‘Freeman has played so rarely in Test cricket that it is not possible to give reasonable opinion on his qualifications for Test cricket.’
Herbert Sutcliffe
AS the world returned to a semblance of normality following the First World War, a new generation of English bowlers discussed and digested Bernard Bosanquet and Sydney Barnes’s disparate legacies.
The late 1920s and 1930s saw the most prolific burst of first-class wicket-taking in history and a leg-spinner was responsible. In a career lasting from 1914 to 1936, Kent’s Alf ‘Tich’ Freeman took 3,776 wickets, a total beaten only by slow left-armer Wilfred Rhodes, who played the game for ten years longer. Once established in 1920, Freeman never took fewer than 100 wickets in an English season until he was sacked in 1936. For eight years in succession from 1928 he took more than 200, including the all-time record of 304 in 1928. His performances included 386 hauls of five or more wickets in an innings and 140 of ten or more in a match.
Freeman, partly because he stood just over five feet tall, tossed up his leg breaks, top spinners and googlies, but with far more accuracy and subtlety than Bosanquet. Known for his stamina, he epitomised Ranji’s description of a salaried bowler, going through the ‘hard grind’ needed to achieve consistency.
In the years when he played, no one could worry that England lacked a top-class leg-spinner. Except they did. Freeman, despite his achievements in the domestic game, played in only 12 Test matches, while those of far lesser achievement were chosen ahead of him. Just two of Freeman’s appearances were against Australia. Somehow the selectors thought of his successes as having come a little bit too easily against county tail-enders on pitches which offered easy spin. He could never prosper on the hard wickets of Australia or, indeed, anywhere against batsmen of the highest class, it was assumed. He was never picked for an Ashes match in his own country, on the pitches that supposedly suited him.
Contemporaries noticed the anomaly. ‘Freeman has played so rarely in Test cricket that it is not possible to give reasonable opinion on his qualifications for Test cricket,’ wrote the England and Yorkshire opener Herbert Sutcliffe. ‘Judged by his record in county cricket in this country – he takes more wickets season by season than any other bowler – and with recollection of the success that has attended Australian bowlers of a similar type when they have visited this country, one is bound to say that Freeman ought to have been a valuable man for England all the time he has been such a valuable man for Kent.’
The former Lancashire and England spinner Cecil Parkin noted that ‘folk are grudging in their praise of his work’. To say Freeman’s successes were all against tail-enders was ‘stuff and nonsense’, he argued, saying, ‘“Tich” is a wonderful chap. There may be a lot of “rabbits” among the batsmen in first-class cricket, but there are not nearly so many as that statement suggests, neither do they always fall to the same bowler year after year.’
Freeman did not always perform alone for his county as a leg-spinner. His colleague for several years during the summer holidays was Charles ‘Father’ Marriott, a schoolmaster at Dulwich College, who wrote poetry in his spare time. The pair got on well but had different ideas about what leg-spin bowling should involve. They were ideas with their roots two decades earlier.
While Freeman loved to use the googly, Marriott, who had hurt his elbow while trying it as a youth, eschewed it, complaining that it could cause injuries and impede accuracy. Marriott was also of a different build to Freeman, tall and severe-looking in his uprightness.
Marriott’s hero was not Bosanquet, Herbert Hordern or the South African googly quartet, but Barnes. It was ironic that Freeman, the ultimate professional in terms of matches played and overs bowled, favoured the more speculative style. But, in the amateur Marriott’s mind, like that of others who had seen him at his best, the brilliance of Barnes – the most money-oriented of professionals – had ascended to a near-spiritual level.
Spending most of his boyhood in Ireland, where he attended Dublin’s St Colomba’s College, Marriott did not see any county cricket until he played in it, for Lancashire, in 1919, before moving south to Kent in 1922. The strongest memory of his youth was of watching Barnes bowling in Dublin in 1912. In the 1960s Marriott still glorified that day:
I can see him now, over half a century later: the tall figure, the 12-yard run with long, easy strides, the beautiful high action with its immensely powerful body swing and follow-through, the flick of the wrist and long sinewy fingers at the moment of delivery, the perfect control of length and direction. Never again have I seen such bowling: I sat there deaf and blind to everything except the miracle unfolding before my eyes, memorising every move, my fingers itching for the feel of the seam.
He might have described Barnes as being wristier than was the case, but Marriott was probably accurate in praising his hero for not bowling a loose ball in 20 overs. ‘The truth is that I had witnessed a masterpiece; after that I would never again be satisfied unless I was striving after the same kind of thing, no matter how short of it I fell.’ Marriott thought deeply about the subject.
It is the faster leg-break bowler (always provided that his length is accurate) who has the advantage against all comers and in all conditions, for his extra pace makes it a continual risk for even the quickest on his feet to get right out to the pitch of the ball. I always feel thankful that I began to realise this at school, and worked hard not only at accuracy but at a steady increase of pace. As a result, when I came out of the Army and went up to Cambridge, I could bowl leg breaks at medium pace without effort.
Marriott considered the googly to be of limited use for all but the best bowlers, in an era when the surprise over Bosanquet had subsided. He distinguished between the ‘first-rate’ practitioners and ‘the rest’. ‘The latter are money for old rope,’ he said.
Eventually, and briefly, Marriott succumbed to the entreaties of Freeman, who was ‘so anxious that I should have a go that to please him I did try a very few one season’. Marriott decided to bowl one googly per innings for a few matches. Against Leicestershire he dismissed a top-order batsman in each innings with this method, which worked ‘like magic’. Still, Marriott gave up the googly once more, as he had done as a youth, feeling it was not worth the extra effort and that his off break and top spinner provided adequate variety. They had been good enough for Barnes, after all.
Each was suited to his own brand of leg spin. Freeman, because of his small hands, needed to use his wrist to achieve turn. Marriott, his digits long and sinewy, was more finger-ish. Freeman hated bowling into the wind, despite his flightier style, so Marriott had to. He was uncomplaining, recognising his senior partner’s virtuosity.
In a book written shortly before his death in 1966, Marriott remarked, ‘The man who has at some time spun a good leg break knows a world all of its own. It doesn’t matter whether it is fast and certain as by Barnes.’ This was a false show of relativism on Marriott’s part. Nothing could ever be as good as Barnes in his mind. He did all he could to emulate him.
In contrast, Freeman can be said to have professionalised leg-break/googly bowling, in doing so much of it so reliably over such a time. Bowling 1,800 overs a season was normal. He was never presumptuous about his place. He would not countenance sloppiness. ‘It is beyond all contradiction that length is the chief part of bowling, and length must be commanded before any attempt at spinning the ball is begun,’ he said. ‘When I was coaching, I used to draw a line nine feet in front of the wicket and instruct my pupils to bowl to that; I have also laid a sheet of newspaper on the wicket and told the boys to pitch the ball on it.’
Freeman’s success at county level relied on subtlety, rather than prodigious spin. Bowling so many balls a season meant preservation of muscles and bones was important. ‘I have probably kidded more batsmen out than anyone,’ he said after retiring. ‘It may seem a strange thing to say but I got a good many wickets through not bowling the googly. The batsman knew I could bowl it and was always expecting it. Often he became so fidgety trying to watch my hand and to anticipate the googly that he got out in some other way.’
Freeman, born in 1888 in Lewisham, south-east London, started off bowling just leg breaks. In 1907, he saw South Africa’s Reggie Schwarz, whom Bosanquet had taught, bowling googlies. A little like Marriott’s early experience of watching Barnes, Freeman was mesmerised. ‘I summoned up courage to ask him how to bowl the googly. His advice was, “Just watch me, you will soon see how it is done,” and after close observation of his bowling I was optimistic enough to believe I could master it and set to work to practise bowling the googly for two years, winter and summer, before attempting it in the middle.’
Marriott and Freeman’s different experiences shaped their cricketing futures. More to the point, they thought for themselves. Freeman, who claimed never to have received formal coaching, argued that true bowlers were born, not made. He also explained what might today be called his aura, the ability to play on batsmen by reputation alone. ‘When you are at the top of the tree it is easier to take wickets than in the days of less experience in the art. I know I bowled better as long ago as 1914 than when I was in my supposed prime.’
This aura did not sway the selectors. Freeman made his international debut in the first Test of the 1924/25 series in Australia. His rival leg spin/googly bowler, Arthur Mailey, recalled that Australian batsmen, used to slow spinners who turned the ball more fiercely, had ‘pounced upon’ him. It denoted a sort of machismo ranking among leggies, those performing on the rock-hard bulli and similar soils down under having to go through a more intense apprenticeship and developing stronger wrists and fingers to get turn. This dichotomous theme continued and developed through the 20th century.
‘Freeman is not a leg-break bowler, but bowls what is called a “straight break” with over spin, and sometimes bowls a ball with a suspicion of a wrong ‘un,’ former Australian captain Monty Noble wrote in 1925.
In his two Ashes Tests Freeman got eight wickets at 57.37 on pitches alien to him. ‘He was not a success in Australia in the only two Test matches in which he played,’ wrote Pelham Warner. ‘I have heard, however, that fortune did not smile on him on those occasions, and that he was a great googlie bowler cannot be questioned.’ Not using him in Ashes series in England, even when Don Bradman was rewriting records in 1930, was strange.
Freeman played his remaining ten Tests against South Africa and West Indies, ending up with 66 wickets at just under 26. Mailey, keen to enhance his own reputation as the top spinner of the early 1920s, remarked, ‘Had he possessed skill to adapt himself to Australian conditions, no doubt he would have been ranked high among slow bowlers of all time.’ He did not get much of a chance.
Marriott played one Test, against West Indies at the Oval in 1933, taking 11-96. He has the best average in Test history – 8.72 – of any bowler to have taken more than ten wickets. ‘What was it but technique that enabled me,’ he wrote, ‘when, with trembling knees and mouth dry with excitement, I was handed the ball for my first over in a Test match, at once to strike a length and bowl a maiden to that most brilliant West Indian, George Headley, then nearing his 2,000 runs for the season?’ The answer was practice. Even when unable to play because of teaching commitments, Marriott went to the nets at Dulwich College and worked on his game.
Marriott loved the summer holidays and the chance they gave to study Freeman and leg spin in general. ‘The advantage of having us both in the side was that we were so utterly different in style, pace and height. The skipper evidently thought it was well worth keeping us on together for long spells, often right through an innings. Thus every August we carried out a series of combined operations which were always intensely interesting and mostly profitable.’
Both men, in their own way, are assured of a place in history. Marriott, the enthusiastic part-timer, would be pleased with his Test match distinction. Freeman, so dominant against county opposition, would have cause to rail at his lack of representative honours. Still, he was a quiet man who did not complain publicly about injustices. Freeman’s problem is that he will forever be judged against the Australian titans of his era: Mailey, Clarrie Grimmett and Bill O’Reilly.
All bowled the leg break and googly. Mailey, the first to appear in Tests, possessed huge turn and almost revelled in his lapses in length, arguing that he was always likely to take wickets.
Grimmett, who left New Zealand as a young man to pursue his dreams of becoming a world-class leg-spinner, had to move to three different Australian states before finally getting picked for Tests at the age of 33. His arm held low, he was a picture of cunning, never wanting to give anything away, perhaps because he had himself been given nothing. Grimmett used the flipper, the sort of back-spinner which floats further in the air than batsmen expect that W.G. Grace had employed in the 19th century. Grimmett flummoxed many in his era with it, but it did not create the same fuss as Bosanquet’s googly before. A ball skidding on can be more effective than one coming in to the body, as Shane Warne has demonstrated with his own flippers, ‘zooters’, and skidders, all doused in a vat of snake oil ahead of each Ashes series. It is hard to detect such balls if bowled by an expert. They look less dramatic than googlies, but are more subtle. Grimmett was far too canny to make a fuss about what he was doing.
When he thought a batsman was able to predict his flipper because of the clicking of fingers it involved, Grimmett started clicking the fingers of his left hand while delivering an ordinary leg break.
It was scheming and deceptiveness seemingly beyond the wit of any other, although the mid-19th-century English roundarm leg-spinner Billy Buttress was said to have done something similar to make batsmen think his straight ball was a leg break, which he must have given an audible flick.
Grimmett famously used a succession of fox terriers to collect the balls he bowled in a purpose-built net in his Adelaide garden. Even in this regard his attention to detail is clear. Fox terriers are known for high energy levels and low drool output.
O’Reilly, in contrast, was all fury, his action and delivery described by Don Bradman as ‘a swarm of bees’. He liberally dispensed the leg break and googly at a pace far above that of most spinners, but below that of Barnes. He came nearest to the prediction by the writer Philip Vaile earlier in the early 20th century that a fast googly would one day be possible. Growing up in the New South Wales bush, O’Reilly practised bowling against his brothers with a ball made from the chiselled-down root of a banksia, an appropriately spiky flower which thrives in Australia’s arid climate.
All three Australians worked out for themselves over the years how to prosper in tough conditions. In 1924/25 Freeman had just a few weeks to acclimatise. Over time observers noticed he did not spin the ball as hard as Mailey, lacked quite the subtlety of Grimmett and certainly the hostility of O’Reilly. It is harsh indeed to compare anyone to such an amalgam of superlatives. Freeman was still a great bowler in his own right. He never got the chances he had earned.
Truly top-class, Test match-quality leg spin, one of England’s many sporting gifts to the world, was seemingly becoming the preserve of another country. Grimmett and O’Reilly’s Test figures in England were better than in Australia, showing that techniques learned in their harder school were portable but difficult, or impossible, to replicate through an apprenticeship in English first-class cricket.
Leg-spinners in this era were manifold at county level. Several others were tried in Tests during Freeman’s career. Among them were Middlesex’s Greville Stevens, Jim Sims and Jack Hearne, Nottinghamshire’s Thomas ‘Tich’ Richmond, Derbyshire’s Tommy Mitchell, Lancashire’s Richard Tyldesley and Surrey’s Percy Fender. Some were big characters. The former Australian captain Monty Noble, who had helped Sydney Barnes develop his swerving off break more than 20 years earlier, wrote that Tyldesley, who also bowled in the 1924/25 series, ‘gives an impression of big spin, but he seems to depend more upon flight than actual break’. He thought Tyldesley occasionally attempted a googly, but it ‘did not appear to be of great value’.
English leg spin was still looking fey in Australian eyes, no longer because of the eccentricity of Bosanquet’s googly experiment, but because it was delivered more weakly by professional bowlers expected to get through hundreds of overs a year and unable to give the ball the same rip as Aussies who played far fewer matches.
Tich Richmond was once considered a serious rival to Freeman, but grew so fat that it was said he lost his bowling pivot. Hearne and Sims both took more than 1,500 first-class wickets. Percy Fender, who took up leg spin after watching Joe Vine bowling it in the nets at Sussex, was a top all-rounder who led Surrey, where he played for most of his career, with panache. Greville Stevens was a man of matinée idol good looks who had scored 466 in a house match as a schoolboy and became more valued for his batting than his bowling.
Neither of these observations applied to Tommy Mitchell, a miner who was discovered during the General Strike of 1926, when Derbyshire captain Guy Jackson spotted him during a match played to help rebuild industrial relations. He spun the ball a long way. Mitchell, looking a little like hapless film star Harold Lloyd in his round glasses, was a noted comedian. With this came a tendency not to take himself as seriously as some thought he should. He was talented but a little erratic.
Blatantly none was as good as Freeman.
The next big, as opposed to titchy, thing never quite happened. In one case the disappointment was especially cruel. In 1933, with England about to play their last match against the West Indies, the selectors took the unusual step of announcing all but one member of the squad. Peter Smith was watching a film in a Chelmsford cinema on the July evening before the start of the Test. An announcement came up on the screen, saying he was required outside the building. There Smith met his father in a state of excitement. He presented his son with a telegram from the Essex secretary, stating that he was to report to the Oval for Test duty the next morning.
Smith telephoned the secretary, who confirmed he was in receipt of a telegram from MCC. The next day he arrived at the Oval, where he spoke to England captain Bob Wyatt and MCC officials, who told him he had been the victim of a hoax. Wisden relayed that Smith had not found it ‘at all funny’. It probably palled even more as Marriott, who did play, took his 11 wickets.
Still, Smith stayed for that first day as a guest of the England Board of Control. MCC secretary William Findlay was kind enough to assure him that he was good enough one day to play for England. The prophecy came true on that same ground – 13 years later. Smith featured in four Tests in total, playing twice against Australia and once against New Zealand on Wally Hammond’s 1946/47 tour. His three wickets cost 106.33 each. A tilt at the weak West Indies of 1933 would have been a gentler introduction.
Lancashire’s Len Wilkinson got three Tests in South Africa in 1938/39 after a flourish in late 1938, when he took 58 wickets in nine matches, aged just 21. But he lost form the following summer, partly due to a hand injury. ‘The only thing I can think of,’ he reminisced, ‘is that I tried to be too perfect, particularly with the googly. I had an England cap and as an England player I had to be good.’ The Second World War came and Wilkinson faded from the scene soon after it ended.
They all got a go at Test level. None got much of one. In terms of what they deserved, Tich Freeman got the littlest of all.