The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  ‘As we were going out to field in your second innings,’ said Larwood, ‘Sir Pelham said to me, ‘‘Larwood, I will give you a pound if you bowl Fingleton out quickly.’’ If you remember, I did, and when I came off the field Sir Pelham was waiting there at the door with a pound note in his hand.’

  I will never forget that ball. It was the best ever bowled to me in cricket. At Larwood’s top speed, it changed course in the air from leg and, continuing on that course, pitched about the leg and middle stump and took the off bail. It was absolutely unplayable. A batsman never minds being dismissed by a good ball, even for nothing, as I was that day.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Larwood, ‘those days are gone for ever, but here’s a pound note. Let’s all go and have a drink and we will say it is on Sir Pelham.’

  There were times, during the Australian tour of bodyline, when Larwood thought the game not worth the candle. He knew abuse. The tumult was overpowering, the work of fast bowling hard. He has a very sensitive side to his nature and often wondered whether it was worth it, but then he allowed his mind to revert to his coal-mining days before he played cricket and that was sufficient. Strangely, on that tour, his stomach revolted against food. He found that beer, with his occasional pinch of snuff on the field, gave him all the sting he wanted. From the Australian viewpoint, it gave him more than enough, but he will always be remembered in Australia, tactics of that MCC side apart, as the Prince of Bowlers.

  It was a coincidence that very day that Larwood should have received from Australia a long letter from a youth on the art of bowling. It was an interesting letter, asking for advice. It was fitting, even though this lad had never seen Larwood bowl, that he should have written to such a one for advice, though I smiled to myself as I read this delightful piece of youthful folly: ‘Do you think, Mr Larwood,’ wrote this ardent theorist, ‘that you might have been a better fast bowler if you had begun the swing of your right arm from lower down?’ As if any Australian would have wanted Larwood to be better than he was, but perhaps the oddest thing of all about this letter was that it came from Bowral, home town of Bradman. How quaint if Bowral, through Bradman’s greatest antagonist on the field, should produce another Larwood!

  When we parted we had extracted from him almost a half-promise that he would come to Old Trafford and see and meet the Australians. He wanted to meet O’Reilly; he wanted to see Lindwall particularly, but Larwood never came. I think the inside of an English first-class ground contained too many sad memories for him. He deserved better of the game; he deserved better, particularly, of English cricket because, in tactics, he was only a cog in the wheel. He was, for a certainty, the only bowler who quelled Bradman; the only bowler who made Bradman lose his poise and balance, departing from his set path of easeful centuries into flurried and agitated movements.

  I left Blackpool glad that I had seen Larwood, and I think that he, for his part, was pleased again to meet an Australian cricketer, the first since the field of battle in 1932–3. There is something tragic about his finish in cricket and the fact that he wishes to have no ties with the game now at all. It is interesting, too, to look back to those days of 1932–3 and reflect what time has done for the central figures, Bradman and Larwood. The game has been over-kind to one; unkind to the other, but that has ever been the ways of cricket. It is a game, mostly, for batsmen, and I thought of all this as I left Larwood on the note, of all things, of migration. He thinks hard these days of bringing his lovely family of five daughters to settle in a country which once flamed from end to end over his bowling. That, surely, must be the oddest thought of all – Larwood settled in Australia! But he would be doubly welcome. Australia has never held anything against Larwood.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  Either side of the Second World War, the England batting was dominated by Denis Compton and Len Hutton. They were alike in achievement and commitment, but dissimilar in personality and technique. Hutton was a taciturn (some would say dour) Yorkshireman, who rarely smiled and always kept his own counsel. Although he possessed a wide array of strokes, he did not often unwrap them in the Test arena. Compton, by contrast, was a cheerfully spontaneous character whose warm and outgoing personality made him loved by schoolboys and opponents alike. He was also an inventive strokemaker who played all the shots in the book, and some that are not there besides. A natural sportsman, he also played soccer for Arsenal and, on occasion, for England.

  I have chosen an account of Compton’s first-class debut and an epitaph on Hutton’s retirement, written by two close contemporaries of the cricketers.

  E. W. SWANTON

  Compton Arrives (1948)

  Just before Whitsun 1936 I played in a match in the Minor Counties’ Championship at Folkestone between the Second XIs of Middlesex and Kent. After about half an hour on the first morning the Middlesex position was distinctly awkward, for we had lost four of the best players for round about a dozen, the writer having gone in first and been a spectator of one disaster after another from the bowler’s end, and, I dare say, having had little of the bowling himself. There was a strong, chesty fellow doing the damage, I seem to remember, called Cole, perhaps helped by that early freshness in the pitch that one generally finds near the sea.

  At this point there entered a juvenile figure with an oddly relaxed way of walking, somewhat loose round the knees and with a swaying of the shoulders, inclined to let his bat trail after him rather than use it as a stick in the usual fashion. As he had to pass me I thought a word of encouragement would not be out of place, and murmured something about playing up and down the line of the ball and there being nothing to worry about. My new companion thanked me politely, and very soon started pushing the ball round the field with every appearance of ease, and running up and down the pitch rather more quickly than his ponderous partner found comfortable. To within a run or two a hundred were put on for this fifth wicket, each of us just missing his fifty. Such was my introduction to Compton (D.).

  When I went back to Lord’s after the match R. W. V. Robins was anxious to know how it had gone, and whether anyone had distinguished himself. I told him I had been playing with the best young cricketer I had ever seen, and when I mentioned his name he said he was just going to the nets with G. O. Allen to look at some of the younger members of the ground staff, and that there was a place going for one of them in the Middlesex side against Sussex next day.

  I can see a cynical smile registering on the faces of a hardened raconteur or two at this point. One has told the story often enough. It has been a stock-in-trade of several talks on cricket, to British and Australian soldiers, to schoolboys, and so on. It is easy to be certain of the truth of any incident one has narrated frequently, as one knows when one endures the hardy annuals of one’s friends and notes how details are apt to change colour until the picture becomes very different from its original.

  All that can be said then is that to the best of my belief I told the Middlesex captain that this was the finest young cricketer I had ever seen; nor does there seem any great merit in the remark, for Denis at eighteen (his birthday had occurred the preceding week) was already showing those excellent gifts of eye and balance which now distinguish him from even the best of his contemporaries; technical gifts and also gifts of temperament, for he was very soon commanding situations more momentous than our little affair at Folkestone.

  In his wisdom, and with Allen’s warm approval, the Middlesex captain chose Denis to play in the Whitsuntide match against Sussex. There was insight in this, for though he had made some runs against Kent Second XI, Denis had no substantial record to urge his preference over several others more mature and experienced. He had not even been selected for the match preceding that against Kent. The highest of his three innings in the Minor Counties’ Championship the summer before had been 12.

  Great cricketers on coming into county cricket more often than not have made distinctive beginnings, either successful or spectacularly the reverse. Patsy Hendren began his career with a duck; Hammond wa
s bowled by Gregory for 0, and, in his second innings, by Mailey for 1; and Woolley has described how in his first match he twice dropped Johnny Tyldesley, who went on to make 295, took 1 for 103, and scored 0, before in Kent’s second innings he redeemed himself with an innings of 64. But Hobbs made 88 in his first match for Surrey and 155 in his second; A. C. MacLaren and A. P. F. Chapman are among those who began with hundreds.

  Denis Compton’s innings in the match against Sussex in 1936 will be remembered by many loyal watchers at Lord’s, for it took place on Whit Monday before a big crowd, and the circumstances of it were exciting. On the Saturday Sussex had made 185, Parks (J. H.) having been caught by Compton (D.) off the bowling of Smith (J.), and Parks (H. W.) having been caught by Allen off Compton.

  Compton says there was nothing specially notable about his first catch in first-class cricket; Allen, on the other hand, declares that the catch which gave Compton his first wicket was a skier taken as he ran diagonally backwards from mid-off, and was one of the best he ever caught: which, if his memory is accurate, implies, of course, that it was a very fine catch indeed.

  On the first evening, against Tate, who in 1936 was still well capable on occasions of the old destructive burst at the beginning of an innings, Middlesex lost four wickets for virtually nothing, and the Monday morning was occupied in a struggle for the lead on the first innings. The end of the batting order read: 9, G. O. Allen, who was going in late having dislocated a finger; 10, Compton; 11, Smith. But this was about the period when the recipe for almost any Middlesex crisis was to send in Jim Smith. Just before one o’clock, therefore, in loomed the vast Smith, and proceeded to cleave the air, and sometimes the ball, being, as Wisden records, especially severe on Wensley, whose off breaks were just the giant’s handwriting. Smith being out for a highly valuable 28, Denis came in last to join Allen at quarter past one, Middlesex needing 24 for first innings’ lead.

  Tate bowled from the pavilion end, and as the young man passed England’s captain-designate he was given an eminently sound piece of advice: ‘This chap comes off much quicker than you expect. Whatever you do, play forward.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ The first ball was a beauty, pitched to a length on the off stump. Denis played back, and it flew an inch over the middle stump into Cornford’s hands.

  Allen, so he recalls, and I do not doubt him, expressed himself pretty forcibly. Denis said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’ll do better in a minute.’ He did do better, to the extent of seeming completely composed. The score crept up until at lunch Middlesex needed only 12. Afterwards these 12 came, and some more for good measure; finally it was Jim Parks, not the deadly Tate, who had Denis lbw, the stand having by then realized 36.

  Three Middlesex matches at Lord’s followed this one, against Notts, Northants, and Yorkshire. Denis played in all of these, and before the last of them there was no question of his place in the team being in danger. He made 26 not out and 14 against Notts, 0 and 87 against Northants, and 26 and 1 against Yorkshire, all in low-scoring matches. In the Notts match he showed more confidence than several of the side against Larwood and Voce. In the Northants match, now promoted to No. 7, he joined Walter Robins in the second innings when five wickets had fallen to those two dangerous bowlers Clark and Austin Matthews for 21 runs, and between them they put on 129.

  It was during one of these two matches, when he was batting with his captain, that he hit either Voce or Clark for two stirring off drives off successive balls up to the top of the ground. While the fielder was fetching the ball a conversation took place between Denis and his captain on these lines:

  ‘You know what to look out for now, don’t you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well, he’ll bounce one at you.’

  ‘If he does, I shall hook him.’ The short fast one came down, and it was duly hooked with considerable violence into the Mound.

  Such a remark, made in another way by a young cricketer, might have suggested a large head. But no one who has known this particular young cricketer has ever entertained the slightest suspicions on this score. I quote the incident as illustrating his naively confident approach to the game. It was utterly natural.

  Three weeks after his first appearance, and in his sixth county match, Denis made his first hundred for Middlesex in the return against Northants at Northampton. On the third morning Middlesex led by 3 runs on first innings with five wickets left, and the plain need was for some more runs with all possible speed. Three wickets fell at once, but then, to quote Wisden’s report: ‘By perfect timing Compton drove, pulled, and cut with remarkable power, and took out his bat, with fourteen fours as his best strokes, in one and three-quarter hours. He and Sims put on 76 for the ninth wicket and there followed a remarkable last partnership of 74 with Peebles, who by sound defence stayed while Compton scored his last 60 runs.’

  All witnesses agree with what a blending of cool judgement and brilliant stroke play Denis set about the bowling on this June morning. He has always revelled in partnerships with tail-enders and it is appropriate that the bulk of his first century should have come in a stand for the last wicket. It would have been fitting, too, if his innings should have led to Middlesex snatching a victory, but this they could not quite do, a thunderstorm stopping the game when Northants had lost eight wickets in their second innings.

  There were no more hundreds that season, but several near-misses. We find Denis scoring 81 out of 131 added with Hulme in just over an hour at Lord’s against Gloucestershire, and 87 and 96 at Maidstone against Kent, batting for less than two hours in each innings. At Hove in the Bank Holiday match against Sussex he got 80 in an hour and a half; at Lord’s against Hampshire 77 in an hour and a quarter. In his last match before rejoining the Arsenal staff for football he reached his thousand runs, finished second to Hendren among the regular Middlesex players with an average of 35. He had been given his county cap (surely the youngest ever to receive it!) and had been jumped from the Third Class on the Lord’s Staff to the First.

  It was no ordinary thing for a cricketer of eighteen to come into the game and straight away produce such batsmanship as Denis showed in ’36. And his attractive method was not the only one, for though by nature a beautifully free striker of the ball, he could become sound and rigid in defence if he decided that that served the occasion best. No wonder that at the end of the season Sir Pelham Warner described him as ‘the best young batsman who has come out since Walter Hammond was a boy’.

  Only one other circumstance connected with Denis’s first season need be recorded here, and it is, I think, disclosed for the first time. When the MCC team to tour Australia was chosen in August there was no small support in committee for his inclusion. Indeed, if G. O. Allen, who was already appointed captain, had been in favour of his going, he would very probably have been chosen: and I venture the opinion that if Allen could have known his man as well then as he soon came to do he would have been happy to take him. As it was, he felt, reasonably enough, that there were considerable risks involved in introducing to the singularly bright light that is always shining on an English team in Australia one so young and inexperienced. Thus might Denis have gone to Australia a full ten years before he did; and, if he had gone, there is little doubt, considering the misfortunes of that side, in spite of its so nearly winning the Ashes, that he would have had his chance in a Test match.

  Actually, when he did first play for England in 1937, he was the youngest Englishman to do so, and one of a distinguished company of four who have appeared before their twenty-first birthday, I. A. R. Peebles, J. N. Crawford, and ‘Young Jack’ Hearne being the others. And when Denis made his century at Nottingham in 1938 he was almost but not quite the youngest cricketer to play in a Test between England and Australia: Archie Jackson, who was to die so tragic a death, and Stan McCabe, both of them players of a brilliance comparable with his, had been a month or two younger.

  ALAN ROSS

  Hutton Departs (1955)

  Self-sufficiency, I suppose, is one of the true
marks of the artist, and Hutton has been self-sufficient as a cricketer to the point of often seeming disinterested.

  Like probably all men who can do one thing better than anyone else in the world, he seemed at moments unutterably wearied by it. The context of Hutton’s cricket, the bleak decade when he almost alone in England – Compton and Bedser were allies – preserved its dignity, has been such that grace and levity seemed almost excluded as indecencies.

  Compton, born under a warmer star, has combined all these attributes, as it were in defiance. His genius is romantic and individual. Hutton has never made such an appeal; his art has existed within precise technical limits. It would have been as unthinkable for Hutton the man to step outside the figure of Hutton the batsman as it would have been for Nijinsky suddenly to assert his own personality while dancing the Faun.

  It is in precisely this subservience of the personal to the impersonal, this sacrificing of the imp of human impulse to the demands of situation, that classicism consists. Hutton has been the embodiment of so many classical ideals – discipline, restraint, concentration, correctness and elegance of execution – that he came to be thought of as an abstraction, infallible and incapable of improvisation. But he was neither of these things. In 1948 he conquered majestically a fallibility against fast, hostile bowling; in 1946–7 in Australia he showed, when forced to it, powers of improvisation never hitherto suspected, of an order of which only the greatest are capable.

  It was known, of course, that he could play every stroke – except perhaps the hook, but then the hook is a luxury and Hutton’s technical vocabulary, though complete, was spare in character – but he showed flashes during his great post-war seasons, flashes as rewarding as his own smile, the lightening of his eyes, that he took pleasure in playing the rarer, more dangerous ones. Only, however, when necessary; it remained an axiom of Hutton’s batting that economy was all, that flourishes were an indulgence and no part of perfection, no matter how esoteric and complex perfection may be adjudged to be. ‘I refrain from saying too much,’ he wrote to me not long ago, ‘I am Yorkshire bred and born you know, I have bought a drink but not too often.’