Harry Pearson is a writer and journalist. From Slipless in Settle (2010), which won the Cricket Society/MCC Book of the Year Award.
THERE WAS A decade of my life when I attended first class or indeed any other form of cricket every chance I got. The eighties were a troubling time in Britain. There was social upheaval, strikes, turmoil and Saint and Greavsie. Some of my friends resorted to heroin. I went to county matches.
I invariably travelled with a workmate who was universally known as The Blob. The Blob was inoffensive enough, but the thought persisted that one day the police would find something nasty under his floorboards and the newspaper reports would say, ‘colleagues describe the accused as a quiet man who kept himself to himself’.
The Blob was single, with the narrow shoulders and bulging bottom of an emperor penguin. He smelled much like one too, the result of living off a diet of fish-paste sandwiches. Fish paste comes in a jar that is the olfactory equivalent of the Tardis – it looks tiny from the outside but it houses a pong the size of a galaxy. The Blob’s sandwiches were made from bread with the springy texture of disposable nappies and the moisture content of wet wipes. A vein of fish paste ran through the middle of them like self-deprecation through a Waugh family gathering. Luckily The Blob was not a sharer.
The Blob used words like palpable and plethora, referred to Lord’s as ‘HQ’ and of batsmen making hay while the sun shone. I did the same myself. It seemed more or less impossible to speak of county cricket without sounding like Test Match Special’s Peter Baxter. Fogey was the lingua franca of what The Blob and I invariably referred to as the Summer Game.
The Blob and I did not talk much during play, I should say. He was far too busy to converse. He was a compulsive scorer. The Blob wrote down the details of every batsman’s innings with a sombre gravity – St Peter in manmade fibres.
One Monday, shortly after I had first started working with The Blob, I asked him if he had enjoyed his weekend. ‘Veritably,’ he replied. ‘I scored the Leicestershire Sunday League match.’
‘You went up to Grace Road?’ I asked.
‘Oh no, just off the tellygoggin.’
I pictured the scene: the curtains drawn to cut out the glare, the stale biscuity odour of bachelorhood filling the room, The Blob, his freshly sharpened pencils lined up neatly on the arm of his chair, a Thermos of weak tea between his feet, acknowledging the umpires’ signals with an upraised hand. It was a measure of the uncertainty of the times that I found the vision extremely comforting.
Why did I go to cricket with The Blob? Well, frankly, who else would go to watch county cricket? Northamptonshire versus Derbyshire at Bletchley is not an event that attracts a hip crowd. It is the sporting equivalent of C&A; carp fishing without the excitement of firing a catapult loaded with live maggots every few hours. The only thing likely to set your pulse racing at county cricket is a bolt of static from the bloke behind you’s bri-nylon blouson.
The tiny crowd that assembled was largely the same whether at Worcester, Basingstoke, or Tring. There was a smattering of elderly ladies in cream macs who would occasionally lay down the baby jacket or bobble hat they were knitting and call for Norman Cowans to pitch the ball up, or for Ray East, the ‘Clown Prince of Cricket’, to amuse us once again by walking like a chicken.
There was also Mr Pavilion. He was at every cricket ground I visited, with his binoculars and his cool box. Some people came to cricket to watch. Mr Pavilion came to talk. Though not actually to anybody.
Mr Pavilion wore a panama hat, terry-cotton shirt, shorts that terminated with turn-ups, fawn socks and sensible sandals. I imagine he and his forbearers had worn this garb since time immemorial or at least since shepherds first hurled balls of wool at one another on the Sussex Downs and Mr Pavilion’s ancestors called out ‘pitch it up, man’ or ‘use your feet to the spinners, sir’ or whatever other phrase he had plucked at random from The Golden Treasury of Cricket Wisdom for All Occasions (abridged from the original Latin by Thos. Carlyle).
A day with Mr Pavilion always passed the same way. The captains appeared. ‘A vital toss to win,’ Mr Pavilion announced in the general direction of one of the matrons, a vital prop without whom too many of his thoughts would, like desert blooms, blossom and die unknown. ‘I’d bat if I were skipper.’
The side which unwillingly followed this course having called wrongly was promptly reduced to eleven for four; a state of affairs which aroused in Mr Pavilion a grave distemper for which he sought physic in nostalgia. ‘Hutton and Washbrook would have batted through till tea on this strip . . . Hammond would have torn this attack to shreds . . . Archie MacLaren would have posted his fifty by now.’
As Mr Pavilion railed on and on you noticed that he was retreating further and further back in time, praising cricketers who retired long before he was born. You realised that if he carried on at the rate he was going he would work his way back through Grace and Felix and Alfred Minn [sic] and, in a couple of minutes, would be proclaiming: ‘Then in this time of shadow came the one they called the run-bringer, the flayer of long-hops; and his name was Beowulf, Prince of the Scyldings, and he’d have treated this Neil Foster fellow with the contempt he deserves, I can tell you.’
Lunchtime came and Mr Pavilion opened the cool box. From it came a quantity of food such as would have tested the seams of umpire David Shepherd’s shirt front: chicken legs, potato salad, coleslaw, ham and pâté, hard-boiled eggs, a bottle of Chablis, bags of crisps, punnets of strawberries. It went on endlessly; while I listened to the crunch of crisp lettuce and the slurping of cherry tomatoes, a polythene glass of beer in one hand and a damp carpet tile that was once, allegedly, a sandwich in the other, peevishly damning the idiocy of man who brings smoked trout to a cricket match.
After lunch, fortified, Mr Pavilion hit a vein of form as thick as Rio Ferdinand’s wage packet. ‘Four all the way,’ he crowed as the batsman mistimed a drive and sent it rolling gently towards mid-on. ‘Elegantly done, sir!’ as a tail-ender aimed a mighty hoik at a half-volley and sent it skimming over the slips. ‘Textbook defensive stroke!’ as a number eleven prodded forward and lost his middle stump. This latter event afforded Mr Pavilion the opportunity to make his joke: ‘An excellent shot,’ he guffawed, ‘if only he’d hit the ball.’ By mid-afternoon the jollity and the Chablis had taken its toll and Mr Pavilion would fall asleep, jerking awake every once in a while with the startled look of somebody emerging from an erotic dream involving their in-laws.
Geoff Millets was another recognisable face in the crowd. With his beige anorak, his taupe sunhat and his pale blue easy-fit trousers Mr Millets appeared indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd but his blandness masked a deadly turn as surely as does the spinner’s flight. One minute you were sailing merrily along, the next you were stumped. We went to cricket to watch, Mr Pavilion to talk – Mr Millets went for a good argument.
Mr Millets was a master of his craft. Youngsters watching at home would have been well advised to study his action. As he approached the possible disputation Mr Millets’s movements were quick and furtive, his head swayed from side to side as his finely tuned hearing sought an opening. Suddenly his left ear picked up a phrase, ‘Knight has got to be . . .’ His hawk-like eyes quickly identified the speaker and never left him as he gathered himself ready to deliver, ‘. . . the best one-day batsman in England.’
That was Mr Millets’s cue. ‘Cobblers!’ he yelped with the strangulated ferocity of a wrist spinner appealing for a bat-pad catch he knows he has no chance of getting. His chosen victim should have shouldered arms and offered no response, but Mr Millets had pushed him on to the back foot and lured him into the corridor of uncertainty. ‘Sorry?’ he replied.
‘With all due respect,’ Mr Millets would say, finding his insidious length, ‘you are talking a load of rubbish.’ With that, he closed in for the kill. And a slow and painful death it was too. An argument with Mr Millets was so long and labyrinthine it makes the average meeting of the Yorkshire committee look like a drag race.
Despite the passing years Mr Millets never lost his focus. He had a resident’s parking permit in The Zone and once in the groove he could not be distracted by anything, particularly cricket. Nor would he let his victim relax. A friend of mine missed the whole of Ian Botham’s seventynine-ball hundred at Old Trafford thanks to an injudicious remark about covered wickets. Another can remember nothing of Shane Warne’s first spell of bowling against England except for the vague smell of scampi fries and the phrase ‘Actually, I think you’ll find . . .’ To a third, the very mention of Graham Gooch’s three hundred against India causes him to slump forward, put his head in his hands and whimper, ‘OK, OK, Doug Walters’ record in this country was better than people give him credit for’ over and over again until he is sedated by a large gin and the talking book of Henry Blofeld’s memoirs.
People say that you didn’t have to get involved, but the fact of the matter was that when your number came up you couldn’t cheat Geoff Millets. You couldn’t beat him in an argument either. He had all the facts at his fingertips and he used them to chip away at an adversary: ‘In fact it was versus Uttar Pradesh’, ‘If you check your Wisden you’ll discover it was 33.72’, ‘Yes, but D. H. Robins’s XI v T. N. Pearce’s XI wasn’t first class’. There was no escape. The best you could do was accept what was happening, sit back and admire one of the game’s true artists.
The matrons, Mr Pavilion, Geoff Millets, me and The Blob. A young man in stone-washed jeans and a Freddy Starr Ate My Hamster T-shirt whose social skills were that he could drink twelve pints and still do a passable imitation of a peacock completed the happy multitude.
As the eighties gave way to the nineties I drifted out of The Blob’s orbit and, finally wrestling the monkey of county cricket off my back, burned my scorecards and moved on.
Five years ago I met another former workmate. I asked him what had become of The Blob. ‘Got married,’ the bloke said. ‘Got married?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure?’ The bloke nodded. ‘Some girl he met at Arundel when Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk’s XI were playing the Australians. Oddly enough her name is Wicket. She’s a scorer too. They’ve got a couple of kids.’
I can picture them now at The Parks or Chesterfield, all in a row, heads down in concentration, the silence broken only by the occasional murmured, ‘He must have got the faintest of snicks to that, though it looked like a bye to me.’
Vernon Coleman is a former GP and author of over a hundred books. This Diary appeared in 1984.
I HAPPENED TO BE in Bournemouth today and, finding myself with an unexpected hour to spare, I gave a taxi driver enough to buy himself a small home on the French Riviera to take me to the Hampshire ground.
I have always liked watching cricket near the sea. I do not know whether it is because the air is so exceptionally bracing or because the sight and sound of so many sea gulls bring back happy memories of seaside holidays and days of lazy pleasure. I did live on the south coast, once, at Shoreham, just a couple of miles along from Brighton, but although I thoroughly enjoyed the experience I was, in the end, quite glad to leave. The problem was that when you live by the sea you take it all for granted. All the excitement of a day trip to the coast disappears when you just have to wander a couple of miles down the road to see the breakers and buy a stick of rock.
The Hampshire ground was pretty empty when I got there and I found myself sharing most of one stand with an extremely earnest-looking gentleman whose bald head was burnt to a dark brown colour by the sun. We were sitting some twenty or thirty yards apart, and to begin with I took no notice of him at all. He had a large notebook stretched out across his knees and seemed engrossed in it.
I had not been sitting there for more than fifteen minutes when I was awoken from my pleasant reverie by the sound of a sudden isolated burst of applause. I looked across and saw that the hairless spectator with whom I was sharing the stand had put down his pencil and was clapping enthusiastically. I thought little of it. I could not see any cause for such a dramatic expression of approval but I had been dozing a little and I was not sure if I had missed a well-struck shot or a keenly flighted delivery.
It happened again after another ten minutes. Once more I could think of no explanation for the applause. And no one else on the ground was clapping. And then again after another quarter of an hour or so. So it went on. Four or five times in the next hour my companion suddenly shattered the silence with a fiercely appreciative round of applause. Curiosity aroused, I kept a very close eye on the balding enthusiast. When, after another thirty minutes or so, it was time for me to leave I made my way over to where he was sitting, hoping to have a word with him and find out just why he was clapping and just what I and the other spectators on the ground had been missing.
As you have undoubtedly guessed by now (I had not guessed although I admit I should have done), the balding gentleman with the large notepad on his knees was an enthusiastic Amateur Statistician. He was applauding minor milestones in his club’s history. The difference was, however (and this explains why the other spectators had missed these statistical milestones and failed to celebrate them with a little palmar oscillation), that the lone statistician was keeping track neither of the batsmen nor of the bowlers.
He told me that he had for many a year harboured an earnest wish to make his mark on cricket statistics but that the almanacs and cricket magazines all had their own resident experts. There was, he reasoned, no opportunity for a statistician who recorded all the usual statistics about wickets taken and runs scored.
And so he had decided to specialise in fielders and fielding. While he kept his records meticulously up to date, he told me that he kept records of every time a fielder stopped a ball, let a ball go through, caught a ball, dropped one and every other missed opportunity. With the aid of a complex system of handicapping which I did not entirely understand, he had worked out a way to measure the number of runs that each individual fielder had saved. He had averages only for his own home county but he could tell me which fielders had the best averages and which fielders were worth their places for the runs they had saved.
And the clapping that I had not been able to understand? Well, every time a fielder reached a small personal milestone (50 runs saved in an innings, 200 runs saved in a season or whatever) then he clapped.
I left Bournemouth confused and just a little wiser, and convinced that the statisticians will eventually take over the game completely. I was very impressed by my bald friend’s dedication and singlemindedness. I wonder if the statistical gurus will ever follow his example. Heaven help us if they do. We will all have raw hands.
Derek Barnard is chairman of the Cricket Society.
First published in The Journal of the Cricket Society in 2011.
I WAS FIELDING IN the slips for Crowborough on a Wednesday afternoon friendly match in the summer of 1981. At second slip a friend said: ‘Derek, do you collect Wisden?’
‘Why do you ask?’ I replied.
‘Oh, because I bought a few advertised in the Friday Ad (our local free paper) last week,’ he said.
These comments set me thinking, and on returning home that evening, I lined up my Wisdens on the kitchen table. I had a run from 1965 (the first year I bought a Wisden) to 1981. This was not a large run but it did cover Kent’s ‘glory’ years from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. Then I thought about trying to trace the career of my boyhood hero Colin Cowdrey through the pages of Wisden and realised that I would need a run commencing with 1946. Only then would I be able to trace that illustrious career from Tonbridge to Test Match.
Obtaining the copies from 1946 to 1964 was not difficult as I was able to purchase these from general book dealers at modest prices, and within a couple of months I had a complete run from the end of the Second World War to 1981. Whenever I travelled to another town on school or family business I always made a point of visiting the second-hand bookshops, and in late 1982 I made contact with Christine and Robert Swift who ran a secondhand bookshop in Maidstone. I asked them to ring me whenever they had any Wisdens in the shop prior 1946.
Yes, you have guessed it, for within a few days Robert rang to say that they had a run of softbacks from 1920 to 1939. The asking price was £200 (today it would be £2000) and Robert would be quite willing to accept my collection of Gillingham Football Club programmes in part exchange. I had to acquire these as I would now possess all the cricket between the two wars with the exception of 1939. Parting with the Gillingham programmes was a wrench but cricket had become my number one sport. (By the way, I have been a Gills supporter for 57 years and saw my first game in 1953.) Some of us have our burdens to carry in life.
A couple of weeks later Robert acquired 1940 to 1945 in linen covers. Actually I believe he always had them but just kept them back so that I could have my appetite whetted again. Yes, another run appeared later in the year (1899 to 1914) and with the agreement of my wife Sheila and the bank manager I paid for them with a £250 loan. So by late 1982 I had a run from 1899 to 1982 with the exception of the war years 1915 to 1919 inclusive.
At about this time a friend suggested that a new Index to Wisden was needed and I approached MacDonald and James (owned by Robert Maxwell) to see if they were interested in my idea. They were, so I needed access to all the other Wisdens.
Martin Wood from Sevenoaks very kindly supplied 1916 and spread payment over three months, and the other war years were bought via the specialist dealers like John Mackenzie and John Eastwood. Facsimiles of the 1864 to 1878 issues were obtained from John Eastwood (these had belonged to comedian Tony Hancock’s brother Roger), and reading copies of 1879 to 1898 from other collectors like Carl Openshaw who had spares. I did not mind the condition of the books – they just had to be readable. Over the years I have gradually replaced the softbacks with original hardbacks but this has now become a very expensive business. Recently an original hardback sold for £20,000 at auction.
Collectors of Wisden were dealt an excellent hand when the Willows Publishing Company decided to do reprints from 1879. They commenced this in 1991 and to date have reached 1930. These volumes are gradually increasing in value as all of them have been produced in a limited print run of usually 500 copies.
So today I possess a complete run thanks to the forbearance of my wife and the bank manager who was always willing to help. Friends have helped me by directing me to shops and sometimes even putting a deposit on a book until I could go and inspect it. No, I have not read every Wisden from cover to cover (I do intend to do so in the near future) but I think I know as much as anyone about the ‘Cricketer’s Bible’.
And the bargain buy? An 1874 original which I bought in a bookshop in Rye in 1984 for £4 and the lady apologised about the price!
R. L. Hodgson wrote under the nom-de-plume ‘A Country Vicar’.
From Second Innings (1933).
ANGELA HAS A relative, who lives in London. We always stay with her for the University Match, and on other occasions when we go up to see cricket.
[. . .] A charming hostess she is, but not a sportswoman. She is never quite sure, I fancy, in what months cricket is played. At least, she has been known to inquire when Angela and I were starting for Twickenham, on a Tuesday in December: ‘Let me see! Is it cricket or football to-day?’
Sometimes – not often – Eliza accompanies us to Lord’s. She is an enthusiastic cricketer, in theory. No one is keener that England should beat Australia! No one is more desirous for Cambridge to defeat Oxford! But, when it comes to watching the actual game, she is apt to make mistakes. There are points of detail, on a cricket-ground, which appear to her mysterious.
I realised this on the first occasion we took her with us. The match was M.C.C. v. Philadelphian Pilgrims, in August, 1921; and the score board announced: ‘Last wicket fell at 230’. Eliza gazed at the sentence, looked at her watch, compared her time with the clock in the tower, and then spoke: ‘Why do they say that?’ she asked indignantly.
‘Say what?’ we responded.
‘“Last wicket fell at two-thirty”, when it is not yet two o’clock!’
[. . .] Eliza expressed her enjoyment of that visit to Lord’s. She was delighted with the result of the match: she rejoiced that (to quote her own words) ‘England had beaten America!’ It was vain to point out that cricket is not America’s game – that they play it but little except in Philadelphia – and that the visitors were simply a team of Philadelphian cricketers on holiday.
‘Isn’t Philadelphia in America, and are not Philadelphians Americans?’ she asked fiercely.
One was forced to assent.
‘And is not the M.C.C. English?’
There was but one possible answer.
‘Very well, then! England has beaten America, and I’m glad of it! I don’t like Americans, but I like cricket! I’ll come again with you and watch it!’
She has done so. Once or twice a year, on an average, she renews her acquaintance with the game. But, even now, I doubt whether she realises fully how a match is conducted. She knows that two rival teams are in opposition; but, quite recently, she was in grave doubt as to whether the two batsmen were on the same side, or opponents. She asked the question!
As a matter of fact, for one who has never played and has no real knowledge of cricket, the various movements must be a little confusing. Why the ‘over’, and the consequent crossing to new positions in the field? Why this and that? So many doubtful points!
I think Eliza has almost abandoned the attempt to understand the whys and wherefores. Her interest in cricket has become, in the main, personal. She takes a liking for some individual player and, forthwith – so to speak – adopts him. Eliza is artistic and admires beauty, so the individual honoured is, usually, a young Apollo. But, strangely enough, he may be very small and plain: if he is also entirely unsuccessful that seems, in her eyes, to add to his charm – especially if he looks pathetic! She has a warm and kindly heart, and creatures in distress always arouse her sympathy.
Lord’s Schools v. The Rest is a match she likes particularly: if we were always able to get to London for the first Monday in August, she would attend it annually. Oxford v. Cambridge she also finds attractive; and Eton v. Harrow, though for the crowd, rather than the cricket. She has not much use for County Championship games and the stern struggle for points. She prefers a rapidly-mounting score, quick changes and sustained excitement: she resembles Angela in that – it must be a family weakness. But Eliza possesses a very useful idiosyncrasy: whenever she is in the slightest degree bored she falls asleep!
It was when suddenly roused from slumber that she voiced what we consider her best saying, up-to-date. We – Angela, Eliza, and I – were watching a Middlesex fixture: at least, Angela and I were watching, and Eliza was dozing. ‘Patsy’ Hendren – Angela’s favourite cricketer – had passed his century and was still undefeated when the last man joined him. He remained undefeated when the innings closed, and walked to the Pavilion amid thunderous applause.
The cheers awoke Eliza. ‘Has something happened?’ she inquired.
‘“Patsy” has carried his bat!’ Angela proclaimed with justifiable pride. ‘Isn’t it splendid?’
‘Has he?’ Eliza cried excitedly. ‘Did the other man throw it down?’
It was not she – though it might almost have been – who made the remark about the weathercock on the Grand Stand at Lord’s.
‘I see,’ said this somewhat short-sighted lady, ‘that they’ve put the figure of a man up there – a man with a beard. Was there not, once, a famous cricketer with a beard? I’m sure there was, and I remember his name. It was Dr. W. G. Grace. I suppose that’s a statue of him. How very suitable!’
One day, Eliza may even eclipse that! Angela and I live in hope!
Frank Keating is the Guardian’s former chief sports writer.
From Long Days, Late Nights (1984).
I SPENT A DAY with Jackie Stewart, the former motor racing ace, at his sumptuous home above Lake Geneva. At lunch the subject of childhood heroes came up, and between pudding and coffee Jackie was away upstairs rummaging in his attic – to come down triumphantly with a battered, old autograph book.
It had been his most treasured possession – more so even than his first set of spanners – back in the 1950s when he was an apprentice garage mechanic in Dumbartonshire and had occasionally travelled with his elder brother, Jimmy, to the racetracks down south. There they all were . . . squiggles of Hawthorn, Ascari, Farina, Brooks, and – still Stewart’s most coveted – Stirling Moss.
Are today’s kids still at it? ‘Sign here, please, Mister?’ Or has the adventure, let alone the simple, wide-eyed romance, gone out of sport for a generation weaned on the inane, so-called intimacies of television after-match quotes, or meaningless newspaper confessions? If the 1930s were for cigarette cards, my 40s and 50s were for autograph collecting. What do they collect now? Anyway, I suppose one Henry Kelly is worth ten Henry Coopers.
The first autograph I ‘collected’ was Charlie Barnett’s. He was Gloucestershire’s opening bat – and once completed a corking century for England at Trent Bridge by rattling the first ball after lunch to the pickets for four. He hit as fiercely as he looked down on us local oiks. He owned wet-fish shops in Cirencester and Cheltenham and rode with the Beaufort and Berkeley foxhounds. He lived at Chalford, near Stroud, and one day a friend and I rode our bicycles up the winding Cotswold Hill and lay in wait with our brand new autograph books. He came neither in nor out, and we were far too scared to knock boldly on the front door. Then I had a brainwave. Charlie’s daughter, Judy, was at the local convent school, in the same class as my sister. A modest bribe was negotiated and, lo and behold, a couple of days later, the book came back with Page One inscribed ‘Best of luck, Francis – C. J. Barnett’.
It was cheating. But I was off. That was the early summer of 1947 and by the end of August’s Cheltenham Festival I had the whole of the Gloucester team and quite a few of the ‘visitors’ too. Most valued of those was ‘W. J. Edrich’, and when, two years later, I nabbed the amiable, scatty sig. ‘Denis Compton’, on the same page, I headed it in my wayward, juvenile capitals ‘THE MIDDLE SEX TWINS’, making two words out of the London county in an unknowing, but interesting, Freudian slip.
My big coup of 1948 was to get the Australians. I simply sent my book to the Visitor’s Dressing Room at Worcester at the end of April, marked ‘For the attention of Mr Donald Bradman’. Back came a sheet of paper, on which all of them had written their names. It remains, perhaps, the finest side ever to tour. I breakfasted that morning in heaven.
Many years later the cricket historian, David Frith, warned me about second-hand signatures. He said he once knew a pre-war Aussie Test player who had been lumbered with a thousand autograph sheets on the boat coming over and to prove it had reeled-off for him a near-perfect Bradman, O’Reilly and Oldfield!
I suspected none of that in 1948. Wretchedly and alas, I have lost that old, beloved autograph book in the general jetsam of moving on, but I can still close my eyes and recall The Don’s neat little, joined-together writing, ‘D. G. Bradman’. If I keep them closed, I could still do you a passable forgery of the upright, well schooled ‘W. A. Brown’ or the cack-handed ‘A. R. Morris’ or his lefty apprentice, ‘R. N. Harvey’. I drooled over them and I learned them almost by heart: ‘C. McCool’ was the most juvenile and unstylish of handwriting, and ‘W. A. Johnston’ and ‘D. Ring’ the most confusing couple of scrawls. You had to work those two out by a process of elimination. The two wicketkeepers, ‘D. Tallon’ and ‘R. A. Saggers’ were straightforward and standing up. ‘R. A. Hamence’ was schoolmasterly, well formed and correct.
Sid Barnes, cobber, and clobbering opening bat plus suicide-point fielder, was the only one to ‘sign’ his name with a rubber-stamp – ‘S. G. Barnes’ bashed out from an exciting, tearaway’s, purply-coloured inkpad. The mesmerizing Miller signed just as the legend said he did – writing a very readable, sub-copperplate ‘eith ille’, and then adding the capitals, ‘K’ and ‘M’, with a gorgeous and flowering flourish.
That stuck-in sheet remained the highspot of my collection. I kept it going for another ten years or so. I had T. E. Bailey before he started writing ‘Trevor’ as his prefix, and likewise D. B. Close before he was ‘Brian’. I got Tommy Lawton from soccer, and Dai Dower from boxing. I had a genuine Billy Wright, too – in person one evening when he opened a local soccer ground. I knew by then that the boaster’s knack was to have approached them personally, not to write enclosing your book and the old s.a.e.
Once, at school, I stole from a friend’s desk (just to own for a morning, and look, honest!) a piece of paper bearing the signature of a Cheshire dentist who that summer had played for England at cricket. It had been, temptingly, in an envelope marked ‘Lancs CCC’.
This prep school was in the habit of having snap personal checks and searches whenever it happened to take the fancy of suspicious Benedictine monk teachers. Suddenly, that very morning, they announced a turnout of desks and pockets. Wherever we were, we had to freeze and wait for these ancient suss laws to be enacted. The stolen, valued, piece of paper was in my pocket. Briefly, I panicked. Then I did the only thing a hoodlum could do. Uneasy, but still unsuspected, I transferred the stolen piece of paper from pocket to hand; then I coughed and sneezed to create an innocent’s disturbance as the fuzz approached; they were unaware that at the same time as I was snuffling, I was popping the guilty thing into my mouth. I am the only man I know to have actually eaten the signature of ‘K. Cranston (Lancs & England)’.
I suppose I’ve become more cynical since, when Gloucestershire played a few county matches at Stroud, I daringly asked ‘B. D. Wells’ to add his much loved nickname to his autograph in my book – and he did, with a smile and a snappy line in inverted commas: ‘Best regards, The Bomber’.
Esther Rantzen might have made an important point when she once said, ‘I don’t know why these autograph-hunters don’t just forge them: no-one would ever know.’
At Gloucester Wagon Works ground, Fred Trueman once lined up all us kids. The queue was as long as an M4 ‘tailback’ in today’s holiday season. Trueman asked each of us our name before planting that personalized, and hugely treasured, set of initials in our book – ‘To Francis, from F. S. T.’. Yet, over a quarter of a century later, on the radio, Fred was sneering the other day at those faithful signature-sentries who have ever followed him. ‘I dunno,’ he said, ‘men keep comin’ up an’ sayin’ they want my autograph f’their nephew. I tell them blunt: if y’want me signature f’your nephew, then I’ll get me own nephew t’sign the ruddy thing.’
Not the sort of thing we pleading, shaking, quaking autograph-hunters want to hear. Fred never toured India with England. Tony Lewis did, as captain in 1972. He was a marvellously civil, genteel, humorous and much-loved leader. In India you have to be; they worship cricket. Five hundred autographs a day is the norm even for a visiting net bowler. Lewis would sign his name into the night. One day, at Bangalore or Kanpur, or wherever, a man knocked on his door each hour of the day prior to the Test Match – ‘My dear uncle, Lewissahib, please sign these sheets of paper for my big and beloved family!’
Tony would readily and dutifully sign each proffered piece ‘A. R. Lewis’. By the second day of the Test, a gateman at last felt himself duty-bound to approach the England captain. Surely he had been too profligate with his invitations. Every sheet Tony had signed had been topped and tailed with the typewritten legend ‘Please admit to Test Match. Signed, A. R. Lewis, Captain of England’.
The greats sign. I have seldom known Jack Nicklaus, Bjorn Borg, Pele or, if you plot the course to a quiet corner, Lester Piggott, refuse to sign an autograph. The most ready, and willing, and friendly signer of anyone I have observed over the years is the boxer, Muhammad Ali. He would go out of his way, even rip pages from spivvy autograph books to sign and give to kids in the queue who only had cigarette packets to offer.
Once, before some faraway fight, I asked him to sign a programme for my twelve-year-old nephew. ‘Put “To Mark, Keep punching, Yrs Ali”,’ I asked, and the great man duly did, although he was going into the ring within minutes.
I sent it off proudly by airmail. When I got home, I asked to see the famous signature. Said Mark’s father: ‘I’m sorry you asked about that. I’m afraid he swopped it last week – for two Lou Macaris!’