Fred Bakewell: Among the Bright Colours

Martin Chandler | 8:52am BST 17 August 2025

Published: 2025
Pages: 236
Author: Pope, Mick
Publisher: ACS
Rating: 4.5 stars

Strange as it may seem to those who know me now there was a time, admittedly not this century, when my reading material was generally fiction. My novels of choice almost invariably came from one of a group of authors that my English teacher at school described as ‘the angry young men’. I started with Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and then worked my way through the rest of his oeuvre, and those of John Braine, David Storey, Stan Barstow and John Wain, amongst others.

The Northamptonshire and England batsman of the 1930s, Fred Bakewell, is a man whose life was such that he could have stepped right out of the pages of one of those novels, and in diligently uncovering his story Mick Pope has produced a book that is as good as anything that the ACS Lives in Cricket series has so far produced, and plenty of the previous 61 of them have been well worth reading.

As a cricketer Bakewell had a difficult job. His county had three fine cricketers, him, all-rounder Vallance Jupp and left arm pace bowler EW “Nobby’ Clark. The rest were either honest toilers who occasionally had their moments in the sun or amateurs who, realistically, were not up to First Class standard. Curiously the lives of Clark and Jupp are also amongst the more colourful of the era but, nonetheless, Bakewell and his team were on the losing side much more frequently than they were winners.

But despite his county’s travails there were plenty of good days for Bakewell and Pope faithfully recounts his achievements on the field. Despite playing for the most unfashionable of the counties the man who ‘Crusoe’ Robertson-Glasgow compared favourably to Donald Bradman, and Neville Cardus to Trumper, did play six times for England. For those Test appearances he produced a century, three fifties and an average  of 45.44. The highlight of his career came in 1936 when an unbeaten 241 against that summer’s County Champions, Derbyshire, almost brought Northants a rare victory over strong opponents in their own back yard.

What the then 27 year old Bakewell might have achieved after that we will never know as, travelling home after the game in the passenger seat of the sports car that belonged to his opening partner Reggie Northway, Bakewell suffered what proved to be career ending injuries in a road accident that cost Northway his life.

There is therefore enough in Bakewell’s cricket career to produce a decent book, but there is so much more to his story than that. He had a difficult background and came into contact with the criminal justice system as a youth, cricket in many ways getting him back on the right road. His career having been taken away from him, the accident that was unarguably not his fault brought him compensation of only £500 (about £30,000 today).

After the accident regular employment eluded Bakewell, but the courts didn’t, whether for criminal matters or matrimonial, and on one of his excursions to a courthouse, on this occasion as a potential witness rather than a protagonist and once again a passenger, another road accident cost him an eye.

Towards the end of his life the by then forgotten Bakewell was tracked down by David Frith. Bakewell gave Frith an interview that was remarkably frank and, to Bakewell’s credit, lacking in any bitterness at the hand life had dealt him. Frith made the whole of his interview and his own memories available to Pope. Beyond that Pope has clearly spent many hours trawling through local and national newspapers and, I suppose unsurprisingly in light of Bakewell’s  eventful life, found much that illuminates his story.

And that was that, or so it seemed to be until, after Frith’s, the most important contribution of all came along as Pope managed to track down Bakewell’s son from his second marriage. John Bakewell was able to add valuable insights although, sadly, he did not quite live long enough to see his father’s biography published.

Fred Bakewell: Among Many Colours is an excellent book and a fine tribute to a man who was far from perfect yet despite that clearly did not want for personal charm and was not without a number of redeeming features.