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The Name Game.
- Thread starter yaju
- Start date
masterblaster
International Captain
Nathan Bracken (Aus)
Basil D'Oliveira (England) SA born - Prevented from playing in SA because of Apartheid - Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1967
Profile:
Prevented from playing top-class cricket in his native South Africa due to the colour of his skin, "Dolly", an allrounder of formidable physical and mental strength, was 25 when he moved to England in 1960 (at the behest of the broadcaster-writer, John Arlott) to ply his craft for Middleton in the Lancashire Leagues –– and later for Worcestershire (in 1964) and England (1966).
He did not play a full English season until 1965, when he was thirty. His batting was probably his greatest strength, using a short back-lift and powerful forearms to play a wide variety of strokes. He was a master of pacing an innings, careful at the start, and accelerating once played in. His bowling seemed innocuous, a gentle medium pace delivered with a nice side-on action from a few paces, but it was cloying in its accuracy, and his economy rate in Tests was 1.95 runs per over.
He, however, moved the ball both ways in the air and off the pitch and had an almost magical ability to break big partnerships. Through no fault of his own, his name will always be attached to a part of cricket history that reflects poorly on most others involved in the D'Oliveria affair. Unaccountably omitted from the England party to tour South Africa in 1968-69, he was added after Cartwright dropped out.
The South African Government indicated that he would not be welcome in South Africa, at which point the tour was cancelled, the end of cricketing relations between the two countries for 25 years. Throughout, D'Oliveira conducted himself with tact, and grace, and continued to be the first choice as England's allrounder until the advent of Tony Greig. He played for Worcestershire until nearly 50, and throughout there was one sharp regret … if only he'd been spotted at 19 rather than 29. Then D'Oliveira would have put the runs and wickets in the book that would have shown future generations what he unmistakably was - one of cricket's greats. (Dave Liverman, 1998).
Profile:
Prevented from playing top-class cricket in his native South Africa due to the colour of his skin, "Dolly", an allrounder of formidable physical and mental strength, was 25 when he moved to England in 1960 (at the behest of the broadcaster-writer, John Arlott) to ply his craft for Middleton in the Lancashire Leagues –– and later for Worcestershire (in 1964) and England (1966).
He did not play a full English season until 1965, when he was thirty. His batting was probably his greatest strength, using a short back-lift and powerful forearms to play a wide variety of strokes. He was a master of pacing an innings, careful at the start, and accelerating once played in. His bowling seemed innocuous, a gentle medium pace delivered with a nice side-on action from a few paces, but it was cloying in its accuracy, and his economy rate in Tests was 1.95 runs per over.
He, however, moved the ball both ways in the air and off the pitch and had an almost magical ability to break big partnerships. Through no fault of his own, his name will always be attached to a part of cricket history that reflects poorly on most others involved in the D'Oliveria affair. Unaccountably omitted from the England party to tour South Africa in 1968-69, he was added after Cartwright dropped out.
The South African Government indicated that he would not be welcome in South Africa, at which point the tour was cancelled, the end of cricketing relations between the two countries for 25 years. Throughout, D'Oliveira conducted himself with tact, and grace, and continued to be the first choice as England's allrounder until the advent of Tony Greig. He played for Worcestershire until nearly 50, and throughout there was one sharp regret … if only he'd been spotted at 19 rather than 29. Then D'Oliveira would have put the runs and wickets in the book that would have shown future generations what he unmistakably was - one of cricket's greats. (Dave Liverman, 1998).
Sir Frank Worrell (West Indies ) Wisden Cricketer of the year 1951
Knighted for services to cricket 1964
This from Cricinfo Player Page -(wisden obituary written by Sir Learie Constantine )
Wisden obituary
Sir Frank Worrell once wrote that the island of Barbados, his birthplace, lacked a hero. As usual, he was under-playing himself. Frank Maglinne Worrell was the first hero of the new nation of Barbados and anyone who doubted that had only to be in the island when his body was brought home in mid March of 1967.
Or in Westminster Abbey when West Indians of all backgrounds and shades of opinion paid their last respects to a man who had done more than any other of their countrymen to bind together the new nations of the Caribbean and establish a reputation for fair play throughout the world. Never before had a cricketer been honoured with a memorial service in Westminster Abbey.
Sir Frank was a man of strong convictions, a brave man and it goes without saying, a great cricketer. Though he made his name as a player his greatest contribution was to destroy for ever the myth that a coloured cricketer was not fit to lead a team. Once appointed, he ended the cliques and rivalries between the players of various islands to weld together a team which in the space of five years became the champions of the world.
He was a man of true political sense and feeling, a federalist who surely would have made even greater contributions to the history of the West Indies had he not died so tragically in hospital of leukaemia at the early age of 42, a month after returning from India.
People in England can have little idea of the problems of West Indian cricket. It is not a question of a few countries bordering each other coming together in a joint team. Jamaica is 1,296 flying miles from Barbados and Georgetown in Guyana 462 miles from Bridgetown in Barbados.
Before that wonderful tour of Australia in 1960-1, Barbadians would tend to stick together and so would the Trinidadians, Jamaicans and Guyanans. Worrell cut across all that. Soon there were no groups, Just one team.
He told his batsmen to walk if they were given out. When Gary Sobers appeared to show his dissent with a decision, he reprimanded him. After that, everyone walked as soon as the umpire’s finger went up.
So when half a million Australians lined the streets of Melbourne in their ticker tape farewell to Worrell and his men, they were not only paying a final tribute to the team’s great achievements, they were recognising the capacity and potential of equals both on and off the turf.
Sir Frank started life in Barbados, worked and lived in Trinidad and died in Jamaica after doing much useful work at the University of the West Indies there. He incurred enmity by leaving his birthplace but he did not care much for insularity, cant and humbug.
He saw the many diverse elements of the West Indies as a whole, a common culture and outlook separated only by the Caribbean Sea. This is why he upset certain people in Barbados when he wrote to a newspaper there criticising the island for having the cheek to challenge the rest of the world to celebrate independence.
Worrell was strongly criticised for this action, bitterly in fact in some quarters. But being attacked did not worry him. He always had the courage to say what he felt about every issue he thought vital to the well-being of the islands.
Sadly, the news that he was dying came through as Barbados played the Rest of the World XI.. But Worrell held no rancour against his homeland. He had bought a piece of land there and had intended to retire there eventually.
This willingness to speak out often got him into trouble, even at school. Cricket had come naturally to him as it does to most youngsters in the West Indies, particularly Barbados. More so with him because he was born in a house only a few yards away from the Empire cricket ground. He and his friends used to set up stumps on the outfield and play nearly all day in the holidays.
At Combermere School he fell foul of a master who accused him of hogging the crease and not letting his colleagues bat.
He was to write later: “I was unfortunate enough to have been under an endemic psychological and mental strain throughout my school days. So much so that by the time I reached the fourth form I was suffering from a persecution complex.
”These were the days when child psychology was not a subject demanded of applicants to teachers’ posts. Indeed, the majority of masters did not have the experience of raising families of their own. There was no allowance for the original point of view.”
Worrell was a pupil who always had an original point of view. Also, as it was becoming clear at this time, he was a cricketer with an original talent. He soon made the Barbados team and records began to flow from his bat as he moved up the order from number eleven (yes, that is where he began his career!).
He shared a partnership of 502 with John Goddard in 1943-4 and an unfinished 574 with Clyde Walcott I 1945-6. Typically, he dismissed both. “The conditions were loaded in our favour,” he said. “I wasn’t all that delighted about it.”
In 1947 he tired of living in Barbados. His mother had moved to New York and his father was away at sea most of the time so he moved to Jamaica. English people will be surprised to learn that many of Worrell’s fellow Bajans have never forgiven him for this “betrayal”. When will they ever learn?
He established an international reputation against the 1947-8 England touring side and at the end of that tour took the step that made him a batsman for all seasons and all wickets. He signed as a professional for the Central Lancashire League side Radcliffe for a fee of £500 a year.
It was a good year to enter League cricket. The Central Lancashire League was a cricket academy and the young, talented player was bound to improve by the experience. Playing in neighbouring clubs were Bill Athey, Jock Livingston, Ray Lindwall, Cecil Pepper, Clyde Walcott, Everton Weekes, Vinoo Mankad and Dattu Phadkar.
I have always held that League cricket makes a cricketer, not only as a player but as a man. There is much to learn in the field of human relations from the kind, friendly and warm people of the North of England. Frank brought his fiancée, Velda, over and their marriage was another settling influence on him.
Worrell was not just living for the present, but he was thinking of the future. He took a course at Manchester University and qualified in economics, his chosen subject.
The flag on Radcliffe Town Hall was at half mast on the day of his death. He married his wife, Velda, at Radcliffe, and their daughter was born there. Such was the esteem in which he was held by Radcliffe that in 1964 a street near the cricket ground was named Worrell Close.
The 1950 tour of England was a triumph for him and he topped the Test batting averages with 539 runs at an average of 89.83. His best Test score of 261 was made in this season, at Trent Bridge.
Norman Yardley, the England captain of the time, told me it was impossible to set a field to him. Place the fieldsman straight and he beat them on the wide. Place them wide and he would beat them straight.
I am not one for averages myself. I am more concerned with how a batsman made his runs and not what his average was at the end of the series. Sir Neville Cardus wrote of Sir Frank that he never made a crude or an ungrammatical stroke. I agree with that. Worrell was poetry.
While Walcott bludgeoned the bowlers and Weekes dominated them, the stylist Worrell waved them away. There was none of the savage aggression of a Sobers in his batting. He was the artist. All three “Ws” were geniuses but Worrell had the most style and elegance. He had all the strokes and the time and capacity to use them without offence to the eye, without ever being hurried.
He was never seen playing across the line. That is why he never hooked. Players and pressmen agreed that even when he ducked beneath a bouncer, he did so with a lack of panic and great dignity. And remember he had Lindwall and Miller to contend with.
The tour to Australia in 1951-2 was not such a success as the 1950 tour of England. Worrell himself said this was because there were too many factions in the side and John Goddard, previously showered with advice, was not helped this time by the seniors.
When Worrell took over the captaincy nine years later, he was to heed the lessons of this dismal tour. The return series in the West Indies in 1955 was again a disappointment for Worrell; he scored only 206 runs. The 1957 tour of England was a further let down. Clearly the West Indies authorities had to change their policy of always appointing a white man to captain the side.
The break was made in 1960 when Worrell, the only candidate with the outstanding qualities to do this gigantic repair job, was asked to lead the side in Australia. Everyone knows the story of that tour and how much it did to restore the good name of cricket after the “bumper” rows, “slow over rates” disputes and other ills which had been afflicting the international game.
Back in Jamaica, Worrell was acclaimed and rightly so. He was appointed Warden of the University College of the West Indies and also a Senator in Parliament.
The Indians were the next tourists to the West Indies and it was typical of the man that when their captain, Nari Contractor, was seriously injured by a blow on the head, Worrell was one of the donors of blood which saved his life.
It was not generally known that Worrell, the thirteenth West Indian captain, was a superstitious man. During the 1951 tour of Australia he was bowled first ball by Geoff Noblet. Determined to make a fresh start in the second innings, he changed every stitch of clothing, fitting himself out in a completely new gear and walked to the wicket hoping that by discarding his old clothes he would change his luck. Not a bit of it! He was out for another first baler!
As he came in, crestfallen, Clyde Walcott, the next batsman, said with a laugh: “Why do I have to face a hat trick every time I follow you?”
His finest hours in England came in 1963 when he led the West Indies to more glory. By this time he had slowed up in the field and his figure was well in excess of Miss World proportions. He was 38 and no longer the player he had been.
But his influence over the side as captain was such that it was unthinkable to rest him in any of the Tests. He bowled a few shrewd medium pacers with his deceptively easy delivery and when the crisis was on in the Lord’s Test, the greatest Test of all time as it was called by the critics, he helped Butcher to add 110 on the Saturday afternoon. The following Monday morning the second innings collapsed.
Asked if Worrell was worried about this, another player replied: “No, he is asleep.” Sir Frank had this ability to drop off at any time, particularly when there was a batting collapse.
As Wes Hall prepared for the final over which could have won or lost the Lord’s Test, Worrell went over to him with some advice. What was he saying? Bounce them? Bowl ‘em straight? No, none of the obvious things. Sir Frank said calmly: “Make sure you don’t give it to them by bowling no balls.” Worrell was the calmest man at Lord’s that day and trust him to think of a highly pertinent point which Hall, in his excitement, may have overlooked.
He announced his retirement at the end of this tour which was a triumph of leadership, technical skill and adaptability. The following year he was knighted. It was a fitting end to an unforgettable career but there was one more job for him to do – manage the West Indies side against the 1965 Australian tourists.
He had groomed Sobers well for the captaincy and theirs was an unbeatable partnership. At last the West Indies were the undisputed champions in their truly national sport.
Throughout his life, Sir Frank never lost his sense of humour or his sense of dignity. Some nasty things were said and written during that 1965 tour but Sir Frank was ever the diplomat. He lost no friends, made no enemies yet won more respect. He would always come up with a smile and a loud laugh.
He was a happy man, a good man and a great man. The really tragic thing about his death at the age of 42 was that it cut him off from life when he still had plenty to offer the islands he loved.
Sir Learie Constantine, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
Knighted for services to cricket 1964
This from Cricinfo Player Page -(wisden obituary written by Sir Learie Constantine )
Wisden obituary
Sir Frank Worrell once wrote that the island of Barbados, his birthplace, lacked a hero. As usual, he was under-playing himself. Frank Maglinne Worrell was the first hero of the new nation of Barbados and anyone who doubted that had only to be in the island when his body was brought home in mid March of 1967.
Or in Westminster Abbey when West Indians of all backgrounds and shades of opinion paid their last respects to a man who had done more than any other of their countrymen to bind together the new nations of the Caribbean and establish a reputation for fair play throughout the world. Never before had a cricketer been honoured with a memorial service in Westminster Abbey.
Sir Frank was a man of strong convictions, a brave man and it goes without saying, a great cricketer. Though he made his name as a player his greatest contribution was to destroy for ever the myth that a coloured cricketer was not fit to lead a team. Once appointed, he ended the cliques and rivalries between the players of various islands to weld together a team which in the space of five years became the champions of the world.
He was a man of true political sense and feeling, a federalist who surely would have made even greater contributions to the history of the West Indies had he not died so tragically in hospital of leukaemia at the early age of 42, a month after returning from India.
People in England can have little idea of the problems of West Indian cricket. It is not a question of a few countries bordering each other coming together in a joint team. Jamaica is 1,296 flying miles from Barbados and Georgetown in Guyana 462 miles from Bridgetown in Barbados.
Before that wonderful tour of Australia in 1960-1, Barbadians would tend to stick together and so would the Trinidadians, Jamaicans and Guyanans. Worrell cut across all that. Soon there were no groups, Just one team.
He told his batsmen to walk if they were given out. When Gary Sobers appeared to show his dissent with a decision, he reprimanded him. After that, everyone walked as soon as the umpire’s finger went up.
So when half a million Australians lined the streets of Melbourne in their ticker tape farewell to Worrell and his men, they were not only paying a final tribute to the team’s great achievements, they were recognising the capacity and potential of equals both on and off the turf.
Sir Frank started life in Barbados, worked and lived in Trinidad and died in Jamaica after doing much useful work at the University of the West Indies there. He incurred enmity by leaving his birthplace but he did not care much for insularity, cant and humbug.
He saw the many diverse elements of the West Indies as a whole, a common culture and outlook separated only by the Caribbean Sea. This is why he upset certain people in Barbados when he wrote to a newspaper there criticising the island for having the cheek to challenge the rest of the world to celebrate independence.
Worrell was strongly criticised for this action, bitterly in fact in some quarters. But being attacked did not worry him. He always had the courage to say what he felt about every issue he thought vital to the well-being of the islands.
Sadly, the news that he was dying came through as Barbados played the Rest of the World XI.. But Worrell held no rancour against his homeland. He had bought a piece of land there and had intended to retire there eventually.
This willingness to speak out often got him into trouble, even at school. Cricket had come naturally to him as it does to most youngsters in the West Indies, particularly Barbados. More so with him because he was born in a house only a few yards away from the Empire cricket ground. He and his friends used to set up stumps on the outfield and play nearly all day in the holidays.
At Combermere School he fell foul of a master who accused him of hogging the crease and not letting his colleagues bat.
He was to write later: “I was unfortunate enough to have been under an endemic psychological and mental strain throughout my school days. So much so that by the time I reached the fourth form I was suffering from a persecution complex.
”These were the days when child psychology was not a subject demanded of applicants to teachers’ posts. Indeed, the majority of masters did not have the experience of raising families of their own. There was no allowance for the original point of view.”
Worrell was a pupil who always had an original point of view. Also, as it was becoming clear at this time, he was a cricketer with an original talent. He soon made the Barbados team and records began to flow from his bat as he moved up the order from number eleven (yes, that is where he began his career!).
He shared a partnership of 502 with John Goddard in 1943-4 and an unfinished 574 with Clyde Walcott I 1945-6. Typically, he dismissed both. “The conditions were loaded in our favour,” he said. “I wasn’t all that delighted about it.”
In 1947 he tired of living in Barbados. His mother had moved to New York and his father was away at sea most of the time so he moved to Jamaica. English people will be surprised to learn that many of Worrell’s fellow Bajans have never forgiven him for this “betrayal”. When will they ever learn?
He established an international reputation against the 1947-8 England touring side and at the end of that tour took the step that made him a batsman for all seasons and all wickets. He signed as a professional for the Central Lancashire League side Radcliffe for a fee of £500 a year.
It was a good year to enter League cricket. The Central Lancashire League was a cricket academy and the young, talented player was bound to improve by the experience. Playing in neighbouring clubs were Bill Athey, Jock Livingston, Ray Lindwall, Cecil Pepper, Clyde Walcott, Everton Weekes, Vinoo Mankad and Dattu Phadkar.
I have always held that League cricket makes a cricketer, not only as a player but as a man. There is much to learn in the field of human relations from the kind, friendly and warm people of the North of England. Frank brought his fiancée, Velda, over and their marriage was another settling influence on him.
Worrell was not just living for the present, but he was thinking of the future. He took a course at Manchester University and qualified in economics, his chosen subject.
The flag on Radcliffe Town Hall was at half mast on the day of his death. He married his wife, Velda, at Radcliffe, and their daughter was born there. Such was the esteem in which he was held by Radcliffe that in 1964 a street near the cricket ground was named Worrell Close.
The 1950 tour of England was a triumph for him and he topped the Test batting averages with 539 runs at an average of 89.83. His best Test score of 261 was made in this season, at Trent Bridge.
Norman Yardley, the England captain of the time, told me it was impossible to set a field to him. Place the fieldsman straight and he beat them on the wide. Place them wide and he would beat them straight.
I am not one for averages myself. I am more concerned with how a batsman made his runs and not what his average was at the end of the series. Sir Neville Cardus wrote of Sir Frank that he never made a crude or an ungrammatical stroke. I agree with that. Worrell was poetry.
While Walcott bludgeoned the bowlers and Weekes dominated them, the stylist Worrell waved them away. There was none of the savage aggression of a Sobers in his batting. He was the artist. All three “Ws” were geniuses but Worrell had the most style and elegance. He had all the strokes and the time and capacity to use them without offence to the eye, without ever being hurried.
He was never seen playing across the line. That is why he never hooked. Players and pressmen agreed that even when he ducked beneath a bouncer, he did so with a lack of panic and great dignity. And remember he had Lindwall and Miller to contend with.
The tour to Australia in 1951-2 was not such a success as the 1950 tour of England. Worrell himself said this was because there were too many factions in the side and John Goddard, previously showered with advice, was not helped this time by the seniors.
When Worrell took over the captaincy nine years later, he was to heed the lessons of this dismal tour. The return series in the West Indies in 1955 was again a disappointment for Worrell; he scored only 206 runs. The 1957 tour of England was a further let down. Clearly the West Indies authorities had to change their policy of always appointing a white man to captain the side.
The break was made in 1960 when Worrell, the only candidate with the outstanding qualities to do this gigantic repair job, was asked to lead the side in Australia. Everyone knows the story of that tour and how much it did to restore the good name of cricket after the “bumper” rows, “slow over rates” disputes and other ills which had been afflicting the international game.
Back in Jamaica, Worrell was acclaimed and rightly so. He was appointed Warden of the University College of the West Indies and also a Senator in Parliament.
The Indians were the next tourists to the West Indies and it was typical of the man that when their captain, Nari Contractor, was seriously injured by a blow on the head, Worrell was one of the donors of blood which saved his life.
It was not generally known that Worrell, the thirteenth West Indian captain, was a superstitious man. During the 1951 tour of Australia he was bowled first ball by Geoff Noblet. Determined to make a fresh start in the second innings, he changed every stitch of clothing, fitting himself out in a completely new gear and walked to the wicket hoping that by discarding his old clothes he would change his luck. Not a bit of it! He was out for another first baler!
As he came in, crestfallen, Clyde Walcott, the next batsman, said with a laugh: “Why do I have to face a hat trick every time I follow you?”
His finest hours in England came in 1963 when he led the West Indies to more glory. By this time he had slowed up in the field and his figure was well in excess of Miss World proportions. He was 38 and no longer the player he had been.
But his influence over the side as captain was such that it was unthinkable to rest him in any of the Tests. He bowled a few shrewd medium pacers with his deceptively easy delivery and when the crisis was on in the Lord’s Test, the greatest Test of all time as it was called by the critics, he helped Butcher to add 110 on the Saturday afternoon. The following Monday morning the second innings collapsed.
Asked if Worrell was worried about this, another player replied: “No, he is asleep.” Sir Frank had this ability to drop off at any time, particularly when there was a batting collapse.
As Wes Hall prepared for the final over which could have won or lost the Lord’s Test, Worrell went over to him with some advice. What was he saying? Bounce them? Bowl ‘em straight? No, none of the obvious things. Sir Frank said calmly: “Make sure you don’t give it to them by bowling no balls.” Worrell was the calmest man at Lord’s that day and trust him to think of a highly pertinent point which Hall, in his excitement, may have overlooked.
He announced his retirement at the end of this tour which was a triumph of leadership, technical skill and adaptability. The following year he was knighted. It was a fitting end to an unforgettable career but there was one more job for him to do – manage the West Indies side against the 1965 Australian tourists.
He had groomed Sobers well for the captaincy and theirs was an unbeatable partnership. At last the West Indies were the undisputed champions in their truly national sport.
Throughout his life, Sir Frank never lost his sense of humour or his sense of dignity. Some nasty things were said and written during that 1965 tour but Sir Frank was ever the diplomat. He lost no friends, made no enemies yet won more respect. He would always come up with a smile and a loud laugh.
He was a happy man, a good man and a great man. The really tragic thing about his death at the age of 42 was that it cut him off from life when he still had plenty to offer the islands he loved.
Sir Learie Constantine, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
masterblaster
International Captain
Will Jefferson (Essex batsman)
masterblaster
International Captain
Im assuming I have to name a player starting with 'D'.
Okay
Dav Whatmore (Aus)
Okay
Dav Whatmore (Aus)
Langeveldt
Soutie
Sarel Burger (nam)
The Baconator
International Vice-Captain
Younis Khan
Ken Barrington (England) Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1960
This from Cricinfo player Page -
Profile:
Just how gifted a games player Ken Barrington was can be gauged from the fact that to reclaim, then permanently keep, his Test place after being dropped, he abandoned his natural attacking style to become one of cricket's most notorious stonewallers. The revised method cost him his place once, by way of punishment for taking 435 minutes to score 137 against a humdrum New Zealand attack at Edgbaston in 1965, but overall it served him brilliantly. England too – before a heart attack forced premature retirement at 37, Barrington amassed 6806 Test runs at an average (58.67) surpassed for England only by Herbert Sutcliffe. A thickset 5ft 9ins, crinkly haired and strong-featured, in anything but batting gear Barrington was jovial and gregarious, always ready to see the best in everyone and every situation. Famous for mixed metaphors, his best-known quip came in answer to a Surrey fan commiserating over his lack of form after a sequence of four low single-figure scores, two ducks among them. "How d'you know I'm out of form?" shot back Ken indignantly: "I've only had nine balls all week!" It shattered Ian Botham's touring team when Barrington, England's assistant manager and a much-loved figure everywhere he went, died suddenly in Barbados in 1981 after another heart attack.
John Thicknesse
Wisden obituary
There should be no need for reticence in anyone paying tribute to Ken Barrington. He died of a heart attack in his hotel room at the Holiday Inn in Barbados on March 14, 1981, the Saturday night of the Barbados Test, while serving as assistant-manager on the England tour of the West Indies. As a player, as a friend, as a businessman and latterly as a leader of England’s cricketers in the field, he was a man who always did what he could and, when the chips were on the table for all to see, one who could be relied upon to give of his best, his uttermost. The world and especially the cricketing world cannot ask for more. That is why Ken Barrington, master of the malaprop, the man who slept not like a log but like a lark, commanded such affection all over the world. His widow, Ann, accompanied him on some of his later trips, and it is good that Ann is still involved in the game through the Lord’s Taverners, to whom Ken gave so much.
Yet reticence there is, and the hesitation is on his family’s account in recalling the circumstances of Ken’s tragically premature death at the age of 50. However, Wisden is a book of record, and historians sometimes find that its early pages tell the facts but less than the whole truth.
To my mind, the story of Ken’s death is as heroic as so many of his innings. It came as a great shock in the spring of 1969 to learn that the chest pains which had led him to withdraw from a double-wicket competition in Melbourne had in fact been a heart attack. After due reflection, taking into account not only his family but the fact that, at 38, batting in Test matches, always Ken’s particular forte, was not going to get easier, Ken Barrington retired. Immediately the cares of carrying England’s rickety batting through the uncertain and far from satisfying sixties slipped off his shoulders, like some leaden cloak. As he took to the village greens of charity cricket and to the golf courses where his game was good enough to be successfully competitive – and therefore a source of pleasure to a man who hated to be beaten – Ken Barrington’s step seemed lighter and his stature in cricket enhanced. His admirers, both far and near, began to realise just how much private effort had gone into coping with chuckers and bouncers, as well as the vagaries of form and the whims of selectors.
None the less, a heart attack is a warning, a red light that never joins with amber and turns to green. Although he had managed tours to India, Pakistan and New Zealand, and indeed had had the well-deserved honour of leading the England party at the Melbourne Centenary Test, nothing in his managerial career had tested him quite like this final West Indian ordeal. As a player he had not only plundered bowlers on the great Indian sub-continent but, the son of a soldier who might well in other times have done tours in India of a different nature, he established such a good-humoured relationship there that win or lose, come triumph or disaster, the pressures of touring were easily absorbed. In Australia, where the results mattered more, his role was that of coach, so that the burdens were shared first with Doug Insole and then with Alec Bedser.
He was playing that same familiar part in the West Indies. Ironically, he had not been one of the early selections, but as an old player scarred in earlier wars against Hall and Griffith, he knew better than most the perils that a new manager, Alan Smith, and an inexperienced captain, Ian Botham, were flying into as they took on the world champions with their fast bowling quartet in the increasingly stormy Caribbean. In Guyana the heavy and persistent rain meant that the practice sessions which were his charge were suspended. They had been difficult in smaller islands like Antigua and St. Vincent in the early weeks of the tour. And then he had to take the team, badly defeated in the first Test and now with their morale increasingly affected by the start of the Jackman affair, as well as their collective lack of practice and form, to the one-day beating at Berbice, while Alan Smith began to play one of his best innings with the politicians. The events of those few days deeply disturbed Barrington. He was also worried about Ann’s imminent arrival if the tour was to be cancelled.
But once the party arrived safely in Barbados he seemed to relax. My own last, long and treasured conversation with him was in the happy atmosphere of a Cunarder’s bridge, a party in the harbour which he himself had organised. Whatever he felt, he was full of hope for the more distant future, his absolute faith in the ability of Botham and Gatting made more significant by the summer of’81. He knew there were gaps in the England side, but he was old enough in the ways of cricket to know that they are not easily filled.
It was a little thing, at least in the context of that global conversation, that piled all the pressure back on to this caring man. At fielding practice it was Barrington who hit the ball that split Gooch’s hand. Gooch was due to bat that day, and in fact played better than anyone – as he told me, without too much discomfort. However, Ken took it badly, as he was bound to do, but it was the way in which he said to Bernard Thomas, “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” that in retrospect gave the party’s medical superintendent the first indication that events were getting out of proportion, upsetting the nervous balance. It was that night, with the Barringtons ready for bed, that the attack struck Ken down. Ann Barrington summoned Bernard Thomas, who was next door, and he knew at once that the attack had been instantaneously fatal. Next morning, when the team stood in Ken’s memory, there were many tears.
My own first encounter with Ken Barrington was in 1948 when I was a boy at Harrow. Tom Barling, the new school coach, brought over from The Oval, where he had not long ceased to play for Surrey, a young leg-spinner from Reading with a West Country burr in his voice. The intention was not only to give us practice against a type of bowling that Harrow were likely to meet in the match against Eton at Lord’s but also to show us what a proper cricketer in the making looked like. We were both seventeen. From then on his career in cricket progressed with its ration of setbacks until he became a record-breaking Test batsman, proudest of all in his unique achievement of scoring a century on every Test ground in England and in every Test-playing country.
As Wisden is a chronicle and as this was a man who rated only the best, it is not inappropriate that the essay on him as one of the Five Cricketers of the Year in the 1960 edition should have been written by Norman Preston and the piece on his retirement by John Woodcock, Preston’s successor as Editor, in the 1970 edition. It is appropriate, too, to add to those assessments of his playing ability his ever-maturing skill as a leg-spinner. No-one ever bowled more enthusiastically in the nets on tour than Barrington, and whether they realised it or not the England players who faced him were getting practice against a player who might have done the double in the 1930s, a decade less demanding at Test level than the 1960s.
It is with his career in cricket during the last ten years of his life that this eulogy is chiefly concerned. It was at Adelaide during the difficult Australian tour of 1974–75 that Barrington first began to believe that he had a contribution to make as a coach at the highest level. He was brought up in a generation which believed as an act of faith that once a cricketer had played at Test level he knew it all. How else could he have been selected? Furthermore, and this is still a more prevalent attitude than Barrington liked, a player who makes as much of a fetish about practising as Boycott is regarded as a freak. As one who had to work out his technique, to subordinate under a layer of discipline the stroke-making ability he had acquired in his early days, Barrington by the time he retired was a batsman who, if he never knew it all, was a scholar (as well as a gentleman) compared to the players he now saw trying to cope with Lillee and Thomson at their devastating best. More than once Barrington himself had had to change his approach both in style and mind, and so he was ideally suited to the task of developing younger talent and skills.
Not every captain appreciates the need for such a rôle; or knows how to put such available experience to its best use. Ironically, it was on his last tour that Barrington really came to fulfil himself in this the last, and to my mind, most difficult of his cricketing lives. By that time he had mastered the art of subordinating self and position without losing respect or the power to contribute. He would get me a cup of tea, suggest something which I’d reject probably because I was tired, but then I’d do it and usually it worked. This was Ian Botham during his apprentice days as captain. To the generation that is coming to full maturity Ken Barrington had become as important as the maypole; something solid. He was the Colonel around whom a team of cricketers could revolve while playing no part in the dance himself.
Like the maypole he was, too, a source of great happiness, with that rare gift of turning events into comic sketches as they happened. The rat hunt in the Ritz at Hyderabad is now part of cricketing legend. Some wretched rodent, unaware of niceties of protocol, had eaten the shoulder out of the manager’s England blazer in its search for nesting materials. By the time the Colonel’s army was assembled, the entire staff of the hotel and all its brushes and brooms were ready to go into action. The villain was struck but not apprehended, and after such a warning honour was seen to have been satisfied on all sides.
Now that he is gone, it is possible that the rôle he created and played may be forgotten through want of a successor. But Ken gave so much to cricket in the 1970s that he had left a few campaigners for the cause for the remainder of the 1980s. Even now as Gooch starts or finishes a drive or Gatting hooks, a memory of Barrington the batsman is stirred. For a coach there is no finer memorial than that. It is the man, though, that his contemporaries will miss; and for this one, at least, the hole that he began to dig on the Sixth Form Ground at Harrow more than thirty years ago is never going to be filled.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
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Just how gifted a games player Ken Barrington was can be gauged from the fact that to reclaim, then permanently keep, his Test place after being dropped, he abandoned his natural attacking style to become one of cricket's most notorious stonewallers. The revised method cost him his place once, by way of punishment for taking 435 minutes to score 137 against a humdrum New Zealand attack at Edgbaston in 1965, but overall it served him brilliantly. England too – before a heart attack forced premature retirement at 37, Barrington amassed 6806 Test runs at an average (58.67) surpassed for England only by Herbert Sutcliffe. A thickset 5ft 9ins, crinkly haired and strong-featured, in anything but batting gear Barrington was jovial and gregarious, always ready to see the best in everyone and every situation. Famous for mixed metaphors, his best-known quip came in answer to a Surrey fan commiserating over his lack of form after a sequence of four low single-figure scores, two ducks among them. "How d'you know I'm out of form?" shot back Ken indignantly: "I've only had nine balls all week!" It shattered Ian Botham's touring team when Barrington, England's assistant manager and a much-loved figure everywhere he went, died suddenly in Barbados in 1981 after another heart attack.
John Thicknesse
Wisden obituary
There should be no need for reticence in anyone paying tribute to Ken Barrington. He died of a heart attack in his hotel room at the Holiday Inn in Barbados on March 14, 1981, the Saturday night of the Barbados Test, while serving as assistant-manager on the England tour of the West Indies. As a player, as a friend, as a businessman and latterly as a leader of England’s cricketers in the field, he was a man who always did what he could and, when the chips were on the table for all to see, one who could be relied upon to give of his best, his uttermost. The world and especially the cricketing world cannot ask for more. That is why Ken Barrington, master of the malaprop, the man who slept not like a log but like a lark, commanded such affection all over the world. His widow, Ann, accompanied him on some of his later trips, and it is good that Ann is still involved in the game through the Lord’s Taverners, to whom Ken gave so much.
Yet reticence there is, and the hesitation is on his family’s account in recalling the circumstances of Ken’s tragically premature death at the age of 50. However, Wisden is a book of record, and historians sometimes find that its early pages tell the facts but less than the whole truth.
To my mind, the story of Ken’s death is as heroic as so many of his innings. It came as a great shock in the spring of 1969 to learn that the chest pains which had led him to withdraw from a double-wicket competition in Melbourne had in fact been a heart attack. After due reflection, taking into account not only his family but the fact that, at 38, batting in Test matches, always Ken’s particular forte, was not going to get easier, Ken Barrington retired. Immediately the cares of carrying England’s rickety batting through the uncertain and far from satisfying sixties slipped off his shoulders, like some leaden cloak. As he took to the village greens of charity cricket and to the golf courses where his game was good enough to be successfully competitive – and therefore a source of pleasure to a man who hated to be beaten – Ken Barrington’s step seemed lighter and his stature in cricket enhanced. His admirers, both far and near, began to realise just how much private effort had gone into coping with chuckers and bouncers, as well as the vagaries of form and the whims of selectors.
None the less, a heart attack is a warning, a red light that never joins with amber and turns to green. Although he had managed tours to India, Pakistan and New Zealand, and indeed had had the well-deserved honour of leading the England party at the Melbourne Centenary Test, nothing in his managerial career had tested him quite like this final West Indian ordeal. As a player he had not only plundered bowlers on the great Indian sub-continent but, the son of a soldier who might well in other times have done tours in India of a different nature, he established such a good-humoured relationship there that win or lose, come triumph or disaster, the pressures of touring were easily absorbed. In Australia, where the results mattered more, his role was that of coach, so that the burdens were shared first with Doug Insole and then with Alec Bedser.
He was playing that same familiar part in the West Indies. Ironically, he had not been one of the early selections, but as an old player scarred in earlier wars against Hall and Griffith, he knew better than most the perils that a new manager, Alan Smith, and an inexperienced captain, Ian Botham, were flying into as they took on the world champions with their fast bowling quartet in the increasingly stormy Caribbean. In Guyana the heavy and persistent rain meant that the practice sessions which were his charge were suspended. They had been difficult in smaller islands like Antigua and St. Vincent in the early weeks of the tour. And then he had to take the team, badly defeated in the first Test and now with their morale increasingly affected by the start of the Jackman affair, as well as their collective lack of practice and form, to the one-day beating at Berbice, while Alan Smith began to play one of his best innings with the politicians. The events of those few days deeply disturbed Barrington. He was also worried about Ann’s imminent arrival if the tour was to be cancelled.
But once the party arrived safely in Barbados he seemed to relax. My own last, long and treasured conversation with him was in the happy atmosphere of a Cunarder’s bridge, a party in the harbour which he himself had organised. Whatever he felt, he was full of hope for the more distant future, his absolute faith in the ability of Botham and Gatting made more significant by the summer of’81. He knew there were gaps in the England side, but he was old enough in the ways of cricket to know that they are not easily filled.
It was a little thing, at least in the context of that global conversation, that piled all the pressure back on to this caring man. At fielding practice it was Barrington who hit the ball that split Gooch’s hand. Gooch was due to bat that day, and in fact played better than anyone – as he told me, without too much discomfort. However, Ken took it badly, as he was bound to do, but it was the way in which he said to Bernard Thomas, “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” that in retrospect gave the party’s medical superintendent the first indication that events were getting out of proportion, upsetting the nervous balance. It was that night, with the Barringtons ready for bed, that the attack struck Ken down. Ann Barrington summoned Bernard Thomas, who was next door, and he knew at once that the attack had been instantaneously fatal. Next morning, when the team stood in Ken’s memory, there were many tears.
My own first encounter with Ken Barrington was in 1948 when I was a boy at Harrow. Tom Barling, the new school coach, brought over from The Oval, where he had not long ceased to play for Surrey, a young leg-spinner from Reading with a West Country burr in his voice. The intention was not only to give us practice against a type of bowling that Harrow were likely to meet in the match against Eton at Lord’s but also to show us what a proper cricketer in the making looked like. We were both seventeen. From then on his career in cricket progressed with its ration of setbacks until he became a record-breaking Test batsman, proudest of all in his unique achievement of scoring a century on every Test ground in England and in every Test-playing country.
As Wisden is a chronicle and as this was a man who rated only the best, it is not inappropriate that the essay on him as one of the Five Cricketers of the Year in the 1960 edition should have been written by Norman Preston and the piece on his retirement by John Woodcock, Preston’s successor as Editor, in the 1970 edition. It is appropriate, too, to add to those assessments of his playing ability his ever-maturing skill as a leg-spinner. No-one ever bowled more enthusiastically in the nets on tour than Barrington, and whether they realised it or not the England players who faced him were getting practice against a player who might have done the double in the 1930s, a decade less demanding at Test level than the 1960s.
It is with his career in cricket during the last ten years of his life that this eulogy is chiefly concerned. It was at Adelaide during the difficult Australian tour of 1974–75 that Barrington first began to believe that he had a contribution to make as a coach at the highest level. He was brought up in a generation which believed as an act of faith that once a cricketer had played at Test level he knew it all. How else could he have been selected? Furthermore, and this is still a more prevalent attitude than Barrington liked, a player who makes as much of a fetish about practising as Boycott is regarded as a freak. As one who had to work out his technique, to subordinate under a layer of discipline the stroke-making ability he had acquired in his early days, Barrington by the time he retired was a batsman who, if he never knew it all, was a scholar (as well as a gentleman) compared to the players he now saw trying to cope with Lillee and Thomson at their devastating best. More than once Barrington himself had had to change his approach both in style and mind, and so he was ideally suited to the task of developing younger talent and skills.
Not every captain appreciates the need for such a rôle; or knows how to put such available experience to its best use. Ironically, it was on his last tour that Barrington really came to fulfil himself in this the last, and to my mind, most difficult of his cricketing lives. By that time he had mastered the art of subordinating self and position without losing respect or the power to contribute. He would get me a cup of tea, suggest something which I’d reject probably because I was tired, but then I’d do it and usually it worked. This was Ian Botham during his apprentice days as captain. To the generation that is coming to full maturity Ken Barrington had become as important as the maypole; something solid. He was the Colonel around whom a team of cricketers could revolve while playing no part in the dance himself.
Like the maypole he was, too, a source of great happiness, with that rare gift of turning events into comic sketches as they happened. The rat hunt in the Ritz at Hyderabad is now part of cricketing legend. Some wretched rodent, unaware of niceties of protocol, had eaten the shoulder out of the manager’s England blazer in its search for nesting materials. By the time the Colonel’s army was assembled, the entire staff of the hotel and all its brushes and brooms were ready to go into action. The villain was struck but not apprehended, and after such a warning honour was seen to have been satisfied on all sides.
Now that he is gone, it is possible that the rôle he created and played may be forgotten through want of a successor. But Ken gave so much to cricket in the 1970s that he had left a few campaigners for the cause for the remainder of the 1980s. Even now as Gooch starts or finishes a drive or Gatting hooks, a memory of Barrington the batsman is stirred. For a coach there is no finer memorial than that. It is the man, though, that his contemporaries will miss; and for this one, at least, the hole that he began to dig on the Sixth Form Ground at Harrow more than thirty years ago is never going to be filled.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
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