Promising Cricketer Lost to the Jazzman’s Lifestyle
Frank Parr played cricket for Lancashire in the early 1950s and was good enough to be considered for the England Test team; but his growing involvement in the jazz scene, eventually as trombonist with the Mick Mulligan Band, put paid to his chances of a professional career. In Owning Up (1978), the second of his volumes of autobiography, George Melly, the band’s frontman, explained why Parr’s time as a star wicketkeeper was short-lived. The professional cricketer, Melly observed, ‘is expected to behave within certain defined limits. He can be a “rough diamond”, even “a bit of a character”, but he must know his place. If he smells of sweat, it must be fresh sweat. He must dress neatly and acceptably. His drinking must be under control. He must know when to say “sir”.’ Frank Parr, Melly observed, had none of these attributes: ‘He was an extreme social risk, a complicated rebel whose world swarmed with demons and Jack O’Lanterns’, and he ‘concealed a formidable and well-read intelligence behind a stylised oafishness’. His fellow band members, Melly recalled, never knew the reason for Parr’s quarrel with the captain of Lancashire which ended his cricketing career, ‘but after a month or two in his company we realised it must have been inevitable’.
Parr kept wicket in the Lancashire first team from 1951 to 1954, achieving ninety dismissals for the county. A left-handed batsman, his highest score was 42, against Sussex at Hove. Parr impressed the England selectors, and after a strong performance at the Oval in 1952 was tipped to play for the Test side. In 1953 he came close to being selected for the winter tour of the West Indies. The former England wicketkeeper Herbert Strudwick described him as ‘the most promising ’keeper I’ve seen in years’. But Parr combined his cricket with a jazzman’s lifestyle, Lancashire’s fast bowler Brian Statham recalling him as ‘an arty, untidy type who looked what he was, a spare-time musician’.
Parr’s scruffy attire and laid-back manner were tolerated by Lancashire’s easy-going captain Nigel Howard, but when Cyril Washbrook took over in 1954 he demanded higher standards of dress and behaviour. Parr was dropped after just five matches, and Washbrook even warned Worcestershire (who offered Parr a job, but then withdrew the invitation) against taking him on: ‘I should inform you,’ Washbrook wrote, ‘that he can be a grave social risk.’ Yet as a cricketer Parr was at the height of his powers. ‘I thought it was the end of the world,’ he recalled. ‘It’s probably why I took up serious drinking.’
Parr played with the Merseysippi Jazz Band for six years before joining the Mick Mulligan Band in 1956 as a full-time professional and moving to London. In the 1950s George Melly and the Mulligan band became synonymous with a jazz lifestyle that involved imbibing copious amounts of alcohol and frenetic and varied sexual activity at all hours of the day and night. Inevitably the band’s performances were often affected, and the attendant disasters were sometimes spectacular (on one occasion, when playing solo trumpet, Mulligan was so drunk that all he could do was blow hard and very loudly, producing thirty-two bars of ear-shattering cacophony); yet as CDs of the period show, by the late 1950s Parr had become a gifted performer.
By then, however, the band’s brand of revivalist ‘trad’ jazz was going out of fashion. ‘[We] knew something was up when we did a concert with Tommy Steele,’ George Melly recalled later. ‘We did our set and the audience was quieter than usual. Then Tommy Steele came on and these small girls exploded into shrieks. Our trombonist, Frank Parr – famously depressive – said we would all be on the breadline.’ The band shut up shop in 1961, and Parr soon gave up playing for good. For ten years he was Acker Bilk’s manager, then worked selling advertising space before having walk-on parts on television shows such as Psychoville (2009), and in films, including The King’s Speech (2010).
Francis David Parr: b Wallasey, Cheshire, 1 June 1928; d 8 May 2012