On the 20th anniversary of the release of one of the most fascinating and underrated cricket books of all time, Mayukh Ghosh continues his fascinating series with a look at the story behind Caught in the Memory by Stephen Chalke
The 1960s was a decade of change. More so in Britain. The pace of life changed too.
Motorways gained prominence over railway lines and National Service gave way to long hair and Beatlemania.
Cricket too was not far behind. New rules were experimented almost every season.
A knock-out tournament (Gillette Cup) in 1963 and then the Sunday League in 1969. Chuckers were caught, no-ball laws were changed at will and the amateur-professional division was no longer entertained.
The other catalyst was the good performance of England. No wonder then that in the domestic front Yorkshire dominated that decade.
In October 1997, Stephen Chalke published his first book Runs in the Memory. With the help of the players, he recreated twelve county championship matches from the 1950s.
A year and half later, he once again followed the same formula, this time recreating matches played in the 1960s.
The players interviewed chose the matches that were stuck vividly in their memory, with one or two exceptions when the author too played a part in picking the matches. He wanted to make sure that every first-class county was represented at least once.
He used ‘present tense’ throughout the book as he believed that it was ‘too easy to overlay the past with the inevitability of its outcomes’.
Ken Taylor, like he did for Chalke’s previous book, drew twelve portraits for the book. This time, to suit the changing times, they were in colour.
Chalke interviewed the players for first-hand accounts. But memory, after thirty-odd years, can often play tricks. He went back and checked the facts wherever possible. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable volume which gives a strong flavour of English cricket in the 1960s.
Nineteen years later, in 2018, when I asked him about this book, he was honest in his assessment:
“They often say that second books are the hardest to write, and there is some truth in that. I was at a crossroads. Should I repeat the formula of Runs in the Memory, or should I branch out, even take on another subject than cricket? I did consider that – the golden age of repertory theatre was a subject I wanted to explore. In the end I played safe, writing the sequel to Runs in the Memory. With hindsight I think I stuck a little too closely to the spirit of the first book. I don’t think I caught the zeitgeist of the 1960s as well as I did the 1950s. For one thing I should not have excluded one-day cricket from the selection of games.
“On the other hand, because I had moved forward a decade, some of the contributors were that much younger than those whom I interviewed for Runs in the Memory and their memories were fresher. So, there were some very good chapters.”
Caught in the Memory was published on March 31, 1999. It has been 20 years and now it’s a collectible. Rarely available on Amazon and AbeBooks and often exorbitantly priced.
But a book worth hunting down….