Oxford 1951–54
‘Cricket at Oxford will always be perfectly embalmed in my mind.....Warm days in the sun, net practices that were never a chore, good wickets, good fellowship – a simple, uncomplicated life.’
Colin Cowdrey
WHEN I discovered that Colin Cowdrey had been awarded the Heath Harrison Exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, I laughed out loud. The coincidence was preposterous. George Chesterton, the subject of my first book, had been awarded the same exhibition for Brasenose half a dozen years earlier – for pretty much the same reasons. Both had passed the entrance exam, both were talented sportsmen, both would have been expected to gain Blues at cricket (which they did), both had all-round careers at school and had been enthusiastically recommended by their headmasters and both were considered to be ‘excellent chaps’ who would no doubt bring credit to the college. And to be fair, both did.
The reason I laughed was that George once told me that he was delighted to have ‘won’ the exhibition until he realised that he had been selected from a shortlist of one. I wonder if Colin had been up against equally fierce competition. No matter. The stipend of £20 per term was more than useful in making ends meet and considering Colin’s status in the game already, I have no doubt that Brasenose considered it money well spent. He was a little embarrassed by the award, with its suggestion of pocket money for a bone-headed sportsman; he was no dilettante, he would knuckle down, work hard, pass his exams and score hundreds of runs in The Parks.
Before books could be opened, there were balls to be hit. Not that Colin had much success in making contact with the ball early on in his first season for Kent. He could have been flaying it to all parts on the Head at Tonbridge. Not surprisingly, Colin struggled. He won’t have been the first, or the last, to find the step-up to county cricket problematic, and I am including here players of undoubted ability and class.
Just three years earlier, Tom Graveney began to doubt that his decision to forsake a promising career in the army to play for Gloucestershire was such a good one as he struggled to make any impact during the early months of the 1948 season. But they stuck with him, he eventually found his form and he was away. The same with Colin. He was so perturbed by his initial run of low scores that he intimated he should be dropped. Nobody listened to him. He scored two against Nottinghamshire and four and nought against Hampshire and was in despair. The swing and movement of Hampshire’s opening pair, Shackleton and Cannings, had punctured his confidence. He simply had no answer and felt he was floundering. But he was patient, he watched and he learned and a better match against Northamptonshire (27 and 47) restored some of his confidence. He had the strokes, of that he was sure, but he still felt he had much to learn about playing the moving ball.
In early June, he had played for the Free Foresters against Oxford University in The Parks and scored 143, thus laying down a marker with many of his future team-mates at the university, but he still wondered whether he had the technique to cope with the higher demands of the county game. The match was deemed first-class (thereby his century was counted as the first of the eventual 107 of his career) but it was a cut below the exacting standards of the county championship and he realised he would need to sharpen up.
Slowly his scores improved, including 54 against Leicestershire and 51 against Lancashire. But it is worth pointing out that of his first 17 innings, six were ducks, and we can include two other scores of four and four in that total. What does that hint at? That he was a nervous starter? This is one criticism that was occasionally aimed at him during his career but I would dispute it. Who is not a nervous starter? If you’re not nervous when you go out to bat, then you don’t care. It is how you control the butterflies that counts.
Colin’s weight of runs in a lengthy career is evidence enough that he was never paralysed by nerves. It is true that he rarely came out with all guns blazing; he was raised in a more cautious era and in any case, he relied on touch and feel and he needed a few overs to get the pace of the wicket and the measure of the bowlers. But these quick dismissals did underline a weakness that he knew he had to eradicate. It was fast bowling that was the problem, not so much extreme speed but movement through the air and off the pitch at a pace to which he was not accustomed.
He was by nature a technician, always intrigued by the mechanics of batting, and he set about adjusting his technique to counter the moving ball. As an exemplar to study and emulate, there was none better than the man who was often batting down the other end from him, the Kent opener Arthur Fagg. At one time, before the war, Fagg had been compared favourably with Len Hutton, almost an exact contemporary, but poor health and the six years of his career lost to war meant that he had never quite fulfilled his early promise. By now, he was nearing the end of his career but he was still a fine player. Watching Fagg adjust to the moving ball, Colin realised that he needed to take that extra split second before committing himself to the stroke and adapted his style accordingly. He later said, ‘During that summer, Arthur Fagg taught me the value of playing late.’
Fagg subsequently became another of those umpires whom Colin would meet regularly on the count circuit. He is perhaps best remembered as an umpire in the 1973 Test at Edgbaston when he became so upset at the behaviour of the West Indians after he had turned down an appeal for a catch that he refused to take the field the next morning. Alan Oakman deputised but only for one over, by which time a placated Fagg resumed his station. Fagg was also officiating in the Headingley Ashes Test in 1975 when the pitch was dug up by vandals.
Let us not forget that pitches were not vandalised very often by protesters but they were by the weather. In the days of uncovered pitches, the medium-pacers thrived. You only have to think back down the ages to recall a noble line of them, from Sydney Barnes to Maurice Tate to Alec Bedser to Tom Cartwright but their effectiveness declined once wickets were covered. The twin bugbears of Colin’s first full season, Derek Shackleton and Vic Cannings of Hampshire, were two such wily campaigners, allying nagging accuracy with little variations of pace, swing and cut, able to strangle the scoring rate when conditions were favourable for batting and quick to exploit a damp pitch when they were not. It is no wonder that Colin struggled initially. Many of his more experienced colleagues fared little better.
At which point an old problem reared its head. He had to rest his feet. They were giving him trouble and he was out for three weeks. Although he would not have admitted it at the time – he confessed to being worried and depressed by his lack of form – the enforced break probably did him good. The pressure was off and he could reflect at leisure on what he needed to do to improve. When he returned to action, it was with a slightly modified technique and mindset – play the ball late and eschew the risky shot until well set.
It seemed to work. By the time of the return fixture against Hampshire, he was in an altogether better frame of mind and top scored with 90 out of a total of 263. Cannings and Shackleton took four wickets apiece and were never easy to play but he felt he could cope. Evidently that view was shared by his captain, David Clark, for during the tourist match against the visiting South Africans at the end of the season, he awarded Colin his county cap.
The ceremony of a captain handing over a cap to a player in his team is a very special moment in anyone’s career, none more so than for Colin. It signifies acceptance by your peers, recognition that you are now an integral part of the team – in short, you have arrived. Colin never forgot the importance of the occasion and always made a fuss of the recipient when he was captain. Derek Underwood told me the delightful story of when he was capped by Colin, his captain. ‘It was in 1964,’ he said, ‘against the Australians at Canterbury. Suddenly, Mike Denness, who was 12th man, came on to the field and handed Colin a cap. Play was held up as he presented it to me. Norman O’Neill was the second person to shake my hand after Colin. Apparently, Colin had rung up my parents the night before and suggested that it would not be a good idea to miss the following day’s play, so they were there to see it all. That was typical of Colin. I never forgot that gesture.’
How different from the experience of Tom Graveney. At the end of the final match of the 1948 season, Tom was unbuckling his pads in the dressing room when he was hit on the head by a flying cap. It was his captain, B.O. Allen, who had casually flicked his county cap in his direction. The contrast between Allen’s off-handedness and Colin’s considerateness could not have been more marked.
Gentlemen v Players, the Scarborough Festival at the season’s conclusion, tables, white linen and tea brought out on to the middle while the band played; all symbols of a bygone age. I remember playing at the famous seaside ground of North Marine Road and staying in the (not so) Grand Hotel. I was surprised by the crowd drifting off from 5.30pm onwards. ‘That’s because tea in the boarding houses is at six o’clock ’oop ’ere,’ a team-mate explained.
The atmosphere was different, quirky even, but let no one say that the cricket was nonchalant and light-hearted. Yorkshire folk don’t do frivolous. It was an unexpected honour for Colin to be invited to represent the Gentlemen against the Players in the annual end-of-season bash at county cricket’s northernmost outpost but he would have been forewarned that the professionals would be taking no prisoners. As an 18-year-old amateur, he would have been right in their sights.
On a damp morning, the Gents batted first and it immediately became obvious that the opening bowlers for the Players, Tom Pritchard, Warwickshire’s New Zealander, and Alec Bedser, who needs no introduction, were not in the business of frivolity either. They were 84/4, with Reg Simpson, Bill Edrich, Peter May and Hubert Doggart sent on their way, and it was the young Cowdrey standing between them and a complete breakthrough. He struggled at first and often that is the mark of a great innings, the fact that it has not come easy. The pitch dried out, greater fluency in his strokes came to the fore and in due course, his second first-class hundred was achieved.
Looking on with admiration no doubt hidden behind those guarded eyes was the Players’ captain, Len Hutton. One can almost envisage him making a mental note of the undoubted class and supreme timing of the youthful prodigy. As we shall see, Hutton was to have a crucial impact on Colin’s early career. After a while, he clearly had seen enough. He brought himself on to bowl with his occasional leg breaks and had Colin stumped for 106, taking 4-20 as the rest of the innings folded for 318.
Praise was generous afterwards from all quarters, press included. Colin knew that he had made a name for himself but was unaware until later how much of an impression he had made on the England captain. Hutton said later that it was not this innings that had convinced him that in Colin he saw a future England star but he was distinctly impressed. And Len Hutton was not easily impressed.
It is a far cry, both in distance and culture, from the windy seaside of Scarborough to the dreaming spires of Oxford. No doubt too it was quite a change to shift from the set routine of a county cricketer to the more laissez-faire world of the undergraduate. For all of his life, in India, at Homefield, at Tonbridge and with Kent, Colin would have had to rise in the morning at a set time for a day’s activity that had been pretty well predetermined. Now, nobody would have bothered had he not surfaced all day, though I doubt he was a natural slug-a-bed.
For the next three years, he was to rejoin Kent only after the summer term at university had finished. Sadly, that is not a state of affairs that exists anymore. Counties seem to want to get their hands on a promising young player and tie him down to a contract without allowing him unfettered access to further education, an attitude that betrays a lack of understanding of what a university education is all about, even for aspiring cricketers. This was a debate that Colin himself pondered, at the time and later, when he had to make some hard decisions about his future.
Did he gain intellectually from his study of geography, his chosen subject? Well, he put the subject to good use by learning how to navigate his way around the country, from cricket ground to cricket ground, once he had got his own car. As for the more esoteric aspects of the course, he admitted he pursued his studies ‘with some interest but no great zeal’. He won’t have been the first student to have similarly scraped by.
His cricket was not greatly enhanced by the university experience. He had already been exposed widely to the first-class game so playing for Oxford would not have been a step up in standard. For most undergraduates straight out of school, university provides untold opportunities to forge new friendships, bonds, affiliations, even romantic attachments but Colin had already joined his tribe. Cricket, and cricketers, henceforth circumscribed his world.
For all that, he enjoyed his time at Oxford and felt that it had broadened his hinterland and opened up his mind to a variety of activities, interests and influences. Dominant among these was obviously sport but there was another facet of the academic community that intrigued him, one that had lain dormant, occasionally stirring from time to time when he was at school, but which now he felt free to explore and debate.
David Kemp judged that Colin was God-fearing at school; he remembers his being hugely impressed by a sermon from the Bishop of Croydon during one Sunday chapel. As we have discovered, Colin’s was no uncritical ear. His diary is punctuated with less than flattering comments about the weekly sermons given by a variety of visiting preachers. I particularly enjoyed this tart assessment one Sunday, ‘Dreadful sermon by Vicar of Tonbridge.’ Another reference to ‘29 minutes of supper sermon’ could possibly, I suppose, be describing the meal given to the speaker by a grateful headmaster but was probably a spelling mistake.
In any event, Colin kept in touch with Cuthbert Bardsley, Bishop of Croydon, and they continued to communicate after he went up to Oxford. According to Kemp, who was also at Brasenose at the same time as Colin, the relationship went much further than desultory exchanges about the latest Test score. In fact, it was David’s opinion that Colin was seriously probing the strength and depth of his faith. I wasn’t altogether surprised. Oxford at this time was something of a hotbed of religious fervour, dialectic and contemplation. Those dreaming spires were prompting thoughts of the hereafter as much as today.
George Chesterton, who preceded Colin in the Oxford side by just three years, told me that most of his team were extremely religious, ‘It was the time when Moral Re-Armament was very strong in the university. Dedicating your whole life to God.’ Moral Re-Armament was popular at Oxford from the mid-1920s onwards and gradually became known as the Oxford Group. The movement had Christianity at its core but based itself on the four absolutes – absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute selflessness and absolute love. Changing the world could only begin by changing oneself. ‘The trouble was,’ admitted George ruefully, ‘I was absolutely none of those things!’ He went on to say that he came back to his hotel room one evening on tour, hoping for a quiet drink and a natter about the day’s play with his room-mate only to find him on his knees at prayer. ‘And he was there for a good hour or so,’ he added. The name of his devout team-mate was Brian Boobyer.
The scorecard for Colin’s first Varsity match, in 1952, records that opening the batting for Oxford was B. Boobyer. In Colin’s words, he was a ‘solid, determined batsman’ and in George’s opinion ‘a bit stodgy’ but he was in the Oxford side for four years and scored 1,970 runs. His obituary in The Daily Telegraph described him as ‘a doughty rather than spectacular cricketer’. The same could not be said of his rugby. He won nine caps for England, playing at centre, and was named as possibly the most inventive back of his era. But it was not his sporting prowess that defined his life. While at Oxford, he had become increasingly attached to the Moral Re-Armament movement and at the age of 24, having come down from university, he turned his back on all sport and other superficial pursuits and devoted the rest of his life to the challenge of his Christian commitment.
Boobyer was at Brasenose with Colin and may well have influenced him. Yet Colin resisted the siren calls of Moral Re-Armament and its total subjugation to its doctrine – after all, his fledgling cricket career would have been its first victim – but he was not immune to the notion of taking orders. ‘We were both enticed by the idea,’ said Kemp, ‘and discussed it a lot. I think the Moral Re-Armers went in a bit strong – sportsmen seemed to be their main target – and that was clearly not the answer to our spiritual quest. But becoming a priest certainly had its attractions for both of us.’
But neither of you took that step? ‘No. We both decided against it. I felt that schoolmastering was probably where I should go.’ And Colin? ‘It was the bishop, Cuthbert Bardsley, who dissuaded him. No, Colin, he told him, you’ll disappear without trace if you take up holy orders. Play your cricket and do good that way.’ Thus the cricket world owed the wise bishop a debt of gratitude. Though I bet the clergy cricket team were disappointed. David gave a little smile and nodded.
There were two classic exemplars of religious conviction whom Colin got to know well and who both, in their different ways, had a profound effect on him, one a Dark Blue and the other a Light Blue. Peter Blake was Colin’s captain in the Oxford side. He took holy orders, became a parish priest in Leeds and then devoted the rest of his life to missionary work. Colin kept in touch. The captain of the opposing Cambridge team was David Sheppard, who needs no introduction and who will make regular appearances in this book. He and Colin remained close, long after both cricketing careers had finished.
I suppose that with friends like these, it is no surprise that Colin was no playboy libertine when he was at university. He worked hard enough, he soaked up the sociological and philosophical character of contemporary Oxford, he explored his own religious convictions, he made friends and started to widen his social circle, and he played a lot of sport.
There was no more rugby, much as he would have liked to play. His feet would not stand the pummelling. But he was once or twice prevailed upon to play football for his college in the Cuppers. ‘He scored a hat-trick and won the game for them,’ announced David, with enthusiasm, ‘even though he had not played before. He was surprisingly quick on his feet for one who was not naturally athletic. And he had superb anticipation.’
Rackets was his main winter game, however. In fact, he gained his rackets Blue before cricket, if only by virtue of its seasonal nature. The university courts had fallen into disrepair during the war and had not yet been restored so a lot of their practice matches took place at nearby Radley College. There he encountered the 16-year-old Ted Dexter and it was clear to him even then that here was a massively gifted games player.
It is interesting to record that in the three years that Colin was in the first pair, Oxford had considerably more success in the annual encounter with Cambridge at Queen’s than they did at Lord’s. Records reveal that in 1952, M.C. Cowdrey and E.N.C. Oliver (Oxf) beat A.H. Swift and W.S.S. Maclay (Cam) 4-0; in 1953, M.C. Cowdrey and E.N.C. Oliver (Oxf) beat C.H.W. Robson and J.M.M. Barron (Cam) 4-0 and in 1954 M.C. Cowdrey and M.R. Coulman (Oxf) beat C.H.W. Robson and J.M.M. Barron (Cam) 4-0. Almost as impressive as the scorelines is the number of initials on display.
Contemporaries of Colin on the rackets courts at Oxford are now thin on the ground and, sadly, memories even thinner. However, I managed to track down a few people who played with him. Charles Swallow played in successful pairs against Cambridge several years later in 1959, 1960 and 1961. He was runner-up in the final of the Amateur Championships in the 1960s and later became chairman of the Tennis and Rackets Association (T&RA), which ran the game.
He does not remember playing against Colin but played in a number of the same tournaments. He particularly recalls one rather eccentric foursome with Colin at a private court belonging to Lord Buckhurst, built to commemorate the centenary of the lifting of the siege of Sebastopol in 1854 during the Crimean War. ‘The T&RA,’ said Swallow, ‘were hoping that Buckhurst’s sons, who were at Eton, would become passionate about the game but they never did. I don’t know whether the court is still in existence.’ He went on to say, ‘Colin was a natural hitter of the ball and despite his bulk was a very quick mover. He tended to play a defensive rather than an attacking game,’ and he added, ‘Behind his genial and courteous exterior, there was always a strip of steel on court.’
For further information, I contacted Howard Angus, former Queen’s professional and world champion, whose knowledge of the history of the game is second to none. He had this to say, ‘Colin was a fine rackets player but by the time I started playing, in 1957, he was only an occasional player owing to his cricket commitments. Perhaps his best performance on a rackets court was when he got through to the final of the Amateur Singles in 1952, when he was at Oxford, losing to Geoffrey Atkins, who two years later, became world champion. Colin and John Thompson of Tonbridge won the Noel Bruce Cup for Old Boys Doubles in 1953, 1956 and 1957. I watched him play in the same competition a year or two later but by that time he had put on a few pounds and was not quite so mobile around the court.’
For the record, he added, as did so many people to whom I spoke about Colin, ‘It was always a pleasure to see and chat to him whenever he came to Queen’s – one of nature’s gentlemen.’
I am indebted to David Kemp for his account of that unexpected and remarkable run of Colin’s to the final of the Amateur Singles. ‘The championships at Queen’s coincided with pre-season nets at Oxford. It was 1952 and Peter Blake was the captain. He was persuaded by Colin to allow him to miss the first day to play his rackets match in London. “I’ve got no chance of winning,” he said, “I’m playing Hubert Doggart. I’ll be back tomorrow.” He beat Doggart 3-2, having been 0-2 down. That meant another day in London, another day’s nets missed.’
And so it went on? ‘And so it went on. Next up was John Thompson, a fellow Tonbridgean, whom Colin knew well. Once again, he did not expect to beat him but he did, 3-0, and John was a very good player. Embarrassed, Colin had to phone Blake that evening to explain his absence from nets again the next day. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll definitely be back. I won’t progress further than the semi-final.” He wasn’t expected to either. His opponent was David Milford.’
I remembered the name. He was more famous as a hockey player. Christopher Martin-Jenkins, of treasured memory, in one of his books described Milford as ‘a shy man with a genius for games and revered as one of England’s finest hockey players.’ He was no mean exponent of the game of rackets too but Colin polished him off. ‘He was in the final, for heaven’s sake,’ cried Kemp, ‘but he had to call up his captain – again – and offer his profound apologies. Blake was not best pleased but there was nothing he could do about it.’
The fairytale came to a juddering halt in the final, unsurprisingly really, as he was up against a future world champion, Geoffrey Atkins, who claimed that title in 1954 and did not relinquish it until an astonishing 18 years later. Colin lost 3-0 but it was no disgrace. It was a triumph to get that far. ‘And you know what?’ Kemp added. ‘He genuinely believed he had no chance of winning any of those earlier rounds. His promises to Blake to be back the next day were utterly genuine. He was like that, Colin, so modest despite his huge talent.’
Possibly the last word on Colin’s rackets is a touching one really. David Makey is the rackets professional at Tonbridge and remembers Colin coming into the courts when he was around, watching his sons play. ‘I played rackets with him several times,’ Makey told me, ‘and the way he hit the rackets ball was different from anyone else I have ever played with. Extraordinary timing and feel. Can’t describe it but something was special and it was an awesome experience for me.’
And if you think Makey is being a little fulsome here, you don’t know rackets professionals. They are normally a critical lot. His description of Colin’s timing of the ball reminds me of a story told to me by Jonathan Smith, former English master at Tonbridge, successful author, father of Ed (Middlesex and Kent), who taught Colin’s sons. He was walking around the Head one day, chatting to an American acquaintance. Colin was batting at the time, probably in a Cricketer Cup match. Colin hit a four. The American, who knew nothing of cricket, turned to Smith and remarked, ‘That’s amazing! He hardly hit the ball and look, no one can catch it.’ And that, said Smith, is as good a definition of timing as there is.
It should be no great surprise that Colin was multi-talented at ball games. Many good sportsmen are. The game of cricket is littered with famous names who excelled at another sport. Two shining lights from cricket’s Golden Age were C.B. Fry, an England international at both football and cricket, as well as holding the world long jump record, and R.E. Foster, who uniquely captained England at both sports. Moving forward to Colin’s era, two contemporaries of his, Willie Watson and Arthur Milton, were double internationals and others such as Denis Compton, Brian Close, Ken Taylor, Micky Stewart, Derek Ufton, Mike Barnard and Don Bennet all combined a first-class cricket career with one in professional football.
From my own era, there were a number of cricketers who would play for Football League clubs in the winter: Chris Balderstone, Graham Cross, Jim Cumbes, Ted Hemsley, Phil Neale, Jim Standen and Alistair Hignell, who played rugby. I have already mentioned Brian Boobyer, Colin’s contemporary at Oxford. In 1954, perhaps the most famous of the double internationals, certainly the last alive, joined him in the Oxford side. M.J.K. Smith played fly-halffor England against Wales in 1956 and later successfully captained England at cricket for several series. More of him later, too. Nowadays, the full-on nature of careers in all sports makes doubling up impossible but there are surely members of the England team who could play other sports to a high standard.
Colin’s observations on the all-round games player are typically interesting. When he was at Tonbridge, he played a lot of golf. That much is obvious from only a brief look at his diary. While staying in Sutton, he spent many an hour in Harry Weetman’s shop in Croydon. Weetman was a formidable golfer in his day, a frequent winner on the PGA circuit and a regular Ryder Cup player. He took the young Colin out on the course and tried to persuade him to give up cricket and take up golf, promising him he would turn him into a Ryder Cup player before he was 25. Golf’s loss was cricket’s gain.
But Colin was not alone in being adept at both sports. In his opinion the best cricketer-golfers in his era were Arthur Milton, Tom Graveney and Ted Dexter, all of whom, he believed, could have made a living out of hitting a small white ball into a hole in the ground. Although Colin did not gain a Blue at golf, he played several times for the university and developed a passion for the game that he never relinquished.
In the days before the advent of the Sunday League, legions of professional cricketers would take to the golf courses on their day off. Colin was always wary of grooving his swing too much; he believed that the two games are not complementary on a technical level. Among his papers I discovered several pages of typewritten notes, obviously groundwork for an article or longer piece that was never completed, which explain his reasoning.
‘Cricket is not a natural game,’ he avers. ‘The bowling action is clumsy and awkward. It is much more natural to throw the ball. Batting looks more natural when players are slogging, as they might do in baseball or rounders. To play with a straight bat demands a sideways-on position and stiffening of the arms at vital moments. Tennis and squash are natural games. There is nothing more natural than hitting a golf ball, even if it requires learning quite complicated techniques if you want to hit the ball consistently straight and well.’
Unnatural as the game is, he goes on to say, most cricketers are good games players. In his time, nearly all his fellow cricketers would have played football in the winter months and be handy with a tennis racket or a golf club. He calculated that in 1952, in his first full year of first-class cricket, out of 200 or so professional cricketers, at least 60 played top-class football. I could not help but wonder if the base of the pyramid in English football would be stiffened by the assimilation of these 60 cricketer-footballers instead of all those barely recognisable foreign players. ‘Bluidy sight cheaper too,’ Brian Close would have pronounced.
But I digress. Geography and rackets aside, the real reason Colin was at Oxford, it has to be acknowledged, was to play in The Parks. For those who have played there, and even those who went only to watch, the cricket ground occupies a cherished corner of the heart. Idyllic memories of the long, lazy days of university life can be beguilingly delusionary but most people who visit The Parks, particularly when there is a match in progress, are of the opinion that it is a most agreeable place to while away an hour or two.
Colin fell under its spell at once. He found his early months at Oxford trying, probably because he had to knuckle down and pass his preliminary exams. He was no natural or confident examinee. But once the season hove into view and net practice commenced, he felt utterly at home. In his own words, ‘Cricket at Oxford will always be perfectly embalmed in my mind...Warm days in the sun, net practices that were never a chore, good wickets, good fellowship – a simple, uncomplicated life.’ The more I unearth about the character of Colin Cowdrey, the more I am convinced that this is what he really yearned for in his life, peace and tranquillity while playing the game that he loved. Unfortunately, he was so good at it that it was always an impossible dream. He became public property when he would have preferred the pleasant anonymity of the club’s third XI.
If he felt his batting stagnated during his three years at Oxford, he might have said the same thing about Dark Blue cricket in general. While he was there, Oxford failed to win a single first-class match. It has to be admitted that they were not a very good side. In comparison, the 1949 team, in which his friend George Chesterton played, included three future Test captains, Donald Carr (England), Abdul Kardar (Pakistan) and Clive van Ryneveld (South Africa). That team beat the touring New Zealanders. ‘It was a bit of a shock,’ Chesterton told me, ‘but not that much of a shock. We were a pretty good side, you know.’
The 1952–54 teams contained no stars save Colin (except perhaps J.P. Fellows-Smith, who did play much later for South Africa), that is until the arrival of M.J.K. Smith in Colin’s final year, and it was only in the Varsity match that year that he came to realise how good a player Smith was. Adequate batting and enthusiastic fielding failed to compensate for lack of penetration in the bowling department and, more often than not, county batsmen filled their boots on the perfect Parks surfaces.
Colin did not fill his boots in 1952 but he made a few decent scores and whenever he batted for any length of time, his opponents were never less than impressed with his style and technique. A county batsman of the future? He already was a county player. A future Test player? It is unlikely at this stage that anybody could have confidently predicted that. He scored 80 against Lancashire, 83 not out against the Free Foresters, 56 against his team-mates at Kent and 79 and 92 against Sussex before being brought down to earth by bagging a pair against MCC.
The match against India held particular sentiment for him, bearing in mind his background. He always loved playing against the Indians, home or away, and felt he had a special affinity with the country and its inhabitants. He batted well in both innings (92 and 54) but he remembered two other innings with greater clarity. Surprisingly, Oxford had their opponents at 32/3 before Umrigar and Hazare restored normality with an unbroken stand of 300 before the declaration came. Colin watched and admired. ‘I loved Polly Umrigar and his forceful batting,’ he wrote later in his unpublished reminiscences and he ‘marvelled at the artistry of Vijay Hazare, an effortless, leisurely strokemaker, a right-hander in the mould of David Gower’.
Lord’s. For Colin, it was becoming as much of an annual pilgrimage as Ascot is for the Queen and chimneys for Father Christmas. The Varsity match, dating back to 1827, is the oldest first-class fixture in existence and remained, even in these post-war years, a major social and sporting occasion, attracting large crowds and widespread press coverage. Given his association with the place, Colin could well have been a bit blasé as he carried his cricket bag through the Grace Gates but not a bit of it.
He always felt a thrill of anticipation when he made his way down the pavilion steps, through the small, white, wooden gates and on to the famously sloping outfield. Oxford came to the climax of their season on the back of some poor results and were obvious underdogs. A quick look at the Cambridge side highlights the gulf in class. It included David Sheppard (captain), Peter May, Mike Stevenson, Raman Subba Row, Gerry Alexander, John Warr, Robin Marlar and Cuan McCarthy. Sheppard, May, Warr and Alexander were all future Test players; McCarthy already was. On paper, it was a mismatch. That Oxford came away with a draw and were pleased with the result says it all.
On his own admission, Colin was not at his fluent best as Oxford batted first. He made 55 out of a total of 272 but in his defence, and that of his whole team, it has to be said that they were up against one of the fastest, and most controversial, bowlers of the day. In his native South Africa, Cuan McCarthy had already made a name for himself as the quickest and most hostile bowler seen in that country for two generations. In 1948, he was picked for the first of his 15 Tests, against the visiting Englishmen, taking 21 wickets in the series.
He came on tour to England in 1951 but fared not so well in the Tests. Although nothing was said, or done, officially, there were rumblings of discontent from his opponents about the legality of his action. In 1952, he took up a one-year scholarship at Cambridge and he bowled with conspicuous success for the university that season, taking 44 wickets. However, he had been involved in two unfavourable incidents before the Lord’s match. He had hit Jim Langridge of Sussex a nasty blow on the head and he had been called for throwing on five separate occasions when he bowled at Worcester, the first bowler to be no-balled for that offence in English first-class cricket since 1908. You can bet your bottom dollar then that the Oxford team were out in force on the players’ balcony watching closely whenever McCarthy bowled.
Colin, in later comments, remained diplomatic about McCarthy’s action, only admitting that he suffered a few bruises and that he found his bowling ‘suspect’. The contentious issue of throwing was to stalk McCarthy throughout his career.
Cambridge piled on the runs in their innings, with Sheppard scoring 127, his seventh century of the season, before declaring at 408/8. Oxford were soon in trouble at 50/5, with Cowdrey stumped by the future West Indian captain and wicketkeeper Alexander for seven, ‘off his pads’, he later ruefully complained. The game was all but up at 135/8 and at 174/9 but an extraordinarily unorthodox and undefeated innings of 43 from tail-ender A.J. Coxon, during which he inexplicably charged the fast bowlers Warr and McCarthy, saved the day. In his book Oxford and Cambridge Cricket, co-written by George Chesterton, Hubert Doggart wrote, ‘I watched Oxford’s rearguard action and recall A.J. Coxon, Oxford’s number nine, heading a short-pitched ball from McCarthy with remarkable insouciance to cover point.’
Oxford’s unlikely escape owed much to a fine innings of 52 by Alan Dowding, an Australian, in England on a Rhodes scholarship. He is still alive, much to his wife’s surprise, having survived a recent fall downstairs, and I managed to track him down in their delightful cottage in the Cotswolds. Shoulder broken, arm in a sling but with memory unimpaired, he shared with me some fascinating detail of this game, and subsequent university matches (he was Oxford’s captain the following year), as well as his impressions of Colin, as a player and as a young undergraduate.
Did McCarthy chuck it? You would be hard-pressed to recognise Dowding was Australian from his beautifully enunciated and well-modulated reply. ‘Well, I have been in this country a very long time,’ he smiled. ‘Now, in answer to your question...We knew that McCarthy had been called before but when I faced him – he was fast, accurate and pitched it full, with only the occasional bouncer – I think I can say that I detected no illegality. Perhaps he only threw occasionally, when instructed by his...’ He tailed off. His captain? ‘Hmm, I wouldn’t put it past his captain. It was David Sheppard, you know.’
I knew. Sheppard was undoubtedly a hard and cussed competitor. Dowding then went on to tell me about the ‘somewhat discourteous’ behaviour by the Cambridge team at the denouement of the match. ‘Shortly before stumps, when it was clear that there was now no possibility of Cambridge winning, with Oxford nine wickets down and 43 runs ahead, without so much as a by your leave, Sheppard, apparently disgruntled at his failure to win the match, led his team from the field. As far as I know, there had been no handshake, no agreement to call time by the captains. Ours was in the pavilion anyway.’
So you won! ‘I beg your pardon?’ Of course, I am not being serious about claiming the match. But that is not the correct procedure to agree a draw, not the way things are done, is it? ‘Precisely. It left a sour taste in the mouth. We had battled hard to save the match, one that we looked like losing, and Cambridge spoiled it with their less than gracious behaviour. It rather coloured what was to happen the following year.’
Now, about Colin the player? ‘We used to call him Master. Which he was. His talent was there for all to see. Being an Aussie, who learnt his cricket on concrete pitches without a mat, who favoured the hook and the cut, I particularly admired his strokeplay square of the wicket on either side, as well as the more traditional English shots in front of the wicket. That cover drive of his....’ My interviewee was lost for a moment in pleasant reverie.
And Cowdrey the young man? ‘Do you know what?’ he seemed to be asking himself, his brow furrowed at the incongruity of it, ‘I never heard Colin offer a word in the dressing room. He would answer if asked but he never initiated discussion. He was always sort of...over there but never to the forefront. Same away from the dressing room. He was never, how shall I call it, one of the lads. Some of us would wind down after play with a few pints in the pub. Colin would disappear. Not that he was stand-offish or unsociable. I just think that chatting over a pint wasn’t his thing.’
What about tactically? Did he have any interesting theories or ideas? ‘That’s the strange thing. He never offered an opinion on how the game was going. When I became captain, I’m sure I made lots of mistakes, some that he must have spotted, but he never uttered a word.’
Shyness? ‘Perhaps. I’m not sure. I don’t think I ever really got to know him, not really. None of us did. That’s not a criticism, just an observation. He was a super chap, much liked and greatly respected, but he was a quiet, reserved, slightly apart figure.’
I found this intriguing, puzzling even. Captain at Tonbridge, future captain of Oxford, Kent and England, and he had no opinions about the game? Extraordinary. Indeed, one might be tempted to say – and I have not been alone in saying this – that sometimes he seemed to drown in theory. Still waters run deep. ‘Indeed. Same with his religious convictions. There was a lot of converting going on at Oxford at the time. Forever you were being asked, “Have you given your life to Christ?” There were a few around, even in the dressing rooms. Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of converting going on at Oxford at the time, what with Moral Re-Armament and the like. There was no problem. We all got on fine, no...tension or anything. But I was aware Colin was quite religious.
‘As it happened, both captains in this match, Sheppard and Blake, became priests.’
Colin toyed with the idea of taking holy orders but was persuaded against it. ‘Was that so? That wouldn’t surprise me. He was certainly in that bracket of team-mates. Never a hell raiser!’ Dowding’s regard for Colin has remained undimmed, even in the twilight of his life. ‘Throughout his career, both at home and abroad,’ he said, ‘Colin was a shining example of kindness and courtesy.’ He then recounted a story which underlines this solicitude for other people, ‘a hallmark of Colin’s personality’ as he called it. Knowing that Dowding’s mother lived in Adelaide, Colin made a point of visiting her every time he was on tour and staying in that city. ‘It meant a great deal to her,’ he said, ‘and I have never forgotten it. That was the sort of man he was.’
After a short rest – a summer term spent playing cricket can be so exhausting – Colin returned to Kent. They had need of him. These were lean times for the hop county and though he did not set the world on fire with his performances in July and August, there was never any doubt that he would be in the team.
By now a staunch man of Kent, as he remained for the rest of his days, it is an odd fact that throughout his long career, he never played a full season for the county, that is, he was never able to play in all their games. For the time being he was up at Oxford for the first half of the season. Thereafter, England commitments took him away on a regular basis. Up until 1956, he played no more than ten matches for Kent a season and even after he took over the captaincy in 1957, his appearances were always curtailed to more or less two-thirds of the full itinerary.
As it had been for Oxford, his form for Kent in 1952 was patchy. But significantly, he found his touch when most it mattered, and when prominent eyes were upon him. At Canterbury, against the touring Indians for the second time that summer, he batted beautifully and this time he made no mistake by converting his 90 into a hundred, his only one of the season, it turned out. If the Indians were impressed by his strokeplay – his style, all touch and timing, would have been familiar to batsmen from the subcontinent – he was again in awe of Polly Umrigar’s batsmanship. He had plenty of time to study him; Umrigar scored 204.
Kent’s next match was against Yorkshire, also at Canterbury. Colin scored 85 not out and single-handedly held the Kent innings together. Watching from first slip, growing more appreciative by the minute, was the England captain, Len Hutton. The mutual admiration society was strengthened when Colin observed at close quarters Hutton himself give a master-class in the art of batting with an innings of 120.
After the match had finished, which Yorkshire predictably won by an innings and 51 runs, Colin took a fateful car journey. He, somewhat to his surprise, had been selected to play for MCC against Yorkshire in the end-of-season festival at Scarborough. His team-mate, Godfrey Evans, had been similarly honoured. Hutton, of Yorkshire, also had to make the long journey north. Evans and Hutton knew each other of old so Evans invited his England captain to join him in his Bentley as navigator and companion. ‘Come with us,’ he cheerily told Colin. ‘Plenty of room for the three of us.’
With two cricket bags already in the boot, Colin squeezed himself into the back of the Bentley and made himself as comfortable as he could with his own bag for company and off they sped. Speed was the operative word. Evans did nothing slowly. It was a drive that Colin never forgot.
But it wasn’t the white-knuckle ride that made such an impression upon him. It certainly wasn’t the discussion about what music should be tuned into on the radio. There has never been a car journey with two or more county cricketers in attendance without an argument about which radio station to listen to. I played cricket once or twice with Godfrey Evans, admittedly in his bewhiskered dotage and only in charity matches, and I can attest to his uninhibited, clubbable personality. Len Hutton I never met but Tom Graveney assured me that beneath the dour Yorkshire exterior dwelt a surprisingly warm and witty personality. You can imagine the conversation.
‘What roobbish is this, Godfrey?’
‘Brazilian salsa, old boy. Ever heard of Carmen Miranda?’
‘Carmen who? Carmina Burana – now, that’s more like it. Love me light opera, I do. Give me a bit of Gilbert ‘n’ Sullivan any day. Not this banshee wailing.’
‘What’s your taste, young Colin?’
‘Er... well, to be truthful, Godfrey, I, er–’
‘Look where you’re bluidy well going, Godfrey. Have you passed your test?’
‘Missed by a mile, captain. Didn’t even get a nick.’
‘Anyroad, as I were saying about these Australians coming next year....’
Throughout, Colin was engrossed as the conversation ranged widely over the technical and mental strengths and weaknesses of countless contemporary players. He began to understand that not only was Hutton a great player but he was also a great student of the game and its intricacies, especially the art of batting. In Hutton he discovered a fellow theorist and listened with rapt attention as Hutton opened up. In that unbeaten 85 which Colin had just made against Yorkshire, he had batted for four hours and it had been a struggle throughout. Not that he was batting poorly and was fumbling around for some semblance of form; no, it was the quality of the bowling and the perilous situation of the Kent innings that had made the preservation of his wicket so crucial.
Like all the top players, Colin always took into consideration the level of difficulty when judging an innings. The fact that he had had to fight to survive would have been right up Hutton’s street. He was, after all, the first professional to captain England. He was a flinty and uncompromising opponent, as hard as nails on the pitch, and he eschewed frippery. That innings of Colin’s would have appealed to him. That is how Test match cricket is played, he might well have thought; this young lad sitting in the back may be a public schoolboy and an Oxford undergraduate but he’s no soft southerner and he can play. He resolved to keep an eye on Colin’s development.
It is worth noting how large the figure of Len Hutton loomed in the minds of English cricket followers of this generation. By all accounts, he was never quite the same player after the war as he was before, not only because of the lost six years of the conflict but also because of an accident he had suffered in 1941, working as an army PT instructor. It necessitated several operations on his wrist, leaving him with a left arm two inches shorter than his right. Nonetheless, he returned to play Test cricket and all that could be said about his post-war exploits with a bat in his hand was that if he was a great player with one arm shorter than the other, he must have been a magnificent one when he was at his peak.
Wisden tells us so. They lauded him as one of the greatest batsmen in the history of the game. Few disagreed. Certainly not Colin. As he developed into a fine player himself and took more and more interest in the technical side of batsmanship, what better model for him was there than Hutton? He listened intently to Hutton during that car journey and he watched intently over the next three days at Scarborough as Hutton batted...and batted.
He had hero-worshipped Hutton from a young age, as many of that generation did, but he was now able to study the great man’s technique at close quarters as Hutton helped himself to a century in each of the Yorkshire innings against MCC. According to Colin, in both innings, he did not play a single false stroke. In his autobiography, he refers to Hutton’s perfect balance at the crease and says, without a hint of bashfulness, ‘I became a total disciple of the way he played.’
Hutton’s style was orthodox and conventional, as was Colin’s. Hutton had all the shots and could demolish the bowling with forceful strokeplay when the situation demanded. But he was an opening batsman and a Yorkshireman to boot and his natural instinct was defence first, attack second. And that was probably true of Colin too. Hutton was a cautious fellow. Colin was no gambler either. Hammond the Cavalier; Hutton the Roundhead? Dexter the Cavalier; Cowdrey the Roundhead? Cliches are easily dismissed but sometimes they contain more than a germ of truth.
In that match at Scarborough against Yorkshire, Colin did not bat so badly himself. For the second time against the same opponents, he scored 85 not out, but he would be the first to admit that he was upstaged by another one of a gifted, some might say gilded, generation of young English batsmen, Peter May. Like his predecessor as captain of his country – he succeeded Hutton in that role in 1955 – May scored two centuries in the match, 174 and an exact unbeaten 100. It is interesting to note the season’s final batting averages for this year; if the young guns were blazing, the veteran was enjoying an Indian (literally) summer:
1st David Sheppard (University of Cambridge and Sussex) 64.62
2nd Peter May (University of Cambridge and Surrey) 62.45
3rd Len Hutton (University of Life and Yorkshire) 61.11
All three scored over 2,000 runs in the course of the season. Colin only managed 1,189 at 33.02, not a poor season, by any means – remember he was still only 19 – but it told him that he still had a fair way to go before he could be mentioned in the same breath as May and Sheppard, even though he had played one or two exceptional innings.
It was not an exceptional innings that saw off Colin’s season but an exceptional piece of fielding. He was not yet a regular slip fielder; in this company he was well down the pecking order for that coveted role. He found himself in the covers playing for the Gentlemen against the Players, the finale to the Scarborough Festival. Hutton, as usual, was batting serenely. He moved comfortably through the 90s, his eye set on his fourth successive hundred, not a unique feat but a considerable one nonetheless.
On 99, he pushed the ball into the covers and called for a single, only to be inexplicably sent back by the non-striker, Johnny Wardle. Hutton slipped, Cowdrey gathered the ball and with only one stump to aim at, hit the wicket before Hutton could regain his ground. Colin said he felt guilty about that...but only a bit. He was ever a gentleman on the field but never a soft touch.
As Hutton was leading England to a famous, and long-awaited, Ashes series win in 1953, Colin was helping Oxford to a winless season, culminating in a loss to Cambridge at Lord’s, and Kent to 16th place, just avoiding the wooden spoon, in the county championship. Those are the bald facts but they hide a considerable truth; Colin’s form throughout the season was greatly improved and he played some wonderful innings, one or two of which were significant for his career. It is difficult to relax, play your shots and shine when all around you appears to be crumbling and that is how it must have seemed to him.
Oxford and Kent were both weak sides. He knew that his wicket was the one his opponents prized and that puts pressure on any batsman, even the best. He scored two hundreds against county opposition before the Lord’s showdown, 127 against Lancashire and 154 against Surrey. Both were important in different ways. Harry Altham, a big hitter at MCC, was present in The Parks when Colin made his century against Lancashire and could not have failed to be impressed. Whether he made a mental note at the time is unclear but he certainly remembered the innings when he was made chairman of selectors the following year, charged with picking the MCC touring team to Australia that winter.
At The Oval, never an easy place to visit in the 1950s, Colin played what he considered to be his best innings to date. His 154 was out of a total of 270 and perhaps just as pertinent, his second innings score of 34 was out of a total of only 63, Jim Laker doing to the undergraduates what he did to Test players when conditions were favourable – he ran amok.
There was also an interesting and telling encounter with the Australians. Colin was bowled by Keith Miller for three in the first innings and by Richie Benaud for five in the second. First blood to the Aussies, you might say. He could put that one down to experience for the true focal point of the season was the Varsity match. Cambridge were not so strong this year and Colin believed that his side, though short of class, were better equipped to put up more of a decent show than the year before. And for all but the final afternoon, his confidence was fully borne out.
Once again, I rely on Hubert Doggart for a summary of proceedings, ‘Oxford’s 312, made in good time on the first day, owed most to M.C. Cowdrey, who gave a masterly display of strokeplay for 116. The Cambridge captain [Robin Marlar] who captured his wicket in both innings, was the only bowler to trouble him.’ Having bowled Cambridge out for only 191, the Dark Blues were reasonably confident of securing their first victory for two years but Marlar had other ideas. He skittled them for 116 ‘with fine command of flight and spin’, taking 7-49, bringing his match tally to 12-143.
Notwithstanding, the victory target of 236 for Cambridge seemed unlikely, particularly when Oxford bowled with accuracy and control. But with cricket, you just never know. ‘Do you want me to describe what happened, first-hand, as it were?’ Alan Dowding asked. I proffered the plate of biscuits, he selected a chocolate digestive and settled back comfortably to tell me the inside story.
Cambridge, at no stage in their second innings, looked likely to reach the required total, that is until an extraordinary passage of events ensued. ‘Dennis Silk, in his inelegant but effective way, had been defying us, largely strokeless, for four and a half hours. He was on about 70 not out, as I recall. A wicket fell and out came Robin Marlar. Or at least out Robin Marlar did not come. They were eight down and we could smell victory. We were all standing around impatiently, wondering what on earth was going on. Where was he? Eventually – it must have been a good five minutes – he made an appearance.’
You were the captain. Did you not invoke the two-minute rule and appeal? ‘To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure of the law. Not that I would have appealed. But still, it was all a bit odd. I went up to the umpire, Frank Chester, and sort of raised an eyebrow but, as was his way when he didn’t want to answer a difficult question, he turned away. At last, Marlar arrived on the pitch. It took him another five minutes to take guard, tie and re-tie his bootlaces, adjust the straps of his pad, take another guard, walk down the pitch, prod it, look around the field, before he was ready. In all, he had wasted...well, I guess, conservatively, eight minutes.’ Why? ‘Making sure of the draw, I suppose.’
Marlar survived the two remaining balls of the over. Silk, who had been impassively watching all this from the other end, then promptly hit the first ball of the next over for four. And the next one. So began an extraordinary, and wholly unexpected, assault on the Oxford bowling that saw Cambridge secure an improbable victory with three minutes to spare, Silk carrying his bat for 116. Cambridge were cock-a-hoop. Oxford were in despair.
Come on, Alan, what happened? Why did Dennis Silk change tack? He smiled enigmatically. ‘It’s surprising but true. To this day, Dennis and I, and don’t forget he was my headmaster at Radley College for over 20 years when I was teaching there, never spoke about it. But my hidden conviction is that he did not really approve of Robin Marlar’s blatant time-wasting, and thought to himself, right, it’s hell or high water. We’re either going to win this or lose it but it’s not going to be a draw.’
In common with the rest of his team-mates and captain, Colin confessed to acute feelings of disappointment after the match, even when he reflected upon it many years later. During his long career, he experienced many highs and lows but there is something special, something deeply emotional, about a Varsity match. Unlike a Test series or a one-day final (which is the culmination of victory in several rounds), this is a one-off encounter and dominates all thought and attention for those concerned throughout the whole season. For some, a whole career. A Blue, forget not, is only awarded for playing at Lord’s; if a player is incapacitated or injured and cannot play, even if he has been a regular member of the team, he does not get his Blue. It means that much.
George Chesterton once tried to explain to me what it felt like to lose to the ‘enemy’, something he suffered back in 1949. ‘The dressing room was like a morgue,’ he said. ‘Quietly, with barely a word, we dispersed. And that team, that had been through so much together, never met up again.’ You can imagine Colin’s disappointment. For all that, his team behaved impeccably, as the last rites to the game were administered.
‘Regrets there must almost always be,’ wrote E.W. Swanton in his match report, ‘but if there were any, Oxford kept them to themselves as they shook Silk warmly by the hand and clapped him all the way back to the pavilion.’ That is how the game should be played, Colin believed, and he never wavered from this article of faith.
The epithet ‘enemy’ was not used offhandedly. Whatever alluring image I had of our two ancient universities coming together in manly and sporting contest in the oldest fixture of them all, on the historic playing field of St John’s Wood, I was disabused by the comments of several who played in those games around that time. ‘No quarter given, none asked,’ said Chesterton. ‘We were out there to win,’ said Mike (M.J.K.) Smith. ‘Not a vicar’s tea party,’ said Alan (A.C.) Smith. Perhaps the most telling observation came from David Kemp, ‘The atmosphere between the two sides was not good, frosty at best, sometimes downright acrimonious.’
That would not have suited Colin’s approach to the game and as we shall see the following year, together with his opposite number as captain, he made efforts to change the unfriendly atmosphere of the fixture, with only limited success it has to be said.
Before that, there was the rest of the season with Kent to negotiate. He was more confident now, with runs under his belt and the ball pinging off the bat nicely. He felt that he had become a little too bogged down with theory and technique, so he relaxed, trusted his eye and judgement and everything seemed to click into place. Ah...form, so elusive but so rewarding when it comes calling. When present, it feels it will never yield and then, like a will o’ the wisp, it has gone.
Colin’s form remained pretty constant throughout 1953, though his scores for Kent rarely reached the peaks; he did not score a hundred. But once again, it is necessary to study the scorecards and to try and interpret what was going on. Of the nine county matches he played that summer, Kent won two, lost four and drew the rest, though in one of these draws they were 47/7 in their second innings before time saved them. In all four losses, they were heavily defeated. Frequently, Colin played well and scored runs but in a losing cause. They were bowled out for 43 against Middlesex, after he had underpinned their first innings with 64 (out of 175). Against Yorkshire, he carried his bat for 24 as his side were bowled out and defeated by 152 runs. Again, he carried his bat for 52 out of 163 in the return fixture against Middlesex but to no avail as they went down by 99 runs. He top-scored with 81 in Kent’s second innings only for his side to lose to Leicestershire by seven wickets.
It has to be conceded that it is very difficult to compose a century when you are left high and dry by the rest of your fellow batsmen. Who knows how many times he perished in the quest for runs as partners were falling away and a more measured approach would normally have resulted in three figures. Kent were far from a one-man band but they heavily relied upon him to make runs and he never seemed to have the luxury of steady players around him to enable him to make big scores. He would never have grumbled about this; Kent was his county. But one does wonder how many more runs he would have scored had he played for a stronger county, such as Surrey, like his compatriot and friend, Peter May.
Was it chance or was it the fact that he was playing for a stronger team that he flourished in the end-of-season festivals, as he had the previous year? For the Gentlemen against the Australians, he scored 50 and 57 and said he could not have played better against a formidable attack of Lindwall, Johnston, Archer, Ring and Benaud. And for the Gentlemen against the Players, he made exactly 100, in the company of May, who made 157. To onlookers, including Hutton, it must have seemed the future of England’s batting was unfolding in front of their eyes. Later, Hutton denied that there and then, he decided to take a punt on the young Cowdrey and take him to Australia 12 months hence but Colin always believed that the selectors, of whom Hutton was only one, had their attention caught by that innings.
Following these traditional epilogues to the season, Hutton took his MCC team off for an acrimonious tour of the Caribbean, the run-of-the-mill county pros found winter employment where they could and Colin returned to his studies at Oxford. He was elected captain of the university side for 1954 and as his attention wandered from his books and he started to plan for the forthcoming campaign, he felt he had reasonable cause for confidence. Most of the old Blues remained and the arrival of M.J.K. Smith would give the batting a more solid look. His confidence seemed in no way misplaced, as the season got under way. He had a good look, a very good look, at the new boy, Mike Smith, as they shared a profitable fourth-wicket stand against Gloucestershire in the first match, Cowdrey 78 and Smith unbeaten on 104. Colin was even able to declare. All right, nine wickets were down but it wasn’t often that the university were in such a happy position.
At the time, although he was impressed by a freshman making an unbeaten century on his debut, he was not fully aware how good a player Smith was. That is until Smith firmly swept any residual doubts from his captain’s mind with his astonishing innings in the forthcoming Varsity match. He had already made his mark at the university that winter as a rugby player, having played in the 6-6 drawn Varsity match at Twickenham. Colin remembers watching him play. He reminded him of another double rugby and cricket international, Clive van Ryneveld, who had been at Oxford a couple of years before him. He had ‘the same long-ranging stride but not so angular’, both possessing ‘good vision of the game in front of them’.
Even in these early stages of their acquaintance which was to flourish as England team-mates over the years, he was struck with Smith’s imperturbability, ‘master of the deadpan expression’, he called it. I always believed that the distracted, professorial, Smith manner had a lot to do with the fact that he wore glasses, which tended to shield the bright blue eyes behind. That air of casualness and laid-back manner proved a deceptive mask in his career.
Colin scored two hundreds in the matches against the counties in the weeks leading up to Lord’s. The first was against Kent. One can imagine the mutterings of his opponents as he raised his bat to acknowledge The Parks faithful as they too, politely, joined in the applause, ‘Hell’s bells, he can do it for them but not for us.’ If so, that would have been a bit harsh but county cricketers are, by nature, a pretty hard-nosed lot. Besides, he was going to rectify that omission soon enough, in the same season in fact. The other hundred was against Sussex, a match in which Hubert Doggart made two centuries of his own.
Doggart became a regular opponent on the county circuit and later, a much-respected and dear friend in the corridors and committee rooms of MCC.
Colin played a most satisfying innings against the champions, Surrey, slap bang in the middle of their decade of dominance in the domestic game. Nor did they rest their best bowlers, as some counties were wont to do, not that it would have made much difference if they had, they were that strong. Against an attack comprising Alec Bedser, Peter Loader, Tony Lock and Eric Bedser, he steered his side to safety with an innings of 79, thus avoiding defeat by two wickets.
Defeat was not on Colin’s mind in the following match, the last before Lord’s. Oxford came within a whisker of beating Warwickshire, which would have brought to an end the long saga of never winning a match against the counties while he was at university. He really believed he had the pros on the run – they all did – but in the end, they were unable to take the final wicket and Warwickshire wriggled free. Disappointment was acute but by now he was beginning to get familiar with the bitter-sweet taste of cricket’s vicissitudes.
Regret was not to last long. Lord’s once more and as he made his way through the Grace Gates and into the now-familiar inner sanctum of the pavilion, he believed his team were in good shape for the challenge ahead. Oxford had not won a match leading up to the big one but they had given a good account of themselves and Cambridge, without May, Subba Row, Alexander and Marlar, were not the force they were. The two captains, both in their third year of this fixture, knew each other, of course, from previous encounters but not well. It was Mike Bushby who made the first tentative approach to his opposite number to discuss the forthcoming match, its significance and the bad press that recently it had been getting.
Bushby, still very much alive and kicking, was most forthcoming with his opinions about this and the match itself. He felt that the stories about bad blood between the two sides had been exaggerated. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that one or two players in both teams were also rugby Blues and the Varsity matches at Twickenham were hotly contested, with no holds barred. He believed that the tension that attended the cricket match – which rarely spilled over into poor behaviour or bad sportsmanship – had more to do with the singular nature of the contest. It was a one-off, with everything riding on the result. There was no second chance. If you lost, the acrid taste of defeat remained with you for the rest of your days. So, inevitably, the matches were laced with pressure, nerves and caution.
That is why, he surmised, E.W. Swanton wrote a piece in Wisden or The Cricketer or perhaps for his newspaper, The Daily Telegraph – Bushby cannot remember which – bemoaning the negative attitude that seemed to prevail in the university matches, especially in recent years. Swanton quoted the words of Robin Marlar, the previous Cambridge captain, in which he said that he wished both teams would come to some sort of agreement ‘to banish this grimness from the game’.
Easier said than done. As an illustration, let me draw a comparison with another historic Lord’s institution, the annual Eton v Harrow match, which actually predates the Varsity match, regularly played at HQ since 1822, as opposed to the first Varsity match there in 1827. When I was master at Malvern (including cricket), I remember speaking to my opposite number at Harrow, Bill Snowden, during a lull in proceedings in one of our games. I was envious of his yearly trip to Lord’s with his team to take on Eton, with a large and boisterous crowd in attendance. ‘Yes, it’s a great privilege,’ he agreed, ‘but it’s a bit of a poisoned chalice as well. It’s all the boys think about for the whole of the season, as if the rest of the cricket they play is not important. If you think that is disproportionate, you have no idea what importance the Old Boys place on the fixture. If you lose, that is all you hear about for the next 12 months. I’ve even feared for my job once or twice. All of which makes for a nervous, cagey game. Avoid defeat at all costs. Not ideal circumstances to encourage positive cricket.’
Not long afterwards, I noticed that the match had changed its format from a declaration to a limited-overs format. Still not necessarily a blueprint for a pulsating game of cricket but at least it was no longer possible to play for a draw.
I imagine that the lack of enterprise and willingness to embrace risk, what Marlar referred to as ‘this grimness’, similarly bedevilled some of the Varsity encounters, and this was what Bushby was anxious to banish. Cowdrey was receptive to his views, he said, and together they resolved to make a decent game of it. ‘And I think we succeeded,’ Bushby told me. ‘It went to the wire, it was a most pleasant game and we all have good memories of it. Even Swanton commented on that fact in his article the following day,’ he added with a laugh.
To this end, the two captains organised a cocktail party for the teams at the conclusion of the first day’s play. I imagine Oxford enjoyed it more than Cambridge. Bushby grimaced. ‘We only had three bowlers,’ he announced, by way of explanation for Oxford’s score of 401/3. ‘Mike Morgan, our opening bowler, broke down after eight overs. Gami Goonesena and Colin Smith bowled all day.’ Well, not quite, but so it must have seemed. They shared 69 overs between them.
Why did you go in with just a four-pronged attack? ‘It had worked fine all season,’ Bushby replied. ‘Besides, if you can’t bowl ’em out with four bowlers, rarely can you with five. It was just bad luck that Morgan got injured.’
I should say so. Oxford made hay. By the end of the day, Mike Smith was on 201 not out, only the third double centurion in the history of the Varsity match. Colin, in his autobiography, called it the most astonishing exhibition of batting he had ever seen. ‘We were playing slightly on the Tavern side of centre, which suited Mike well, as he was able to give anything bowled at him from the Pavilion End the full range of his on-side strokes. I stood fascinated as balls pitched far outside the off stump were flashed past midwicket.’ When Colin stated that he stood fascinated, he meant at the non-striker’s end. He and Smith shared in a third-wicket stand of 180 in two hours, pretty good going for that era. Grim it certainly wasn’t.
Mike Smith is very much alive too, a sprightly 83-year-old, now living in Warwick. I paid him a visit and as he bustled about, making coffee and excusing the debris of his desk worktop in his search for relevant pieces of paper he used as aides memoire, he chatted cheerfully and at length about Colin Cowdrey.
‘We met long before we played county cricket,’ he said, ‘even before we overlapped up at Oxford. When he was a boy, he used to stay with relatives in Leicestershire. I lived in the next village. I always remember two of the mainstays of the Leicestershire attack in the pre-war years, George Geary and Ewart Astill, who became coaches at Charterhouse and Tonbridge, saying that they had unearthed two of the best cricketers they had ever seen. They were...?’ He waited for my reply. May and Cowdrey? ‘Correct. P.B.H. and M.C.C.’ He seemed moderately impressed with my grasp of cricket history.
‘Now, when I went up to Oxford, I didn’t have any serious thoughts about playing county cricket. I’d played a few games for Leicestershire in the holidays but I was hopeless! I was never coached. D’you know who was the greatest influence on my batting career?’ This time he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Colin Cowdrey. We batted a lot together, you see, in that summer for Oxford in 1954.’ How did he influence you? ‘If you’ve got half a brain, you watched and copied the best. And there was no finer technique than Colin’s.’
Tell me about this innings at Lord’s. ‘I was dropped first ball!’ he guffawed. I knew that. It was not a case of my secure grasp of the finer details of cricket history on this occasion; Mike Bushby had told me a week or so before and the anguish in his voice was tangible, even 60-odd years after the event. He wouldn’t name the culprit but went on to praise Smith’s temperament. ‘What I always admired about Mike was that he was so phlegmatic about things. He just blinked, put it out of his mind, set himself again and never looked like getting out. Classy.’ I returned to quizzing my subject. ‘I got off the mark with a nick between the wicketkeeper and first slip,’ Smith said.4 ‘It was an absolute dolly. Neither moved as it went past the two of them. Dennis Silk was at first slip.’
Ah, now I know the culprit. ‘Wasn’t really his catch, to be fair. Then I got my head down.’ Not what Colin wrote. He said he’s never seen hitting like it. ‘That was later, when we were well set and I could go for it.’ What about the view that you were a predominantly on-side player? ‘I played on the leg side because there were no bloody fielders on the leg side in those days,’ he grinned. ‘I did it to mess up the bowlers’ line. Hit the ball where there aren’t any fielders, that was my motto.’
And Colin? How did he play it? ‘He just stroked it. He could play all the shots on both sides of the wicket. He was the best timer of the ball I’ve ever seen. He had the perfect technique. He was so good he could do anything with a bat. But it was an orthodox technique. I watched and learned and became a better player as a result.’ The cocktail party that evening? I expect you sank a few. ‘Too knackered,’ he quickly interrupted.
Declaring overnight with 401 on the board, Colin’s plan would have been to bowl Cambridge out and seize hold of the game. But once again, they were thwarted by the obdurate figure of Dennis Silk, who made his second century in successive Varsity matches. True to his word about trying to inject urgency into the fixture, Mike Bushby declared at the end of the day 57 runs behind.
Off went Oxford when play was resumed the next morning in pursuit of quick runs in order to declare themselves, with enough time to bowl Cambridge out. But valour conquered discretion, wickets tumbled to a range of injudicious strokes and Colin was left with more of a thorny problem in trying to gauge the timing of his declaration than he would have wished. But like Bushby, he was conscious of his obligation not to kill the game so he declared with Oxford at 148/9. The target of 206 in two hours and 25 minutes was ‘a fair one’, Bushby said.
Cambridge went for it but the loss of early wickets hampered their progress, they fell behind the clock, Oxford pressed for victory but the wicket eased and they lacked the wherewithal to apply the coup de grace. At the close, Cambridge were eight down. The match was drawn but it had been anything but a ‘grim’ draw. Both captains were satisfied that their team had given their all and that the fixture had regained some of its lost lustre.
Never mind, he must have thought as he packed his bag, there’s always next year. Soon he would have turned his attention to Kent and the remainder of the county season. He had not completed all of his exams – one can only assume that cricket had got in the way of his finals – and he expected to return to Oxford that autumn for another year. But on 27 July, at the completion of the match against Surrey at Blackheath, everything changed.