SPECTATOR SPORT
Fringe benefits
Frank Keating
EDINBURGH (not to mention the top of Surrey) has no patent on 'fringes' and the editor of Wisden, Matthew Engel, and your correspondent did our unmusical bit last week for the Three Choirs' Festival 'fringe' at the dear old Green Dragon in Hereford. It was not quite a packed house, but it was a matey one as we ruminated and rambled on about cricket writing, our waffle being given a gleaming professional gloss by readings of our selections by the actor Christopher Dou- glas (who also happens to have written the definitive biography of Douglas Jardine).
We had the obligatory warm-up wallow with Cardus, of course, followed by 'Cru- soe' Robertson-Glasgow, who took up sports journalism, I fancy, on the debutant's day, down from Oxford, that he took five Hampshire wickets with curvaceous inswervers for Somerset, and:
After the match was over and we'd won I, being 19, rushed away for an evening paper to see what they said about my bowling. They said that the Hampshire batsmen 'had failed unaccountably against an attack that present- ed no obvious difficulty'. Unaccountably? No obvious difficulty? Nuts.
That is why cricketers take up cricket writing.
The Swanton we chose for Christopher to wrap his plummiest E.W.S. vowels around was the prophesying Daily Tele- graph report in May 1974 from Hove, Sus- sex v. Somerset, and our esteemed octoge- narian's first sighting of a skinny Vivian Richards and a coltish Ian Botham:
If the mature-looking 22-year-old Antiguan, who sees the ball very early and hits it mighty hard, can curb himself just a little, he will soon be wearing the plum cap of the West Indies. . . and later Botham, a 19-year-old youthful all-rounder from Yeovil, showed a certain style in making a brisk 26.
The three of us agreed in Hereford that, of the immediate moderns who have swapped willow for quill, Peter Roebuck is out on his own. Some of Peter's stuff has been almost as vivid and pointedly rich and original as early C.L.R. James, when he used to come over with his triumphant fellow-Trinidadian, Constantine, for Lancashire summers and write for the Guardian in the 1930s. It goes without saying that we had a brainful dollop of C.L.R. at the Green Dragon.
Christopher also read trouvies from liter- ary bods like Kingsley Amis (a classic con- frontation with a cricketing-earnest Harold Pinter in a hospitality-box at Lord's) and Evelyn Waugh (who scathingly loathed the only village game his bat-besotted brother Alec conned him into). Another who played the game well, and then wrote beguilingly about in television drama, was Peter Gibbs. We were pushing our 'full' 90 minutes and the jostle outside was noisy for the next 'fringe' delectation, a talk (with lantern slides) entitled 'Peaks and Lamas, an exploration into the high mountains of the Himalaya'. Hereford is catholically well-rounded: the Himalaya mountains squeezed nearly as many in as cricket nuts.
Peter (i.e. P.J.K. Gibbs) and another grit- ty northern nut D.H.K. Smith opened Der- byshire's batting for years. Remember hap- pily those old Light Programme 10-to-2, post-Archer, lunchtime scoreboards in the 1960s: everyone else was 102 for 3, or 97 for 4: Derby and P.J.K. and D.H.K. were always around 29 for no wicket, Gibbs 13, Smith 15. Two hours of stodge. Gibbs is now an enthralling writer with a light touch, and when he retired from cricket Alan Gibson (another true trouper hoorayed in Hereford) gloriously noted that Derbyshire without stonewaller Gibbs would 'be like Hamlet without the first gravedigger'. Said Matt last week, 'I thought that the funniest line I'd ever read. Till, years later, when researching The Guardian Book of Cricket, I found Cardus using the exact same phrase about old impregnable deadbat Harry Make- peace when he retired in 1930.'
So who did Cardus, in turn, nick the lovely line from? To be sure, plagiarism remains journalism's `Miracle-Gro'. Thank the Lord for it. Especially on 'the fringe'.
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