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128 pages

English

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The life and times of Middlesex and England wicketkeeper-batsman John 'JT' Murray, one of the acknowledged greats of English post-war cricket. Irresistibly cool, glamorous and apparently unapproachable, Murray was Christopher Sandford's consuming hero at the time the author was confined in an English seaside boarding school in the 60s. Twenty or more years later, the two became friends. In 2017 Murray eventually succumbed to a decade-long campaign and agreed to share in full his lifetime's reminiscences, recounting his experiences of a quarter of a century as a professional English sportsman. Murray proved unfailingly generous and humorous (if by no means uncritical) in his accounts of the great Tests, the tours and the parade of celebrities, sporting and otherwise, he encountered. This treasure trove of stories - described not just in the dry accountancy of scores and averages, but in droll anecdotal detail - lies at the heart of a unique cricket book illustrated by photographs, letters and notes from Murray's own collection.

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Críquet

Cricket

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	23 septembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785316098
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2019
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Christopher Sandford, 2019
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 978-1-78531-487-2
eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-609-8
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
1. Summer of Love
2. My Money is on Murray
3. Brighter Cricket
4. Gentleman
5. Player
6. A Touch of Class
Bibliography
Also by Christopher Sandford
FICTION
Feasting with Panthers
Arcadian
We Don t Do Dogs
PLAYS
Comrades
MUSIC BIOGRAPHIES
Mick Jagger
Eric Clapton
Kurt Cobain
David Bowie
Sting
Bruce Springsteen
Keith Richards
Paul McCartney
The Rolling Stones
FILM BIOGRAPHIES
Steve McQueen
Roman Polanski
SPORT
The Cornhill Centenary Test
Godfrey Evans
Tom Graveney
Imran Khan
HISTORY
Houdini and Doyle
Summer 1914
Macmillan and Kennedy
The Man Who Would be Sherlock
John F. Kennedy and Great Britain
The Zeebrugge Raid
Summer 1939
To Colleen
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I BEGAN writing this book, with John Murray s guarded approval, in May 2018. I say guarded because Murray didn t want it to be a statistical trawl through each and every one of his 635 first-class matches ( They ll fall asleep ), nor to linger too long over the biographer s traditional fetish for his subject s deprived childhood or troubled journey to the top. Instead, his advice was simple: Just give them an idea of what it was really like, and above all tell them how lucky I was. I ve tried to follow this excellent rule, and despite the news of 24 July 2018 I hope the reader won t find that the later chapters necessarily constructed from the material John left behind show any conspicuous falling off from the modest merits of the beginning.
In another sense I suppose I really began writing the book in around 1965, when as a star-struck eight-year-old I first became seriously obsessed with England s impossibly smooth wicketkeeper, and characteristically Murray himself always urged me to put some of your own spin on the story. Again I ve tried to follow his advice, while I hope not being wafted away on a haze of nostalgia or maudlin self-promotion. I was proud to call Murray my friend, and, while he unstintingly helped me with the book up until the day he died, neither he nor anyone else listed below can be blamed for the shortcomings of the text. They are mine alone.
There s a great deal to be said for the various places of education mentioned in this book. In spite of flaws more on my part than theirs, I actually enjoyed my time at the schools listed, and would like to particularly pay tribute to Mr Gervis (50 years later, it still seems impertinent to use a first name), Alan Kennington and Julian James at St Aubyns, and also to Dennis Silk, that fine amateur cricketer and impressively austere headmaster, who died in June 2019.
I would also particularly like to thank: Wendy Adams; Dave Allen; Pete Barnes; the late Richie Benaud; Rob Boddie; Emma Boycott; Geoff Boycott; Mike Brearley; Robert and Hilary Bruce; Jane Camillin; Paul Camillin; Alice Cooper; Ted Dexter; the late Godfrey Evans; Jon Filby; Steven Fletcher; Malcolm Galfe; Mary Gallivan; Ashley Giles; James Graham; the late Tom Graveney; Steve and Jo Hackett; Alex Holmes; Jo Jacobius; Imran Khan; Barbara Levy; Vince Lorimer; Robert Dean Lurie; Lee Mattson; Frank Misson; Colleen Murray; Nick Murray; Greg Nowak; Peter Parfitt; Robin Parish; Jim Parks; Peter Perchard; Clive Radley; Tim Rice; David Robertson; the late Sefton Sandford; Peter Scaramanga; Mike Selvey; Fred and Cindy Smith; John Snow; Garry Sobers; Jack Surendranath; Sussex CCC; the late Fred Titmus; Derek Underwood; Diana Villar; Richard Whitehead; the Willis Fleming family; the late Aaron Wolf; and Yorkshire CCC. I m grateful to Robin B. James for kindly supplying the book s index.
My deepest thanks, as always, to Karen and Nicholas Sandford.
C.S. 2019
A man that fortune s buffets and rewards Hast ta en with equal thanks.
- Hamlet, III. II
1.
SUMMER OF LOVE
T HE year 1967 was my own private summer of love, but not for any reasons connected with the world of herbally tinged joss sticks or bare-thighed young women swaggering around Carnaby Street in Courr ges miniskirts. You probably know the sort of retrospective that takes the Swinging Sixties, and more particularly Swinging London, on their own terms. Society was shaken to its foundations! a recent BBC documentary on the subject shouted. All the rules came off, all the brakes came off the floodgates were unlocked A youthquake hit the UK , and so on.
For at least most young Britons, of whom I was one, what this mainly seems to have meant was some very silly shirts, marginally better food (thanks to new European trading laws) and, so one gathers, a slight increase in the use of soft drugs. By a lucky bit of timing, the introduction and rapid availability of the female contraceptive pill also happened to coincide with the arrival of that other defining symbol of swinging etiquette, the duvet. Exact statistics are elusive, but as a result of these twin developments it s likely that a few more single young women bunked up with their boyfriends, a societal trend celebrated in the Rolling Stones seminal 1967 single Let s Spend the Night Together , one of several public effusions proposing nocturnal activity at around that time.
But in truth, that was about it for the youthquake. For millions of adolescent Britons, it seems fair to say that sex, drugs and rock n roll took their place against a normal existence of knitting or cricket, with a probationary glass or two of Babycham, and worrying about one s school exams. A night out at The Sound of Music , followed by the Berni Inn Family Platter, remained the height of most young teenagers aspirations. When Time magazine came to dub London the Style Capital of Europe , it focused on a few photogenic locations and eye-catching developments such as the pervasive rise of hemlines and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards appearing before magistrates on drug charges. Despite the subsequent claims of the BBC, these were not events that appeared to be part of any broader revolution under way against the Britain of Hancock s Half Hour , with its grinding conformity and identical, red-brick semi-detached houses furnished just like your granny s.
Certainly there was little evidence of anyone conspicuously seeking to move the guardrails defining the limits of acceptable behaviour to be seen at St Aubyns prep school in Rottingdean, East Sussex, where I found myself detained for much of 1967. Social ferment was slow to disturb that part of the world. The school itself was a combination of distressed seaside hotel and Victorian fortress, with innumerable outbuildings and corridors, all smelling obscurely of boiled cabbage, grouped around the central block, and a sturdy flint wall separating the whole place from a large, sloping playing field which sometimes made it feel like you were being pushed downhill when you were batting there. There was a road at the south end of the field, and beyond the road was the English Channel. In general it seems fair to say that St Aubyns wasn t known for its spirit of freewheeling social adventure. There was an elaborate system of rules, rewards and punishments, and the seven- to 13-year-old boys wore a year-round uniform of grey shirts and sweaters, and grey shorts, with an itchy grey suit by way of variety on Sundays and other special occasions. There were no girls. An etiquette of finely tuned call and response ruled between the students and the staff, the former known by our surnames, the latter answering to Sir . There was something of a generation gap apparent in this relationship, and I suppose it could hardly have been otherwise in light of the fact that roughly half the dozen full-time masters had taught my father at the same institution 30 years earlier - and they seemed pretty ancient even then , he once told me.
As I say, though, there was love in the air during that summer of 1967, and in my case this meant cricket in general and more particularly the incumbent England wicketkeeper John JT Murray. Murray was exquisite. The sheer class of the man communicated itself even on the boxy, black-and-white Baird TV set perched in a dim corner of the St Aubyns schoolroom where I principally watched him. He seemed to me to be much like Cary Grant with gauntlets. Always immaculately turned out in creamy white flannels and a blue cap, Murray would go through a little routine before each ball was bowled, circling his arms, the tips of the gloves touched together, patting the peak of the cap, and then dropping smoothly down to settle on his haunches behind the stumps. There was something both athletic and sedate about his posture. Murray s balance and coordination were such that he was hardly ever seen sprawled on the turf, though he could dive full length, making impossible catches seem simple, with the best of them. As Wisden wrote when honouring him as one of its Five Cricketers of the Year in 1967:
Murray s reputation is built on polished orthodoxy and eschewing the spectacular for its own sake. He denies the need for flashiness The sheer professionalism of his wicket-keeping has made an essential and vital difference to En