Arthur McIntyre’s wicketkeeping played a crucial part in Surrey’s seven successive championship triumphs from 1952 to 1958. He was unfortunate that the panache and brilliance behind the stumps of Godfrey Evans, who was two years younger, prevented him playing more than three times for England. Many good judges, however, felt that there was little to choose between the two wicketkeepers. Peter May, in his autobiography A Game Enjoyed (1985), seemed to go further than that: ‘Godfrey Evans could touch great heights of wicketkeeping, but day in, day out, Arthur was the most reliable wicketkeeper of the 1950s. He should have played many times for England. He kept superbly to Alec Bedser, Loader, Laker and Lock on difficult wickets, and made it look easy. He was never acrobatic. There was no need, as he was always in the correct position on his two feet.’ Alec Bedser echoed these sentiments, considering McIntyre ‘at least equal to Evans’ in his ability to make stumpings off his brisk medium pace. McIntyre, in fact, found it more difficult to keep wicket to Jim Laker, who spun the ball so viciously. In a first-class career that embraced 390 matches between 1938 and 1963, McIntyre claimed 638 catches (nearly all of them as wicketkeeper) and 157 stumpings.
On leaving school he at first took a job outside cricket because he did not fancy selling scorecards or pushing the roller as a member of the Oval ground staff. When he did finally go to the Oval, in 1936, he was put in charge of the cycle shed. It was as a bowler that McIntyre made his debut for Surrey in July 1938, at home against Sussex; he claimed the wicket of the Sussex number eleven. In his next game, against Kent, the opposition included Frank Woolley, then fifty-one years old. His lingering bowling ambitions were rather dampened by the Bedser twins (also serving in Italy at the end of the War) who bluntly observed that his height – five feet five – was something of a handicap. Nevertheless, he became firm friends with the Bedsers, between whom, incidentally, he found no difficulty in distinguishing: Eric, he noticed, had a slight scar under his chin.
On the twins’ recommendation McIntyre wrote to Surrey asking if, on his return, he might be considered as a wicketkeeper. After Gerald Mobey’s retirement at the end of 1946 season, McIntyre immediately established himself as the county’s wicketkeeper. His batting steadily improved, and in each of the three seasons from 1948 to 1950, he made more than one thousand runs. In 1950 McIntyre and his wife Dorothy dined with Godfrey Evans, and Dorothy jested that it was high time Godfrey suffered an injury which would give Arthur a chance to play for England. Shortly afterwards Evans broke his thumb, and McIntyre was selected to play in the fourth Test against the West Indies at the Oval. ‘You witch,’ Evans told Mrs McIntyre. England were comprehensively defeated at the Oval. Yet, while McIntyre failed with the bat, he kept wicket so well to Doug Wright’s fast leg-breaks that he was chosen as Evans’s deputy for the tour of Australia in 1950–51. On the way out, he hit a brilliant century in fierce tropical heat against Ceylon at Colombo. It was still extraordinary, though, that he should have been preferred to Gilbert Parkhouse for the last batting place – Godfrey Evans kept wicket – in the first Test in Brisbane. With England caught on a sticky wicket, McIntyre was out for only one. In the second innings he joined Len Hutton, who was batting brilliantly, as England sought a winning total of 193. Sickeningly, though, McIntyre was run out going for a fourth run, as the Australian wicketkeeper, Don Tallon, ran fifteen yards to collect a bad throw, and then threw down the wicket with his gloved hand. England lost by 70 runs, with Hutton left not out on 62.
McIntyre continued to play regularly for Surrey until 1958 (when he was one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year) and occasionally thereafter. His last first-class match was against Yorkshire at Bramall Lane, Sheffield, in July 1963: he made 50 not out (in a Surrey total of 225) against an attack that included three England bowlers, Don Wilson, Ray Illingworth and Brian Close. Geoff Boycott, in his second season for Yorkshire, also featured in that game, though he contributed nought and two. Boycott would retire from first-class cricket in 1986; that was eighty years after the debut of Frank Woolley, with whom McIntyre had also played.
Arthur John William McIntyre: b Kennington, London, 14 May 1918; d 26 December 2009