be fun sometimes and ‘Greigy’ was probably correct in the implication that all Benaud and no Greig would make for dull listening.
On the other hand over-indulgence was one of the reasons, no doubt, why so many in the days before satellite transmission used to say that they watched the television but listened to Test Match Special. To his credit Greig himself has never lost his enthusiasm but he became, and remains, overinclined to hyperbole as a commentator. When every ‘game on our hands’ is ‘marvellous’, every ball ‘a gem’, every shot a ‘real beauty’, every dropped catch ‘atrocious’ and every situation ‘absolutely sensational’, there is not much room for anything prosaic. This is the voice of the salesman, not of the expert. It is better to be honest.
My radio career, however, was still no more than a bright ambition as I found my feet at The Cricketer. The trick with producing a topical cricket magazine of record was to try to provide something for different sorts of readers. Some were interested only in a bit more depth on contemporary events than the daily newspapers had space to provide, but real students of the game needed sufficient historical fare to please them. There are and always have been any number of amateur cricket historians, many of them excellent, who would ply the office with articles sent in on spec.
Finding the right balance was not easy, especially when the only rival magazine in the late 1960s, Playfair Cricket Monthly, concentrated only on first-class cricket and ignored the recreational game that was always part of The Cricketer’s remit. Later the challenge became more serious when one of my successors as editor, David Frith, broke away to set up his own rival magazine, Wisden Cricket Monthly.
An Anglo-Australian who became probably the best cricket historian of recent times, Frith shared some of Irving’s faults and qualities. He, too, was stubborn and punctilious, a perfectionist, inclined to be free with his criticism of others, especially if they had anything to do with The Cricketer. Unlike Irving he was a useful club cricketer himself, taking the game extremely seriously. For a time, until taking umbrage over selection and coaching issues, he was president of Guildford CC. He has always been prickly but he has a real feel for the game and for the characters who play it, especially the English and Australian ones whom he had hero-worshipped from an early age. I was the first to publish his work, I believe, making room for one or two characteristically poignant articles on the gravestones of famous past players. He still writes sharp, affectionate pieces about the cricketers he has known personally during his durable and single-minded career.
The ownership of the magazine for which I slaved all day and most evenings for more than two years changed hands after Hutchinson had sold it to an American magazine group called Mercury Press. One of the directors was the former Somerset cricketer and captain Ben Brocklehurst, whom I had first met when he played for R.J.O. Meyer’s XI against Marlborough. He had already had a part in my destiny by missing one of his tremendous drives against my bowling and being stumped by Mike Griffith, the first, as it turned out, of three wickets for me in four balls that turned that match early in the summer term of 1962 and more or less guaranteed my place in the team.
Brocklehurst was appalled that Mercury’s chairman, after a brief look at the profit and loss account of a magazine that had been running since Pelham Warner had founded it in 1921, was proposing to close The Cricketer. Taking a brave gamble, encouraged by his loyal, attractive and forceful second wife, Belinda, Ben bought the magazine himself and ran it successfully as a business for most of the rest of his life. He was a big red-faced, jovial, occasionally cantankerous man who had a gift for bringing people into a business with a family feel to it. He and Belinda ran it from their home on the Kent/Sussex border, with the considerable help of loyal lieutenants from the same area. They expanded by starting Cricketer Holidays, based originally on cricket visits to Corfu. They found a niche, selling holidays to middle- and upper-middle-class folk of a certain age: typically they were Daily Telegraphreaders of the old school.
I had just started to get used to Ben, and had moved office at his behest from Hutchinson’s base in Great Portland Street to Argyle Street in the shadow of the London Palladium, when my opportunity came to join the BBC in 1970; but he was fully established as the life and soul of his little empire wh
en I rejoied the magazine.
I returned to The Cricketer as full-time editor in 1981, the year that made an immortal hero of Ian Botham. There was an overriding reason for leaving the intense but privileged life of cricket, travel and hotels that I had enjoyed since succeeding Brian Johnston as BBC cricket correspondent seven years before. The family and my life with Judy had to come first.
The balance between work and family life is one of the hardest for anyone to strike correctly but there was no doubt now that the time had come to be at home more regularly for the children. When I took my place behind one of three desks in the cosy but cramped little editorial office that Brocklehurst had rented from the printers in Redhill, James was seven and about to start as a day boy (until he was eleven) at Cranleigh prep school, Robin was five and learning his Ps and Qs amongst a small class of local boys starting out under a retired schoolmistress named Mrs. Pakeman and Lucy was, at eighteen months, already a bundle of laughs and smiles.
For all the pleasures of touring, I was really looking forward to a winter at home in Sussex. I had taken a big drop in salary by rejoining The Cricketer, one that I was tempted to supplement when Bill Gray, who had become the owner of Wisden after the bat-making side of the business had been swallowed by Grays of Cambridge, offered me the job as editor of the Almanack. I have kept the offer a secret until now. Already I knew that the BBC were keen to retain my services as a commentator for home Tests – needless to say the feeling was mutual – and it was not long before a sudden illness suffered by Jim Laker led to an offer from BBC television to commentate on Sunday League games and any Tests for which Test Match Special did not need me.
It was tempting to be invited to edit Wisden, flattering too, but I knew it would be no sinecure, even before meeting Graeme Wright, who assisted John Woodcock before becoming editor himself in 1987, at the London home of my first book publisher, Richard Johnson. He was by now an editor at Macdonald, the publishers of Wisden. Planning and producing a monthly magazine was a full-time job in itself without all this extracurricular activity and it would have been madness to pursue the idea, besides which Gray quite rightly had suspicions that Brocklehurst would like to use my association to buy and bury The Cricketer’s fledgling rival, Wisden Cricket Monthly. In any case Woodcock, Alan Gibson’s wise and lucid ‘Sage of Longparish’, was worthier than I. The Cricketer was not a bad forum from which to pontificate on the game, although I little knew then that in time I would be granted two even better ones.
Brocklehurst had faced a crisis when his editor, the studious and fastidious Frith, suddenly announced that, tired of being dictated to by his boss and those who helped to keep such a tight rein on his expenditure, he was intending to start up Wisden Cricket Monthly. Reg Hayter, the highly regarded manager of a press agency that serviced newspapers all round the country, filled the gap until I arrived to become the Editor and, for what it was worth, a member of the Board. I was allowed a free editorial hand and did my best both to widen its influence and sharpen its topicality.
Swanton maintained his interest, writing for the magazine throughout his eighties, and Woodcock, now retired from The Times, could occasionally be prevailed upon to write too, although it was like trying to squeeze juice from a dry lemon to persuade him sometimes that people wanted to read him as much as ever. The genial, and quietly shrewd Vic Marks, whom I had encouraged to write for us on his tour of Australia in 1982/3, later joined the board and Colin Cowdrey had been a member too for some time, as had John Haslewood, a long-time friend of Jim’s who had been a director of Watney-Mann. Once a year we met at the In and Out Club in Piccadilly for a two hour meeting under Ben’s chairmanship, followed by a three hour lunch. Wine flowed freely and the company could not have been more convivial. No one remembered in detail what had been discussed at the formal Board meeting: Ben continued to run the company’s financial affairs precisely as he pleased.
I had a good and loyal editorial ‘team’. It consisted at first of Mandy Ripley, a plump warm-hearted girl for whom nothing was ever too much trouble and who, like us all, worked until the job was done; and Andrew Longmore, recently down from Oxford, a fine schoolboy wicket-keeper/batsman for Winchester and in Sussex club cricket for Chichester. He was determined, a fast learner who became one of the best of Sunday sports feature writers. Andrew and I made our mistakes when it came to the presentation of the magazine, with which Ben was seldom satisfied, but I think we produced an interesting monthly, more varied in its approach than WCM, if, for a long time, less colourful.
Our expenditure – the amount of pages, the extent of colour pictures, fees to contributors, charges for printer’s corrections and the like – was always very closely monitored. It meant that we made a profit while WCM, soon to be underwritten by an even bigger sugar daddy when Paul Getty bought Wisden, never did.
When Andrew got his deserved chance to spread his wings, Ben introduced Peter Perchard, a skilful production man who loved cricket, quickly learned the other elements of editing and, like Mandy, worked his socks off. That little office in Redhill was a hive of industry from soon after dawn until long after dusk. When I resumed my duties as BBC cricket correspondent in 1984 I was able to give less of my own time – sometimes it seemed like blood – to the cause of The Cricketer but I remained as a less hands-on editor until moving to the Daily Telegraph in 1991. I made sure that Peter got a pay rise but Ben was keen to have a ‘name’ on the masthead and it was on my suggestion that the title of editor went then to Ben’s son-in-law, Richard Hutton, the dry, acerbic and highly capable former Cambridge, Yorkshire and England all-rounder. I thought he wrote rather well, especially about the finances of the game, and I personally found him amusing company, but his bluntness and slightly cynical approach to life was not always appreciated by those around him. Moreover, he had a paymaster of equally strong will in his father-in-law. Despite the natural sweetness and diplomacy of his wife, Charmaine, he and Ben eventually fell out, leaving Peter to assume the editorial seat that he deserved.
There were plenty of frustrations as editor of the magazine, especially those that related to keeping to the budget set by the proprietor. In both my stints editorial costs were watched by Ben’s cost-cutting Rottweiler, Harry Constantine, a portly fellow who was likeable but always knew better than anyone else. He would have been just the man to enforce George Osborne’s spending cuts. When colour pages became a possibility they had to be justified by securing coloured advertisements and the size of the magazine was rigidly dependent, at most times of the year, on the amount of business that could be drummed up by our advertising manager. Originally this was the genial and experienced Colin Pegley of Jackson Rudd & Associates. He was soon succeeded by an amiable bumbler named Christopher Bazalgette, a tubby red-haired Ronald Fraser lookalike who was employed by Ben to work solely for The Cricketer. That gave him every incentive to sell as much space as possible.
Christopher was known to everyone in club cricket in Hampshire as a shrewd trundler of slow-medium ‘nothings’. They lured a quite extraordinary number of batsmen to destruction over more than forty years of playing mainly for the Hampshire Hogs on their gorgeous ground at Warnford in the Meon Valley. Nothing came ahead of Hogs cricket for ‘Baz’, but his need to make ends meet made him an assiduous gatherer of cricket-based ads, gleaned mainly from his many friends and contacts in the game, not least the equipment manufacturers. Each year, to keep his contacts ‘sweet’, we would be obliged to produce an ‘Equipment Supplement’ which the editorial staff would try to sell to the reader as an additional bonus. Chris, the most well-meaning of souls, cannot have passed many English exams and was, I have always assumed, dyslexic. Translating into English the endless reams of semi-literate copy that he produced for this supplement was an annual chore, but Christopher was, no doubt, well aware of his shortcomings. Despite them he produced several books, usually co-written with somebody else. Nothing ever seemed to dim his enthusiasm.
As long as Ben remained strong enough th
e magazine itself remained robust, never rising above the circulation of around 45,000 reached in the early eighties, but always cutting its coat according to its cloth. Having swallowed its first competitor, Playfair Cricket Monthly, in 1973, and having thereby increased the circulation substantially overnight, Ben’s dream had always been to do the same to WCM, which might never have been viable but for Frith’s masterstroke in acquiring the name Wisden in return for a royalty.
Ben’s only mistake was not to put away sufficient into his own pension. The need to draw more cash from the businesses led, quite quickly, to an amalgamation between The Cricketer and WCM in which the latter, despite its smaller circulation, came out effectively as the winner, certainly so far as editorial personnel were concerned. Under the able, sharp editorial direction of John Stern, The Wisden Cricketer has continued to provide a thorough coverage of the whole game. It has a considerably bigger staff than I was allowed under Ben’s parsimonious control, but I would say that it is in every way superior to The Cricketer under my direction. It may have more of the look of WCM in terms of design, but it is more comprehensive and imaginative than the latter was under Frith and it has continued to serve the game as a journal of record and an independent voice, the two objectives that I always tried to keep in mind for The Cricketer itself. The wheel came full circle for me in 2011 when The Wisden Cricketer was acquired from its previous owners by a consortium that had for some time run the website Test Match Extra.com. If only for old time’s sake, I took a small stake.
8
OFF TO THE BEEB
Saturday afternoon at Broadcasting House in London in the early 1970s. There is nothing in all the realm of human labour quite so intense as a room full of journalists close to a deadline.
In the case of the BBC Radio Sports Room it was deadline time on Saturdays from a little before noon until seven pm, each man and woman absorbed utterly in the immediacy of the task in hand. Desks were strewn with papers at one end of the long, bright room on the sixth floor of BH. At the other end the teleprinter machines kept up a constant chatter. They spewed out news of goals, runs, wickets and the one, two, three from the latest races, with the urgency of a dawn chorus. In the little studio, partitioned and sound-proofed behind the teleprinters, the red light would be almost permanently at the ready for live broadcasting, the room beyond peopled by three or four studio managers, urgently spinning or editing tapes. Down below in studio B9, the hub of the operation to bring news of the afternoon’s sporting events to the nation was no less hectic.