Cricketing Caesar
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CRICKETING CAESAR MARK PEEL Contents Introduction. 6. 1. His Father’s Son . 17 2. ‘Shades of C.B. Fry’ . 38 3. Growing Up in South Africa. .59 . 4. The Wilderness Years . .69 . 5. New Wine in Old Bottles . 88 6. Stepping Up . 102 7. The Lure of the Orient . .112 . 8. ‘England Arise!’ . 121 9. Misfortune in Pakistan . .136 . 10. Good Enough?. 146. 11. The Ashes Retained . 157 12. A Missed Opportunity. 173. 13. ‘Physician Heal Thyself’ . .178 . 14. In Jardine’s Shadow . 185 15. Demob Happy. 201. 16. The Art of Captaincy . 211. 17. Annus Mirabilis . 232 18. Festooned with Honours. .251 . 19. Benign Critic . 258. 20. On the Couch . 273. 21. Reform in Order to Preserve . 288. Mike Brearley . 303 Endnotes . 309 Acknowledgements . 314. Bibliography. 316. Chapter 1 His Father’s Son OHN Michael Brearley was born in the north London suburb of Harrow on 28 April 1942. Few things used Jto irritate his father Horace more than Geoff Boycott’s contention that Mike was part of a gilded elite compared to his own humble provenance. Not true, he professed, since their ancestry was of lower stock compared to the Boycotts’, who, as miners, were the aristocracy of the working class. Horace’s grandfather, Joseph Brearley, was a mechanic from Triangle, a village four miles south-west of Halifax in west Yorkshire, who married Emma Normanton in 1868. After the birth of their son James in September 1872 they moved to Heckmondwike, a former mill town, nine miles south-west of Leeds, on the edge of the Pennines, where Joseph continued his work as a mechanic. James, too, began in the same trade, graduating to become an engine fitter who travelled all over the north of England mending and fitting crucial pieces of mill machinery. He was also a fearsome fast bowler for Heckmondwike. Once when Horace came off the field after scoring a century there, an old man in the pavilion congratulated him but told him that he wouldn’t have scored it if his father had been bowling. 17 CRICKETING CAESAR In 1896 James married Lydia Ann Gregg, the feisty daughter of Michael Gregg, a former carrier turned publican, and his wife Elizabeth Ann. Originally from Commonside, Dewsbury, a mill town with a radical tradition, they later moved to the village of Gomersal, north of Heckmondwike. They had eight children, the youngest of whom was Horace, born in 1913. The two eldest brothers, Joseph and Percy, both fought in the First World War, along with five other Brearleys from Heckmondwike. Joseph, a clerk in the rate office and choirboy at the local church, enlisted in the Yorkshire Hussars, the county’s senior yeomanry regiment, aged 16, in September 1915. In 1917 the regiment was converted to infantry as the 9th West Yorkshire and later that year they were engaged in the bloody battle of Passchendaele, the Flanders offensive which claimed 250,000 British casualties. It was while volunteering for an advance attack that Joseph was shot through the lung and died instantaneously. He has no known grave, but his name is on the Tyne Cot Memorial near Ypres and on several war memorials in Heckmondwike. His commanding officer commended him for his bravery and unselfishness, qualities which won him the Victory Medal and the British War Medal. The fourth brother, Arthur, was a fine cricketer and led Heckmondwike to a hat-trick of wins in the Heavy Woollen Cup, the oldest club cricket competition in England, between 1936 and 1938. In 1938 he married Mary Crowther, a member of Spen Valley lacrosse team, and Horace was best man. Horace, born in 1913, always said it was only because he was the youngest child, and the older ones were earning, that he was able to stay on at school and go into higher education. At Heckmondwike Grammar School, he won a maths scholarship to Leeds University, where he gained a first. A superb all-round sportsman, he played squash for the university and captained it at both hockey and cricket. In addition, he captained the 18 HIS FATHER’S SON Combined British Universities cricket team, as well as playing hockey and cricket for Yorkshire, albeit a solitary appearance in the case of the latter. Making his debut for the Yorkshire 2nd XI in 1935, he topped the averages the following year, scoring 449 runs from ten completed innings, and according to Wisden, ‘stood out above any of his colleagues’. He was markedly less successful in 1937 but he did make his championship debut against Middlesex as an amateur, a late replacement for the England batsman, Maurice Leyland. Batting at number five in a side that contained legendary names such as Herbert Sutcliffe, Len Hutton, Hedley Verity and Bill Bowes, he made 8 and 9, sharing a brief partnership with Hutton in the second innings during which he complained that Hutton kept monopolising the strike. That same year Horace began teaching at King Edward VII School, Sheffield, and it was there that he met Marjory Goldsmith, a fellow mathematician who taught at the sister school. Brought up in Surrey and educated at London University, Midge, as she was known, was a warm, sprightly person whose love of sport, especially netball and tennis, made her the ideal wife for Horace. They married, and on the outbreak of war they moved south when he enlisted in the Royal Navy. On being ordered to report to HMS Hood in March 1941, he was delayed on the railway and arrived in time to see the battleship putting out to sea. Two months later, she was sunk by the Bismarck with the loss of all but three of her crew of 1,418. With Horace away for much of the war either on the high seas or in South Africa, where he taught navigation and meteorology to ratings, life was hard for Midge. After a spell living with her mother in Ealing, west London, she was evacuated to Yorkshire before moving to Portsmouth once Horace, now a Lieutenant Commander, was stationed there. On his discharge in 1946, he 19 CRICKETING CAESAR returned to teaching, first as head of maths at Sloane School, before joining CLS in January 1950 and remaining there till his retirement in 1978. A warm, friendly man with a droll sense of humour, Horace was a natural schoolmaster liked and admired by his colleagues for his reliability and integrity. Never one to get embroiled in petty disputes, his down-to-earth bluntness and Yorkshire common sense ensured that the common room maintained its sense of perspective. A gifted teacher of maths and mechanics, he made his lessons both interesting and fun. Having explained a topic for 10 or 15 minutes he would then give the class examples to work on, making himself available to those who were in difficulty. On occasions he would invite individuals to explain solutions and Terry Heard, later head of Maths at CLS, recalls that it was the satisfaction gleaned from such an experience that persuaded him to become a teacher. Horace’s ability to empathise with the less able was his particular forte. In later years, ex-pupils would come up to Mike and share their delight at his father getting them through their O-level Maths, and how both he and they did a jig of celebration when they heard the result. ‘I had a great affection for Horace,’ recalled former pupil John McGeorge. ‘He was a very warm character; both as teacher and friend. He did not tell us how to solve a mathematical problem: he would solve it with us, as our friend. ‘Horace displayed a pastoral interest in us, very important during our turbulent teenage years, and to me personally he showed great kindness.’ [1] In addition to his work in the classroom, Horace played a leading role in the life of the school: organising the timetable, singing in the choir, coaching rugby and hockey and running 20 HIS FATHER’S SON the school cricket. Although the least sentimental of men, he would always help those in trouble, on one occasion standing up for a boy whose strong right-wing views had alienated the School Society, even though his own politics were very different. It was a measure of the man that when Mike was in his class, he didn’t favour him over other pupils and that Mike, in turn, was never embarrassed by having his father teach or coach him. He thought his father a ‘terrific teacher’ and once commended his style of ‘invisible leadership’ to a panel of international cricket umpires. From 1945 the Brearleys lived at 62 Brentham Way in Brentham Garden Suburb, Ealing. It was the coming of the Great Western Railway in 1838 which opened up Ealing to the rest of London and led to a surge in development. Brentham Garden Suburb, built between 1901 and 1915, was the original garden suburb built on co-partnership principles, primarily by Henry Vivian, a trade unionist, the chairman of the Ealing Tenants Ltd and later a Liberal MP. Committed to the ideal of communal living in beautiful surroundings, the directors of Ealing Tenants designed cottage homes for working people in the Arts and Crafts style, each with their own garden. It was in this ‘paradise’ that Fred Perry, the greatest of all British lawn tennis players, grew up in the years after the First World War, and its green open spaces held a special appeal to Horace. Hailing from the industrial north, he used to marvel at the sight of trees in the street. Growing up in their modest, terraced home, one of 600 or so on the Brentham estate, Mike and his two younger sisters, Jill and Margy, enjoyed a happy, secure childhood.