CMJ Read online
Christopher Martin-Jenkins died peacefully at home on January 1st, 2013. Warm tributes to him came from across the cricketing world.
‘It is doubtful that anyone has contributed more in a lifetime to the overall coverage of cricket than Christopher Martin-Jenkins . . . CMJ, as he was widely known, was one of cricket’s most respected writers and broadcasters.’ Jonathan Agnew
‘CMJ was one of the voices of the English summer – a true gentleman who embraced the changes in cricket whilst acting as a guardian of its traditions and values . . . Quite simply he will be remembered as one of the legendary characters of cricket writing and broadcasting.’ Adam Mountford, TMS
‘As a commentator and journalist he was passionate about upholding the values of the game and always expressed his views with clarity and humour.’ Mike Griffith, MCC president
‘A true gentleman and fantastic servant to the game of cricket, he will be missed.’ Charlotte Edwards, captain of the England women’s team
‘He was always great company . . . As a player I respected him; when I became a fellow broadcaster that respect only ever grew . . . A true gentleman.’ Sir Ian Botham
‘He was a man who just loved cricket – everything about it. He loved being around the grounds and working in the sport, but it was not just international games that grabbed his attention. He was a great lover of county cricket, too.’ Angus Fraser
‘CMJ was such a wonderful and truthful broadcaster. His quiet, unassuming and lucid commentary, informed by Christian beliefs and sense of place, was in its way an expression of a world view and a philosophy.’ Peter Oborne, Telegraph
‘He came closer than anyone to combining the knowledge of an expert with the enthusiasm of a student.’ Scyld Berry, Telegraph
‘A genuinely witty raconteur, with a dry humour and a gift for mimicry . . . We’ll all raise a glass in memory of not just a brilliant and knowledgeable broacdcaster, which he was, but also, for those privileged to have counted themselves as friends, to a supremely lovely bloke.’ Martin Johnson, Sunday Times
‘He was the voice of an English summer, part of a dwindling breed of eccentric, impish but much-loved cricket commentators.’ Simon Boyle, Daily Mirror
‘A loveable commentator who radiated knowledge and became part of the game’s fabric.’ Stephen Brenkley, Independent
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012
This paperback edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013
A CBS Company
Copyright © 2012 by Christopher Martin-Jenkins
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Christopher Martin-Jenkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
All pictures supplied courtesy of the author
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-84983-268-7
ISBN: 978-0-85720-083-9 (ebook)
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the UK by CPI Group UK Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
To our children, James, Robin and Lucy, who have given me so much pleasure; and to their children, Molly, William, Freddie, Missy, George, and any still to come.
CONTENTS
1 Summer’s Lease
2 Hooked
3 Family Matters
4 Eastbourne
5 Westborne: Life at Marlborough
6 Cambridge
7 The Cricketer Magazine
8 Off to the Beeb
9 Test Match Special – Commentators
10 From Brown to Boycott
11 The West Indies
12 A Second Family
13 Books and Speeches
14 County cricket and the Daily Telegraph
15 Australia Then and Now
16 India
17 Pakistan
18 New Zealand
19 Sri Lanka
20 South Africa
21 The Times
22 Sparkling Teams and Champagne Moments
23 Change – But Not All Decay
24 Sussex and England
25 R.M-J
26 Playing the Game
27 From Cricket to Golf
28 Faith
29 Confessions
30 Crises – and Consolations
31 Frustrations
32 Cricket’s Future
33 MCC President
34 A Bend in the River
Index
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
1
SUMMER’S LEASE
The Kennington Oval, south London; I am watching professional cricket for only the second time. In the 1950s it is still a smutty place, brown brick abounding, a working-class playground if ever there was one, where early F.A. Cup finals were played. Cloth caps are the prevailing fashion on the wooden seats where my young brother and I sit uncomfortably, the sun like a hot blanket bearing down on us through a heavy sky the colour of pale lead, though it is August in a heat-wave. The youthful Ken Barrington, looking small in the green middle distance, albeit with the chunky build of a middleweight boxer, lifts a bat guided by white-gloved hands and brings it sharply down on a ball pitched outside his off stump. With amazing speed the hard red ball skims precisely towards us on the boundary’s edge. ‘All the way, all the way’, says a wizened old watcher to our left, pleased to see a late cut executed with such mastery by so inexperienced a batsman. The white fence in front of us absorbs the impact and it drops to the grass, close enough to touch. I so want to pick it up and throw it back. Sore bottom or not, I am already besotted with the game.
The Oval again on 23 August 2009, sun still shining down, this time from a bluer sky on a brighter afternoon at a ground now developed for business executives; as much glass, steel and plastic as brick these days. Thousands watching in the ground but millions listening on the radio, to me for some reason! Michael Hussey, all angular style and nose-to-the-earth determination, heroic in defeat for Australia, gets an inside edge onto his pad off Graeme Swann’s off-break. Alastair Cook envelops the ball at chest height at short-leg and little umpire Asad Rauf’s finger is raised towards the sky. England have won the Ashes.
That does not happen very often. To be on the air to describe the moment is a special privilege and it felt almost as exciting to me in 2009 as it had thirty-two years earlier, in 1977, when Rod Marsh, like Hussey raging against the imminence of defeat during a defiant innings, skied a drive off Mike Hendrick towards Derek Randall at wide mid-off. Randall’s were the surest hands (and the swiftest feet) in the England team. He circled below the descending red blur, held the ball securely in both hands, threw it high in the air and, keen schoolboy in an adult shell that he always was, turned a cartwheel that signified a nation’s joy.
All this I described as best I could in the instant of its happening, before uttering (subconsciously aware, even in 1977, of the contemporary need for soundbites), the magical words: ‘And England have won the Ashes.’
There is a civilised tradition that allows a home commentator to describe the moment of victory, be he English or Australian. I have given way to a few in my time, from the silver-voiced Alan McGilvray to the laconic Jim Maxwell. In 2009 Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s bright and industrious correspondent, on the air when England’s e
ighteen-year drought ended in a welter of patriotic fervour four years previously, had left the box to be the first to interview Andrew Strauss. To my amazement he bobbed up in the middle with a microphone in hand, scarcely more than a minute after Hussey had been caught, to give listeners the first breathless reactions of the 2009 summer’s ultimate hero.
Emails had poured in to Test Match Special from all quarters of the globe, including Mozambique, Ghana, South Georgia and the base camp at Everest. Somehow people had found ways to listen to the radio commentary. Five or six million was the estimated audience. For an objective commentator there should not even be reflected glory at moments like this but it is hard not to rejoice within. It would be boring, after all, if the same nation were always the top dog.
The pleasure has been all the greater on those even rarer occasions when England have claimed the urn in Australia itself during my forty years and more of writing and talking about cricket for a living, not least when Strauss and his team enjoyed an even greater triumph early in 2011. Three innings’ wins for England on that trip lifted the spirits of millions during a cold, grey winter in Britain. There is something special about being there to record victories won in foreign lands, particularly unexpected ones. I think of Derek Underwood bowling Gary Sobers as the West Indies collapsed against spin bowling at Port of Spain in 1974; of Steve Harmison blazing his way through the West Indies at Sabina Park in 1994; the game at Karachi in 2000 when the winning runs were scored by Nasser Hussain’s side in almost pitch darkness; or the time in 2001 when the Sri Lankans, so hard to beat on their own pitches, collapsed like dominoes one stifling Saturday afternoon in Colombo.
It is the Ashes that resonate loudest. Having taken over from Brian Johnston in 1973 as the third of the four cricket correspondents so far appointed by the BBC, it fell to me to describe the moments when Bob Willis bowled Australia’s number eleven, Alan Hurst, at Adelaide in 1979 and, seven years later, when Merv Hughes swung a ball from Phil Edmonds into the waiting hands of Gladstone Small at deep square-leg at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Through eighteen years of reporting for the Daily Telegraph and The Times there were no such good tidings to tell, but the 2010/11 series helped to erase from English memories at least the humiliation of losing all five Tests against Ricky Ponting’s great team four years previously. The emergence of England as the strongest team in Test cricket in 2011 when I was not only commentating but also, to my agreeable surprise, acting for a year as President of MCC, prompted the thought that I might have reached the autobiographical stage of life.
Cricket has been the central theme, although not the only one, since early boyhood. I can see myself now at the age of about eleven, sitting at a brown, ink-stained desk in the fusty form-room at my prep school in Eastbourne in early May, circa 1955, as a soft hum from outside the windows betrayed the mower, pushing its way up and down the playing field outside. At such times my thoughts inevitably drifted from whatever was being taught beside the blackboard. Mowing meant cricket then and, even in what might be called mature middle age, my nose still tends to twitch, like a deer’s on the wind, when it sniffs the beckoning scent of newly cut grass. In those relatively carefree days it used to lure as irresistibly as bread in the oven or the salty tang of the sea.
Fresh air and cricket always tended to take precedence over academic study, except perhaps when examinations loomed, but at least some of what I learned in other contexts has stood me in good stead during my working life. A few suns have set since I surprised Dennis Silk, later a distinguished Warden of Radley, during a lesson in A House at my senior school, Marlborough, by responding to his request for an example of alliteration with a headline from that morning’s Daily Express:
Stupendous Statham Skittles Springboks.
Yes, he confessed: that was alliteration, if not very literary alliteration. Some forty years on, I found myself writing for a tabloid, too, although it was a broadsheet when I joined it, honest guv. Becoming cricket correspondent of The Times, having been in the same role at the Daily Telegraph and, for even longer, the BBC, marked the completion of an extremely fortunate hat-trick.
‘Did you ever, in your wildest dreams, imagine that I would achieve all that?’ I asked my wife not long ago. ‘To tell the truth, darling’, she replied: ‘I’m not sure that you have ever appeared in my wildest dreams.’
Not my joke, unfortunately, but it is true that many have fancied making a living from talking and writing about cricket and that, alas, not many have ever had the chance. I have indeed had a fortunate innings, if not one to be especially proud about. We are all blessed, after all, with some talents, and making good use of them, especially if sometimes it can genuinely serve others as well as yourself, is what life should be about. ‘You should always give more than you take’, as my distant cousin Tim Rice observed in his lyrics for Sir Elton John’s ‘Circle of Life’.
The odd thing is, however, that there is as much satisfaction to be gained from overcoming one’s disadvantages as from making the most of abilities. Every cricketer knows that bowlers are especially proud when they score a fifty, or batsmen when they surprise themselves by taking a wicket.
What has made me proud, apart from the achievements of my children, has been the occasional small victory over natural hamfistedness. Hanging pictures without knocking out the plaster from the wall, mending plugs (in the days when that was an essential household skill), growing a few vegetables in our early married days, creating a sandpit for the children years ago or laying a patio in the garden have all been little triumphs. It is true that I managed to break two toes in the latter endeavour by dropping a paving stone onto my foot shortly before my wedding, but few great victories come without cost.
The doers of society, the manufacturers and the carers, add more to the sum of human happiness than the talkers, writers and observers. Happily for me and a few like me, it takes all sorts to make a world. I was never destined to do anything very serious for a living.
Up to a point, however, I am still doing it, and I don’t really want to stop – for ‘summer’s lease hath all too short a date’.
2
HOOKED
In some ways it has never got any better than it seemed in the first fine careless rapture of my youth. Cricket in a garden or on a beach was, for me, as good an experience of bliss as could be found. Only when it became an organised game did the harsher realities start to bite: the need for personal discipline and responsibility to the team; and sometimes the disappointments of getting out early, dropping a catch or being taken off wicketless. But that is part of the point of cricket: it teaches lessons about life, how best to succeed and how to react when you don’t. Also that, having striven to do your best, contentment lies to some extent in finding your own level.
From pride and all vainglory good Lord deliver me, but the fact is that I have achieved a minor celebrity by broadcasting and writing about the game. I know that thousands – probably an understatement – would love to have done the same. Aware always of the famous C.L.R. James question ‘what do they know of cricket who only cricket know’, I nevertheless make no apology for attempting to justify a whole career based on a mere game, and a life-long affair with its character and characters.
With a bat and a ball it would be no problem. The sheer pleasure of timing a stroke for the first time, the sound of that resonant click, the swift dispatch of the ball to some gratifyingly distant place, can be enough to hook a person for life. As for the bowler’s joy in hitting the stumps and hearing that different, distinctive clip of parting bails, it could conjure up images and analogies more appropriate to a novel.
What sets these experiences apart from all the other games, of course, is the team context in which they occur once the garden, the street or the beach has been swapped for a field; and the childhood battles have been exchanged for real matches. Then the fielders become as important as batsmen and bowlers, able to create their own moments of ecstasy from a swift swoop, a one-handed pick-up and dea
dly strike on the stumps; or a dive, an outstretched arm and a magical realisation that the flying ball has been grasped inches from the ground.
Baseball alone shares with cricket (and team golf, a form of the game that too few golfers learn to appreciate) the intensity of individual duels within a team battle. No doubt it offers also these same moments of personal triumph, but without the 360-degree canvas on which a cricket match unfolds, or the same variety, strategy, or infinite capacity for sudden changes of fortune. The longer the game of cricket, the more this is true.
It is hard to convey to the uninitiated these heady moments of delight. To attempt it is the literary equivalent of trying in music to convey a trout, rose-moles all in stipple, muscling up a chattering brown river. Schubert managed it in music and I dare say that Elgar could have interpreted the ebbs and flows of cricket just as well had he watched beside the Cathedral and the water meadows at Worcester rather than drawing his inspiration from the Malvern Hills. In words, the game at its best really needs a Shakespeare to do it justice, but at least there was Neville Cardus to embroider its characters in days before television and Raymond Robertson-Glasgow to observe ‘all summer in a stroke by Woolley’.
These days there seems to be all summer in a kick by Rooney. Until soccer and its highly skilled, grossly spoiled ‘superstar’ professionals swamped every other game on television and in the newspapers, cricket was indeed the chief sport of every summer, so much a part of the English way of life that Siegfried Sassoon could write at the height of the First World War:
I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats.
W.G. Grace was famously stimulated to his greatness by a keen cricketing mother, but the seeds in me were sown by my father. I was already entranced by the time that we moved to South Holmwood, near Dorking in west Surrey, in 1951. We had a garden with what seemed to me like a long strip of grass between the vegetable and soft fruit patches. It was meant to be a pathway for wheelbarrows, conveying waste and weeds to the rubbish dump at the bottom; but it was used by my two brothers and me in summer for the much better purpose of running in to bowl, in our imaginations, like Ray Lindwall or Alec Bedser or Jim Laker, across the lawn to the waiting sibling. If I were batting I might have been Len Hutton, Denis Compton or my favourite player, Tom Graveney. When I bowled, right arm pumping after the manner of Lindwall or T.E. Bailey, a hapless Australian would be facing, perhaps Neil Harvey if the recipient were my left-handed younger brother, Timothy; or Lindsay Hassett if it were David, the elder one, also red-haired.