The faux pas is familiar to most who listen to a lot of speeches. Quite often they pass over the heads of inattentive audiences. I seemed, for example, to be the only one who noticed a familiar Grace being muddled by a nervous club chairman as follows: ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord be truly thankful.’ But I was certainly not the only one to gain innocent joy from a solecism by Col. John Stephenson, the greatly liked and respected secretary of MCC, when we spoke together at a fundraising dinner for a cricket tour to be made by his old school, Christ’s Hospital, the great Bluecoats School at Horsham. Reminiscing as he looked down the imposing dining hall John declared in his stentorian, army-trained voice: ‘When I was a boy at this school we had capital punishment and I can honestly say that it never did any of us any harm.’
Thanks to ‘Colemanballs’ in Private Eye many of the faux pas made on the air are recorded: such gems as Murray Walker’s ‘Every colour of the rainbow – black, white and brown’ or ‘Did my eyes deceive me or is Senna’s Lotus sounding a bit rough?’. Like Brian Johnston, Walker has been in demand as an after-dinner speaker partly because of this propensity.
It would be a dull world without human frailty or humour and happily most people, certainly most who follow cricket, seem to be more or less on the same wave length, whether they are in Canberra, Cape Town, Carlisle or Calcutta. It is always a relief when, having worked hard to try to get a speech right for the occasion, it goes well. I suppose that my biggest triumph, if that is the word, was at a Lord’s Taverners’ Christmas lunch at the Grosvenor House in Park Lane, with about 1000 happy revellers present. I was nervous because the star speaker was the late Mike Yarwood, then at the height of his fame as a television impersonator. I went on before him, with the witty actor and comedian Peter Jones (he of the Rag Trade, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and many other TV and radio shows) as the meat in the sandwich.
Opening the batting, I decided to risk a few amateur impersonations of my own, tailored to the occasion. As the Telegraph’s Peterborough column reported the next day they brought the house down, and I got a standing ovation. Peter Jones, beginning by joking that he did not wish to be competitive, was witty, brief and very well received before leaving the floor for the other professional comedian. Alas, Yarwood went down like a lead balloon. He simply attempted to do part of his television act, not very well, and it was highly embarrassing when he lost an audience who had started very much on his side.
He had probably had a little too much to drink which cannot have helped. I have always acted on the principle that a glass or two of wine (or perhaps a beer beforehand and a glass with the meal) has the effect of dulling the critical side of the brain without destroying the creative side. Besides, dinners can be long affairs and food needs wine as an accompaniment. I am usually driving home anyway so there is always the need for moderation.
It was not alcohol, but a developing brain tumour about which no one knew, that made a famous England batsman’s last appearance at a cricket dinner a sad embarrassment. There was some amusement at first when, soon after his initial reminiscent story, he began to tell it again. When he repeated it a third time no one knew what to think or do.
More often, alcohol is the villain. An inordinately lengthy retirement speech was given by a distinguished former cricket writer in London a few years ago. He is still going strong years later so I shall not mention his name, respected as he is, but nerves and booze had got the better of him. He began with a brilliant story about Walter Hammond but ended an hour later by asking if he should sit down and being affectionately told by everyone in the room that he should do so. They had started to laugh at him as well as with him, which was a shame.
You should try to leave them wanting more and as a matter of fact people are usually quite happy to talk to each other at dinners so don’t mind if the speeches are short. Vivian Jenkins, the former Welsh full-back, Glamorgan cricketer and rugby writer for the Sunday Times, was once rather too well entertained by the local president as he sat on the top table in the hot and stuffy room at a club dinner. Rising to his feet to propose a toast to the club, he swayed slightly and uttered the words ‘Wally Hammond was a bloody good player’ before slowly subsiding into his chair for a long sleep. No knowledgeable person in the room could possibly argue.
More than once I have not even got that far, albeit through no fault of my own. Once I had just been announced, at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, when an elderly person on one of the tables collapsed to the floor, apparently having had a heart attack. The subsequent delay while a doctor was summoned and an ambulance ordered was not much of an aid to the atmosphere. On another occasion, at Reigate Priory Cricket Club, I was about to say my first words in the club pavilion at the end of the meal when all the lights – which were on a time meter – went out and the room was plunged into pitch darkness. Actually that helped the feeling of general merriment, but twice since members of my audience have fainted, to the natural consternation of all those in the room, who usually assume the worst. On the last such occasion, at the Haslemere Harvest Supper, I took it as my cue to sit down.
I had by then said enough, unlike the Earl of Onslow, with whom I was speaking at a charitable function at his elegant home, Clandon Park, one evening in the 1980s. Oddly enough for the descendant of the British Parliament’s most legendary Speaker, he was reluctant to speak in public. Interrupted by someone with a mild comment from the back of the hall as he made his introductory remarks, he stunned everyone by responding: ‘I don’t particularly want to make this speech and it is clear to me from your interruption that you don’t want to hear me, so I shall sit down.’ Whereupon, he did so. As someone who has always cared rather too much about what people think of me, I admired his courage.
Most speakers, certainly not excluding myself, are guilty of plagiarism, and even ‘new’ jokes are invariably variations of old ones. I admire those who keep coming up with their own original stories, often with the help of professional comedy writers, like the always funny favourite of many a Lord’s Taverner occasion, Bob Bevan. For years he has traded on being goalkeeper for the Old Wilsonian third XI (or lower). His gravelly voice and cockney accent help, but so does his topicality. He started telling stories weaved round Bobby Moore; now it is John Terry, Kevin Pietersen or whoever is in the news.
It is one thing to borrow a story, as I occasionally have from Bob, another to take credit for an entire speech. Many years ago now I heard an absolutely shameless exhibition of a kind of plagiarism that would better be described as robbery. The perpetrator was a circuit judge and, as a knight of the realm, presumably one of high reputation. He had memorised the famous recorded speech given by the barrister Humphrey Tilling at a Forty Club dinner. At a Round Table dinner (and no doubt at many others) he reproduced it virtually word for word without once acknowledging the source of the wit for which he received his standing ovation.
It was bad luck for Tilling to have his speech recorded and circulated, although Brian Johnston had most of his best stories recorded too. Incredibly, they continue to sell twenty years after his death. It never bothered him to give more or less the same speech over and over again. Geoff Miller, the genial Derbyshire and England all-rounder who has been the National Selector in recent years, is another who does the same. It is, undoubtedly, the way you tell ’em that counts.
It is often the time spent thinking about and composing the speech, not to mention travelling to make it, that really earns the fee, although most of my speeches over the years have been unpaid anyway. Those that were professional engagements certainly rewarded me better, hour for hour, than writing books but the eventual satisfaction was greater when books finally appeared. In any case I simply enjoyed writing them.
I cut my teeth on the accounts I wrote of my first five overseas tours as a means of paying for Judy, and, quite soon, Judy and the children, to join me for a time overseas. In India in 1976/7 I was already onto my third book, enabling her to come for several weeks wit
h James and Robin, who were then only four and two. The books were far from classics but for me they were a good substitute for newspaper reporting and they at least left a fullish record of events for future cricket historians.
In 1978 I was approached out of the blue by Steve Adamson of Orbis Publishing, asking if I might produce a ‘large-scale, illustrated reference book on cricket to the model of Leslie Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion. I replied that there was already a superb encylopedia on the game in the form of The World of Cricket which, under Jim Swanton’s formidable editorial direction, was soon due to be updated.
Instead, I proposed that I should write the first book ever to publish a biography (some, obviously, very short), of every Test cricketer. This would, I wrote to Adamson, mean 1560 different biographies as opposed to 350 in The World of Cricket. The deal was done and I was soon embarked on feverish work on the project, helped not a little by assiduous research, in the cases of many of the players that I had never seen, by a retired civil servant from Woking, Jim Coldham. The Complete Who’s Who of Test Cricketers appeared in the early summer of 1980. I produced two more editions but eventually I could no longer spare the candle-grease or stand the grind. Years later the book was updated and expanded in a new form by the Oxford University Press under the title World Cricketers but since then the rapid advance of the internet has made online sites the obvious sources of history and statistics for most of what publishers used to call ‘students of the game’. Everyone can be an expert nowadays.
I burnt midnight oil over several books in the years before turning to daily journalism. Bedside Cricket, produced by the enterprising Adrian Stephenson, was more pleasurable to write than most of the others and I greatly enjoyed writing short profiles of some of the more colourful contemporary cricketers in another of Adrian’s projects, the simply entitled Cricket Characters for which the caricaturist John Ireland produced some brilliant drawings.
I have written one or two books since, including one on the 2002/3 tour of Australia, co-written with Charles de Lisle. He put his heart into it and wrote exceptionally well, but it was an unhappy tour for England and Charles, brother of the talented sometime Wisden editor, Tim, was unfortunately having serious health problems at the time, which complicated matters. More enjoyably, and for obvious reasons less demandingly, I produced a personal anthology entitled The Spirit of Cricket which truly was a labour of love.
After ten years as a hungry free-lance, however, fate, chance, inclination and, perhaps, divine will, were pushing me towards a new challenge.
14
COUNTY CRICKET AND THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
A county cricket ground on a May morning in the 1980s. It might be any number of pleasant places but let us say that it is Hove. In the slight haze of a rapidly warming day, loyal followers of the staple English game are happily ensconced in sagging blue and white coloured deckchairs. Most are men but there are women too, usually in charge of a picnic bag. Already the thermos has been opened for a first cup of coffee. On their menfolk, panamas outnumber floppy white sun-hats. Everyone has a newspaper. For the great majority of them it is the Daily Telegraph. Each of them is cheerfully scrutinising one of the cricket pages.
When Jim Swanton left the Daily Telegraph in 1975 he had a ready-made successor in his long-time stablemate, the Sunday Telegraph correspondent Michael Melford. Michael told me that when Jim had come to the party at which he and his future wife, Lorna, were celebrating their engagement, Jim slipped him a wrapped package as he left, muttering as he did so: ‘I thought you would like this.’ It turned out to be a signed photograph of the great man.
With his softly spoken, dry and wry wit, Michael (whose posthumously published, limited edition memoir, A Bowl of Cherries, is a tiny classic) was a great companion on tour, and an inseparable friend of John Woodcock’s, with whom he saw eye to eye on all matters of social propriety. A sound, experienced writer with a nice light touch, he was a shrewd observer of the game, loyal to the establishment, who kept the standards high. But the authority that ‘EWS’ had established as correspondent for so long slipped once ‘Mellers’, his near contemporary, had retired.
The no less witty Michael Carey soon resigned after disagreeing with his Sports editor, Ted Barrett, who had ordered him to report a ‘racialist’ incident involving Imran Khan at Worcester that to Michael’s mind had nothing to do with the cricket match he was supposed to be reporting. Michael Austin and the genial, competent Peter West temporarily covered tours (Peter, famous as a versatile television performer, went to Australia in 1986/7 when he relished every moment and did his best to reduce the nation’s stock of Chardonnay) before Barrett settled on a ‘news man’ more in tune with the approach that he required. Peter Deeley, an experienced news reporter with no deep passion for cricket, took over.
Deeley, too, was nothing if not competent but he would never have pretended to be a true ‘authority’ on the game. Unlike pretentious old CMJ, who at that sort of time was regularly sounding off on the air and in editorials in The Cricketer, his coverage lacked conviction or strong opinion. He reported who did what and when with faultless accuracy but did not much care ‘how’. That, alas, is the way most reports are done these days, liberally laced with meaningless quotes. It is opinion, perspective and insight that make a good read.
Peter’s relatively bland approach was soon noticed by both readers and senior men at the Telegraph. Soon after the tour of the West Indies in the early months of 1990 I was approached by the paper’s managing editor, Jeremy Deedes, the genial son of the legendary Bill, and asked if I would like to become cricket correspondent. I had got an inkling of what he had in mind when, at his invitation, I dined with Jeremy and his wife, Anna, at the Coral Reef hotel in Barbados. Jim and Ann Swanton were also there. The naturally irascible Peter Deeley had just caused something of a stir by making a fuss after a party given by the British High Commissioner to Barbados, when taxis had not appeared as expected.
I was therefore not surprised when the offer came to become correspondent of a newspaper read at that time by the majority of serious followers of cricket. Once Jeremy and I had settled the details, I did not hesitate to take it.
Peter stayed on as a cricket reporter and I can hear him now, sitting next to me in the press box, saying ‘What a terrible shot’ whenever anyone was bowled. It might have been an unplayable nip-backer or a superb deception in flight but in Peter’s book it was usually the batsman’s fault! But he was a supportive companion who never bore me any grudge and was, I think, heartily relieved to be free of the extra responsibility. So far as I know, he has not been seen on a cricket ground since he retired.
The salary that I was offered was considerably greater than the one I was receiving at the BBC and a bit more than I had been getting for combining that job with the editorial directorship of the The Cricketer. Beside that, however, I had been increasingly frustrated by the attitude of those involved with the fledgling Radio Five, for whom – in a clear portent of the way that all sports reporting would go – soccer seemed really to be the only show in town.
In particular I was furious with the way that Radio Five was neglecting proper coverage of county cricket and sending me to matches on Saturdays without ever asking for more than hurried updates. I protested to Larry Hodgson, the genial former tennis correspondent who had inherited the typically grand BBC title of Head of Sport and Outside Broadcasts, Radio and, at his request, I explained my objections in writing:
‘The Radio Five producers’, I wrote,
simply do not understand a game that, by its very nature, is slow, drawn-out, cerebral, contemplative. It tends to meander gently and burst into sudden life. No one can predict when it will. In the hands of a competent commentator, especially if he has a second voice next to him for variety’s sake, it should never be dull, however ‘slow’ the play itself may be. Yet Saturday after Saturday goes by with no commentary whatsoever. Even the scores are given far too seldom and twice this season I have had to b
low a gasket – with no apology from the producer – when scores have been given that are three-quarters of an hour out of date because no one has even bothered to ask me at the OB for the latest score.
Nor will I hear any nonsense about the lack of interest in county cricket. If that is so why is there so much newspaper coverage devoted to it? Why are several different companies currently making money out of conveying scores and commentaries down telephone lines? Local radio covers cricket far more comprehensively than we do.
All that, alas, remains true today, the only difference being that newspapers no longer report the county game so thoroughly. Larry was sympathetic but nothing much changed so, relieved that he was still keen to include me as a regular TMS commentator and boosted by an extraordinarily generous letter accepting my resignation, I began the 1991 season as the Telegraph’s new correspondent under the command of Max Hastings, a brilliant editor with very little interest in cricket, and David Welch, as supportive a sports editor as one could wish for.
I certainly did not approach it in a mood of superiority or without a certain trepidation. No doubt the same was true for Jonathan Agnew, taking over my long-time role at the BBC. He soon showed himself to be completely at ease in the job and I quickly felt the same, although I had no prior knowledge of the routines of daily newspaper reporting.
I knew that I would enjoy the challenge, not least of the slower pace and gentle pleasures of the county game, which still had a certain rhythm over the course of a season in the days before Twenty20. Here, I knew, were to be found what Thomas Gray called ‘homely joys’, albeit with the destiny of at least some of the players obscure. It was not life or death cricket, but for the players, each one of them ambitious for himself and his team, it was important, and so it was for all who followed them and enjoyed reading about the matches. Sometimes they were slow and dull, more often full of character, the class players standing out but the journeymen doing their bit and having their days. Keenly fought and in a pastoral setting County Championship cricket comes second only to a Test match.
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