Thanks for having me
FRANK Kr TimeMy good father was a fellow of unlikely parts. A cityborn London Irishman who worked all his life in farming, his twin obsessions were the Catholic Church and the Labour party. His heroes were Cobbett, Chesterton, Nye Bevan and Pope Pius. But Dad was utterly oblivious to anything sporting. On Saturday mornings in the mid-1940s, when I was nine or ten, he'd take me with him to the noisy mooing (and poohing) maelstrom of Gloucester's cattle market and, when I became cheesed off traipsing around after him (or steering clear of steers), he'd leave me in the Hillman and bung in the regular pile of weekend papers he'd bought: for me the Wizard or Radio Fun, for him Picture Post, the Catholic Herald and — cribs for his rabble-rousing that evening at Stroud Labour club — Tribune, the New Statesman and The Spectator.
I daresay I began imagining The Spectator to be an early soccer fanzine, but soon each Saturday I was heading straight for its always sparkling essay Sporting Days by the northcountry Labour MP J.P.W. Mallalieu (who, I learnt much later, answered universally to the nickname 'Curly'). What an enthusiastically welcoming writer he was for a boy already, to his father's dismay, preoccupied with games, and 'Curly', I can tell you straight, was obviously a crucial inspiration for what was to be a happily misspent life. I was still devouring his stuff half a dozen years later at school at Douai where the Spec was delivered weekly to the Bede library. When the 1st XV went up to Twickenham to see the 1954 All Blacks, led by legendary Bob Scott, I still recall the warm thrill a week later reading Mallalieu's vivid report: 'New Zealand had one thing which neither England nor perhaps any other football side in history has ever had — a fullback like the balding-headed Scott.' Golly, I'd actually been there too.
In 1957 a hardback collection of those Mallalieu pieces was published, the author's dedication to H. Wilson Harris, 'formerly editor of The Spectator for whom it was a pleasure to write'. By then, the magazine was already two editors on from Harris (Walter Taplin and Ian Gilmour), but sport still dipped an oar with fairly regular pieces from Neville Cardus, Bernard Darwin and BBC Test match 'voice' John Arlott, the last on a variety of subjects — even, in 1955, this boxing match: 'Four times Johnson's upswinging fist made a strange angular line in the space where Marcos had been a moment before. Tobacco smoke had turned the steamheat into a swamp mist. Punches landed with the sound of a boot clapped into a puddle . . . Then Marcos ran at Johnson and hit him again and again with a feminine intensity.'
There's a trouve for fans of cricket's pastoral, peaceable poet, but nice how things turn out and surprising strands entwine together, for Arlon was to become a valued mentor to me; and all of 35 years after that unlikely piece, in one of his last letters to me before his death, John noted his pleasure, for old times' sake, at hearing a new Spec editor, Dominic Lawson, had hired me in 1990 to begin the first of two rewarding long shifts as resident caretaker of Spectator Sport, a post which, by the way, ends with this very Christmas issue of 2007. (Don't ask the reason: old age and cobwebby decrepitude, I suppose.) Arlon's ringside dispatch was apt historically, somehow, because the inaugural sporting passage ever carried by the first Spectator just months after its founding in 1711 by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele was the latter's description of a prizefight of 'many Escapes and imperceptible Defences' staged at the Bear Garden, Hockley-in-the-Hole, 'a Place of no small Renown for the Gallantry of the lower order of Britons' between Messrs Buck and Miller, 'two Men of quick Eyes and ready Limbs'. Was that Fleet Street's first ever sports report?
Two and a half centuries on, this cub had graduated from the Stroud News to the Hereford Times and was able to buy for himself his weekly Spectator, which by then, under editor Brian Inglis (1959-1962), was enjoying a glistening passage — both chic and radical, you might say — with a dazzling crew (Alan Brien, Bernard Levin, Karl Miller, Cyril Ray, Katharine Whitehorn and co) further to inspire a blunt-pencilled rustic in the sticks. No matter that sport, with that lot, didn't get a look-in — although for years I'd quote a puzzled inquiry by the wonderful Whitehorn (then, and still, my journo heroine) which defines the darling basic battiness of cricket: 'Why are the umpires, the only two people on the field who aren't going to get grass stains on their knees, the only ones allowed to wear dark trousers?'
Inglis was succeeded by goodie top Tory lain Macleod, who claimed never to miss an annual Calcutta Cup rugby match; he also had a fondness for cricket, illustrated when he interviewed a young Alan Watkins over lunch at White's for the job as the magazine's political corr. According to Alan: 'When I arrived at the club at precisely one o'clock, Macleod had a large dry martini (his favourite drink) in his hand and was seated before the television set. England was playing Australia. Simpson and Lawry were opening the Australian batting. Macleod bought me a drink and said somewhat peremptorily, "I forbid any further conversation until 1.30." ' Over the next decades, Alan's inimitable grace and style would enhance occasionally the Spec's predilection for rugby union; and other sporting types like Clive Gammon and Alan Gibson sometimes got out and about, as did regular Turf-cutting forerunners of today's Robin Oakley such as city ace Christopher Fildes and Juliette Harrison. Late true-great Benny Green, underrated and understated, was always a must-read for me on no end of sporting matters. (My grandfather couldn't prescribe a pill to make a greyhound run faster, only one to make the other five go slower.') Twenty-odd years ago, another of the mag's politicos, Ferdinand Mount, covered a number of midsummer Wimbledons with a string of resplendent cutout-and-cherish essays.
By then, of course, there was Jeff, dodging and weaving, jabbing and moving, his column usually alongside his high-living, sporty sparring-partner Taki. Unwell or not, irrepressible Jeffrey Bernard gamely kept a flag flying for any Spectator sportsman. Jeff died ten years ago this autumn, racked to the very end because: 'Since the age of 14, I dearly wanted to be regarded as a sex object. I am sick to death that I was loved only for my cooking, accurate seam bowling, ability to solve anagrams and obtain credit from bookmakers.'
Way to go, you might say. During my bash since 1990, as well as Jeff, Simon Barnes and Mike Henderson came off the bench to inject some prolonged and refreshing vim into the attack. Meanwhile, here's to a happy new era, and a merry everything — oh yes, and et.' thanks for having me.
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