I t is hard to believe that John Arlott has been dead 10 years this Friday. His voice, of course, is still with us, imperishable. Through technology that voice will never die, never be forgotten, one age-proof link forever to reflect his light. I have just played a handful of snatches: “Hollies bowls … Bradman goes back across his wicket and pushes the ball gently in the direction of the Houses of Parliament which are out beyond mid-off. It doesn’t go that far, merely goes to Watkins at silly mid-off…”; “Mann’s inhumanity to Mann…”; “So it’s Botham … in … like a shirehorse cresting the breeze…”; “We have a streaker … not very shapely … and it’s masculine…”
Not that I needed the tape recorder. I know them by heart, and plenty more, and I dare say all of you of a certain age can recite no end of the vintage too. John was buried in St Ann’s churchyard on his Channel Island of Alderney. The bedroom window of his widow Pat’s new house looks out over the graveyard.
That very first New Year’s Day of 1992 two other islanders, Ian and Kathy Botham, who have a holiday home there, began their family tradition of breaking open a bottle of Beaujolais alongside John’s grave and toasting his genius and the memory of a broadcaster which the modern system could never again throw up. And even if it did, the technique would not stand an earthly, for the true-great pioneer broadcasters paradoxically needed silence to work in, and with, and only 10 years since the great man’s death, every new voice at the microphone seems intent only on justifying their jobs and their “fame” by butting in on an already raucous Babel of rabbit, rabbit, rabbit…
Ten years. More than twice times that in fact because, can you believe it, it is 21 years since Arlott last uttered on Test Match Special: “Nine runs off the over, 28 Boycott, 15 Gower – 67 for two, and after Trevor Bailey it will be Christopher Martin-Jenkins” … at which, in the middle of the Lord’s Centenary Test of 1980, both batsmen and all 11 Australian fieldsmen dropped what they were doing, turned and joined the packed throng who were already on their feet to applaud as a shirtsleeved, overweight figure high in the distance left the broadcast box in the pavilion turret for the final time.
Unsteadily, sheepishly almost, the great man turned his back on the arena and carried his primed glass of claret towards the pavilion’s back staircase marked “Exit”. A few of us clustered around, awestruck at the spontaneity of the occasion, and Tony Lewis said to him: “John, I was sure you’d sign off with something a touch more romantic.” Growled John: “There’s nothing more romantic than a clean break.”
Lucky for these pages at least, Arlott did not sign off with a “clean break” from the Guardian, for all sport’s most evocative voice had doubled as cricket eminence for this newspaper in the great line from Cardus since sports editor John Samuel had persuaded him to join in the 1960s (at the same time as our first horseracing racing correspondent Richard Baerlein: what a spring double!). From retirement on Alderney John continued to send back fond, fruitful and fruity dispatches on cricket as well as his unmissable weekly “Honest Bottle” wine column.
Once, aptly, he chose his “Desert Island” cricket XI, a team “of angels I will most enjoy watching in heaven”: Jack Hobbs, Wilfred Rhodes, Vivian Richards, George Brown, Keith Miller, Ted Dexter, Mike Brearley, Ian Botham, Learie Constantine, Jim Laker, Wesley Hall. I telephoned the island to ask was he sure that Hampshire’s George Brown would be a good enough wicketkeeper. “All right, then,” burred The Voice, slightly affronted, “give the gloves to Leo [another Hants best friend, Harrison] … and while you’re at it, say that Frank [Tyson] will give an exhibition of fast bowling in the lunch interval and, of course, put down Basil [D'Oliveira] as 12th man.”
Yes, you knew “Dolly” had to play a part. Arlott’s proudest thing was to be responsible for securing a post in English cricket for the Cape coloured D’Oliveira who, deprived of any first-class cricket through his country’s insidious apartheid and having heard his distant and distinct commentaries through the static and crackle, had written John a forlorn letter for help in green ink. In no time, as the world and his wife knows, Dolly was triumphantly batting and bowling for England – until 1968 when, the day after scoring an epic match-winning 158 in the final Ashes Test at the Oval, he was shamefully and shamingly dropped from England’s touring party back to his South Africa homeland that winter.
The selectors insisted they had chosen the side “purely on cricketing ability”, although it has since come out that the MCC, in those days allowed a veto on selections because England teams travelled in their name, had been specifically told, through the past-president Lord Cobham, that the tour would be cancelled by South Africa should D’Oliveira be on it. But the MCC had not, apparently, told the selectors, and the rest of Fleet Street meekly went along with Dolly’s omission “for cricket reasons”. Arlott was vilified when he not only said he would refuse to broadcast on any Test match involving South Africa but, in these pages, fiercely pronounced it as “ludicrous to think that anyone of open mind could believe the selectors left out D’Oliveira for valid cricketing reasons”.
The cricket establishment berated him. Of the many blackballing letters he received, he once told me, by far the most unpleasant had been from one of the selectors, the former England captain Peter May. Not that he wanted one – “never trust those bastards at Lord’s, m’boy, never trust ‘em” – but John went to his grave 23 years later with not even a grunt of apology from Lord’s that he had been right all along.
As well as May, together with the MCC’s eminences Gubby Allen and Billy Griffith, the selectors on that tumultuous day in 1968 were the captain Colin Cowdrey, Don Kenyon, Alec Bedser and the chairman Doug Insole. Only the last two are alive. Now, on the 10th anniversary of Arlott’s death, out of the blue an unlikely and remarkable new book has been published. At the Heart of English Cricket* is a glisteningly well-remembered and appealing monograph in hardback by Stephen Chalke on the life of Geoffrey Howard, caring and radical secretary at both Old Trafford and the Oval, before-his-time manager of successive MCC teams abroad and still a livewire of 92 .
Any sportsperson of a certain age will enchantedly relish and lap up the myriad of horse’s-mouth revelations in cricket’s most delightful book for a long time. Howard vividly remembers D’Oliveira’s crowning Oval innings on the day the selectors met into the night: “The telephone rang, and the caller was on the line from Prime Minister Vorster’s office in Pretoria. A fellow called Teeni Oosthuizen. He was a director of Rothmans, based in South Africa, and he’d been trying to contact Griffith, the MCC secretary ‘I can’t get hold of him, so will you take a message to the selectors. Tell them that, if today’s centurion is picked, the tour will be off.’” Howard duly passed on the message to chairman Insole. So the selectors did know. And 33 years on, Arlott is publicly proved to have been right. Up there, he’ll be grinning that grin of his: “Of course I was right, the bastards!”
Of the two survivors of that notorious meeting, there is no point in challenging 80-year old Sir Alec, always content to be a political naif (when Commonwealth prime ministers in 1977 announced the Gleneagles Declaration which imposed a sporting ban on South Africa, Bedser artlessly gruffed: “What’s a golf course got to do with it?”) But Insole, 75 and happily recovering from serious heart surgery, laughs off any charge with typically bluffness: “No way I’m saying that Geoffrey didn’t tell me of Pretoria’s telephone warning – but, frankly, I don’t recall it specifically because at that time every Tom, Dick and Harry was saying what would happen if we didn’t pick a certain someone. All I remember is opening a very long meeting by saying ‘Gentlemen, forget South Africa, let’s just choose the best MCC cricket team to go overseas, Australia, anywhere…’”
On John Arlott’s serene gravestone in his windblown Alderney cemetery is engraved two lines from one of his own poems:
“So clear you see those timeless things,
That, like a bird, the vision sings.”
* pp223, £16 post free, Fairfield Books, Bath BA1 6EY (01225 335813)
