BOOK OF THE WEEK
The Tour: The Story of England’s Overseas Cricket Team 1877-2023
By Simon Wilde (Simon & Schuster £25,580pp)
It’s funny to think that if Britain hadn’t been a small island nation, cricket might never have broken the bonds of a quirky ball game virtually unheard of by the rest of the world.
An island nation perhaps, but with its long maritime tradition it reached a scope disproportionate to its size. And of all the evidence of Britain hanging around abroad, cricket has to be one of the few things it left behind that is both highly visible and distinctive and, even for the most awake, hard to beat.
No other sport has tours quite like cricket tours – long, action-packed and often full of gossip too – which is why Simon Wilde’s extensive history of England’s cricket team abroad is so full of interest.
The first major overseas tour from England to Australia and New Zealand in 1876 lasted 254 days; their most recent triumphant visit to Pakistan was only 30. Grand tours have turned into package tours.
Denis Compton is pictured signing autographs for his fans with a cigarette in his mouth
Wilde is the seasoned cricket correspondent for The Sunday Times, and this complements his biography of the England cricket team.
As you’d expect, all your favorite anecdotes are here – a well-oiled Andrew Flintoff being rescued from his late-night paddle boat by the St. Lucia Police Department, David Gower in flying gear buzzing his teammates in Australia in a Tiger Moth, Geoff Boycott who bites going to golf instead of watching his peers play in a test match and, of course, the first blows to apartheid-era South Africa when they refused to accept Basil D’Oliveira because he was of mixed race.
Brits may not be very popular abroad these days, but our overseas cricketers are like a gold mine for the host country.
The very first match played by an England team in Australia in 1862 was so attractive that all the costs of the tour were covered by one match alone.
When England first toured India in 1933–34, the Delhi government closed its offices and declared Bombay a public holiday: unsurprisingly, the average gate for that test match was 100,000.
A seven-month tour of Australia in the 1880s would have turned a profit had the sponsor WG Grace, the most famous cricketer in the world at the time, offered £3,000 to manage the team. That is the equivalent of half a million today, proving that the huge sums offered by the Indian Premier League have always been there in one form or another.
The pressure on the captains can be enormous. Doug Insole, a former Essex captain and Peter May’s deputy on tour, said the skipper had to be a “public relations officer, agricultural consultant, psychiatrist, accountant, nursemaid and diplomat, as well as selector and tactician, while also dealing with a number of ferocious hostile bowlers.” trying to knock off your block’.
Wilde opens the bowling with a riveting chapter called Staying Sane, which belies the notion that touring is one long fun in the sun for the cricketers, who are miles from home and cocooned with people they may not always get. together with.
British footballer and cricket champion Denis Compton is pictured batting for England in 1952
Some players sail through any number of tours seemingly unscathed: the unflappable Alastair Cook has carved across the globe for centuries, while others have cracked – the famed Marcus Trescothick, as well as Jonathan Trott. Graeme Fowler and Steve Harmison also struggled in modern times.
Graeme Swann, the great off-spinner, once said, ‘Touring before you have kids is the best thing you’ll ever do. You spend time with some of your best friends, [in] five star hotels, playing cricket for your country. It is awesome.’ The downside, of course, is that once you have kids, it’s not so much fun anymore.
It is true that the English cricket authorities – and indeed many of the game’s more traditional supporters – have not been particularly sympathetic to partners and families until recently. The thought of wives, girlfriends and even children sharing breakfast with the team would have been enough to cause many residents of the Lord’s Long Room to have a stroke.
Women were only admitted to the MCC in 1998. The class structure of the game was like an open wound. In 1962-63, the men who led the team on the Ashes tour of Australia couldn’t have been more old-fashioned.
The manager was the Duke of Norfolk and although the old amateur status had been abolished, the captain and vice-captain, Ted Dexter and Colin Cowdrey, were both public school and Oxbridge. Dexter’s wife, Susan, jumped at the chance to join the tour and do some modeling.
This did not go so well for Fred Trueman, a hugely illustrious – if combative – Test player and cricket professional. He told an Aussie journalist that he wasn’t sure “whether we should play by the Jockey Club rules for Dexter Enterprises, or go on a mission hunt” (a spiky reference to the Reverend David Sheppard, another senior player and later Bishop of Liverpool ).
Dexter fined Trueman £50 for not contributing to team spirit. He was furious and vowed never to play for England again, although public opinion was massively on his side. He did play again, but never went on a major tour again.
Not even Ray Illingworth, later a successful England captain and an influential figure in the game, could stand it. “None of the professionals have ever been invited to dinner. . . not that we’d want to go anyway, but all the amateurs dined with the Duke of Norfolk and it was divisive. I never felt comfortable in the set-up.”
Thank goodness, for ‘Bazball’, feel the England team’s aggressive, powerful batting style following the appointment of current coach Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum and captain Ben Stokes, all tatts and shades, and not much to do with the Duke of Norfolk.
Sporting legend Denis Compton is pictured in 1951 leaving London Airport for South Africa
It was Trueman’s first wife, Enid, who articulated the woes of the itinerant widow’s life. “When you’re married to a famous person, everyone expects it to be great. You can also be very lonely on your own while your husband is thousands of miles away.
“And you won’t miss me half as much as I miss you, because you’ve got all the contacts, the parties, the dinners. All I’ve got is the phone, the reporters, and the threat.”
So no fun than being locked up at home and within weeks they were divorced.
There were huge opportunities for womanizing and, er, infidelity, which Wilde skates tactfully over in his accounts of modern tours.
England’s first overseas cricket visit was in 1859 to Canada and the US. The manager, Fred Lillywhite, was very enamored with the ladies of Philadelphia: “It was afforded by the presence of such a large and beautiful collection of the fairer sex.”
An incentive that, frankly, has probably had the same effect on many touring cricketers over the years.
The big batsman and England captain Wally Hammond, described by his biographer as ‘a womanizer on a grand scale’, was known for his enthusiastic pursuit of women at home and abroad.
More recently, Frances Edmonds, the wife of English spinner Phil, didn’t mince words: “There’s no point in pretending that three and four month tours don’t come with a fair amount of tissues,” she wrote.
One who knew a lot about that was Denis Compton, a hugely glamorous figure, dazzling cricketer and an impossibly handsome man, who got many approaches. “My first two marriages didn’t really stand a chance,” he recalled. “Test cricketers have the hardest job of all to keep their marriages going because of all the touring.”
Still, there were fees. The temptations were always there. When a beautiful blonde [on the ship to Australia] asked me to sign her menu, she shoved her napkin into my hands.
“Written in lipstick was her cabin number.”