Until I succumbed to the lure of Enid Blyton’s Five Go to Kirrin Island or
Malcolm Saville’s Wings Over Witchend
I would often be found with my head buried in an atlas or junior encyclopaedia.
However, perhaps the most influential book of all was, oddly enough, Dad’s
battered cloth-covered 1951 edition of the Wisden almanac,
the cricket-lover’s bible.
Well, I’ve never attempted to conceal my ‘anorak’
credentials, but this obsession with a statistical book published ten years
before my birth predated even my first forays into trainspotting. I don’t think
there was any significance attached to the 1950 cricket season; perhaps it had
been given as a twenty-first birthday gift. Nevertheless, once Dad first dusted
off the book and showed it to me, I was hooked.
Firstly, I was amazed how a volume with such small
dimensions could contain more than a thousand pages. Wow! Admittedly I paid
little attention to the sizeable chunk devoted to cricket’s holy laws, but
those black-and-white photos of smartly-blazered gents with huge white collars,
together with scorecards for every match played in the 1950 English summer,
winter tours and global domestic competitions, seemed more enthralling than
anything Dickens or RL Stevenson ever wrote.
It wasn’t the prose, the short summary introducing each
game, but the facts and figures which proved so absorbing. It’s hard to put my
finger on the reason. It’s not as if cricket was hitherto an enigma. I would
have been well aware of contemporary stars such as Garfield Sobers, John Snow
and Colin Milburn. Nevertheless I devoured all the facts and figures therein.
Without consulting the internet I couldn’t tell you much about, say, the 1970
season but I can happily reel off unaided long-remembered stats from two
decades previously: John Dewes’ nine centuries, Roy Tattersall’s 193 wickets,
Everton Weekes’ 304 not out against Cambridge University and the fact that
Lancashire and Surrey finished as joint
county champions.
Perhaps in retrospect, this yellow-covered publication
represented not merely a random snapshot of a single year’s sport but the
entire history of the game. Those fragile, wafer-thin pages contained a myriad
of first-class cricket records (no one-dayers then, of course), many of which
remain, and always will be, unbroken. The Wisden introduced me to names such as
AP Freeman (304 wickets in a single summer), Jack Hobbs (197 career centuries)
and of course the incomparable Don Bradman, whose retirement with a Test
average of 99.94 would still have been fresh at the time of publication.
My youthful brain was filled with a whole new vocabulary of
names and initials: DVP Wright, RN Harvey, RT Simpson, Essex spinners Peter and
Ray Smith (Dad’s namesake!), Wardle, Washbrook, Fagg, Fishlock, John and James
Langridge, Laker, Lindwall, Knott, Nourse, etc, etc. It was almost as if I knew
all these mysterious figures from long ago, permanently attached to their 1950
tally of runs or wickets.
Except, of course, that I didn’t know them at all. It was
only by talking to Dad that these old cricketers were brought to life. For
example, Hampshire’s Charlie Knott had been educated at Dad’s alma mater, Taunton’s School, Doug
Wright had bowled fast leg-breaks (huh? Even now, I’ve never seen anyone do
that on a regular basis), the West Indian ‘Three Ws’ were so thrilling and
Essex’s Trevor Bailey had been stultifyingly boring. Even Mum, too, had
anecdotes of collecting autographs of Essex players when accompanying her
younger, cricket-loving brothers to Valentine’s Park.
Dad could also furnish me with context to apparent oddities
such as why NWD Yardley captained England when he seemed to score few runs and
take no wickets (he was amateur in an era when professionals were frowned upon)
and John Goddard skippered the West Indies touring side, purely because he was
white. These weren’t just dusty tales of cricket, they were social history.
For many years I would revisit this venerable edition of
Wisden whether to research something or simply for pleasure. I was fascinated
to discover that one or two players I had watched perform in the mid-Seventies
(notably Somerset’s captain Brian Close and Middlesex spinner Fred Titmus) also
had bit parts in the book.
Yet it didn’t propel me into the rarified world of Wisden
collectors. The only other edition I bought (I think it was in a sale!) was
that of 1985 featuring the unforgettable exploits of Viv Richards et al the
previous summer. More
recently, a friend bought me a limited-edition focussing on the famous 2005
Ashes season, a splendid souvenir of that series. However I could not lose myself in the wealth of contemporary
stats in the way I'd done with those concerning 1950. Perhaps it
was because I had scribbled down some scores and notable performances in my own
diary, or that TV and the Guardian sports pages had rendered Wisden redundant.
Yet despite many of its pages becoming loose, possibly
even mislaid, it’s Dad’s old possession which I most cherish. It’s not just
because, since his death in 2015, that it reminds me of him. It’s also a
souvenir of a time in my pre-teens when I was developing an interest in a sport
which would entertain, intrigue and engross me for five decades and counting.
It’s not my sole source of
inspiration – there’s no substitute for playing – but the dusty, musty 1951 Wisden was
undoubtedly a factor.
