‘He hadn’t even got his honours blazer at school. And he’d just scored a hundred against the full Western Province side!’
Lee Irvine
IT is a piquant fact that Barry Richards – as with countless other South African cricketers – owed his chance to strut his stuff for the first time on a public stage to a British philanthropist born in Worcester. William Richard Morris (1877–1963) was a motor manufacturer and the founder of Morris Motors. He was ennobled as Lord Nuffield in 1934 and became Viscount Nuffield in 1938. He had no children so he donated much of his vast wealth to charities. Among numerous philanthropic endeavours, he set up the Nuffield Foundation and Nuffield College, Oxford.
Anyone in South Africa with cricket in his blood will have heard of Nuffield Week. The story goes that the good English lord was watching the third Test at Durban between England and South Africa in January 1939 and was dismayed by the pummelling suffered by the home side bowlers as England rattled up 469/4 declared, Paynter scoring 243 and Hammond 120. After the second day’s play, on the spur of the moment, he decided to make a huge donation to South African cricket, provided it was used to promote the game at school level. The match was duly lost by South Africa, by an innings and 13 runs, but they acquitted themselves well enough for the rest of the rubber, notwithstanding their new benefactor’s concern, losing it solely by this one English victory. The series is probably best known for the fifth Test, the so-called Timeless Test, which was to be played to a finish, no matter how long it took. In the event, it had to be abandoned as a draw at tea on the tenth day, with England only 42 runs short of victory with five wickets left, otherwise the tourists would have missed their boat home.
Consequently, a fund was established which was used to institute a cricket tournament, known as the Nuffield Week, during which the representative school team from all the provinces played each other and immediately after the event, the South African Schools side was selected. Needless to say, the week loomed large in any schoolboy’s mind, who took his cricket seriously. Barry Richards was no different and shared the same nerves and excitement of the occasion as many provincial and Test players before and after him. The significance of Nuffield Week has lost some of its lustre in recent years – it is now known as Coca-Cola Week and is just one of several privately-sponsored cricket festivals – but back then, ‘No one, but no one, who had pretensions of playing first-class cricket would have come through the ranks without attending Nuffield Week,’ Barry announced unequivocally. It was the perfect stage for him to exhibit his budding genius to the wider public. Influential people were there to impress and Barry seized the moment.
Barry explained that before Nuffield Week, it was necessary to make an impression during Offord Week when the Natal schools would play each other and during which the Natal Schoolboys XI would be selected. Barry was 16 and his exploits for DHS had already gone before him (on the cricket field, I hasten to add) so perhaps it would have come as less of a surprise to knowledgeable observers than it was to Barry that he was very much in the frame to be picked for the Natal side, even if he was still a colt. It may seem like just another plainly evident step in his career towards international honours but what 16-year-old looks far into the future and truly believes in his own destiny? He hoped, he wasn’t sure, he bit his nails in anticipation and was thrilled when the team was announced and he was in the squad.
Interestingly enough, also included in the squad was a certain M.J. Procter. They knew each other well enough, having locked horns at prep school and at high school level. Their careers were to take remarkably parallel paths; one went on to play for Natal and Hampshire and the other for Rhodesia and Gloucestershire and of course they became team-mates for Natal Schools, South Africa Schools, the full South African Test side and the Rest of the World. So close was their cricketing association that it is generally assumed that they were joined at the hip. Not so, it would appear. ‘Prockie was more social than me,’ Barry said. ‘I was an only child and as such, more of a loner. I would go out with the lads and have a meal and then go home. Prockie was more inclined to burn the midnight oil.’ They had different interests outside cricket too. Barry played a lot of golf whereas Procter preferred the horses. Lee Irvine offered an interesting slant on the different personalities of the two. ‘Prockie was easier socially and found making himself popular with team-mates, members, supporters a bit of a doddle. Barry was more reserved. He kept his own counsel and didn’t trust people until he knew them well. That is partly why Barry got a reputation of being a mercenary and Prockie did not, even though they were both paid professionals.’ The charge of acquisitiveness against Barry will be something we will be revisiting later in this story.
The venue for the festival that year was Johannesburg. They travelled overnight by train. It was the first time that Barry had been out of Natal and he was very much on his guard, determined to be as unobtrusive as possible and to toe the line, behaviour, he noted wryly, that was not common to the whole team. He kept close to the people he knew well, Lee Irvine and Harvey Wannenberg, both fellow DHS boys. They were billeted in boarding school accommodation and the games were of a traditional format, not limited overs, much like the Currie Cup.
The first match against Border, which Natal lost, was notable for an accomplished hundred from someone even younger than Barry. His name was Hylton Ackerman. Barry was hugely impressed by the mature and accomplished innings of the 14-year-old, knowing instinctively that this boy was destined for big things, and sure enough, their earlier careers were fated for similar stellar success and equal bitter disappointment. Barry may not have recognised genius in himself but he could see glimpses of it in one or two others. His own performances were good enough, if not outstanding, but he guessed, looking around at the talent on display, that he was in with a shout of being selected at the end of the week for the full national schools side. All the players from the competing teams were summoned on the Friday evening and as they stood awkwardly about, the team was announced. Barry was in, as was Ackerman, but there was no place for his friend, Lee Irvine. Why not, I wanted to know, especially in view of his undoubted talent and weight of runs at school. Irvine gave a rueful laugh when I asked him. ‘I’d broken my arm during the previous rugby season and it hadn’t fully recovered. So I had not even been considered for Offord Week, let alone this week in Joburg. But four or five senior boys had been banned for boozing, so they brought me back. I was short of cricket, not fully fit and missed out.’
The reward for selection was a full-on game against the Transvaal provincial side at The Wanderers. And these were schoolboys, let us not forget, sent into battle against experienced first-class cricketers and on what was traditionally one of the fastest and bounciest pitches in the world. It was no fairy tale introduction to the tough world of men’s cricket for the youngsters; they were comfortably beaten. Barry was not yet an opener but the team was short of openers and he was sent in first to face the new ball. He remembers being dumped on his backside – for the first time in his fledgling career – by Slug Lodwick, a bowler considerably quicker than anyone he had faced before. He made only nine but was not put off by the occasion and has only buoyant memories of the whole week. ‘We were playing against people whose names had been in the papers the previous week,’ he said, in much the same awed tone of voice that others would convey when talking about him. But his first taste of the big time had only sharpened his appetite.
But first, it was back to Biology and the dissecting knife. If he could have cut through the boredom of never-ending lessons until the next cricket season, he would have. Mercifully, for him, as Joni Mitchell’s lyrics sing to us, ‘The seasons they go round and round’, and it was not long before Durban High School were taking all before them on the cricket field. Apart from the majestic batting – ‘crushing strokeplay’, Barry called it – of the fully fit Lee Irvine, he has one particular memory that sticks in his mind. The famous England Test player, Denis Compton, came to the school and took what I suppose these days would be called a ‘masterclass’ with Barry and Harvey Wannenberg in the nets. By now, the great batsman, bon viveur and party animal was with his second wife, Valerie, a South African, and he was spending as much time as he could, cricket commitments aside, in the sunnier climes of southern Africa. Did he pass on any momentous advice? Barry admitted to being so awestruck that he took in very little of what the great man said to him. ‘However, he must have been a little impressed for he publicly came out with his support for my inclusion as a 17-year-old in the South African touring party to Australia in 1963/64.’ Was that ever a feasible possibility? ‘No, of course not. But we did get on well whenever I met him later on.’
That tour, as it happens, was when another young prodigy burst on to the international scene. Graeme Pollock, lionised as a schoolboy cricketer even more than Barry, but one year older, had broken a number of records in South African cricket, including being picked for Eastern Province as a 16-year-old when still at school, the youngest to score a first-class century and the youngest to score a first-class double century. In the third Test during this tour, he scored 122, thus becoming the youngest South African to score a Test hundred, a record that still stands today. I remember listening to Ron Roberts on a tinny transistor radio under the bedclothes at night describing the precocious talent as a ‘new star in the cricketing firmament’. I cannot be sure that those were the exact words used – it was, after all, 50 years ago – but the awe and excitement in his voice crackling over the airwaves from the other side of the world were unmistakeable.
Two questions cross the threshold of my mind at this point. Who was the greater batsman, Barry Richards or Graeme Pollock? It is a favourite conundrum of cricket lovers the world over and one that has been put to me and pondered on by the scores of people that I have spoken to in the course of writing this book. It is something I have endlessly debated myself, having played with and against both, albeit only in passing. The answer is unattainable, I suppose, relying as it does on personal opinion and subjective analysis but the points of view of the great and the good of the game make interesting reading, as you will discover as this story unfolds. And the other question is: why do players from other countries seem to mature earlier than Englishmen? The answer to that is equally difficult to nail down but it is worth bearing in mind as we follow the early careers of both men.
For Barry, all was gearing up nicely for his second Nuffield Week in December 1962, taking place this time in Cape Town. A year older, Barry was no longer an ingénue; if not yet the finished article, his emerging talent was exciting the admiration of not just Denis Compton. The week was not only something of a triumph for the Natal side, who, with four DHS boys in the team, were unbeaten, but also for Barry personally. Consider his scores: 82 v Griqualand West, 50 v Rhodesia, 102 v Western Province, 101 v North East Transvaal. He has fond memories of sharing a partnership of 164 in 81 minutes with Mike Procter, who reached his hundred just before the declaration. I think it can safely be said that Barry was not chewing his fingernails in nervous anticipation as the team for the South African Schools was read out on the Friday evening. Sure enough, he was selected, with Lee Irvine as captain and another future Springbok, Mike Procter, in as well. Hylton Ackerman was also included and he would have brought up the total of later internationals in the side to four had the ill-fated tour to Australia in 1971/72 not been cancelled. In addition, several other members of the team were to go on to play first-class cricket so it was, in the words of Irvine, ‘One hell of a strong side, perhaps the strongest South African Schools side ever assembled.’
The full Western Province team were experienced and battle-hardened, surely more than a match for schoolboys. It would appear not. Set 237 to win in 226 minutes, the Schools won by three wickets, with three-quarters of an hour to spare. Admittedly, the declaration was generous but you can bet your bottom dollar that the men had no wish to come off second best to a bunch of kids. The press were all agog, as you would expect, but the focus of their attention was not on the schoolboys’ victory, newsworthy as that might have been, but on the new prodigy, Barry Richards. He had scored 106, his third century in successive days, only the fourth time a schoolboy had taken a hundred off a full provincial side.
In every successful sportsman’s career there are defining moments when the rest of the world sit up and take notice. It might be defeating a leading seed at Wimbledon. It might be a sub-par round in treacherous conditions in The Open. It might be scoring a last-minute winner as an unknown in an FA Cup semi-final. This was Barry’s moment and he had seized it eagerly, almost as if he sensed that destiny was calling. More than anything else, of course, he had convinced himself that he could cut the mustard at this exalted level. ‘I never felt intimidated by the occasion or by the opposition,’ he said. I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to this match in particular or to the rest of his career. But clarification wasn’t really needed.
And then, as if the fates were intent on bringing him down to earth after raising him so high, it was back to school and those dreaded lessons. ‘He hadn’t even got his honours blazer,’ Irvine whistled in disbelief, who knew and understood the cachet of that privilege. That oversight was soon put right but the gold-braided blazer did little to affect Barry’s preoccupation and rising excitement with the forthcoming South African Schoolboys tour of England in June and July of 1963.