IAM proud of my Derbyshire roots, but Christopher John Adams might easily have been an Essex boy like my elder brother David. Although my Dad, John, was born in Huddersfield he migrated south to teach PE, first in Gravesend, Kent and then at Hornchurch Grammar School, where he was head of the PE department from 1964–67. As he arrived my Mum Eluned (Lyn) had recently left to study PE at a training college in Dartford. Mum had been born in Essex although her mother, Joan, hailed from Derbyshire. When she qualified, Mum got a post at a school in Shenfield, Essex, before becoming a head of department herself at Dagenham County School.
With their teaching background I suppose there was always a chance that I would follow the academic path. But, more importantly as it turned out, they were also sports-mad. Not only did they teach it but they also played it. Dad had been on Huddersfield Town’s books as a youngster and had been approached by their manager Bill Shankly, who cut his teeth with Huddersfield before going on to greatness at Liverpool, to become a professional. Dad could play on the left wing or as a centre-forward and was considered a good prospect. Unfortunately for him, his father Alf, who had played for Tranmere Rovers as a very quick winger, told John he had to concentrate on his education. Alf, incidentally, had quite a varied working life. At the time he ran a fish and chip shop and later became a cinema manager. His own father had been stud groom to the Earl of Derby, so there’s another Derbyshire link!
Dad was a more than useful club cricketer and played at a good level for many years as a left-arm spinner and lower-order batsman, more Boycott than biffer, with various clubs, notably Staveley Miners Welfare. He had played his first league game in Huddersfield aged 12, coincidentally the same age I won my first cricket trophy, the single wicket competition at Staveley. Mum played netball, hockey and tennis while my enduring love of golf was probably fostered by her parents, both of whom ended up captaining Maylands Golf Club near Romford. I can still remember, as an eight-year-old, hitting a ball with an adult’s club about 150 yards to the utter astonishment of the professional there.
Dad had ambitions beyond the classroom, though, and in 1967 applied for a job with the Football Association. They were expanding their coaching operation and were recruiting coaches for the four regions. Dad recalls going to the FA’s old headquarters at Lancaster Gate for his interview and being offered the job a few days later. Once the formalities were completed he was led down to the basement that was full of training kit left over from the 1966 World Cup. He was told to help himself, which is why for years I always associated Dad with Sir Alf Ramsey because both of them wore that famous blue tracksuit with ‘Admiral’ emblazoned across the front. He became one of the youngest qualified FA coaches in the country, qualifying at Lilleshall with the likes of Don Revie, Bertie Mee and Ron Saunders, all of whom had long and successful managerial careers. One of his proudest achievements was being unbeaten in two games in charge of the England women’s team, against France and Scotland.
His patch included Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Derbyshire and he decided to move the family – David had been born in Essex in 1967 – to Harrogate. It was a real wrench for Mum to move away from her friends and family. She was only 23 and it wasn’t long before they were on the move again. Having been gazumped on a house they fancied on the Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border, they settled on another in Whitwell, a couple of miles from Yorkshire just across the border in Derbyshire.
The house was a mews cottage that only had two bedrooms, but there were two large barns as part of the property and a big back garden. They paid £4,500 and renovated the barns to make it five bedrooms. It was there, on Wednesday 6 May 1970, that I was born with the midwife’s help while two-year-old David and my Dad kicked a football about in the front garden.
By all accounts David was a bit of a handful. He had a stubborn streak and would run off at every opportunity. With Dad away for a lot of time because of his job and David proving such a difficult toddler, bringing up two young boys must have been very hard for Mum.
Although there were farms and fields at our end of Whitwell, it was a pit village and everything in the community revolved around the mines. Mining in Whitwell dated back to 1894 and when I was born the pit still employed just under 800 miners and was producing nearly 500,000 tonnes of coal a year. The bowls club, tennis courts and Miners Welfare social club in the village were all inextricably linked to the pit. I had moved to Chesterfield by the time Margaret Thatcher’s government began to dismantle the coal industry but I would go back to Whitwell to visit Dad at weekends, after my parents split up, and can clearly remember picketing going on outside the entrance to the pit during the miners’ strike of 1984.
Two years later the pit had gone and, it seemed to me at the time, a large aspect of village life went with it. I remember a few years later wandering through the village and discovering that the bowls club had closed and the tennis courts were overgrown with weeds. With the pit shut down and so many people out of work the village simply could not sustain the leisure facilities which had been an integral part of life in Whitwell for nearly 100 years. A similar thing was happening all across the coalfields of the north Midlands and Yorkshire as a once-great industry slowly disappeared. It was very sad.
My earliest sporting memories are of playing football in our sloping back garden at 38 High Street. Mum loved village life and was very community-spirited. She was soon part of the playgroup and coffee morning crowd. Saturday mornings were always spent at our house. The mums would be inside drinking coffee and gossiping while five or six of us would play football outside. Being the smallest and the youngest I would invariably be shoved in goal while the others played a game called Cup Tees until there was only one person left, usually David.
Dad’s job with the FA took him away a lot which is why weekends at home were so important to him. He played cricket for Staveley Miners Welfare in the Bassetlaw League. Staveley had several pits and a flourishing sports set-up, a bit like Whitwell but on a larger scale.
On Friday nights he would head off there for a pint or two while outside David and I dragged the mini roller across the outfield to use as the stumps so we could play cricket using Dad’s bat. It was one of those old-fashioned blades with the manufacturer’s name burned on to the front. A few years later I had it framed for him and he has still got it. It was on the vast outfield at Staveley where David and I began to love the game.
We would play until it got dark, go inside for a shandy and bag of crisps, and return for the next two days for more games on the edge of the outfield while Dad rolled out his left-arm slowies a few yards away from us. Back at home, when we set up some stumps in the back garden, we had no alternative but to play straight. If we hit anything square the windows of the house would be in range so it was a case of back and across and presenting a straight bat all the time. I don’t think we ever broke a window, although I nearly caused David a serious injury during one of our games at my birthday party.
He was bowling and struggling to get me out. I warned him that he was bowling too fast but he cranked up the pace and cracked me on the leg with the ball. As he scarpered around the corner of the house I threw the ball as hard as I could and saw it whistle past his ear. If it had struck him heaven knows what might have happened. Dad reckons that was the first time he realised I wasn’t the shy, introverted type he thought I was. Among the fielders that night was my pal Matthew Root, father of the England batsman Joe.
By then I had become a somewhat reluctant pupil at Whitwell School where even walking from the infants’ playground into the junior one always felt intimidating for a shy five-year-old who, even then, had little interest in academic subjects. What I also remember about the place was how cold it got in winter. With all that coal on our doorstep you would have thought they could have heated the building. Back at home, I soon became friends with the Burgess brothers across the road. Like us, Simon and Giles – who was the same age as me – were football and cricket mad and we would spend hour after hour all year round playing in either our back garden or across the road.
It sounds like an idyllic upbringing and in so many ways it was but things changed when I was seven years old and my parents split up. I will never forget the first time I realised all was not well between Mum and Dad. I had gone across to the Burgesses’ place where we had set up a rope swing from a huge tree next to their house which swung across a big bed of nettles. That was the challenge of course, to swing across the nettles to the other side. When it was my turn I lost my grip on the rope and ended up face down in the nettles. I made my way home covered in nettle stings and in some distress. Mum was getting ready to go out but she settled me down, applied some dock leaves and waited for the babysitter to arrive.
When Dad got home later that night I was still in a bit of a state and he was upset when he realised that Mum had left me with the babysitter. That night I sat there listening to their argument about whether she should have gone out or not. A few days later they sat us down and told us they were splitting up. I thought it was all my fault – my parents were going their separate ways because of what had happened when I fell in the nettles. I carried the guilt around for a long time but, as I got older and things became clearer, I realised that their personalities had been incompatible, even though they had been married for 13 years. They had been happy for a while but I suppose it was a split waiting to happen. Back then, in the mid-1970s, divorce was still relatively uncommon. We didn’t know of any parents who were not together although the Burgesses split up soon after Mum and Dad. Michael Burgess remarried a woman called Sandra and his stepdaughter Samantha was to become my wife. Small world, I suppose.
Dad remained at the house in Whitwell but Mum got a job teaching PE and human biology at a technical college in Clowne, near Chesterfield. We moved to a semi-detached house in Brimmington Common and enrolled at Calow Church of England School. For someone who loved the village life we’d had at Whitwell and hated any sort of change it was a traumatic time but kids adapt and we quickly built up a new circle of friends.
I was nine when I was first introduced to Benita White, a woman who had as big an influence on my career as anyone else. These days, coaching youngsters in any sport has a proper structure to it. Young talent is identified at a very early age and nurtured through various age groups. Back then the Chesterfield Cricket Lovers’ Society, which is still going strong today, recognised that there was a lack of even basic coaching for youngsters in the area, apart from the sessions that local clubs would run on Saturday mornings during the summer. Dad saw an advertisement in the local paper and to help persuade us that it would be a good idea he bought David and I our first proper bats. Mine was a Gunn and Moore with red and blue stickers.
Dad remembers my full ‘debut’ for one of the Chesterfield Cricket Lovers’ teams at Hathersage in Derbyshire’s Hope Valley. There must have been 60 or 70 kids playing there that day and Dad was so worried his presence might disturb my concentration that he hid behind a stone wall. He does recall me touching gloves and patting my batting partner on the head after every run we scored. He thinks that was the first time he thought I had leadership qualities.
Every Thursday we would go to the local polytechnic where Benita and a small army of willing parents would teach us the basics. Benita’s analogy that holding a bat was like rocking a teddy bear stayed with me throughout my career.
When you are a kid you remember things like that and it was simple really. If you visualise how you hold your bat you’ve got your arms in a round with your elbows sticking out and when you’re batting the action that you do is rock your bat backwards and forwards as if you are rocking your teddy bear to sleep.
The first time we met her Benita came across as someone with a lot of self-confidence. ‘We’ll make cricketers of you,’ she told David and I. And she did. At the time it certainly did not seem odd that a woman was teaching us cricket skills. Benita had so much charisma and energy and we soon started to look forward to Thursday nights in the polytechnic gym. When I went on my England tour in 1999 Benita was there in Cape Town for the fourth Test and to watch the young player whose love of the game she had helped to nurture. She was extremely proud. I wasn’t the last either. A few years later Ian Blackwell, who has had a fine career with Somerset and Durham and played a Test match and 34 one-day internationals, learned the game with Benita.
If it sounds like cricket was taking a hold on me it wasn’t the case. By now Dad had left the FA and began working for a chap called Ken Stanley, who was one of the first football agents and whose star client was George Best. It was through that connection that he worked with George and Geoff Boycott on coaching books designed to teach the rudiments of football and cricket to youngsters. After a couple of years he became disillusioned and after helping a pal of his at Plymouth Argyle raise £40,000 in sponsorship so that they could sign the former Liverpool player Brian Hall he took a job at Rotherham United as their commercial manager, combining the role with football reporting duties for the BBC’s Saturday sports programme Sport on Two.
I think Dad found his true calling in life when he got that job and for the next few years every Saturday for David and I during the winter involved watching the Millers. We must have visited every lower-league boardroom in the country during those years and a few at a higher level when Rotherham got promoted under Emlyn Hughes, an iconic figure during Liverpool’s glory years who joined the club as player-manager in 1981.
I developed a soft spot for Rotherham and loved being part of the fabric of the club, albeit in a small way, but I was an Arsenal fan. That might seem strange for a boy being brought up in Derbyshire whose father supported Huddersfield Town so let me explain. Ian Elliott, one of my pals back in Whitwell, was a big Arsenal supporter and when he had a growth spurt I got Ian’s hand-me-downs. In 1978 Rotherham played Arsenal in a League Cup tie at Millmoor.
By then I had got quite attached to them and their players, guys like Ronnie Moore, Tony Towner and Gerry Gow, a Scot they had signed from Bristol City whose ferocious tackling shook the ground. That night they pulled off a surprise 3-1 win over the Gunners. Dad was delighted of course; I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I hated school, not least because I was occasionally bullied. When I was 11 I moved to Tapton House School on the other side of Chesterfield, whose alumni included Robert Louis Stephenson, inventor of the steam engine. It was a very old-fashioned place. They still used the cane for instance. I was still essentially a shy lad and hated being taken out of my comfort zones. David and I, as brothers do, would fight like cats and dogs and because he was a couple of years older he would invariably get the better of me.
The bullying always started when I began to run into a few boys who had been on the receiving end of some beatings in the playground from David. I remember one instance when I was travelling home on the bus one afternoon, sitting there minding my own business, when another lad got up to get off and whacked me in the eye as he passed. I got home and when David and Mum confronted me I blamed it on a cricket injury. I think I told them I’d been hit in the nets. David was protective of me although he wasn’t necessarily sympathetic. But when I eventually confessed what had really happened he gave my assailant a real thumping.
Bearing in mind the reputation I earned, unfairly or not, as a bit of a hot-head myself when I began playing professional cricket, it might come as a surprise to discover it wasn’t me doing the bullying as a kid. It went on a lot then of course as people who grew up in the 1960s and 70s will remember.
Teachers didn’t necessarily turn a blind eye but we are talking about a time when exam results and the performances of individual schools were starting to attract scrutiny so scrapes in the playground tended to be ignored until they got totally out of hand, which rarely happened.
But it was an unhappy time for me. Our idyllic life in Whitwell before Mum and Dad split up seemed a long time ago. These beatings continued occasionally for a while but I began to toughen myself up and filled out a bit physically although it wasn’t until I went to Chesterfield Boys’ School when I was 13 that I began to settle down.
I did not play much cricket there – in fact I can only remember one game because they concentrated on athletics in the summer – and academically I was still struggling but they played football and I was soon progressing into the first team.
I also joined a youth team called Somersall Rangers in Chesterfield. The manager was a guy called Roger Woodhead and under his guidance I began to turn myself into a decent schoolboy centre-half. I didn’t have the physical attributes perhaps but I could read the game well, I enjoyed organising those around me and I relished a tackle. Pride of place in our house in Whitwell was a picture of the 1966 World Cup winners and I modelled myself on Bobby Moore. One or two clubs began to come and watch me play for Somersall and Chesterfield seemed the most keen. The plan was for me to leave school at 16 after I had taken my O Levels and be taken on to their YTS scheme.
I came under the wing of Frank Barlow, who had played for Chesterfield for eight years and was a terrific coach. He took over as manager for three years in 1980, somewhat reluctantly, before going back to coaching.
In a trial game for their youth side there was a mix-up in communication between Frank and the team manager and I ended up playing as a striker in two games against Scunthorpe United and Derby County, and scored in both matches. There were four YTS places up for grabs and Frank thought I had a chance.
Scunthorpe must have liked what they saw in that game because they offered me a trial as well and so did Barnsley while Sheffield Wednesday, who were a First Division club in those days, wanted to take me for a month to see how I measured up.
The trouble was I still loved my cricket and was starting to do very well. When I was 14, I took 3-24 and Dad 7-21 in a match for Staveley and I remember scoring 145 not out against Clipstone when I batted for much of my innings with Michael May, who was on the Derbyshire staff at the same time as me a few years later. I was captain of Derbyshire Schools Under-14s, having played for them since the age of 11, but back then I always regarded cricket as something I might take a bit more seriously if I didn’t become a professional footballer.
It all seemed to be mapped out for me. I was going to leave school as soon as I could and start out on a life in professional football. Then a chap called Mike Stones, who ran the Derbyshire Cricket Association, came into my life and things were never the same again.