NINETY-THREE NOT OUT

Frank Keating talks to R.E.S. Wyatt, Jardine's

henchman on the notorious `bodyline tour' and still as combative as ever

THE 1994 cricket season will be logged in the game's permanent legend. A magical young West Indian batsman, Brian Lara, having posted Test match cricket's highest score of 375 against England in the spring, reeled off five more successive centuries by way of introduction to his new English county, Warwickshire, and then smithereened the game's all-time first-class record by scoring 501. Warwickshire, uniquely, went on to win three of the four trophies for which the counties com- pete.

This week, by way of celebration, the Warwickshire club begin building a splen- did new grandstand at the city end of their Edgbaston arena. It will not be dedicated to Brian Lara. It is to be called the 'Bob Wyatt Stand' and it will be opened next May by the man himself, in the month of his 04th birthday and precisely 72 Mays since his first innings for Warwickshire on the very same paddock (v. Worcestershire, c Tarbox b Preece 37).

Traditionalists would have preferred the R.E.S. Wyatt Stand. This bulldog of a bats- man was an amateur, and cricket's most enduring set of initials stands for Robert Elliott Storey. His cousin is young Woodrow. He captained England 16 times out of his 40 Tests, and was vice-captain to Douglas Jardine on the todyline' tour of 1932-33. In first-class cricket Wyatt spanned 28 summers and scored close on 40,000 runs (85 centuries), took over 900 wickets, and held 415 catches. He lives in Cornwall in a handsome house he designed himself above the glorious Helford estuary, where the wooded hills this week were well under way towards their famed autumn splendours.

The one trophy of the four not won by Warwickshire this summer was the NatWest one-dayer. They were beaten in the final by Worcestershire. The old man was there in his panama hat, and in the sharp mid-morning sunlight he gazed down in contented reverie on the lovely acres where he in his pomp of youth had sported with his friends. His first half-century had come at Lord's, against Middlesex and `Young Jack' Hearn in 1923. Lord's opened the Bicentenary Gates, behind the old Tavern, only for Wyatt. `I can't lose today,' he chuckled, as his wife Mollie had wheelchaired him up the lift and into J.P. Getty's box that morning. For he had played for Warwickshire till 1939 and, after the war, for Worcester- shire till 1951. In his penultimate county innings, aged 50, he drove a winning six into the pavilion at Taunton off Bertie Buse's final ball of the match. A couple of weeks earlier that summer I had sat on the grass at Cheltenham and watched him bat for the first and only time. He made 61, a pugnacious snort of an innings against Gloucester's Test bowlers, Goddard and Cook.

Seventeen months ago, Wyatt had a severe stroke. The family knew he'd pull through when, three weeks later in hospi- tal, he went to prong a Brussels sprout with his fork and skewed it off the plate but the old slip-fielder caught it one-hand- ed before it hit the floor. `They tell me I've made a marvellous recovery. I sometimes can't hear too well, but I haven't been left with any distortions of the face — pity, what, might have improved my looks, eh? I hate the wheelchair, so I use a frame to walk any distance, and I don't think I can bowl overarm any more.'

`Whatever you do,' the utterly delightful Mollie had warned sotto voce, 'don't ask him about all this Atherton ball-tampering fuss, or why he left Warwickshire after the war. If you do, he can become the peppery old blighter he has always been, between you, me, and the gatepost.' And she chortled with pleasure and fond recollec- tion.

The grand old nut-brown face below the bullet-head and wide forehead remains tes- timony to long days well spent under the suns of summer. He seems scarcely less vinegary-sharp than when I climbed the high hill and first knocked on his door a dozen years ago, and attempted to jog his memory on the 50th anniversary of the `bodyline' tour. Now he gruffly supposed that I thought this summer's Oval Test match had been wonderful. 'Oh, yes, sir,' I gushed.

`Well, it wasn't wonderful to me. It creat- ed interest and I suppose it seemed excit- ing enough. But where were all the varieties of cricket's skills and beauties? Just fast bowling or medium bowling. No variety at all. There was more variety in facing one over from Wilfred Rhodes than in the whole of the Oval match. Certainly this chap Malcolm might be an awkward fellow to deal with, but there should be more to cricket than just tearing up and banging the thing down short. Larwood was a marvellous fast bowler, but he could vary his attack considerably.'

He continues to ask the questions and then answer them. `How do you think we'll cope with this fellow Shane Warne in Aus- tralia this winter, eh? Not very well, I should think. He's got a wonderful control of length and flight, but my theory is that he spins the ball too much. When Grim- mett or O'Reilly beat your bat, they usually hit the wicket. This Warne beats the bat, the wicket, and everything. What's the good of that, eh?'

The best over Wyatt ever faced was from a leg-spinner. `From "Father" Marriott of Kent on a chalky pitch at Tonbridge; beat me four times in the first five balls, and got me out with the sixth.' Who was the best batsman he ever played with or against?

He beads your eye like a schoolmaster receiving a ludicrous and juvenile question.

`Jack Hobbs, of course, on all pitches, although you have to say the Don [Brad- man] was the faster accumulator.' Wyatt contrived to open an innings alongside Hobbs only once — persuading the mae- stro to take a busman's holiday from the press-box and play in an MCC up-country game against Australia's Northern Districts at Newcastle in 1933. When he was open- ing the batting for England, Herbert Sut- cliffe was Wyatt's favourite partner. 'Of all the great players Herbert was the least self-

ish. He was a grand partner in a crisis and absolutely fearless.'

A staunch and resolute fearlessness endeared Wyatt to the English throughout his career. He would play on for the cause with cracked ribs and broken thumbs and fingers. On the England tour he led to the West Indies in 1934-35 (with spending money of £25 from Lord's in his pocket), he missed a bumper from Martindale which smashed his jaw in four places. In an affectionate biography of Wyatt by his friend Gerald Pawle, the author quotes another of his opening partners, Cyril Wal- ters, who died in 1992, a stripling of 87:

Bob never flinched. He used to stand there like solid rock. If he saw a ball he thought should be hit to leg for six and mistimed it, he took it on the jaw instead. He was very strong. And there was a stubborn streak in him Like many before or since (Hutton and Gooch, for instance), he made a duck in his first Test innings — lbw Promnitz, first ball, against South Africa in Johannesburg on Boxing Day 1927. Eighteen months later he played his first home Test, also against South Africa. He and Woolley bat- ted with resplendence at Manchester to put on 245 for the third wicket, Wyatt's 113 being the first century by an English amateur since the 1914-18 war.

A year later, in 1930, he captained Eng- land in the last Test of the Ashes series, taking over amid furious press controversy from the 'golden' Percy Chapman. With half England's wickets down for a paltry 197, he took up his bat to join Sutcliffe and face the last over before tea from Grim- mett. He was uncertain how the vast Ken- nington throng would greet the usurper and new captain. As Ronald Mason reported in Batsman's Paradise:

We had heard applause before, that very day — the roar that greeted Hobbs and Sutcliffe; the cheers for Duleepsinhji's 50; the very special welcome a crowd always reserves for Hammond. They were swallowed up in this one like odd buckets of water slung into Nia- gara. The noise beat up against the eardrums like a noise at sea. As Wyatt reached the wicket at the Vauxhall end great banks of sound came volleying from all sides . . . the noise continued, thudding and insis- tent, even as Wyatt took guard and Grim- mett moved back to begin his run The crowd were recognising and encour- aging Wyatt's fighter's courage. He had never faced Grimmett before, but knew his armoury contained a mesmerising googly. If only, he thought, he could survive the five balls to tea, he would be OK. Wyatt played three balls comfortably enough and watchfully. The fourth — 'magically dis- guised' — was the googly. 'It deceived me completely and missed off-stump by a frac- tion.' He played back to the next leg-break and went in, safe, to tea. After which he and Sutcliffe continued into the next morning and put on 170.

The more dramatically combative Jar-

dine was captain, and Wyatt his vice, when the Ashes series was resumed, down under, two years later. Jardine, says Wyatt, could vary between warmth and severity, shyness and arrogance. 'Yes, it's true, Douglas did not like Australians, certainly not when there was a mass of them.'

The tone is bonny, bold. No ancient's tremor, no once manly voice now turned to childish treble. 'By the end I was dead against "bodyline". It created ill-feeling as well as cutting out the most attractive strokes in cricket. It wasn't planned as such. In a way I might have started it, you know. It was in a match against an Aus- tralian XI before the Tests began, at Mel- bourne. I skippered, Douglas was up-country doing a spot of fishing. We were fielding. When the ball stopped mov- ing away from the batsmen, I began to get the slips over to the short-leg positions, primarily to stop the ones and twos on the on-side. Bradman looked slightly uneasy; Larwood got him for 36 in the first innings and clean bowled him for 13 in the second. When Douglas got back I told him in detail what had happened . . . '

So Jardine let Larwood off his leash. `You people today just don't realise quite how fast Larwood was out there. The Aus- tralians didn't play him very well, mind you, and they couldn't duck properly. Harold was dangerous because he bowled only fractionally short of a length. And then he was so beautifully accurate and full of subtle varieties. He bowled extremely fast skimmers, getting up at their noses, and when the batsmen backed away the ball would follow them.'

Not like Yorkshire's Bill Bowes, says Wyatt. 'Bowes was too tall for Australian wickets and, anyway, bowled too short. His stuff bounced like a tennis ball, no use at all. I told him so as well. He said I didn't approve of bodyline because I was scared of it. He then bet me five shillings I wouldn't get 50 for Warwickshire when they played Yorkshire in the upcoming summer. Hedley Verity said, "I'll have five bob on that too."' At Leeds, Yorkshire trapped Warwick- shire on a sticky and they were all out for 63. 'Of those, I made 33 not out, and Bowes and Verity somewhat grudgingly agreed that as I was not out I hadn't lost the bet, but I could only count 25 against my second innings score. That was hardly fair, but it was two against one, and for the second innings on a still appalling wicket I went in and made 24 before Verity got me. So I lost the bet by one run.

`But listen to this: at the end of that sea- son I came up against Bowes again in a match at Scarborough. He bowled bodyline at me throughout my innings — and I whacked him all over for a century before lunch. Not a bad retort, eh?'

And the old man chuckles, fit to burst.