of Ian Peebles, a delightful Scotsman who bowled leg-breaks for Oxford, Middlesex and England. Peebles was a considerable force in a City of London wine merchants, and wrote charmingly, knowledgeably and extremely amusingly about cricket for the Sunday Times. Before the war Peebles had shared a flat in the Temple with Henry Longhurst and Jim Swanton, whom he relentlessly called ‘James’. It was a most distinguished gathering.
We began my first summer half with new-boy nets, and it was then that I caught CHT’s eye for the first time. I immediately found myself playing in ‘Select A’, the top game in Lower Sixpenny, of which he was the master-in-charge. I had a fierce competitor for the position of wicketkeeper called Julian Curtis, a wonderful all-round games player who probably lost out to me because I just had the edge in the batting stakes. In that first year, 1953, the Keeper (captain) of Lower Sixpenny was Simon Douglas Pennant, with whom I went on to play for the school and later for Cambridge, who bowled left-arm over-the-wicket at fast-medium. Edward Lane Fox was also in the side, but now that we were playing against opponents that were better-versed in the art of playing left-arm spin, ‘stumped Blofeld bowled Lane Fox’ became a less frequent entry in the scorebook. It was a memorable first summer half.
My cricketing activities went on much to the detriment of my work, and I must admit that, as at Sunningdale, my greatest ambition in the learning department was simply to get by. This attitude never received Tom’s blessing when my school reports, which were always of the ‘must try harder’ variety, were up for discussion. But as far as I was concerned, it was only cricket that mattered. If it was not Lower Sixpenny matches against other schools, it was Select A games, nets or fielding practice, and I am afraid I was the most intense competitor. The school professional at the time was Jack O’Connor, the dearest of men, who batted a time or two for England in the thirties, and played for many years for Essex. He ran the Bat Shop, just at the start of the High Street, next door to Rowland’s, one of the two ‘sock’ shops, where we guzzled crab buns and banana splits. Jack sold sporting goods, and whenever any of us went in he would give us a smiling and enthusiastic welcome. He was to become a great friend and cricketing confidant. Buying batting gloves, wicketkeeping inners or whatever from his modest emporium always involved a jolly ten-minute gossip. Once or twice CHT brought him to the Lower Sixpenny nets to watch some of us batting. Jack always gave generous, smiling encouragement. Once when I was batting he turned his arm over; so began a lifetime of misery and mystification for me as far as leg-spin and googly bowling are concerned. I still have nightmares of an umpire signalling four byes.
The winter halves were, for me, little more than an inconveniently large gap between cricket seasons. There was nothing so gloomy as going back to school towards the end of September, when the weather was gorgeous but all, or most, of the cricket grounds were strung about with goalposts. What made it even more depressing was that my return was often just a couple of days or so before my birthday. Various wrapped presents were always tucked away in the bottom of my suitcase, but opening them alone in my room between breakfast and going to chapel was a cold-blooded exercise if ever there was one. They did, however, usually contain a couple of cricket books, which helped.
In the Lent half I tried my best to impress those who mattered with my ability on the fives court and between the goalposts on the soccer pitch, but I never quite made it on either count. Soccer was run by a wonderfully bucolic former Cambridge cricket Blue called Tolly Burnett (ACB), a relation of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, who added greatly to the gaiety of nations in just about everything he did. He was large, if not portly, marvellously unpunctual, rode a bicycle as if he was, with much pomp and circumstance, leading a procession of one, or perhaps rehearsing for a part in Dad’s Army, and walked with an avuncular swagger. I am not sure what Captain Mainwaring would have made of Tolly. He drove an exciting sports car, and took biology with considerable gusto, especially when it came to the more pertinent points of reproduction, in a div room just around the corner from Lower Chapel. If you stopped him in the street to ask a question, he would clatter to an uncertain halt and invariably say in somewhat breathless tones, ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy. Just a bit pushed,’ then off he’d go with a bit of a puff. What fun he was, and how we loved him. I am not sure the authorities at the school entirely agreed with us, for although he was, I believe, down to become a housemaster, the position never materialised.
Tolly captained Glamorgan during the summer holidays in 1958. The Glamorgan committee felt, as they did from time to time, that Wilf Wooller, the patriarchal figure of Welsh cricket, was too old and should be replaced. In their infinite wisdom they brought in Tolly for a trial as captain for the last eight games of the season. His highest score was 17, and the dressing room came as close to mutiny as it gets. In September he was back teaching biology at Eton, and Wooller was still the official Glamorgan captain. By the time Tolly’s moment of possible glory came, his girth would have prevented much mobility in the field, his batting was well past its prime, and his ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy’ might not have been exactly what the doctor ordered in a Glamorgan dressing room which was pure-bred Wales to its eyebrows. His charmingly irrelevant ‘Up boys and at ’em’ enthusiasm must have fallen on deaf ears. Tolly was more Falstaff than Flewellyn.
Back at Eton, before that little episode, he sadly, but entirely correctly, preferred Carrick-Buchanan’s agility between the goalposts to my own. I did however achieve the splendid job of Keeper (captain) of the second eleven. Tolly was also the cricket master in charge of Lower Club, and sadly I never had first-hand experience of the way in which he coped with that. It would not have been boring.
Keeper of the soccer second eleven, or ‘Team B’, as we proudly called ourselves, was not a particularly distinguished post, but it led to my first sortie into the world of journalism, which turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. We had a considerable fixture list, which included a game against Bradfield College’s second eleven at Bradfield. The Eton College Chronicle felt compelled to carry an account of even such insignificant encounters as this, and for some reason I was chosen to write the report. We were taken by bus to Bradfield, where we joined a mass of boys for a lunch which it would have been tempting to let go past the off-stump. Then we changed into our soccer stuff, climbed a steepish hill and found a well-used and pretty muddy football pitch. I enjoyed writing my account of the day’s events, and it duly appeared in the columns of the Chronicle. Unfortunately, it elicited a hostile response from Bradfield, who made a complaint which promptly came to the ears of Robert Birley, Eton’s large and formidable-looking, but in fact kind, rather shy and immensely able, headmaster. He was to us a remote, Genghis-Khan-like figure who hovered somewhat ominously in the background. Birley was known, unfairly in my view, as ‘Red Robert’. This merely meant that he had realised somewhat earlier than most of the school’s supporters the urgent need for change if a school like Eton was to survive. Many reactionary hands were thrown up in horror.
Anyway, one morning I found myself ‘on the Bill’, which meant that I was summoned to the headmaster’s schoolroom at midday. When I arrived, more than a trifle worried, I was told in no uncertain terms that what I had written about Team B’s midwinter visit to Bradfield was extremely offensive, and that I must without delay write a number of letters of apology. Apart from a general dressing down, I don’t think any other penalty was exacted. I still have a copy of this most undistinguished entry into the world I was to inhabit for just about the rest of my life. I have to admit that in the circumstances it may have been a little strong in places, although it is positively mild when judged by today’s standards.
The Michaelmas half in 1954 will always remain firmly in my mind, and for cricketing reasons too. England were touring Australia in the hope of hanging on to the Ashes they had won in a nerve-racking game at The Oval the previous year. There were one or two exciting newcomers in the England party, especially a fast bowler called Frank Tyson and a twenty-one-year-old called Colin Cowdrey, who was still up at Oxford. I found the whole series quite irresistible, and would tune in to the commentary from Australia under my bedclothes from about five o’clock in the morning. This was always a bit of a lottery, as the snap, crackle and pop of the atmospherics made listening a difficult business. Sometimes the line would go down altogether, and the commentary would be replaced by music from the studio in London. Those delicious Australian voices of the commentators, Johnny Moyes, Alan McGilvray and Vic Richardson, added hugely to the excitement, and John Arlott was there to add a touch