Speak for England

Arlott and Swanton were two of the voices of English cricket. A new book explores their impact. Richard Nye meets co-author David Kynaston 

They call it confirmation bias: the tendency to search for and interpret information in a way that endorses pre-existing beliefs. But the effects don’t always kick in.

When historian David Kynaston and journalist Stephen Fay set out to write a book on John Arlott and EW ‘Jim’ Swanton – the two leading cricket writers and broadcasters of the postwar years – biographical contrast was the premise underpinning their design. In the blue corner, borne aloft by billowing self-importance, sat Swanton: high priest of tradition, acolyte of the Establishment, the Last Emperor of Lord’s. In the yellow corner, the earthier Arlott: liberal, working-class – and conscious of it – and a poet; champion of the journeyman cricketer; the fruitiest rural voice in the game. Yet these striking dissimilarities were only part of the truth.

“What emerged was the idea of both men as a mirror of how the game changed in the 35 years after the war,” says David Kynaston at his New Malden home. “They were both romantics in their own way and it was striking how, on big issues, they often took the same side.”

Following the evidence is, of course, something Kynaston does in his sleep. ‘The most entertaining historian alive’, in The Spectator’s unstinting assessment, he has already published fine work on subjects ranging from the City of London to WG Grace. His masterful ongoing series Tales of a New Jerusalem charts the history of Britain from the end of World War II to the breaking of the Thatcherite dawn, with the first volume, Austerity Britain (2007), named Book of the Decade by The Sunday Times. And in Fay – whose own impressive output also embraces theatre and finance – Kynaston has the perfect collaborator for this latest work: Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket.

“Being a journalist, Stephen was highly proficient at seeing the wood through the trees. As a historian, I’m good with trees, but sometimes struggle to spot the wood. We respected each other’s disciplines. It was very harmonious.”

More so, certainly, than the relationship between the two men’s biographical subjects. Early in their respective careers, at a Test match in the late 1940s, the pair clashed loudly over a seat in the commentary box – an altercation that ended with Arlott threatening to throw Swanton off the pavilion. Over the ensuing decades peace came dropping slow, though Arlott – an affectionate nurser of resentments – never quite sheathed his double-edged sword. 

“Can you imagine what it must be like,” he would remark privately in later life, “to write as much as Swanton did over so many years and not leave one memorable sentence?”

A penetrating thrust from the man who was, beyond doubt, cricket’s master of the memorable phrase.

“Arlott was very black and white emotionally,” reflects David. “If he was for you, he would do anything, but his chippiness ran deep. Maybe Swanton was being condescending towards the new boy with the Hampshire accent. Arlott wouldn’t have liked that.”

And Swanton did condescension well. Though not born into the officer class – his father had been a stockbroker and his public school (Cranleigh) was of the minor variety – he was determined not to let so unfortunate a glitch hold him back. Confident of manner and lucid of prose, he quickly earned a place at his profession’s top table, serving as cricket correspondent for The Daily Telegraph for 29 years. His essential courtesy was disfigured by a bullying self-regard, to the effect that he rarely saw a bag without looking for someone to carry it.

“He could be flexible – it was he, rather than Arlott, who welcomed one-day cricket,” admits David. “Nor was he narrowly partisan. And on the question of whether or not to play apartheid South Africa, he was very much on the side of the angels. Where he couldn’t adapt was in his snobbishness, his fondness for the old school tie. That really helped to perpetuate the unfortunate image of cricket as a class-bound affair.”

Like his co-writer, Kynaston is an ‘Arlott man’. Partly it is a matter of creed: Arlott stood twice for parliament as a Liberal in the 1950s and, like Swanton, was resolute in opposition to apartheid. On leaving South Africa after England’s tour of 1948-49, just months after the National Party took power, an official asked him casually to declare his race. “Human race,” he replied, and never visited the Cape again. 

But there was also his enduring affection for cricket’s plodding professionals; the faithful domestic animals of the county scene for whom the summit was always out of reach. Where Swanton, conservative to the core, saw the appointment of a professional England captain as the thin end of an alarmingly subversive wedge, the perennially dissenting Arlott was all for it. Let the underdog’s bark be heard. They also serve who only stand and field.

It is upon a similar regard for the humble and the obscure that Kynaston’s acclaim as a historian partly rests. In his minutely researched works, the voices of miner and mandarin are equally heard. “He is attracted by people who make compromises,” wrote one reviewer, “who accept second-best, live dingily and submit quietly without relinquishing hope.” People, in fact, like Arlott’s unfashionable county cricketer, transplanted from Taunton or Hove to the poky back kitchens of Biggleswade and the pubs of Ashton-under-Lyne.

“Arlott admired craftsmen, whether they were glassmakers or cricketers. He had a great love affair with that old world. But he also had a dark, pessimistic streak – it was no coincidence that his favourite novelist was Hardy. As a broadcaster he was a genius, but he may have wondered, towards the end of his life, whether he had fulfilled himself as a writer.”

Arlott men and Swanton men: two distinct breeds. Yet the tribal chiefs themselves, like Englishmen and Americans, were separated by a common language: the language of love for a game that changed dramatically during the decades of their pomp. From the immediate postwar boom, when grounds overflowed with thankful spectators drunk on the wine of peace, cricket’s popularity declined slowly throughout the 1950s, beaten for pace by the advent of competing new attractions and bogged down in an increasingly conservative style of play.

As the 60s started swinging, the new one-day game brought a whiff of rock and roll, enabling cricket to cling onto the coattails of a society where fighting on the beaches was more Clacton-on-Sea than Dunkirk. Then, in 1977, came Kerry Packer, an Australian media mogul whose brash, alternative ‘cricket circus’ plucked the best players from their national teams, seduced them with silver and split the entire cricket world in two. The mirror cracked from side to side: for Swanton, in particular, the curse had come upon the game.

“Packer changed the whole terms of reference. It was the start of the mercenary thing, with cricketers up for hire – the forerunner of the global Twenty20 market we have today. After Packer cricket became a coarser game – floodlights, coloured clothing, the works. In one sense it merely speeded up processes already in play, but it also had its own transformational effect.”

Thus the great history debate takes guard: whether individual actors or impersonal forces primarily decide the outcome of affairs. David is content to shoulder arms.

“On the whole, I do think that there are long-term forces at work, so I’m deterministic to that extent. Would the Reformation have come to England if Catherine of Aragon had produced a boy? It surely would. Or take the Welfare State. It was already on its way in the 1930s: the war merely hastened its arrival.

“On the other hand, individuals do matter in history. Something like Thatcherism would have happened without Thatcher, but it might have taken a less strident form. Individuals have the power to set the precise course of a voyage.”

With Packer initially at the helm, cricket sailed into more prosperous waters. But the price was high, the game’s timeless rituals and rhythms buffeted by the gale. Little by little, the world of Swanton and Arlott was buried at sea.

“It’s still recognisably cricket,” insists David. “What has changed is the whole audience context – the noise, the crassness, the constant drinking. For me, sitting through the Big Bash, in Australia, would be a taste of hell. I also deplore the way that the authorities have wrecked the English season, like town planners destroying what the Luftwaffe missed. Most worrying of all is the lack of media coverage. Cricket has dropped out of the national conversation.”

All the more important that, in this elegant and affectionate tome, two of cricket’s finest voices should be heard again, soaring above the racket like cuckoos from a long-forgotten spring.

Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket, by Stephen Fay and David Kynaston, is published by Bloomsbury (£20) 

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