Reggie Schwarz, Bernard Bosanquet and PG Wodehouse
by Arunabha Sengupta
As a lad in the early spring of his youth, way before he turned into that old stick-in-the-mud who goggles at us from old photographs all eye-glasses and pipe, old Plum Wodehouse used to run in quick and deliver them with all the pace he could muster. You see, he used to gallop in with the new ball for Dulwich College, sometimes with the future England opening bowler Neville Knox as his partner-in-crime. He even ghosted a cricketing article for Knox, the latter not exactly managing too much time in the more scholarly premises of Dulwich after all his exertions on the cricket field.
The portrait of the comic genius as a young fast bowler
Perhaps this fascination with fast bowling was what made Wodehouse step a bit gingerly on the bandwagon of leg-spin googly. That too even as he sprinkled his cricketing stuff generously in his school-stories, during the first decades of the twentieth century. After all, that was the time when the mischievous ball turning the other way provided the spin that plenty of writers — good, bad and the ghastly — added profusely to their yarns. One English critic was justifiably moved enough to comment, “There seems to be more leg-spinners in fiction today than in the cricket grounds of England.”
It was Bernard Bosanquet who started it all, with the game of twist-twosti with which he passed his time at Oxford. The rather banal objective of this parlour game was to spin a tennis-ball past one’s opponent who sat at the other end of a billiards table. One fine day, when goofing around with this game at his family home at Claysmore, Enfield, Middlesex, Bosanquet’s over-the-wrist action started sending the ball bouncing past his amazed adversary, breaking from right to left instead of otherwise.
“How the devil are you doing that, Bernie?”
“Oh well, you know … what with my wrist doing this thing and that, it sometimes comes out like what-do-yer-call-it.”
Soon, there were cries of black-magic and ‘that’s not cricket’ and ‘Townsend would never have done it’ and every other dashed cliché that follows anything new in this game. The cries were echoed in the furthest corners of the world when Bosanquet unleashed this type of delivery on the unsuspecting batsmen in New Zealand when he went there with Lord Hawke’s team in 1902-03. In fact, when the team went over to Australia and played New South Wales, the great Victor Trumper was flummoxed by one of the wrong ’uns. The great batsman returned to the pavilion and told his mates, “Watch it! There’s a joker out there bowling off-breaks out of the back of his hand.”
And then Plum — Warner, not Wodehouse —persuaded our Bosanquet to bowl his stuff in Australia (with a dashed bit more control, if he pleased, than the ruddy four drop dollies that he had the rather nasty habit of sending down way too often). That did cause quite a flutter. What with Hill, Hopkins, Gregory, McLeod, Trumble and Kelly all falling to the curious wrong ’uns at Sydney, and England thereby bringing back The Ashes, the blasted balls now had to be taken seriously. Opinion was divided between wrong ’uns and bosies, before finally some weighty voices got around to a consensus on ‘googly.’ Why googly you ask? That has remains a wrong ’un beyond the best of historians to get a grip on.
Bosanquet himself was often as stumped as the batsmen with the results. He never quite developed a thorough understanding on why and when and wherefore and how often the wretched delivery left his hand. But, Reggie Schwarz was a rather tenacious chum who followed Bosanquet around at Middlesex, and then on a tour to North America. He figured out that if he turned his wrist enough to release it from the back of his hand, the ball would break the other way.
He continued to do that, in the process disposing with the normal leg-break altogether. Well, to be sure that was not the point, the trick lying in the unpredictability and suddenness and variation and all that sort of thing. But, Schwarz was too devoted to the googly and treated the leg-break like the unwanted second son of British aristocracy. Well, to be fair, he sometimes mixed it up with one that went straight through.
Schwarz went over to South Africa, to keep the wolf at bay, working himself to the bone for the cricketing Randlord Abe Bailey. The southern sun mellowing him till milk of human kindness sloshed about inside, he whispered the secrets of the art to some of his South African buddies — Aubrey Faulkner, Bert Vogler and Gordon White. White was more of a batsman, but he dabbled with the delivery every once in a while. The other two were, however, who went deep down into it, not caring a damn. They bowled leg-breaks and googlies and top spinners … All four of them came at you together, becoming a battery of googly bowlers, a devious lot especially on the matting wickets in that country … they beat England 4-1 in 1905-06, and 3-2 in 1909-10. All the unorthodox spin the Mother Country could offer in response was the old-fashioned underarm lobs of George Simpson-Hayward. No wonder the English cricket critics were miffed. As were perhaps the critics of English literature who no doubt looked for a bit more stark realism in the stuff being churned out.
But, our Plum — Wodehouse, not Warner — was not really overwhelmed by all these dramatic developments in the cricketing world. From Jessop to Trumper to Hobbs, he alluded to several cricketers in his books — before he turned his attention to the readers across the pond and, developing the heart of a goof, gravitated towards golf.
The only genuine leg-spinner who snuck into his pages was the England and Somerset all-rounder Len Braund. But Braund, who scored three hundreds in Test cricket as well as capturing three five-wicket hauls, did not bowl the googly. Not that he was not an excellent all-round cricketer, he was … a brilliant catcher to boot. In fact, in A Prefect’s Uncle, while walking back to his bowling mark, Gosling conjures up the delightful image of Braund and Johnny Douglas standing in the slips instead of the bungling Norris.
In A Prefect’s Uncle, there is also Baynes, a rare fictitious slow leg-break bowler created by the Wodehousean pen, who helps Pringle add 3 runs in the MCC match, although he cannot quite trouble the batsmen on a perfect wicket. In Mike there is de Freece, who is not only a slow leg-break bowler but also a talented wing three-quarter and racquets player. But, his cricketing deeds in the pages are limited to scoring a career-best 28 from No 11. In the same chapter there is the mention of Grant, the Wrykyn bowler of slow leg-breaks with no pretentions to batting, but such was the lot of the side that he had to go ahead of Devenish.
None of the fictitious leggies in the pages turn the match on the head with devious breaks, googlies and top spinners. Which leads me to speculate that in spite of a lot said otherwise about his flights of fancy, Wodehouse had his feet firmly on the ground as he tapped away merrily on the typewriter. He did not stretch the facts a bit too far, and England remained as devoid of top-class googly bowlers in his works as at Lord’s, The Oval and Trent Bridge. At least he did nothing as fanciful as Spedegue’s Dropper. The very idea of someone tinkering with sky-high lobs in 1928 makes one quiver in one’s shoes, and not from the fear of getting dismissed.
I would say the art of leg-spin caught Plum’s fancy rather late in his career, when in the Internment Camp in Belgium, his leg-breaks seemed to pitch perfectly on the spot.
But, leg-breaks and googlies nevertheless managed to hitch themselves on to the Plummy scheme of things. It is time to find out how.
Going back to Bosanquet, he was what one would call a Bertie Wooster with a talent for cricket. He was a gentleman of means, as they were known as in those days, which roughly meant that one did not have to do much else than loaf around, and spend winters in Australia and New Zealand playing cricket if one was half decent. Bernard Bosanquet was more than half decent; in fact he was more than decent. He could not quite control his googlies, but was a hard-hitting batsman with 21 first-class hundreds and could send down medium pace as well.
But, in his life he was a dilettante, and a classic one at that. Moreover, one without access to a Jeeves. That created a particular problem.
Young Molly Jones fell in love with this dashing cricketer. And this Old Etonian, Oxford Blue, Middlesex and England cricketer ardently reciprocated the feelings. However, the father of Molly was Kennedy Jones, a pushful Scot with Irish blood and the face of a gangster. He was the editorial despot of Lord Northcliffe, presiding over the affairs of Evening News, Daily Mail and other publications.
Kennedy Jones would never hear of Molly marrying the idle-rich Bernard Bosanquet. To win his daughter’s hand, the least the gentleman cricketer would have to do was to get a job. But, great and unquestionable as his love for Molly was, a job would have messed up Bosanquet’s life. For one thing, he could no longer loaf around, something which he was undoubtedly good and passionate about. And secondly, and by far the profoundly more important reason, he would no longer be able to turn out for the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s, The Oval and Scarborough. The Mr appearing next to his name would disappear from scoreboards across the land, and the BJT would make their way to the rear part of his name. Hence, the situation reached what we would generally refer to as an impasse.
“But, we love each other and the laws of nature and logic state that we should get your blessings and tie the knot and hitch our lives together, and all that …,” that’s what the young couple kept saying. Hearing this, Kennedy Jones would turn distinctly different from a-ray-of-sunshine as befitted a Soctsman with grievance. Further, his Irish blood would boil, and he would repeat out of the side of his gangster like mouth, “Over my dead body.”
And that is precisely what the young couple did … only, by then they were not so young anymore .
Kennedy Jones passed away in 1922, by which time Bosanquet was 45. They wasted no further time in getting hitched. But, be it inertia or the hot-water-bottle complex of the English gentry, they took their time in proceeding to the next step.
Their son was born ten years later, on August 9, 1932.
Here we come to the interesting bit.
Reggie Schwarz was the man who stuck to Bosanquet through thick and thin, picked up the art of the googly, propagated it and made sure that the flame would remain burning and scorching batsmen down the years. It was he who ensured that Arthur Mailey would one day dismiss Victor Trumper with one such ball and subsequently lament that it was like killing a dove. It was he who ensured that another such delivery would bowl Don Bradman four runs short of a 100-plus average , making 99.94 the most recognisable number in the cricket-savvy world. It was he who ensured that years down the line, in spite of over 15,000 Test runs and 51 Test centuries, Sachin Tendulkar would smile the widest when remembering the ball that turned back contrary to expectations and knocked back the stumps of Moin Khan through bat and pad at Multan.
Let us dash back to the First World War, popularly called Great War because no one dreamt that there was another coming along just around the corner … although, I dare say, there was hardly anything ‘great’ about it.
Ability to bowl the wrong ’un did not really matter when it came to dodging bullets. Googly bowling all-round great Aubrey Faulkner was decorated in Gallipoli. However, classy batsman and part-time googly bowler Gordon White died of wounds suffered in Palestine. Reggie Schwarz, for his part, dazzled in German South West Africa, being mentioned in the despatches. He was subsequently wounded in France and perished from broncho-pneumonia on the day Armistice was signed. It was subsequently discovered that Schwarz had left his friend Bernard Bosanquet a bequest of £ 1,000 in his will.
Hence, it is not surprising that cricket chroniclers find their eyes turning rheumy and hearts heavy with emotion, and after wiping a tear or two they write that when a son was born to Bosanquet in 1932, the creator of googly christened him Reginald.
The Son of the Inventor
Great story, but a wrong ’un follows. This is where Reginald Bosanquet sends down his own version of a googly.
The man who went on to inflict his presence on the British television audience for twelve years, as the anchor of News at Ten, later wrote the following in his autobiography Let’s get Through Wednesday: “I was not enamoured of the name Reggie. But, it could have been worse. When I was born, in those early 1930s, two popular names for male off-springs were Reginald and Archibald — due to the popularity of the Wodehouse novels. My father felt Reginald would be rather nice for me; my mother plumped for Archibald. They were arguing about it right up to the time I was being taken into church for my christening. At the font my mother gave in. I was Reginald. It was a narrow escape.”
This delightful nugget of autobiographical narration hints at one possibility and one certainty. It may be that Reggie Schwarz and his connection with Bernard Bosanquet were independent of the christening, and the son was named by Wodehouse-loving parents who fought tooth and nail to choose between two nephews of Mr Mulliner. Perhaps the Christian name of Jeeves settled the issue.
(Of course, as Tony Ring points out, in the canon it was Bingley who revealed the first name of Jeeves in Much Obliged Jeeves. And Much Obliged Jeeves was not published until 1971. By then the image of Reginald Bosanquet was already being formed on the television screens of thousands of homes across the country and his father was busy gettings his googlies hit all over the Elysian Fields by the Jessops and Hobbs and Trumpers. But, the best of fans as we all know, are blessed with more than one’s fair share of clairvoyance)
Or it may be that Reginald Bosanquet’s years of association with the news industry had reached the point where the fine line between fact and fabrication develops a Cardusian fuzziness. Perhaps Reginald was indeed a name inherited from the Bosanquet-Schwarz connection, much like googly itself. And his subsequent wrong ’un about his own name was a result of his own fascination for PG Wodehouse.
The certainty that emerges is that at least one member of the Bosanquet family —most probably all — doted on PG Wodehouse. Be it after rubbing ABC Liniment on painful wrists after a day of sending down too many wrong ’uns, or after washing one’s temple with Eau de Cologne after yet another unfruitful discussion with one’s father about the advantages of marrying a gentleman cricketer, or after taking off cucumber slices from one’s eyes after staring at arc lights for too long, all of them curled up with the tales of Blandings or Berkeley Mansions to help them drift off.