MAY’S BOUNTY. Can there ever have been a more enchanting name for a cricket ground? It might just as easily have served as a title of a sonnet by Keats or the subject of a lyrical ballad by Wordsworth. But no, it is a cricket ground located in north Hampshire, donated by Lt Col John May, a member of a famous Basingstoke brewery family, to the local community for the purposes of sporting activity.
Cricket has been played there since the mid-17th century and it is currently home to Basingstoke and North Hants Cricket Club. From 1966 to 2000, Hampshire played a couple of their home games there every year.
A number of counties had similar festival weeks away from headquarters. Scarborough, Harrogate, Tunbridge Wells, Hastings, Eastbourne, Bournemouth, Bath, Cheltenham and Guildford were once as much of the first-class game as Lord’s, Old Trafford and Trent Bridge but have now sadly fallen out of favour as being uneconomic.
Basingstoke Week was one such fixed point in the calendar, not greatly loved of the players, largely because of the cramped and spartan changing facilities, with a wooden floor that had more splinters than the gun deck of HMS Victory at the battle of Trafalgar. However, the post-match hospitality in the sponsor’s tent was as generous as anywhere, it had to be admitted.
So why would I start a biography of Colin Cowdrey at a nondescript, albeit pretty, club ground which isn’t even in his home county? The reasons are twofold. First, Cowdrey was no stranger to festival cricket. In fact, he loved playing at these outposts of the county game as much as he thrilled to the challenge and excitement of Test cricket at the great stadiums around the world. It was no great struggle for him to turn out for his beloved Kent the day after the conclusion of a Test match, no matter how modest and unexceptional the venue; county cricket was his bread and butter and he never turned up his nose at it.
Kent v Hampshire at Basingstoke was yet another fixture in a crowded season and he would have looked forward to playing. There was never an occasion when he did not look forward to buckling on his pads. He loved the game with a passion that never wavered from childhood to the day of his death.
Secondly, something happened at Basingstoke on 15 May 1974, which gave everybody who was there and many who were not cause for thought, throwing up an unusual but pertinent example of the enigma behind the public façade of Colin Cowdrey. By now, even in the earlier stages of the season, the name of Andy Roberts was making people, cricket lovers, journalists, players, selectors, sit up and take notice. Andy Roberts was fast all right, frighteningly so, and county cricketers up and down the land were now well aware of this. Including Cowdrey.
It hardly needs saying, but I shall say it nonetheless, that Cowdrey was as fine a player of fast bowling as there was in the game. His long Test career substantiates this. He faced all the fast bowlers of his era, from Lindwall and Miller, to Adcock, Heine and Pollock, to Meckiff, Rorke and McKenzie, to Watson, Hall and Griffith and to Lillee and Thomson. He knew how to survive and flourish against the very fastest. That is not to say that he relished it. Any batsman who says that he enjoys playing against fast bowling, I mean really fast, when you have only 0.4 of a second to react when the ball is rearing at you at 90-plus mph, is lying. Especially in those pre-helmet days.
So, when he went out to bat for Kent against Hampshire at Basingstoke in the early summer of 1974, Cowdrey would have heard of Andy Roberts and listened to the stories swirling around the county circuit about his fearsome pace but I doubt he would have felt intimidated. Admittedly the score was 21/4 and Roberts was steaming in down the slope but he had been here before, many times. For a few overs, he made it all look so easy, the mark of a good player. I had seen him at close quarters once or twice before and had always marvelled at the amount of time he seemed to have to play the ball. Many batsmen were hesitant, abrupt and sudden, often making an initial movement forwards or back before the ball was even bowled. Not Cowdrey. He was calm, unflustered, unhurried and economical with his foot movement and the ball seemed to glide off the bat. He was no different this day.
Then Roberts tested him with a bouncer. He did not attempt a hook; he let it go. But at the same time the old entertainer could not resist playing up to his audience. Theatrically, he made as if he hadn’t seen it, ducking far too late and looking around as if to say, ‘Good heavens, where did that go?’ The crowd loved it, chuckling at the play-acting. But there was a collective intake of breath from the Hampshire players.
Up on the players’ balcony, the Kent 12th man, David Nicholls, turned to James Graham-Brown and muttered, no doubt between mouthfuls of doughnut, ‘Er, I don’t think he should have done that.’ Barry Richards, standing at first slip, observed out of the corner of his mouth to Bob Stephenson, Hampshire’s wicketkeeper alongside, ‘Uh-oh, red rag to a bull.’ Richard Gilliat, the Hampshire captain, was fielding at mid-off. He told me, ‘When I returned the ball to Andy at the end of his run, his face was expressionless, as it always was. We all knew what was coming.’
Indeed. Everybody in that Hampshire side was ready for it. Surely, it was inconceivable that Colin Cowdrey, who had faced more bouncers than pretty well anybody currently playing, was not expecting it too. The point was that Andy Roberts had two bouncers. We, his team-mates, had seen them both often enough and knew how devastating the second one was. The first was his slower bouncer, quick enough by anybody’s standards but once evaded, it tended to induce a false sense of security in the batsman’s mind. The second one, that bit quicker, was on the unfortunate batsman before he had time to react. Roberts hit more batsmen than anybody I have ever seen. And Cowdrey was not to be spared.
Richard Lewis, who was fielding at short-leg, said later, ‘All I can remember was Colin falling like a sack of potatoes and in so doing he knocked over his stumps. He’s out, I immediately thought, hit wicket!’
There is a wonderful series of shots, taken by the master of cricket photography, Patrick Eagar, which renders in almost cinematic form the moments before, during and after impact of ball on cheek, with Cowdrey’s bat clearly rearranging his stumps. It was a horrible few minutes as concerned players gathered around the prone figure. A further picture of Eagar’s, with Lewis kneeling down, one hand on Cowdrey’s back and the other raised to summon help from the pavilion, is quite poignant. Sometimes, an image needs no words.
To everybody’s relief, following a protracted period of medical assistance, Cowdrey pulled himself to his feet. We all expected him to make his way back to the pavilion, a little unsteady on his feet perhaps, with a severely bruised jaw and possibly missing one or two teeth, but thankfully upright and compos mentis. However, he had other ideas. He made as if to take guard again and resume his innings. Somewhat embarrassed, the Hampshire fielders pointed out to him that he was in fact out, hit wicket.
He turned to Gilliat to remonstrate. ‘He said to me that he wasn’t out and that he wanted to continue,’ said Gilliat. What did you say? ‘I just shrugged my shoulders and said, but Colin, you’re out. Then David Constant, the umpire, bustled over and said, of course you’re out Colin. And he had to go. He didn’t want to, you know, and was muttering something about the spirit of the game.’ Incidentally, Bob Woolmer, next man in, put it about in the Kent dressing room when he returned shortly afterwards, caught behind for three, that sawdust had to be thrown over the batting crease to soak up the blood. That was an exaggeration. I can confirm that there was no blood and no need for sawdust.
Three questions arise from this incident at Basingstoke, all of which we pondered over, at the time and subsequently. Even now, the answers, such as they are, intrigue me. First, why did Colin want to carry on batting? The answer to that probably lay hidden deep within his psyche. His pride. No batsman likes to admit to being hurt or discommoded by a bowler. A quick, surreptitious rub of the injury, with perhaps a wry little smile at your tormentor, is all you want to allow. Colin would have wanted to pick up his bat immediately, to show who was boss.
Secondly, he was more than likely, if not concussed, then not fully aware of what had happened. The man had just been struck a nasty blow on the jaw. Perhaps he had been unaware he had broken his wicket as he fell. Umpire David Constant was in no doubt. Colin had to go. He had to be dragged away but doesn’t that say something about his bravery and his tenacity? Furthermore, the fact that he was immediately taken to hospital for treatment and took no further part in the match gives rise to the suspicion that he was not wholly in possession of his senses.
And the third is possibly the most perplexing. ‘The strange thing was,’ said Richard Gilliat when we talked about this many years later, ‘Colin and I never really spoke to each other ever again after this incident, apart from casual greeting.’ I was shocked. I had no idea. Why was that? ‘I was never really sure. I think he believed that we had been unsporting, that we shouldn’t have appealed and that he should have been allowed to continue.’ But there was no need to appeal, was there? It was out. End of story. He wrinkled his nose, at a loss to explain it, as I was. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he felt we could have withdrawn the appeal, not that we had made one. Connie had given him out, not us. In any case, I wasn’t going to call him back. To me, the decision was correct and obvious.’
How very odd. Two of the true gentlemen of the game, two nicer men you could not wish to meet, Cowdrey and Gilliat, Tonbridge and Charterhouse, captains both of their school, their Oxford University side and their respective counties, having a spat that was never resolved. I had heard of historic quarrels between county captains that would fester over seasons, usually because one or other wouldn’t declare, but between two scions of the cricket establishment, over a matter of principle, was, to say the least, unusual. Mystifying, even. I wondered what was going on in the Kent dressing room at the time. What was said when Colin returned, sat down and unbuckled his pads?
I asked an old friend and opponent, James Graham-Brown, who was on that balcony when David Nicholls made his remark. ‘Colin was deeply upset, that much was clear,’ he told me. ‘He kept on shaking his head and muttering, “Bad form” or, “Unsportsmanlike behaviour.” He felt that a line had been crossed.’ But what was that line, I pondered. Surely it was not the fact that Roberts had bowled him a bouncer. He had been facing bouncers throughout his first-class career and none was better at playing them. Never had he suggested that the bouncer was anything other than a legitimate weapon in the fast bowler’s armoury. So why had this one caused him so much disquiet, apart from the obvious fact that it had rearranged his jaw?
The answer – if answer it is – I unearthed many, many years later, during research for this book. He believed that Roberts had thrown it. This caught me by surprise; indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that my jaw dropped when I heard the suggestion. I had played with Andy Roberts. I had faced him many times in the nets. Never did I believe there was anything dubious about his action. And neither did I hear the merest hint of a grumble from team-mates or opposing players, at the time or subsequently, that he was a ‘chucker’.
However, since the advent of super slo-mo images, you do look at bowlers’ action and sometimes wonder. Is it possible to bowl that quickly without a slight, almost indiscernible, straightening of the elbow? I remember seeing slow motion newsreel of Larwood bowling in the infamous Bodyline series and thinking to myself, hello, that was a bit jerky, wasn’t it? As often happens, the advance in technology, far from making things clearer, has only served to muddy the waters.
Let us not forget that Cowdrey had been on that acrimonious tour of Australia in 1958/59, bedevilled by accusations of throwing, primarily by the Australians Meckiff, Rorke, Burke and Slater, though the Englishman, Tony Lock, was hardly above suspicion either. He had also faced Geoff Griffin of South Africa, and Charlie Griffith of West Indies, both of whom had suspect actions. So Colin knew all about throwing. If he had a suspicion that someone chucked, it was beholden on everybody to sit up and take note. But he never told anyone, other than his most trusted confidants. Why? We shall never know.
We can speculate. Perhaps he wasn’t sure. Perhaps he did not want to cause a fuss, a furore even. He would have known that had he opened his mouth publicly, there would have been a storm of press interest. Roberts was just setting out on a long and distinguished career. Perhaps Colin felt he would not be believed, or, at the very most, accused of sophistry, inconsistency. He still had his pride. He could still play. He had not lost the urge to perform on the big stage. He would not have wanted to be accused of ‘losing it’ and blaming an illegal delivery for his misfortune. ‘He set great store by sportsmanship, you know,’ his son, Christopher, told me. I knew. He did.
It has been well documented that Colin Cowdrey believed that you should always carry yourself like a gentleman, both on and off the pitch, and that you should treat your opponent with respect. Benign, genial, chivalrous and kindly, he exuded a sort of generous, cheerful, even boyish delight in playing the game and he disapproved of the more abrasive, confrontational posturing that was beginning to take root towards the end of his career.
He wrote in his autobiography, ‘I revere the manners and the customs of this country which are rather scornfully written off these days as old-fashioned and typically English.’ He believed the virtues of the game of cricket were immutable and as good a frame of reference as any for a worthy life. He abhorred the coarse, the boorish and the ungentlemanly. It is entirely appropriate that the annual MCC Spirit of Cricket Lecture should be named in his honour, a past president of MCC himself. Together with Ted Dexter, he had been instrumental in incorporating a preamble to the laws of the game, The Spirit of Cricket. To him, cricket had to be played in the right spirit; otherwise, what is the point? It is a game, after all.
Ah, but there’s the rub. Do we play cricket for fun or to win? Every games player worth his salt will tell you that it’s much more fun when you win. And if you play it seriously, you must win, or else you lose your place in the draw or the competition or the rankings or the team, and ultimately your job, your livelihood. So more is at stake than pure personal enjoyment.
This is the dilemma facing all professional sportsmen and women. How far are you prepared to go to win? Where do you identify the point beyond which you will not set foot in your quest for the upper hand, because over there lies the murky territory of gamesmanship, sharp practice and cheating? As ever, it remains a matter of personal judgement. Opinions vary as much as human nature. One man’s quick thinking is another man’s chicanery. As often happens with these contentious disagreements, time lends distance and perspective. Looking back, it doesn’t seem to matter very much now. It certainly didn’t affect the result of the match. Hampshire won by an innings and 71 runs.
Andy Roberts took the county scene by storm in 1974, taking 119 first-class wickets at an average of 13.62, and went on to become one of the great West Indies fast bowlers of that generation. Colin Cowdrey quickly recovered from his mishap. Within a few weeks, he was playing as well as ever, so much so that his name was touted for the tour of Australia that winter. In the event, he was not selected. He was, as it happened, recalled to the national colours during that devastating series, to make his sixth tour of the country, but that dramatic story awaits us in a later chapter.
Colin Cowdrey came to represent this ethos of gentleman amateur but I am convinced he never set himself up as its ambassador. It was his nature to abhor shabby behaviour, on or off the field, and, as we shall see, it was a code of conduct buttressed by his upbringing and strong Christian faith. However, he was no apostle for courtliness at play; he never saw himself as an heir to Chaucer’s veray parfit gentil knight.
It is true that he later did become a knight – of the realm – but others put him there. He did not seek the epithet nor the honour. He led his life according to his own lights. Others chose to behave differently. He did not, publicly at any rate, turn on those who had different values. He was no moral crusader. As he says in his biography, ‘I am not the extrovert showman who happily wallows in the public eye. Indeed, I have always admired the unobtrusive touch.’
So, I think it would be true to say that he liked to do good, with a bat or a pen or a gin and tonic in his hand, by stealth, with no fuss, no fanfare. Anybody who saw his cover drive would understand what I mean. It was so well timed that it had just enough velocity to reach the boundary (I should know; I chased a few, convinced that I would catch them. But I never did). He was not one to crack the advertising boards. I believe he was a gentle man as well as a gentleman.
Yet it did surprise me how Cowdrey seemed to divide opinion. I was fully aware of the criticism occasionally levelled at him that he would sometimes go into his shell and allow bowlers to dictate to him.
I remember talking to Tom Graveney about Colin not long before Tom died. He was a huge admirer of Colin, as a player, as a person and as a captain. Colin’s travails with the England captaincy, both when he had it and when he lost it, will concern us in a later chapter but Tom reckoned that his quiet authority brought the best out in his team, not least himself. So fond of Colin was he and so convinced of his moral probity and inherent decency, that he asked his friend to become godfather to his son, Tim. Tom was no fool; he recognised a good’un when he saw one. As for Colin’s batting, he had this to say, ‘He had the technique, the shots, the timing, everything. Sometimes he batted like a dream.’ And then he gave a little sigh. ‘If only he had had the ruthlessness of Peter May. There would have been none better.’
I wish I had had more time with him to explore exactly what he meant but alas, Tom’s innings was shortly to be curtailed. Was he intimating that Colin lacked ruthlessness? As a captain, he was occasionally criticised for indecisiveness but according to Tom, in the Caribbean during the 1967/68 series, when he felt he had the full backing of the selectors and the team, ‘Colin was a changed man – he cracked the whip, you know.’ Or did he mean that sometimes an innings full of authority and thrilling strokeplay could be followed by one of scratchiness and diffidence?
Anyone who has played cricket for a living knows all about the vagaries of form; like a will o’ the wisp, one day it is there and the next it has evaporated. Colin had a stockpile of talent and all the weapons to combat any attack yet his contemporaries wondered why he felt he had to retreat into his shell from time to time. Paradoxes abound about the man. It is what makes him an intriguing subject.
Listen to this observation of a young player just starting out on his county career for Kent as Colin’s was coming to a close. ‘I was playing in a second XI match against Surrey at Norbury in 1971,’ James Graham-Brown told me, ‘and I had scored 60, my first half-century for Kent. Colin phoned me – I had not even met him – to congratulate me. What a lovely thing to do. From that moment I was a Cowdrey man through and through.’
Here’s another example. Bobby Parks was a young team-mate of mine at Hampshire, making his way in the game just as my time was drawing to a close. His father, Jim, had played many times with and against Colin over the years and they had been on several MCC tours together. ‘Several days after my debut for Hampshire,’ Bobby told me, ‘Colin (I had never met him) sent me a note congratulating me on my first match. Apparently, he used to do this all the time. Later on, as I got to know him, he turned out to be probably the nicest man I’ve ever met.’ This solicitude for others has been stressed time and time again by those whom I have interviewed for this book. Colin was undoubtedly a kind man.
He scored over 7,000 Test runs at an average of 44.06, so he can’t have been quite so kind to opposing bowlers. You don’t play 114 Test matches without having a steel rod for a backbone. I am reminded of the retort from David Gower, another one who has been unfairly castigated in some quarters for squandering his talents at the highest level, ‘Well, I scored over 8,000 Test runs so I can’t have been such a bad player, can I?’ Indeed not. Incidentally, Gower’s Test average of 44.25 compares very closely to Cowdrey’s. And Peter May, generally regarded by many, Tom Graveney included, as one of the finest of post-war English batsmen? His Test average was 46.77. So, there was not much of a difference in record between the ‘ruthless’ May, the ‘dilettante’ Gower and the ‘unassertive’ Cowdrey. Public perception can be a capricious mistress. More anomalies to explore.
What intrigues me more than anything about the man is how he married his generous temperament with the inherently selfish business of scoring runs. ‘It’s nonsense to suggest that Colin had no ego,’ Graham-Brown told me. ‘Of course he had an ego. All the great performers possess an ego. Colin was no different. He knew how good he was, how blessed with God-given talent. But that ego was a fragile one. It occasionally fractured and, like Humpty Dumpty, it had to be put back together again. And do you know what – that made him an attractive man in my view. Somehow, his insecurity made him more endearing.’
Not everybody who played with him would agree, I expect. Sport at the highest level does not admit of weakness and certainly one or two found his vacillation infuriating. But the vast majority, I feel confident of saying, admired him for what he did achieve, in spite of these perceived weaknesses. Who doesn’t warm to a person overcoming obstacles, particularly those placed there by his own nature, to reach the sunlit uplands of success?
Colin Cowdrey was born on a tea plantation in India and ended up in the House of Lords, being granted on his death a memorial service in Westminster Abbey. Only three sportsmen to have been so honoured, the others being Sir Frank Worrell and Bobby Moore. This is a life worth examining and, as Socrates once said, the unexamined life is not worth living.