on the subject of professional captains. He had always firmly expressed the view that many more professionals could with advantage be appointed as captains and elected to serve on selection committees. Verity, he believed, would have made a particularly good captain, as would Sutcliffe, who proved his ability when leading the Players on four occasions. In fact, if Sutcliffe had accepted the Yorkshire captaincy when it was supposedly offered to him in 1927, he might well have been given the England captaincy ahead of Jardine when the time came.
Jardine was moderately successful as a cricket commentator on the radio. His observations were always perceptive and lucidly expressed, but his delivery was a little slow for post-war tastes. It certainly lacked the bite of the modern ‘I don’t know what’s going on out there’ school. He undertook these broadcasting and journalistic engagements more out of a need to earn a living than as a means of maintaining contact with the first-class game. By now he had a wife and four children to support. Things weren’t quite as hard as earlier in their marriage when Margaret Jardine had taken to smallholding, but the extra income was useful and Jardine himself contributed short stories to the evening newspapers which brought in a bit more. He tended to worry a good deal about money but defied the constraints of austerity to the extent of running a somewhat decrepit Rolls Royce Phantom II, bought from a chap in Bognor Regis where the family were holidaying.
The family was a very close one and Jardine involved himself more in the children’s upbringing than most men of his class were accustomed to do at the time. He read to them, played with them, took them on outings (the circus being a particular favourite), and his daughter also remembers the family sitting round listening to ‘The Goon Show’, which used to make him cry with laughter. All the children were sent to boarding schools but during the holidays there would be large gatherings of Peats and Jardines either at Hockwold Hall or on the estates that Sir Harry Peat rented in Perthshire. The Peats were a great sporting family; there was a substantial amount of shooting attached to Hockwold Hall and about 25,000 acres went with Crosscraigs House on the south side of Loch Rannoch. The children were all taught to fish, stalk and walk with guns as a matter of course.
To Jardine’s great delight, his two eldest daughters, Fianach and Marion, became fond of playing and watching cricket and often went with him to Lord’s for the day. His only son, Euan, though, was unable to continue the distinguished cricketing line. Margaret Jardine had come into contact with German measles while carrying him, he was born with a weak heart and suffered from very bad health throughout his childhood. His father was fully aware of the pressure that resulted from having a famous father and a number of contemporaries remember that he was deeply concerned about it.
Jardine was a devoted family man but he was also fond of socialising. They did not entertain much at Radlett and so he tended to do a fair bit of clubbing, lunching and bridge-playing in London. Ian Peebles recalled in Spinner’s Yarn that ‘D.R.J. came to the City at intervals and we saw quite a lot of him. He was a splendid guest with the agreeable habit of particularly addressing his remarks to anyone who seemed shy or left out of the conversation.’
He was chairman of the New South Wales Land Agency, which was a sheep-farming concern. When the company was taken over by the Scottish Australian Company, he was taken onto the board of directors and in 1953 he was asked to travel to Australia on the company’s behalf to assess the development possibilities of the property. He hesitated for obvious reasons before undertaking the mission, and he went to the trouble of consulting Jack Fingleton, by now a friend and press box colleague, on the sort of reception he was likely to get. Fingleton tried to explain that Australians do not as a rule bear grudges and that he would be warmly welcomed. With some trepidation Jardine went ahead with the trip and found that Fingleton had been right. There was no pelting with rotten eggs at the airport and he was jovially received, in his own words, ‘as an old so-and-so who got away with it’.
A reunion lunch was arranged with Prime Minister Menzies attending, also Larwood, Mailey, Bardsley and Oldfield. Larwood’s autobiography includes an account of the occasion, which seems to have been most convivial, with people making jokes about bodyline without any embarrassment. Fingleton remembered that he also gave a talk in the radio series, ‘Guest of Honour’, which was very well received. Jardine was pleased but puzzled – he could not understand these Australians at all.
Larwood himself had been even more warmly welcomed when, three years earlier, he had emigrated to Australia. Again this had been at Fingleton’s instigation. The ex-Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, had personally paid half the Larwood family’s hotel bill when they first arrived.
In 1957 Jardine was obliged to make a similar trip, this time to inspect land which he owned in Rhodesia. It was a working holiday and he took with him his second eldest daughter, Marion, for whom the trip was a twenty-first birthday present. While he was there he contracted a disease called tick fever. He did not respond to treatment as well as was expected, but the doctors felt there was no cause for great concern and recommended a long sea voyage back to England.
On his return, he was admitted to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, where his condition showed no improvement. He was moved to University College Hospital and tests revealed an advanced state of cancer. Deep-ray treatment was administered, but without success. His wife was then told by one of the hospital doctors about a clinic in Switzerland which was having a moderate degree of success against cancer. Jardine agreed to go, although neither he nor his children knew what was wrong with him. The deep-ray treatment had caused him great difficulty with his breathing and he thought that the Swiss mountain air would help.
The couple travelled to Switzerland and he was admitted to the clinic. It was found that he not only had lung cancer but that it had got to the stomach and the brain as well. There was nothing they could do for him beyond giving him pain-killing drugs and on 18 June 1958 he died. His body was cremated and flown home and his ashes were scattered over the top of Cross Craigs mountain in Perthshire.
From Jardine, A Spartan Cricketer, 1984
18 JUNE 1934
SHIFTING THE FIELDSMEN
SIR – In order to conciliate the Australians, we are not to allow the bunching of fieldsmen on the leg side by fast bowlers. It therefore seems reasonable that there should be a limit to the closeness by which the Australians may approach the bat when Grimmett or any other slow bowler is bowling.
The batsman knows that the only way to move the fieldsman is to wait for the loose ball and then deliberately take aim, hoping to ‘score a bull’. It is not quite cricket, for in the mind of the batsman there is always the irritating feeling that while he does not wish to injure, he must remove the man.
In most cases this unlimited ‘in-fielding’ amounts to obstruction, and is just as likely to injure a fieldsman as fast bowling to a leg field is likely to injure a batsman.
E.G. Bisseker
London WI
From Not In My Day, Sir: Cricket Letters to the Daily Telegraph, 2011
While I didn’t ever play against D’Oliveira, he was, by my time in the game, the second XI coach at Worcestershire. I would encounter him on several occasions over the years and I remember him holding forth in the changing rooms at New Road, where he was still a huge figure. How was it that this unassuming man could have become such a massive, inadvertent political figure without doing anything other than be selected to represent his adopted country at sport? I think he was just the right person at the right time, who happened to come along and, by being there, helped
