Roy Swetman, who played for Surrey from 1954-61 and made 11 Test appearances for England, has died aged 89. Richard Spiller tributes his career.
A career which saw him play for Surrey, Nottinghamshire, Gloucestershire and England made Roy Swetman something of a curiosity.
He was marked out for great things at an early age, making his first team debut for nursery club Addiscombe aged 15 – alongside Clive Dring, who would go on to play for Kent – and given a first-class debut for Combined Services aged 19 while doing National Service. Swetman’s maiden appearance for Surrey would come the following season, 1954, and he was sent on an MCC A tour of Pakistan in 1955-56.
It almost ended in disaster, a light-hearted prank one evening involving umpire Idris Begh which saw a group of players soaking the official with buckets of water, blowing up into a fully-fledged diplomatic incident.
Swetman’s involvement in it did not block his career path and he was selected for the 1958-59 Ashes tour as an understudy to Godfrey Evans, despite not even being the first choice at Surrey. He was already familiar with the spin wiles of Jim Laker and Tony Lock, having kept when Laker took 10-83 for the county against Australia on the 1956 tour, a precursor to his 19 wickets in the Old Trafford Test.
When Evans was injured down under, “Swetty” made his Test debut in the third match, at Sydney, making a staunch 41 in the first innings of the only match England did not lose in a disastrous tour led by his county captain Peter May.
“I hadn’t even got my county cap when I went on that tour,” he recalled, also appearing in the fifth Test at Melbourne and two more in New Zealand at the end of the trip, his boyish looks making him appear even younger than he was.
Rebuilding became the theme for England and after Evans had played the first two Tests of the following summer, Swetman made three appearances against India before heading to West Indies as first-choice.
He played in the first four Tests but, with England aiming to protect a 1-0 lead, saw Jim Parks preferred for his batting – by no means the first or last Surrey keeper to suffer such a fate.
Swetman would not play for England again and decided to retire from first-class cricket at the end of 1961, aged 28. Why?
“I was offered a job in 1961 and I decided to do that. I’ve always been in the building trade and, unlike now, every cricketer needed to have another job then because, unless you were one of the few picked for a tour, you needed to earn a living between the end of August and the middle of April, when you reported back.”
Yet Swetman was not done with the game. He returned to play for Addiscombe, scoring thousands of runs and even reinventing himself as an off-spinner before being lured back by the persistence of Reg Simpson to play for Nottinghamshire for two years from 1966.
And after that came a spell at Gloucestershire from 1972-74 after a chance meeting with skipper Tony Brown – “I bumped into him at a bunfight at the Dorchester” – before the gloves were finally put away, 286 first-class matches yielding 530 catches, 66 stumpings and two centuries.
Swetman enjoyed life in the Mendips, travelling to the Surrey Old Players Day at The Oval for several years, although he admitted that he might not have enjoyed some modern trends.
“There seems to be an awful lot of coaching now. There are two ways of learning – you watch the game and then you go out and play. The only practice we did was two weeks in the nets when we reported back, which we hated.
“After that we couldn’t wait to get on the road to Cambridge to play the university match. From the start of May to the end of August we played six days a week, so there wasn’t much time to be practicing anyway.
Swetman had suffered ill health for much of the year. He leaves a widow and a brother.
