by Mayukh Ghosh
Christopher Sandford has been writing books for well over thirty years. Many of them have been on cricket and cricketers. For a man with such a CV he is unusually modest and self-deprecating. More so if we consider he has a dual UK-US citizenship!
Chris was candid when I asked him about his early days:
“My mother was American, my father (Royal Navy officer) deeply British. The latter played good services and club cricket as a young man, and probably my first distinct memory of the game was being in a car with him somewhere in the-then sleepy English market town of Guildford while listening to a crackling radio broadcast of the 1964 Test series with Australia. At some stage England evidently did something unexpectedly good either with the bat or the ball, because I distinctly recall my father taking one hand off the steering wheel, giving a sort of light punch or slap to the air, and emitting a low but audible cry of 'Yes!' - all high emotion coming from one so normally sparing in that regard. For some reason I can't remember much of the subsequent 1965 summer, but by about halfway through the '66 England home series with Garry Sobers' all-conquering West Indies I was well and truly hooked. The last Test of the series, at The Oval, was a big one on a number of levels: not only did England somehow manage to win, but the team's two batting heroes, Tom Graveney and John Murray, both later became friends. In 1991/92 I wrote a book about the former, while the latter - 'JT' to his many admirers - became my absolute idol, perhaps in part because I was by then a seriously bad wicketkeeper at my English boarding school, while JT seemed to me, and many others besides, to be the absolute pinnacle of cool in that particular position.”
Chris played all his cricket in various boarding schools in England, before joining Cambridge University. Once those days were over, he has sort of shuttled between UK and US.
The foray into cricket writing was not planned and it all happened quite suddenly.
“I dabbled with some (pretty bad) cricket reporting for various London or provincial newspapers in the 1980s, but I suppose things really got rolling on that front when I met an English book publisher named Richard Wigmore around 1987 or '88 and he suggested I write a biography of the then recently retired great Kent and England spinner Derek Underwood. For various reasons that project eventually fell through, but along the way I met the 68- or 69-year-old former England stumper (and force of nature) Godfrey Evans, and all parties eventually agreed that I'd do a book about him to celebrate his 70th birthday. Evans, among other things, introduced me to many or most of the English cricket greats of his day, and as a result I later ended up doing a similar book about Tom Graveney. Everything sort of moved on from there.”
Chris’ latest book is about two of Evans’ contemporaries. They both played in the MCC team which dominated world cricket in the 1950s.
Jim Laker and Tony Lock.
In Chris’ words: “The odd couple!” which became the subtitle of the book.
When asked about the reason behind writing this book, Chris explained, “I'm not entirely sure why, but over the last few years I seem to have become more and more involved in writing books that compare and contrast two or more characters, as opposed to just giving a more-or-less straightforward account of one individual.
In that spirit, I've done, for instance, Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, then John F. Kennedy and Harold Macmillan, and possibly one or two others of that same ilk. The obvious idea is to show two or more personalities who are often linked together in the public mind but are, or were, really quite distinct, in close juxtaposition to one another - which allows for more creative tension in the story as a whole if you get it right, not that I'm saying I do, or did!
“Anyway, if you're even halfway interested in the whole history of 20th century cricket, as I am, Laker and Lock immediately spring to mind for such treatment. They weren't only superbly accomplished players in themselves, but of course, in England at least, they laboured under the collective name of the 'spin twins'. What's hopefully interesting about the story is that, other than both bowling for Surrey & England, they of course had very little in common: Laker was seven years older, squarely-built, reserved, phlegmatic - or if you prefer, a bit aloof - a sort of avuncular figure who never seemed to express either much enthusiasm or for that matter disappointment; Lock by distinct contrast was wiry, excitable, wore his heart on his sleeve, jumped up and down with joy when something went right, looked and acted utterly crushed when it went wrong.
“So in terms of temperament, and many other ways, so far from being 'twins' they were really complete opposites, and the fact that they were only ever work colleagues rather than friends illustrates the point. Then there's also the poignant fact that both lived distinctly rocky later lives - Laker wrote a virtual suicide-note of an autobiography, called Over to Me, that caused such a furore he was made unwelcome at both Lord's and the Oval for years afterwards, while Lock ultimately moved to Australia, where his own retirement was clouded by two separate criminal charges of sexual abuse - and both died sadly young, at 64 and 65 respectively.”
Lock and Laker have previously been subjects of books, besides the autobiographies they’d written. Chris’s work, though, is slightly different as the motive behind writing it is not only telling their life stories.
“It's true there are reasonably full existing Laker & Lock bibliographies - and I go on record as generally admiring the work of the late Alan Hill in the area - but, still, I can immodestly boast of being the first author to ever put them together in this way as a dual biography.
“As I say, the basic idea is to try and generate, if not tension, then at least some sort of recognisably human interplay - sometimes friendly, sometimes neutral, sometimes bluntly hostile - between the two, in a way that just treating one or other of them purely as an individual can't really aspire to. That was the plan, anyway. Whether or not I've brought it off in the book at hand is for others to judge.”
He, of course, had inputs from his cricketer friends from that era, the likes of Dexter, Murray, Graveney and Evans.
“I think I was at least able to include a certain amount of first-hand testimony from the likes of Ted Dexter, Godfrey Evans and Tom Graveney, etc (all now sadly having left us) about what Laker and Lock were actually like at close quarters.
“I remember my friend Godfrey, in particular, telling me riotously funny stories about his experience of keeping to the pair of them at the famous Old Trafford Test in 1956: Laker just plugging away, calmly taking wicket after wicket, and Lock growing more and more exasperated at the other end, bowling faster and faster (and thus, on that wicket, less effectively) until, Evans swore, you could 'literally see steam coming off him like a over-stimulated racehorse'. I always thought that sort of defined the essential difference between the two bowlers: the one patient, phlegmatic, a bit dour, immaculately precise and persistent; the other mercurial, brilliant on his day, on other occasions essentially useless or at least a hostage to his own emotions. It's all in the book.”
Laker and especially Lock had courted controversies in more ways that one. I was intrigued to know Chris’s stance regarding those episodes.
“All I can say is that I trod lightly when it came to describing the two separate charges of sexual abuse brought against Lock in his final days. I stress that I no way disbelieve or discount the two (then) young women involved, but I think on a purely human level - Lock then having just lost his wife, and himself battling terminal cancer - it was obviously a heart-wrenching time for all parties.”
There have been cricket books with two or more cricketers as subjects. But it will be intriguing to see how names like Laker and Lock get the treatment in one book which is about both of them, highlighting their successes together as well as how different they were as individuals.
The book was published on April 18 by Pitch Publishing and is available from usual outlets.