by Arunabha Sengupta
The score is 113 for six as the 45-year-old makes his way to the wicket across the soft outfield grass. He tells himself to have a look at the bowling, to get used to the pitch. Just 39 remain to win and plenty of time.
Perhaps it is due to the rigours of indulging in profuse apologies, on behalf of the just-dismissed batsman who has left in a disgruntled huff. Or perhaps it is the twinkling of the low sun through the half-bared branches of the chestnut trees beyond the bowler’s arm. The short of length delivery suddenly becomes way too enticing. At the last instant the straight bat is abandoned in favour of a heave over short-midwicket. The ball comes slowly off the pitch. The stroke sends it in a gentle lob into the fielder’s grasp.
It looks pathetic. The return to the pavilion is lonely, sad, silent. Teammates look away. The resulting defeat is painful. The journey home is long and melancholic. His form has dropped sharply through the season.
The unfortunate dismissal changes the landscape of cricket writing.
It is September 1993. Unemployment has risen for the second month running in the UK. In East London the British National Party has won its first council seat—an unemployed lorry driver beating the Labour Party candidate by seven votes. The end of a summer made remarkable by Shane Warne spinning his first delivery in a Test in England across the entire expanse of Mike Gatting to hit the top of off-stump.
Are his days of playing for the wandering club over? Stephen Chalke refuses to believe it. His father played till he was 62.
He decides to work on his game. 3-D Sports refers him to a coach called Ken Biddulph. A former Somerset bowler of the 1950s and early 1960s. A telephone call is made. An hour’s session is arranged. When he reaches at four o’clock, Biddulph greets him, “Stephen? Nice to meet you. I’ve got some good news. There’s nobody in after us till six o’clock.”
They work hard. The goal is simple. A few more runs, a few more wickets … enough to help Stephen enjoy the game for a few more years.
After one and a half hours, they sit and talk. Ken Biddulph starts remembering his days of county cricket. When he got Roy Marshall out for a duck and overheard a spectator at fine leg: “I say…I’ve come all the way from Southampton to see Marshall bat and some silly bugger’s got him out.” When Hampshire captain Colin Ingleby-McKenzie won a bet by beating his own fastest hundred of the season and bought dinner for both the teams.
Afternoon stretches into evening. Stephen has to cancel plans to watch the fireworks display at Bath University with his family. The stories linger. He returns home and checks the Wisdens.
Taunton 22 July 1959 RE Marshall c Lomax b Biddulph 0
Bournemouth 18 June 1958 ACD Ingleby-McKenzie not out 113 in 61 minutes. Biddulph 2/82.
How about writing down all these stories?
His cricket improves. 23 wickets in 1993 becomes 39 in 1994, 50 in 1995. In 1996 he captures 82 wickets and averages 30 with the bat. Not bad for a 48-year-old cricketer playing for a wandering cricket club.
It is now 1996. The Prince and Princess of Wales complete their divorce proceedings. Ford launches its new Ka city car. English cricket splashes about in low waters, reaching out for straws in all directions, from Australian coaches on one side and to a Tesco chairman on the other. Meanwhile 40/1 outsiders Leicestershire triumph in the County Championships..
Stephen is not happy working in adult education. Management changes, reorganisations, shakeups … all these result first in promotion, then dissatisfaction and finally a generous redundancy package.
He seeks to reinvent himself, takes a course on ‘An Introduction to Feature Writing.’ His off and on dabbling in a set of autobiographical short stories have indicated he needs a critic. “My writing was crying out to be shaken out of its introspective preciousness.” Sitting in 2020, looking at the tale of one of the greatest cricket writers of all time, we are struck by the keen Socratic wisdom that shaped his development. Indeed, quite a rarity in a domain where both substance and style are so often superseded by self-importance.
Meanwhile the stories of Ken Biddulph have continued to flow. Personalities great and minor, cricketing and otherwise, have flitted through the recollections. From Harold Gimblett to Harold Macmillan.
What if more memories are mined?
Stephen starts on a mission to collect unheard voices of the 1950s.
Often funny. Roly Jenkins suffering from a sore finger and asking the umpire if he could borrow the one he was not using. We’re given memories so that we can have roses in December.
Sometimes sad. The same Roly Jenkins saying, “I’m going to play as an amateur today. I want to catch the early train back to Worcester.” And thereby not being considered for further Test duty. A stab of thorn in those roses of December.
Stephen drives around England and Wales. Talking to cricketers. Don Shepherd, Dickie Dodds, Tom Cartwright, Dennis Brookes, Bomber Wells, Arthur Milton and others. It is about the cricket and about the people who played and the people who watched. Told in the voices of the cricketers. The mesh of memories woven together by a deft pen. The backdrop of the times wondrously prose-sketched. Finally, it is a way to revisit his own childhood and early youth.
A leading cricket writer who sees a draft is not convinced that the use of present tense works. Stephen goes forward with it. It is at the heart of the freshness.
The first result is Runs in the Memory. With illustrations by Ken Taylor—the England all-rounder, Huddersfield footballer and professional artist.
But who will publish a book on county cricket in the 1950s without any major star as central character? It is, after all, not financially viable.
So, Stephen has to learn to do it himself. That is how Fairfield Books is born.
Reactions and reviews are joyful, spontaneous. EW Swanton names Runs in the Memory among his six best cricket books of all time. Frank Keating urges people to read it. Stephen even gets a fan letter from the Irish folk singer Andy Irvine.
There is only one discordant note. Robin Marlar is the reviewer at The Cricketer, erstwhile captain of Sussex, who has had more than a little fun poked at his expense in the description of a 1959 match. He is not happy and makes it known.
2020. I flick through the pages of my own copy of Stephen’s second book, a similar exploration of the memories of cricket in the 1960s—Caught in the Memory. Purchased second-hand from John McKenzie. On the front fly-leaf is the bookplate proclaiming: “From the Library of Robin Marlar.”
Quality wins through in the end.
Back to 1999. The Queens Birthday Honours indicate that the manager of Manchester United will become Sir Alex Ferguson. Cornwall is the only region in Britain to experience total eclipse.
After Caught in the Memory, it is time to branch out. It starts with the help of the inimitable Bomber Wells, ‘with summer’s day in his face and laughter in his soul’.
They sit outside the boundary of the College ground at Cheltenham, watching Worcestershire battle Gloucestershire, both struggling for a place in the following summer’s Division One. As they watch the current game, they remember the 1957 encounter between Yorkshire and Gloucestershire at the same venue. Sam Cook’s benefit match. With Arthur Milton, Tom Graveney, Ray Illingworth and others joining in the conversation. Added to the mix are memories of Bill Edrich and Charlie Parker, the spinning finger of Tom Goddard compared to the Devil’s Horn.
A curiously original way of telling a story, of writing a book. All the while cups of tea keep being poured out and fig rolls keep being offered.
Ken Taylor’s sketches of the cricketers are this time accompanied by pencilled sceneries by Stephen’s wife Susanna Kendall, a trained artist.
“The monumental unforgettable book all writers hope they have within them,” writes Robert Brooke in The Cricket Statistician, before adding rather ominously: “Whatever the future holds for him, it will inevitably be something of an anti-climax.”
Three years down the line Brooke simply says, “I was wrong.”
By then Stephen has wandered into the other end of cricketing recollections. While Bomber’s was a story of endless fun, Bob Appleyard’s is a tale of success incredibly tempered by the relentlessly merciless fire of fate. The saga is draped in layers and layers of travails and tragedy, but emerges as a tale of hope, of someone who is no trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere. No Coward Soul wins the Wisden Book of the Year award of 2004.
It is not the first award. In between there has been a journey through the magical memories of Geoffrey Howard, the 92-year-old former secretary of Lancashire and Surrey, manager on three MCC tours, including the Typhoon-Tyson odyssey to Australia with Len Hutton’s men. The inside story of English cricket has been laced with tales of the amateur captain asking Wally Hammond to take over because he needs to go for a haircut, of a Wisden editor ‘rescued’ by life-guards while swimming blissfully in a Sydney beach, of Howard himself taking the controls and flying the MCC team from Indore to Delhi.
When The Heart of English Cricket is chosen the Cricket Society Book of the Year in 2001, Howard’s stick propels him across the floor as he accompanies Stephen to the podium.
Down the years Stephen continues to extract the memories of many … from Keith Andrew to Ken Taylor to Mickey Stewart to Tom Cartwright to Geoff Cope.
Over a cup of tea Mike Brearley compares Cartwright to Caleb Garth of Middlemarch. Stephen pulls the book out once he gets home. Yes, there are similarities. There are differences. He regularly sits with Tom in the Y Mochyn Du pub near the Glamorgan ground. “There was much more of a rhythm of life then,” says Tom. “Now people are striving for things they can’t attain, the structures break down and the natural rhythm is lost.”
Tom Cartwright —The Flame Still Burns is the Wisden Book of the Year 2008. Sadly, Tom passes away a few days before the book is released.
Meanwhile Stephen writes a regular column for Wisden Cricket Monthly. Driving around England to peep into the past through a cricketing lens, treading through a hundred interviews, recollecting matches and characters, cricketers and their associated lives—as curates and bishops, dancers and trombone players. He meets Hedley Verity’s son and Jim Laker’s widow, and writes about wartime matches involving 12 days travel from Imphal to Bombay to county sides declaring innings closed because they cannot afford to unwrap another ball. The columns are published in book form. The Way it Was is perhaps the best cricket book most people have not read. It wins the Cricket Society Book of the Year award in 2009.
In late 2013, he embarks on an ambitious history of the County Championships. One and a half years and many a fascinating story later, it emerges as the magisterial Summer’s Crown. It wins the Cricket Writers Club Book of the Year award in 2015.
All through the years, he drives around England, speaking at cricket societies, to audiences of all sorts and sizes, selling books and stocking them.
In the midst of all this there are other publications.
Way back in 2001, during a mad afternoon between his trysts with Geoffrey Howard and Bob Appleyard, Stephen decides to publish others.
The writer to start with is not a bad one. The name Fragments of Idolatry is perhaps confusing to some. One reader rings up asking for Fragments of Adultery. In any case, David Foot’s brilliant sequel to Beyond Bat and Ball finds itself published by Fairfield Books. The only note of discordance is over the royalties.
“I’ll pay you two pounds a book,” says Stephen.
“No, no, no. You can’t pay that much,” says David.
Later in 2010 Foot writes Footsteps from East Coker, an underrated gem.
Other titles follow. There is John Barclay with his Appeal of the Championship, Life in the Airing Cupboard and Lost in the Green Grass. The peerless columns of the troubled genius Alan Gibson compiled into a priceless volume edited by his son Anthony Gibson—Of Didcot and the Demon.
There is Douglas Miller with the biographies of Don Shepherd and Charles Palmer.
Fred Rumsey with his Sense of Humour, Sense of Justice.Brian Rose with Rosey.Simon Lister with Supercat—the biography of Clive Lloyd.
Then there is Tony Ward of Northampton, whose emails as a reader become fascinating enough to culminate in Typhoon Tyson to Twenty/20.Patrick Murphy and Mark Wagh who write a different type of books, focusing on one season.
And others. Even non-cricketing, literary ones. Such as Anthony Gibson’s The Coloured Counties.
The Curator of Memories
How does one categorise Stephen’s own work? Oral history? Assisted biography? A more corporeal version of ghost writing?
I would rather call him a Curator of Memories.
He works on the principle of Alan Bennett: “Anyone of any distinction should, on reaching a certain age, be taken away for a weekend at the state’s expense, formally interviewed and stripped of all their recollections.”
Stephen excels at this. Mickey Stewart, the largely unsmiling sergeant major while manager of the England cricket team, opens up to him with a theatrical sense of comedy. His grandfather, after all, appeared in Fred Karno’s troupe with Charlie Chaplin.
The voice is always that of the subject. Emerging into view against Stephen’s carefully crafted background.
The narrative is always warm. Yet they remain bereft of the sloshy sentimentality that renders so many cricket books sickeningly soggy, doddering at the brink the dubious if not wading in it.
There is empathy, in loads, but no slant. There is nostalgia but no rosy retrospection. The memories are preserved, but only after authentication.
As Kanheman, Tversky and others have shown us, memories can be very misleading. They play tricks. Stephen is fully aware of this. He knows recollections are not trustworthy windows to the past, prone as they are to reshaping themselves, to remember what they are comfortable with. Hence, often the voices of his subjects come with his own careful commentary, straightening the detail wherever necessary.
Speaking of my personal experience, I tend to froth at the mouth when old-timers rattle off bloated and fabricated fiction disguised as fond memories the glorious past with nonchalant disregard for contradicting scorecards. Stephen, in contrast, treats them with warmth, as endearing bits of human foible, to be tidied up with a gentle hand. Yes, memories can be misleading. But, they are precious.
Hence, Stephen is a curator. Safekeeper and interpreter of the historical artefacts that emerge from conversations. Removing and repairing the faulty bits and laying out the resulting displays in appropriately constructed environments.
Before those memories are lost forever.
These are insights into the past. A record of the changes, within cricket and without, the transitions undergone through the march of time. Never all good, never all bad.
Where Stephen veers away from Bennett’s dictum is in the ‘formal’ bit.
He ends up having chocolate digestives with Bomber Wells, sleeps in the guest room of Bob Appleyard in the same bed where Len Hutton once crashed, drives Geoffrey Howard to the memorial service of Alf Gover, continues to have lunches with Ken Biddulph. He deals with elderly men, and while he transforms their recollections into the best books of the cricket world. And through the association he invariably transforms their latter days into some of the most enjoyable.
He becomes their friend. He shares their ups and downs.
Somebody lends Bomber his copy of Well, Well, Wells! Bomber in turn lends it to someone and forgets who it is. When the chap asks for his book, it is Stephen who hunts down and buys a replacement copy in the second hand book market.
It is Stephen who engineers a letter from David Sheppard which ends the distress of Rupert Webb.
Down the years he speaks at the funeral services of Geoffrey Howard, Ken Biddulph, Keith Andrew, Frank Parr, Bomber Wells and Tom Cartwright. Before his death, Geoffrey Howard informs his daughter that he needs no memorial. “The book on which Stephen worked so carefully with me is my memorial.”
It works the other way as well. When Tom Cartwright suffers his massive heart attack, Stephen is distraught. It is Bob Appleyard who becomes his rock of support.
At the same time, he persuades Bob not to use the book as a vehicle to lash out at Geoff Boycott.
The relationships with his protagonists are always personal. But never at the expense of the integrity of a rigorous chronicler.
2020. A tragic year of Biblical proportions. Finally, there is a way for bowlers to stop Steve Smith from scoring all those hundreds. It is called Coronavirus.
Somehow, slogging through the winter, I have finished writing my book on cricket and society in apartheid South Africa leading up to the Stop The Seventy Tour campaign. Just before the lockdowns slam travel embargoes around the world, I manage to meet Peter Hain at the House of Lords, London, and get him to write the foreword. In May Apartheid: A Point to Cover is published. I send Stephen a copy.
He writes (among other things): “I love the flickering style of it, moving from scene to scene with such an eye for the telling detail. The use of the present tense makes it so immediate.”
I pause and reflect. Flickering style, moving from scene to scene, use of present tense. Who do these traits remind me of?
Is there the shadow of Stephen Chalke there? I generally take many of his methods as guideline—the most important being that the unit of a cricket book is a cricket match. Anyone who has read him will know what I mean.
No, not a shadow. I would like to think a bit of the luminous light that sparkles in his works does shine through in mine.
Stephen has retired from publishing. Only after curating his own memories, in a splendid volume called Through the Remembered Gate. We read the stories behind the various cricketing tales he has penned down the years, and alongside are the backpages of his own life. And his writing remains as moving when he pauses along the way to narrate the story of a Scottish dentist.He is still writing. When we last interacted, he was busy helping Lansdown Cricket Club with a new history—it is the oldest club in the West of England and, among much else, where Viv Richards played in the year he qualified for Somerset.
Stephen Chalke. Born on 5 June 1948.