by Arunabha Sengupta
“I cannot pretend that all cricketers are clean-limbed, noble Englishmen, on the verge of sprouting wings, and that first-class cricket is the lovely and beautiful game that Sir James Barrie in one of his deamy but slightly incomprehensible speeches, or Mr Neville Cardus, Mr Thomas Moult, or Mr William Pollock, in their soothing writings would have us to believe it always to be. No, no, a thousand times no.”
Thus wrote Arthur Carr in his autobiography. Aptly he called it, Cricket With The Lid Off.
Having no fairy-tale fancies about the purity of the game, Carr, the Nottinghamshire captain, played the game to win. Thus he nurtured his two professional bowlers, Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, and often egged them on with profuse amounts of beer. He encouraged them to bowl short, placed fielders on the leg side … in short, he laid the framework for Bodyline. It was he who introduced the duo to Douglas Jardine in the grillroom of Piccadilly Hotel.
Before that, of course, Carr had been captain of England, dropped Charlie Macartney before he had scored to see him dash off to a century before lunch, and been rather unceremoniously removed from captaincy. It was indeed an eventful career, short for England, stretching across 25 years and 45 centuries for Nottinghamshire.
It was strange that he ever played for Notts. His father was a millionaire stock-broker in London and the family lived around the city. Being a racehorse breeder mad keen on horses, Carr Sr suddenly wanted to join the poshest foxhunt in England—the Quorn Hunt in Leicestershire. Suddenly, having no connection whatsoever with Midlands, he bought a large mansion in the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border, which happened to fall just within Nottinghamshire. 500 yards down the road was Leicestershire. Carr was 15 then. Two years later he was playing for the county.
Not everyone was convinced. Against Gloucestershire, on debut, he fell to Charlie Parker for 1 and 0. Three years down the line, he was still struggling, falling to Blythe for a patchy 13 against Kent at Canterbury. On the way back to the station, he shared a cab with a stranger. “That young Carr Notts are trying is no good,” the man told him. “He will never make a cricketer.” He continued the journey in this vein.
As he alighted, Carr informed the man, “Good day. By the way, I am Carr.”
The following match saw Carr hit his first hundred, a knock of 169 against Leicestershire at Trent Bridge. That day, he received a telegram: “Your critic in Canterbury Cab congratulates you.”
A Test average of 19.75 and the 21000-plus runs at just 31.56 shows that the good days and bad were quite randomly sprinkled throughout his career, loaded somewhat towards the latter.
The career included a tour to South Africa, in 1922-23, with Frank Mann’s team. Mainly because Hobbs, Sutcliffe and some others declined their invitations. In the tour-brochure pen-picture, Carr was billed as a dashing batsman and a splendid field, especially in the country. However, in the 24 innings on the tour, he crossed fifty twice and averaged less than 20. He also put his foot in his mouth during a speech during a dinner saying half the South African side would not make the Nottinghamshire team. However, he had a good time shooting lions and struck up a friendship with Percy Fender, an association almost as important to the development of Bodyline as his nurturing of Larwood and Voce.
Carr never worked in his life, apart from a rather bizarre career in the army. His millionaire father did not trust him with money but saw to it that he could be comfortable without really sweating it out.
Carr was made a lieutenant in France in 1913. He got invalided once and was mentioned in the despatches once. And then he was in the reserves between the two World Wars and was called up in 1939 when the Second World War broke out. But he was still a lieutenant. How he managed never to be promoted, or whether he was promoted and got demoted again, remains a mystery. He was definitely a pain in the neck for the army.
The strange thing is that he was too old to go overseas in the Second World War. So, he went to Catterick, a large army base in Yorkshire. And what did our man do there? He seduced the Colonel’s wife, which ended up in a messy divorce for the Colonel.
A colourful man by all counts.
Arthur Carr was born on 21 May 1893.