Stumps & Runs & Rock 'n' Roll

Tim Quelch

Description

Stumps & Runs & Rock 'n' Roll is Tim Quelch's 60-year account of growing up and growing older with cricket, spanning the period between Queen Elizabeth's coronation in 1952 and the present day. Scandals and trends, unforgettable events, and heroes come and go in English cricket just as in Quelch's vivid backdrop of cultural change, while the fortunes of the Test side oscillate as wildly as his ever-shifting soundtrack of popular music. The book features telling vignettes of famous and not-so-famous cricketers seen in action by the author throughout his life-including Freddie Trueman, Wes Hall, Brian Statham, Graeme Pollock, John Snow, Peter Burge, and Jeff Thomson-whose lasting impressions merge with those of triumph and adversity, pop, and politics. This is a life not so much measured by coffee spoons as by cricket scores, with many of its abiding memories impaled upon a particular melody or riff.

Sujets

• Críquet
• Cricket

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing
• Date de parution: 09 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785310973
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2015
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Tim Quelch, 2015
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN: 978-1-78531-051-5 eBook ISBN: 978-1-78531-097-3
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Contents
Introduction
Great Balls Of Fire 1952-1958
In The Middle Of Nowhere 1959-1966.
Breakin Down The Walls Of Heartache 1967-1972
Life In The Fast Lane 1973-1976
Anarchy In The UK 1977-1979
Oscillate Wildly 1980-1986
Things Can Only Get Better 1987-1999
Race For The Prize 2000-2005
Feels Like We Only Go Backwards 2006-2012
Final Thoughts
Appendix
References
Photographs
Introduction
My deceased parents gifted me a love of cricket and popular music at an early age. These twin passions have stayed with me for over 60 years, placing their distinctive marks upon the passage of time. This book is a testament to their gifts. It is essentially a Baby Boomer s account of growing up and older with cricket, in which the wildly oscillating fortunes of the English Test side are set against a changing cultural and political landscape with popular music supplying the soundtrack.
The story begins in the early 1950s, when I was still a small boy, and when Britain was recovering uncertainly from a ruinous Second World War. Here, my initial impressions of my first cricketing heroes are described, inevitably moulded by dad s accounts, and merged with the popular songs I heard on the radio, our record player and the first jukeboxes. The tale continues in a similar vein over the ensuing years, through adolescence, adulthood and later life, taking in England s various triumphs, and, until recent times, their frequent adversities, recounting the impact made by an ever-changing cast of players, and reflecting upon the times in which they played. This is a life not so much measured by coffee spoons as by cricket scores with many memories impaled upon a melody, phrase or riff. For popular music , for want of a better generic term, evokes fragments of my past with greater vivacity or poignancy than any other musical form, better even than albums of age-bleached photographs.
My musical taste is as eclectic as my cricketing preference is conservative - I love the drawn-out drama of the four- or five-day game more than the lusty slogging of the shorter contest. So, it encompasses everything from swing to soul, blues to metal, folk to jazz, reggae to rap, funk to punk, old rhythm n blues to new rhythm n blues, disco to techno , acoustic to electronic and various combinations of these.
For much of the 1950s, cricket united my family. Despite the unreliable summer weather of those years, cricket dominated our weekends. Dad played, mum prepared the teas and I watched. Meanwhile, I absorbed my parents choice of music - the crooners, the classical excerpts and the show songs. And when our family reunited in the early 60s, that bond resumed with dad and mum introducing me to live County Championship and Test match cricket. By then the musical landscape was changing with the emergence of rhythm and blues bands. They also bought me a wonderful, mellow-sounding bat which was sadly wasted on my thin talent, and fed my cricketing curiosity with a generous supply of annuals, diaries and biographies, that supplemented dad s sprawling library. They loyally supported my development as a school and club cricketer, and bought me the table cricket games that lit up dark winter days - the anarchic Cricket at Lord s and the deft Discbat.
When increasing age reversed our roles, I took dad to matches in quiet, pretty villages, particularly when he fretted over mum s poor health, and when his mind began failing him following the onset of dementia. Mum also retained a sharp interest in the game even as age and infirmity made her life very troublesome. There were many occasions when visiting her in hospital that she would ask how England were doing. In health and sickness cricket remained as a key part of our lives.
The inspiration for writing this book came from Dannie Abse s poem, Winged Back . In Winged Back , Abse entwines musical, sporting and political references in evoking his 1953 past. Citing Noel Coward s observation, Strange the potency of a cheap dance tune, he describes himself winged back to an England shrugging off grim austerity, and celebrating a new Elizabethan age with an Ashes triumph.
I claim no cricketing authority. I once played the game for fun, or so I told myself when my competence failed to meet my modest ambitions. My credentials for writing this book are based entirely upon the vivid impressions this changing game has left with me, placed, as I have often been, beyond the boundary. My hope is that the book will resonate with all those who have shared even part of my journey, and that its sales will enable me to make a substantial donation to Cancer Research UK as it is my intention to pass on all of my royalties to this important charitable cause.
Most of the material gathered for this book derives from what I have seen and heard, supplemented by scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings, with the various books referenced on the final pages helping close gaps in my diminishing memory. Readers may not agree with my various interpretations. That is fine. It is, after all, a game of opinions as well as facts. I hope, though, that the impressions I have given of former players and past games inspire pleasant recollections.
In the appendix located at the end of this book, I have provided a statistical analysis of England s top Test performers over the last 60 years, broken down by the decade in which they played most of their Test matches. This has been done in order to provide a series of reference points in accounting for England s vacillating fortunes over this period. An analysis is also provided of England s win percentages, examined over time and compared with those of other Test-playing countries. Finally I have hazarded a selection of the players who might comprise the strongest England cricket team of my lifetime. As is the way with lists, this is merely a frivolous exercise with the intention of sparking a debate about who was best.
Finally, I would like to thank everyone who helped me to bring this book together: my late parents for inspiring my love of cricket and popular music; my wife for putting up with my long absences while writing this book; the staff at or associated with Pitch Publishing for their guidance and skill in bringing the book to production; the daily press for 60 years of cricket reports, particularly The Daily and Sunday Telegraph , The Guardian and The Observer , although many of these reports are retained as unattributed scrapbook entries; BBC TV and radio, Sky TV, and Channel Four for their live commentary and highlights; all books mentioned in the reference section which have bolstered my faltering memory; and last, but not least, Getty Images, who kindly granted Pitch Publishing permission to use the wonderful photographs featured in this book.
Tim Quelch April 2015
Great Balls Of Fire
1952 - 1958
England won 52 per cent of 50 Tests played between June 1952 and August 1958
1952 Walking My Baby Back Home
Is it really possible to recover a distant past without distortion, deception or doubt? Except where the scorching glare of trauma has left an indelible imprint, remembrance of things long past is surely tainted with misapprehension, conflation and revision, prey, perhaps, to the impact of what was later seen, read, watched, heard or felt, and edited by an ever-changing outlook.
Nevertheless, in my mind I retain a blurred clip of age-speckled film. I am lying in the long, moist grass at the edge of the village recreation field, in dappled sunlight, watching dad bat. He is wearing thick, voluminous woollen whites that are actually cream coloured. I have no idea whether these images are real or imagined as I hear a succession of cracking rifle shots - pock , puck - disturbing the languid summer hum. Engrossed, I watch dad brutally despatch one inviting delivery over the swings and into the melting road, before heaving another high over the leg side boundary where the ball clatters against the village hall slates, then smacking yet one more low past the bowler with tracer-like fury. It is an unashamedly heroic portrait drawn by a small boy in awe of his father s strength, for dad was a powerful man, at least physically, a legacy of his daily wrestling with the notoriously stiff gear levers on the gypsum mine s giant bulldozer.
It was in the summer of 1952 that my black Labrador and I began accompanying dad to his village matches, or at least that s what I m told. Since I was barely four years old at the time, I am entirely reliant upon my deceased mum s word. If true, this was the year in which dad s hero, Len Hutton, became England s first professional captain. However, little of the great man s patience and stylistic perfection rubbed off upon dad. Much later, I watched him bludgeon the first five balls he received to the boundary before being bowled by the sixth. It was hardly Hutton-like.
In 1952, my parents and I lived on a small, rural, council estate, huddled beneath a high Wealden ridge. The council houses were arranged in a tight circle as if defying a marauding Sioux