of judges had hardly considered it worthy of attention.
For instance, I will never forget, and I’m certain my father Les won’t either, the occasion of my first opportunity to impress at a national level, the English Schools’ Under-15 festival of 1971, staged in Liverpool. I had been selected to represent the South West and, naturally, Dad came with me. In the trial game to decide who would play for England Schools against the Public Schools at Aigburth, I produced what I thought was a telling performance with the ball only to later discover it had been a waste of effort. When I came on to bowl, I set a precise field in accordance with a tactical plan, and I enjoyed my first reward when I did the batsman through the air and had him caught at mid-wicket. When similar hard work earned a further five wickets, I left the field satisfied with my bowling and feeling confident that I would succeed in making the final XI.
Unbeknown to me, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, the selectors and I did not see eye-to-eye. In fact, their perception of what had taken place was entirely different. Les had been sitting close to them to see if he could pick up anything from their conversations, and when I took that first wicket he overheard one of these so-called experts comment: ‘Ignore that. It was a fluke’. Against such reasoning I had no chance of making the team and I was duly left out, primarily because they considered me a batsman rather than a bowler. I suppose they hadn’t ever heard of all-rounders. In the years that followed, whenever I managed to achieve anything on the cricket field, it gave me the greatest satisfaction to remember those blinkered observers and wonder what they were doing with their lives at that moment.
Les was fuming, and when the selectors added insult to injury by offering me the exalted role of substitute’s substitute, 13th man, he and I said ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ and promptly headed for Lime Street station.
Fortunately, Tom had seen enough to make a rather different judgement. He took me under his wing and taught me the art of swing bowling. He used to hang his head in despair sometimes when he saw me try to bounce people out, but in the end he believed in me enough to persevere. It was Tom who ensured that Somerset recommended me to Len Muncer, the chief coach of the Lord’s groundstaff boys, the nursery for young talent from all over the country. Tom also persuaded Somerset to give me a chance in a couple of Sunday league games at the end of the 1973 season. It was in the first of these, a televised match against Sussex at Hove, that I took a skyer in the deep to dismiss Tony Greig, a feat that played a large part in the club’s offer of a contract. It was just as well that Tom and Closey put in the effort they did, because, frankly, although it was an awful lot of fun, the education I received at Lord’s was mainly concerned with extending my repertoire of ways to skate on thin ice.
I thought Yeovil was a big town, but coming to Lord’s and London in 1971 really opened my eyes to the big bad world. When I first arrived in the ‘smoke’ I was the original yokel, sixteen years of age and totally naive to the realities of big city life. In short, my name was Ian Bumpkin.
The first thing that struck me about London was the fact that everything was still switched on at one or two in the morning. If you went to the West End at that time, there would be thousands of people milling around as if it were the middle of the afternoon. I just could not work it out. The first time I went into a strip club with the older groundstaff boys, I just stood there laughing in amazement at these women dancing about and taking their clothes off. I really had no idea this sort of thing went on. I had a lot to learn.
My first visit to Lord’s took place at the end of August 1971 when I travelled up with Mum for a trial. Marie sat in the rose garden behind the pavilion while I went off to try and prove what I could do. I remember bowling and batting quite well, but I was competing with lads who were considerably older than me. So I was quite surprised when they told me that they wanted me to start on the following Saturday. Before that, there was not much of the season left, but, at the end of it, I was invited back for the summer of 1972. There was still the winter to deal with so I returned to Somerset and the local labour exchange to look for work to tide me over. It wasn’t glamorous, but I’m proud to say I never went a week without finding something, and ironically I earned more in that six months than I did in my first cricket season with the county.
I didn’t mind the physical work, whether it was as a petrol-pump attendant, brickies’ labourer or plasterer’s mate, and I wonder how many of those who have since walked along the corridors of Yeovil General Hospital realize they are treading on my handiwork. Perhaps the most important aspect of these odd jobs was that they made me appreciate the cricket season all the more when it came, and made me even more determined that there was going to be more to my life than laying floor tiles.
When I arrived at Lord’s full-time, I had my first taste of the kind of ritualistic behaviour that is part and parcel of professional sport – the initiation ceremony. The older boys would come into the junior dressing room, grab the newcomer, pin him down and strip him, then coat his privates in whitewash. All very grown up, of course, but the fact is that your standing within the group was dependent on how well you resisted the assault. Although only sixteen, I was a bit of a handful even then. The first time it happened to me, it took about six of the boys to hold me down. So I was ‘in’. There was a lot of larking about, particularly on rainy days, and if any of my playing colleagues or opponents who became victims of my practical jokes later on want to know from where I got the idea of setting fire to newspapers while they were being read, or sticking chunks of fresh (and sometimes not so fresh) fruit or the occasional prawn in their batting gloves just before they went out to bat, they need wonder no more.
My big mate at the time was Rodney Ontong, who had arrived from East London near Johannesburg, South Africa. In many ways his home town was as much in the sticks as Yeovil had been, and as two country boys we immediately hit it off. We also shared the same confident attitude and approached cricket in an identical fashion – our motto was work hard on the pitch, then play hard afterwards. I would provide scrumpy from Yeovil and Onty would arrive with his suitcase loaded with South African brandy. It was a genuinely gruesome combination, but it did the job and the groundstaff Head Boy, Bill Jones, one of whose jobs, would you believe, was to ensure discipline in the ranks, would often be left to pick up the human debris at the end of the night’s entertainment. I soon learned all about the drinking games that you had to compete in if you wanted to be part of the social scene: the yards of ale, the boat races and the like. I had sampled beer before coming to Lord’s, but it was only when I formed my partnership with Onty that I really started to get the taste.
The only difference between us was that he managed to toe the line better than me when it came to discipline. He would make sure that he stayed on-side with the coaches, Len Muncer and his assistant Harry Sharp. But I struggled with Len, who was one of the military school of cricketers, with razor-sharp creases in his flannels and immaculate shoes. What annoyed me most was that he had decided very early on that I couldn’t bowl. That was absurd because Somerset had sent me up as an all-rounder, not just a batsman who could bowl a bit. I wanted to be in the game as much as possible and Len’s resistance was a pain in the neck.
Most of my bowling was done in the nets, not only for practice but also because it was the place to escape from some of the more mundane tasks that were part of the job. By falling out with Len, however, I lost out on one of the perks.
At weekends when MCC teams were playing up and down the country, they would more often than not find themselves a player or two short. So they would send to Lord’s for a member of the groundstaff who would then not only have his expenses paid but would also enjoy a free lunch and tea. From one match you could end up making as much as the £12 we were paid per week. Len controlled the list of who went where and unfortunately, because of our differences, I was hardly ever selected for one of these trips.
The bottom line was that Len didn’t have much time for me because he felt I was too brash and over-confident. He may even have been right. I probably didn’t do myself much good in his eyes when on one occasion my desire to prove myself in this fiercely competitive
