Bat and baton
Michael Henderson
IT can be an enclosed world, sportswriting, but some of us get out now and again to admire the delights of neighbouring parishes. So it was with great joy last week that I heard Simon Rattle, indisputably the greatest Englishman alive, conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in a pair of glorious concerts at the Festival Hall.
There is a sports connection with the great Prussians — at least there is for me. In November 1987, when Rattle made his debut with the Berliners, I fell into conversation during rehearsals with his father, Denis. 'You write about cricket and music?' he asked. 'Lucky man. You must be the new Cardus.' It was hardly an original line then, and I've heard it 100 times since, but that afternoon, in Cold War Berlin, it made me feel very tall.
Rattle senior turned out to be a great cricket-lover, and that night, after his son had conducted Mahler's Sixth Symphony, he took me to one side in the Green Room. The Rattles lived in Liverpool, where Simon was born, but, in his childhood, Denis had gone to Chatham House, a Ramsgate grammar school, where he played for the first XI against the might of Kent. He batted against the great leg-break bowler, AP `Tich' Freeman, who took more first-class wickets — 3,776 — than anybody in the history of the game except Wilfred Rhodes.
'Freeman had just come on and had taken a wicket with his first bail,' said Denis. 'I was sitting next to Les Ames [the Kent and England wicketkeeper] at lunch, and I was petrified, so he told me what to expect. -The first ball will be a leg break. Leave it alone. Second ball: topspinner. Third ball: careful, googly. Block it. Fourth ball: off break. Fifth ball: oh, this will bowl you." And it did. Freeman tossed it very high and it turned about 45 degrees to clip the leg stump. He took nine for 11. Our scorer, by the way, was E.R.G. Heath, who later became prime minister.'
Some years later, Rattle's manager, Martin Campbell-White, another cricket-lover, told me that I could play for his team against MCC — 'that's Munich Cricket Club'. It was a splendid day in the English Garden, made memorable by young Daniel Harding's question after he had blocked the first ball he received from a lively Australian bowler: 'Can I go?' Harding, Rattle's protégé, lives in Paris now and thinks nothing of flying to Manchester and back in a day to watch United, but his knowledge of cricket remains sketchy.
There have been so many associations between cricket and music. Sir John Barbiroili was an enthusiast of the summer game, and a different kind of knight, Harrison Birtwistle, is a follower. So is Sir Neville Marriner. Tim Rice, yet another knight, has just begun his term as president of MCC (not the Munich one). But I treasure that night in Berlin, and keep the programme, on which 'von' Rattle scribbled, 'Caught in the slips again.' Last October, back in Berlin, I heard him conduct for the 100th time, and presented him with a reciprocal card. It said simply, 'Raise your bat.'
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