The Trusty Servant May 2015 No.119 | Page 12

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