Dialects, once heard, came naturally to me, and I put that small talent to good use when I plucked up the necessary courage to perform an act based on impersonations at one of the ‘smoking concerts’ by which one gained entry to that famous reservoir of British comedy, the Footlights. The smoke, trapped like thick fog inside a fusty upper room, was positively disgusting, but from time to time I made further appearances in these concerts and I was always generously received, as performers invariably were.
My brother Tim, who followed me to Fitzwilliam along with several other Marlburians in the next few years, joined me in what was probably the best of these acts, in my last year. It was a simple parody on Kipling’s poem ‘If’, in which both of us recited the lines in front of a mirror with appropriate variations, he as Harold Wilson, myself as Edward Heath.
For a time we appeared as a double act, ‘Brothers In Cabaret’, entertaining during parties at Cambridge, auditioning at Quaglino’s and the Blue Angel in London, and getting a shortlived professional contract at the Burford Bridge hotel in Dorking, until, following two more or less triumphant half hour cabarets, we caused offence to our third audience when I impersonated the Queen’s Christmas message. I had done this many times before without annoying anyone but it is extraordinary how differently audiences will react. The manager, a European with the unusual name of Otensooser, decided that he could not risk further complaints from customers offended by such irreverence. My career as a professional comedian was abruptly terminated.
At that time the Footlights always performed a concert at the Edinburgh Festival. I went to a final selection audition for this, performing before Clive James, the President, the equally forceful Germaine Greer and Eric Idle, who was the outstanding comic genius in Cambridge at the time and who succeeded James as President the following year. Musical talent was also required to get into the Edinburgh cast, however, and my rendition of Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ was almost certainly excruciating. (Try singing it: it is not easy, unless you are related to Frank Sinatra.) In any case my ambitions were certainly not fixed on anything thespian. I had gone to the trouble of learning the song with some reluctance, knowing that if I were to be invited to join the Edinburgh cast it would mean missing the two-day match between the respective cricket second XIs, the Cambridge Crusaders and the Oxford Authentics. I was therefore relieved not to be invited, but I fell firmly between two stools because I had an undistinguished match against the Authentics, making a particularly bad duck in the first innings after overindulging, uncharacteristically, the night before.
There were other, more ‘serious’, comic talents up at Cambridge at that time. One of the most brilliant was a medic named David Lund, a pianist and gifted comedy writer, but Clive and Germaine, both graduates from Australia destined to spend much of their life in Cambridge, and Idle, soon to make his name, and fortune, as the zaniest and most original writing contributor to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, were the brightest stars. Eric was the funniest, Germaine the one who wrote the most influential book; but as a writer, poet, essayist and broadcaster, Clive James would get my vote as victor ludorum.
He would do more justice than I can to the greatest experience in anyone’s life, falling in love. There are many ways to do it and there is a great paradox to mine, because my relationship with Judy was at once love at first sight and a slowly developing realisation that she was the one.
Attraction at first sight would therefore be the truer description of the night in the dining hall at Fitzwilliam that I spotted her several tables away: a dark-haired, slim, tallish girl with hazel eyes and a wide smile. She was the guest of someone else for dinner that night and even if she had shared my attraction we would both have been far too polite to approach one another. We had not, after all, been introduced. This was only 1967, neither of us had been brought up in London, she had been to a sheltered girls’ school in Oxford, Greycotes, I to one at Marlborough which had not yet taken the bold step towards co-education.
It was later in that same term, I think, that Fitzwilliam staged a winter ball. Convention required my attendance. Tina Tipper, a sweet girl from Shalford, closely guarded by her father, a retired Major, and a welcoming mother who seemed less suspicious than her spouse of this young man’s intentions towards their very pretty daughter, had been my companion at one or two social occasions at Cambridge in the previous year but for some reason – perhaps that she had already sensed that she was more a useful adornment at parties than a girlfriend to whom I was seriously committed – she was not available for the Billy March Ball. So I plucked up courage and asked a luscious girl from the neighbouring female college, New Hall. Susanna Duncan was buxom and something of a Cambridge Zuleika Dobson. I dare say there was even some envy that she had accepted the rare pleasure of acting as my partner for the occasion. But the moments in the evening that lingered in my memory were those when Judy, her beauty less confidently advertised, came to my little study/bedroom at Fitzwilliam to leave her coat on my bed.
She was partnering David Martin that evening and I was the slowest of suitors. The looming reality of exams took precedence in my life, with fives, cricket and evenings with the lads at pubs like the Castle and the Cricketers. Only in the last few weeks of the summer term of 1967, with exams at last over, did I think properly again about Judy. I needed a pretext and in those last few days of a total freedom such as none but post examination students ever experience, I was given two. With five friends I hosted a drinks party on one of the College lawns. A few days later Judy accepted the invitation to the St. John’s May Ball that I had driven over to Homerton in the Morris Minor to deliver.
Nothing else in my Cambridge life had been redolent of Brideshead Revisited but this long evening was, starting with a candlelit dinner in the St. John’s hall that included, like some Tudor banquet, roasted swan. We danced all night, literally, whenever we were not attending various cabarets by various well known artists at the time. The singer Long John Baldry stays in the memory as one of them. By the time that we were having coffee by the river some time after dawn (I am afraid that I did not risk trying to punt along the Cam in my state of at least semi-inebriation) I knew that I was not going to let Judy go if I could help it.
Despite that it was some time before I stirred myself to ask her out in London. It should really have been something more highbrow – Judy knows her Shakespeare well for a start – but I plumped for the extremely undemanding Way Out In Piccadilly. Frankie Howerd was the star. Brilliant with a live audience, he had everyone helpless with laughter simply with ‘Ooh, yes, no, listen’ etc., accompanied by a familiar range of facial expressions and the occasional anxious look over his shoulder, indicating that we alone were party to his revelations. His co-star, Anita Harris, sang ‘I could spend my life just loving you, if you would only learn to love me too’ which summed up my feelings rather well.
I haunted Cambridge periodically for the rest of Judy’s time at Homerton and when she began teaching at Abingdon we would meet halfway at Henley every week and spend weekends as often as possible at one or other of our parental homes. My parents soon adored her and I greatly liked her mother, a modest but tireless bastion of local good causes at Brackley in Northamptonshire, where she had lived since marrying the widely revered headmaster of Winchester House School, C.H. Telford Hayman. Sadly, he had died when Judy was only two.
We knew that we would get married long before I finally got round to a formal proposal in my car on the edge of the Thames at Henley in May 1970, following an especially good dinner. By then my future at the BBC was looking reasonably assured. I had a regular salary and, by staying at my father’s business flat in Hallam Street during the week rather than taking up what would have been, no doubt, a more enjoyable option to join two cricketing friends, Richard Johnson and Graham Prain, at their flat in Chelsea, I was able to save enough money to get a mortgage the following spring. We were married at St. Peter’s Church in Brackley on 17 April 1971 and ever since I have been th
ankful for my good luck. Everyone who knows Judy will know why.
7
THE CRICKETER MAGAZINE
A few short hours after breakfast and the bright June dawn that ended a blissful first evening with Judy at the St.John’s May Ball, we have gone our separate ways on urgent business. Typically dutiful, she is off to a lecture after two May Balls in a row – I was not her only suitor. I, bleary-eyed, am on my way to The Oval to make my first acquaintance with the legendary Daily Telegraph cricket writer and BBC pundit E.W. Swanton. He has chosen the Surrey/Kent match to meet me in The Oval pavilion’s version of the Long Room, interviewing me informally for the post as assistant to the deputy editor of The Cricketer. He looks a little too big for the high chair on which he sits, making occasional notes, and sometimes humming. ‘This is my man’ he says, smiling paternally as the youthful Alan Knott comes out to bat.
I was by no means the only one on the shortlist for the vacancy at The Cricketer and it took some time for an offer to come my way: £700 a year, I think it was. Slave labour it was to be, too, but I was on my way and Ernest William or ‘Jim’ Swanton, known and respected, if not universally loved, by everyone in cricket, was as good and influential a mentor as an aspiring cricket journalist could wish to have.
Unless you were training for a rigorous mountain climb you ascended to the single office of The Cricketer Ltd in the autumn of 1967 by means of one of those old lifts typical of London clubs and small hotels, with two gates, the first one made of iron that needed to be clanged shut by hand before you pressed a button for the relevant floor and waited for the second door to labour by electric power to a closed position. Then, after a dignified pause, like an old person catching breath, the cage began to lift slowly and with almost human creaks and groans to the main floor of the Hutchinson Publishing group. Jim, persuasive as ever, had urged two cricketing and golfing friends to become the proprietors of a magazine that had been living from hand to mouth since its foundation by Pelham Warner in 1921.
Down the corridor from the spacious offices of the chairman and vice-chairman, the charming Bimby Holt and bluntly-spoken Noel Holland, Old Harrovians both and in their different ways not unaware of the grandeur of their status, stood an office occasionally visited by an even more important and much more famous representative of the Kent establishment, Swanton himself, no less.
Being editorial director of The Cricketer, to whose future well being he was devoted, gave Jim a convenient London base, more private than the Bath Club, his other haunt in town. His role was to write magisterial editorials each fortnight, to plan the magazine’s editorial strategy and to use his huge circle of worldwide cricketing contacts to order articles for future issues. No one in my memory ever refused him, despite a miserly payment of one guinea per 100 words, ‘for all our contributors great and small’, as Jim’s standard letter, typed for him by a lean and beautiful blonde secretary named Julie Firmin, always made clear. J.J. Warr once responded: ‘Dear Jim, delighted to write the 500 word piece on Cambridge’s prospects for the season as you request, at your usual rate of a guinea a word.’
In spite of his reputation for pomposity Jim was quite capable of seeing the funny side of that but he never pretended to be a hands-on editor. The nuts and bolts of getting the magazine edited, designed and printed he left to others, very few others indeed as I was rapidly to discover.
If John Warr’s letter hinted to me that it was possible to get beneath the haughty carapace of Jim’s character to the more considerate heart of the man, it was not until he asked me to play for his Arabs team on a short tour of Kent that I began to relax in his company. Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie was a fellow guest for supper at Delf House, Jim and Ann Swanton’s elegant house in one of the narrow medieval streets of Sandwich. Throughout the meal he pulled the great man’s leg so frequently and to such hilarious effect that I never again took him quite so seriously.
Despite that I remained to some extent as a pupil to a schoolmaster in relation to Jim during my first stint at The Cricketer. I remember his ringing me on the Sunday morning in August 1968 after Basil D’Oliveira had been left out of the MCC touring party to South Africa that winter despite his commanding innings of 158 against Australia in the Oval Test match the previous week. ‘Morning, Christopher’, he began. ‘You’ve read the Sunday Times I suppose?’ Alas, I had not.
‘Yes’, of course, I lied hesitantly, terrified of not being on the ball on so important an issue.
‘What do you think?’
I felt like a child caught cheating. No doubt it was obvious from my subsequent blustering prevarication that I was unaware of the precise nature of allegations of a cover-up by the establishment and of political collusion with the hated, and soon to be assassinated, John Vorster. There had been at least a nod and a wink that the controversial ‘Cape Coloured’, as South Africans knew him, would be left out of the team to avoid controversy wherever he played in his native land.
Jim was no establishment man himself when it came to race issues but he subsequently disapproved of the uncompromising cover that I had chosen for the September issue of the magazine two days before, with the single word REJECTED screaming from a picture of D’Oliveira driving during his great innings. Like most people I was incensed that he had been left out and smelt a rat, almost certainly wrongly.
Unless Jim was paying one of his occasional visits to the office my only confidant and sounding post, even that early in my time on the magazine, was a hard-bitten, experienced and likeable Daily Mail journalist, George Rutherford, who helped me with the layout. One of his sub-editors, Ken Willson, would come down with me to the printers, Taylor, Garnett, Evans, to ‘put the paper to bed’ in Watford every fortnight. That was a tedious business because the compositors were so incredibly bound by Trade Union rule and custom, apparently to make every job as time consuming and long-drawn out as possible. I would play jocular verbal games with Stan Taylor, a world-weary old boy in a cloth cap and long brown overalls, who was father of the chapel and would call a meeting (virtually) every time that I wanted to change a word on the stone.
‘TGE’ was a modern lithographic printer but this was still the days of hot metal and every alteration had to be paid for. Thus, like every editor, I was caught between my desire to produce as accurate, readable and attractive a magazine as possible and the wish of the proprietors, in this case Hutchinson, to keep down costs. I had been thrust into the editorial deep end because within a month of my arrival at Great Portland Street the official deputy editor, the unique, eccentric Irving Rosenwater, had resigned on some matter of principle that he never explained to me.
Irving had originally made himself more than useful to Swanton as a sort of Man Friday and he continued to read his copy to the Telegraph, saving the great man from the considerable chore of getting his pieces across at matches, making sure on his behalf that every comma was in the right place and no doubt prompting him on such matters as dates and records. Despite his humble background, Irving spoke, like his master, in a clear, well modulated voice, so there was little room for doubt from the copy-taker on the other end of the line.
Even in our short time together Irving taught me quite a bit about the nuts and bolts of producing a fortnightly, particularly how to prepare ‘copy’ (usually typewritten, sometimes handwritten) for the printers, who had to be told what typeface and what sized type were wanted; and how to make corrections on the side of galleys (proofs) which would come back from the printers each day on a van, full of errors. He pointed out to me how dangerous a little knowledge could be. For example the printers’ reader would invariably change M.J. Smith of Middlesex to M.J.K. Smith (of Warwickshire) because he had heard of the latter but not the former.
Irving was by then in his forties and the ideal workhorse so far as Jim was concerned. He was the most precise, punctilious cricketing scholar I ever met, far more stubborn than any mule who has ever dug his toes into the sliding grit of a mountain pass. Born and bred in Stepney, presumably of pr
e-war Jewish immigrants, he lived until his death in 33, Diggon Street, surrounded and eventually virtually buried by paper, because he hoarded everything like a squirrel in autumn. He would even go fossicking into waste-paper baskets at Lord’s in case any letter that might be of historical interest had been discarded.
I believed he thought of nothing else until years later when, as a television scorer, he was accused of groping a young secretary and lost his job with Channel Nine.
When I started pressing, in due course, for some supplementary income and experience, both badly needed, Jim typically did his best for me, writing to Roger Fowler-Wright, sports editor of the Sunday Telegraph. It led to some free-lance soccer reporting in the winter months, which I greatly enjoyed, although Jim would not let me write under my own name. Instead my pieces appeared, not very subtly, under the by-line ‘Christopher Martin’.
Producing reports of the right length at speed to meet the various Sunday paper deadlines (often before the match had finished, indeed) required careful wording and certain foresight, although the matches that I attended were relatively lowly and I knew little about any of the players. Before the first match, at Vicarage Road, Watford, I did my best subtly to pick the brains of the local fans with whom I was travelling by public transport. As we got to the entrance to the ground the man to whom I had been talking (who had assumed that I was a fellow fan) said: ‘Still, I expect it’ll be a different game when we read about it in the morning.’
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