‘DAVID GOWER ON FULL SONG, JUST LEANING BACK AND SQUARE CUTTING… IS AS REMARKABLE AS HEIFETZ, THE GREAT VIOLINIST, IN ITS WAY.’
Richard Stilgoe was born in Camberley, Surrey, on 28 March, 1943. A lyricist, musician and songwriter, he wrote the lyrics for such musicals as Starlight Express and Phantom of the Opera and has toured frequently, often with Peter Skellern. He founded the Orpheus Trust, which offers performing arts experiences to disabled youngsters, and launched the Stilgoe Family Concerts series at the Royal Festival Hall, featuring young performers. He has been High Sheriff of Surrey and president of Surrey County Cricket Club and the Lord’s Taverners. In 1998 he was awarded an OBE for services to music.
This is my only home fixture. Richard and his wife Annabel are spending an hour at my house in Islington before heading off for dinner in nearby Camden. Richard begins by recalling a match in Liverpool between Lancashire and the West Indian tourists that, partly because of the pedestrian scoring rate, the seven-year-old Stilgoe had found really dull. This was despite a high-scoring display by Frank Worrell and wickets in abundance for slow left-armer, Alf Valentine. Three years later, however, Richard’s experience was more enjoyable.
‘The first match I remember was in 1953 when I was just 10. It was at Old Trafford and my nanny took me and my friend Geoffrey Morris to see England against Australia. We were there just for the morning and I saw Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller. We sat just outside the boundary rope so that we were really in touch with the cricket – somewhere, alas, you are no longer allowed to be, I think, anywhere in the world. I don’t know why, because we weren’t intending to do a pitch invasion and we didn’t bother about health and safety very much, and we wore our school uniforms because back then you wore your best clothes to go to a sporting event. Certainly I remember that all around us in the crowd were guys in three-piece suits and trilby hats, dressed up even on a sweltering hot day because they were going out. We saw Len Hutton, who was out for 66 I think, and Denis Compton and Reg Simpson. And then at lunchtime we went home, because I had to get back in time for my tea.’
Moving on from spectator to player, Richard became interested in the game via his parents and his school teachers, who helped him to develop his enthusiasm for cricket. ‘There was Mr Stott at school, who was good and encouraging, and my dad, and particularly my mum, who had played for the school. She was very funny and had been a wicketkeeper and one of her skills – actually, it is still there – is to tell loads and loads of really good jokes to put the batsman off. You can hear it nowadays in stump “cams” – the amount of chat going on all over the world by a wicketkeeper. It is one of the signature skills. You have to be able to catch, you have to be able to stump and you have to be able to bat, but you also have to be able to natter all the time to put the batsman off. My mum, bless her, was good at all of that.
‘I played at school for the Second XI, which sounds grander than it was, because I think only 22 boys played cricket, so the Second XI was loads of us who were really fairly hopeless. Later on I went to a school in Somerset and I have still got the Second XI picture, with all of us sitting the special way that schoolboys sit, with arms really tightly squeezed together to make it look like you have biceps. If you really push hard enough, you could kind of look as if your skinny little sticks of arms have actually got muscles in them.’
By then Richard was trying to emulate the great off break bowlers of the 1950s. ‘I was trying to be Jim Laker or Roy Tattersall, both off break bowlers. But my deliveries set off as off breaks but they always went straight on. I have two deliveries: basically the off break which doesn’t turn from left to right and the leg break which doesn’t turn from right to left.’
Richard never played club cricket. It was some years after leaving school that he eventually started again in social and charitable matches. ‘I don’t think I played for anybody ever until there was a Nationwide-sponsored match. I think it was broadcaster Michael Barratt’s XI against Michael Parkinson’s XI, and when I tell you that the highest scorer in that game was another broadcaster, Sue Lawley, you will get an idea of the quality of bowling.’
And then, of course, there were the Lord’s Taverners games, with that lovely mix of celebrities, cricketers and other sportsmen. ‘Yes, I’ve enjoyed them so much. We all have so much fun while we raise money for the kids. I remember one match, we had three Test fast bowlers in the side – they were regulars, namely John Price, Fred Rumsey and John Snow. Snowy had more than twice the number of England caps than the other two had between them. I remember him, one of those games, saying to Price and Rumsey, “Could I open the bowling for once? Because I used to!” And John Price said, “No, you’re not on Warfarin. You can’t open the bowling for the Taverners unless you’re on Warfarin!” It is a very good qualification; unless you’d had a triple bypass, you weren’t an opening bowler!’
Richard has been a lifelong supporter of Surrey County Cricket Club and became president in 2005. ‘That year, we won the Ashes and we got the grandstand built, but all that is of little consequence because Surrey got relegated for the first time in its history. I am afraid I get blamed for that more than I get the credit for winning the Ashes, which I think is deeply unfair! But there is something about the Oval. I mean, there is something wonderful about Lord’s but I never feel smart enough there – I never feel properly dressed and there is a feeling of having to be on your best behaviour all the time, and there is always somebody disapproving of you. The Oval is a much more welcoming, easy place and I hope it always stays like that. We have had women in the pavilion and families around for ages so there has never been a fuss about that sort of nonsense.’
Since the redevelopment of the Vauxhall end stand, you can’t walk round the ground any more. At lunchtime you used to be able to walk round and have a drink with your mates behind the pavilion but not now. Richard empathises with my point of view. ‘The members would like just to be able to go and sit where they like. I suppose, like a lot of aspects of English life now, we would like to be trusted more. If you have been a member of a county for years and years and suddenly they say to you, “You can’t go and sit in that bit of the ground because of security,” they are kind of saying, “We think you’re a risk.” People don’t want to be thought a danger to somewhere they love and have been to for such a long time. They want to be able to go and sit wherever they like. In their favourite seat, the place they always used to sit.’
There has been an almost magical link between music, writing and cricket, ever since the game became a national sport. Richard believes there is an inherent beauty in cricket, particularly in relation to the unique sounds and tempo of the game. ‘There are an awful lot of us who like these things, certainly, and cricket has always had people reflecting on it and writing about it, partly because nothing else goes on for five days. You have plenty of thinking time: an awful lot happens to the world in the length of time a Test match takes. There will be no great writing about Twenty20 cricket – it’s really sad. I think Twenty20 cricket is an absolute blast, but nobody is going to get an award for writing about a Twenty20 game and all the commentators hate having to write about it.
‘But the music and cricket thing, I don’t know why they are not on the same side of the brain. Cricket is a left side of the brain activity on the whole: it is motor systems. Music is the right side of the brain, the imagination side, so it is not that. But there are a large number of people who like both. The greatest fan of all is George Shearing, the blind jazz pianist, who for years would come over to England from New York to sit at Lord’s throughout a Test match. Whenever he had a spare moment, Brian Johnston would go and sit next to him and describe what was going on. Shearing said – and Peter White, a BBC journalist, who was also blind and a huge cricket fan, agreed – there is something about the atmosphere: cricket makes wonderful sounds. And it really does. If you leave the ground before close of play, you must know this. As you are walking round the back of the pavilion, or walking away up the street but can still hear the crowd, there is one noise for a four, another noise for an appeal, another noise for a wicket, and another noise for a six – they are quite distinct. You can actually tell whether the crowd is cheering or disapproving or what – you can tell pretty much what is happening. And although it would be a waste if you have sight to sit and watch a cricket match with your eyes shut, it would be quite salutary to see how much you get from it. After all, masses of us spend hours and hours listening to the radio in the car or anywhere. I think the thing I like almost more than anything in the world, because it combines two of my great pleasures, is sailing on my boat during a Test match with a long wave radio on. Because you can go quite far out and still get long wave and still enjoy a Test match going on while you are sailing.’
Richard has written often about cricket and a particular favourite is the grace he said before the England captains’ dinner, a marvellous event held at the Hilton in Park Lane in 2009:
Who would be a captain? Who would be that brave?
To be chosen by committees with a lot of face to save?
Who would be a captain, with a team that falls apart,
Spraining ankles playing football half an hour before the start?
Who would be a captain, from the moment you have tossed
To bravely telling Nasser all the reasons why you lost?
Who would be a captain, with the media on your back?
“You’re too timid in defence, and far too risky in attack!”
Who would be a captain? For most that’s just a dream;
The young people we look after are not even in the team –
Disadvantaged or disabled, people look at them askance.
Taverners don’t look away, but give them all a sporting chance.
Help us all do that tonight – in the auction be good tippers.
Eat wisely, ’cos for afters we are going to have grilled skippers!
Give generously tonight, then when you roll back home again,
Your wives will all forgive you, and smile and say “Ah – men!”
Richard also wrote the ‘Lillian Thomson’ piece back in the 1970s. ‘Yes, that was 1977, but five years before it was actually Lillian Massie to begin with. Because I heard John Arlott, after the first day of the Lord’s Test, summarising it and saying that the English batting had collapsed, and the damage had been done by Lillee and Massie. So I had this picture straight away of this woman called Lillian Massie who could bowl at a 100 miles an hour. Eventually it became Lillian Thomson because Massie only had that one great match when he got squillions of wickets, and I think spent the rest of his life wondering how he had done it!’ Indeed, there was talk at the time that the ball allegedly behaved in a peculiar fashion.
Lillian Thomson Australia’s finest flower,
A maiden bowling overs at a hundred miles an hour.
She’d bowl ‘em at your ankles,
She’d bowl ‘em at your forehead,
If she bowled them in the middle
She could hurt you something horrid.
This humorous mixture of cricketing folklore and musical whimsy leads me to wonder whether Richard had ever considered writing a musical. ‘Peter Skellern and I went off to India to do research for a musical about cricket in India. The thing that had intrigued us was that there had been an appalling custom in India called suttee where, when a man died, his wife was burned on the same funeral pyre as him. That had stopped. But suddenly in the mid-1980s, in one particular part of India, it started happening again. There was a lot of outrage and a lot of cover-up and a lot of talk about it. Peter and I had this idea of placing these events just down the road from where a Test match was being played, so you had these two dramas, one apparently unimportant and one really, really important, going on at the same time. We thought it might be interesting theatre.
‘The mockers was really put on that when we went to India, did the research and saw Mark Tully, the great BBC broadcaster who lives in Delhi, and he basically said, “Don’t do it, because it will be misunderstood and it will look like the English pointing fingers at the Indians. It won’t be seen as a piece of drama or a piece of comment; it will invoke exactly the same reaction as the Satanic Verses.” It was very wise advice. If you have a long, long imperial past, you can’t then talk about things without being accused of sort of trading on that imperial past. So it never happened and I am not sure that the world lost a great work as a result. Nevertheless, there is always something terribly exciting about a fire on a stage because straight away the audience always knows this is bloody dangerous. But that is not a good enough reason to have a race riot outside!’
It’s not surprising to hear that Richard tried to emulate the great off break bowlers such as Roy Tattersall. But who else did he like to watch or admire the most? ‘Oh gosh. Jim Laker, partly for that wonderful sort of “stiff upper lip” thing of getting 19 wickets in a Test match and not telling anybody. I think he stopped at the pub for a half of bitter on the way home, but didn’t tell anybody in the pub what had happened. Incidentally, when Jim Laker got nine wickets in the first innings, I bet David Oliver, a school friend, two shillings that he would get all 10 wickets in the second innings. At evens, this is. And David Oliver was furious at having to hand over two shillings, which was a lot of money. But at Ladbrokes I would have got a thousand to one. That’s the only bit of real prescience that I can claim. I thought that on the wicket there is that patch and that patch is going to be there for the second innings as well. It was days later before you saw it on Pathé News, and Test match footage was quite bad then. You didn’t even see very much of it – the radio commentary was so important. So, Jim Laker, a modest, very talented man.
‘I am also a great admirer of David Gower. Quite embarrassing, really, because I know David. I have a scorecard at home with ‘caught Gower bowled Stilgoe’ on it, which I am as proud of as anything I own. Lazy devil as well. Absolutely brilliant catch: sort of down, one hand on the floor, when he was at mid-off and he strolled forward and picked it just off the grass.’ Richard can’t resist a forward lunge towards the appropriately green carpet before continuing. ‘If he had just set off a bit earlier, the way anyone else would have done, it would have been quite an easy catch but he couldn’t be bothered. So he had to make it brilliant. It is quite embarrassing, knowing somebody who has that kind of touch and skill. There are times when, in any game, it suddenly gets beautiful. George Best playing football, David Beckham taking a free kick – both had a kind of art to it. David Gower on full song, just leaning back and square cutting… is as remarkable as Heifetz, the great violinist, in its way.
‘The one who fascinates me at the moment is Pietersen, because I am sure he fascinates everybody. Not as one of my favourite players, but just this strange thing of having a talent that you are not really in control of and you don’t really understand. I mean he works hard – he really, really practises – but still he can do things that he doesn’t know how he does them. Famously, it was Olivier, after the first night of Richard III when everybody came round and found him in a terrible state in the dressing room, and they all said, “You were wonderful, you were amazing” – he said, “I have no idea how I did that. I don’t know what to do tomorrow night to do that again.” Being in the grip of a talent like that, where you think, “All I can do is go out on the stage again and hope that the magic happens again.” It is so exciting to watch a talent that is not quite under the control of the owner of that talent.
‘The rise of Ian Bell actually gives me a great deal of pleasure because he is somebody who has had to find an awful lot, having been a glorious 18 or 19-year-old player and doing absolutely brilliantly and then being promoted to the higher level and everybody thinking, “He’s a bit small, he’s not very glamorous,” and having a really tough time. He is growing all the time now and he is a lovely player to watch. There is a real touch there. He is my size as well – I like that.’ The diminutive Richard chortles and when, at my six foot plus, I feel it safe to do so, I join in. Then he continues, comfortably perched on the edge of his seat.
‘I mean, there are certain people we all love. We all loved Denis Compton partly because the… oh, just the attitude thing. You know, it’s supposed to be a game and Denis Compton played it as if it was a game. Len Hutton was wonderful as well. I was a great Boycott admirer because he is not an athlete but somebody who turned himself into a fantastically successful player. I think there wasn’t an enormous talent there. It was a fantastic amount of graft to make the very most out of what he had.’ Which is difficult to criticise, I suggest, but it made for a very selfish cricketer. ‘Yes, the words “team game” don’t really fit in there, do they?’
Richard has been a cricket fan and amateur player for the majority of his life, and feels there is much to gain from the game. ‘Oh, you do actually get a set of lifelong friends. In cricket, you spend a lot of time fielding, standing next to people and chatting. There is a lot of chatting that goes on during a match. You’re all there for the same reason, you all like the game in the same way, you all have views on it and it is wonderfully easy, non-hierarchical, chummy and unpressured. It is terribly different, coming from showbiz to standing around in the slips knowing that nothing much is going to happen. As opposed to going out onto a stage all by yourself in the hope that the first joke will go well and then if it doesn’t you tell another one. I suppose that is the difference as well. In cricket, when you’re batting, if you miss the first one, that’s it – you don’t get another two hours of having to try and get the next bit right. But no – it is a trite thing to say, but the camaraderie of being in a not very important cricket team is terrific. My pride is in being part of that every now and then.’
An amusing and laughter-filled hour with a delightful man has flown by. As he prepares to leave, we are still talking cricket. That is, until Annabel tells him that they are already running somewhat late for his thoroughly well-earned dinner.