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He was commended by the editor, Charles Wintour, for his report of Campbell’s noble failure and continued to give his employers dedicated service, not least when reappearing on the front page after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination at the start of England’s tour of India in 1992/3. It apparently amused the editor that John gave equal prominence to the murder of the leader of the world’s largest democracy and the fact that, despite it, the England tour would proceed.
Plenty of good companions there undoubtedly were on that and subsequent trips, but I missed my wife and family. In the age of air travel one was never so remote that a return home was not possible in a crisis, but a chasm, in those days filled more by letters than by expensive phone-calls, parted Judy and me until, on this first tour, she joined me for a blissful fortnight in Barbados.
Meanwhile she had been left with all the problems of running a home while I took the kudos for reporting daily to the high-profile Today programme and the various sports news bulletins throughout the day. I did many more of these than Brian Johnston had been accustomed to on previous tours, simply because I had worked for the Sports News department for the previous three years and was used to the hourly service that is now staple fare on Radio Five Live. In those days, mind you, cricket took its proper place in the order of things. When I left the BBC staff several years later it was already beginning to come a poor second to what we then sometimes still referred to as Association Football.
During Test matches on that first tour of the West Indies I also voiced reports for national news bulletins, including, very occasionally when a story was big enough, the nine o’ clock television news. Just such a story came along in the first major match of the tour, on the second day of the first Test. It was the famous running out of Alvin Kallicharran after the last ball of the day had been bowled.
Everyone on the ground knew, because of the time, that it was the last ball. Derek Underwood, with his customary pin-point accuracy, had bowled six ‘dot’ balls to Bernard Julien while Kallicharran, the hero of the day, relaxed at the other end, 142 not out. As Julien pushed the last ball just past the right hand of Tony Greig, fielding close at silly point, his partner continued walking towards the pavilion opposite him and Alan Knott pulled up the stumps before making his way back to the dressing-room. Greig, meanwhile, picked the ball up, took a few paces towards the unprotected stumps at the non-striker’s end and threw them down from close range. The respected little Jamaican umpire Douglas Sang Hue raised a a finger, slowly and sadly, in answer to Greig’s jubilant appeal.
Greig clapped his hands and walked briskly off but he was quickly made aware that what might have passed as a fair piece of gamesmanship in his native South Africa was considered beyond the pale in both England and the West Indies. The great batting hero of the day, a young and dazzling left-hander from a few miles across the water in Guyana, was out through no fault of his own other than failing to wait for an official call of ‘time’ from the umpire. The confusion of the other England players was matched by that of the crowd’s. There was indignant booing as the wickets on the big scoreboard were changed from six to seven.
Up in the commentary box at the Northern End, with the Maraval Hills behind me, I was quickly given a hospital pass by the local commentator, Raffie Knowles, a charming old boy who knew his football better than he did his cricket. ‘There’s pandemonium at the Queens Park Oval’ he said in a shaking voice: ‘And to explain what’s happened, over to Chris Jenkins’.
I had a wiser and more experienced observer next to me on the other side, Gerry Gomez, who supported my view that it was morally if not technically wrong for England to take a wicket in these circumstances. I mentioned that I had seen Mike Denness, the England captain, in earnest conversation with Mr. Sang Hue as they walked off the field and speculated that he would be asking for the appeal to be withdrawn and for the decision to be rescinded. Thereupon the scoreboard operators, listening, like many in the crowd, on their transistor radios, put the wickets on the board back to six. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that thereby a riot was averted.
Other than another umpire-related incident in the series in England the previous summer, when Arthur Fagg temporarily refused to go on umpiring because of the hostile reaction of Rohan Kanhai after Geoffrey Boycott had been given not out, this was, I think, the first of many cricket stories in my time as a commentator and reporter that made national rather than sporting news. I must say that I always got a special kick from the suppressed excitement and apparent importance of these events, storms in tea-cups though most of them were. I suppose it is a legacy of Empire, and cricket’s perceived role as an acceptable symbol of British patronage, that gives these scandals such resonance whenever they involve an England team. This one really got the adrenalin flowing, with several of my press colleagues suggesting that the tour might be called off. It was only at eight that evening in Port of Spain, after a tense meeting between the MCC team manager, Donald Carr, and Jeff Stollmeyer, the relaxed and urbane Anglophile Trinidadian who was, fortunately, chairman of the West Indies Cricket board, that the crisis was dispelled. It had been agreed that Kallicharran would be allowed to continue batting the following morning.
‘Greigy’ remained the central character of that tour and indeed of English cricket in the three hectic years that followed it. He was a genuinely charismatic character with a charm to match his overbearing presence. From the start I liked his friendliness, marked by a winning smile and an engaging chuckle. He made no secret of his self-confidence, nor of his ambition. Shakespeare, the great reader of human character, would have called it ‘o’erweening’; but he was no mere solipsist: he was interested in other people and his nature remains a generous one. I first met him when I played against him on a Cambridge College tour when he was nineteen and in England playing some games for Sussex second XI in 1967. He was obviously a prodigious talent, even though he holed out to my modest off-spin for eighty or ninety during a hectic run chase by the club for whom he was playing at the behest of the bibulous chairman of Sussex’s cricket committee, Tony Crole-Rees.
Greig became, rapidly, a superb and aggressive all-round cricketer who immediately made his mark for Sussex with his 156 in his very first innings for the county’s Championship team the following summer. Eventually, judged against other great all-rounders, his Test averages as a batsman (40) and bowler (32) suggested that he was an even better player than he was but he was the original fighting cricketer and no one in my experience ever made more of his natural ability. As the Kallicharran incident had demonstrated, he was an opportunist as well as a pragmatist. He had already been on tour with great success in India and Pakistan under Tony Lewis the previous winter and he was vice-captain to Denness in the West Indies, to the displeasure of Boycott, who felt he should have been captain on that tour.
I got to know and like Denness himself in later years. As captain he had what might have been a typical Scottish reserve, despite his ready smile. To some extent I think he felt that the leadership had been thrust upon him. It was not done so against his will but despite his successful command of the talented Kent side of the time, he might have been happier as one of the ranks. The press relations side of his job did not come naturally but it was not his fault that he should have run into the fabled combination of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson in Australia the following winter. He took it on his dimpled chin and finally enjoyed some sweet personal success at the end of that tour, albeit only after the main prize had been lost.
The relatively venerable Boycott and the youthful Frank Hayes apart, other members of the team on my first tour were all more or less my contemporaries. I did not spend much time on the tour with them – even then, players and journalists mainly kept apart except when they were travelling – but it was my job to put a microphone before them on rest days or the occasions when they had done well and I got on well with all of them: Dennis Amiss, who had a prolific tour, scoring 1120 runs in sixteen innings, and who has become
a good friend; the Kentish trio of Alan Knott, Derek Underwood, and Bob Woolmer; the salty-witted Jack Birkenshaw and two gentle northern fast bowlers, Mike Hendrick and Chris Old; the highly individual Bob Willis; the other Surrey bowlers, the chirpy and friendly Pat Pocock and his equally likeable but much more moody mate Geoff (G.G.) Arnold, known to all as ’Orse; the bluff and amiable John Jameson and, the best tourist of the lot, Bob Taylor. Forever smiling and revealing a gold tooth in the process – wicket-keeping repairs I assume– Bob’s nickname was ‘Chat’. He would talk to anyone about anything and no team ever had a better natural diplomat.
It was a good side, not a great one and they were outplayed by a West Indies team whose batting was of significantly higher class. The top six of Roy Fredericks, Lawrence Rowe, Kallicharran, Clive Lloyd, Gary Sobers and Rohan Kanhai was as powerful as any that has ever represented the West Indies. Yet England contrived to draw the series when on the second visit to Trinidad Boycott belatedly found his best form, scoring 99 out of 267 and 112 out of 263, and Greig produced from almost nowhere the most sensational bowling performance of his frequently dramatic career. He switched from his usual bouncy fast-medium to bowl off-cutters at slow medium pace, often with the sort of dip achieved by another who could switch paces in the same way, Bob Appleyard, who had been Len Hutton’s Yorkshire trump-card in Australia in 1954/5. Now, Greig enabled Denness to come home at the head of a side that had somehow shared the spoils, taking thirteen wickets for 156 on a dry, turning pitch.
I was an excited witness to it all. More than that, on the last day of the match I was the first to commentate ball-by-ball on radio on a BBC-produced programme overseas, when Bob Burrows managed to persuade Radio Three that the game was building to a climax that deserved a big audience.
Gradually we did more and more commentary on tour in future years although in Australia we continued, as of old, to take the ABC’s coverage. Representing the BBC as the guest commentator in local transmissions in Australia, the West Indies and New Zealand was a huge privilege and one of the reasons that I enjoyed touring so much, especially as I never established the right to commentate on every Test at home, even when I was officially the BBC cricket correspondent.
Even in the Caribbean, life on tour could drag and home seem a long way away. In Barbados, of course, there were always the beaches on occasional free days, not to mention beach parties of the kind that Tony Cozier, the king of the Caribbean media and one of the shrewdest and best commentators there has ever been, threw at his little holiday house on the Atlantic coast.
Smaller islands visited, usually in the early weeks of a tour or at the end for rather more demanding one-day internationals, were a joy, amongst them St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and, in 1974, Antigua, before it became a part of the cricketing mainstream thanks to Viv Richards and Andy Roberts.
When I turned to writing rather than broadcasting for my main living, the tour of the West Indies every four years or so was the one I most enjoyed, as much as anything because the time difference allowed one to write pieces for three or four editions during a day’s cricket, each one of them urgent and up to the moment, before relaxing completely in the evenings in the knowledge that nothing that happened in the hours of darkness could reach newspapers that had been put to bed almost as soon as the last ball of the day had been bowled. But these tours were not all about swimming before breakfast in a shimmering light blue sea or drinking those inimitable rum punches as the sun set at the end of a day’s enjoyable work. Large chunks of each tour were spent far from any beach, often in hotels whose rooms were old-fashioned and whose food brought back memories of school meals. As tourism developed, so life on tour became more comfortable but it was always, essentially, a job of work not a holiday.
In Port of Spain there was no beach near the city and the same was true of Kingston, so a lot of time on all my tours would be spent in two vibrant, potentially dangerous cities where sensible folk watched their step when they left the safety of their hotel. In Kingston I once tried to find some white leather shoes of the kind that look and feel right for evening wear, without socks, in tropical climes at night. I had not gone far into New Kingston, the safer part of Jamaica’s rough capital city, when I was approached by a youngish man, built to my height but several stone heavier and stronger, who asked if he could be of assistance. ‘I’m just looking for some shoes’, I said. ‘Follow me, man’, he replied, in a friendly enough way but also in a manner that suggested that I would be better not to argue.
I sensed, without any negotiations being required, that he would assure me of a safe escort so long as he was properly paid. Two or three shops did not have either the type or the size of shoe that I was looking for and on a hot afternoon we went further and further into the meaner streets of a Kingston Town somewhat different from the one envisaged by anyone listening to that sweet song about the girl left behind ‘down the way where the nights are gay and the sun shines daily on the mountain top’. My anxiety had grown to apprehension when he finally guided me into a shop that had a pair of hand-made leather shoes that cost very little, fitted my aching feet to perfection and which I still wear on hot evenings overseas. Without any need to annunciate our understanding, he led me back to within sight of my hotel and I handed over a tidy sum of US dollars.
I once woke in the middle of the night at the Pegasus hotel in Kingston, where poor Bob Woolmer ended his days at the start of the 2007 World Cup, to hear in the middle distance the despairing cries of a girl or woman whose pleading screams sounded horribly as though she was being raped. The city has a reputation for murder and brutality linked to drugs but the Jamaicans I have known have always been delightful.
At Cambridge a larger than life (albeit slimly built) chap called Alva Anderson had arrived from Jamaica in my second year with a reputation as an outstanding cricketer and footballer. It proved very exaggerated unfortunately but Alva, a happy-go-lucky fellow with a touch of the Walter Mitty about him, did not seem to mind and he has done well in life since. By contrast the first really well-known Jamaican cricket commentator, Roy Lawrence, was a modest fellow who had settled in Leeds by the time that I knew him, disenchanted with his own island. Roy was known for his occasional faux pas during his running commentaries, including: ‘Trevor Bailey has been batting for just over an hour and he gets a single off Valentine which takes him to ten, nine of them in singles’. He was also happy to confess to: ‘It’s another beautiful day at Sabina Park. The sun is blowing and the breeze is shining all over the ground’.
Allan Rae, one of the heroes of the 1950 West Indies tour of England, was very kind to the young English commentator who arrived wet behind the ears in Jamaica for the first time in 1974. He was happy to watch Test matches from the little pavilion of the Kingston Cricket Club at Sabina Park, where he was the president, a modest man for all his status. A capable barrister who shouldered most of the administration of West Indies cricket in the 1950s with his former opening partner, the charming Trinidadian Jeff Stollmeyer, he asked me to dinner at his house in Kingston to meet the great Clyde Walcott. Rae, whose piercing green eyes were his most striking characteristic, and Walcott, a commanding figure with a voice as deep as Paul Robeson’s, were fascinating to hear both on their experiences in England and on the inter-island rivalries in the Caribbean.
Clyde, later knighted, went on to become an influential administrator in the affairs of world cricket, succeeding Colin Cowdrey as chairman of the ICC. He was always a dignified figure who more or less held the balance of power between the old governers of the game from England and Australia and the pushy rising forces of the Orient. I never knew the most revered of the three Ws, Sir Frank Worrell, merely admired his cricket from afar on the 1957 and 1963 tours; but, like all who knew him, I warmed immediately to (Sir) Everton De Courcy Weekes when I worked with him in commentary boxes in the Caribbean. Whereas one always felt that Walcott, like Viv Richards, was aware of his colour in the presence of people who had not yet come to terms with
genuine racial equality, Everton has always seemed absolutely at ease in his own skin and situation, both a happy and a wise man. He was, too, the old Bajan aficionados will tell you, Cozier amongst them, the greatest of three immortal cricketers.
Guyana, on the South American mainland, was the place that everyone seemed to dread, simply because it rained so much there at the time of year when cricket took place. Georgetown, the capital, is a singular place, laid out by the Dutch below sea level with a system of dykes and locks. Its wooden buildings, painted white and green, have great charm, none more so than the beautiful old wooden Cathedral, outside which I should have been more generous one Good Friday to a terribly crippled man whose constant pain and terrible poverty were obvious. I did not have much more than the taxi fare for the journey back to the hotel after the service, so gave him only what remained. The look of disappointment on his face when I handed over what would have been the driver’s tip has lived with me. This from a Christian on Good Friday of all days. ‘I was hungry and you did not feed me; I was naked and you did not clothe me.’ I could so easily have walked back to the hotel – it was not much more than a mile, although very hot – but he, with his crutches, could not have gone half as far as he limped off to continue his suffering. Too often in my life have I regretted momentary decisions that quickly become irrevocable, especially those when a generous impulse has been overruled by the voice of ‘reason’. O bring back yesterday, bid time recall.
Most of Georgetown’s spacious wooden houses are painted white under green roofs. The old ground at Bourda has a pavilion as redolent of cricket history as any outside Lord’s, its bar well frequented by local members and its walls covered by black and white photographs of past players and teams. For the 2007 World Cup foreign investment made possible the building of a large but soulless modern ground, built amongst cane fields and marshland out of the city centre. It had none of the character of Bourda, but it drained immeasurably better after rain. Sadly, most of the Bourda Tests I saw there were spoilt by the ground’s inability to absorb heavy downpours. I took a pair of galoshes with me in 1990 especially for Guyana but one would have needed wellies on the morning that the whole field was ankle deep in water. Shoals of small fish were swimming about on the edge of the outfield, surely a phenomenon unique to Bourda. In half a dozen visits to Georgetown the abiding memories, unfortunately, are of rain falling from a slate grey sky into a sea the colour of porridge.