SPECTATOR SPORT
ONE OF the reasons Sussex County Crick- et. Club has apparently scrapped its annual dinner is 'the cost involved in obtaining good speakers'. Reporting this in the Daily Telegraph, William Deedes remembered a Passage in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire indicating that when speak- ers had to be paid for their orations, things began to go awry. The post-prandial sporting speech is now b.ig business. Killing the Vatted calf isn't in
— four-figure fees, full expenses, even in some cases re-arranging the dinner's date to suit the speaker's diary — which is a heck of a variation on the old Newport County joke: 'Er, hullo, is that the County ground? What time's kick-off this after- noon?' 'What time can you get here, boyo?' The broadcasters have cashed in on the cottage industry. Henry Blofeld, Christo- pher Martin-Jenkins, and Brian Johnston have good, funny and expensive set speech- es. The bearded swot with the row of coloured pencils in his top pocket, Bill Frindall, is also a star turn, though the par- leying parade is led by one-time players now at the mike, like Bill Beaumont, Cliff Morgan, Fred Trueman, and Trevor Bailey. Two former international sportsmen, Peter Parfitt, the cricketer, and Mike Bur- ton, the rugby forward, are both now corpo- rate hospitality tycoons and also, for my money, the best and funniest at the after-
Post-prandial speakers
Frank Keating
dinner doodle. Burton's one piece of advice is to steer clear of the dinner-dance: 'They are the kiss of death. You have to wait till the Club Secretary has had his say, followed by the Captain, who labours through the team's playing record before naming "The Most Improved Player of the Year". Then the Club President will either bore the pants off everyone with a nostalgic look- back over his own playing days, or rail at length on the evil of creeping professional- ism, before announcing the "Club Man of the Year Award" to so-and-so for the third year in succession. Finally, with everyone either itching to dance or drunk with bore- dom (or both), you, the paid guest speaker, rise to do your bit on a hiding to nothing.'
As Deedes remarked, the trouble with hired speakers and comedians at sporting dinners was that they felt impelled, in return for their £400 fee or whatever, to speak at inordinate length. Mind you, that was no problem for one of the breed's pio-
neers. W.G. Grace had one set speech, of a single sentence. On the MCC tour of Cana- da and America, for instance, his first din- ner speech was at Montreal: 'Gentlemen, I beg to thank you for the honour you have done me, and would say I have never seen better bowling than I have today, and I hope to see as good wherever I go.'
Throughout the tour, W.G. varied it only with substitutions for the word 'bowling'. At Ottawa it was 'a better pitch'; at Toron- to `batsmanship'; at Hamilton 'fellows': at Niagara 'prettier ladies'; and in New York it was 'tasted better oysters'. The good doc- tor admitted he had no pretensions to ora- tory: 'I would any day as sooner make a duck before tea than a speech after dinner'.
That most charming of all cricket writers, Raymond Robertson-Glasgow, once defined the acceptable supper-singing speech: 'If a fellow gets up and says he saw the Blackburn Rovers of 1891 beat the Something-or-Other Rangers, he might just as well have stayed on his seat. But the man who describes how he saw W.G. cracking them around at Bristol in that year has news value as well as a riveted audience. He may be a howling bore — but, by Jove, he saw the doctor in action'.
By the way, I missed one current speaker off my list of 'greats'. I have heard him at golf and cricket dinners and been enchant- ed. His name is William Deedes.
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