JOHN HOWARD, the Australian Prime Minister who intervened last week to call
off a scheduled tour to Zimbabwe, calls himself a “cricket tragic”.
In England we would call the Rt Hon Sir John Major, KG, CH, something of an
anorak. He willingly and unashamedly admits that if he knew he were going to
die tonight he would still want to know the close-of-play scores. The number
of cricket followers who would empathise with that certainly runs into
thousands, quite possibly into millions.
Perhaps he should have made more political capital from his love of a game
that has provided a lifetime of pleasure, more as spectator than player
since a knee was shattered in a car accident in Nigeria when he was only 23.
Now 64, he and the game still need and please each other.
Clem Attlee used to get updates of county scores during Cabinet meetings and
Lord Home played first-class cricket, but there has surely never been a
British prime minister more profoundly interested in cricket. Certainly he
is the first to write a book about it. More Than A Game: The Story of
Cricket’s Early Years, his account of the game from its 16th-century
origins in the Weald to the outbreak of the First World War, is a genuine
advance on any previous history of the period. It puts the game firmly in
its social and political context, is thoroughly researched by carefully
selected assistants and is as solidly presented by the author as an innings
by Ken Barrington, one of the England batsmen he used to watch as a boy at
the Oval, in Surrey’s golden age.
We met not, as we might have done, in the pavilion at Lord’s, where he goes to
Test matches such as the present one against the West Indies and also to
attend MCC committee meetings, but rather on his “home” ground at
Kennington, in a spacious room behind the bowler’s arm in the still
sparkling new stand that sweeps across the whole width of the Vauxhall End.
Reflecting the time and effort he put in to raising the enormous sum needed
to build the OCS Stand, it is called the John Major Room.
Immaculately dressed as ever in dark-blue suit and yellow tie, quick to smile
and exuding that personal charm and warmth that won friends of both sexes
from the moment that he became MP for Huntingdon in 1979, he looks fit and,
as he always does in my experience of him, thoroughly at ease. He is
evidently enjoying the political after-life as a prosperous businessman,
lecturer, ambassador for such charities as Mercy Ships, Sightsavers and
Asthma UK – and as an author. But nothing appeals more than returns to what
was once much the grubbier of London’s two Test grounds.
“As a child cricket entered my bloodstream and it has given me a lifetime of
enjoyment and solace,” he says, with clear memories of the escape the game
offered to a rather lonely little boy. His music-hall actor father was 70
when the future Conservative leader was 6 and his mother smoked herself to
an early death from bronchitis. He was, he says, “not a complete mug” as a
batsman at his Surrey grammar school and he still savours the straight
driven four that whistled past the bowler’s nose in a house match to take
him past 50 and his team to victory.
Looking towards Brixton, one of the first London boroughs to fill up with West
Indian immigrants in the immediate postwar years, he is almost misty-eyed.
“I was able to walk to this ground and to get in for sixpence after one
o’clock,” he says with barely a glance at the present Surrey team bowling
the early overs of a Championship match on a grey morning before a crowd
much smaller than the ones that used to watch Peter May in the 1950s. May’s
strokes “rang out like pistol shots” in what seemed to be permanent
sunshine. “I spent most of my summers here and I would watch whatever there
was, even a second team game.”
The house he lived in was “multi-occupied and multiracial” and he never forgot
his roots, nor has he ever disguised them. It makes his subsequent journey
through the Tory ranks all the more remarkable and adds perspective to the
social comment in his book, especially the relationship between aristocratic
patrons and yeoman players. The early years of the game’s history are full
of pitfalls, but the only mistake in the text I noticed was that Jane Austen
was not the eldest daughter of her large family. On the other hand, I had
forgotten – or never known – that four of her nephews played first-class
cricket.
John Major’s political career was not so free from error but the end of the
Blair decade (a book with that title must surely be imminent) is giving
political commentators a chance to reflect on the less trumpeted, certainly
less well-spun achievements of a predecessor whose destiny was to be the
sandwich between the more spectacular Thatcherite and Blairite eras. There
was more meat in the young grey eminence than his critics have allowed.
After all, he and his fellow cricket-lover Ken Clarke left Gordon Brown, the
incoming Chancellor in 1997, with falling inflation, falling interest rates,
rising employment and, after growth for five successive years, what Major
calls – with little fear of contradiction – “the most competitive economy in
Western Europe”.
Tony Blair inherited also the groundwork for the recent Northern Ireland
concordat and, unlike the unprovoked Gulf War of recent years, the first was
a genuine reaction to the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq – far more limited and
less catastrophic.
If, for most of his time in power, Major seemed to be swept along by the tide
of events rather than to be dictating them, he was still able sometimes to
put a personal stamp on national life. The National Lottery, for example,
was very much his project but he balances any self-satis-faction at its
success with some very English self-deprecation.
“One of the biggest regrets I have is that I didn’t push harder to put cricket
back in schools and to stop the continuing sale of playing fields when I had
more influence than I do now. But the lottery was there to help sport
flourish at all levels and to give a new flowering to the arts.
“I do feel very angry indeed at the way that so much of that money has been
ransacked and used by the Government for expenditures that were
traditionally met by the taxpayer and still ought to be.” His political
career ended in an innings defeat, but he enjoyed most of it. “I loved the
House of Commons and I entered it to help people trapped by circumstances
they could not control. If I had inherited in 1990 the situation I left in
1997 I would have been able to do more for them. But, all the time I was in
politics, I was conscious that it wasn’t the only thing in my life. I
realised – when I became Prime Minister at 47 – that almost whatever
happened, by the time I was in my mid-fifties I would cease to be in that
position so I knew I could return to the things that had been pushed aside –
such as sport, music and literature.” He admits that his own rise was too
sudden and regrets especially having had less time as Foreign Secretary.
“The thing I was best at was private persuasion and that is very much
required in any foreign minister. I spent a lot of time helping processes
along without the searchlight on.
“I’m delighted especially that the festering hatred in Northern Ireland has
gone and that the men of violence were given a way into democratic politics.”
Major remains a driven man, starting work at 6am on most days, which explains
how he could make time for one of the most detailed, balanced and
wide-ranging histories of cricket in Britain yet written. It makes good use
of the considerable amount of recent research that has, for example, put
Hambledon Cricket Club into proper context as less the cradle of the game in
the late 18th century, more an important early club that happened to have
been chronicled in glorious colour by John Nyren and treasured ever since as
a reliable portrait of the nature and character of a game that was rapidly
spreading at that time.
That cricket history is important is not, to John Major, a matter for doubt.
“Cricket helped bind the British Empire together and it has played a serious
part in the social evolution of this country for 500 years,” he asserts.
What is more, children have a right to that heritage. “Sport and leisure are
equally important components of their education as literature and
mathematics. Only by exposing them to the joy of cricket can we inspire a
love of the game.”
And so to some serious cricket watching before lunch in the pavilion and an
afternoon of more demanding pursuits.
MORE THAN A GAME: THE STORY OF CRICKET’S EARLY YEARS by John
Major
HarperPress, £25; 416pp
Buy
the book here for the offer price of £23 (free p&p)
PMs in print
Edward Heath
The Conservative Prime Minister’s twin passions for music and sailing were
well known and he wasted no time settling down to write Sailing: A Course of
My Life within a year of his resignation. Other books followed, including Music:
A Joy for Life, and Travels: People and Places in My Life.
Harold Wilson
The Labour leader between 1963 and 1976 was twice Prime Minister and, after
leaving No 10 in 1976, citing exhaustion, he wrote Chariot of Israel:
Britain, America and the State of Israel, published in 1981.
Arthur James Balfour
The PM between 1902 and 1905 was a member of the Society for Psychical
Research before entering the world of politics, and went on to write a
number of heavyweight books of philosophy, including Questionings on
Criticism and Beauty in 1909 and Theism and Humanism in 1915.
Winston Churchill
Britain’s great war leader turned to writing during his “wilderness years”
after 1931, becoming one of the best-paid writers of his time. His prolific
output ranged from A History of the English Speaking Peoples to an account
of how he was run over by a taxi.
JAMES CHARLES
