Only one of our occasional players more or less guaranteed a victory, however: Andrew Corran, a genuinely fast bowler of great craft who had taken the new ball for Oxford and Nottinghamshire. Andrew was master-in-charge of cricket at the school in most of the years when I managed (captained) the MCC side there, as I later did at Charterhouse and Marlborough. He was a genial man of civilised tastes whose wife, Gay, mixed beauty and wealth with great talent as an artist. His first concern at one of those MCC games was to make sure that a barrel of King and Barnes Sussex bitter was available to the opposition at all times. No doubt there was more than one motive, but the ample supply of ale seldom prevented one of my regular players, John MacDonald, from luring the schoolboys to destruction with highly flighted leg-breaks. John was a British Airways pilot who had retired early to play and watch as much cricket as he could. He died of a heart attack at Lord’s shortly before the start of the first Test of the famous series against Australia in 2005, having queued from early in the morning to get his favourite place in the pavilion.
Leg-spinners of any quality always flourished in the club cricket that I played. A clever little bowler from Middlesex, Stuart Feldman, took shoals of wickets for the Old Paulines and so, for the Old Alleynians and Wimbledon, did Simon Dyson, who, unlike the other two, did not rely on flight but on quick, fizzing leg-breaks and googlies. He so impressed Trevor Bailey when he played with him in the Cricketer Cup that Trevor said immediately that England should take him on tour.
Generally club cricket was a batsman’s game, however, none the worse played as it is still in ‘jazz hat’ cricket when the norm is for the side batting first to declare at around half-way in the match with somewhere between 250 and 275 on the board, then to set the opposition the challenge of getting the runs. There was seldom a bad game when played in this positive, as opposed to aggressive, spirit and spinners always played their part. I lost count of games that culminated in the side batting second hanging on for a tense draw with nine wickets down, although another leg-spinner, the Cambridge Blue Mike Kirkman, has never forgotten my bowling him with the final ball of a match between Albury and the Old Alleynians. He and his last wicket partner had held on for half an hour. To my final flighted off-break he played a forward defensive of exaggerated care, only for the ball to trickle back under his bat and gently to remove a single bail. From the fielding side’s perspective at least, it was richly comical.
Of course pitches could be too good. Playing for the Arabs against the Bradfield Waifs at Bradfield one day I chased leather in the field all morning and early afternoon while the home side scored 221 for one in 62 overs. The Arabs, with their Etonian openers Rupert Daniels and Clive Williams both scoring centuries, knocked off the runs for the loss of one late wicket in thirty-six overs.
Many a wandering club, like the Arabs, was started by a group of cricketing friends, among them the oldest extant club of them all, I Zingari; but none, so far as I know, set out, as the Willow Warblers did, in 1991, with the intention of playing a maximum of 100 matches. That was the plan when Tom Bristowe and his brother, Mike, the youngest of four cricketing brothers at Charterhouse of whom Will, an Oxford Blue in 1984 and 1985, was best known, decided to start a team to play occasional matches with and against cricketers they liked.
Along the way they had immense fun, playing against long-established clubs such as IZ, Free Foresters, Arabs, Butterflies and Sussex Martlets, and on some of the most beautiful grounds in southern England. In all the Warblers played 81 games, involving just 57 members, including five who were still playing in county cricket when the experiment ended exactly as intended. Tom, the club’s driving force except during the two years that he spent with an American merchant bank in New York, decided to draw stumps, true to the original intention, as soon as it became harder to find teams of the right strength for what had rapidly became rather an impressive fixture list. Busy working lives, marriage and the responsibilities, in some cases, of fatherhood had begun to get in the way of playing.
The Warblers were always a genial bunch of cricketers, attempting to be true to their ‘cardinal’ virtues of prudence, courage, temperance and justice, but they were always competitive. Their greatest success on the field occurred in glorious surroundings at Wormsley, where as strong a team as could be mustered, including several former Oxbridge and Durham players, overcame a Paul Getty XI replete with current and former first-class cricketers. Great philanthropist as he was, the late Sir Paul, and those who handpicked his teams, preferred to win: it was the only time the Warblers were not asked to renew a fixture.
I was lucky enough not only to play in the first game at Wormsley, but also to be the first man to make a fifty there. Opening the batting for Sir Paul’s team against an MCC side with some notable cricketers, including the Indian Test spinner Dilip Doshi, I was sufficiently inspired by the truly perfect surroundings and the considerable crowd to play a decent innings. This was one of several occasions in similar matches – the others usually for charity – that I have deliberately given my wicket away, although in this case the sacrifice had something to do with the attraction of being able to linger with Judy and other guests over the lunch of salmon, Chablis, strawberries and cream.
My later home-based club cricket was played at Horsham in the sylvan surroundings of Cricket Field Road and on pitches that, season in, season out, have always been amongst the best in the country. Not only was the company of fellow Horsham cricketers congenial – if, occasionally, a bit rough – but the benign batting conditions were ideal for someone like me whose job meant only occasional games, many of them for the mid-week ‘Thursday XI’.
Sussex have played in most seasons at Horsham for more than a hundred years and one knew there would be a hard, well-prepared pitch. Opponents always wanted to put out as strong a side as possible here, especially in those days before cricket leagues came south. Sunday matches were often more important than Saturday ones and in one such game, playing for Cranleigh in the 1960s, a beautiful high summer’s day, I managed to get to ninety-six before I was caught and bowled to the genuine dismay of the wicket-keeper. All the way through my innings he had kept up a complimentary running commentary from behind the stumps. He was John Dew, the local doctor.
Wicket-keepers, as all cricketers know, are a devious lot, generally speaking. There are those who reckon that John’s constant banter – he would stand up to everyone except the quickest bowlers – was designed to aid the Horsham cause. Actually, it was just his natural enthusiasm, which is not to say that he wasn’t a very competitive cricketer, a brilliant wicket-keeper and a useful batsman, especially when the chips were down, who had played for Sussex second XI and for the full County team, against Worcestershire and Warwickshire, in 1947.
Very few men have spread such joy on and off a cricket field anywhere. It was his happy destiny (and his choice) to live virtually all his life in Horsham, most of it spent in his surgery, singing in the church choir, or on that lovely ground. Cricket was not his only passion. He had captained his school, Tonbridge, at rugby, and he gave as much time to his Christian faith, his family and to developing a deep appreciation for music and nature. When he died of cancer in 2008 the large and beautiful parish church of St. Mary’s that separates the ground from the prettiest street in the town was literally over-brimming with those who had come to say goodbye to their beloved GP.
He had been president of the cricket club for forty-four years. He had irrepressible enthusiasm and instant, utterly genuine charm, emphasised by a hearty laugh. I can see and hear him now beside the pavilion at Cricket Field Road, or on the adjoining greensward leading up towards Denne Hill, aptly known now as the John Dew Ground. His rasping voice would offer encouragements and admonitions to all the young cricketers under his wing at any of the thousands of matches or weekday practice sessions that he organised with a small army of helpers:
Good shot, Michael!
Well done, Christine!
What happened to that bat of your
s, Harry? You’re supposed to hit the ball with it, not drop it. Well done, though. What a good innings!
Five wickets, Angela. Really? Gosh, they must have been useless batsmen!
He knew exactly when to build young cricketers up, when gently to make fun of them, when to give them wise advice, how to make them feel involved: above all, magically, who they all were, not just their own names and characters but also the names of their mothers and fathers, even of their brothers and sisters. He loved cricket but he also loved and respected people of all types and ages.
The same was true of Sandy Ross, another Sussex man with whom I played a lot of cricket, not least for MCC because, despite an active family life and his employment as an effective manager of a chain of roadside catering establishments (and later as a school bursar and cricket coach), he was always available for any of the matches that I managed. His open, freckled face was regularly lit by the warmest smile of anyone I have known. He seemed either to play or watch cricket every day of every English summer.
Built not unlike Alec Bedser and blessed with huge hands with which he could cut and swing the ball even when he got heavier in his middle age, Sandy took shoals of wickets for all the many clubs that he represented, including all ten for only twenty-six in a Sussex League match for East Grinstead. He was only sixty-one when he collapsed and died instantly of a heart attack when he was fielding in a match for the Sussex Martlets. Again an unusually large parish church, East Grinstead, was full to the brim to say farewell.
Apart from a holiday appearance when I was still a schoolboy, for Oporto against Lisbon in Portugal’s annual expatriate ‘Test’ match, the first cricket that I ever played overseas was in South Africa during my gap year. I was largely unsuccessful, frequently getting stumped, but I had my successes for media teams in later years, including one at the Cable & Wireless ground in Barbados against a team captained by the former Test batsman Peter Lashley. For some reason I forgot my youthful inhibitions about hitting the ball in the air and repeatedly enjoyed the satisfaction of smiting a medium pacer back over his head for six, greatly helped by a strong wind behind me. There was also a small triumph in Sydney when I was presented with a genuine bronze medal of the type issued to men of the match in events sponsored by Benson and Hedges. I had taken some wickets and made the top score as our motley crew regained the ‘Ash’. This made a pleasant contrast to a humiliating experience at a Birmingham League ground on the rest day of a Test at Edgbaston when I broke a bone in my hand missing a caught and bowled chance, then foolishly batted before going to hospital for an X-ray. In agony I soon missed a straight ball from the Aussie media’s opening bowler, Martin Blake. An Australian news team was filing the game in the hope of a bit of fun at Pommie expense and duly found the ideal clip for the closing item of their evening news bulletin: ‘The Pommie media did no better than their Test team when they lost to the Aussies in “Birming-ham”, helped by this beauty from Martin Blake which sent famous commenator Chris Martin-Jenkins back to the pavilion for a sorry duck.’ No mention of the agonising broken bone, naturally.
These were games of no importance, of course, to anyone except those involved, which is true of almost all amateur cricket, but they matter at the time. I enjoyed scoring runs in benefit matches because it gave me the chance to show the professionals that I could play a bit too. Over the years I enjoyed myself in Malta, Corfu and Dubai – in all these cases relishing the even bounce provided by smooth concrete pitches – not to mention India, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies.
All this was not a bad consolation for not playing the game professionally. Like Lord Cobham, who preferred batting against his own bowling to ‘eating pâté de fois gras to the sound of trumpets’ as his definition of heaven, I was a better batsman than bowler. It therefore came as a pleasant surprise to discover, when I was asked recently if I had ever got a Test batsman out, that over the years I can remember dismissing nine of them, excluding Enid Bakewell, star of an England ladies’ tour of Australia. Some of the men were better batsmen than others: Paul Hibbert and Bobby Simpson (Australia); Tony Greig, Graham Roope, Richard Hutton and Angus Fraser (England); John Morrison (New Zealand); and Alvin Kallicharran and Ranjie Nanan (West Indies).
I was not, of course, fit to tie the bootlaces of any of them but it is amazing what anyone can achieve by being in the right place at the right time!
27
FROM CRICKET TO GOLF
Old cricketers turn to golf. Very few of them become any good at it, including me, but many of us grow to love it almost as much. Except in foursomes, the best form of the game, it lacks the element of team involvement provided by cricket, but it offers most of the other challenges, especially the mental ones. Cricket requires a batsman to strike a moving ball, golf only a stationary one, but both games reward strategic thinking, presence of mind, concentration and, perhaps above all, confidence.
Having shamelessly bragged about all those soft Test victims, I can now reveal with no less pride that not long ago I finally did a hole in one, at the age of sixty-five (an eighteen-hole score that I can only dream about). Naturally, I exclude the ‘aces’ that I achieved quite often on my self-made garden ‘course’ at home, when I regularly used to plop them in on the sixth, the famous pond hole, sometimes even first bounce out of the pond itself. When it came to doing the real thing, however, no one was looking.
I was playing all by myself shortly before sunset on a fine Sunday evening at Kooyonga, a course of high quality at Adelaide where Don Bradman used to play and with which my own home club, West Sussex, has reciprocal rights.
Approaching the 167-metre (183-yard) seventh in a relaxed frame of mind, but with no great expectation following my customary mixture of poor and decent strikes on earlier holes, I knew that I had hit a four iron as well as I could. The ball, a Precept ‘Laddie’ bought from the Pro an hour earlier in case I should lose a few, disappeared over a rise at the front of the green, heading for the flag. It was, however, an unprecedented pleasure to find it lodged between the bottom of the pin and the inside of the hole. There was only one other person on the course, a local with whom I shared the startling news in case he should feel like a free drink afterwards. ‘Well done’, he said. ‘Unfortunately I don’t think it counts.’
It was less satisfactory than it must have been for Ronnie Aird, one-time secretary and later president of MCC, at the other course where I am lucky enough to be a member, Royal St. George’s at Sandwich. Having, like Tony Jacklin on a different occasion, holed in one at the 16th, he turned to his opponent, who was just preparing himself to try to follow him in by some miracle, and said: ‘I’m sorry, but I think that’s my hole.’ He had been in receipt of a stroke.
Jacklin’s ace at the Dunlop Masters is much better known, naturally. It more or less guaranteed his tournament victory and set him on the course for the glorious double of the Open and the US Open in the same year. He was regaled in the bar afterwards by a rather superior member of Royal St. George’s. ‘You’re Jacklin, aren’t you’, the man of the moment was asked.
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Did a hole in one at the 16th I hear.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Well done. What club did you use?’
‘Six iron, Sir.’
‘Six iron? Wrong club.’
Would that I had such confidence in my golfing opinion. I have always been prone to self-doubt about my swing, no doubt extremely well founded. Time is running out if I am to get much lower than my present handicap of fourteen, twice that of my younger brother’s and ten more than my elder son’s. Both of them played much more than I did as young men and there is no doubt that the earlier you learn the mechanics of the golf swing the better.
Golf was always the best means of getting away from the grind of a cricket tour. I had some tense battles over the years with, amongst others, John Thicknesse and Vic Marks, with whom I once got stuck on New Year’s Eve after a titanic battle at Royal Cape
Town Golf Club. The staff had gone home early and had locked the clubhouse, leaving us with no option but to climb onto a flat roof and clamber down the other side into the car park. Knowing South Africa’s obsession with crime and security it is a wonder that we did not set off alarms loud enough to waken the dead.
Foursomes contests were even better. My partner was often Jack Bannister, the former Warwickshire seam bowler, a successful bookmaker and incisive journalist in later life and one of the most versatile men I have ever met, blessed as he was with a brain like a computer. We enjoyed many a close match against John Thicknesse and John Woodcock, although Jack and I invariably had to pay for the drinks.
Like his friend Richie Benaud, Jack was a loyal member of the media golfing teams that for many years I have assembled during Birmingham Test matches to play against Edgbaston Golf Club before breakfast, usually on the third morning of the Test. Despite the support of heavyweights such as Paul Allott, Ian Botham and Mark Nicholas, all low-handicap golfers – even sometimes of the redoubtable Ted Dexter – most of us usually end up on the losing side, and therefore paying for our breakfasts. In one of these games I plonked my nine iron from the tee into a bunker in front of the green at the shortest hole on the course. The four of us looked on in amazement as a fox emerged from trees, trotted across to the bunker, plucked the ball into his mouth and set off into more trees on the other side.
CMJ Page 33