Trevor Bailey penned a classic ‘Not-in-my-day’ essay
Our next object proved an overnight success when it first appeared in a 1978 Test match. Australia’s Graham Yallop is the batsman first credited with wearing a helmet, but in fact one of modern cricket’s most essential items of kit first saw the light of day forty-five years earlier.
It was the great Middlesex and England batsman Patsy Hendren who first came up with the idea for some sort of protective headgear. Legend has it that the Notts Express Harold Larwood promised Hendren’s wife that he would ‘knock his block off’, and he almost did with a stream of short-pitched deliveries during a county game.
Hendren, by now in his forties and relying more on instinct than eyesight, knew he had to find a solution. In discussing the subject with cricket writer William Pollock, Hendren told him that ‘he had had all the bangs in the head from fast bowlers that he wanted for the rest of his life, and that he had come to the conclusion that it was folly to bat against certain quick bowlers, particularly on the wickets at Lord’s, without some kind of extra protection’.
Hendren experimented first with ‘some rubber inside the cap’ before enlisting the help of his long-suffering wife. According to Hendren’s obituary in the 1963 edition of Wisden, what they produced was a normal cricket cap which ‘had three peaks, two of which covered the ears and temple, and was lined with sponge rubber’. For nearly half a century cricket continued without helmets. Bowlers were still quick, batsmen still anxious, but no player dared run the risk of ridicule by striding to the crease covered up. Then in 1972 Australian all-rounder Graeme Watson took a ball in the face from Tony Greig while batting against a World XI. According to Melbourne’s Sunday Age, Watson ‘was in a critical condition in a Melbourne hospital for several days and received 40 pints of blood in transfusions. At one stage he stopped breathing and received heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation’.
Greig wasn’t a quickie, but there were plenty who were in the 1970s, men such as Lillee and Thomson, England’s Bob Willis and the fearsome West Indian duo of Michael Holding and Andy Roberts. The World Series seemed to add an extra yard or two of pace to these bowlers.
Batsmen’s anxiety began turning to dread. England’s Mike Brearley had started wearing a padded cap similar to Hendren’s in 1977, but following Peter Toohey’s destruction at Roberts’s hands Dennis Amiss sought greater security, the Englishman wearing a motorbike crash helmet for the rest of the World Series. Though the helmet was hot and uncomfortable Amiss said it ‘enhanced his confidence at the crease by removing the fear of being struck on the head’.
Trevor Bailey penned a classic ‘Not-in-my-day’ essay
Soon he was loaning out his helmet, until in March 1978 Graham Yallop walked out to bat against the West Indies in Barbados wearing a white helmet designed especially for cricket with a transparent visor. According to Indian cricket writer Arunabha Sengupta, Yallop was ‘booed and jeered all the way to the wicket [but] the Victorian batted about two and a half hours and scored 42, and started a fashion that changed the game forever’.
Many of the game’s old guard were less than impressed. In a classic ‘Not-in-my-day’ essay written for the 1981 edition of Wisden, former England captain Trevor Bailey poured scorn on the helmet, impugning the courage of the modern player and implying that his generation were made of sterner stuff. ‘None of the [former] players I have mentioned required a helmet for protection, for either physical or mental reasons, which is, of course, why they are worn,’ declared Bailey. ‘Which leads to the question, has the pace of the bowlers increased dramatically? I don’t personally think so.’ Bailey ended his polemic wondering ‘whether the helmet is a sensible adjunct to batting, like pads and gloves, or merely a well-marketed gimmick and a modern trend’.
Bowlers, no longer able to rely on intimidation, enlarged their bag of tricks
It was neither; it was a necessity, as South African batsman Jonty Rhodes discovered in 1994 when he was hit on the helmet by a Devon Malcolm bouncer. Doctors later said the ferocity of the blow would have probably killed Rhodes were it not for the helmet, which ended up in the hands of Tony Henson, a headgear manufacturer. ‘We had an aerospace engineer assess the evidence and work out the speed of the blow and the force of the impact. And we used that information to improve our helmets,’ recalled Henson in an interview four years later. ‘Jonty’s blow helped improve cricket helmets… The minimum figure for a helmet now is that it should reduce impact by 25 per cent. At the time Jonty’s reduced it by about 17 per cent and that was enough to save him from serious injury. Now we aim to make helmets which reduce the shock of the blow by 40 per cent.’
There was much gnashing of teeth when helmets became widespread. While Bailey and his ilk tut-tutted at the timorous modern players, connoisseurs of the game worried that there would no longer be a place for cricket’s pacemen. In fact studies have shown that between 1971 and 1978 (in other words, the pre-helmet era) quick bowlers took Test wickets at an average of 25.12 runs with a strike rate of 52.60; from 1978 to 1986 this average improved slightly to 24.82 with a strike rate of 53.89.
So batsmen may have felt more confident playing the quicks but it didn’t mean scoring runs became easier. And the bowlers, no longer able to rely so much on intimidation, enlarged their kit bag of tricks, mixing up slower balls with slow bouncers and reverse swing. ‘I’d like to see more intimidatory bowling in the current game, but the aim is to get batsmen out, not hurt them,’ said Rodney Hogg, an Aussie paceman in the 1970s who once hit Viv Richards on the head with a 90mph bouncer. ‘Helmets are the most sensible thing going. Why wouldn’t you want to wear a helmet?’