Skippers of yore
FRANK KEATING
Pitched suddenly into England’s cricket captaincy, it has been a delight to see Andrew Flintoff going about the job with a smile on his face. However the series ultimately pans out, wholehearted Flintoff’s ursine charms made for a winning start all right. Traditionally, of course, established England captains steered clear of India. The anointed monarchs of my boyhood (Hammond, Yardley, Brown, Hutton and May) never once led a tour to the sub-continent, hiving off the captaincy to such greenhorn amateur apprentices as Nigel Howard and Donald Carr. Later, stalwart county captains like Tony Lewis and Keith Fletcher were given one-tour commands.
I was on the latter’s trip in 1981–82. Unlike the present one — arrive late Feb, home midApril — we were away from the end of October to the beginning of March. India won the first Test and the next five were drawn. It is still considered the most tedious series in history; nevertheless I was beguiled and enchant ed. There was time to get out and explore; now, between playing and net practice, they never poke their noses out of the marbled ‘intercontinental’ hotels. Fletcher was not the most, well, ambassadorial captain of England. The Essex countryman never got to grips with the overwhelming place. When we played at Baroda he was cautioned by the FCO for addressing the Maharajah as ‘old cock’. Fletch had played in Colombo years before, when it was capital of Ceylon, and when we rounded off the tour with a seventh Test, Sri Lanka’s first ever, in front of every local dignitary you could think of, the captain in his public speeches could never stop himself calling it Sri-Lon, as in: ‘’Ow ’appy we are to be in Srilon.’ In fact Swi-Lon, for lisping Fletch always had trouble with his r’s (in spite of the fact that he named his two daughters Tara and Sara).
How very different in the days of Empire: England’s two pioneering tours of All India in 1934 and 1938 were led respectively by the Wykehamist Douglas Jardine and the Old Etonian Lionel Tennyson. A son of the Raj himself (born on Bombay’s Malabar Hill), Jardine’s haughty arrogance was taken as normal, although he too was warned about native sensibilities by the Viceroy, Willingdon, when, playing against Patiala, the captain demanded replacement of the umpire (Middlesex player G.F. Tarrant, who wintered as the Maharajah’s cricket professional), who had given eight lbw decisions against the tourists, including Jardine, ‘before tea on the first day’. Four years later, m’lord Tennyson also received an official red card as Willingdon’s successor, the Tory aristocrat Linlithgow, turned out to welcome the team’s aptly named Viceroy of India at Bombay. ‘Hello, Hopie, ol’ boy,’ roared Lionel, explaining to all around that the plumed imperial grandee ‘was my little fag at Eton’. Next day, he received the curt order that ‘Your Excellency’ was now Hopie’s preferred manner of address.
On Fletcher’s tour I had a day’s shooting with Botham up in Jammu. Good fun: five guns, about 40 beaters, and just hare and partridge. Not much, but last of the line: from his dozen shoots, Jardine logged his personal 1934 bag: ‘One lion, one panther, one tiger, one bear, three crocodiles, numerous stags and innumerable smaller creatures’; four years later Tennyson bagged an elephant in Nawanagar and then, looking for a tiger, famously shot a goat tethered in a clearing as bait. ‘For all you know,’ he said to the only pressman as witness (E.H.D. Sewell of the Times), ‘it could have been a man-eating goat.’
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