When Essex visit the Kia Oval for the top-of-the-table clash in the Vitality County Championship, the Festival of Red Ball Cricket will celebrate the best of four-day cricket. Richard Spiller recalls two long-departed veterans of the ground who would have cherished this celebration of the red-ball game.
Sharpened by each other’s recollections, the two veteran members spoke regularly about their favourite memories of watching cricket at The Oval.
The profligate and kindly Jack Hobbs, the inventive genius of Percy Fender trying to find ways of defeating stirling opponents on plumb pitches, the brilliant glovework of Herbert Strudwick. And the highlight of most seasons? Nottinghamshire visiting at the August Bank Holiday – then at the front end of the month – when a capacity crowd would be certain, not least if Harold Larwood and Bill Voce were playing.
“You had to get here very early or you just wouldn’t get in. No chance,” recalled Ken Bourdelot, who went on to spend most of his adult life in the Royal Air Force. He saved up in the final years of his service so that, once free, he could follow Surrey round to every game one summer. He struck lucky as it was 1971, when the County Championship was won for the first time since the glory days of the 1950s.
The trek took in Canterbury, Nottingham, Birmingham, Hove, Sheffield, Taunton, Lord’s (or ‘headquarters’ as he always called it, ever the military man), Kettering and finally Southampton, where the crucial bonus points were gained.
It was one way to see the country for which he had served so long, mostly by train although “the players were very generous with lifts if they had room. We had a lot of fun.”
His lifelong friend Alan Palgrave had Surrey in the blood. His father, Louis, had written one of the club’s earliest histories “The Story of The Oval and history of Surrey cricket 1902-1948”.
Alan had been a civil servant whose first act on retiring was to throw his alarm clock in the bin. If he resembled a Whitehall Warrior in his familiar blue suit, not everything played into the image. Rather than buy the Daily Telegraph or suchlike he would carry The Sun. Maybe it was the racing tips, which was certainly the reason Jim Laker would visit him each day in the Long Room before heading round to the betting office on the ground.
For them, every season was a festival of red ball cricket. It was all they knew, until limited overs cricket arrived in 1963 and, like many of their generation, they weren’t sold on it. Heaven alone knows what they would have made of T20 cricket but they would have been pleased to see the ground full – as long as their familiar chairs at one end of the Long Room weren’t snaffled too early.
Given his distrust of fizzy drinks – “we used to get the muck off our medals with that stuff. Stick to beer, it’s much safer” – Ken would certainly approve of having a beer festival to coincide with one of the big games of the season.
For him and his contemporaries, the County Championship really mattered. They had seen the grand days of title after title and many thin ones, when Surrey were among the also-rans.
Long gone maybe but Alan Palgrave, Ken Bourdelot and the members of yesteryear would relish seeing Surrey celebrate the competition they cherished.
