‘England would have had another Sydney Barnes with which to confront the genius of Bradman.’
Jim Swanton
IN August 1925 a tall, 17-year-old Scot turned up at a garage in south-west London. Ian Peebles, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, was looking for adventure. He had spent a few days looking around the city before making a pilgrimage of sorts to the old garage in Richmond. This was no ordinary garage. It was the world’s first permanent indoor cricket school. It had just opened, Peebles finding out about it in an advertisement in The Cricketer magazine, which promised to ‘improve your cricket 100% in a few weeks’. He used £40 in savings gathered from his job in a bank in Edinburgh to make the trip.
As Peebles entered the tatty building on Petersham Road he was greeted by the school’s owner. He limbered up and bowled in the nets. ‘Although I was unaware of it at that moment, the next few minutes were to be the most important in my whole life,’ he remembered.
The owner of the school was Aubrey Faulkner, one of the greatest all-rounders in cricket history. The solidly built South African was himself a very fine leg-spin and googly bowler whose greatest deeds were performed in the era of Bosanquet and Barnes, and who had been taught the googly by Bosanquet’s protégé Reggie Schwarz. He watched as Peebles bowled at about medium-fast pace. Faulkner was astounded. Peebles dismissed a batsman with a delivery that reminded him of something so wondrous he had never thought it could be repeated.
‘Was that a leg break?’ Faulkner asked. Peebles was surprised by the question. Of course it was. The ball had hit the pitch and moved away from the batsman. Having grown up in a manse in Uddington, on the outskirts of Glasgow, far from the eyes of most English cricketing observers, Peebles was unaware of the magnitude of what he was able to do. So Faulkner, smiling, had to spell it out to him.
‘I had acquired the knack of bowling the leg break at fast-medium without the orthodox bent wrist, but showing the palm of the hand to the batsman, in the manner of the great Sydney Barnes himself,’ Peebles wrote.
He had always been able to do most things with the ball – spin, swing, variations of pace. But Faulkner’s attentions moved Peebles’s expectations on to a new level. He attended the school for more sessions. The coach, a taciturn man, became increasingly intrigued by what was happening on the matting pitches. After a few days Faulkner offered Peebles a ‘most intoxicating prospect’. Would he care to leave his job at the Bank of Scotland and move south permanently to become secretary of the indoor school?
‘If I did,’ asked Peebles, ‘do you think I would ever play for a county?’
Faulkner stood, pensively. ‘If you come to me,’ he replied, ‘you’ll go a darn sight further than that.’
Peebles returned to Scotland to explain the situation to his parents. After a while they agreed to allow him to go. Peebles started work in January 1926. So did Faulkner. He regaled Peebles with stories of what Barnes had done. ‘Like most of his generation,’ wrote Peebles, ‘Faulkner thought Barnes was the greatest bowler of his times, and could not imagine a better in any era, past or future.’
Both boss and worker toiled in the nets, bowling at aspiring batsmen for several hours a day. When Faulkner’s right arm tired, he switched to his left. Peebles developed an all-consuming relationship with cricket. He and Faulkner shared digs in Earls Court. They also came to share an obsession with emulating Barnes. Faulkner told Peebles he was the only person he had seen who could do the same things as the Staffordshire genius at the same pace.
Peebles’s intense workload honed his skills so that, after a while, he could land the ball at will indoors. Plum Warner, now retired from the first-class game, was a frequent visitor to Faulkner’s school and recommended him to Middlesex. ‘Peebles was, at this period, one of the best young bowlers I have ever seen,’ he said. ‘He had everything in his favour, height, a lovely action, spin and flight.’ The school transferred to larger premises in Walham Green, allowing the use of four pitches, offering different bounce and speeds to replicate a variety of conditions.
Just after he moved to London, Peebles found a book in the house he was sharing, which purported to tell people’s fortunes. Perhaps it was Gypsy Rickwood’s Fortune Telling Book, a popular publication of the 1920s, each reply reliant on the turn of a card. Barnes’s question for the book he found was, ‘Shall I fulfil my greatest ambition?’ This was to bowl like Barnes. ‘No,’ said the prophet. ‘The results would not be at all satisfactory.’
The book was just mumbo jumbo, but when he went outside to play matches in the summer of 1926, Peebles got a glimpse of a less than Barnesian future.
My performance was a caricature of its true potential. The pitch looked 30 yards long, the ball felt like a cake of soap, a gentle breeze became a gale, and my timing and rhythm had fallen apart. Nor did my talent ever return. I could bowl seamers, off-spinners and googlies, but the quick leg break had gone for good. Occasionally I would bowl a few fairly respectable leg breaks, but without any great life and with no lasting confidence or control. Yet back indoors I would immediately re-start where I had left off, and all our hopes would vainly rise again, to evaporate on my next appearance. It was a phenomenon Faulkner himself could not explain nor with which he could cope.
Peebles appeared to have developed a form of cricketing agoraphobia. Or perhaps it was stage fright, intense anxiety and cardiovascular activity which arises at the point of performance. By this time Peebles’s expectations had risen to unrealistic levels. One of the symptoms of stage fright is sweaty palms, a feasible explanation for the apparent soapiness of the ball in his hands.
It is a feeling many leg-spinners would understand, being able to work wonders in the nets but feeling useless and exposed when called upon in a match. Yet the extremity of difference between being ‘the next Barnes’ one moment and a duffer the next marks Peebles out as a special case. The pressure was proving too much.
Peebles could not cope with the comparisons or the ‘embarrassment’ of failing to live up to the expectations of Faulkner and visitors to the school. Meanwhile, constant bowling in the nets was straining his right shoulder. Note that he was also bowling the googly. Might this hint at confusion in Faulkner’s mind between the methods of Barnes and Bosanquet?
Peebles tried again and again to replicate his Barnes-like deliveries outdoors but could not. Still, Faulkner retained high hopes and, on his and Warner’s recommendation, he was included in the Gentlemen’s XI for the fixture against the Players at the Oval in July 1927. Still not resident in London long enough to qualify for Middlesex, it was his first-class debut. The press was quizzical to say the least. The Gentlemen v Players match, especially in a Test-free season like 1927, was the highlight of the summer.
In a dull draw, Peebles took 1-95. Yet he must have shown some promise as he was picked for the next fixture, at Folkestone in August, where he got 1-126. Similarly undistinguished performances followed in the North v South (he played for the North) and an MCC match. Still, he was picked to tour South Africa with England that winter. He got just five wickets in the Tests at 49.20, admitting he was not sure of his best style, varying between quick and slow.
Peebles, now qualified for Middlesex, left his job with Faulkner in 1928 after the two had a falling out, exacerbated by the intensity of their relationship and Faulkner’s expectations.
In the summer of 1929 Peebles decided to bowl constantly at a slow-medium pace. It worked. He took 123 wickets at 19.70 runs apiece. He reasoned that this more normal method would not take so much out of him and allow him to retain control. This upset Faulkner, but Peebles proved to be extremely good at it. He bowled a mixture of conventional leg breaks and googlies.
Peebles, a suave, highly sociable man, went up to Oxford University in 1929, despite his lack of success or application previously as a pupil of the Glasgow Academy. He played for the side in 1930, leaving that year, having done almost no academic work and recording spectacularly poor exam results.
That summer saw the greatest feat of scoring in Test history, as a youthful Don Bradman remorselessly took 974 runs off England. Fresh from Bradman’s record 334 at Headingley the selectors were desperate for someone to make a difference by getting rid of this growing nuisance. Tich Freeman did not get the call. Peebles was their man.
Arthur Mailey, retired as a player but working as a journalist, was rebuked by the manager of the Australian party, William Kelly, for giving Peebles advice during the Test. ‘Please understand that slow bowling is an art, Mr Kelly,’ he replied, ‘and art is international.’
What happened in that Old Trafford match was, in bowling terms, a minor masterpiece. Rain ruined the match, but Peebles did not disappoint. In the little play possible, the pitch took turn, albeit slowly. As the journalist Jim Swanton remarked, Bradman had made all his 728 runs so far in the series in dry conditions. This was different. Peebles’s first ball, a well-pitched leg break, almost bowled him. Bradman muddled on to ten, when Hammond, renowned as one of the finest slip fielders in history, missed a catch off Peebles. Soon afterwards Bradman edged another one from him and Duleepsinhji, another player who had received coaching at Faulkner’s school, made the catch.
‘The weather easily won the fourth Test,’ The Times reported, ‘but at least, if only temporarily, the spell of Bradman’s invincibility was broken.’ Bradman, not one to shower opponents with compliments, admitted Peebles had given him a ‘very anxious time’. ‘He bowled splendidly, and we were all in great trouble against his boseys. I frankly admitted that day I could not detect them.’
Peebles remained in the side for the final Test at the Oval. As the series was tied at 1-1, it was declared a timeless match. In Australia’s only innings, Peebles took 6-204 as Bradman made a double century.
His achievement was somewhat lost amid the excitement of this innings and the fact it was Jack Hobbs’s last match for England. Peebles’s previous humbling of Bradman is his best remembered performance but, in statistical terms and as a show of his stamina and determination on a flat pitch, his Oval outing was superior.
However, his career, echoing the predictions of the ‘clairvoyant’ book he had consulted in the 1920s, declined. Peebles, even in 1930, was losing the ability to turn his leg break, he and others blaming his overuse of the googly. ‘It was significant that one of the few leg breaks he bowled in the Test matches proved the means of getting rid of Bradman,’ Wisden commented.
Peebles had two excellent series against South Africa and New Zealand in 1930/31 and in 1931, taking 31 wickets in total. But his shoulder broke down at the end of 1931, ending his Test career at the age of 23. He continued to play for Middlesex until 1948, despite losing an eye in a Second World War bombing raid.
The sense of genius lost remained. ‘Perhaps he went to South Africa at too young an age; perhaps he played too much cricket, and certainly he was overworked to a horrible extent at Faulkner’s School,’ wrote Warner, ‘but no-one could have bowled much better than he did in the Test Match at Old Trafford.’
Mailey felt deep disappointment at Peebles’s decline. He had taken a course in ballistics to understand better what the ball was doing and enjoyed discussions with Peebles on the subject, remarking that ‘and yet I could never understand why one so far up in technical knowledge of flight variation could lose his leg break, particularly in the thirties, when England were looking for a good slow bowler. Although I was an enemy in England’s camp then, I shall never forgive Ian for that lapse.’
It was not a decline Faulkner lived to see. During that Old Trafford match of 1930, Peebles was returning to the team hotel in a taxi when he spotted Faulkner, who was working as a radio broadcaster, waiting in a bus queue. He got the driver to stop and gave him a lift. The two exchanged pleasantries and discussed old times in the bar of the Midland Hotel. It was the last time they saw each other.
On 10 September 1930, less than seven weeks after Peebles had made Bradman look a mug, Faulkner committed suicide. He stuck his head in the oven in the small bat factory adjoining the cricket school. His secretary, Ronald MacKenzie, smelt gas and summoned a policeman. The pair found Faulkner with his mouth over a gas jet. He had left a note saying, ‘I am off to another sphere via the small bat-drying room. Better call in a policeman to do the investigating.’
Faulkner and his new, young wife Alice had been planning a trip to Paris a week later. At the inquest she said he had once previously threatened to take his life by gassing himself but usually his depressive episodes had sorted themselves out when he went out on his own for a walk.
‘He used to enjoy good health, but at the end of last year he was not so well,’ she said. ‘I think he had overworked a great deal, and he had two operations, which left him far from well.’ He had been ‘very temperamental’, she added. The inquest in Fulham recorded a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind.
Faulkner was a man of many acquaintances but few close friends, but his death at the age of 48 shocked the cricket world, Peebles included. ‘When I went to call on his young widow she told me something which moved me profoundly,’ he wrote. ‘When he seemed to lose heart and all taste for life, she said, he had one abiding interest. It was to look in the morning paper to see how many wickets I, his discovery and protégé, had taken the previous day.’
The journalist and broadcaster Jim Swanton, a friend of Peebles who shared a flat with him in the Temple area of central London after he left Oxford, described Faulkner’s sense of pride mixed with regret at the way Peebles had done things. ‘Peebles was to bowl successfully in many Test matches… but Faulkner, one of the greatest judges of a cricketer that ever lived, used often to maintain that if only he could have produced in the open the form he showed indoors, before he had been heard of, England would have had another Sydney Barnes with which to confront the genius of Bradman.’
Faulkner was a man with demons. He had grown up in Port Elizabeth in a home dominated by his alcoholic father, Frank, who beat up his mother, Anne. When he was 15, he returned from cricket practice one day to find Frank drunk and attacking Anne. By now a thick-set young man, he hit his father so hard that he knocked him out of his shoes. It must have been a wretched upbringing. As a result of his disgust at Frank’s boozing, Faulkner became a lifelong teetotaller. The cricket school was not experiencing financial problems when he died, but a fund-raising deal had fallen through and Faulkner refused to open a bar there on a matter of principle, reducing his potential profits.
He served with distinction in the First World War, seeing action in Salonika, Egypt and Palestine, reaching the rank of major and winning the Order of the Nile. But he caught malaria. In the advert for his cricket school, published just after it opened in 1925, Faulkner urged young cricketers to ‘place yourselves in the hands of one who has been through the cricketing mill’. Not just cricketing. He’d had a lot to deal with in his life and, at its end, Faulkner could not shake off his depression.
At the inquest, the coroner said Faulkner’s suicide note had included a few other words which did ‘not matter’. These can only be a matter of conjecture, but usually coroners keep such details under wraps to avoid hurting the living.
Faulkner’s problems ran deeper than cricket, but might the situation with Peebles – his failure to live up to the impossibly high standards of Barnes – have contributed to his state of mind, or at least acted as a point of fixation? Might Faulkner have referred to this in his suicide note? We can never know.
What we can say is that much of Faulkner’s time was taken up with trying to develop something like Barnes. Peebles continued to share Faulkner’s belief in Barnes as an ideal to emulate, as late as 1968 writing of him in The Cricketer:
No one before (so far as one can ascertain) or since has been able to utilise his technique although it was logical and simple, for basically it consisted in bowling the leg break in the least complicated way, which is to say like the off break, from the front of the hand. Without the elaborate bend and turn of the wrist the ball can be more simply controlled, and bowled at very much greater pace. All this is perfectly clear in theory yet Barnes has had no outstanding imitator, nor successor.
Cricket writers and schoolboys often speculate on how the best bowler of one era would fare against the best batsman of another. Barnes and Bradman were arguably the best of any era. Faulkner, who watched much of Bradman’s run-scoring while working as a broadcaster in 1930, must have come to feel he had almost facilitated such a contest between the two, with Peebles as proxy for Barnes. That morning at Old Trafford was good but, because of Peebles’s troubles and the fact that he had changed his style from the Barnesian to the conventional to achieve it, not quite good enough for Faulkner.
Barnes did not disappear, becoming just a semi-imaginary figure from the past. His last first-class match, for Wales against MCC at Lord’s, ended on 22 August 1930. On the same day, on the other side of London at the Oval, Australia won the Ashes. Peebles was the not out batsman as Wally Hammond was dismissed to finish the match. Bradman never faced Barnes in first-class cricket.
Faulkner did not just teach leg spin, of course. Sussex and England’s Duleepsinhji, in that summer of 1930, scored 173 in the Lord’s Test, still reckoned to be one of the best innings in that ongoing contest.
Faulkner wanted to buck the English system of over-grooming players, of making them perform within prescribed limits, saying he based his system upon ‘a collection of “do’s”, rather than on one of “don’ts”’. He also claimed never to tell a player what to do without explaining why. English coaches were often ‘lazy in mind’, he reasoned, and, ‘When the hapless old methods fail to produce cricketers, it is maddening to hear that it is the boys, forsooth, who are to blame, and not their mentors. Ye gods! We coaches, I fear, are indeed a self-complacent lot.’ Plum Warner, for one, felt Faulkner’s philosophy was likely to have a profound effect on English coaching.
He could teach anything, but leg spin was his pet subject. Bowlers needed ‘to look a little further than to length pure and simple’. It was important to teach more than ‘the wearisome and monotonous length that reduces so many county games to such boring affairs’.
If Faulkner noticed a boy had the ‘propensity to spin the ball from leg I encourage him to persevere with his spin – and help him at the same time to gain length. I would never dream of making a young fellow sacrifice, in the beginning, spin for length… The boy that can make the ball do a little naturally is far too valuable a product to kill by pumping blind length into him.’
He argued that it was part of a coach’s job to know ‘precisely when to rest’ a young player. In that regard Faulkner summarily failed with Peebles, whose shoulder experienced far too much wear and tear as a teenager to allow him full effectiveness over a long career.
Barnes and Peebles met on several occasions. On one, at Lord’s in 1930, the old master showed the younger man his technique. Peebles called this ‘a glimpse of the bowler’s promised land’.
Peebles, an aspiring journalist, wrote about one conversation in the press, but was embarrassed when the report was published with a headline that made Barnes furious. ‘It was a pity that an enterprising sub-editor had captioned the account, “Barnes tells young bowler how he would get Bradman out”. He was furious at being put in this false light, and it took Sir Pelham’s advocacy to convince him that I was naive, but certainly not guilty.’ It was hardly the most incendiary headline in newspaper history, but Barnes was apparently angry at being portrayed as arrogant. He could still bristle with the best of them.
The experience did not deter Peebles from the world of print. He became a wine trader and part-time journalist, his respected articles and books informing cricketing debate until the early 1980s, when he died of cancer. Peebles’s son Alastair, who followed his father into the drinks trade by running a wine-tasting school in Devon, remembers a ‘marvellous’ man. Peebles’s genial good nature meant he retained friendships within the game. In his writings he mused about his shoulder injury, but not in conversation. ‘I think it was very frustrating for him, but he never really discussed that with me,’ says Alastair. ‘He would say he had had a very good life. For the son of a minister he got a long way. He was a man without side.’
Peebles remained philosophical. He summed up his career well. ‘I was a good might-have-been, or maybe a might-have-been great,’ he wrote.
What of Faulkner’s other charges? Before he started his indoor cricket school he taught at St Piran’s prep school in Maidenhead, Berkshire. One of his pupils was Freddie Brown, a Peruvian-born future Surrey and Northamptonshire player who captained England on the 1950/51 Ashes tour. He retained respect for ‘the Major’, attending his cricket school.
Brown spent the Easter holidays of 1930 with Faulkner, ahead of going to Cambridge later that year. ‘It was during this period that he changed me from a new-ball medium-pace bowler – with an occasional leg break – into a leg-breaker with an occasional quick one,’ he remembered. ‘He argued that the competition for a place in the Cambridge side as a leg-spinner would not be so keen – and most grateful I was to him for what he did.’ Brown, who was a prisoner of war from 1942 to 1945, having been captured at Tobruk, became known as a martinet as captain. He revoked his leg-spinning for medium pace for a while during the 1950/51 Ashes tour, reasoning that it would be pointless on the unforgiving pitches encountered.
Another of the visitors to the Faulkner School of Cricket was Walter Robins who, like Peebles, played for many years for Middlesex and appeared in Tests. Educated at Highgate School and small and wiry of build, he was a teenage prodigy at football and cricket. Faulkner developed him as a leg-spin bowler. Wisden noted that he ‘could not always command a good length; but though he sometimes came in for punishment he was always capable of producing a telling delivery’.
Peebles described the Robins of the late 1920s as the ‘best English leg-tweaker I ever saw’. Disdainful of flight, he whipped down leg breaks and googlies at a pace well above that of most spinners. Robins was a brilliant fielder and had a low boredom threshold and extrovert personality, believing in cricket as entertainment. ‘He bowled at a great pace, and his beautiful action and body swing would have satisfied the most severe critic,’ wrote Plum Warner. ‘He seemed to “spit fire”.’
His greatest dismissal, among the 64 he achieved in 19 Tests, was Bradman bowled by a googly for 131 in the second innings of the Trent Bridge match in 1930. Bradman did not even offer a stroke. The pair, who were good friends, used to argue affectionately over the incident for years.
‘Don always used to say to me, “Oh, I meant to get out to your father”,’ says Robins’s son Richard, also Bradman’s godson.
‘I said, “Come on, Don, of course you didn’t. You never gave up anything in your life.”
‘He said, “I know he wanted to marry that girl, you know. The only way she would give up was if I got out to him.’”
Robins did indeed marry Kathleen, one of the spectators that day. The idea Bradman would show such largesse during a run chase which ended up with England victorious by 93 runs is fanciful. Robins effectively won the match with a ball of brilliance.
But he could be inaccurate. ‘It is agreed that a leg-spin bowler is needed to dislodge Bradman,’ wrote Neville Cardus in the Manchester Guardian in the summer of 1932, while the side to go to Australia the following winter was under discussion. ‘Probably Robins and Brown would be useful if they would bowl good-length balls more than three or four times a week.’
A coach, seemingly in contradiction of Faulkner, prevailed upon Robins to slow down in pursuit of control. By general consent this made him less effective.
Robins remained a major force in cricket as an administrator and manager until his death, at the age of 62, in 1968. Another reason for his place in cricketing folklore was the bestowing of the name ‘chinaman’ on the left-armer’s version of the leg break, a delivery that turns in to the right-handed batsman. The story goes that Robins was facing Ellis ‘Puss’ Achong, a bowler of oriental descent, delivering the ball in this style, in the Old Trafford Test of 1933. After he was stumped, he reportedly said, ‘Fancy being bowled by a bloody Chinaman.’ West Indies all-rounder Learie Constantine then supposedly inquired whether Robins was referring to the bowler or the type of delivery and the name stuck.
Richard Robins says his father, a lover of fuss of any kind, whether born of adulation or notoriety, was happy to be associated with the tale. But, he adds, he told him it was not true and that fellow England batsman Patsy Hendren had made the comments, using a word slightly ruder than ‘bloody’. This is possible, especially the sense of surprise at the type of delivery, as Achong bowled Hendren for 77 in his debut Test at Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in 1930.
Robins played sporadically in first-class cricket until 1958, taking 969 wickets at 23.30. Faulkner never saw most of it, but he would have been proud. Still, he got to see two of his leggies play for England and dismiss Bradman.
Robins and Peebles played in a Middlesex side seemingly obsessed by leg spin. Even the South African quartet of the 1900s paled numerically as the county side on occasions in 1930 included five England leg-spinners. Jack Hearne, Greville Stevens and Jim Sims played alongside Peebles and Robins. The South African Test leg-spinner ‘Tuppy’ Owen-Smith, who played rugby union for England, also turned out for the side from 1935 to 1937.
The Faulkner-taught bowler who achieved most in international cricket was Doug Wright. Born in Sidcup, Kent, just a few days after Britain entered the First World War, he left school aged 15 in 1930 to become a legal clerk but in the summer managed a few matches for Chislehurst. While there, Gerald Simpson, captain of Kent’s second XI, noticed some potential and recommended him to Faulkner.
Faulkner offered Wright a job on his coaching staff, saying, ‘Work with me and I’ll teach you how to play cricket.’ Wright, quiet and eager to learn, spent hours discussing the theories of leg-spin and googly bowling. Faulkner offered Wright some simple advice, ‘Keep it up to the bat.’
Unfortunately his most venomous-looking deliveries had the habit of pitching several feet too short. So, unlike Peebles, Wright decided to bowl quicker and with a flatter trajectory. This worked. Wright’s success with this method was not restricted to the nets. Unlike his predecessor at Faulkner’s school, he could replicate the fast leg break, albeit a wristy, orthodox ball rather than the stiff-wristed Barnes type, outdoors.
Kent were delighted with the results and offered him a contract. In 1932 Tich Freeman missed a few matches and Wright made his debut. He made steady progress over the next few years, Freeman always ready to offer advice. It was the same as he had given to Father Marriott.
‘When Warwickshire were playing Kent at Gravesend in the first year Douglas Wright turned out for us,’ Freeman remembered, ‘I got a wicket with the last ball of an over and (Leonard) Bates came in to take the next ball from Wright. I suggested to Wright he should bowl a googly first ball; he did and Bates’s leg peg went down. Bates said to me afterwards, “You told him, Tich, didn’t you, to bowl a googly?” and I admitted the little strategy.’
Wright’s breakthrough came in 1937, the year after Freeman was sacked for getting ‘only’ 110 wickets. Wright took 111 wickets in 1937, followed by 110 the next. During his career, which lasted until 1957, Wright took more than 2,000 first-class wickets. In Tests he became England’s most successful out-and-out leg-spinner in terms of wickets. Barnes could not be included in this specific category, such was his variety of weapons.
Wright’s long run-up was one of the more bizarre in history. ‘His approach looked like a cross between a barn dance and a delivery stride,’ according to the Australian writer Ray Robinson.
‘D.V.P. Wright of Kent is a manifest basket of talent,’ wrote C.B. Fry in 1946. ‘He is called a “leg-breaker”, isn’t he? And on his day he bowls the leg break at a pace faster than the usual bowler of this sort well enough to run through any side. On other days he seems to bowl with the limit of ill-luck.’ He saw Wright as a sort of missing half of the perfect bowler, the other being off-spinner and off-cutter George Lohmann of the late 19th century. ‘If George Lohmann had had command of Wright’s leg breaks, as well as of his other artistry, he would have been even more formidable than he was. Vice-versa applies to Wright.’ That was quite a compliment.
One of Peebles’s successors as an employee of Faulkner’s school, Tommy Reddick, was reckoned to be a talented leg-spinner/googly bowler in his youth. He later focused on his batting, playing for Middlesex and Nottinghamshire before moving to South Africa. He became a respected coach and journalist.
Stan Squires, like Peebles fleeing life at the bank a few years earlier, gave up work in a stockbroker’s office to pursue his dream of becoming a first-class player. He joined Surrey in 1928 and remained there until 1949. His bowling career is intriguing. ‘As a slow bowler he specialised in off breaks, although in later years to suit his county’s needs he turned to the leg variety,’ Wisden said in its obituary after he died in 1950, aged just 40, from a blood disease.
After the Second World War, off-spinner Jim Laker was in the Surrey team, as was Alec Bedser’s twin brother Eric, who bowled in the same style, necessitating Squires’s move to leg spin. This seemed to set his mind working. Squires cross-fertilised the off break and leg break in a way even Bosanquet had not imagined. Laker left an enticing tale:
Stan was the only man I knew who could bowl the ‘inverse’ leg break with an off-break action. It was the perfectly disguised ball, and Stan would often amuse himself and confuse others by bowling it out in the middle in between the fall of wickets. But he could only bowl it from a standing position, not with a run-up, and he never attempted it in a match.
This sounds like the ball popularised by, and often attributed to, Pakistan’s Saqlain Mushtaq in the 1990s, known as the ‘doosra’, meaning ‘second’ or ‘other’ in Hindi and Urdu. So Squires, a man taught by Faulkner, himself a friend of googly expert Reggie Schwarz, who had learned the trick from Bosanquet, had himself done something apparently new.
It has a glorious symmetry – sort of literally. Events started by the populariser of the googly might have seen the doosra created in England, via the involvement of two cerebral South Africans.
Although Squires never dared try his invention in a match, he pushed at cricketing boundaries in the way that Barnes and his admirer Faulkner had encouraged. Sadly Faulkner, the coach who had given so much of himself, found no happiness in this ‘sphere’.
Even so, Peebles, Brown, Wright and Robins took 258 Test wickets between them. What more might Faulkner have achieved had he lived longer?