Can Anyone Hear Me?

by Peter Baxter

  That eased with the move to Barbados, after the Jackman furore had caused cancellation of the second Test, but then came another incident – the sudden death of the team’s coach, Ken Barrington, in the middle of a Test match. At the same time, rumours abounded about the captain, Botham’s, extra-curricular activities.

  In London the BBC radio newsroom were not overjoyed with Don’s coverage. Some of the problems, like the difficulties of getting through to London from Guyana, were of course not his fault. But in the case of Barrington’s death, they felt that he should have tipped them off as a warning, even with an embargo, instead of waiting until he was sure the family had been told before he made contact. That approach meant that he was not the first to tell them. When they rang him up to let him know the rumour of the death and he said casually that he already knew, they were not pleased.

  The West Indies tour was followed by a sensational Ashes series in England, when Mike Brearley was recalled to the colours to inspire England and their hero, Botham, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

  With cricket such hot news, when the head of Radio Sport announced that Mosey would be our man covering the winter’s tour of India, the news department expressed their concern and began to consider sending a reporter of their own.

  It was the sports editor, Iain Thomas, who came up with a solution. Peter Baxter could go to India to take the news reports off Don’s hands and also relieve Don of the worry of getting Test Match Special on the air. The newsroom were happy with that and Don only heard the latter part of the arrangement and probably reckoned he’d been given a bag-carrier. He was content at least for me to do all the player interviews, though he sneered at the modern thirst for them. The only exception to this was Geoffrey Boycott, whom Don insisted on interviewing himself, claiming that Boycott would only talk to him.

  There had to be some matrimonial consultation before I accepted the invitation to tour, but in early November 1981 I embarked on an Air India jumbo to Bombay. Sitting next to a charming Indian doctor from New York, I received a few tips about India during the journey, one of the most useful of which was that women would always be more helpful than men if you had a problem there.

  Communications were my major concern, but in those darker days there was less pressure of expectation. Within the next ten years, television, with its own satellite technology bringing perfect sound and vision, would change that. Back in 1981 there were places where getting through at all was regarded as achievement enough.

  We relied a lot on hotel telephones and the hotel operators themselves quite clearly never expected to get through to London, which in those days, outside the big centres, might as well have been on the Moon. The print press wrote their stories on portable typewriters and then had them telexed to their newspapers from camp telegraph offices at the cricket grounds or the central telegraph office in any town.

  On a few occasions, Mosey and I tried splitting forces, with him trying to get through from the ground, while I did the same from the hotel. Indeed, after that first game in Baroda, while he waited with the press bus for the last of the journalists to file their copy before moving on to Ahmedabad, our next port of call, I was allowed to hitch a ride on the team coach to get there more quickly and try my luck in getting through from the new hotel.

  It will sound remarkable to today’s touring cricket press that I could do that, but we lived much more in each other’s pockets then, particularly in touring the sub-continent, and that sharing of the team bus was not a unique experience on that tour. Team and press luggage was moved from place to place as one consignment. Of course both parties, particularly the press, were much smaller in number than they were to become 20 years later. After the Test matches started, we picked up a three-man BBC television news crew, one of whom was permanently shuttling backwards and forwards to either Bombay or Delhi, the only places from which they could send their stories.

  Anyway, the team’s generosity on this occasion brought me no luck and even on the morning of the one-day international in Ahmedabad – my first TMS production abroad – the prospect for communications looked bleak. Although I had found the commentary box on my visit to the ground the day before, it had been utterly barren. As we were dependant on All India Radio for all our technical support, I made contact with them and was told that no equipment would be arriving until the morning.

  To my relief, when I turned up the next day, the box was unrecognisable. Radio engineers bustled about, setting up equipment and, for all that it looked past its best, this was an encouraging sign. I found a telephone in the telegraph office that was set up for the benefit of the press and sent a telex to the BBC sports room to give them the number as a safety measure. (I later discovered that the message actually never got there.)

  Mosey arrived from the hotel and Tony Lewis from the airport, having flown into Bombay overnight, so our commentary team was assembling as planned. Gradually, however, my confidence in the communications started to wane. The game started and still we had made no contact with London. I called out in vain, with the antique headphones pressed to my ears, straining for a response. At long last I heard it: a faint and distant voice calling out, ‘Hello, hello.’

  This was a breakthrough. I called back, excitedly, ‘Hello Bombay! Can you put me through to London, please?’

  The faint voice persisted, ‘Hello, hello.’

  ‘Come on, Bombay,’ I said, ‘We should have been on the air an hour ago.’

  The voice failed to acknowledge me, though continued to call out, to my increasing frustration.

  Now Tony Lewis made his first contribution to the tour, tapping me on the shoulder to indicate the turbaned engineer sitting immediately behind me and calling out, ‘Hello, hello.’

  The message was conveyed to me that we had no line bookings. As I had all the paperwork, I knew this was wrong, but this was the word from the Overseas Communications Service in Bombay. Over subsequent tours of the sub-continent I became used to this as a standard delaying tactic to put the annoying Englishman on the back foot.

  Wednesday 25 November 1981

  Play was well under way and we still had no contact with the outside world, when Tony gave me some excellent advice. He muttered that Henry Blofeld had found that a well-timed outburst of indignation and even rage was sometimes quite effective in these parts.

  Amazingly, it worked. Within seconds of demanding angrily to speak to the man in charge of communications in Bombay, I was actually speaking to London, where Christopher Martin-Jenkins had been filling time manfully, with readings from a series of telexed scores from the BBC’s man in Delhi, Mark Tully.

  As regards the advice about the flash of temper, it’s worth noting that while such tactics are occasionally effective in India, they are thoroughly counter-productive in other places, notably the Caribbean.

  England’s win by five wickets in that first one-day international in 1981 was to be their last in India on that tour. Again it is a measure of the way things have changed that I interviewed the captain, Keith Fletcher, in the dressing room after the game. It was the only remotely peaceful place on the ground. While such an entry was always strictly on the captain’s invitation, it became quite normal on that and my next tour of India.

  As dusk fell on Ahmedabad that November evening in 1981, with a rabble at his dressing room door, Keith Fletcher was a fairly contented man. That would change over the following weeks, but just then we could look forward to the comforts of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, to which we were all bound that night, there to prepare for the first Test Match.

  As a result of my experience in Ahmedabad, my most urgent mission when we arrived in Bombay was to visit the Overseas Communications Service and go through all our line bookings for the tour with them. These were, after all, the people who had claimed that we had no bookings. Disarmingly, they produced all the paperwork we had exchanged via British Tel
ecom. It seemed they were just reluctant to believe it until they had actually seen someone from the BBC. It certainly taught me a valuable lesson for all future tours: to start with this kind of personal contact. While I cannot claim that everything always worked like clockwork thereafter, it did help immeasurably.

  In fact, generally on all my early tours, the first thing to do on arrival anywhere was to make contact with the people who were going to help us get on the air. The problem in some places was identifying the crucial person who was actually going to make it work. In India I would go to the local All India Radio station, there to be introduced to the station manager and his chief engineer, sometimes together, but more usually separately in their offices, in which I would be given a mandatory refreshment – tea in the northern half of the country and coffee in the south, but always syrupy sweet.

  After visiting the OCS in Bombay, I went to the All India Radio station, not far from the Test match ground, the Wankhede Stadium.

  Thursday 26 November 1981

  I found myself ushered into the local commentators’ pre-Test meeting. We sat around the station controller’s office, sipping impossibly sweet tea, until the controller called us to silence.

  ‘Gentlemen, we must not be biased,’ was his only pronouncement. We all nodded sagely at this great wisdom and the meeting broke up.

  I did manage to get a meeting with the chief engineer and some of his staff, but the BBC requirements seemed to baffle them. In particular the need for a telephone for reports at the same time as the commentary was going out was hard to grasp.

  I was reminded of the advice I had received on the flight out, that in India women are much more helpful than men, when I met our allocated engineer, a lady called Veena. She seemed to understand immediately what we needed and took me back to the ground to show me where everything would be tomorrow.

  The cricket on this tour was fairly dire, though on the first day Ian Botham enlivened proceedings by scything through the Indian batting.

  Friday 27 November 1981

  Our glassed-in commentary box gave us little of the noise and atmosphere of the occasion, but with tiered rows of chairs in the back of the box, we found we were acquiring a crowd of our own.

  ‘It’s filling up nicely,’ was Tony Lewis’ comment, as he drew my attention to the massed ranks.

  I thought I ought to make enquiries as to who these people were. The first I asked announced herself as the wife of the Director General of All India Radio. I withdrew.

  India won that low-scoring first Test by 138 runs, thanks to the spin bowling of Dilip Doshi in the first innings and the seam and swing of Kapil Dev and Madan Lal in the second. In a six-Test series, this was to be the only positive result.

  The Test match ended a day and a half early. This had one benefit, in that the BBC, worried about the quality of the microphones we had been furnished with by AIR, had despatched a pair of their own to me. Little did we know when the arrangement was being made, what a rigmarole would ensue.

  To start with, I had to meet our local shipping agent at the hotel on the rest day, an occasion which gained me a nickname that has stuck for a generation.

  Monday 30 November 1981

  I agreed to meet the agent in the hotel foyer and, while I waited for him, a porter came past carrying a board with the name ‘Mr Bartex’ on it. Michael Carey of the Daily Telegraph was keeping me company and, with an eye for a crossword clue, pointed out that this was an anagram of ‘Baxter’. And sure enough, it turned out that it was me he was paging on behalf of the shipping agent.

  The shipping agent is at his wits end. He asked me to supply him with a letter for the customs, to reassure them that the microphones will be re-exported after use, which I did. But later in the day he reported that his efforts had not been successful and they remain in their custody. Things were more confused by the customs’ apparent belief that, like All India Radio, the BBC is a government ministry. It looks as if I shall have to go and see them as soon as the Test Match ends.

  And so it turned out.

  Wednesday 2 December 1981

  I took a taxi to the shipping agent’s small office near the airport. The man himself was fulsome in his apologies for the red tape over which he had no control. He took me to the cargo terminal. I picked up the tone of the place from the sight of a pig leaving the building as I arrived.

  We entered an office where four rows of seats were fully occupied in front of a man at a desk. We went to the front immediately and the nearest members of the crowd, who might have thought they were at the head of the queue, were ushered away with the peremptory order, ‘Wait half an hour.’

  My friend the agent (who never did reveal his name) showed him the shipping order.

  ‘Passport,’ he snapped.

  I showed it.

  ‘Has he a TBRE?’

  My friend looked at me enquiringly – and rather pointlessly, because he had asked me the same question several times earlier and I still had no idea what a TBRE was.

  Not for the first time I asked, ‘What is a TBRE?’

  ‘Downstairs,’ was all the answer I got.

  In another office on the floor below we were issued with a form and I sat in the corridor to fill it in with the agent’s help. He took it away with the instruction, ‘Wait five minutes.’

  As good as his word, he was back half an hour later, brandishing a wodge of paper. ‘We go to customs hall.’

  To get into that we had to call at another office, where the passport and the wodge had to be examined. The paper was thrust back into my hand with the explanation, ‘TBRE!’

  Two yards further on, a man in khaki uniform wanted to see it all again. And then we were in the bonded warehouse. There was an ominous line of eight desks, each manned by an official in white uniform. Happily, we by-passed the first seven desks. The man at the eighth predictably started with, ‘Passport.’ Then, ‘TBRE.’

  ‘Can you tell me what it stands for, please?’

  ‘Tourist Baggage for Re-Export.’

  He stamped the paperwork noisily, but that was not the end of it. We did have to visit each of the other seven desks after all, where the same procedure was gone through. By now, to slow the whole business down, we had to talk cricket at each desk, too.

  At the end of the line I was suddenly presented with the package. To my dismay, I had to go back to desk number one to open it. Two microphones of a type I wasn’t familiar with lay inside, with accompanying attachments.

  ‘What is this?’ said the customs officer, pointing at something that looked like a large screw.

  ‘God knows,’ said I, though I did better with the next piece he chose. ‘Ah, that’s a windshield.’

  The manifest had to be signed and then taken for further stamps all the way down the line of desks again, though the atmosphere was much more friendly. After all, I was becoming an old friend and it appeared that all these people had nothing else on today apart from stamping my paperwork. ‘What do you think of Kapil Dev?’ was the most frequently asked question.

  ‘We still have the register to sign,’ said my friend, when we seemed to have finished. Even that took four desks to complete.

  As we emerged after over three hours in the building, he asked, ‘Why did you ask for them to be sent?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  And with that I was just in time to join my colleagues arriving at the airport for our evening flight to Hyderabad.

  In my early days on these tours, the concept of back-to-back Test matches had not yet surfaced, so between Tests we would usually be in smaller cities for matches against regional teams, which would take place in some interesting venues. The early call on the All India Radio station would be quite a revelation.

  In Hyderabad on this 1981–82 tour, I found the AIR station was in the splendidly appointed former guest
house of the Nizam, the erstwhile princely ruler, immediately across the road from another of his old palaces, which now housed the local government offices. Several years of broadcasters’ occupation had taken some of the lustre off the guest house, but you could get some idea of its previous glory.

  Here I met what we believed to be the world’s first female cricket commentator. She was Chandra Nayudu, daughter of India’s first cricket captain, C. K. Nayudu. She was elegant and softly spoken and contemplating the start of what was only her fourth commentary in five years.

  The next day I found myself invited to sit alongside her in the AIR commentary box to help her with the names of the England fielders.

  Much later in the tour, we were in Indore in the centre of India, where the local AIR station was more prosaic than the Nizam’s guest house. I found that I was expected there.

  Thursday 21 January 1982

  The radio station was a bungalow on the outskirts of the town and at its gates I found the entire staff drawn up for my inspection. I had to pass down the line like visiting royalty inspecting a guard of honour.

  Friday 22 January 1982

  Our day at the Nehru Stadium was enlivened by the quickest century I have ever seen. Ian Botham had made it pretty clear to the press the previous evening that he reckoned playing in these provincial matches (this one was against Central Zone) was a waste of time and warned that he intended to alleviate his boredom with some fireworks. He reached three figures from 48 balls and his whole innings of 122 occupied only 55 balls. It contained seven sixes and quite a few of his sixteen fours fell only just short of the boundary rope.