Both tended to be sharper in the mornings than they were after a good lunch but Trevor was brilliant when it came to shrewdly observed summaries of a day’s play or of a player’s performance. I always enjoyed our double acts when, with the clock ticking towards the end of Test Match Special for another day, I would read out each bowler’s analysis and he would give his characteristic assessment of their performance in the manner of Mr Jingle in The Pickwick Papers. ‘Very good bowler; bad day.’ Or ‘Good county bowler, struggling at this level’. Or ‘Distinctly promising’. I once called him the greatest distiller since Johnny Walker.
He absolutely loved to make predictions, always with breezy confidence. Sticking his neck out was part of the fun. Comfortably seated in the corner of the box, and always giving the appearance of enjoying himself thoroughly, he would give his opinion on the likely course of the day as early as possible. ‘Sunny day; no clouds to worry about; very good pitch; one good New Zealand bowler – Hadlee, he’s high class; the rest honest trundlers; no decent spinner; England . . . what shall we say . . . 308 for three at the close.’ When, very occasionally, such prophecy went spectacularly wrong, he took the leg-pulling with chuckling good humour.
He was impatient of committees but a generous, kindly soul, who, though he relished a challenge on the sporting field – the bigger the better, in fact – was by nature a peacemaker off it. As such in commentary boxes not short of contributors with sizeable egos, he was a precious team member. He was, too, a curious mixture of sharp perceptiveness and woolly vagueness, not least with names.
The story most characteristic of Trevor is the one that he often told himself of his first Test match at Headingley when he decided to take his wife, Greta, to the seaside on the Sunday, always, in those civilised days, a rest day in the five-day game. Never thinking of consulting a map, and vaguely under the impression that Harrogate was a well-known resort, he drove her to that elegant spa town, searching all afternoon in vain for the sea-front.
Trevor always thoroughly approved of Shilpa Patel’s habit of opening one of our generously donated bottles of champagne shortly before the close of a day’s play. ‘Ah, the medicine’, he would exclaim, without need for further explanation, if he was on the air when the cork was popped. Life was as much fun for him, it seemed, as it had been in his playing days. On trips abroad he would take cine-films that graphically illustrated the pleasure that he was having off the field with companions such as Denis Compton, Godfrey Evans, Frank Tyson, Jim Laker and Brian Statham. (His captains, Len Hutton and Peter May, were usually a step away from any high-spirited frolics.)
I last saw Trevor in 2009 when I was helping the film-maker Michael Burns with Cape Summer, a DVD produced by MCC and based on Trevor’s films of the 1956/7 tour of South Africa. Sadly, he could remember nothing of that trip but his amiable willingness to please had not changed.
Fred was a brilliant entertainer when telling stories at cricket dinners, especially on the subject of his second tour of the West Indies in 1959/60 when ‘all them Cambridge undergraduates kept dropping catches off my bowling’. The Cambridge men who appeared in that series – Peter May, Ted Dexter and Raman Subba Row – actually only just outnumbered the Oxford ones, Colin Cowdrey and Mike Smith, but anyone with a light or a dark blue cap anywhere in his bag was viewed by Fred as part of the establishment whom he darkly accused of making life difficult for him. The future Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard (Cambridge and Sussex), came in for some especially ribald comment whenever the great fast bowler recalled the 1962/3 tour of Australia and David’s (quite untypical) spate of missed chances. ‘Let’s face it’, Fred would say, ‘when the Reverend puts ’is ’ands together he ought to ’ave more chance than you and me, not less.’
The nearest equivalent to Trueman and Bailey in the latter days of Baxter’s control of TMS was the pairing of Vic Marks and Mike Selvey. Both are nearer my own vintage and have long been good friends. Vic, with his famous chuckle, like an old engine starting up on the third or fourth turnover on a cold morning, is deservedly popular with everyone; listeners and colleagues alike. He is a most sympathetic colleague, invariably with something interesting to say and a shrewd sense of when best to say it.
Mike may not have the same warmth in his voice, but he knows all there is to know about the art of swing and seam bowling and his was a subtle humour ideally suited to Radio Four, unlike the sledge-hammer variety preferred by some more famous. That both these two are still regularly in the press-box means that they are au fait with all that is going on in dressing-rooms. On tour this has often given radio the edge over Sky television, whose commentators, with the notable exception of the concientious ‘Bumble’, truly a national treasure, often missed matches between the international games to play some golf. I never blamed them (often envied them in fact!) but sometimes a fringe player would force his way into the England as a consequence of taking his chance in a three-day game and one or two of the pundits would express surprise. Perhaps those who suddenly decided to sever their links with Mike Selvey, after twenty-four years of contributing to TMS at home and abroad, will think again. While recognising the need occasionally for a new voice and a ‘big’ name, there are plenty of relatively low-key series overseas, not to mention World Cups, when they should be glad to call on his experience and know-how.
Inevitably a few who might have been talented summarisers have never made it to the microphone for one reason or another. Peter Richardson of Worcestershire, Kent and England was one such. After his playing days he was too busy running a farm in Kent, but with his sense of humour he would have been an asset. I enjoyed our occasional meetings, not least in a taxi on the way to a cricketing lunch one day when he was musing on the logic of one of his teenage children. ‘You don’t hold your knife like that’ he had instructed his son at breakfast that morning, to which the unanswerable reply was, ‘Why?’
The same son, a fine games-player like all his family, later ran the Emirates Golf Club in Dubai and allowed me and other cricket journalists to play there without paying a green fee. His generosity was put to the test when John Etheridge of the Sun accidentally allowed his motorised buggy to slide down a bank into a lake, complete with his set of hired golf clubs.
Richardson senior was one of those involved when in 2006 I was asked by the former Surrey president Brian Downing to interview some of the survivors from both England and Australia at a dinner at The Savoy to commemorate Jim Laker’s nineteen wickets against Australia, fifty years before. That momentous day at Old Trafford, watched by me on television at home in South Holmwood, was one of the most revelatory days of my life, so, naturally, I was delighted to do so.
There was some film shown to the audience of Peter reaching his maiden Test hundred in the same match. Having pushed a ball into the covers and run his single he briefly raised his bat and accepted a congratulatory handshake, before everyone got on with the next ball. Referring to that, knowing his famous sense of humour and trying to raise a laugh, I said to him: ‘I noticed that you didn’t run round the pitch with your arms in the air; in fact you didn’t even kiss the badge on your cap.’ To which, to my disappointment, he replied: ‘Well, after winning the toss it was important that we got away to a decent start . . .’ I was not aware until that moment that Peter had become almost totally deaf!
Commentators and summarisers have come and gone but for more than forty years Bill Frindall was indispensable to TMS as a scorer and statistician. By making an art of scoring Test matches on radio Bill had become something of a legend, the man on whom we commentators on BBC Radio relied. Sometimes he was the willing butt of our humour, especially when there was a possibility that some very obscure record might just have been broken, but at all times he was also the consummate professional to whom we looked for facts and figures. Coming from Bill they had an imprimatur which no one ever seriously questioned.
He died soon after getting home from Dubai on the annual fund-raising trip for the Lord’s Taverners. It wa
s sheer malign fate that he – and he alone of those who supported that trip – should have contracted legionnaires’ disease. It cut him down at a time when, though he was about to turn seventy, he was still fit enough to be playing a few games of cricket each season with the boundless enthusiasm he had always shown since captaining the colts at Banstead, presumably without a beard. For the touring team that he founded, the Malta Maniacs, he took lots of wickets, each of them precisely recorded in his personal records. He ran in with energy to bowl as fast as he could, his hostility enhanced by a beard which turned from jet black to grey like W.G.’s.
Professionally he was an essential element in the eclectic mixture of personalities in Test Match Special. From the moment that he joined the programme in 1966 soon after leaving the RAF he was commercially savvy, being known to George Rutherford as ‘Bill Swindall’ but he was certainly not alone in making the TMS brand name work for him, reasonably so indeed considering how modest the pay has always been!
Bill conducted a complicated private life with a number of women posted in various parts of the world, and had two unsuccessful marriages before finally settling down in Wiltshire with Debbie, a bright and attractive primary school head teacher. He gave of his spare time generously to cricketing charities, a factor, no doubt, in his being honoured with an MBE in 2004. He was also the scorer at Wormsley for Paul Getty’s XI, keeping meticulous records, naturally.
He had a quick wit and the sharpest of brains. He was often way ahead of other commentators in spotting things, be they records or the well-endowed lady in the fourth row of the Tavern Stand. Sometimes events can unfold with dramatic suddenness on a cricket field and there is much to be recorded, both on paper and, more recently, online too, but Bill, though he could sometimes be testy like most of us, would practically never be flustered into an error. His many books of records, and an entertaining autobiography, are his legacy.
Unlike their radio counterparts, television scorers are neither seen nor heard. It does not make some of them any the less eccentric. The one whom I remember best was Michael Fordham who got so excited on BBC television during the Headingley Test of 1981 that I had to stand in for him for an over while he dashed to the Gents.
Malcolm Ashton has taken over as the TMS scorer at home. Another intelligent and able man, with a great sense of humour (especially for a professional tax expert) he has a broader range of contacts than his famous predecessor. He also has less of an ego! Overseas, South Africa has produced the most remarkable of all the members of this singular breed. Listeners to radio during the 2010/11 Ashes series will have heard Andrew Sampson, another literally bearded wonder. He is a masterly user of all the information available online and misses no milestone, however obscure.
Imagine my astonishment when, after a passing reference to Don Bradman’s highest first-class score of 452 when England reached that total as a team during one of the Tests in Australia in 2010/11, Andrew piped up seconds later in his clipped, slightly high-pitched South African voice: ‘And Bradman scored those runs off 465 balls in 415 minutes with 49 fours.’ I know that sites such as Cricket Archive make such information available but it is the industry and curiosity that ferrets it out so quickly that is so extraordinary.
11
THE WEST INDIES
This is the life! No need here for a vest or pullover, nor a blanket at night, especially in Trinidad’s clammy climate which, in the early months of 1974, gave me my first experience of tropical warmth. It was an open-necked shirt by day and a fresh one after the evening shower, ready for rum punches in the brief twilight with fans whirling like dervishes from high ceilings to cool the laden air and blow the mosquitoes back towards the wide Savannah across the road.
Touring in the winter months started for me fortuitously young. There was no better place to begin than the Caribbean. I had only just had my twenty-ninth birthday when I set off for Port of Spain at the end of January 1974, excited but apprehensive as a child on his first day at a new school.
Heart-wrenching as it was to leave Judy and James behind, I had been given a tremendous opportunity to advance my career when I was told that I would be the BBC’s only reporter in the West Indies. Fail and I would not have been cricket correspondent for long. But this was to be the first of a long succession of tours, none more enjoyable than those in the Caribbean.
There is little to match the excitement of a maiden trip to a strange land. While a part of me pined for home and those left behind, I also felt suddenly and gloriously free from the rotas of the BBC Sports Room. For the first time I was their man in the field, free, as far as programme schedules permitted, to do the job my own way, reporting every day on a cricket tour that everyone of my acquaintance wanted to hear about.
Home at the start of that first tour of the West Indies was the Queens Park hotel, a large, white-painted plantation-style building constructed entirely of wood, elderly but stately, not yet eclipsed in reputation by the more modern Holiday Inn by the docks or the avant-garde Hilton, newly arrived half-way up a hill on the other side of the Savannah. But the Queens Park’s slow decline was already underway, despite its relative closeness to the Queens Park Oval itself. You could walk to the ground in fifteen minutes from the established hotel, but when the team returned to Trinidad later in the tour they persuaded their travel agent to switch their patronage to the flashier and more expensive option of the Hilton, a striking piece of architecture with the public rooms on top of the bedrooms and a striking foyer with vases full of magnificent lilies and a vast expanse of highly polished wood.
The journalists, trying to turn a blind eye to the occasional cockroach, stayed where they were. It saved time and avoided the expense of a ride in one of the huge, swaying Lincolns, Pontiacs and Buicks that queued up the drive to the Hilton. Their Indian drivers spent their days waiting for guests, then ferrying them round the Savannah in their long, swaying vehicles, or up the narrow road to Santa Cruz where the island’s interior is fleshy with riotous verdant growth but scarred at the edges by ugly concrete buildings and vulgar advertising hoardings. Man’s inhumanity to nature.
Some people hate touring. It has its disadvantages, of course, but I enjoyed, above all, the independence that it allowed. Working far from home enables the traveller to give absolute attention to the job in hand. Alan Bennett expressed it well (naturally) in his Writing Home:
Being on location with a [film] unit, like being on tour with a play, concentrates the experience; one is beleaguered, often enjoyably so and for a short while the film becomes the framework of one’s life. I am more gregarious than I like to think and to be working on a film with congenial people in an unfamiliar place seems to me the best sort of holiday.
I felt exactly like that about touring overseas. From the moment that I left home, always an agonising wrench from Judy and worse as our family grew, the truth is that, with a few exceptions when life got tough or wearisome, I was totally absorbed in the small, yet at the time apparently all-important, ups and downs of a cricket tour. The everyday telephone calls, the social obligations of home, the bills that had to be paid, the letters to be answered or fuses to be mended were all left behind as soon as the plane landed at a distant airport overseas.
The camaraderie of life on tour was enjoyable. So, for a time, was life in hotels; and in press and commentary boxes with witty and, on the whole, like-minded journalists. On that first trip the press and radio boxes included only one journalist of my own age, Jon Henderson of Reuters, but the remainder were mainly very good company too: there was John Woodcock, who had seen it all but loved his job and did it with consummate authority; Swanton himself, nearing the end of his road as a full-time correspondent; the mustachioed old smoothie Crawford White of the Express; the experienced, rather world-weary Alex Bannister of the Mail (who nevertheless lived to a great age); the amiable and highly capable Sun correspondent Clive Taylor, destined to die tragically young from septicemia contracted in India; and the cheeky chappie Peter Laker who, ap
art from writing for the Mirror, spent his days planning practical jokes, spinning a little rubber ball and working imaginatively on his expenses. He and his wife, Connie, who looked a little like Barbara Windsor, usually managed to move to a smarter house after each tour.
Another who became a friend on that trip, John Thicknesse of the Evening Standard, had been advised by a senior colleague, the boxing writer George Whiting, to ‘thieve a little, leave a little’ when it came to filing expenses on trips away from home. Thickers was a card: independent, immensly conscientious and caring to the point of obsession about his job, but a great companion at any time other than when a deadline was looming. Impetuous and often infuriatingly stubborn, he could also be kind. He was very intelligent, a shrewd judge of character, irreverent of authority, a fund of stories and an unshakeable opponent of anything he felt was wrong. He would gamble on almost anything, but only when he had calculated the odds.
He always said that his job as the Standard’s cricket correspondent from 1967 to 1996 was the best in the business. He was invariably an informative, opinionated, interesting read. Before he got onto cricket full time his first assignment for the paper had been to cover Donald Campbell’s attempt on the world water speed record on Coniston Water. With his capacity to make immediate friendships he played cards with Campbell on the night before the fatal drive and reputedly dealt him the same ‘unlucky’ hand that Wild Bill Hickock received before getting shot.
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