Chapter 6 Footnotes

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‘He takes some understanding…’

Bannister, Cricket Cauldron, p.201.

Alec Bedser used the same kind of phrasing as Bannister: ‘When Len was younger, he took a bit of understanding … He just kept himself to himself, very private’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.75). Brian Statham thought Hutton was easily the best captain he played under but still concluded, in his 1961 autobiography: ‘He was a difficult man to understand, hence the numbers and outspokenness of his critics. Nobody that I know really understood him’ (Flying Bails, p.118). The excellent collection of interviews and anecdotes in Len Hutton Remembered (pp. 34, 50, 91) contains adjectives such as ‘oracular’ (Mike Brearley), ‘evasive’ (Bob Wyatt), ‘inscrutable’ (Peter May).

‘He was a funny man was Len’: Ray Illingworth means funny peculiar, although Leslie Thomas, who worked with Hutton on his Evening News columns in the 1950s, suspected that what the uninitiated found enigmatic was at bottom mischievous: ‘He did it for the inward fun of it. I never heard him shout or laugh loudly. The joy was almost secret, shared only if you got to know him. Even now, when someone tells a Hutton story, I can see the joke protruding, even if frequently they cannot’ (p.462).  Even though Hutton was generally thought to have mellowed in retirement, Donald Trelford, his editor at The Observer when he was a regular contributor in 1980s, also felt he was ‘a bit of a mystery to himself at times and he enjoyed people’s bafflement about him’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.42).


Cricket is My Life

Cricket is My Life, ghosted by the journalist/poet Thomas Moult, was published in 1949. The title For England and Yorkshire, which would have suited Hutton just as well, had already been taken by Sutcliffe.


‘But I was born in the north, and was a pro…’

Hutton, Fifty Years in Cricket, p.157.


‘exceptional environment’

See Cricket is My Life, p. 25-26: ‘This simple and almost self-contained community, with its shop and its inn, was originally designated a “Christian Republic”. My family had been members for generations, and I attended the Church and Sunday School, to which the cricket ground belonged.’

In his History of the Moravian Church (pp.312-314), J.E. Hutton notes the propensity of English Moravians for self-contained settlements which tended towards ‘isolation’ – and in fact laments that this ‘settlement system’ was ‘the road not to Church extension, but to Church extinction’.  Compare Podmore, pp.136-43.


‘just that caressing “feel” of a cricket bat’

Frank Keating, conducting an Observer interview, says Hutton told him this ‘without a trace of sheepishness’. Compare Howat’s biography, p.8 and Len Hutton Remembered, pp.34-35.


kept a cricket ball in his pocket

Recorded in rough notes titled ‘Captaincy of England’ which Hutton made on NatWest Bank Trophy headed paper (dating them to 1981 or after): ‘Never allowed to play with a ball on Sundays. But always had a ball in my pocket just in case I could find a quiet spot to bowl a few leg breaks’ (MCC Archive, HUTTON/6).


‘big impact’

In an interview with Trelford for BBC television, excerpts from which appear in the Tribute to Len Hutton video: the passage where Hutton says that his Moravian upbringing ‘really and truly’ had a ‘big impact’ occurs about 100 seconds in. However, in print, Hutton tended to talk about this exceptional environment in a typically unexceptional way and forbore any serious analysis of its influence other than to say that the Moravian emphasis on diligence proved ‘a sound precept for later life’ (Fifty Years, p.39).


thrift

According to Howat (p.3), one of Hutton’s maiden aunts made weekly collections for the National Savings Movement for over 50 years.


craft

Until his marriage, Hutton lived in a house his father had built and attended a church his grandfather had built. He inherited a fascination with creating things out of wood and metal and told Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs he was even less keen on being cast away once he knew that the luxury of a set of carpenter’s tools would not be allowed (Howat, pp.169-70).


self-reliance

Richard Hutton interviewed by Chris Waters: ‘He wasn’t a religious person – I think he was fairly agnostic about it – but the Moravian way of life was embedded in him. One of their characteristics is self-reliance and he was extremely self-reliant. He was independently minded; I think that was really the foundation of his character’ (Waters, Fred Trueman, p.127).


‘even when things were going well…’

Dorothy Hutton in an interview with Michael Marshall (Gentlemen and Players, p.159).

Dorothy was an Anglican from Scarborough. Cardus observed that Hutton was also exhibiting a typical Yorkshire trait when ‘sometimes he may have turned thoughtfulness to worry’ (‘Len Hutton: The Master’ in 1956 Wisden, p.94). Hutton uses this passage as a chapter epigraph in Fifty Years in Cricket, p.136.


Hutton’s family did not have the means…

Howat explains that there had been a decline in the fortunes of the family’s building business either side of the war, first because of fixed-price contracts and then because of general economic conditions, so that Hutton’s father Henry sold the business and became a joiner/bricklayer, ‘with something of a struggle to keep up appearances’ (p.3). Leonard is reputed to have played only once in a proper game on the Sunday School pitch in view of his house.


‘there were considerable advantages…’

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.37.

Pudsey had an important geographical position as a ‘buffer state betwixt Leeds and Bradford’ (Hutton’s friend Keith Moss, interviewed by Stephen Chalke, in A Tribute to Len Hutton, about 6 minutes in).  It had a central place in Bradford League cricket as the home of Pudsey St Lawrence (for whom Hutton’s elder brothers all appeared) and Pudsey Britannia. It had a central place in county folklore as the birthplace of the great openers Tunnicliffe and Sutcliffe, who successively held the world record for a first-wicket partnership. Tunnicliffe and Brown put on 554 for the first wicket against Derbyshire at Chesterfield in 1898.  This record was broken by Sutcliffe and Percy Holmes at Ilford in 1932 – or was it? See Chalke’s Five Five Five for an account of the infamous missing no-ball which turned the scoreboard back to 554 by the time Sutcliffe and Holmes were photographed in front of it.

Les Ames, another cricketer to be ‘greatly impressed’ by the Bradford League thought the great line of Tunnicliffe-Sutcliffe-Hutton was ‘surely one of the romances of cricket’ (Close of Play, p.124, p.137).


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‘severe’ early training

Constantine ‘never found more keenness than in the Bradford League’ when he played in it during the Second World War and thought that this breeding-ground was one of the reasons Yorkshire won the Championship with monotonous regularity (Cricket in the Sun, p.115).


Like …Weekes…Hutton was taught to keep both the ball and his feet on the ground

Fifty Years, p.39: ‘If I had suffered from conceit, it would have been rapidly knocked out of me. There was little danger of a boy getting above his station in those days.’

Hutton and Weekes must be high in the lists of Test batsmen with the ratio most runs to least sixes. Weekes claimed to have hit only one, off a Bill Johnstone no-ball, but Stephen Lynch suggests he hit two. And I suspect, although I cannot be absolutely sure, that the only sixes Hutton hit in Test cricket were the two on the 1953/54 tour discussed in Chapters 13 and 16.


prematurely in his opinion

Thomson (Hutton and Washbrook, p.34) says Oldroyd was made ‘most unwillingly redundant’.


‘none too keen’

Fifty Years, p.39.


quick-witted ‘artist’ … slow-scoring ‘labourer’

Kilburn’s History, p.64.


‘Tell him Private Oldroyd proposes to go on sitting in it’

Howat, Cricket’s Second Golden Age, p.37. There are, of course, many stories in the same vein: compare Marshall, Gentleman and Players, p.130.

For all his dourness, Oldroyd must rate as one of the best uncapped players Yorkshire has produced: indeed, he made John Arlott’s best-ever XI of Englishmen who never played in Tests.  Robertson-Glasgow described him as ‘one of those small, tough, humorous militant men who make the comedy and greatness of a country’.  It must be said not many of Oldroyd’s contemporaries found him consciously humorous, although he once wound up Rhodes by signalling sixes in time with the umpire: ‘Don’t stand there grinning like a Cheshire cat!’ (Fifty Years, p.17). Perhaps the last word should be left to Cardus: ‘He bats with an accent’.


Hutton’s ‘true baptism’ in the first team

Cardus, ‘Len Hutton: The Master’ in 1956 Wisden, p.91.

Cardus tells us Hutton got himself out with the shot and leaves Mitchell’s epithet blank, which usually in his writing invites us to interpose the rudest swearword available. In Hutton’s own recounting of the tale (Fifty Years, p.43) he plays and misses and Mitchell says “That’s nae bluddy good”.  Cardus’s account, to quote one of his equivocal admirers C.L.R. James, is ‘perhaps of that highest order of truth which good fiction is’ (Beyond a Boundary, p.79) and catches the spirit of the what he called the Yorkshire professional’s ‘way of living’.  The way in which James transplants the romanticism of Cardus into a West Indian setting has often been remarked (although compare Beyond a Boundary, p.86).


what was of use and what was not

Bowes tells a wonderful anecdote, often repeated, where Emmott Robinson, the quintessential Yorkshire pro, buys him a barometer for his birthday so that he can monitor atmospheric conditions before matches: ‘Be sure that tha makes good use of it’ (Bowes, Express Deliveries, p.155).

The Old Ebor website cites the Sheffield Daily Telegraph (25 April 1930) on the subject of first-innings points: ‘The argument of the players is that it is no use them risking their wickets and going all out for a win if the other team decides to concentrate on the first innings lead.’  Sellers thought coming second in any context was ‘no ruddy use’ (Great Captains, p.98).


‘cricketers from Yorkshire underwent a subtle metamorphosis…’

Kilburn, History, p.45.


2.30 at Thirsk

Hutton tells the tale of first acting as twelfth man to the first team (in 1933) in his foreword to Tony Woodhouse’s History (p.1). The weather was ‘very hot’ for the away game against Leicestershire and drinks were brought forward to 3.15:

Beforehand I was certain Yorkshire cricketers kept their mind on the cricket during the day’s play. This was not so, as I was asked by George Macauley to take out to him on the field at drinks time the winner of the 2.30 at Thirsk. I had never spoken to Mac before, but with the help of Frank Stainton of the Sheffield Telegraph I was able to supply Mac with the required information promptly at 3.15pm.

Hutton’s memory was usually precise, even in nostalgic anecdote, but while contemporary newspapers confirm that England was in the fag-end of a heatwave during the match, on the two days Yorkshire were in the field at Aylestone Road the racing was from Haydock, Kempton and Windsor not Thirsk.


‘a privileged pupil attending an advanced seminar’

Fifty Years, p.24.

Hutton is actually talking here of listening to Bowes and Verity, whom Hirst had brought to the ‘indoor shed’ to test the youngster out, and who would always be very strong influences upon him. But he makes similar comments about making sure to drink in the experiences of all the professionals in the county dressing room.


more varied than the Yorkshire clichés sometimes suggest

Like Cardus, Robertson Glasgow was a skilful enough writer to keep finding material in these clichés, as in his portrait of Mitchell, a batsman whose strokeplay was ‘lost’ as soon as he became part of the Yorkshire machine: ‘Publicans are popularly credited with red faces, bakers are supposed to walk about with flour in their hair; in the same way Arthur Mitchell bears about with him, and will never lose, the marks of his apprenticeship to Yorkshire. It was severe.’ (Crusoe on Cricket, p.154). But, as well as the granite-hard pro embodied in Oldroyd and then Mitchell, there was the more studious type exemplified by Bowes and Verity, the happier warriors in the mould of Hirst such as Maurice Leyland, the court jesters such as Arthur Wood and rather more erratic types such as George McCauley. The brilliantined Sutcliffe, as discussed below, was possibly one of a kind. Yet all of these professionals were rounded enough, complex enough characters to defy neat categorisation: they could all by turns be dour, studious, proud, funny, caring. Kilburn’s loving portrait of ‘Ticker’ Mitchell in Thanks to Cricket (pp.46-49) shows that there was quite a lot going on under the surface.


‘without hindrance’

Fifty Years, p.45.


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‘Gerrup. Tha’s makkin’ an exhibition o’ thisen’

Recounting this ‘classic’ anecdote, Birley (Social History, p.245) says it was made ‘to the young Hutton – or whoever’. He is recognising how, in these canonical Yorkshire anecdotes almost any famous name can be inserted. One thinks of the Yorkshire bowler (sometimes Robertson, sometimes Trueman) telling the jazz-hat he has just bowled ‘’Twas wasted on thee’, or the Yorkshire spinner (usually Rhodes) telling the Oxbridge type who has just hit him for six that ‘We don’t play for fun’. Hutton does not name the slip fielder in his version of the ‘Gerrup’ tale, translated out of dialect (Fifty Years, p.42).  Ellis Robinson is the name I have seen inserted most often although Hutton himself is sometimes placed there.


‘’E makes a lot of fuss and lah-de-dah about it’

Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, p.25.


‘Them’… ‘Us’

Chapter 3 of Uses of Literacy. Some of the things Hoggart records his community saying about ‘people at the top’ sound familiar in a cricketing context: ‘the higher-ups…get yer in the end’, ‘talk posh’, ‘are all twisters really’, ‘never tell yer owt’, ‘will do y’ down if they can’, ‘are all in a click’ (clique), ‘treat y’ like muck’ (p.62).

George Orwell was sceptical about all this: ‘There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness, sort of Northern snobbishness…The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy – at any rate that is the theory’ (Road to Wigan Pier, p.8). But he crossed the Trent only for the purposes of writing a book.


The ‘Them’ against whom Yorkshire…constructed their ‘Us’

‘It is the bugbear of Yorkshiremen’, Alan Gibson once observed, ‘that they always feel they have to behave like Yorkshiremen, or like the fixed belief in what a Yorkshireman should be: tough, ruthless, brave, mean’. Or compare Hoggart (p.109): ‘The mark of a stagey Yorkshireman is his conviction that the height of wit is to be found in the dialectal obiter dicta of the greatest, and always native-born, Yorkshire county cricketers, those who call a spade a ‘bloody shovel’ to prove their directness.’

Gibson was in fact one of the congenital anecdotalists who helped the formation of these fixed beliefs in relation to cricket.  There will always be a debate about how much the myths of Yorkshire cricket were genuinely formed by the close-community environments and how much the communities needed to form the myths. But, from the rich literature, it is possible to suggest a batting-order of Yorkshire qualities (which of course could be taken to excess) and the corresponding Middlesex faults against which they found sharper definition:

YORKSHIRE QUALITY YORKSHIRE EXCESS MIDDLESEX FAULT
County-proud Chauvinistic Cosmopolitan
Self-sufficient Parochial Privileged
Unpretentious Dour Flashy
Fraternal Clannish Snobbish
Gutsy Stubborn Spineless
Hard-working Unaesthetic Dilettante
Thrifty Niggardly Profligate
Straight-talking Abrupt Fancy
Results-focused Unsportsmanlike Uncompetitive

Don Mosey, in his impressionistic survey of Yorkshire cricket history, was recalling his experiences of being teased in southern commentary boxes when he observed ‘there has always been “them” and they have never liked “us”‘. But the reverse was perhaps even more true (We Don’t Play It For Fun, p.5).


Middlesex nearly cancelled fixtures…

The reaction of the Yorkshire amateur Rockley Wilson to Middlesex’s threats to cancel was ‘if you drop us for one year we’ll drop you for fifty’ (Swanton, p.61).

Trueman observed that Yorkshire v Middlesex games were still ‘pointed’ when he began playing in them (Fast Fury, p.142).


‘They were out to beat us, to humble us…’

Beyond a Boundary, p.62.

Compare another Don Mosey observation: ‘The game is run from NW8; its roots go deep into public school and Oxbridge soil. It is difficult, if not impossible, to beat The System other than by asserting superiority on the field of play’ (We Don’t Play It For Fun, p.3).  Mosey adds that Yorkshire were ‘occasionally willing to enlist Lancashire’ for the purposes of ‘sorting out the Effete South’.


‘thirteeen hours of temptation repelled’ … ‘virtuous studentship’

Cricket Country, pp.81-82.

Blunden gives a beautiful account of what he calls ‘this immensely patient and serious yet charming innings’. He makes sure to mention Hardstaff of Notts among the ‘seasoned troops’ who helped Hutton to the record, but his clear implication when describing Hutton as ‘a perfect pupil, sedulous in his instructions’ is that had been brought up in the hard Yorkshire school.  Blunden also seems to recognise that the school of Bradman’s Australians may be harder still: he paints a picture of the ‘formidable’ O’Reilly personifying a spirit ‘decidedly different even from the dales or the hills of Yorkshire’.


‘needle keenness’

Almost whenever Constantine thinks of Yorkshire he uses the word ‘needle’; it is in Cricket in the Sun (p.116), where he talks specifically of ‘needle keenness’, even if, like Blunden, he seems almost to think that the Australians may now be keener: ‘That is the spirit of Yorkshire cricket; and that is the spirit that must meet similar traditions elsewhere before it can be defeated’.

Constantine’s friend James was also convinced that England were ‘immensely strengthened morally’ in 1938 by its Yorkshire contingent (Glasgow Herald, 20 July 1938, quoted in Hogsberg, p.146)


extreme ‘dodges’

A phrase Bowes used of Macauley: ‘He knew all the dodges’ (quoted in Hodgson’s History, p.109).

On the other hand, Hutton was to observe that Ticker Mitchell provided a ‘model’ in that he played the game extremely hard but with ‘unfailing honesty’.


deliberately kicked the ball over the boundary

1939 Wisden: ‘An unusual incident happened during the eighth and last stand, in which Fleetwood-Smith participated. When Brown cut the last ball of an over, intending to run a single Hutton, with the idea of trying to give the less experienced batsman the strike, kicked the ball to the boundary.’  Bill Ferguson refers to this incident by calling Hutton ‘ever the tactician’ (Mr Cricket, p.101)

Because Hutton’s action was deemed intentional, the striker Brown was awarded five runs and kept the strike. Henry Blofeld (2010, p.189) thought that Hutton was never forgiven for this by ‘those who run the show’.


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Compton scored one run

Eddie Paynter, who sat with Compton padded up for hours on end, won his bet of £1 that they would not score 10 between them: see Compton’s End of an Innings, pp.19-20.


‘Len could play the type of innings’

See Reg Hayter’s 2004 interview with Compton and Hutton.

In End of an Innings, Compton remembered one of his (rare) long partnerships with Hutton against West Indies at Lord’s in 1939: ‘Len producing the finest and most attractive shots and showing the style of open cricket which perhaps we did not later see from him sufficiently often’ (p.21).


‘joyless concentration’

From the caption to the photograph of Hutton which Compton included in his 1958 autobiography, End of an Innings. There is a good article by Alan Hill which shows how that book represented a considered attack on Hutton and Bradman for introducing many of the ills of the modern game.


‘natural way of playing’

End of an Innings, p.31.

Compton uses this expression when complaining about Hammond’s instructions on the 1946/47 tour of Australia which, as we shall see, anticipated Hutton’s in the West Indies in 1953/54.


the word ‘Master’ … ‘certain air of age’… ‘always looked young…’

Cardus’s retirement tribute to Compton in the 1958 Wisden, p.79: ‘Yet the word “Master” in all its pontifical use was not applied to him [Compton] but, in his period, reserved for Sir Leonard.  The reason is that Compton’s cricket always looked young, fresh and spontaneous. The resonant term “Master” implies a certain air of age and pompousness, a Mandarin authority and poise’.  ‘Pompousness’ is presumably used in a Latinate way of Hutton’s classical batsmanship, but still feels like the wrong word.

Nevertheless, the contrast between preternaturally old pro and evergreen risk-taker was often drawn. For Alan Mitchell, on tour with New Zealand in 1949, Hutton was ‘the machine, perfect in technique, patient, remorseless – and a trifle slow’ whereas Compton was ‘a bonny battler, a mixture of the orthodox and unorthodox, always cheerful and full of vitality, inclined to take more risks’ (Cricket Companions, p.145). Compare James, Cricket, p.72.


In retirement … insisted they had always been friends

Compton interviewed in Len Hutton Remembered: ‘People always think Len and I didn’t get on – partly, I suppose, because of this rivalry between the North and South. We were actually great friends, particularly after his retirement. He came to live down in the south, near Coombe Hill Gold Club, and we were on the phone about once a week, talking about present-day cricket’ (p.61). He repeated this in several other interviews after Hutton’s death. Compare Fifty Years in Cricket, pp.60-61 for Hutton on Compton, again denying north/south rivalry.

However, an anecdote recorded by Henry Blofeld (Cricket and All That, p.153-54) gives a flavour of that rivalry, which seems to have remained active in their retirement and no doubt coloured the relationship during their playing careers. When they bumped into each other at the Queen’s Hotel in Birmingham, Hutton is reported as saying: ‘You never loved a hard fight in a Test match, Denis, did you?’ He then elaborated: ‘That’s the difference between the southerner and the northerner. Up north cricketers absolutely revel in a fight. They prefer it to a match which lacks high tension.’ Blofeld chivalrously concludes that Hutton was intending a ‘compliment’ to a happy-go-lucky cricketer who was prepared to buckle down.


Both men were professionals…

Whereas Geoffrey Howard thought Hutton ‘will never change so long as he plays cricket’ (Chalke, At the Heart of English Cricket, p.94), Alan Ross thought Compton always seemed ‘quite separable from his profession’ (in his review of Compton’s End of An Innings (1958), collected in Green Fading into Blue, p.181). In a different essay on Compton, which includes another comparison with Hutton, Cardus says he is ‘a man who appears above his particular job and attracts the attention of people who are not intensely interested in his vocation’ (p.67).


‘To Compo, Len … to Len, Compton…’

Insole’s late reminiscence that ‘Len and Dennis never got on’ occurred at a Cricket Society function, recorded by Michael Burns. Brearley is another to say ‘Hutton and Compton never really got on’, although he then immediately recounts an earlier recollection of Insole that they talked all afternoon in a box at Lord’s the month before Hutton died (On Cricket, pp.20-21).

Tom Graveney: ‘I felt as a youngster that it was a definite war between North and South with Denis and Len. If the Northeners could have a go at ‘Compo’, they did, but it wasn’t quite as bad when Len came South. I don’t think the Southerners minded because he was doing a job for England’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.106). Graveney observed elsewhere: ‘Side by side they played for England for nearly twenty years, living contrasts in everything they did – in batting, in attitudes, even in the way they lived’ (Cricket Over Forty, p.121).


(especially in Huddersfield)

Herbert Chapman left Huddersfield, where he won three league titles, to do the same thing at Arsenal. Arsenal beat Huddersfield in the 1930 Cup final (the tradition of the teams coming out together began in that year as a tribute to Chapman).  Dave Russell says of the pride in ‘northern-ness’ which was a feature of inter-war football: ‘Its most frequent manifestation … came in the often intense dislike that many northern supporters had for Arsenal’ (Football and the English, pp.116-17).


Hutton was too sensible a person…

Roy Hattersley: ‘I knew that the war had harmed his career. But it was not until I read the obituaries that I realised how great the damage was. It was a subject he never mentioned. Indeed, when I spoke of it at a cricketers’ dinner, he reminded me that not only cricketers lost six of their prime professional years and came back with half their youth gone’.

When war was declared, Yorkshire had just finished a game in Hove and made a poignant last journey together as a team in a hired charabanc to Leeds. The charabanc, which Hoggart described as the ‘gondola of the working-class’ may have had a particular symbolism given that it was usually reserved for ‘pleasure occasion[s]’ (Uses of Literacy, p.121). Hutton remembered that ride through blacked-out towns on evacuee-choked roads as vividly as his triumphant drives back north from The Oval in 1938 and 1953, and an account of it was read out by his son Richard at his funeral. From the great side of 1939, not only was Verity was mortally wounded in action, but Bowes spent three years as a prisoner of war and Yardley nearly a year in hospital (recovering from wounds incurred in the same Italian campaign where Verity fell). Macauley, who sent Hutton on the errand for the winner at Thirsk in 1933, retired in 1935 but continued to play club cricket until 1939.  He died of pneumonia in 1940 on active service as an RAF pilot officer.

We may also recall that one of several Yorkshire CCC casualties in the Great War was from Hutton’s home village. The fine all-rounder Major Booth – the Major is a Christian name not a title – fell on the Somme fighting for the West Yorkshire Regiment in 1916; Abe Waddington, whom Hutton took on his last tour of Australia as a lucky mascot, was wounded in the same attack and held Booth in his arms in his last moments in a shell-hole. For a more general analysis of Yorkshire cricket in and around the Great War, see Jeremy Lonsdale: A Game Sustained (2019).


last day of training for the Dieppe raid

While it seems uncontested that Hutton’s training course was for Dieppe, I have not been able to establish whether he was really earmarked to go on it or taking part in the training to boost morale (he is sometimes described as a ‘PE instructor’ in accounts of his war service). Sandford (p.290) quotes Hutton wanting to be ‘in the heart of it’ as a soldier and being disappointed to find himself ‘sitting around with gloomy types drinking tea’.


‘it was a fact of my life…’

Fifty Years, p.59.

Even Hutton, usually the least theatrical of men, described the two years spent in and out of hospital trying to fix an arm that had to go in and out of plaster twelve times as the ‘darkest passage’ of his life (Fifty Years, p.30). He had to come to terms with the possibility he would never play cricket again. His biographers often point to the gravity of the situation by pointing out that his surgeon, Reginald Broomhead of Leeds, was awarded honorary life membership of Yorkshire (Howat, p.53). It is characteristic that Hutton himself indicates the severity of the injury by pointing to the ‘50 per cent disability pension’ he received from the army (Fifty Years, p.30), but he also discusses his injury in more emotional terms. The dark days of the rehabilitation coincided with the birth of his first son Richard, yet his arm was initially too weak to hold him (p.49; Tribute to Len Hutton, 26 minutes in). And few things make a craftsman more likely to let out a sigh of distress than damage to an essential piece of toolkit: ‘If only my right arm had been broken instead of the left!’ (Just My Story, p.110). We will return to the technical aspects of his injury in Chapter 17.


nagging ache in his foreshortened arm

‘My arm aches a bit, Freddie’. One always worries about relying on Trueman as a witness but this is what he says Hutton told him at The Oval in 1951 before getting out a Harrow-sized bat (one down from full-size): ‘And he went out and scored 151 with it’.  Although Trueman does not say so, the venue and the score place the anecdote at the moment of Hutton’s century of centuries (Len Hutton Remembered, p. 161). Hutton had always been attached to Harrow bats since Sutcliffe picked one out for him personally at his sports shop. Some obituarists seem to assume that Hutton used a Harrow all the time after the war, but Statham says he carried one in his bag and used it only when his arm was particularly sore.

Ted Lester thought Hutton played ‘a lot of half-cock’ after his injury (Len Hutton Remembered, p. 139). By this Lester meant specifically that he tended to play only half-forward in defence because of his shortened arm but the phrase stands as a useful shorthand for Hutton’s revised approach in general.


nagging fear of being put ‘out of business for good’

Fifty Years, p.49. [I have silently elided a pronoun in this phrase.]


PAGE 85

‘It must have hurt. From that moment I knew we had a chance.’

This is a tale Hutton clearly enjoyed and those who remember him telling it include his son Richard (Tribute to Len Hutton, 54 minutes in) and Mike Brearley (1995, pp.95-96; 2018, p.17). Compare Ted Dexter on his description of Headley being hit by Trueman, an incident we will examine in Chapter 8: ‘Hutton almost feels the ball on his own body. Fast bowling was never far away from Hutton’s thoughts’ (From Bradman to Boycott, p.91).

This is borne out by Hutton’s pained references to the stigmata of the opening batsman: ‘I still have a winter ache in my right-hand index finger to remind me of the ball I received from Johnson, the West Indian fast bowler’ (MCC Archive, HUTTON/TEMP 12, pp.6-7); ‘Voce gave me such a smack on my leg that I still wince at the memory’ (Fifty Years, p. 41); ‘In 1937 [Gubby Allen] struck me on my left thigh with a ball which came back like lightning “down the hill” and even today when the weather is damp and cold there is pain on the precise spot where I was hit’ (p.168). In Chapter 4, we saw him remembering the bruise inflicted by Tyson at Redcar.

Perhaps we can trace the moment Hutton’s discomfort against pace to his being knocked unconscious on the 1938/39 tour of South Africa, off the third ball he received from him in the provincial game against Wanderers before the first Test: ‘Hutton was not only knocked out but the ball rolled from his head onto the stumps, and he was carried off the field and rushed to hospital’ (Lazenby, Edging Towards Darkness, p.78)


decapitation strategy

A phrase often attributed to Steve Waugh: see Leigh and Woodhouse, Cricket Lexicon, p.80.


‘the stiffest examination of any batsman in the history of the game’

Cowdrey, interviewed in Len Hutton Remembered, p.86.

Compare Kilburn’s interview in the same book, p.122 and Fingleton, Masters of Cricket, pp.234-35: ‘nobody in cricket had more bumpers flung at him’. Hutton himself thought he ‘probably had more practice against the really quick stuff than any batsmen in Test cricket’ (Fifty Years, p.112).


‘he took some hammer’

Wilson, interviewed in Len Hutton Remembered, p.142: ‘The Australians aren’t the politest people in the world by any means, and when they were on top they would let him see they were on top’.


‘grim time’ … ‘in hospital’

Hutton certainly remembered bouncers were ‘ten a penny’ in that series. See Fifty Years, p.49: ‘Just before the fourth Test in Adelaide in 1947, a retired test cricketer [possibly Bowes] said to me: ‘Len, they’re trying to put you in hospital’.  He did end up there, ‘but not for very long’, after hooking into his face in the New South Wales game. ‘It seemed to me,’ remembered Hammond, ‘that Len had to face more bumpers than the rest of us put together’ (quoted in Foot, p.129).

It should also be noted Hutton came into the series with a badly damaged right index finger (Fingleton, Brown and Company, p.35).


legendary cameo

The tale that Hutton went on the attack after Bowes had passed on reports ‘that tha’s afeard of them’ is told by Cardus, so may not be entirely reliable (others seem to date this exchange to the eve of the fourth Test). Cardus says of the twenty-minute innings itself that Hutton scored ‘only 37 but so dazzling in clean diamond-cut strokes that old men present babbled of Victor Trumper’ (Cricket All The Year, p.65). For A.G. Moyes, ‘the Hutton who scintillated that day was one of the masters, a man who had removed the dungarees he wore at the Oval and arrayed himself again in flannels’ (A Century of Cricketers, p.206). Washbrook remembered ‘some of the best 37 runs that I’ve ever seen…a magnificent short innings’; Bedser agreed it was a ‘fine innings’ but added: ‘I don’t know why he did it in the context of the game. He got out, that’s how I looked at it’ (Len Hutton Remembered, pp.57-58, p.81). The context of the game was that England were over 400 behind on first innings. It should also be noted Lindwall was injured and did not play in the second Test.


‘tried to take the Aussie bowling by the scruff of the neck and failed’

Hutton, in a short article entitled ‘Wearing on the nerves’, Observer, 9 August 1981, p.16.


uncharacteristic at best…

Hutton had scored two half-centuries in the MCC game against Australia. He missed the Test trial but went into the series on the back of several hundreds in county cricket. He registered 74 in the second innings of the first Test in a brave partnership with Compton. He made a good start to the Second at Lord’s in the field (taking three catches in the leg-trap, including Bradman for the fourth time in five first-class innings).

There is some debate as to whether Hutton backed away more in the first innings than the second innings but even Kilburn rated it ‘the most disappointing personal display of his career’ and another loyal supporter, Kitchin, described his second knock as ‘mysterious’. A young Charles Williams remembered Hutton looking ‘pale and distracted’ in 1948 (Gentlemen v Players, p.42). Hutton assumed the Committee dropped him ‘out of concern for my health’ as ‘the omission could hardly be based on comparative form’ (Cricket is My Life, p.222).  Warner supported this view in The Cricketer, although even some Hutton loyalists like Thomson came to think that dropping Hutton for one game may have had a good psychological effect.


vulgar and ‘yellow’

Just as patrician administrators had a fetish for classical off-side play, they tended to have an allergic reaction to anyone ‘yellow’ enough to back away from fast bowling. Hutton’s treatment echoes the way Percy Holmes was allegedly blackballed from the England side because the chairman of selectors Harry Foster thought he saw him backing away to leg against Macdonald in 1921 (Chalke, Five Five Five, p.23).


Although Hutton was recalled after one game…

After Emmett was exposed by Lindwall, Hutton was recalled for the fourth Test at Headingley, scoring 81 and 57 in two century partnerships with Washbrook.


‘I never saw Len flinch again for the rest of his career’

Swanton in private conversation with Gibson, recounted both in Cricket Captains, p.189 and Growing Up With Cricket, p.155.


He remained ‘hurt’…

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.151.


PAGE 86

Tom Goddard’s bowling figures were 32-3-186-0

Recollecting the 1948 Gloucestershire v Australians match nearly sixty years later, Graveney strongly implies that Goddard was deliberately targeted. Rain eventually scuppered England’s chances to force a win at Old Trafford but captain Yardley says he badly ‘missed spin bowling of the native Yorkshire style’ in that Test – and, with Verity fallen, he names Goddard as the alternative (Cricket Campaigns, p.171).  Les Ames thought that, if Goddard had played in the next Test at Headingley, England would not have lost (Close of Play, p.93).

Goddard was very much at the veteran stage but topped the first-class averages in 1947 and 1949. See Bradman’s War for Lindwall bowling only one bouncer to Emmett in the county game, noting his discomfort and then dismissing him with a snorter in the Test. On the other hand, that book also records Goddard being ‘disillusioned’ when an Australian told him they had not been instructed to hit him out of the firing line, and that ‘things were merely taking their natural course’ (p.222).


made way for Crapp

Jack Crapp scored a hundred in the county game and played in the last three Tests, putting up a brave show in the first innings at Old Trafford. But he is best remembered in that series for dropping slip catches offered by Bradman on the last day at Headingley when Australia scored 404 to win the game. In fairness, they sound pretty hard: ‘I might have been caught twice in the slips – once by an acrobat and once from a fairly difficult chance’ (Bradman, Farewell, p.204)


‘riot squads out in the West Riding’

Thomson, Hutton and Washbrook, p.95.

Those with less of a Yorkshire axe to grind also remembered Hutton’s omission as ‘damn nearly a decision of Cabinet size’ (Graveney, Heart of Cricket, p.12) which ‘very nearly caused civil war in England’ (Gordon Ross, Testing Years, p.59).


‘personally affronted’

Hattersley, ‘Len Hutton and Me’, Observer, 6 July 2003.

Alan Gibson says his ‘indignation knew no bounds’ at the time – ‘Dirty work by Lord’s again!’ – even if he came to see the rationale that Hutton had been dropped pour encourager les autres (Growing Up With Cricket, p.155; compare Captains, p.189 where Gibson admits to being so ‘deeply upset’ that he wrote indignant letters to Warner and Swanton).

David Nobbs, later to create The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, was a southerner but had adopted Hutton as his hero despite most of his classmates preferring Compton and Edrich: ‘I didn’t hate Emmett – it wasn’t his fault – but how I hated those selectors’ (Stern [ed.], My Favourite Cricketer, p.86).


‘Tha couldn’t pick a fine day’

Holmes tells the story against himself in his autobiography (Flanelled Foolishness, pp.174-75). We shall return to this incident in Chapter 18.


He remained ‘hurt’…

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.151.


The Australian writer Malcolm Knox has even surmised…

Bradman’s War, pp.228-30: ‘Was Bradman acting, sub rosa, as a fifth selector?’

Perhaps Kilburn was alluding to this theory when he says the selectors were ‘induced’ to drop Hutton (Thanks to Cricket, p.88). Allen Synge is another to suggest that ‘we can possibly trace’ Robins’ hand in the decision to drop Hutton (Sins of Omission, p.108)

Simon Wilde also points out that Allen attended ‘all’ the 1948 selection meetings ‘in a non-voting advisory role’ (England, p.278).


‘a man battered by cricket’

Arlott, The Echoing Green, p.148. Hutton used this passage as a chapter epigraph in Fifty Years (p.81).


PAGE 87

‘the penalty of greatness is its enchainment’

Kilburn’s 1956 retirement tribute, originally written for The Cricketer.


‘badly hurt’

Kilburn, interviewed in Len Hutton Remembered, p.130.


‘the popularity stakes’

Fifty Years of Cricket, p.60.

However, in this mellow, retrospective account Hutton insists he could see why Compton was a ‘highly attractive prospect as a future Test captain leading England into a new and glittering era. Everyone warmed to his style and zest’.  He also insists: ‘I never saw our situation as Compton v, Hutton, or in the light of North v. South with the honour of the vice-captaincy going to a privileged “man of Lord’s”’.  Rather he made the ‘reasonable assumption’ that the bluff Brown was looking for a personality ‘as close to his own as he could find’.

But Trueman certainly read the appointment in the context of the ‘great rivalry between Yorkshire and Middlesex’, noting that when he began playing in these games there was ‘back-biting’ and ‘jealousy’ between Compton and Hutton. Trueman noted that Mann had usurped Yardley as England captain at home in 1949 before making himself unavailable for the Ashes tour eventually led by Brown: ‘Then they made Denis Compton vice-captain above Leonard. Denis Compton, great player that he was, didn’t have a cricket brain; knew nothing about the game at all’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.165). Alan Gibson also noted that the view ‘the wrong professional had been made vice-captain’ was held ‘with particular vigour’ in Yorkshire – and for that matter in Warwickshire where, as we shall see, Tom Dollery was doing a fine job as county skipper (Cricket Captains, p.182).


‘I felt the car slow down…’

Kilburn, interviewed in Len Hutton Remembered, p.130.

In Thanks to Cricket, Kilburn twice implies that Hutton seriously considered withdrawing from Brown’s tour: ‘How nearly there was need for late revision after the startling announcement on vice-captaincy, against logic and seniority, only Hutton can know’. Kilburn also allowed himself a barbed reference to Brown’s style of leadership: ‘Though the earnestness of endeavor might have been beyond reproach the display of cricketing commonsense most certainly was not’ (pp.60-61).

For his part, Compton – who also heard the news of his appointment on the radio – was initially astonished, then delighted and then began ‘wondering how Len Hutton and Cyril Washbrook would react’ (End of an Innings, p.69).

Woodcock’s recollection of the outward journey in 1950/51 suggests Hutton may have been in the habit of retiring to their cabin earlier than Compton: ‘While others aboard ship enjoyed all the fun of the voyage, Len conserved his mental and physical energies for the battles ahead. He had a succession of appointments to keep with Messrs Miller and Lindwall. He would appear for a gentle game of deck quoits, dine modestly, dance the obligatory foxtrot and take himself off to rest’ (quoted in Times, 20 July 2021).


Judged on simple numbers…

Compton’s Middlesex teammate John Warr once waggishly suggested that his friend’s specialised subject, if he were ever to appear on Mastermind, should be: ‘My great Test innings on the Australian tour of 1950-51’ (Quick Singles, p.90).

Hutton’s average was arguably artificially high because Brown put him in the middle order in the early Tests and he was not out four times in the series. Compton was struggling with his knee and had a run of bad luck in the Tests (he scored heavily in the other games).


Judged on tactical contribution…

Fingleton was one of many to notice that in the Tests Brown ‘often conferred with Hutton, the hard-thinking Yorkshireman’ (Brown and Company, p.76).

In his retirement memoirs, which settle several scores, Compton says of his experience in the New South Wales game: ‘I was very far from happy about the negative attitude which Len Hutton seemed to adopt towards me as captain’ (End of an Innings, p.82). Trueman was told that when Compton asked Hutton for advice, Hutton told him to send a telegram for more bowlers and walked away: ‘That’s what he was like when he was overlooked by the authorities’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.167). In an earlier game against Victoria, Fingleton formed the opinion that ‘the greatest obstacle to a professional captaining England in a Test would come from the professionals themselves’ – ‘I didn’t envy Compton his job for a moment. He got very little support this day’ (p.54).


Compton picked up a black eye at a Christmas party

This was rather improbably explained by a collision with a garden tap, a story Compton stuck to in End of an Innings, p.79.


‘conducted himself particularly well’

Richard Hutton, interviewed by Stephen Chalke in the Tribute to Len Hutton video, about 45 minutes in.


PAGE 88

‘instinctively pro-traditional’ … ‘I think he enjoys being accepted…’

Letter from Jack Davies to Gerald Howat, 27 April 1987 (in the Howat archive now held by MCC). While Davies suggested that the ‘enigmatic’ Hutton was ‘probably a good deal more reflective and penetrating than he seems’, Davies did not think his character ‘provokes speculation in the way that Plum’s did’.


contemplative ‘stillness’

J.E. Hutton, A History of the Moravian Church, pp.296, 305.  Compare Podmore 1998, pp.59-65, 67-69.


‘to be relaxed enough to be able to concentrate’

Richard Hutton, interviewed by Stephen Chalke in A Tribute to Len Hutton, 41-43 minutes in.  The same video carries an excerpt from the Trelford television interview where Len Hutton says he found it much harder to relax than to concentrate.


‘calm, worried, wise man’

Arlott, in a 1987 Wisden Cricket Monthly article.


the profane over-exuberance which seemed to put Lord’s off…

As already discussed in the footnotes to Chapter 4, the two great county captains who book-ended Hutton’s career, Sellers and Surridge, were probably not quite good enough players to be considered for the England captaincy at home and probably had too many business interests to be available for tours abroad, when MCC would countenance much poorer cricketers as captain to preserve the amateur principle (Nigel Howard in India in 1951/52 being a classic example).  But perhaps another factor was that they had a reputation for – as the euphemisms had it – straight-talking and not suffering fools gladly.  Warner will also have remembered his experiences with A.W. Carr, whom he usurped with Percy Chapman in 1926, and indeed even with Chapman himself, who became more foul-mouthed as his drinking problem worsened.

On the other hand, Brian Close remembered being given a ‘rollicking’ by Hutton when he failed to read Jack Iverson’s googly at Sydney on Brown’s tour: ‘It was only three words and you can guess what they were’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.173).


the chapel and the public house

I hope it is not too pat to set up this opposition, which put another way boils down to the opposition between the temperate and the profane which was certainly a feature of the community my parents came from in the West Midlands, and which I could still see vestiges of when I lived in Hull in the 1980s. There is a research project, for those qualified, on the range of non-conformist influences on Yorkshire professional cricket.  A.A. Thomson’s now almost forgotten novel, The Exquisite Burden, comes close to encapsulating the affinities between non-conformist religion and cricket:

He could not remember a time when he had not been in love with cricket, or when the clack of ball on bat had not filled him with a kind of ecstacy. It thrilled him in exactly the same way that the more dramatic Bible stories always thrilled him, opening windows on a world of sunlight and green grass; a world of combat and knightly endeavour; a golden world rich with trembling beauty and the joy of life’ (p.124).

An even more difficult area is the influence of freemasonry: I believe Sutcliffe, Verity, Yardley and Hutton were among the many Yorkshire cricketers who were masons. As Eric Midwinter notes, masonic lodges were ‘very far removed from the friendly societies associated with the working classes’ (Class Peace, p.105).


‘ideal coach’ in George Hirst

Hutton, Cricket is My Life, p.21.


‘all Yorkshire’s strength and more than Yorkshire’s grace’

Thomson, Hutton and Washbrook, p.31.

None of us are perfect – ‘he had a thing about wasting electricity’ (Chalke, Summer of Plenty, p.36) – but few better men have played or taught cricket than George Herbert Hirst. The view from above (Pelham Warner): he was ‘the ideal cricketer, so straight, so strong, so honest’.  The view from the media (Jim Kilburn): he was ‘happy, earnest and unselfconscious’. The view from below (Len Hutton): he was ‘generous, cheerful and kind’.  It is somehow fitting that Hirst’s personal records of 1906 will almost certainly never be broken.


‘the nicest, kindest man in the world’

Swanton, Gubby Allen, p.37.


his true ‘headmaster’ at Rugby

Warner, Between Two Wars, p.217.


PAGE 89

Robins was coached by Albert Knight

Rendell, Walter Robins, pp.13-14.


‘the value of authority’

Hutton, Fifty Years in Cricket, p.45.


On his Test debut in 1937…

Fifty Years in Cricket.


‘easier approach to captaincy…’

Just My Story, p.13.

This echoes a mantra one sees countless times in conservative cricket journalism of the post-war period. Swanton’s endorsement of Brown after the Gentlemen v Players game of 1949 being typical: ‘Brown’s runs were the product of a style of play which is essentially that of a cricketer not under the restraints and the taboos of one who plays the game for a living’ (quoted by Fingleton, p.24) Although ‘taboos’ is quite nice there.


initially ‘terrified’

Gibson writes that when Hutton began to emerge as a new opening partner for Sutcliffe, ‘there was a feeling of post hoc ergo propter hoc, although I do not suppose they put it quite that way in Pudsey’.  However, he got the impression that ‘in later years, Hutton did not seem all that pleased that he was assumed so readily to be Sutcliffe’s child’ and this was why the influence of Hirst was over-emphasised (Growing Up With Cricket, pp.146-7). I am not quite sure this is supported, at least on the written evidence or on the evidence of Hutton’s early dress-sense, which was much more Sutcliffe than Hirst. In Fifty Years of Cricket, Hutton names Sutcliffe, Hirst, Bowes and Verity as his mentors – this may be in the order he encountered them but he seems to give them equal weight (p.15). He probably received more kindness from the last three but none of them were primarily batsmen like Sutcliffe: ‘He was an extraordinary man, a great Yorkshireman and patriot…I owed a lot to his promptings and wisdom’ (p.21). Hutton is also reported as saying that he looked up to Sutcliffe ‘with the reverence that a pious Roman Catholic has for the Pope’; Kilburn believed ‘his great model and idol in a business and social sense was Herbert Sutcliffe’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.25, p.131).

While Hutton felt their batting styles and characters were ‘different’, they still had much in common: both were carpenters by training, both had a set of formidable maiden aunts who were their greatest supporters, both made shrewd business capital out of their celebrity by running sports-equipment shops. And while both were fiercely proud of their community, both were ultimately trying to climb out of it: they altered their accents, Sutcliffe more strenuously than Hutton, and – as noted shortly in the body of the book – sent their children to private schools.


‘make your manners and bearing better than those of the amateurs’

Quoted by Stephen Chalke in a good short essay on Sutcliffe.

C.L.R. James (Cricket, p.72) described Sutcliffe as ‘the most aristocratic of modern batsmen’.


‘His flourishing rebukes to anyone…’

Kitchen, Len Hutton, p.23.

Compare Kilburn, in a Wisden obituary: ‘By his refusal to depreciate his own value he raised the status of his profession’.


an artisan shop-steward

Eric Midwinter would disagree with my emphasis. Citing the story where Sutcliffe insisted Bowes wore his Yorkshire blazer at lunch, he argues that Sutcliffe’s aim ‘was not to make a proud trade with a craft guild character like an engineers’ or electricians’ union. His aim was to make cricket a profession in the style of teaching or medicine or law’ (Class Peace, p.103). There was indisputably that element in Sutcliffe, but I think he took at least equal pride in regional and professional traditions. He would have remembered the new type of professional whom Ric Sissons has suggested emerged in the 1890s: ‘They were respectable men who took a pride in their appearance and provided the rest of the working class with role models worthy of aspiration’ (1988, p.171).


in an extremely complicated affair of 1927

For the best account, see the Old Ebor website.


PAGE 90

Hammond had been coached by the Pudseyite John Tunnicliffe

For a year at Clifton College. Hammond was not a pupil – he left boarding school in Cirencester at 16 – but was sent there by Gloucestershire to be Tunnicliffe’s notional assistant coach and to hone his game under the eye of ‘Long John’. Foot’s biography says Tunnicliffe ‘was, as Hammond admitted more than once, the best coach he ever had’ – we may also note that they were two of the greatest slip-catchers of all time. In Cricket My Destiny, while he says he ‘learned an enormous lot’ and that Tunnicliffe was ‘a generous and tireless tutor always’, Hammond actually had an ambivalent memory of his influence, feeling that it was too repressive: ‘Scoring shots that score every time should not be “coached out” in an attempt at theoretical brilliance of stance or style’ (pp.14-15).

Certainly, according to Yorkshire folklore, Tunniclife became the ‘Rock of the Gibraltar’ (Yardley, Cricket Campaigns, p. 115) because he ‘deliberately sublimated himself and his own instincts to the requirements of his career and the team’ (Hodgson, p.61).  Hodgson argues Tunnicliffe’s ‘cloak of care and austerity’ (p.62) was donned because his early reputation as a hitter for Britannia was not to the taste of county coaches. Compare Kilburn: ‘As a young batsman his inclination was to hit the ball as hard and as often as possible, but he found, at county level, that unrestrained adventure was unprofitable and he became predominantly defensive in outlook and method’ (p.33). And Thomson: ‘As a batsman Tunnicliffe was conditioned to sobriety, but could hit the ball hard, as they say in Pudsey, if nobody was looking’ (p.29).


‘much in common’ … ‘aura of superiority’

Hutton, Fifty Years of Cricket, p.58. Sutcliffe, who described Hammond as ‘our greatest batsman’ (For England and Yorkshire, p.97), was an usher at his first wedding in Bingley (Foot, Hammond, p.187).


‘He was like a man planing a piece of wood…’

Hutton, quoted in Howat’s biography, p.170


Warner had always been ‘potty’ about Hammond’s classical style…

David Foot, Hammond, p.109, reporting a comment of the admittedly biased Wyatt.

Warner’s sponsorship of Hammond’s captaincy soured his relations not only with Wyatt but with Allen and Robins. See Howat, Plum Warner, pp.163-64; Swanton, Gubby Allen, pp.211-12; Rendell, Walter Robins, p.78.

Although Wilde (p.57) says that Hammond’s captaincy elicited ‘praise’ from Hawke, there is another tale that Hawke handed in his tickets for the Lord’s Test match in protest. Constantine seems to be alluding to this when he refers to a titled cricket patron ‘making a most unpleasant and public gesture’ when an ex-professional was asked to captain England (Cricket in the Sun, p.88).


encouraged him to accept a directorship…

Midwinter makes the following comment on Hammond’s gentrification: ‘The whole strategy had obviously been vetted, approved and perhaps even instigated by some of the cricketing authorities. They preferred to switch the class of the man rather than offend the code of the class’ (Class Peace, p.104).  Horace Hazell put it more bluntly: ‘Wally had been a pro until he decided to become a toff’ (reported by David Foot, p.227).


‘I have never felt grimmer in my life’

Hammond, Cricket My Destiny, p.141.

Hammond will also have had grim memories of the previous two Ashes Tests at The Oval, also timeless because the series had not been decided.  On both occasions, England were crushed into the dust by Bradman double-centuries. In 1930, Australia won by an innings and 39 runs (Bradman 232) to win the series 2-1. In 1934, the same series result was achieved by an Oval victory of 562 runs (Bradman 244, sharing a world-record partnership of 451 with Ponsford). Always a reluctant bowler, Hammond had to get through 42 overs and 19 overs respectively (Wyatt was England captain on both occasions).


grind the Don down

Hammond himself had very mixed feelings about ‘direct attack’ bowling but he did have Farnes and Bowes at his disposal and they got much more out of Bosser Martin’s pitch than Australia, who had no fit fast bowlers. Bradman, clearly still rather irritated by the whole experience when he looked back on 1938 after his own retirement, suggests another theory for Hammond’s approach: ‘In some quarters it was said that the Englishman were playing the Australians at their own game. In others that they were out to kill once and for all Test matches played to a finish, because England preferred matches of a limited duration…’ (Farewell to Cricket, p.116).

Hutton was quoted by David Foot as saying: ‘I have a feeling somehow that neither Don nor Walter liked each other very much’ – he was sure Hammond’s determination to get himself to 336 against New Zealand was a calculated response to Bradman’s 334. Hutton also observed of the 1946-47 series, shortly to be discussed in the book: ‘There was this feeling, this rivalry between the two captains. Neither was going to give the other anything at all. You’ve got to give a little bit who you are captain of England, and you hope the opposing captain will do the same’ (p.149). Stollmeyer may have been surprised to read the last sentence. Compare Graveney, Cricket Over Forty, p.93.


instructions to ‘cool it’

Fifty Years, p.24. Hutton tells the story again in the interview with Hayter.


‘practically wanted a doctor’s certificate’

Swanton, Sort of a Cricket Person, p.97.


‘that supreme act of cricket Fabianism’

Tribute to Hutton’ by V.G.J. Jenkins, on the occasion of his benefit year, 1950 Wisden.

James remarked he ‘never had so painful an experience at any cricket match’ seeing Hutton inch to the record (Beyond a Boundary, p.188). James clearly means he was bored stiff not gripped by the tension. Howard Marshall was another correspondent to find the Oval Test a ‘trial of endurance’ (Lazenby, p.31). Swanton spoke of England’s ‘Cyclopian sense of chivalry’ in 1938 (Last Over, p.45). Blunden, less critical, noted that Hammond’s tactics were thought somehow ‘illegal of discreditable’ by the more romantic followers of the game (Cricket Country, p.82).

Hutton took twice the time Bradman did to get to 334. His 364 is still the longest Test innings measured by the number of balls faced (847).

Frank Keating had a bit of fun with all this when he once overheard Hutton reminiscing at a Headingley Test: ‘At one point the doughty old opener was explaining to a young lady how 52 years ago he had sat over there, just to the left of the scoreboard, when he was 14 and seen another cricketing knight get 300 in one day.  ‘And,’ he added, ‘eight years later that same Don Bradman was to watch me score my 364.’ Inquired the girl innocently: ‘In one day?” “Er, no,” said Len, looking sheepish as his middle-stump cartwheeled.’ (Guardian, 28 August 1982, p.24).


‘aloof and Olympian’

Fifty Years, pp.56-57.


PAGE 91

Hutton… thought Compton and Edrich should have been sent home…

Wilde, England, p.225.


‘do so only as a professional’

Just My Story, p. 15.

According to Simon Wilde, ‘when it came to it, Wyatt was sent as emissary to Hutton and suggested he might follow Hammond’s example and turn amateur’ (England, p.250).


‘a matter of principle’

Just My Story, p 57.


‘serve cricket and the professional cricketer’

Just My Story, p.15.


Trueman opined…; Bedser thought…

Len Hutton Remembered, p.167; p.83.


‘prevailing system’

Len Hutton Remembered, p.84; Fifty Years of Cricket, p.57.

He is actually talking about the system which forced Hammond to turn amateur but the point holds in 1953. A late John Woodcock article makes the same sort of point: ‘The break with tradition, when it came, was, I think, something that gave Hutton an extra incentive at the same time as a conceivable hang-up, although he would never, of course, have said so’ (Times, 28 February 2017).


‘the British prejudice that is was right and proper…’

News Chronicle, 7 July 1953, p.4 – in its serialisation of Geoffrey Murray’s biography of Tensing.


PAGE 92

his personal suggestion

Fifty Years, p.64.


Gubby Allen sometimes credited

In his biography, Swanton says one of Allen’s first successes was to ‘suggest and steer through’ this measure, saying that ‘the idea had come to him as a result of a talk with Len Hutton in the West Indies’ (p.244). Michael Down states ‘the move was, in fact, instigated by G.O. Allen’ (p.73). Geoffrey Moorhouse (Lord’s, p.53) is another to assert Allen was responsible for offering honorary membership to professionals, ‘unquestionably the most inspired mark’ he left on MCC.

In fairness to Allen, he does acknowledge Hutton’s role in an unqualified way in conversation with Michael Marshall.


Frank Woolley subjected to the indignity

Fifty Years of Cricket, p.56.


Howard was asked not to wear his MCC tie

Chalke, At the Heart of English Cricket, p.85.


The county deigned to return his capital…

Hutton, Fifty Years, p.153; Howat, Len Hutton, p.87.

I may be taking a slight liberty here, without full information, as Hutton got back the two-thirds of his capital originally withheld, and Yorkshire seem to have simply invested most of it in government bonds. There may also have been tax advantages to their investment approach.  But the point holds that there was a significant loss in ‘real’, inflation-adjusted, terms and that Hutton, who developed in interest in equity investing, would have done a much better job managing the money himself.

For a brief summary of ‘Benefit Paternalism’, see Sissons 1988, pp.138-40.


Like Sutcliffe, Hutton ran a successful sports shop…

It certainly should be recognised, against the general grain of my argument that most British professional sportsman were still treated as if they were in service not in employment, that in the inter-war years it was already possible for ‘stars’ to supplement their income materially through their outside interests. Hobbs had set the trend in cricket for the re-investment of benefit proceeds into a sports shop, which Arlott thought was a ‘major step in the elevation of the professional cricketer’ (quoted in Sissons, p.214). Midwinter estimates that Hobbs’ annual earnings were £1,500 per annum, compared to £1,000 for a GP in that era (Class Peace, p.97). But it is still generally true that the only way cricketers could get a fairer share of gate receipts was to move to the leagues (there was no such opportunity, outside of unofficial boot money, for professional footballers in the era of the maximum wage).


‘fine lads’ … ‘as well behaved as those of the old Public schools…’

Gibbs, The New Elizabethans, pp. 44-46.

These attitudes, at least among the privately educated, were traditional. J.M. Mangan provides many examples in his book on the Victorian/Edwardian ‘educational ideology’ (it should be added in fairness that he is not on the look-out for less ideological attitudes). For example, a Headmasters’ Conference of 1923 noted that working-class boys could have the same ‘mental capacity’ as public schoolboys but ‘they have not got the same sense of playing the game and working for the need of all’ (1981, p.202).


‘Although there has been a great advance in the attitude…’

Dollery, Professional Captain, p.166.

Dollery’s book was ostensibly a technical instruction manual, and he chose his words carefully. Even so, there are traces of bitterness about the apartheid which prevailed in pre-war county cricket, when he remembered gentlemen walking into county sides when their diaries allowed, while players were walking through a separate gate to meet them on the pitch. In his final chapter, Dollery addresses the ‘three arguments are usually advanced against the professional captain – that he will be too cautious in his methods, that as a paid servant of the club he will be dominated from the committee-room and that he will not be able to command his fellow-professionals effectively’ (p.161).

To objection 1, the ‘brighter cricket’ argument, Dollery suggested ‘zest’ should be attributed to each man’s personality not his status; to objection 2, from his experience at Warwickshire, provided a professional captain proved his leadership qualities, his committee would give him reasonable autonomy; to objection 3, promotion from the ranks did not necessarily invite insubordination and indeed Dollery could draw on ‘the freemasonry of his fellow professionals’ (his senior pro, Eric Hollies, was tremendously supportive on and off the pitch).

Fred Titmus made a caustic observation on the attitudes which still prevailed in some committee rooms: ‘Many county sides still cling to the idea that it is not in the nature of the professional to make a good captain unless, of course, he turns amateur, in which case his basic nature undergoes radical change apparently’ (quoted by Down, p.84).

‘Not quite’ has a long history in England – Dollery may even have been thinking of this passage in Trollope:

Toogood was an attorney, like himself, and was at this moment engaged in a noble way on behalf of his cousin’s husband, without any idea of receiving back even the money which he would be out of pocket; still he wasn’t quite,—not quite, you know—‘not quite so much of a gentleman as I am,’—Mr. Walker would have said, had he spoken out freely that which he insinuated. But he contented himself with the emphasis he put upon the ‘not quite,’ which expressed his meaning fully.


from Littlemoor Council School

At the suggestion of his parents, Hutton did spend one year at Pudsey Grammar School but that was, from what I can make out, for part-time instruction in technical drawing.


‘a decision which causes one furiously to think’

The Cricketer, 10 July 1948, p.237. In this article, Warner implies that Allen was also opposed to the decision.


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(and also a reminder that the inner circle was never as united…)

As with most private clubs, MCC had a complex system of patronage and committee which was always likely to encourage back-biting. There were periodic Middlesex v Surrey issues (especially Warner versus Leveson-Gower) and even what was perceived to be the ‘Middlesex mafia’ were capable of falling out. In 1936/37, Allen felt let down by Robins’s irreverent attitude as vice-captain and Warner felt let down by Allen awarding himself a game off before the crucial fifth Test. Then both Allen and Robins made common cause against Warner for the way he abandoned their claims to the England captaincy in order to swing behind Hammond.

After the war, there is definitely a sense of Allen waiting for his old patron to get out of the way. He supported Altham as Treasurer in opposition to Warner’s preferred candidate. He also bought himself a nearly-new Bentley, as if in readiness to take over as chairman of selectors, despite his protestations to the contrary. See also Swanton, Sort of a Cricket Person, p.245.


like another octogenarian leader Churchill

Hutton does not draw this analogy himself but his description of Warner chimes with two observations on Churchill during what the Prime Minister himself referred to as his ‘last innings’. Jock Colville, his private secretary, noted in 1952 that ‘age is beginning to show’ and Peter Hennessy later wrote that ‘he had the phrases but no longer the facts’ (Having It So Good, pp.185, 218).


‘feeling his age’ … ‘He was … a very powerful influence…’

Fifty Years, p.70-71.


‘I have had little contact with Sir Pelham Warner during the past three years.’

Just My Story, p.125.


Allen’s influence at MCC had become ‘considerable’

Fifty Years, p.76.


‘altogether simpatico’ with professionals such as Sutcliffe

Swanton, Gubby Allen, p.213. [Note it is EWS not me who has not applied an accent to simpatico.]


‘“I don’t – I don’t go to Lord’s,” Sir Len began…

Scyld Berry, reminiscing in a 2016 Telegraph article which is now behind a paywall.


‘an authority on Lord’s’

Hutton, p.6 of seven-page typed notes on Lindwall (MCC Archive, HUTTON/TEMP 19).


a Yorkshireman suspicious of leg-spinners

Brearley, Art of Captaincy, p.194: ‘I think Hutton, like many Yorkshiremen, found leg-spin bowling disturbingly enigmatic.’

Bill O’Reilly remembered having a drink with Hutton in 1938 and asking him what advice he would give any likely-looking young leg-spinner in the Bradford nets – ‘Len said: ‘I’d advise him to become an off-spinner’ (Len Hutton Remembered, p.183).


‘Let me say that for Selectors of the England side…’

Just My Story, p.16.

We shall see some examples of Robins treating dressing rooms and players’ hotel rooms as his personal fiefdom in Chapters 17 to 19; in another example, Tony Lock remembered him  barging into his hotel room to tell him off for appealing against the light at Edgbaston in 1963, telling him: ‘I didn’t think you had as much bloody intelligence as that’ (Kirwan, Get Lock On, p.39).

Unlike Hutton, Compton paid a warm tribute to Allen and Robins in his retirement memoirs, although his description of them as the ‘watchful spirits’ of Middlesex may carry a trace of irony: ‘They had views which they expressed by telephone to the dressing-room if necessary’ (End of an Innings, p.186).


Plummie, Gubby and Robbie…

Sir Pelham was usually ‘Plum’ but Allen did address him as ‘My dear Plummie’ in their own correspondence (Rendell, Gubby under Pressure, p.78).


fitted into the stereotype of the ‘pin-stripe brigade’ and ‘old school tie’

And even before the war – Swanton was ironically being called ‘a pillar of the Old School Tie’ in 1937 – when he was 20 (Last Over, p.13).


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‘gin-soaked old dodderers’

Another canonical phrase with several variants, but I have gone with this version.

Other similar formulations include ‘twats in cravats’ (ascribed to Trueman by Sandford in The Final Innings); one also thinks of the ‘57 old farts’ Will Carling felt were lingering on the RFU Committee.


‘behind the times and in front of the Daily Telegraph

Engel (Guardian, 26 October 1981, p.19) was in fact referring to Alec Bedser, a conservative servant of the game from a different background, but his epigram is also applicable to administrators in the inner circle, as suggested in a Frank Keating profile of Allen, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, which noted that he had ‘enjoyed his usual morning lie-in with the Mail, his tea and his Telegraph’ (Guardian, 26 August 1982, p.19).


‘competent and devoted men’ … ‘material reward’ … ‘changing world’

Ian Peebles, 1977 Wisden, p.22.


To their credit, the inner circle did not block Hutton’s appointment…

Wyatt, chairman of the home panel, was more than happy to claim he was ‘mainly responsible’ for the decision (Len Hutton Remembered, p.48).  His customary position – which some read as his way of registering a point about the disappointments of his own career – was that the team should be picked, in the Australian manner, before the captain. But Alan Gibson suspected Brown ‘must have been as responsible as anyone for the choice’ because he had been served well by Hutton in 1950/51 (Cricket Captains, p.184). Certainly Brown was much closer to the ‘inner circle’ – indeed he would have considered himself part of it – than any of the other home selectors.


the war’s sociological effect …. its economic effects

Hutton himself pointed out that ‘after the 1939/45 war people began to argue that, if someone who had risen from the ranks was good enough to lead an army regiment in the field of battle, professional cricketers could be good enough to lead England in the field of sport’ (Just My Story, p.14). Hutton says he ventured no opinion on this subject himself, but he might have heard radio broadcasts such as the one made on the Home Service in 1949 by the Huddersfield MP J.P.W. Mallalieu. Mallalieu predicted a falling away of the amateur and professional distinction in most sports, believing that Hutton would ‘undoubtedly’ captain Yorkshire and that there was ‘no reason’ he should not captain England (‘The Outlook for British Sport’, Listener, 17 February 1949, p.280).


Warner never had time for those he called ‘cricketing Bolsheviks’

Perhaps the most famous example is his attack on Cec Parkin for daring to criticise Arthur Gilligan (see Birley, Social History, p.219). A motif of Warner’s writing, like his penchant for comparing the cricket field to a battlefield and vice versa, is the assumption that socialism is beyond the boundary: ‘Can you imagine a cricketer being a Lenninist?’ (quoted by Howat, p.96).

Quite interesting in this regard is the response to the Coronation Honours List, in which Richards and Hobbs were the first professional sportsmen to be knighted. Compton McKenzie, writing in London Illustrated (June 1953, p.4), seemed to think they had been honoured precisely because they knew their place, acknowledging ‘the welcome precedent of recognising good players because they are at the same time good workers and perfect sportsmen’.


he, Allen and Robins could all point to ways

For example, Warner was the first touring England captain to see to it that his professionals stayed in the same hotel; he was also behind the move to make Hearne the first pro on Middlesex Committee (Howat, p.48); he campaigned in The Cricketer for cricket facilities to be made available to all classes (p.94).

Allen, with Altham, did inestimable work in the 1950s to bring cricket to underprivileged children. They also wrote the MCC Coaching Manual together.

Robins is credited with ending the tradition of separate gates for amateurs and professionals at Lord’s, by saying to the MCC secretary Colonel Rait-Kerr: “Surely if we can fight with them we can also change with them!” (Rendell, p.88-9).

John Arlott was still probably right to conclude, in an assessment of Allen, that the inner circle ‘are dedicated lovers of the game who nevertheless found it hard fully to understand the feelings and aspirations of those who seek to make their livings out of it’ (Guardian, 1 January, 1989, p.39).


within the appeal to altruism, the gentleman ideal…’

Wilkinson, The Prefects, p.16.


‘a vacancy was found’

Howat, Plum Warner, pp.20, 12.


‘meant some financial sacrifice on his father’s part’

Swanton, Gubby Allen, p.25.


Robins owed his education…

Rendell, Walter Robins, pp.13, 17.


landed aristocrats of previous generations

It should be admitted that Harris and Hawke were perhaps not quite as comfortable as their titles suggest: one of Harris’s motivations for managing the imperial cricket programme was to further his business interests (Wilde, England, p.82-83) and Hawke was notorious for taking fulsome expenses on overseas tours and at Yorkshire.


PAGE 95

the equation of ‘aesthetic manners with moral virtue’

Wilkinson, The Prefects, p.15-16.


‘the sort of chap who sleeps in his vest’

The social historian Arthur Marwick considered this ‘the best of many memorable lines’ in I’m Alright, Jack (Class, p.295). I was not able to find this line in the novel upon which the film was based, Private Life by Alan Harvey, which makes some sly – if sometimes ‘period’ – observations on class and race. As with Kind Hearts and Coronets a decade earlier, it is the film screenplay which is much funnier and well observed than the novel (Dennis Price makes an appearance in this film too).

This sort of thing had of course been a staple in comedies of English manners even before the Industrial Revolution, and is not always intended to be taken too seriously: ‘The last time I played in a village cricket match I was caught at point by a man in braces. It would have been madness to risk another such shock to my system. My nerves are so exquisitely balanced that a thing of that sort takes years off my life.’ (Psmith, in P.G. Wodehouse’s Mike [1909]).


‘sitting up in his bed with a woollen vest on’

Chalke, At the Heart of English Cricket, p.84.


Warner, whose pyjamas were monogrammed…

I am taking a slight liberty here in that I cannot be certain about the pyjamas, but Warner’s granddaughter Marina, in an affectionate and insightful portrait for The Guardian, suggests many of his possessions were monographed:

Their sitting room was filled with memorabilia: the daffodil yellow of a run of Wisden, of course, a clock in the shape of a wicket, a clothes brush in the shape of a bat, biscuit tins with pictures, a cigarette box in the shape of a ball, the huge silver cup that was stolen later from our parents’ house, Grandpa’s caps and hats with different-coloured ribbons, his umbrella with the gold band and his watch-chain in his pinstripe waistcoat, all inscribed PFW – Pelham Francis Warner.


a ‘silly so-and-so’ by his own brother

Just My Story, p.90.


a ‘Mutton-Head’

Warner to Menzies, quoted by Howat in Plum Warner, p.201, using a term of abuse sometimes employed in P.G. Wodehouse novels and still in occasional use today.


‘no cricket sense’ … ‘I do not feel Hutton is a leader’

Warner to Menzies, quoted by Howat in Plum Warner, p.201.


‘to discover that the spectre of Bodyline still haunted the corridors of power’

Fifty Years, p.65.


PAGE 96

‘not bowling’ and ‘not cricket’

Warner made these remarks in the Morning Post (see Docker, Bradman and the Bodyline Series, p.85). He was of course then put in a compromising position in Australia. It should be acknowledged that Warner remained an enthusiast for raw pace, so long as it was employed without causing a stink.


a symbol of ‘national prestige’

Bannister, quoted in Crump’s article on ‘Athletics’, in Mason’s history of sport (p.58).

Bannister finished only fourth when favourite for the 1,500 metres at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Britain’s only gold in Helsinki was won by the show-jumper Colonel Harry Llewelyn and their post-war medal counts had been dismal.  Even in 1948, when Britain won 3 golds in London, the USA won 38. This was taken by some as a sign of decline, along with the loss of two world boxing titles and the Test defeats to Bradman’s Invincibles.


use of pacemakers

For the English distaste for this practice, see John Bale, Roger Bannister, pp.30-32.


‘coldly scientific’ training methods

Bale, Roger Bannister, p.88.

Bale’s book provides a good, short introductions to the issues raised by Bannister’s career. Amateurism perhaps cut three ways for him.  First, he felt he was at a disadvantage compared to the ‘full-time state-owned athletes’ of the Soviet bloc.  Second, although he was a scholarship boy, as an Oxford graduate he was perceived to have an advantage over less privileged British runners, like Pirie and Ibbotson, and certainly had one over the Scandinavians (disbarred for taking appearance money) and the Kenyans (disenfranchised before independence and only to emerge as a middle-distance force at the 1966 Empire Games in Jamaica).  Third, he had to deal with the ambivalence of the Amateur Athletics Association, which took patriotic satisfaction in his achievements but sniffed quite loudly about his methods. These tensions came to the fore in Bannister’s goodwill tour of America after he broke the four-minute barrier. The expedition was encouraged enthusiastically by the Foreign Office as a boost to British and pan-Atlantic pride, but dampened when his scheduled appearance on a television show sponsored by a tobacco company had to be aborted for fear of his losing amateur status.


not ‘bona fide’

To be precise, it was the British Amateur Athletics Board which opined on the validity of Bannister’s ‘record’, noting that it was not achieved in ‘a bona fide competition’ and that in any case ‘it does not regard individual record attempts as in the best interests of athletics as a whole’ (Times, 13 July, p.6).

The Times correspondent attending the race at Motspur Park had noted the ‘profound secrecy’ of Bannister’s attempt and the fact that ‘the ever-willing C.W. Brasher’ found himself ‘happily and conveniently placed’ to act as lead man on Bannister’s final lap (29 June 1953, p.4).

Forensic examination of the eligibility of records seemed to be going on all the time in the 1950s and, rather like the fuss made about sponsored shirts or shorts in broadcast sport in the 1970s and 80s, now seems terribly arcane. The News Chroniclereported that the RAF Cycling Association’s record time for a 50 miles team-trial had not been recognised as a British record because the Association was ‘too widely spread to be recognised as a localised club’ (9 July, p.7).

Another topical example involved the great Jamaican sprinter, McDonald Bailey, who had got into trouble with the AAA for endorsing starting blocks. Shortly afterwards, Bailey packed the whole thing in by signing a Rugby League contract with Leigh.


‘direction was notably accurate…’

Kilburn, Cricket Decade, p.80.


‘suddenly had a lot of problems with his bootlaces’

I was put on to this quotation by Martin Williamson’s article on the Coronation Ashes. He ascribes it to Woodcock, who as far as I am aware was not writing for The Times in 1953. So I have ascribed it to Green, although I have not yet been able to find it in his Times reports on the Tests.


‘people’s game’ … ‘decaying contemporary industry’ … ‘creeping paralysis’

Cardus, letter to Times, 6 May 1953, p.9.

Martin Kelner cites the Cardus letter in full during a typically irreverent but typically perceptive essay on the impact of the Matthews Cup Final.

See also Midwinter, Class Peace, pp.98-100.


PAGE 97

‘gloomily and parsimoniously…’ … ‘unworthy’ of the Coronation

Cardus, ‘The Great Indians’, Spectator, 4 July 1952, p.10 (this report is also anthologised in A Fourth Innings with Cardus).


‘The players are, so to say…’

Cardus in the Covers, p.213.

This observation is made during a complaint, typical of Cardus’s reporting of the series and in fairness applicable to both sides, that ‘there has been no constant standard of style or etiquette in the present rubber’.


Lord’s never took much notice of Cardus

A letter from MCC secretary Ronnie Aird to Brigadier Willie Clark, dated 18 July 1955, noted that Cardus ‘knows little about cricket and has in my opinion become a crashing bore’ (correspondence in MCC Archive). Cardus was never granted membership of MCC, even though he reputedly liked to draft his reports from a certain spot in the Long Room.


‘an almost unanimous disquiet…’ … ‘tremendous fillip’ … ‘defensive virus’

F.R. Brown, ‘Batsmen Must be Bold: Forward Play the First Essential’, in 1954 Wisden, pp.87-91. In Brown’s defence, it appears he was commissioned to write the article by the editor Norman Preston. But his article, written by a losing captain to undermine a winning one, comes close to treason. Imagine Hutton writing such an article about Brown.


‘few scars’ … ‘stopgap’ appointment

Hutton, Fifty Years of Cricket, pp. 64, 61.


‘persistently anxious not to tread on corns’

Kilburn, Cricket Decade, p. 94.


‘poor old Leonard nearly finished up in a mental home’

Len Hutton Remembered, p.124. Compare Thanks to Cricket, where Kilburn is thinking specifically about the return of Brown in 1953 (examined in Chapter 4): ‘Hutton’s personal experiences could have made him a candidate for a psychiatric ward’ (p.92).


Hutton’s ‘lonely pioneering journey…’

Birley, Social History, p.287.