It goes without saying that the players feel the same. Year after year the famous sloping ground inspires exceptional performances, especially from cricketers from overseas. Australians love the place so much that they lost to England only once in the 20th century, when Hedley Verity bowled them out, with fourteen wickets in one day, in 1934.
Individual feats of a hundred or five wickets are enshrined on the honours boards in the dressing-rooms. Above the visitors’ changing-room players in all matches are treated to the best cooked, most delicious and wholesome food. Until 2010 it was prepared by a brilliant English cook, Linda Le Ker. Her French husband was the best ‘front of house’ man in the business before their joint retirement. It looked as though my presidency might coincide with rather less exalted cooking and service at the various members’ dinners in my year in the chair but I need not have worried: the standards have been maintained by their successors.
Presiding over a club and ground that together have formed a national institution for more than 200 years is no sincecure: when he was President the former Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who, as Lord Dunglass, had played on the ground as an Eton schoolboy, famously observed that there was more paperwork to deal with than there is in Whitehall. It is not just the main committee but the abundant sub-committees which produce all this reading matter. They cover:
Cricket (that is all cricket played at Lord’s and by the Club all over Britain and on overseas tours; the Laws, and MCC’s sponsorship of the main cricketing universities and various grass-roots initiatives);
World Cricket (the quietly influential pressure group mainly comprising famous former players of various nationalities who meet twice a year to debate and advise on issues facing the game);
Finance (everything to do with the income and expenditure of a business with a turnover of some £35 million);
The Lord’s Estate (maintaining the ground and its assets);
Membership (everything to do with the rules and rights of members and the associated clubs, including Real tennis, golf, squash, chess and bridge); and
Arts and Library.
MCC has a highly accomplished curator in Adam Chadwick, who supervises the Library and Museum not just from the basis of great knowledge but also with tact and pragmatism. The collection of archives, pictures, books and cricketana, including, of course, the Ashes urn, is both vast and valuable. Duplicates were sold at the auctioneers Christie’s in 2010 for a profit of £536,000, all of which was immediately ploughed back into the judicious acquisition of further cricket archives at the appropriate time. On Chadwick’s advice we decided to invest in a beautiful painting by Henry Walton of cricketers at Harrow School, playing around the time of Hambledon’s high noon, just before curved bats gave way to straight ones, wickets acquired a middle stump and bowlers began to lob the ball to a length rather than roll it along the ground.
I had never been to one of these big auction house sales before. It was quietly dramatic with some well-known cricketana collectors gathered in the warm, brightly lit room at Christie’s, making almost imperceptible bids, often against a row of agents on telephones who were seated just above the floor and who swallowed up the majority of the items for anonymous bidders. The auction raised £536,000 including a world record for an individual cricket book £151,255 (against a top estimate of £70,000) for William Epps’ A Collection of All the Grand Matches Played in England from 1771 to 1791. Published in 1799, it is extremely rare – there is not even a copy in the British Library – and it seemed unnecessary for MCC to possess two of the handful of copies still extant.
Half a million pounds seems a decent return on old books that had often been left to the Club in wills but it demanded enormous preparatory work on the part of the small library staff to make sure that permission was granted. The bottom line is placed into perspective by the fact that it cost more than that recently to buy a single picture to add to MCC’s collection of originals, the painting by Lewis Cage of The Young Cricketer which now hangs in the Long Room.
The President is encouraged to attend meetings of all these committees and I tried to do so in all cases except finance. I know my limitations: I am to finance as Lady Gaga to the recruitment of mercenaries in the defence of Malta against the Turk in the 16th century. Despite this it was essential to be on top of the general principles of what contributed to the profits and losses of the Club and, for the purposes of grasping the main issues confronting the main Committee (which meets eight times a year), to know what was going on in all the other committees.
I was surprised by the commitment required but tried to abide by the adage that a job worth doing is worth doing properly. I started my year with a visit to one MCC – a speech after dinner on 2 October at Malmesbury Cricket Club in Wiltshire (unfortunately a more painful event than anticipated because I had just had two teeth removed and the stitching of the wound had caused an ulcer on my tongue that got worse with every painful word that I uttered) – and ten months later cut the ribbon on a pavilion extension at another MCC, Mistley CC in Suffolk. This followed a terrific match between Mistley and Marylebone that ended with a six into the boundary hedge to give the local club victory with two balls of the match left: no wonder the community spirit was so joyful at a splendid marquee dinner afterwards.
The majority of the journeys during the year, excepting the longer ones to Australia, Sri Lanka and India, were to Lord’s and back. During the year I presided and spoke at 48 dinners; attended 26 committee or sub-committee meetings and five private meetings on MCC matters (plus a couple of conference calls, both of which saved a lot of petrol). I joined eleven additional events for MCC members plus five days of the club’s Golf Society and went to eighteen other events or matches in my capacity as President.
By comparison the twenty-four match days I attended at Lord’s seems a rather small amount, but seven of these were followed by receptions for players and at all of the games Judy and I were as hospitable as we possibly could be to our guests in the President’s box. We wanted everyone to feel truly welcome and at ease and Judy was so good at achieving that, having taken infinite pains to seat people at lunch next to someone with whom they would have something more than cricket in common.
We were allowed four guests of our own choice each day. The remaining twenty were friends or associates of the club: influential folk such as the High Commissioner for India, the immaculately bearded Maharana of Udaipur, Sir Mervyn King (one of English cricket’s greatest supporters anyway) or the attractive and vivacious Lord Mayor of Westminster, Susie Burbage. I wish we could have entertained even more people in that perfectly positioned box, where the food, drink and personal service are all worthy of a six-star cruise liner. These occasions, from the Test matches to the final of the Village Championship, were, to me, the icing on the cake. They were also exhausting: I felt every bit as tired when the last guests had meandered (in some cases) towards the lift as I do at the end of a day’s commentary.
By the end of September I totted up 136 days of what might be called physical commitment to the presidency but there were emails, phone calls or letters relating to club affairs of one kind or another that occupied some part of virtually every day. For most of the year the club, with all its pleasures and problems, seemed much like a family, to the extent that I would worry about them at night as often as not.
For a short time, before the introduction of a club chairman to maintain consistency, presidents served for two years. I would undoubtedly have found the role easier in a second year because I would have known what was important and would probably have felt more relaxed generally, but, of course, it would have extended the considerable commitment.
I was loyally supported throughout my year not just by other members of the committee but also by the executives. No one revered the traditions of Lord’s more than MCC’s secretary between 2006 and 2011, Keith Bradshaw from Tasmania, whose resignation towards the end of my year in office came as a great disappointment. In my explana
tory letter to members I tried to get the right balance, saying why Keith was leaving, detailing the means of choosing his successor and firmly scotching the inevitable rumours (and would-be press stories) that he had been sacked.
A friendly fellow by nature with a lovely smile, Keith had recovered with great fortitude and a wonderfully positive attitude from bone cancer. He had had other problems in his personal life but they had not impaired his devotion to a job that he loved doing. Sadly, however, his mother had died suddenly on the opening day of the Test match between England and Sri Lanka at Lord’s in June, which set off a chain of events that made it essential for him to return to his home country for good at the end of the summer.
At least the last Test adminstered by him, against India, was a resounding success, culminating in a win for England late on the last day before a ground filled to capacity, mainly by last-minute spectators attracted by the free entry offered to children and a modest entry price of £20 for adults. It was typical of Keith to get the balance just right. The eventual profits were a record for any Test in England, making over £4 million for the ECB to plough back into the game, and a further £2 million to help finance MCC’s multi-faceted cricketing activities.
From the moment that he arrived at Lord’s Keith, helped by the affable David Batts, the former hotelier who had transformed the Club’s catering, had made a positive impression on members and the wider public by his friendliness and his ready acceptance of new ideas. His decision-making, in common with his predecessors’, was limited to a degree: as the government is run by the cabinet with loyal and unbiased support from the Civil Service, so MCC is run as much by its General Committee as by its executives.
They have the final say on whether to recommend such major developments as the Vision for Lord’s, the lavish plan to expand the ground over the next decade or more, before putting it to the full members for the final verdict. This had become by far the most contentious issue by the time that I became President. There had been discussion about the ‘Vision’ for years and expenditure on various plans amounting to more than £3 million, spent mainly on fees to professional advisers. The debate perhaps went deeper than the question of how the ground should be developed, touching on the central issue of MCC’s very purpose: is it about maximising profit from Lord’s for the greater good of cricket, or about preserving the ground’s uniqueness? I think that even the most ardent would-be developers would agree that it would be a sin to turn Lord’s into another concrete bowl.
The man who had been chairing the development committee, the able Welsh QC Robert Griffiths, had put heart and soul into his role but had lost support from some in his attempt to hasten the acceptance of the grand vision for the future of the ground, involving property development at either end.
The master plan by the architects, Herzog & de Meuron, was exciting and imaginative, but it also involved, in its original version, vast expenditure to move facilities at the Nursery End below ground and a property deal that would involve the creation of up to five huge blocks of apartments between the Nursery and the gardens of St. John’s Wood Church, a ‘vision’ that many opposed.
Robert could not see this, nor that the vast expenditure envisaged on the development would be a gamble. There was no guarantee that the new facilities, even if they received approval from both members and the planning authorities, would be profitable in future. To his mind, as he said both in public and in private, the whole plan had been widely praised. As an example of far-sighted architectural imagination it had, but a shuttered eye was being turned to the environmental cost of the Grand Design, quite apart from the financial risk of going ahead.
I had serious personal doubts, and I knew that they were shared by many members who had been given a rather partial view of the future in various unofficial leaks to the press. Those huge new buildings would tower over the northern end of the ground, where the trees of St.John’s Wood churchyard still give Lord’s the feel of a cricket ground rather than a stadium. I felt that this need not be ‘the inevitable price of progress’. There was also a question mark over the long-term sustainability of a ground with greater capacity.
Matters came to a head in late January. Robert was frustrated at the lack of progress, especially in securing agreement with the property developers, Almacantar, whom his high-powered committee had identified as the partners most likely to deliver a deal with MCC that would enable work to begin at the Nursery End. Unwisely he suggested to the Chairman and Treasurer that they should consider their positions.
They did. One Saturday morning in January I opened my emails and discovered that the issue had reached crisis point. Either these two key members of the main committee would stand aside, or the development committee would have to be wound up.
I decided to call on the Club’s three trustees, Sir Tim Rice, Mike Brearley and Anthony Wreford, to take an independent look at the reasons for Robert’s frustration and whether or not there had been unreasonable delays on the part of the executives and senior committee members in their dealings with Michael Hussey (no relation), the boss of Almacantar.
In the period before the next crucial committee meeting in mid-February, the trustees spoke to all concerned and came to the conclusion, as I expected, that Oliver Stocken and Justin Dowley had acted with no more than reasonable caution. Neither was against the idea of entering into negotiations with Almacantar but neither could go forward with someone whom they believed to be pursuing his own agenda.
Knowing how one journalist in particular, my Times colleague Ivo Tennant, had been given confidential information from previous committee meetings by a source never definitely identified, I was concerned that there might be a further damaging leak before the committee met. I persuaded the trustees that the proposed way forward should be kept a total secret between ourselves until the meeting started.
Although Oliver was to chair the meeting we had to tell him nothing about the main item on the agenda. I cannot divulge details of confidential committee deliberations other than those that have already been made public but it would be true to say that the meeting on 16 February was as full of passion and human drama as most Shakespearean plays. I was quickly obliged to take the chair and reluctantly to cross swords with one of the sharpest barristers in the land, who had given a lot of his time and expertise to the Vision for Lord’s, completely unpaid, of course.
Robert was understandably crestfallen but he had misjudged the mood by challenging the senior officials. Eventually the committee, helped by the balanced views of a former Prime Minister who had seen more momentous conflict than this in Downing Street, was unanimous that the development committee should be disbanded and that a smaller negotiating group, led by Justin Dowley and Keith Bradshaw, should be appointed to begin negotiations with Almacantar that did not prejudice other means of developing new stands. This was, at least arguably, a natural end to the development committee’s work, although its chairman emphatically did not agree.
MCC’s press officer issued a statement that evening that made no mention of any offers to resign, but that side of the story nevertheless appeared under Ivo Tennant’s name the next morning.
Robert made it clear that he had not changed his mind, but he is a resilient character. He remained chairman of the important Laws sub-committee and stood for election to rejoin the main committee in October 2012, backed by John Major and another QC, Lord Grabiner. This brought forth new stories, one of them, in Private Eye, seriously ill-informed.
It suggested, utterly falsely, that the departure of Keith and David Batts was a consequence of their disaffection with the decision taken to reconsider the ‘Vision’.
The article further suggested that Oliver and Justin had pulled off a ‘coup’. This was absurd: they were chairman and treasurer, so no ‘coup’ was required. The worst calumny was the strong suggestion that Phillip Hodson had effectively been appointed my successor because he was in cahoots with Oliver.
The decision to ask Phillip to be pre
sident was entirely my own, made once I had decided that it was time to appoint someone from north of Watford, preferably a Yorkshireman in view of their poor recent representation in the role. Only three Yorkshire-bred men had been president in the 20th century, hardly a fair representation of their influence on the history of English cricket. I sounded out in strict confidence two of my former press box colleagues, John Woodcock and Robin Marlar, both with a long experience of MCC affairs but both no longer involved. Both gave my selection top marks.
My successor will have one duty which I presume to be unique for an MCC president, namely the presentation of an Olympic medal after the archery tournament at Lord’s during the London Games. Just after I left office in 2011 I had the intriguing experience of doing the same after the men’s individual competition in the ‘London Prepares’ competition. I handed over a medal and a cricket bat as a memento to the winner, Brady Ellison of the USA, and another to the second placed Korean, Im Dong Hyun, who had broken his own seventy-two-arrow points record earlier in the tournament. Both had shot brilliantly in a high wind, firing their arrows over the square from the Pavilion End towards the Media Centre. I was struck not just by their accuracy but the speed with which they drew the bow, a lesson to any golfer, incidentally, that setting up and executing a shot need not take as long as it usually does.
I am lucky that I have now returned to the main committee as an elected member and that I remained a member of the Arts and Library committee and two working parties, one charged with deciding on Bradshaw’s successor, the other working on incorporating MCC under Royal Charter to protect both the members from public liability and the Club’s assets. I did not therefore feel bereft, suddenly cut off as yesterday’s man, as Tom Graveney told me he did from the day that he ceased to be President in 2005.
CMJ Page 38