How the 1961 Ashes laid bare cricket’s ugly double-standards

Australia's captain Richie Benaud (left) bowling at Old Trafford, August 1 1961 - V Wright/Central Press/Getty Images

In geopolitics there’s such a thing as the shot that changed the world. There isn’t, obviously, in cricket. One of the big shots that changed nothing, other than the result of a match, was played by Brian Close against Australia at Old Trafford in 1961. With the Ashes up for grabs, England were bearing down on a famous victory on the fifth day of the fourth test.

Close, a beefy southpaw, had just straight-driven one of Richie Benaud’s leg breaks for six. Benaud now bowled wider of the off stump, aiming for a Passchendaele of footmarks gouged up by the boots of Fred Trueman and co. Close twice swept lustily and missed. The third time he connected, and was caught behind square for eight. England collapsed and, from an impregnable position, lost the match and the Ashes.

The opprobrium that came Close’s way – “grotesque”, “a nightmare”, “best talked about in whispers” – had much to do with the fact that he was a professional and a northerner. His captain Peter May got a duck (bowled out by Benaud) but he was an amateur and a southerner. This paper’s correspondent, the tribally elitist EW Swanton, forgave him.

In the 1960s, English cricket resisted the social fluidity happening around it. All decade the national side was captained by a succession of gentleman amateurs. The Ashes would not be regained for another 10 years when Ray Illingworth, another Yorkshire pro, was put in charge.

Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes (★★★★) presents a history of English cricket through the prism of the 1961 Ashes, which came down to that game and, according to Swanton et al, that shot. Its co-authors David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts were both still in short trousers but already entranced and, winningly, it shows.

England captain Peter May looks on at his stumps in disbelief as he is bowled by Benaud in England's disastrous second innings in the 4th Test at Old Trafford, August 1 1961 - Getty Images/Central Press

Why the title? What does Benaud’s footwear have to do with anything? It turns out that the night before the fifth day, when the Aussie captain walked back out onto the square to pore over the trench of footmarks that would turn the ball and the game, he wore blue suede shoes. May worked in the City. The authors find it impossible to imagine his feet shod in any shade of suede, and therein lies a symbolic difference between cricket as practised by the 1961 Aussies and their hosts. Swashbuckling modernists vs stockbroking conservatives.

This was, to quote Harold Pinter’s yearning couplet about Len Hutton, “another time, another time”. The tourists stayed all summer and played every county. One-day cricket was taking its first uncertain bow. The MCC, a private members’ club, ran the world game. Wisden devoted 62 pages to public schools and nothing (“nothing,” the authors repeat in disgust) to state schools.

Back in that day, when television was the poor relation to print and radio (Swanton’s other fiefdom), whole books would be published about a test series. The authors don’t quite attempt that. Instead their story divides into three. The first hundred pages carefully explore the back story to 1961, then offer granular accounts of the first three tests. The second hundred are devoted obsessively to Old Trafford: Australia’s first innings failure, England’s substantial lead whittled away in the second innings until Australia add a century in a breath-taking last-wicket stand. Then “Lord” Ted Dexter scythed a glorious 70 and victory was in sight. John Arlott, one of many oracular observers reanimated on these pages, likens the endgame’s tension to a Greek tragedy.

Cricket Match at Bedford Park, London, 1897 (oil on canvas) by Camille Pissarro - Bridgeman

Only a certain type of reader could go anywhere near a forensic session-by-session reconstruction of such an ancient match that, since Raman Subba Row’s death last month, no Englishman who played in it survives. But patient and scholarly storytelling, alert to nuance and eager for detail, captures something of the hypnotic, accumulating rhythm of the full five-day game in all its pregnancy. It’s made the more thrilling if you don’t know the result – though you can hardly expect this review to avoid spoilers for a game played 63 summers ago.

A long outro on cricket’s growing pains hastens all the way through to last summer’s Ashes. To this day the Gentlemen and the Players, no longer meeting in that sclerotic summer fixture at Lord’s, continue their class warfare by other means. May and Dexter persisted with the lofty amateur ethos as chairmen of the selectors. “Who can forget Malcolm Devon?” said the latter (sadly not quoted here) after a fine performance by England’s quickie Devon Malcolm. Now that state schools have no pitches to play on and private schools provide roughly half of England’s (and Australia’s) XIs, the authors morosely conclude that Gentlemen are winning the long game.

Among the very few females mentioned are Lady Diana Spencer, born in 1961 just before the first test at Headingley, and Christine Keeler, introduced to Jack Profumo at Cliveden during it. It’s refreshing, therefore, to encounter so many women playing up and playing the game in Brendan Cooper’s Echoing Greens: How Cricket Shaped the English Imagination (★★★).

An admiring caricature by Thomas Rowlandson captures Hampshire and Surrey contesting the first women’s county game in 1811, skirts all a-billow. The stuffy Victorians put a stop to their fun. “I don’t believe cricket’s a game for the petticoats,” harrumphed a gent in an 1890s Punch cartoon, not long after a women’s exhibition match in Liverpool attracted 15,000. Meanwhile suffragettes dabbled in leather and willow, and the young Stephen sisters were keen child players. There are sweet photos of a tiny Virginia Woolf keeping wicket and an older Vanessa Bell playing a stern forward defensive.

Cooper gets his title from Blake’s Songs of Innocence, whose illustrations included images of a lad wielding a bat. He doesn’t quite offer a complete history of English cricket nor of all currents in English literature and visual art. But wherever they – or cinema or music – converge there are entertaining titbits. Who knew that HG Wells’s father was the first bowler to take four wickets in four balls? Or that Conan Doyle got WG Grace out?

Detail of 'An Ideal Cricket Match' (1887) by Sir Robert Posonby Staples and George Hamilton Barrable

Cricket was first mentioned in medieval literature and appeared in religious illustrations. The first poem devoted to it was in Latin. In 1744, the year the game’s laws were codified, James Love composed Cricket: An Heroic Poem. “Hail, Cricket! glorious, manly, British game! / First of all Sports! be first alike in Fame!”

A game first played by rural ruffians clambered up the ladder, capturing England’s nostalgic imagination along the way. Keats said his head was “stuffed like a cricket ball”. The Pickwick Papers contains a mashed-up description of a game suggesting Dickens didn’t know his ins from his outs. Trollope put cricket in a novel set a century into the future.

Each era found its own literary uses for the game. A cricket short story by Hardy touched feelingly on class. In Finnegans Wake its language doubles as the lewd lexis of sex. “Did she google?” asks Spooner in Pinter’s No Man’s Land, meaning sleep with men other than her husband. (Googlies turn the wrong way.)

This is a well-stuffed compendium. Cooper parses every passage or painting for significances, some of which perhaps aren’t always there. He is even kind about John Bellany’s widely derided 1985 portrait of a bottle-blond, barrel-chested Beefy Botham. “It is as if he is made of out of Englishness itself,” he claims. Gentlemen may disagree.

Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes is published by Bloomsbury at £22. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books

Echoing Greens: How Cricket Shaped the English Imagination is published by Constable at £25. To order your copy for £19.99 call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books

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