‘I WAS PROBABLY THE WORST CRICKETER EVER TO BE PRESIDENT OF MCC.’
Sir Tim Rice was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, on 10 November 1944. He is an Academy, Golden Globe, Tony and Grammy Award-winning lyricist who has written songs for Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Aladdin, The Lion King and many more. He has published more than 30 books on British pop music and cricket, and appears frequently on radio and television. He has been inducted into the American Songwriters’ Hall of Fame and was knighted in 1994 for his work in the arts and sports. He has established his own charitable trust and is a long-standing member of the Lord’s Taverners.
When I arrive at Tim’s beautiful home, close to the Thames, I am taken through his garden, where gardeners are busily and noisily at work pruning the trees, past the now covered swimming pool, to his office, tucked away in the far corner. It is here, in a bright, sunlit room, that we sit and talk cricket.
The depth of Tim’s love of the game is evident in many ways: in his continuing involvement with MCC, his impressive collection of cricket books, his detailed knowledge of the game and, perhaps most of all, his very own cricket team. After he had started to play for the Lord’s Taverners in the early 1970s, he thought it would be quite fun to play one or two purely social matches. ‘In 1972 I organised my own team, to play just one game against a friend of mine called Bill Heath,’ Tim recalls. ‘He got a team together called Bill Heath’s Gentlemen, and I think my team was called the Occasional Creamers – a rather strange name which one of the guys in my team suggested. The match was a great success – everybody enjoyed it – so we decided to do it again the following year. This time I called my team Heartaches after the company that I set up when the top rate of tax was 83 per cent and the only way you could avoid it was to form a company! That game was also very successful and led to five more that summer, and we now have anything between 10 and 20 games each year. I invite the odd celebrity who happens to be a friend, like David Essex, to play and a few serious cricketers. Then it is just friends and over the years it becomes friends of friends, so it is a social network really.
‘We don’t have a home ground and although it would be nice, I don’t think it’s going to happen now. I have often thought about moving out to the country and getting a pitch but we have access to a beautiful ground at Stonor Park in Oxfordshire, quite near the Getty ground at Wormsley. I am vice president at Stonor and I help them out occasionally on a few things, so we pay a hundred quid fee or something like that to play there against other wandering sides. We go to Cornwall, where I have a house, virtually every year, and we’ve been up to Yorkshire for a couple of tours in and around Scarborough. Those are the only tours we’ve done in England but we have also been to Berlin, Estonia and St Petersburg, which was great fun. We’ve even been to North Carolina in America two or three times and to South Africa some time ago, which was very successful.
‘We much prefer the traditional form of the game but do play a bit of limited overs, which some teams prefer even though it’s a bit frustrating to lose a game by nine runs when you are 171 for 3. I quite like the concept of a drawn match: we have had some very good games with one side or the other battling to hold out for a draw. For example, in one match recently, we bowled the opposition out for 138 and thought, “Oh, we’ll win this.” But when we found ourselves at 50 for 7, we clearly weren’t going to! Then some real old codgers down the bottom of the order had to bat out to save the day; my brother Jo and I survived the last four overs, which was very satisfying. Had it been limited overs, there would have been no point and the game, in effect, would have been over. I always say, rather pretentiously, it’s a bit like life – at the end of their lives, most people will be happy to go away with a draw. Some things in life are good and some are bad; some work and some don’t. I feel cricket mirrors life more than any other sport, much more. And one of the reasons is that you can go on a long time, and at the end of it, not much is resolved.’
At this stage I suggest to Tim that the Heartaches’ colours – red, pink and green – might be regarded as somewhat bizarre, particularly when seen in all their glory in the blazer, for example. ‘Well, let me tell you how it came about. One night, somebody suggested we had our own colours and one of the players’ wives said that she would design a cap for us. She did, and the three colours were red, pink and purple – a combination that was frankly a bit “Yikes!” So I suggested that maybe we should change the purple to green – and the club’s colours were born! They are quite bright but they are nice colours and I think ours are better than one or two that I can think of.’
I ask Tim if he has had any great achievements as a player with the Heartaches – possibly with his notorious slow left-arm deliveries? ‘Well, strangely, I have twice completed a hat-trick. Only seven have been recorded in Heartaches history, which is pushing 600 games now, which means we are getting one hat-trick every 80 matches or so. And I’ve had two of them – which is obviously because I have played more than anybody else!’
This prompts me to take Tim back to his earliest involvement in cricket and to what had initially attracted him to the game. ‘My first memory of watching cricket was the Ashes in 1953, when my parents bought a television set, as many people did, to watch the Coronation. The Ashes was a bonus and so the TV was on quite a bit, although I doubt if it was for every ball by any means. I was at prep school then and I was very keen on maths and numbers. One of my masters was a very enthusiastic cricketer as well as a mathematician. I remember we had one lesson in which he said, “Right, today we’re not going to do maths. Instead we’re going to teach you about cricket scoring. You’ll find it very useful as you progress up your prep school and public school ladder if you can score.” And he was right, because I did.’
Tim’s mobile phone is sitting on the table and rings almost non-stop while we are talking. But he answers it just once, and then only after asking me if it is OK to do so. It is his young daughter, calling him from Cornwall. This brief interlude is typical of the man and I really warm to that. A couple of minutes later we are under way once more and I ask him about his early playing days.
‘When I was nearly six I began to play at my prep school, a basic game with a soft ball, but by the time I was seven or eight we wore brown cricket boots and we definitely played with a hard ball.’ I had to interject – brown boots? It all sounded rather like Stanley Holloway! ‘It wasn’t long after the war and it seemed to be just the way it was. We definitely had brown cricket boots; I remember that quite clearly. They had sort of spikes on and they were probably a bit cheaper than the proper white boots that the senior boys wore. Perhaps the reason was that children’s feet grow so quickly!’
When Tim went to Lancing College he swam for his house and the school and this, coupled with a hip injury he suffered in his mid-teens, meant that he played very little cricket in his time there. ‘After I left school I don’t think I played any cricket at all until I was 24 or 25. I was still very keen on the game and used to watch it at Lord’s, becoming a member of MCC in 1969. Then, when things like Jesus Christ Superstar took off, I remember getting invited to play for the Lord’s Taverners for the first time.
‘It was at Blenheim Palace. John Gorman of The Scaffold was playing and, I think, Michael Cox, who had a hit record with “Angela Jones”, plus the usual regulars like John Price and John Snow, although they were still playing for England in those days. I remember playing with Bill Edrich, although I might be cobbling several early games together to make one memory! But I recall playing then, for the first time in many moons, and thinking, “Gosh, this is wonderful.” Everything just came back to me – the smell of grass, the track, holding a bat, all these things I hadn’t done for a long time. I’m not even sure I had any kit. As a result, I thought I would like to play more cricket so I continued to play for the Taverners and one or two other charity teams, and then started the Heartaches.’
With one notable exception, Tim has never seriously combined his award-winning talent and experience as a lyricist with his love of cricket. However, in 1986, he joined forces again with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, eight years after they had parted company. ‘Prince Edward, who was working with Andrew at the time, had asked him whether he would write something for the Queen’s 60th birthday and Andrew very kindly asked me to work with him on a sort of mini operetta. I had had this idea for a long time – a little joke-ish thing – about a cricket scene where the best batsman has to choose between putting his team first and sorting out his love life. He has spotted his girlfriend with a caddish racing man but, of course, like every decent chap, he decides to bat on, with the result that his girlfriend has time to see the error of her ways. We expanded that into a Gilbert and Sullivan-type story about 25 or 30 minutes long and called it Cricket. We staged it at Windsor before a very small private audience, including the Queen and the Duke. The Queen Mum was also there, which was why we had deliberately included a racing theme. They all sat there and listened and seemed to enjoy it and got the jokes – and the tunes are very pretty.
‘Subsequently, we performed it at a Taverners’ Ball but it didn’t really go down very well because people were chatting, as they do, and unless you have a really loud cabaret which people can dance to, they don’t take any interest. It was a rather quiet, gentle and, in a way, quite sophisticated performance, and of course, people didn’t really hear it. It was the wrong venue for it. We were also going to record it, but a lot of the tunes ended up going into other shows of Andrew’s so that kind of put the kybosh on that. Some of them were in Phantom of the Opera and several others are in Aspects of Love. The hero’s big song in Cricket is called “All I Ask of Life”, which he sings as he is being battered by a vicious West Indian paceman! This became “All I Ask of You” in Phantom of the Opera.
‘Cricket could easily be expanded to about an hour and done by schools and elsewhere – that would be quite funny. The whole script is published, I’m glad to say, because it is nice to feel it exists. It is in a book of cricket verse [A Breathless Hush… The MCC Anthology of Cricket Verse], which David Rayvern Allen put together, so if you find that, you will get the whole story there. But unfortunately most of the tunes have disappeared or are probably not able to be used.’ Tim still seems disappointed about this, although he is careful not to say so. It was his last collaboration with Lloyd Webber.
Despite the outcome with Cricket I express surprise that he has never felt tempted to do a cricket musical on a grander scale. ‘I’m sure there are exceptions but by and large any dramatization – be it through a play, film, musical or a novel even – of any sort of made-up cricket, or any other sport, is never as exciting as the real thing. You’ve got the Roy of the Rovers sort of thing, I suppose, for kids but any sort of play or story that hinges on the sport itself, I think is difficult. Apart from anything else, cricket doesn’t really have an absolutely international appeal. In America, it would mean nothing. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I have never particularly had the desire.’
Tim became president of MCC in 2002, following in the footsteps of a boyhood hero, Ted Dexter. ‘I was very honoured to follow Ted, particularly because he made that marvellous 70 in 1963 against the then mighty West Indies – the first Test match that I had seen at Lord’s. The appointment was also very special for me because, certainly in the last 20 to 25 years, they have tended to go for people who are actually quite good cricketers, whereas I was probably the worst cricketer ever to be president of MCC. My brother Jo did a book, a very good book, called Presidents of MCC and I think his research led him to the conclusion that there were one or two other candidates around the time that the Club was founded in 1787, but it couldn’t really be proven! But it was a great honour and I enjoyed it.
‘I was very lucky because it was great representing MCC during the Ashes series in Australia, when I saw quite a few of the Test matches and spoke at a lot of dinners. I went to Melbourne and Adelaide but by the time we reached Sydney, we were 4-0 down. Fortunately, we did win there, quite comfortably, Michael Vaughan making a big hundred and Andy Caddick taking seven Australian second innings wickets.’
During his presidential year Tim was heavily involved on the social side as the key representative of MCC, but what achievement had pleased him most, not only when he was president but also during his time on the committee? ‘Getting women into the Club was probably the most important thing. There have been lots of improvements to the ground which, by and large, are very good but that is something which is always going to happen. In 100 years’ time they will still be altering and improving it. But in the late 1990s, purely as a committee member, I was quite heavily involved in the membership for women issue with the then president, Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie. It was really his great achievement but I was helping to swing the mood of the members and acting as Rachel Heyhoe Flint’s proposer. Getting that voted through was the most important thing, because we had to, for the general good of the Club and because it was beginning to harm its image. I did have some sympathy with the old buffers, because old buffers have rights as well, but all the same it was undoubtedly a time for change.’
This leads me to ask Tim whether there are things that he would really like to see change in cricket today? Anything that he finds particularly irritating? He is swiftly into Victor Meldrew mode. ‘At the moment it is going through so many changes so quickly you feel like saying, “Hang on, enough already. Let’s just take stock.” However, my biggest complaint is the shambles of the English domestic fixtures list – it is a complete disaster. I don’t know why it’s always such a mess. There are different competitions going on at different times. One like the County Championship gets going, then it stops. Then another starts, then that one stops. There is no sort of real logic. You pick up the paper and you don’t really know what you are going to read about. When I was a kid it was Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – those were the days that your team was always playing and you knew it. Now you are not sure when your county are next going to be playing and when it does appear, it’s usually got so many people in it who are only there for three weeks that it is simply hopeless. It is just that the whole structure of English cricket at the moment is a bit of a mess in my view. Obviously Twenty20 has a lot to do with that. I am not against Twenty20 particularly; I just hope it is not going to pull everything down around it.’
Tim has a fine collection of cricket books, including his beloved and valuable complete set of Wisdens. ‘If I don’t want to get stuck into some incredibly heavy work it is rather nice to pull a cricket book off the shelf and read about an old tour or Test match. As for the Wisdens, the first one I got was 1954, which was all about the 1953 season. A friend of mine at prep school had it and I just thought it was a wonderful book. I couldn’t get enough of it and I was given a copy for my 10th birthday. After that, I began collecting them every year, while slowly moving backwards as well, looking for earlier editions. You could pick them up in second-hand bookshops and I gradually found one or two really obscure ones, like 1903, which I found in a book shop in Tottenham Court Road. I was trying to collect in sequence but there comes a point when you realise it is all but impossible to get a complete set by buying them one at a time. I suppose it might be possible but, as it happened, in 1973 a complete set came up for sale for £750. I bought it, even though that seemed rather expensive at the time. I suppose you could multiply that figure by at least 20 today to allow for inflation, so we are talking maybe £15, 000. But I think a complete set now would be at least £100, 000. You have also got to bear in mind that since 1974 there have been nearly another 40 Wisdens, so that in itself would make it more expensive. So it was a good purchase.’
Indeed it was and, as Tim has said, it is a way to relive past games and revisit cricketing giants. Not surprisingly, he has some particular favourites. ‘Denis Compton and Bill Edrich, I suppose, are two of my initial heroes, from right back when I was a child, even though I didn’t see them at their best. I would always think of Bradman as well and although I never saw him play, knowing a fair bit about the history of the game, I feel I know his career quite well. I did meet him once or twice, which was great. Of course, Ian Botham was quite fantastic, and Bob Willis was capable of incredible bowling spells. I was also a great fan of John Snow, who was a brilliant bowler. I just have so many memories of an awful lot of amazing players.’
Tim has put a great deal into cricket in many different ways, with his own team and with what he has done for charity, for MCC and for the Taverners, but I wonder what he feels he has gained from this deep involvement in the game. ‘It’s been a very good way to make friends, and to keep friends. It is difficult when you are running around in the modern busy world, but of all sports it is the one that gives you time, not only to enjoy yourself playing the game, but also to talk and reflect, and to get to know friends. I am sure that is true of a lot of sports but I am equally sure that people who are playing football sweat away for an hour and a half and have a great time but don’t really have conversations. They might have a beer afterwards but that’s it. With cricket, the fact that it is a full day means that unless you are a pretty useful batsman, half the time you’re not actually on the field. So there is plenty of time to meet people and talk, and get to know people, and play with the kids. This is very important.’
By now, Tim is being badgered by his long-serving PA, Eileen. Having been more than generous with his time and his cricketing memories, he is now late for a lunch appointment. As he rushes off, I depart at a somewhat more leisurely pace, reflecting on my time with a man of many cricketing parts.