by Arunabha Sengupta
Sydney during Christmas, 1954.
Frank Tyson had just bowled England to a famous series levelling win, and the Christmas lunch was hilarious … ‘best to draw a curtain over it, just say it was hilarious’, remembered manager Geoffrey Howard.
After lunch, some of the party went swimming in the beach. Including Norman Preston, editor of Wisden. Also on the beach was George Duckworth, old Lancashire and England wicketkeeper, accompanying the England side as baggage master and scorer. He ran into some rugby league friends acting as lifeguards. His active brain whirred into action. “Let’s have an incident.”
Soon the lifeguards were in the sea, converging upon Preston and ‘rescuing’ him from drowning. “No, no, no … there’s nothing wrong with me,” protested the poor editor. But he was carried back to the beach, while Duckworth stood there in splits.
George Duckworth played just 24 Tests as the premier wicketkeeper of England. But Les Ames was a far better batsman and often won the solitary slot in the side. Picking better batsmen over the better keeper is not a modern malaise as many will have us believe. However, when Duckworth did don the big gloves for country or county, there was hardly ever a blemish. Agile and smooth, known for leg side catches, when he shouted “Owzat” it rang through the ground and pierced the air. It was reputed to be the loudest appeal ever witnessed in cricket. If the question had been asked for a caught behind decision and the response was positive, he used to throw the ball in the air in a characteristic manner and often engage in a little leap of celebration.
After his days in cricket, he dabbled in radio and television broadcasting to organising three Commonwealth tours to India, Pakistan and Ceylon; from farming and pigeon breeding to running a small hotel.
All would be well with your trunk if he was the baggage master. “He achieved the impossible of getting me from State to State without the loss of a single garment,” wrote Denis Compton.
And as scorer? There was a first-class match of not great importance in Bulawayo in late 1956. Peter Richardson, going for his hundredth run, was short of his ground. As he walked back, Duckworth turned to his fellow scorer, “We’d better count again, just to be sure.” And a moment later he exclaimed, “Oh, that’s funny, I make it 100.” Thus, the scorebook reads Richardson run out 100, and the left-hander has 44 first-class hundreds, not 43.
As tour organiser, he was the one who selected teams. “We collaborated,” explained Les Ames. Jim Laker said, “He has the whole business of running a tour worked to a fine art.”
Neville Cardus, that eternal fact-agnostic snob, wrote patronisingly of Duckworth taking the trouble of reading Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in preparation for visiting India ‘in charge of scoring or baggage’. His patronising amusement was misplaced. Duckworth was a professional cricketer and not an amateur dilletante of the sort Cardus so fawningly idolised, but at the Warrington Grammar School he had been a teenage prodigy who aced Latin and maths putting many a Toff to shame; and he successfully led and supervised politically sensitive and diplomatically exacting tours to India.
Duckworth was perfectly at ease with his own working class Lancastrian background as a Town Hall office boy and equally at home reading Tennyson’s poetry, conversing with equal felicity with the rustic Eddie Paynter and the sophisticated Jawaharlal Nehru. South African journalist Bert Fellows called him ‘Warrington’s Ambassador at Large.’
George Duckworth was born on 9 May 1901.