by Arunabha Sengupta
“I peered at Warren Bardsley as he took shelter in the bar from the icy wind. He was over here in the role of a reporter and of course the bar is really the best place for a cricket reporter to be in if he wants to write true, graphic accounts of the match in progress. There are so many people he can question about what has happened! Certainly he would go crazy if he were to watch every ball bowled for six hours a day throughout the season. The old habitués who appear to watch everyday and all day at Lord’s adopt another method of preserving balance of mind. They sleep a good deal of the time, and wake up when anyone does an old-time cover-drive.”
Fun-filled, mildly satirical but not overly so. Ken Farnes was at Leyton to watch Australia take on Essex, having just quit the drudgery of a bank job. He would proceed to Cambridge and subsequently become a schoolteacher. Add to that his natural soul of the poet.
His book Tours and Tests is therefore filled with some beautifully lyrical yet restrained passages. For example, the bit where he embarks on the Cavina across the North Atlantic towards Barbados for England’s tour of West Indies in 1934-35:
“The prospect of leaving England’s chill grey December for sun-drenched coral beaches fringed by palms is undoubtedly pleasant. But as your vessel leaves Avonsmouth and encounters the cold and choppy Bristol Channel, you may find tropical sunshine of your imaginings very much obscured if you are not a particularly good sailor.”
Farnes was not a good sailor. Hence the lurching movement of the ship soon became overwhelming. “My only intercourse with the outer world was through the cabin steward and Errol Holmes. The latter survived not only the seas but the spectacle of a green cabin-sharer. By […] nights I heard the howling of the wind and the ceaseless groans and creaks of the straining ship, and watched the troubled moon making jerky, circular tours of the porthole.”
The tales of the tours are fascinating. Farnes describes a joyride in Trinidad, where the launch capsizes, “Maurice Leyland refusing to be disturbed by the incident was swimming nonchalantly around fully clad”. There is also a most surprising look beneath the façade of a man known to be perennially taciturn, “Wally Hammond came to the surface still wearing his hat, this he proceeded to doff and bade everyone good morning.”
What Farnes does not talk about at all are his bowling exploits as a rather feared fast bowler.
About his 10 for 179 on debut against Australia, including Bradman for 25 in the second innings.
Of the 1936-37 tour of Australia, he writes about big kangaroos far off, loping away in aloof dignity over the crest of a low ridge and there is a photograph next to a Maori woman during the New Zealand leg. He does not mention his omission from the first few Tests followed by his outstanding 6 for 96 at Melbourne during a total of 604. However, he does mention his dropping a couple of catches in that Test.
He does not talk of his 4 for 63 at The Oval but describes the endurance and concentration of Len Hutton’s 364. During the South African tour of 1938-39 he dwells neither on his 4 for 29 at Durban in the England win, nor on his 4 for 74 during that Timeless Test, but does mention reading the introduction of Tagore’s Gitanjali which he borrowed from Hedley Verity.
Farnes captured 60 wickets in 15 Tests at 28.65, in an era of shirtfront wickets. In the years following Bodyline and leading up to the War no fast bowler took more wickets than this 6 foot 5 inch Essex giant.
The book does have some insightful commentary about cricket, with a balance between practicality and romanticism. “In cricket firstly bowling prevails over batting, secondly the batsmen evolve a technique to counteract the particular method of attack in vogue, then for a time batting triumphs, until bowlers find new means of dislodging the batsmen. And so the pendulum goes on swinging…”
It still does. That is why reverse swing, doosra and the rest are invented.
The last words of the book are “I believe that the first-class game as a whole is in a better condition today than it has been for a long time—speaking, of course, without taking the war into consideration.”
Without taking the war into consideration.
The book was published in 1940.
Farnes met Aeron Franklin in a service canteen in Torquay, a woman whose marriage was breaking up, who joined the war effort as a voluntary nurse. The schoolteacher and cricketer, now a RAF Volunteer Reserve, fell deeply in love. He quoted amorous lines to her from James Elroy Flecker’s Hassan.
He wrote to her “Sweetheart, Aeron, darling, I love you, want you, cry out for you. What can be done about it?”
On the night of 20 October 1941, he cabled her to wait in the airfield as he got into his first unsupervised flight in a Wellington bomber. Aeron waited there. She kept on waiting.
Farnes never arrived. He had crashlanded in a tennis court at Chipping Warden and had been killed immediately, even before the plane had come to rest in a garden at Hogg End.
He had just turned 30, full of life, hope, love and cricket. Without taking war into consideration, it had promised to be a long, happy life.
Ken Farnes, fast bowler, schoolteacher, poet and brilliant writer, was born on 8 July 1911.
Illustration: Maha