2 / The Melbourne Cup
Two consecutive days is quite enough time to devote to any one man. Indeed the World Health Organisation would probably rule that anything more than a one-night per annum exposure level to the insomniac shenanigans of PHE could seriously damage your health. On the third morning after my arrival in Australia I therefore flew off to Melbourne, while the England team emplaned for Kalgoorlie, materialistic Mecca of gold-mines and whore-houses. That disciplinarian, Micky Stewart, would just have to find a way of keeping the boys out of the gold-mines. Phil and David Gower, however, elected to make the journey by overnight train. Beefy Botham had implied that he too would like to take the twenty-six-hour train trip, but the management decided otherwise. Twenty-six hours of the irrepressible Beefy in a confined space with gratis booze was not considered to be a terribly good idea.
On the flight from Adelaide to Melbourne I read Thommo Declares, the ghosted biography of Jeff Thompson, erstwhile pace bowler, and enfant terrible of Australian cricket. I am not too wild about the genre of ghosted biographies. To my lights only people who are dead should invoke the privilege of opting out of the hassle of recounting their own version of events. Unfortunately, with one or two remarkable exceptions (Peter Roebuck, Vic Marks, Mike Brearley, all Oxbridge men), most cricketers take the easy option, pick up the loot, and let some other poor bloke do the graft. Too often the results tend to be of fairly iridescent mediocrity, with oleaginous sycophancy as the major hallmark. Until such times, however, as cricketers develop the time, the inclination and sufficient words in their vocabulary to write their own stuff this is the type of sports book we shall tend to be saddled with.
Thommo’s book makes interesting if not consistently edifying reading. Frequent expletives have patently been deleted, but there is nonetheless an obvious effort by biographer John Byrell to promote an uncompromisingly macho image. The book pays joyous tribute to those quintessential Aussie values of playing cricket, swilling beer, swearing voraciously, and bonking oneself stupid. ‘Ian Botham’, says Thommo, ‘would make a great Aussie’. It is still not known whether Mr Botham will be taking legal action.
The book continues very much along the only-good-Pommie-is-a-dead-Pommie line. England is dispensed with as a ‘shithole’, since there are no beaches to speak of. In fairness I suppose one has to admit that there are not too many surfers’ paradises in the immediate vicinity of Lord’s, The Oval, Edgbaston, Trent Bridge or Headingley. The one-time fastest man on earth has a more serious complaint, however, in that the wild pigs in England ‘had all been cleaned out by something like the fourteenth century’. To tell the truth, it seems perfectly incredible that someone who played cricket against England teams until as late as 1985 should have come to the conclusion that the species has died out completely.
Most of this, of course, is designed to reinforce the received image of the Aussie fast bowler, but it is, in fact, a far cry from the man himself. Thommo spent a brief period with my husband’s county cricket team, Middlesex, some five years ago, and far from being a loud-mouthed lout, everyone found him a most polite and personable character (for an Australian, that is). In retirement, Thommo now runs his own landscape gardening company, devotes much time to his favourite hobby of growing orchids, and readily admits that he too is becoming a trifle weary of the well-hyped ‘gorilla’ image. Sadly, these stereotypes are often the only images of Australia promulgated abroad. Currently being promoted is a huge ‘Buy Australian’ campaign, and many marketing consultants are trying hard to gainsay the predominantly ‘ocker’ impression created by such advertisements as Paul Hogan’s amusing Fosters’ lager series, and the Castlemaine XXXX publicity, which is now taking a very definite turn for the better!
The phenomenal box-office success of the film Crocodile Dundee, where Hogan plays a crocodile-hunting, beer-downing rough diamond from the Outback, will do little to help those suave sophisticates of the PR world in their ‘Australia really is a terribly civilised place’ efforts. For the majority of people who have never actually made it Down Under, the Hogans, the Sir Les Pattersons, and the ‘Terror’ Thompkinses represent the stereotype Australian they far prefer to believe in.
The flight from Adelaide to Melbourne does not take long, which is just as well. Neither does Thommo’s book. It took nearly as long to read it as it must have done to write it.
The Melbourne Cup, which falls traditionally on the first Tuesday of November, is without doubt the high spot of Melbourne society’s social calendar. Imagine Ascot, Wimbledon, Henley and a royal wedding all rolled into one, and you’re beginning to get the idea of the Melbourne Cup. The actual Cup day is a state holiday in Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital, but Melbourne itself is enveloped in frenzied Cup fever for an entire carnival week. To give you an inkling – over the four days’ horse-racing this year (Derby Day, Cup Day, Oaks Day and the Ampole Stakes), over AUS$120 million were wagered. (You may reckon on about two Australian dollars to the pound sterling.) Other items of Melbourne Cup expenditure include AUS$12 million spent on ladies’ finery: a more modest AUS$250,000 spent on men’s clothing; AUS$5 million spent on rented marquees, car parks, cocktail and private parties; AUS$250,000 on flowers; and AUS$25 million on alcohol (including 100,000 cases of champagne). The Melbourne Cup, as they would say in Ireland, is good crack.
I was invited to the Cup by Channel 9 television personality, Mike Willesee. Willesee, who, according to aforementioned Channel, ‘almost invented current affairs’, is an Australian amalgam of Terry Wogan, David Frost and Sir Robin Day. His early evening chat show is nearly always top of the ratings and no one really knows whether he is going to be acerbic, sympathetic, relentless or generous. His great specialities are hauling double-talking politicians over the media coals, or extracting uncomfortable facts from shady business men, and he is compulsive viewing. His researchers also deploy tireless efforts to net international megastars for the programme, but sometimes even they screw it up. So it was that Phil and I were on the programme.
Our appearance was courtesy of a satellite link-up while we were still in England and it was, by all extremely biased accounts, an entertaining performance. I personally cannot remember; it was very early in the morning. Afterwards Phil raced off to Lord’s to meet the 9 am deadline for delivering his contract to the TCCB. One of the strictures of the contract was that players would not be allowed to give radio or television interviews, and so Phil simply signed the contract after appearing on Willesee. Two weeks later, however, he was severely reprimanded and almost dropped from the tour party for our second Edmonds duo, an interview this time with David Frost on Wogan. We did a little double act. According to his contract, Phil was not allowed to talk about the cricket, and so to circumvent the letter of the law, he pretended telepathically to read my mind. It was a harmless, perfectly puerile piece of fun. Unfortunately the British newspaper the Sun, whose adoptive offspring Ian Botham had been banned from making a TV appearance, decided that Edmonds should not be allowed to indulge in such flagrant rule-twisting with impunity, and the Sun solids hit the fan. Phil was summoned to Lord’s to see out-going TCCB secretary, Donald Carr, and incoming TCCB secretary A. C. Smith.
Phil did his unconvincing best to explain that being a multifaceted little person, his Frost interview might well have gone along completely non-cricketing lines. He had, for example, recently been involved in a takeover bid for a public company, Blacks Leisure, which had created no mean interest in the financial pages of the press.
‘Don’t be silly,’ argued Smith, irritated. ‘The reason they wanted you on the show was because you are a cricketer. They wouldn’t have wanted you if you’d been a plumber!’
‘No,’ agreed Phil. ‘If they’d wanted a plumber they’d have asked Gatt . . .’. In a previous incarnation, Mike ‘Gatt’ Gatting had been an apprenticed plumber.
Phil made a full, exhaustive and totally insincere apology, had his wrist slapped, and after detention was allowed home with a bad mark and a
reprimand. The schoolroom is no place to be when you are thirty-five years old. I fear Phil is going to find this press and media gag very difficult to countenance over the next four months.
Waiting to meet me at Melbourne airport was Carol Bennetto, of William Heinemann (Australia), the publishers whose occasional aberrations result in the production of books such as this. There is currently plenty of excitement in Heinemann (Australia). Not only do they have Jackie Collins and me to deal with, but managing director Sandy Grant is up to his neck in the MI5 25,000-part miniseries.
Everyone, by now, must have heard of former MI5 officer, Peter Wright, and the attempts to publish his controversial memoirs in Australia. Her Britannic Majesty’s government is currently resisting such attempts in the Australian courts, defending the principle that intelligence officers do not publish unauthorised memoirs. Since no one in their right civil service mind is going to authorise memoirs the main import of which is that the British intelligence service leaks like a sieve and that former MI5 chief, the late Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet mole, this means that the Peter Wrights of this life shall publish no memoirs at all. Wright, at present living in Tasmania and in fear of his life, and indeed, presumably, of anything subterranean, grey, pro-Russian and furry, is clearly a significant test case. The issue is causing a furore in Whitehall, in Parliament, where Mrs Thatcher has been subjected to some fierce opposition questioning, and also here in Australia, at the New South Wales Supreme Court in Sydney.
The British government has fielded the hitherto inscrutable mandarin, Sir Robert Armstrong, to be its main witness. Sir Robert, Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary and Security Adviser, is also the United Kingdom’s most senior and powerful civil servant, and I have had the odd opportunity to study him from relatively close quarters in the past.
I first became aware of the éminence grise behind the governmental throne whilst working as a conference interpreter at the 1984 World Economic Summit, held at Lancaster House in London. He seemed to epitomise that quiet, yet probably ruthless, intelligence and efficiency which so hallmarks the real high-flyers in Whitehall’s corridors of power. Two years later, in May 1986, I took the same flight as Sir Robert, and British Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, to the World Economic Summit in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I could not quite establish whether the real-life Sir Humphrey Appleby and the real-life Jim Hacker saw the irony of the British Airways choice of in-flight movie. It was Yes, Minister.
For the purposes of a tour diary, it may well be that Sir Robert’s major claim to fame is his privilege in having attended school with that doyen of English cricket writers, The Times correspondent, John ‘Wooders’ Woodcock. It is, nevertheless, also true that the Cabinet Secretary is generally held, in international diplomatic circles, to be one of the coolest customers ever to don a three-piece pin-striped suit and bowler and brolly. It was therefore all the more flabbergasting when we read here in Australia that Sir Robert had been moved to slug a photographer at Heathrow Airport prior to his departure for Sydney. Slug a photographer? Sean Penn, probably. A Frank Sinatra gorilla, perhaps. But the head of the British Civil Service? It seemed as likely as Malcolm Fraser losing his trousers . . .
The saga of the ex-prime minister’s pants was not, however, to dog my promotional tour steps in Melbourne. My last book, Another Bloody Tour, an account of England’s disastrous 1986 tour to the West Indies, had just arrived here, and was creating quite a stir, especially amongst the male-chauvinist misogynist-journalists who prefer to pontificate about it rather than actually read it. I have definitely come to the conclusion, especially in the male-dominated arena of cricket, that it is not what you write that certain people object to, but the fact that, as a woman, you wrote it at all.
The first engagement in Melbourne was an interview with Channel 10’s Gordon Elliot, on Good Morning Australia. It is the equivalent of our Breakfast TV, and took place in the open air, outside a large department store, Myer’s, in a shopping mall.
‘You were awful,’ said Phil supportively that night when I phoned him.
The next day the producer rang up and offered me a contract.
Another guest on Good Morning Australia that day was Melbourne society queen Lillian Frank. Lillian is a large, extrovert, extremely attractive lady, who goes in for a lot of brilliantly outrageous hats and clothes, and speaks with an indefinable Mitteleuropean accent. I warmed to her immediately. She reminded me of an interpreter friend of mine in Brussels.
I think it was John Dryden who wrote in his poem ‘Absalom and Achitophel’:
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
Sadly I cannot check this out as I write. Few of the cricket correspondents have brought their Complete Works of Dryden with them. Anyway, this interpreter chum of mine definitely oscillates in that vague critical zone between outright genius and downright bonkers. She speaks seven different languages with absolute fluency, all assimilated, presumably transcutaneously, from her seven different ‘husbands’, and she too operates in that same sort of indefinable accent, which I find so endearing. I remember interpreting a long time ago at a Council of Agricultural Ministers in Brussels – so long ago I think it was even in the days before popes were being sponsored by beer companies – and it was very late at night. It was one of those annual EEC agricultural price-fixing marathons that often used to go on for twenty-four hours at a stretch. (They subsequently became much snappier, when some Calvinistic Dutch president banned booze from the conference room. Nothing quite focuses the average political mind like the prospect of an alcohol-free twenty-four hour agricultural price-fixing session.)
Anyway, the proceedings were moving painfully towards the usual compromise-style denouement. At such precarious junctures, the President-in-Office of the Council generally clears the room of the inevitable congregation of minor luminaries, leaving the ministers alone with their senior advisors, (usually the permanent representatives in Brussels) to wrangle over the last few European currency units.
‘Seuls les ministres, et un adjoint,’ ordered the President, trying to pare down numbers to an absolute minimum.
‘Only the ministers and one . . . only the ministers and one . . . only the minister and . . .’
My colleague struggled, exhausted, the accent getting heavier, to find an acceptable rendition of the word ‘adjoint’. These adjoints were, after all, the equivalents of ambassadors.
‘Oh, only the ministers,’ she fulminated finally, fed up; ‘and one other creature.’
I recall Britain’s Fred Peart looking decidedly amused, with a proportionately deflated permanent representative by his side.
It is strange, is it not, how in life there are certain quite ridiculous things which condition our reactions. A name, an accent, often an association long since forgotten will make us like or dislike a person for no other reason. So it was that I took to Lillian as soon as I heard her speak. She invited me to her hair salon in Toorak, that exclusive suburb of Melbourne, where they arranged my perennially defiant hair into a chignon for the Melbourne Cup the next day. I had, of course, to wear my hat. My large Liberty hatbox, gleaming, like the Assyrians’ cohorts in purple and gold, had created great interest among the British Airways cabin crew on my way over. One of them had even asked to try it on. It looked rather fetching, really, though not quite his style.
My hat was of black silk and extremely large. When I say large, it probably involved about as much fabric as the average spinnaker on a twelve-metre yacht. It was therefore not entirely felicitous that the day of the Cup there was a strong northerly blowing. When they say a strong northerly, in Melbourne they mean about a Force 10. For most ladies the entire day was therefore spent, as indeed it was for me, with one hand clasped to the head, Simon-Says fashion. Such deportment does little for anyone’s sartorial style.
Fashions at the Melbourne Cup are nothing if not eclectic. Alongside the ostentatiously expensive designer hats, suits an
d dresses, there were clearly a few little numbers that had been run up all too hurriedly at home on the Singer. Temperatures soared to thirty-five degrees, and an announcement was made that gentlemen would be permitted to remove their jackets in the members’ enclosure. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was there with his wife, Tamie, but declined the opportunity to mislay any further pieces of apparel. There were, though, a number of young men wearing dinner-jackets and no trousers. It was difficult to ascertain whether or not they were making a political point and, if so, which. Some chaps had the temerity to wander around in nappies, although given the per capita paucity of lavatories, this turned out to be one of the day’s more sensible ideas. Weaving in and out of the assembled rich was a modern-day Robin Hood, and his Merry-to-the-point-of-positively-stocious-Men. Fortunately for the assembled plutocrats, the Sherwood Forest socialist philosophy on the redistribution of wealth was not a part of their Melbourne Cup manifesto, and they left everyone more or less in peace.
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