"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
A.C. MacLaren, captain of Lancashire and England, once made 424 against Somerset. He was a hero of the great cricket journalist Neville Cardus, who had watched him as a boy, but few others:
The truth is that MacLaren wasn't good with people, his judgements of them often colossally wrong headed. He had a bedside manner based on the barked order, a fact traceable as far back as his schooldays at Harrow.
His fag was a "quite useless" and "snotty little bugger" unsuited to the sporting life, which in MacLaren's opinion made him the legitimate butt of ridicule and ritual cruelty. The fag's name was Winston Churchill.
The book begins with a moving tribute to John Arlott's kindness to Hamilton when he was a young journalist and ends with an acknowledgment to Michael Meadowcroft for his searches in the National Liberal Club's archives. You can't ask for more than that.
The first time they met, my father and Tim were so captivated by each other’s company that they went out for a drink and did not return until late the following morning.
My favourite book on John Arlott is the memoir of him by his son Timothy, which also gives a much sunnier picture of another of this blog’s heroes, T.H. White, than you will find elsewhere. (T.H. stood for Terence Hanbury, but White was always ‘Tim’ to his friends after the retail chemists Timothy Whites, which was for many years Boots’ main rival on the high street.)
I’ve never understood why the biography of White by Sylvia Townsend Warner is quite so highly regarded – Timothy Arlott’s elder brother Jim, who died in a road accident at the age of 21, is the ‘Zed’ of that book – while Helen Macdonald concentrates in H is for Hawk on what you might call the more hysterical aspects of his personality.
Timothy Arlott, however, gives us a White more like the Merlyn of The Sword in the Stone:
‘Tim’ White looked a bit like Ernest Hemingway – tall, white-bearded and strongly built, also a lover of the outdoors, animals and alcohol, and a writer by trade – but that is where the similarity ends.
In summer he sometimes wore just a large scarlet towelling bathrobe over shorts. One night two rather serious young men came to his door and introduced themselves as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Flinging the door open wide, Tim boomed, ‘I am Jehovah.’ …
Biographies of Tim White have made him out to be a melancholic homosexual. I can only say we saw nothing of either. With my mother and us children during those summer holidays he was a riot. He was an enthusiast about movie cameras and making his own films about twenty years before it became popular with the general public – and Tim’s films were full of humour.
He would organise imitations of the new ‘whiter than white’ Persil TV commercials and startle Alderney housewives leaving the grocers by descending on them with a movie camera, my brother Jim as the compere asking which washing powder they had chosen and pulling fresh ‘whiter than white’ samples out of his pockets like a conjurer If they had not chosen Persil. Even in his early teens Jim could do superb deadpan imitations of smarmy suave comperes.
This is what Sunday afternoon cricket used to be like on television before the advent of the 40-over Sunday League. I have the faintest memory of watching a Cavaliers game myself.
A Somerset side containing stalwarts like Brian Langford, Roy Virgin and Fred Rumsey, is beaten by a team of stars, with the spin of Gary Sobers and Richie Benaud bewitching the Somerset lower order.
The Cavaliers opening partnership that almost wins the game on its own is Bobby Simpson, the current Australian captain, and Roy Marshall, who played four tests for the West Indies in the early Fifties before becoming a key member of the Hampshire side.
All this and John Arlott nearly being killed by a six too.
Ben Quinn explains how the National Trust fought back against the culture warriors: "When it comes to disinformation, [Celia] Richardson speaks of taking 'a broken windows approach' - borrowing from the criminology theory that addressing low-level problems creates an atmosphere that discourages larger ones."
"From the 19th to 20th century, children were physically removed from their homes and separated from their families and communities, often without the consent of their parents. The purpose of these schools was to strip Native American children of their Indigenous names, languages, religions and cultural practices." Rosalyn R. LaPier says Joe Biden's apology for the horrors of Native American boarding schools doesn’t go far enough.
Dominic Grieve has some good advice, which the Conservative Party will ignore, concerning the severe problems that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights would cause.
It is all too clear that unelected bureaucrats now control what happens on the West Yorkshire Rail network on the grounds that declining passenger numbers, a result of their own failures, justify further cuts. Curtailments to Sunday and evening services could soon follow. In a reversal of decades of local progress, argues Colin Speakman, West Yorkshire’s once-thriving commuter rail now struggles under bureaucracy and neglect.
"Arlott was a superlative cricket commentator, a failed Liberal politician (was there any other kind in the post-war era?), and a major catalyst in the D'Oliveira Affair. Were it not for John Arlott we may never have heard of Basil D’Oliveira and the controversy sparked by D'Oliveira’s selection for England’s tour to South Africa, turning South Africa into even more of a pariah state may never have happened." Matthew Pennell wrote a post for Black History Month on British Liberals and the D'Oliveira Affair.
Andy Lear searches for the ghost woods of Rutland's Leighfield Forest.
Here in 1975, introduced by John Arlott, is Phil Edmonds in his blond Adonis phase, making his test debut. In his first 12 overs for England he took 5 Australian wickets for 17, his victims including both Chappell brothers.
He was to bowl much better than this for England, but never with so much luck. Still, his sudden appearance on the test scene was part of the revitalisation of the team under Tony Greig's captaincy.
From his debut until his last test, against Pakistan in 1987, Edmonds only played 51 of a possible 126 games for England.
In part this was because we rarely played two spinners, though Edmonds and John Emburey were fixtures in two successful Ashes series in the 1980s. But it was also because he came to be seen as a difficult character.
Sometimes the selectors went to ridiculous lengths to avoid picking him. In 1982 Edmonds took 80 first-class wickets for Middlesex, but three off spinners (Eddie Hemmings, Vic Marks and Geoff Miller) were taken to Australia that winter and there was no place for him.
"This mess was, of course, both predictable and predicted. That’s why I’ve been struck, visiting the UK this summer, by the curious political taboo against discussing how badly Brexit has gone, even among many who voted against it." Michelle Goldberg has found that no one in the UK wants to talk about the disaster of Brexit.
Neil Schofield-Hughes warns Wales to be beware of Keir Starmer's attack on devolution in London over ULEZ.
Mark Lilla says we need a post-identity liberalism: "By the time ... [students] reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good."
I have long been more interested in Karl Popper theory of knowledge than his philosophy of science. Steven K. Graham looks at its implications for the education of younger children.
Andy Boddington is pleased that Ludlow is not too posh for Rag’n’Bone man: "A few complaints from people that live a mile from the castle. The topography of Ludlow means that sound travels to unexpected places. Expected places too. There were good crowds on Whitcliffe Common which could perhaps remarket itself as the Ludlow Amphitheatre."
This weekend's weather in Manchester has been no laughing matter, though John Arlott used to claim it's the only city where they have lifeboat drill on the buses. The Mill looks into the fairness of its reputation for rain.
Today, 25 October, is the feast day of the twin saints St Crispin and St Crispinian. Jacob Rees-Mogg couldn't resist dating his resignation letter "St Crispin's Day" - Crispin's twin never gets the same coverage.
The two were martyred in 285 or 286 in Northern France, and a local tradition holds that they lived for a time at Faversham in Kent.
St Crispin's Day (his twin doesn't get the same coverage) is famous as the date of the Battle of Agincourt and for the king's speech in Shakespeare's Henry V.
My favourite piece of cricket commentary dates from March 1977 and the Centenary Test - a one-off test played between England and Australia at Melbourne to mark the centenary of test cricket and of Ashes cricket in particular.
Arriving from a victorious tour of India, the England captain Tony Greig won the toss and put Australia in. A good team bowling performance saw them dismissed for 138. Sadly, normal service was resumed as Dennis Lillee and Max Walker bowled England out for 95.
Australia declared their second innings at 419 for 9, setting England an improbable 463 to win. Yet for a while it looked as though they might get there. Good batting by Mike Brearley, Derek Randall and Dennis Amiss meant England reached 279-2.
But it was not to be. Dennis Lillee too five wickets and Australia won by 45 runs, which had been there margin of victory a hundred years before.
While things were going well in England's second innings and Derek Randall was batting out of his skin, I heard, listening in the night, John Arlott say:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.
He really was the greatest cricket commentator of all.
Cricket fans of a certain age will be amused to learn that there is a promising young player on the books of Leicester City called Dempsey Arlott-John.
Young person's voice: I don't get it.
Liberal England replies: Listen to this programme about the great John Arlott.
Two of my favourite cricket journalists, John Arlott and Alan Gibson, were Liberal Party general election candidates.
To them I can add Frank Keating, who was never a candidate but did act as campaign manager to Grenville Jones.
The story begins, as Keating once wrote in the Guardian, in the "one-room, one-man Leominster branch office of the Hereford Times in 1958":
"Keating, boyo, I'm North Hereford's new Liberal candidate: I'm going to make you - and you're going to make me."
And so, mutually, we each contrived to do so. There was no official Lib organisation; the Tories were landslidingly first, the rest nowhere. Grenville's first target was to do better than the Libs in South Hereford, considered winnable, where Robin Day was Liberal candidate.
We were to do better, and comfortably; the supercilious townee Day was out of his element on the rustic hustings, whilst alongside him at joint meetings, off-the-cuff Grenville would have the smocks rocking and rolling in agreement and mirth in the cattle-aisles and among the pig-pens.
This star-struck young reporter played his part. Grenville would telephone from London with his variety of opinions - anything from the National Farmers Union's local fatstock prices to the end-of-the-monarchy or Kenya's Mau-Mau - and, shamelessly, I would patch-in these matters of policy into reports of non-existent meetings around the constituency, invariably "packed-out and enthralled"
Jones, who had already fought the Isle of Ely in 1950, next turned up as the Liberal candidate in Tavistock at the 1964 general election.
By then Keating was working in outside broadcasts for ITV in London:
"I could now officially be called "campaign manager." The Olympic Games were in the offing in Japan, and I had mates in the graphics department doctor huge posters showing star athletes lunging to breast the tape - with Jones's face superimposed and the legend announcing 'A Gold For Grenville'. In one weekend, we must have pasted up more than a thousand.
The Tories were rattled - but, of course, hung on to win. Grenville, gloriously, took the silver again."
Jones, who later joined the Labour Party, became a pioneering political consultant, with clients including the imprisoned Nelson Mandela.
When Frank Keating died in 2013, his Guardian obituary said:
Few modern sports writers have brought alive sporting people, past and present, champions and also-rans, as Keating did. Few have written with such sympathy, able to laugh with them, not at them, at the same time minting fresh, inventive phraseology. He created a new language for the nation's sporting press. He was unique, and beloved by contemporaries, who saw his writing skills and awards as a guiding path for their own.
It is not an exercise in nostalgia about a man universally considered to be the greatest cricket commentator and 'the voice of an English summer' it is an exploration of Arlott as a political figure both inside and outside the world of cricket.
John Arlott's politics can best be summed up as those of a radical liberal, and he twice stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party. But he would have found obedience to the party whip difficult, and he rarely adopted a party political stance during the many years that he appeared on the panel of the BBC Home Service's Any Questions.
He appeared with such people as ... Michael Foot and a young Margaret Thatcher; and he attacked the political orthodoxies of both left and right. He always championed the 'common man' against the power or money or privilege.
Backwatersman reviews Stephen Fay and David Kynaston's biography of John Arlott and E.W. Swanton. The England opener Peter Richardson emerges as a hero for his teasing of the latter. He "continued to vex him by submitting accounts of the doings of fictitious public schools to 'The Cricketer' and comically blimpish letters in praise of Swanton to 'The Daily Telegraph'."
"Before viewing Harlequin ... it’s best to set aside the old-fashioned notions of 'good' and 'bad.' They just don't apply here. I've watched the film twice now, and I still have no idea if it's a 'good' film or not. But it is flat-out crazily entertaining, and I love it." Jim Donahue watches the film directed by David Hemmings and starring Robert Powell.
Caroline from Flickering Lamps shows us the turbulent history of Clerkenwell's Spa Fields
Iain Dale has collated a collection of Liberal Party and Liberal Democrat party political broadcasts. It begins in 1955 with John Arlott, Frank Byers and Herbert Samuel.
Cheryl Misak looks at the influence of Frank Ramsey on Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work he translated into English. The older brother of Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frank made many important contributions in philosophy, mathematics and economics before his death aged 26.
London was once a city of horses, says Alex Cochrane : "Humans lived cheek by jowl with the 300,000 horses of cabmen, traders, laundrymen, grocers and rag-and-bone men. You can see the traces of that time everywhere: old stone drinking troughs, hidden cobbled mews, mounting blocks, slips and ramps."
Nicolas Roeg was not a born filmmaker argues Brad Gullickson, but put in the work.
Yesterday Mark Pack posted a 1950 film celebrating cricket with narration from Ralph Richardson and John Arlott.
Attentive reader's voice: Didn't you post that film yourself a few years ago?
Liberal England replies: It was seven years ago, but who's counting?
Watching the film again on Mark's blog, I was struck by how quickly Arlott established himself as the voice of cricket. Only five years before it was made he was a police sergeant in Southampton.
Arlott made the leap to cricket broadcasting via the BBC Overseas Service, where he produced poetry programmes for Indian listeners. (He was an accomplished poet himself and had cultivated the friendship of John Betjeman and others.)
The post Arlott was given at the BBC in 1945 sounds very like the one George Orwell vacated in 1943.
Yesterday a blue plaque was unveiled on the house in Lodge Road, Southampton, where Arlott and his wife lived when he was still a policeman.
In one corner of the Hilton, Don Bradman broke bread with England's Bodyline attack. In another, 84-year-old Percy Fender, when reminded that in 1930 he had doubted Bradman's ability to succeed in the lushness of England, ruefully replied: "An indiscretion of youth."
On the concourses of the MCG, scoreboard nameplates of old greats hung, exuding history. On match morning, 18 past captains were paraded on the ground, Ian Chappell in a green safari suit. Well, it was the '70s.
40 years ago tonight, the Centenary Test began in Melbourne. Australia and England came together for a one-off game to mark the 100th anniversary of the first Ashes test.
It was a great occasion and the cricket lived up to it. Australia won by 45 runs, just as they had done a century before.
But for a long time it looked as though they were going to make the 463 runs needed to win in the last innings.
Derek Randall scored a wonderful 174, interspersing his clowning with ravishing strokes. I remember, listening in the small hours, hearing John Arlott quoting Shakespeare:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.
But though Mike Brearley, Dennis Amiss, Tony Greig and Alan Knott all passed 40, no one was able to give him enough support for England to win. The scorecard is on Cricinfo.
Randall won Man of the Match, but an account of the test by Greg Baum suggests Dennis Lillee's performance in defying illness and injury to take 11 wickets in the match was greater:
[Rodney] Marsh protests to this day that though Randall made the match, Lillee won it.
Lillee did not tour England in the summer of 1977 and England, by then captained by Brearley because Greig's involvement with Kerry Packer had been revealed, won back the Ashes.
And Derek Randall never quite had the career that that innings in Melbourne promised. A few years later Matthew Engel was to suggest that there were three rules for new selectors:
Don't have more than two glasses of port after dinner, don't interrupt the Chairman of Selectors and if in doubt drop Randall.
So said Alec Shelbrooke, a Tory MP who has hitherto flown beneath the radar of this blog, of Gary Lineker.
But he can be both. There are plenty of precedents.
The great John Arlott fought Epping for the Liberal Party at the 1955 and 1959 general elections.
Not only that: he was a regular panelist on Any Questions? which made him about the best known Liberal in the country before the party's revival under Jo Grimond.
A second member of the Test Match Special team, Alan Gibson, was a supporter of the Liberals. He fought Falmouth and Camborne in 1959.
And, as Andrew Hickey remined me on Twitter today, David Icke was one of the Green Party's principal spokespeople when he still worked for BBC Sport.
If Shelbrooke would prefer a right-wing example, he need look no further that Denis Compton.
While a member of the BBC's television commentary team for test matches he fronted the organisation Freedom in Sport, which sought to re-establish fixtures with Apartheid-era South Africa.
So Gary Lineker could certainly be a political activist and a BBC sports journalist if he chose. So far, of course, he has done no more than offer an opinion.
My mother once mentioned (parenthetically, forgetfully) that when she was a probationary teacher at Basingstoke in the early Thirties and he was a policeman, she had known John Arlott 'quite well'. This might have meant anything. It probably meant no more than her having 'gone to a couple of dances' with the young Hugh Casson, whom she had met through his father, University College Southampton's rowing coach.
Though I wouldn't put much money on her remaining in the cabinet for long, I don't suppose Maria Miller will stand down as MP for Basingstoke. And if she does, the Liberal Democrats are unlikely to win the by-election.
Because, since its creation in 1885, the Basingstoke constituency as been won by the Conservatives at every general election but one. And when they lost it, they managed to win it back the following year.
It is not accurate to say they have held the constituency since 1885 except for one year, because of the strange career of Andrew Hunter who was Basingstoke's MP between 1983 and 2005:
In 2002, he withdrew from the Conservative Party, in order to fight elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly as a candidate of the Democratic Unionist Party. He had family and Orange Order connections with Northern Ireland and opposed the Good Friday Agreement. The elections were held in November 2003, when he stood in Lagan Valley, and he failed to gain a seat, coming seventh in a six-seat constituency.
On 10 December 2004, he announced that he had joined the DUP Parliamentary Group in the House of Commons, the first Member of Parliament for a seat in Great Britain to represent a party based in Ireland since T.P. O'Connor represented Liverpool Scotland from 1885 to 1929.
The one general election at which the Conservatives lost Basinstoke was that of 1923, when Reginald Fletcher won the seat for the Liberals.
And who was the Liberal agent who produced this unexpected victory?
"The doctor, I believe, recommended my mother to have another child and she said, 'Yes, Doctor, I would if only I could afford it,' and it really was like that. But she was a most capable woman. She was the local Liberal agent and did succeed. She was the only one who ever did, the only agent who ever got a Liberal in for Basingstoke.
Reginald Fletcher was defeated in the 1924 general election. He later joined Labour and won Nuneaton in 1935. Raised to the peerage as Baron Winster in 1942, he briefly served as minster of civil aviation in Clement Attlee's government.
An international conference is taking place at the University of Glasgow on Friday and Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of the great cricket book Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James.
The speakers include Mike Brearley, former President of the British Psychoanalytic Society and (far more importantly) former England cricket captain.
You can watch the proceedings live on the web on Friday 10 and Saturday 11 May from 9.30 a.m.
John Arlott once called Beyond a Boundary "the finest book written about the game of cricket". And it is about far more than cricket: part autobiography, part social history of both the Caribbean and Victorian England, and part call to political action.
Earlier this evening I listened to this superb documentary on BBC Radio 4.
John Arlott is remembered as a cricket commentator - except that it is more than 30 years since he retired as a commentator and 20 years since his death, so I fear that many followers of the game today have hardly heard of him. Suffice to say, he was the greatest cricket commentator there has ever been.
But there was far more to him than that. He was twice a Liberal candidate and, in the days when the party was at its lowest ebb, he was probably the best known Liberal in the country, thanks to his appearances on Any Questions? He was also one of the foremost British campaigners against Apartheid in South Africa
You can hear John Arlott: Cricket's Radical Voice on BBC iPlayer for the next week. By the time it has finished, the programme has gone a long way to substantiate its claim that he was "one of the great radical liberals of the 20th century".
