MCC: the men for the job
Sir: I have been a subscriber to the SPECTATOR for many years and find much of interest in every issue. Nothing you have ever said has so aroused my admiration and gratitude as your initial-leading article on Biafra (31 May), which indirectly did more, perhaps, than anything else to arouse the conscience of the country, although it failed, alas, to influence the policy of our government.
Nevertheless, I was surprised to see from Christopher Hollis's article, `The Men for the Job' (27 September), that you have joined the fashionable journalistic chorus of critics of the mcc. He rightly concedes that the selection committee should include ex-professionals of past distinction. However, he astonishingly seems to suggest that ex-professionals, with little knowledge of any world except that of cricket, dominate the MCC committee itself, the body ultimately responsible for all decisions taken. Does he not realise who its members are? Can he name a single ex-professional on it? He mentions Sir Alec Douglas-Home as one who would have made an admirable cricket ad- ministrator. Does he not know that he was president two years ago and is still a member of the committee? Doubtless his advice was sought and heeded throughout the whole of the d'Oliveira affair. Dennis Silk (whose Christian name was spelt wrong), `a man of wide culture and a lover of poetry,' who, incidentally, has travelled to many parts of the world with MCC and other cricket teams, is likewise a member, and has attended every committee meeting in recent months except one, which coincided with his first chapel service as Warden of Radley. There are numerous other committee members who have achieved distinction in widely varied walks of life.
Of the full-time administrators, for the sake of brevity, I make reference to only one, the secretary, Mr S. C. Griffith. His entry in Who's Who shows him to have been successively schoolmaster, soldier and journalist, winner of the DFC in 1944 and awarded the ID in 1954. To many like myself who watched him being inter- viewed in Twenty-Four Hours he came across as a man of and absolute integrity.
In spite of all that has been said I believe that the recent decisions of the Mcc committee have been worthy of the highest traditions of the game whose very name is a byword for fair play: Theycould have stooped to subtlety; to their credit=thby did not. They have my sym- patiii'Iiiiiiny complete confidence.
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