He was the most carefree batsman of his generation, but it was all too much
for the selectors. Frank Keating recalls the genial strokeplay of ‘Our Tom’
The first time is always the best – and for romantics anyway, as the years roll on, the first remains the most enduringly gratifying for mind and spirit. I talk, of course, of hero worship. Recollection warms the memory as well, for you are seldom betrayed by the figure you first lionised in the uncomplicated purity of early childhood. In my case, I am even more fortunate – my boyhood’s callow wide-eyed idol worship has grown into a fond and comradely relationship, man-to-man, ancient-to-ancient. When I was 12, Tom Graveney was 10 years older and already a champion folk hero of Gloucestershire in England’s pastoral and cuddly West Country. Now he is 77 and I talk to him as a contemporary. And my hair is greyer even than his.
Yet I am still in schoolboy awe of the valorous chivalry of his deeds at cricket, of the genuine creative invention and authentic artistry of his transcendent batsmanship.
Gloucestershire, of course, had a noble heritage in batsmanship. It was the county of Grace, and of Jessop and Hammond, too. In the south was the city of Bristol, where the county cricketers were based, but once a midsummer they would travel north into the blissful hills to play two or three Championship matches in the stately town of Cheltenham. This visit would be midsummer’s high-temperature mark for us local urchins, as well as our fathers and uncles, sisters, cousins and aunts. Everyone all around was “on holiday for the cricket”.
August 1950 held the most red-hot two days of my sheltered life so far, when the county gathered to play the mesmerising West Indian tourists at Cheltenham. Of course, our fellows were skittled in no time – and in successive innings – by the ravenous and magical guiles of those spin “twins” Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine. The only one of our batsmen to play the two wizards of tweak with any remote degree of certainty was “our Tom” – fresh country-boy’s hale face, coltishly upright and gangly shy at the crease, but with a high twirly back-lift and a stirring signature-flourish in the follow-through of his trademark cover-drive (a stroke which would become a timeless artefact of serene and mellow beauty around the world and throughout the game). And a man sitting, sardined, on the grass next to me in the rapt, packed throng said: “Our Tom’ll be servin’ England within a twelvemonth, you’ll see.”
And so he was, and so we did. He was blooded for one Test against the South Africans in 1951 at Old Trafford on a sticky and he stayed in for an hour to make 15 (“full of cultured promise,” said John Arlott on the wireless), and that October set sail on the liner Chusan for his first overseas MCC tour to take in the new sights, sounds, and differing surfaces (either coir [coconut] matting, jute, or turf) of ‘All India’.
At once, he scored warm-up centuries at Bombay and Dehra Dun – a whole county back home straining its ears around the wireless sets in their kitchens enthralled by his progress – but he missed the first Test match in Delhi with a severe bash of dysentery. A week in the Hindu Rao hospital got him over the worst, but he was still uneasily queasy when the second Test came along at Bombay. More than 50 years on, he remembers: “I was still feeling groggy, but was determined to play. I reckon I felt and looked like a skeleton when I walked in to bat.” He took a pint of water and a salt tablet every half hour, which turned into an awful lot of water and salt – because he endured for eight and a quarter hours in the fierce heat against the craft and cunning of Amarnath, Shinde and Mankad, and the young man’s epic 175 was to remain the highest Test score by an Englishman in India until Dennis Amiss made 179 against Bedi, Chandra and Venkat fully 25 years later.
Us hero-worshippers continued to raise the rafters back in Gloucestershire as Tom served England with grace and charm for the next 10 years – first the colt matching the elderly monarchs Hutton and Compton, stroke for stroke, then the two lordly and haughty amateurs, May and Cowdrey. By which time a group of dullard “industrial” selectors at Lord’s became grudging . . . this Graveney, they said was all very well, but, horrors, he treats Test cricket like festival cricket, his manner is too carefree and smiling, his strokeplay too genial that he only seeks to present his great ability rather than enforce it ruthlessly.
So England dropped him for five of the next six years, and Tom moved across the border to play for Worcester, still a legend in his own locality and where the mellow architecture of his glorious strokeplay matched the imperishable resplendence of the ancient cathedral which adjoins the county’s famous ground.
Graveney continued to enchant all England every summer, but not the England Test team. Till, in 1966, another string of sad England performances had a brave new batch of selectors seeing sense and turning, once again, to Graveney – now in his 40th year – to dig them out of a deep hole being dug by Sobers’ dashing West Indians. At Lord’s, too. Tom counter-attacked and answered the ferocity of Hall and Griffith with a majestic 96 – then 109 in the following Test, and an even more regal 165 in the one after that at The Oval. He was back, and it was not only Gloucestershire amd Worcestershire now who were revelling in the joy of it. All cricket was under the spell of his masterclasses. The following summer, against India at Lord’s, Graveney beguilingly unrolled another masterpiece – 151 against Chandra, Bedi, and Prasanna – “superb,” said Wisden, “the day belonged entirely to Graveney, elegant as ever.”
In the New Year honours list of 1968, the Queen awarded him the OBE and he celebrated with a sublime 118 against West Indies at Port-of-Spain – his favourite century of all his career 122. Henry Blofeld, who was there, said “any art gallery in the world would have bought that innings for millions”. The following winter, Graveney’s 105 against Pakistan at Karachi rounded off the enchanted oddyssey.
The hero still lives in Cheltenham, where it all began. We still take a beer together, and I sit at his feet and listen, rapt again as the schoolboy was. Content and smiling, still hale and hail-fellow, Tom has had both hips replaced, but still plays regular golf and keenly follows his beloved cricket (he thinks modern bats far too “blunderbuss” heavy – “only a tiny minority, a Lara or a Tendulkar can use them as we did, like a rapier, a wand”).
When he retired from the crease in his mid-40s (4,882 Test runs and 47,793 first-class), the wise old cricket writer JM Kilburn hurrahed Graveney’s uninhibited heroic approach: “In an age preoccupied by accountancy, he has given the game warmth and colour and inspiration far beyond the tally of the scorebook.”
Precisely. The batsmanship of Our Tom was of the orchard rather than the forest, blossom susceptible to frost but breathing in the sunshine. Taking enjoyment as it came, he gave enjoyment which still warms the winters of memory.
FRANK KEATING grew up in the West Country and is one of its best-loved sportswriters. He is a former chief sports writer of The Guardian and still writes for the paper