The Character of Cricket Page 2

  Out in the middle Pringle was batting. Philip Wright was a fan of Pringle’s, always had been ever since he had heard his coach at Felsted School singing his praises. The chairman’s report had a rather startling line about Pringle. After complimenting him on his form, it continued: ‘It is infuriating to hear occasional loud, uninformed and ill-mannered criticism of him from a small section of the members.’ When I asked the padre about this he said, ‘They thought he got into the England team too soon. And he wore a ring in one ear.’

  It was the first time all season that I’d smelt sun tan oil on a cricket ground. Not, of course, in the inevitable sponsors’ executive boxes and tents. (Cundell Corrugated were the match sponsors.) But on the public side, over by the old hospital now up for sale, chaps had taken off their shirts. The wicket was well on their side of the square and they had a closer view than my reverend friend in the boater. ‘Jardine’s Insurance Knows no Boundaries.’ ‘Bolingbroke and Wenley – Chelmsford’s Department Store.’

  It must be a grand place that has a department store called ‘Bolingbroke and Wenley’, and so it is. Wandering lonely by the main gate I asked a gateman if the stands and floodlights just outside were the home of Chelmsford Town Football Club. ‘Town?’ he repeated, scandalised. ‘Town!? We’ve got a cathedral! It’s Chelmsford City.’ Indeed the ground felt like a City Ground, with its grandstands each side. It could accommodate twelve thousand, but they’re lucky to get twelve hundred. The last big crowd was in the late sixties, when they drew Ipswich in the FA Cup. Their fixture list reveals Aylesbury United and Basingstoke United, Corby, Folkestone and King’s Lynn. These days it is the cricket that prospers in Chelmsford.

  Peter Edwards, watching play from behind his huge plate windows, ticked off evidence of this prosperity. His must be the grandest secretary’s office in county cricket. It used to be the committee room, and it’s big and full of trophies. He waved expansively at the ninety-four advertising boards; drew my attention to the fourteen consecutive years in profit and to the eight thousand members; to the £101,000 taken at the gate (almost four times as much as Notts, he told me). Once or twice we were interrupted. There was an ugly moment when Brian Hardie was hit on the helmet by a ball from Cowans. Down he went, to be helped off groggily and sent to hospital. Later Mr Edwards paused to deliver a public address or two from the mike. During one of these interludes 1 noticed a model microphone. It had been presented to commemorate the 1983 championship and was a model of the very microphone that Dame Nellie Melba had used in her great pioneering song broadcast put out by Marconi of Chelmsford in 1920. I had never known about that. Above the model, by way of proof, was a photograph of the Dame looking very glamorous in a hat.

  The clouds began to bank ominously that afternoon but McEwan made a hundred, duly acknowledged by the secretary on his microphone – so much more effective than Melba’s. Then Pringle, apparently not wearing his ear-ring, took up the challenge, and saw them home. The Reverend Major and the Secretary were suitably pleased and I had a pint of Tolly Original bitter, the local bitter. Then I cut through the ‘city’ centre on my way back to the Liverpool Street train. I have to say I was not convinced.

  The great statue to Chelmsford’s greatest son spoke of his serene wisdom and purest love of justice and unwearied kindness and predicted that he ‘will be held by his country in undying remembrance’. Alas this Lord Chief Justice does not even feature in my biographical dictionary. And the cathedral, which looked much more like a parish church than a cathedral, was closed. No self-respecting cathedral should close at six.

  But the Essex club and ground are impressive. ‘Six championships in six years’, wrote Tom Pearce, their president and former skipper, in his preface to the Yearbook. They win on the field more often than not these days and this success is complemented off it. If I have a serious complaint about the county ground, it is their lack of gates. They have no grand wrought-iron entrance. This is, however, being remedied. The members are subscribing and Mr Edwards says that they will be in place soon. At the moment they are to be called ‘The Members’ Gates’, but the Essex buzz is that they will be named ‘The Fletcher Gates’. It would be a suitable tribute to Captain Keith OBE, twenty-three years an Essex player, twelve their skipper and the man who took them to their first ever championship.

  To be honest, though, I would rather they were named after an old and faithful supporter, the author of Salute the Carthorse and Country Padre. I shall always associate Chelmsford Cricket Ground with the parson in the boater. I don’t suppose ‘The Wright Gates’ will ever happen, but I like the idea of a wrought-iron tribute to Major the Reverend Philip.

  The Parks

  I had forgotten what a bossy old autocrat the University of Oxford is in its own back yard. The notice by the gate says, forbiddingly, ‘This is University Property. All persons who enter and remain in the Parks do so subject to the following rules.’ The rules are the usual sort of small print about the closing time, and no litter and no bikes and no loudspeakers. Mention is made of a fearsome sounding figure called ‘The Parks Constable’, and there is a wonderful catch-all phrase which warns you that ‘Misuse or removal of or damage to University property is prohibited. This includes picking flowers.’ I see the point, but it’s a singularly unromantic one. The Oxford Parks are exactly the sort of place where a young man should feel obliged to pick a flower for a girlfriend as they wander towards the banks of the Cherwell. The Parks are very beautiful in the best English tradition of open countryside tamed and cultivated: half-way between meadow and garden.

  Perhaps the oddest note on the board by the gate is the one which says, ‘The use of the pitches for organised games without the consent of the curator is prohibited.’ This, after all, is a home of first-class cricket and has been since 1881. Yet, if the University XI wants to play a single match after the end of term, Dr Simon Porter, the club’s senior treasurer and fixture secretary, must make a formal application in writing. Once term is ended and the truncated cricket season concluded in mid-June, the ground is turned over for dons’ tennis courts. Oxfordshire would dearly love to play on this, possibly the most beautiful of all English grounds, but the dons’ tennis takes precedence.

  It was looking just as it should last May – banks of sprouting pale green leaf and sharp, bright pink and white cherry blossom shielding Norham Gardens and Lady Margaret Hall to the north, the funny soaring brick Gothick of Keble Chapel to the south-east: an idyllic landscaped setting with only a few assorted horrid modern science laboratory blocks in the distance to remind you that there is another world out there. There should have been old men dozing fitfully in the ancient deck chairs, girls in summer frocks lying on the grass and making daisy chains.

  No such luck. A day which had dawned sunny in London had become grey and almost foggy as I drove over Christmas Common, and Oxford was damply raw despite the lilac and laburnum. I counted seven stalwarts watching the cricket at the day’s beginning. The cricketers themselves were sweatered and shivering.

  The university was playing Hampshire and performing respectably. Three of their best players were away taking their Final Exams but the team had scored 303 for eight declared in the first innings. People tend to ignore performances like this, concentrating instead on the dismal day earlier in May when Oxford accumulated only 24 in their first innings against Leicester. Dr Porter, a former Blue himself as well as vice-captain of Oxfordshire and captain of Headington, was rather miffed that John Woodcock had been given front page space in The Times to draw attention to the debacle. Woodcock, editor of Wisden, had not been at the game, and conditions had been dreadful because moisture had got under the covers, making the wicket virtually unplayable. Dr Porter said any side would have had trouble on it.

  All the same Woodcock made some fair points. More than four thousand of those technically eligible to play for the university are now women, and for some unfathomable biological reason women can’t play cricket as well as men. Dr Porter, who has a PhD and is
plainly no academic slouch, also echoed the popular sportsman’s complaint about too much emphasis on intellectual achievement. 1 mentioned that I had been up with the younger Pataudi and remembered a wonderful fifty he made in the Parks, putting Frank Worrell’s West Indians to the sword in 1963. Pataudi, no scholar at Winchester, had scraped a fourth in Oriental Languages. ‘Precisely,’ said Dr Porter, ‘and look what Pataudi did for the University. Same with Imran Khan.’ He didn’t want to follow the American pattern and admit ‘students’ on sports scholarships, but he didn’t see why dons should positively discriminate against games-playing candidates who have the necessary academic qualifications. ‘They do that?’ I asked naively. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. Even the geography faculty, a traditional refuge for the aspiring Blue, has tightened up. Cambridge are luckier. They have something called ‘Land Economy’. ‘I like the idea of a man working for a degree and playing first-class cricket,’ said Dr Porter combatively as he stared out of the pavilion window into the mist. ‘What better training for life?’

  It’s a jolly little pavilion: high gabled Victorian with one big room, much beamed, where the players have their lunch. That day the Hampshire men in tracksuits were sitting about playing dominoes. The tables were laid, half-pint bottles of beer in little clusters of four. There was one wife or girlfriend present in a jump suit with leg warmers. The professionals seemed mildly, though not aggressively, bored.

  All around this room are boards with the names of all the Oxford cricket Blues year by year from 1827. Ted Wilson, the assistant secretary, pointed out curiosities and celebrities. ‘There’s Bosanquet – Reggie’s father, who invented the googly. And C.B. Fry. And see here – R.P. Moulding. You may not have heard of him but he got more Blues than anyone.’ I hadn’t heard of Moulding, but there he is on no less than six separate boards from the late seventies to the early eighties. Moulding got past those perverse examiners without any trouble. Moulding got a first. There are many Mouldings on the boards, men whose finest cricketing hours were here playing for the University but who scarcely troubled the scorers subsequently. But there are some of the greatest names in cricket too: Cowdrey (he went down without taking a degree and I doubt whether the authorities would look too kindly on him if he had been born thirty years or so later than he was); both Pataudis; M.J.K. Smith, now president of the club. Some names have odd associations for me – A.L. Dowding, captain in ’53, a Rhodes scholar. Dowding once occupied my room in Balliol. ‘Ah, Mr Dowding,’ my scout used to recall. ‘He was a real gentleman.’ M.M. Walford, ‘Oh, Lor’ Micky’ we called him at Sherborne. He was housemaster of Abbey House and used to score hundreds for Somerset in the summer holidays. And there are more recent Blues like Imran and Tavare still in county cricket. Of this year’s maligned team several are on first-class county books. Carr has signed for Middlesex; Thorn for Warwickshire. Oxford is still, against the odds, a genuine nursery of the game.

  Upstairs, usually locked and seldom used, there is another small room full of dusty mementoes. One of the Hampshire team, suffering from ’flu, was lying prostrate on the window seat. A signed portrait of W.G. Grace hangs on one wall, and stacked above a cupboard are the old scorebooks. Ted Wilson pulled one down at random. ‘Bit of history, eh?’ he said. It was 1884. University versus the Australians. Spofforth and Bannerman were in the side. A little later we found the 1905 Australian game. The Aussies won. Trumper made 77, but the undergraduates weren’t disgraced. The Hon. L.N. Bruce made 69 in the first innings. I bet he wouldn’t get past the examiners these days. ‘It’s not a complete set,’ said Wilson. ‘The pavilion was commandeered by the Army during the war and they burned some of them to keep warm. I suppose they had other things on their minds apart from cricket.’

  The person I felt most sorry for was Ken Tichbon of the Oxford Travel Agency. At least Ted Wilson, in his tiny office, had a single-bar electric fire. Ken Tichbon was under canvas, with only alcohol to warm the inner man. Mr Tichbon’s tent – a big tent but not quite grand enough to be described as a marquee – was the first place I visited. The notice at the entrance said the public weren’t allowed in unless invited, but I poked my head through the opening and was immediately asked to have a drink by the convivial and affable Mr Tichbon, who was sporting two weeks’ worth of Cypriot sun tan and a Hampshire Cricket Club sweater.

  He is a life-long Hampshire supporter and likes to sponsor their match against the University. For a few hundred pounds he enjoys the privilege of entertaining friends and business contacts at the ground. He regards it as money well spent, a perfect way of combining business with pleasure. All told, such sponsorship brings in over £3,000 a year – a useful addition to the annual grant from the TCCB.

  Mr Tichbon was doing things in style. There was champagne cooling in Ted Wilson’s fridge (though it hardly needed it) and the catering was being done by Merton College – the best, according to him, in town. Cold beef, cold salmon, cold turkey, cold ham; salads, Stilton. All delicious. We were a rather motley assortment. The airlines were represented by Olympic and Air Canada; the banks by the manager of Lloyds; All Souls by their butler, who looked in for a jar and a beef roll around tea-time. He had some jolly tales of the day Russell Harty came to the college to see A.L. Rowse. Tony Winlaw, better known to Telegraph readers as A.S.R. Winlaw, produced some amazingly esoteric pieces of knowledge. He could reel off the names of every single first-class county captain of 1946 – a matchless party trick – but I did manage to surprise him by guessing that Ken Farnes was one of only two fast bowlers feared by Len Hutton. He then capped this with a blow by blow account of Farnes’s performance for the Gentlemen against the Players in 1937.

  Very, very occasionally during the afternoon the crowd swelled to double figures. Over towards Keble two boys threw a boomerang. Down by the Cherwell a stout lady in lisle stockings shouted at her King Charles spaniel. She looked like a lecturer in medieval history, an authority on Beowulf and Bede. A black labrador strayed on to the pitch and no one cared. A Brideshead male blond sat briefly on a bench, college scarf muffling his chin, Times sticking from tweed jacket pocket. From inside Ken Tichbon’s tent came the hum of contented chat, though no one looked out to watch the cricket moving to its placid, inconclusive end.

  All round the prettiest ground in England the blossom blossomed and the light grew steadily worse.

  Trent Bridge

  The first thing a post-war cricket lover asks an old Trent Bridge hand is ‘Was Larwood as fast as they say?’ At least to me, whose earliest live fast bowlers were Statham and Trueman, that seemed the obvious opening question for Harry Dalling who, according to local folk-lore, was born in the pavilion at Trent Bridge in 1921 and has lived there ever since. (Local folklore is, as usual, slightly misinformed, but more of that later.) We were sitting behind the wicket at the bowler’s end in the room from which Mr Dalling makes announcements over the Tannoy. (‘Will the owner of a blue Vauxhall, registration number...’)

  ‘He used to bowl from the Radcliffe Road End,’ said Mr Dalling, thoughtfully, gazing down at the broad lawn where a distinctly quick Richard Hadlee was trying to blast out a Leicester eleven depleted by England calls on David Gower and Peter Willey, ‘and my father used to say to me, “If you can’t see the ball, watch the batsman’s pads”.’ More often than not Larwood’s delivery was too fast to detect with the naked eye from the boundary, but if you watched the pads you would catch a glimpse of red leather as it flew past or thudded against them, causing a puff of newly applied bianco. Larwood took 1,247 wickets for Nottingham. Voce from the other end took 1,312. Fewer people remember another devastating fast bowler who played for Notts. In 1959 Keith Miller played against Cambridge University, made 164 runs and took two for 35. Henry Blofeld of the BBC opened for Cambridge. It was Miller’s only match for the county and Harry Dalling was there, just as he has always been when there is play at Trent Bridge.

  The ground is just south of the Trent in a part of the city given over almost exclusively to sport. It
was a sad sign of the times that when I asked the taxi driver to take us to ‘the ground’ he dropped my son and myself outside the main gates of Nottingham Forest. It didn’t much matter. The two grounds are very close, close enough for Forest to hire out their director’s boxes to Trent Bridge ticket holders on big match days. All they have to do is cross the Radcliffe Road at lunchtime. The other Nottingham soccer club now lives just north of the river, but in the old days both Forest and County played at Trent Bridge. In 1897 there was an international soccer match there with England playing Ireland. In 1910 County departed, floating their old stand across the Trent to their new home. The last League match at Trent Bridge was in 1910 when County played Aston Villa.