NO.119
T H E T R U S T Y S E RVA N T
Memories of Winchester Cricket
We are grateful to Peter Jay (C, 50-55) for
this delightful memoir:
Nawab of Pataudi, for it was he, was more
than equal to this challenge and we lost
the match and the cup. The gods of cricket
were avenged for my blasphemy against the
‘spirit of cricket’ the previous year and I
had to confess a grudging respect for the
courage and skill of little ‘Tiger’.
Thirty-two years after his own father
finished at Cook’s, my father Douglas
followed him into the same House: he
recorded his impressions in a memoir,
written 60 years after he entered the
School:
‘The contemporary hero, however, in
the House was not Sir Edward Grey, or
HAL Fisher, AP Herbert, or the poet
Robert Nichols, all of whom had been
inmates, but Douglas Jardine, who had left
the term before. He had led the school to
victory at cricket over Eton and won the
house cricket cup, and, I was given to
understand, had virtually never lost a
game, though on some occasions as captain
he had found it necessary to alter the score
in the House matches after the play was
over in order to be sure of winning. When
he became captain of the England side
playing Australia nearly 10 years later, I felt
sure England would win (this was the
notorious bodyline series)…’
For me, the key echoes - and otherwise
– in my father’s experience of Winchester
are the Jardine legend, vividly transmitted
by him and powerfully reinforced by the
vast ‘body-line’ literature about the
international row between the English and
Australian cricket authorities, which
influenced me greatly. I believed strongly
that, in the words of the Dragon School
song:
‘The aim of the game is always the same,
To strive that the Dragon may win it”
It was in this spirit that, when in 1954
and 1955 I found myself captain of the
House Hopper Pot (Turner Cup for InterHouse cricket) team, I determined, at the
beginning of a match in which Cook’s
needed only a draw to obtain the cup, to
win the toss and, if possible, to bat
throughout the entire allotted period for
play. This so enraged the venerable doyen
of English cricket, a former Housemaster of
Furley’s and the then current treasurer of
the MCC, Harry S Altham, that he
suffered his first heart attack, which some
blamed on me…
I received my just deserts a year later,
when, endeavouring to retain the cup, we
batted indifferently against Beloe’s
(captained by Charles Black) and then
faced defeat as their batsmen proved hard
to dislodge. By 6 in the evening, in a fading
light, I had Peter Stevens, at 6 ft. 5 inches,
bowling down the hill out of the
exceptionally dark trees on the crumbling
Old Tent pitch, a proposition later
described by the former England captain,
Gubby Allen, as the most fearsome
schoolboy bowling he had ever seen. We
broke through finally and their last man
came in, clad, as was the Winchester
custom at the time for very junior players,
in grey flannels and brown boots and
standing all of something under 5 feet tall.
Imagine my astonishment and rage as this
dwarf proceeded to cut and hook the
bowling in all directions. Striding up the
pitch, I told Peter Stevens, ‘if you can’t get
him out, knock him out’. The diminutive
12
It was in that same summer of NMMB