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Sundial in the Shade: The Story of Barry Richards: the Genius Lost to Test Cricket
Sundial in the Shade: The Story of Barry Richards: the Genius Lost to Test Cricket
Sundial in the Shade: The Story of Barry Richards: the Genius Lost to Test Cricket
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Sundial in the Shade: The Story of Barry Richards: the Genius Lost to Test Cricket

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As a former county player, Andrew Murtagh is often asked, 'who is the best batsman he has ever played with or against?' His answer is always unequivocal - 'Richards.' And then comes the inevitable rider - 'Barry, that is, not Viv.' It is a travesty that the cricket world has largely forgotten Barry Richards - a cricketing genius. Debuting for South Africa in 1970, his run-scoring, technique and audacious, extravagant strokeplay took the breath away. A glittering international career beckoned. However, the apartheid storm burst, and Richards had played his first and last Test series. Consigned to plying his trade for Hampshire, Natal and South Australia, Richards became increasingly frustrated and disenchanted with the game he had loved. Following retirement, personal tragedy and professional controversy continued to stalk him, though he has now come to an uneasy acceptance that he will be forever known as the genius lost to Test cricket.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 1, 2015
ISBN9781785310676
Sundial in the Shade: The Story of Barry Richards: the Genius Lost to Test Cricket
Author

Andrew Murtagh

Andrew Murtagh and Adam Lee are both engineers, authors, and activists. Andrew's background is in biomedical engineering and he works in the med tech industry; Adam a software engineer working in that sector. In their free time, both blog at Patheos on the big questions; Andrew at Soapbox Redemption, Adam at Daylight Atheism. Andrew is the author of Proof of Divine (2013), Adam the author of Daylight Atheism (2012). In their theological discord, they became friends, and have teamed up to end human trafficking. 

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    Sundial in the Shade - Andrew Murtagh

    2014

    Introduction

    ‘SO,’ said my dining companion opposite, fixing me with his eyes, ‘who was the greatest batsman you ever played with or against?’

    ‘Richards,’ I replied, without a moment’s hesitation.

    He continued to chew while he gave this some thought.

    ‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘I don’t think anyone could disagree with that. After all, Wisden named him as one of the five cricketers of the century, did they not? King Viv – surely the most…’

    ‘Barry,’ I corrected him, ‘Barry Richards. Not Viv.’

    His blank stare hinted that he didn’t know whom I was talking about.

    ‘Barry Richards?’ came a voice from further down the table. ‘The greatest batsman never to have played Test cricket!’

    ‘Well, that’s not entirely true,’ I pointed out, ‘He did actually play four Tests. Against Australia in 1970. He scored two hundreds and finished the series with an average of…74.86.’ That last bit, about his average, was something of a stab in the dark. I couldn’t remember exactly, not having a head for figures. In fact, I had not been that far off. His Test average was 72.57. Which puts him second only to the incomparable Bradman and above the greats of the game, such as Pollock, Headley, Sutcliffe, Hammond, Sobers, Hobbs, Hutton, Greg Chappell, Lara et al. But only four Tests is, statistically, too small a number to count.

    And therein lies the problem and which probably accounted for my dining companion’s look of puzzlement.

    ‘Why did he only play four Tests?’ piped up another voice.

    ‘South Africa got banned, didn’t they?’ said someone else.

    ‘That’s right,’ said another, ‘they were isolated because of apartheid. A jolly good thing, as it turned out. Brought down the government, Mandela was released, paving the way for democracy and his election as president.’

    ‘I’m not sure whether their cricket team being isolated was entirely responsible for the downfall of apartheid.’

    ‘But banning their rugby team did.’

    ‘It certainly helped to concentrate minds.’

    And for the next quarter of an hour, the argument about apartheid and South African politics raged. The women looked bored. I was beside myself with frustration. ‘Hang on!’ I wanted to shout, ‘You asked me who was the greatest batsman I ever played with or against. I’ve given you my answer and you won’t let me say why.’ But of course I didn’t. Apartheid is one of those subjects, like the NHS or public schools or social benefits, that excite great passion and heated debate and nothing – not even the prematurely curtailed career of Barry Richards – can stop that person on his soapbox. I gave up and sipped my wine. Bloody politics, I thought, not for the first time either.

    ‘Politics has been inextricably bound up with my life,’ Barry said to me early on in the process of writing this book, ‘It always has and so it remains.’

    I pondered this for a while. It had been my intention to write the story of his life from a personal perspective, not ducking the controversies but not getting subsumed by them either, thus sabotaging the narrative flow. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to realise that he was right. It would be a bit like taking the reader through the unfolding events of the Second World War without mentioning Nazism. To be truthful, I had wanted to concentrate on his cricket career but I now saw that was impossible. Politics was at the heart of everything that happened to him.

    My mind went back to an afternoon sometime in the mid-summer of 1970. I was a university undergraduate and was on a summer contract at Hampshire County Cricket Club. What better way was there to earn a bit of money to augment a meagre grant? Playing cricket every day of the long summer vacation hardly qualified as a job in my mind but there it was; I was paid £10 a week and I joyfully considered myself a professional cricketer.

    There had been no match that day so we had been practising in the nets all morning. Following a lengthy session, we were refuelling in a local hostelry when in walked Barry Richards. All the others knew him because he was Hampshire’s overseas player. There was no fawning or kowtowing to him; he was just one of the team, albeit one with a very special talent that had already attracted approving attention nationwide. Although I had attended pre-season training in early April and got to know everyone reasonably well, Barry had not been there. Overseas stars, by and large, didn’t ‘do’ pre-season training – the English weather in spring is too inclement, so they normally pitched up just in time for the first match, much to the annoyance of the English players. So I had missed meeting him. As it happened, he was not in the Hampshire XI. He was playing for the Rest of the World.

    No, this was not some make-believe series against Mars in which cricket enthusiasts indulge themselves by picking their World XI. It was a real series, hastily arranged by the Test and County Cricket Board, between England and the Rest of the World. That summer, South Africa had been scheduled to tour but following the D’Oliveira Affair and increasingly strident political opposition and violent public protest, the tour had been cancelled. Barry had been named in the South African touring party – he had even been issued with his tour blazer – but it gradually became clear that there was no way the matches could be played without the risk of serious disruption and the axe had inevitably fallen. It was a shame for the cricketing public who had been looking forward to watching the Pollocks, Barlow, Procter, Irvine, Lindsay and Richards in action. What a team they were! They had just walloped Australia 4-0 and were widely regarded as the most talented and most exciting Test team on the planet.

    It was a shame for us cricket-lovers but never mind, the British public could lick their lips in anticipation of watching a team of all the talents. The Rest of the World had Sobers, Kanhai, Lloyd, Intikhab Alam, McKenzie, Gibbs, augmented by the South Africans, Barlow, Procter, Graeme and Peter Pollock and of course, Barry Richards; they would be a match for Mars, let alone England. For Barry, it provided some consolation for the abandonment of his country’s tour of England. Did he sense that this would be it, the final flourish of his Test career barely before it had started?

    It was difficult to tell on that summer’s afternoon. It was clear, however, that he was relishing his days in the sun, notwithstanding the political clouds that were amassing on the horizon. The light of battle was in his eyes. He may even have bought us all a drink as he described with animation the progress of what was, I think, the third Test against England (in another fateful little twist of the knife in Barry’s career, Test match status was retrospectively removed from these matches by the Test and County Cricket Board, a decision that seems as baffling today as it did at the time).

    ‘This isn’t Hampshire Second XI,’ he told us, ‘nor even,’ turning to me, ‘Southampton University. This is the Rest of the World!’

    It might have sounded patronising but that was not his intention. It was almost as if he was reassuring himself that he was indeed dining at the top table of international cricket and that was where he belonged. And none of us could have disagreed or would have wanted to disagree. We all knew – it went without saying – that he was the best batsman in the world. And the best batsman in the world deserved the chance to parade his talents on the world stage.

    Alas, that was it for him. South Africa were scheduled to tour Australia in 1971/72 but the possibility of it taking place became more and more unlikely as governments worldwide hardened in their opposition to that country’s internal policy of apartheid. The team was picked, with Barry included, of course, but, as expected, the tour was cancelled and South Africa, as a cricketing nation, was effectively isolated. And not even the most optimistic dreamer could ever believe that their isolation would end anytime soon. Certainly Barry entertained no such hope. His Test career was over as soon as it had begun. All that was left was the peripatetic life as a hired mercenary in the professional game and the slow, sad descent into frustration and disillusionment. At the time, I had sympathy for his predicament. But now, many years later, I see that it was a tragedy, both personal and professional, and I wanted to tell his story before he becomes no more than a melancholy footnote in the history of the game. He deserves more than that.

    Andrew Murtagh

    1

    A Singular Child

    ‘Barry shows promise at cricket.’

    An early school report

    ON 21 July 1945, bowlers around the world gave an involuntary shiver. It was not the dawn of the atomic age – the bombing of Hiroshima took place a fortnight later – but the birth of Barry Richards that had given rise to their sense of foreboding. It was a nasty moment but it soon passed as suddenly as it presented itself. Not to worry, they reasoned, it won’t be us who will suffer. That punishment awaits the next generation of bowlers.

    They were right, of course. But they could not rest easy in their beds for long; ever impatient, Richards was ten when he made his first fifty, 11 when he was selected and made his first hundred for the Durban District Under-14 side – effectively the whole of Natal – and 18 when selected for his first tour overseas, to England as captain of the South African Schools. It was almost as if he somehow knew that his representative career was going to be brief so he had better get a move on.

    It is a common misconception that all white South Africans during apartheid lived in grand mansions with a swimming pool, a tennis court, manicured gardens and a retinue of servants. And that all black South Africans lived cheek by jowl in ramshackle huts in crowded locations, without electricity, running water and even the basic sanitary facilities. This perception is not entirely accurate, it has to be said; not all members of the ruling whites enjoyed great wealth and gilded lifestyles any more than all blacks lived in abject poverty. There were poor whites too.

    I am not sure that the Richards family could have called themselves poor, not in the sense that most inhabitants of the townships would have understood it. But they certainly did not have money to burn. They lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a block of 30 flats in Durban. Barry, their only child, slept on the balcony. Whaat? Exposed to the elements? I know Durban has a sub-tropical climate but it’s by the sea and the wind sometimes blows. ‘No Murt, you clown, it was an enclosed balcony.’ Be that as it may, Barry was too young to be aware of financial difficulties; all he wanted to do was play rugby and cricket. With regular meals on the table and unstinting encouragement from his parents to embrace the outside lifestyle of a South African boy, there was little in his daily routine to spoil this idyll. But it was not a bed of roses for his parents; behind the scenes, they had to struggle to make ends meet. They were, I suppose, what used to be termed ‘hard up’.

    Both sets of grandparents were second-generation South Africans, his father and mother had been born there so the family were hardly newcomers to the continent. In other words Barry belonged, and this of course informs us of his loyalty to, and love of, his country. He is firmly, resolutely, unashamedly South African. He did not cut and run, serve a qualification period and play for another country. At that time, it was unthinkable, he asserted. Players didn’t even change clubs or provinces, let alone countries. That was completely off the agenda. Well, what about Tony Greig? He was a contemporary of yours, was he not? ‘Greigy went because he had a Scottish mother and therefore had a closer association with England. And he knew he wasn’t going to get in the Springbok team.’ That tells you something about the strength of South African cricket at the time.

    Was he a better all-rounder than Mike Procter? Without taking anything away from Greig’s undoubted qualities of courage and leadership, I think it fair to say that Procter was the greater cricketer. Subsequent homegrown cricketers who did defect – Allan Lamb, Kepler Wessels, Chris and Robin Smith – were younger and the emotional ties not quite so strong, perhaps. For his own part, Barry wanted nothing more than to wear the Springbok colours and no one was more proud than he when that dream came to pass.

    There was no history of cricket playing on either side of the family, as far as he knows. Certainly not on his mother’s side; his father’s antecedents remain a mystery. ‘I knew nothing about them because my father never mentioned them,’ Barry said. ‘If anyone brought up the subject, he would immediately clam up.’ So it would seem that Barry’s special aptitude for the game truly was God-given. From the earliest age that he can remember, he always had a bat or a ball in his hand, which is, I firmly believe, another prerequisite for greatness. Nobody becomes predominant in the game if he doesn’t eat, sleep and breathe it. That means hour upon hour of practice until it’s too dark to play anymore.

    But as a young boy, he had no idea that this was what he would have to do; he just played and played because he loved it. And if there was no one to play with, he would practise alone, by throwing a golf ball against the garage wall and hitting the rebound with a 12-inch bat. If he missed it, that would mean a long trek to fetch it. He soon learned not to miss. That’s what Bradman used to do when he was a kid. ‘But he used to hit it with a stump,’ Barry corrected me, as if comparisons with the legendary Australian were entirely out of place.

    At other times he would play with the three Morris boys, neighbours of theirs, on an old, disused tennis court at the bottom of the road. You could bowl – underarm – as fast as you liked from ten yards and no quarter was given. ‘I was younger than all of them, so obviously I had to learn how to stay in.’ All grist to the mill. Did you ever have coaching lessons or were you entirely self-taught? ‘Well, we had a coach at school called Neil Fox. He encouraged me a lot but he didn’t know much about cricket. What he did impart came straight out of a manual. He was Irish, you see.’ Steady on! There are plenty of good Irish cricketers, you know. I’m Irish, in case you’ve forgotten. ‘Which proves my point,’ he countered.

    He then went on to expand on one of his pet hobby horses. ‘The current generation misses out on physical exercise, you know, climbing trees, playing games, running about. All that stuff is good for you when you’re growing up.’ Although he was encouraged by his parents to get outside and play, in truth Barry needed no such prompting. On his own admission, he was no bookworm.

    Tell me about your parents. How was your relationship with your father? There was an intake of breath and a long pause. I suspected that this wasn’t going to be easy for him. ‘Well, they were very supportive,’ he said, unconvincingly. And then he obviously decided to dive straight in; there was no point dilly-dallying on the edge of the diving board, staring down at the water below. His father had been made redundant in his mid-30s when, following a merger, a restructuring at the optical firm where he worked took place. He was forced to leave and seek another, lower post with the municipality with less pay. That experience would leave a sour taste in most men’s mouths; in Les Richards’s mouth, the bitterness never dissolved. ‘He had a lot of anger in him,’ said his son, ‘and he just didn’t know how to get it out.’ Clearly, it put a strain on the marriage, which Barry all but tacitly admitted. ‘There was no divorce in those days,’ he pointed out. ‘Marriage was for ever and they just got on with it.’

    How did you get on with your mother? ‘Mum was more forgiving,’ he answered, intriguingly. Who, or what, needed forgiving? I did not ask because he was opening his heart here and it did not seem appropriate to interrupt. But I could read between the lines. ‘She just got on with things,’ he went on. ‘It was tough for her. She was always…well, how shall we say, overruled by my father.’ In the opinion of Vintcent van der Bijl, later a team-mate and good friend of Barry’s, Doreen Richards was a ‘wonderful, wonderful mother’, who ‘looked a bit like Barbara Bush’ and who had, he felt, a soothing influence in the home. Barry was unsure about the allusion to a former First Lady of the United States but was in full agreement about his mother’s selfless and compassionate influence on the family. ‘Whereas my father…’

    Added to the tensions in the relationship, there were obvious financial restraints on the family with less money coming in. Both parents had to work, his father for the municipality and his mother in a department store, and the hours were long. Barry’s great friend and of course later team-mate, Lee Irvine, commented, ‘Like my family, they were strapped for cash. As a result, I think, Barry always worried about money and where it was going to come from.’ This would in time give rise to the popular notion that Barry Richards was a mercenary and would never do anything for nothing. Grossly unfair, when you examine the evidence; it’s all very well for people to be baffled by perceived parsimony when they themselves have never known privation. ‘I was a latch-key kid,’ said Barry, with no hint of rancour. Nevertheless, in an ideal world you would want one parent to be there when you arrive home after a day at school, even if it is just to say hello, and did you have a nice day as you dash past to be first out in the street to be with your mates. Barry had no such stability in his early life. I gently probed the effects that this might have had on his upbringing but he was not going to wallow in self-pity. All he would own was that it toughened him up; it made him more self-reliant than he might otherwise have been.

    There was Grandpa Percy, his mother’s father. He took it upon himself, as all good grandfathers should do, to keep a devoted but protective eye on his grandson. Barry remembers him with nothing but extreme affection. If various items of kit or equipment were needed, somehow they were provided and it didn’t need a detective’s mind to know who was responsible. He came along to watch the young boy play and did his best to encourage him without ever allowing him to get cocky. After one particularly fine inning, Barry approached him, fully expecting congratulations and praise. Instead, he was given a fearful dressing down – for not raising his bat and touching his cap, as etiquette demanded, in acknowledgement of the spectators’ applause. A lesson, incidentally, that Barry never forgot.

    And of course, there were the madcap escapades that one normally gets into with one’s grandfather. Percy felt that 11 years of age was time enough for the young Barry to be introduced to the internal combustion engine. Accordingly, he sat the boy down in the driver’s seat of his Morris 1000 and went through the intricacies of gear and clutch with his pupil. ‘Got all that?’ Barry enthusiastically nodded. ‘Right then,’ instructed Grandpa, ‘put it gently into reverse and ease out backwards on to the road.’ Now those who have driven a Morris 1000 will know that that model had an unusually long gear stick and sometimes first gear and reverse were not easily told apart. Result? The car shot forwards and demolished the garage door. On another occasion, when presumably the callow driver had learned how to manipulate the long gear stick, the two of them were on their usual jaunt up along the coast road with Barry – still not yet a teenager – at the wheel. Rounding a bend, to their horror, they spied a parked police car. With commendable speed of thought and sleight of hand, Grandpa Percy whipped off his trilby and jammed it on Barry’s head. The driver was blinded, the trilby being too large and covering his eyes, but ‘we got away with it’, he laughed.

    He had no brothers or sisters so, apart from illicit driving lessons, he had to make his own entertainment. Of course, this meant that he had the stage to himself at Christmas and birthdays but it had the effect that he became ‘a bit of a loner’, he admitted. ‘If you’ve always been on your own, it becomes a way of life. The only interaction I had was with neighbours in the flats or kids at school. As a kid growing up, when all you want to do is get outside and play cricket, you don’t think about these things, do you?’ Fair enough. I guess not. All I would say about his childhood is this; God may have put a golden bat in his hand but there was no silver spoon in his mouth.

    I have a friend who was brought up in South Africa around the same time as Barry. He used to regale us with stories of walking to school for several miles, and in bare feet. It wasn’t that his parents couldn’t afford shoes; he said that it was nothing unusual. ‘Everyone walked around barefoot where I lived. It’s just the way it was. And there were no buses. Nor were we driven to school, like the kids today. It was a very safe environment. Nobody got lost. Nobody got run over. No one was abducted. Different world, I suppose.’

    Barry was at pains not to paint too romantic a picture of the old South Africa, where everything seemed more organised, peaceful and assured. Although he was too young to appreciate it, the storm clouds were already gathering over the horizon and this idyllic world was about to be sundered forever, yet he will insist that growing up was ‘more secure’ back in those days. That could be said for anywhere, I dare say, but there was an unmistakeable note of wistfulness in his voice as he recalled to mind walking to school and boyhood tomfoolery and endless games of cricket.

    Did you have a maid? There was just a second’s hesitation. ‘Yes, we did. She didn’t live in, like some did. But you have to understand that everyone had a maid. The going rate to employ one was ridiculously cheap but if you didn’t employ her, she would go without.’ I understood the skewed logic here, of a social and fiscal system which forces the daily wage of those in the service industry to be so low, barely above subsistence level. Many South Africans that I have spoken to have pointed out to me the moral dilemma that confronted them, of living in an unequal and unfair society. A good proportion of them did what they could: giving their maids and gardeners extra food and clothing, paying for their children’s school books, even sometimes paying the school fees and medical expenses. A drop in the ocean, perhaps, but what could they do? Some found the yawning chasm between the haves and the have-nots intolerable and emigrated. Many were in no position to do so, even if they had wanted to. ‘South Africa is my home,’ Barry said, ‘It was where I was born and brought up. I am African. And there are many tribes in Africa. But it is just the case that our tribe is white.’

    Were you aware of apartheid? Or rather I should ask, when did you become aware of apartheid? ‘Well, you grew up with it,’ he answered. ‘So, in that sense, it was always there, in the background.’ I can sympathise with that. What young boy, obsessed with sport and the outdoor life, bothers himself too much with the politics of the day? It wasn’t until he went abroad for the first time, to England in 1963, on a cricket tour, that the painful realities of the unpopularity of his country and its racial policies hit home. ‘There was no TV,’ he reminded me. ‘The only news we had was what we heard on the radio and read in the papers, both under government control. It was a very closed and protected environment. We were taught to be…’ The right word, when it came, was obviously carefully selected. ‘Compliant.’

    More obvious to him was that there were actually two different groups of the white tribe and the social chasm between them seemed to be almost as wide as that between black and white. The earliest settlers in the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century were mainly Dutch, later added to by Protestant French Huguenots, German missionaries and some Scandinavians. They spoke Afrikaans, sometimes scornfully referred to by English speakers as ‘kitchen Dutch’. The British arrived later and seized control of the Cape as a colony in 1806, which led to the Great Trek northwards by the Afrikaners – known as Voortrekkers – in the 1830s to settle in Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natal, in order to escape British rule. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1887 brought turmoil to the country and friction between the two white peoples, which led directly to the Boer Wars at the tail end of the 19th century. The Union of South Africa, with Britain in control, was brought into being by an Act of Parliament in 1910, with the King its constitutional monarch. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the English speakers not unnaturally responded to the call to arms whereas the Afrikaners were firmly opposed. In 1948, the Afrikaners finally gained the majority they needed to win the election and South Africa was unswervingly set on its course to sunder all links with Britain and its King, leaving the Commonwealth and declaring itself a republic. It was under Afrikaner rule that Barry grew up, in a country whose government enthusiastically embraced the principle of apartheid, with the English-speaking community at best ambivalent about the policy.

    Barry was as conscious of the divide between the two branches of the white tribe as anyone growing up in South Africa at that time. He had to learn Afrikaans at school as a second language, just as the Afrikaners had to learn English as their second language. So, how good is your Afrikaans? ‘Pretty average. I suppose I can make myself understood. But as I’ve told you, I was pretty average at everything at school.’ Not cricket, though. He had to admit as much. Was there any social interaction between the two – the British and the Afrikaners? ‘You have to understand that Natal was one of the last outposts of the British Empire. The Afrikaners were not in the majority, as they were in other provinces.’ So there was an unmistakeable social divide? He was not so sure about that but he did offer this interesting summation of the situation. ‘I suppose you could say that the Afrikaners had the political clout whereas the English concentrated on trade, commerce and business.’ Ah, ’twas ever thus. After all, what else drove the British Empire?

    Did they play cricket? ‘Traditionally, not much. It was seen very much as an English game. Rugby was their passion. But around the late 1960s, when the South African Test team were carrying all before them, they sat up and started to take a bit more notice. Now, of course, it’s very different. There are plenty of Afrikaners in the Test team.’ That, we both agreed, was a welcome state of affairs just as we both appreciate that it will take time before there are as many blacks in the team as whites. Cricket is complex, expensive and not easily accessible at the best of times. But it will happen. Ali Bacher, former Springbok captain and influential administrator, had a dream that one day, South Africa would have a team of white batsmen, black fast bowlers and Indian spinners. Now that truly would be a gratifying advertisement for the new Rainbow Nation.

    But we are getting ahead of ourselves – the poor boy is still at primary school and this political and moral web has yet to ensnare him. Probably, at this early stage of his life, he was too preoccupied with cricket even to dwell on whether he was happy or not. Then his father sent him away to boarding school and all equivocation about happiness evaporated. How did you find boarding life? ‘Horrendous!’ was his uncompromising reply. He was barely ten years old and Treverton School was 100 miles from Durban. If your parents were not well off, how did they manage to find the fees? ‘Well, it wasn’t a big school and they needed the pupils, I suppose. I don’t think it was much.’ The truth is that he was very unhappy there and felt very isolated. Quite why, he wasn’t sure. What ten-year-old can analyse his feelings? Some boys love boarding life and thrive. Others are not suited, don’t enjoy it and feel homesick. Barry was clearly in the latter category.

    It was his appendix that rescued him. In great pain as it became inflamed, he was rushed to the nearest hospital, ten miles away, not in a well-equipped ambulance but in the back of a pick-up truck, driven at speed by the headmaster. The appendix was removed that night. After a few days of convalescence on the ward, he returned to the school where his parents came to see him. In answer to concerned enquiries about his wellbeing, Barry whipped out a phial from the bedside cupboard containing the aforementioned appendix and presented it to his horrified mother. ‘There you are, mum,’ he declared with commendable inventiveness, ‘I told you they had little black things in their potatoes!’

    Whether she was taken in by his story or whether, with a mother’s instinct, she sensed that all was not well with her son, Barry was removed from the school at the end of the year – to his immense relief. But why, I wanted to know, had his father sent him away in the first place? Barry’s answer took my breath away. ‘To be brutally frank – now that he’s gone – I think that he just didn’t want to have me around.’ How very sad. The consequences of not feeling wanted in childhood are incalculable and probably scarring for life. How much it affected Barry was not easy to determine. He is not one to wear his heart on his sleeve but I suspect it was more hurtful than he was prepared to let on.

    In any event, he was mightily relieved to meet up once again with his old mates from primary school who had moved en bloc to Clifton Prep. This was a school whose fees were not inconsiderable. Whether it was guilt on his part or, for once, a tacit acquiescence to his wife’s insistence that Barry had a good education, his father had to dig deep into his pockets to pay them. Was it money well spent? On his own admission, Barry did not set the world alight academically but of course he excelled at sport, as you might imagine, and his name is top of the published list of Clifton’s famous alumni. He has even had the cricket pavilion named in his honour so the school evidently remains proud of him and his achievements. ‘But not Kingsmead,’ he told me. ‘Nothing in my honour at my home ground.’

    But most of all, the boy was content at his new school. And this manifested itself no more clearly than in his cricket. ‘It was at Clifton when my batting started to kick off,’ he said, though he might just as well have used the phrase ‘to kick off’ about his rugby too. It will come as no surprise to learn that he was a mighty good full-back, who could catch and kick and read the game in front of him. ‘But I wasn’t very fast over the ground, as you know well enough, Murt,’ he reminded me, ‘and when I started to have trouble with my ankles, I gave up and concentrated on my cricket.’ When only 11, he was selected to play for Durban Schools Under-14s, the first in a long line of representative honours that stretched all the way to the South African Test side. Also selected was Lee Irvine, an experienced player all of one year older than Barry. As we shall see, Irvine features large in the Richards story.

    Talking of age, how old were you when you began to realise you had a special talent, that you were better than everybody else? He screwed up his face. ‘Difficult to say, really. You could tell straight away that some of the other boys weren’t very good at hand-eye coordination but it didn’t seem to me that I was particularly out of the ordinary. Obviously, when getting picked for Under-11 sides when I was nine and Under-14 sides when I was 11 hinted at some ability. But special…?’ One trait of my subject’s personality that I have always admired – something that has landed him in deep water more than once – is his willingness to speak his mind, frankly and unadorned. If he says that he was unaware of his exceptional gifts when he was a young boy, you can take it as read that that is the truth of the matter. By the same token, he won’t pussyfoot around when he acknowledges that there did come a time ‘when I would back myself against most opponents’, as he wryly puts it.

    When you were a kid, did you ever watch the Test matches? ‘Yes, we were given half-day holidays to go to Kingsmead when the Test was on.’ Any game, any player, that stands out in your memory? ‘I can vividly picture John Reid, the New Zealander, batting. But touring sides visited once every three or four years so Test matches were few and far between.’ He reminded me yet again that there was no television; the only sight they got of cricket elsewhere in the country or abroad was of a shaky, grainy, black and white clip in a newsreel at the cinema. But there was the Currie Cup? ‘That’s right. I remember watching two of the greats, Roy McLean and Jackie McGlew, little imagining that I would be playing with them in the Natal side when I was 18.’ He then gave a little laugh. ‘I also remember a chap called Gary Bartlett. My God, he was quick. But he chucked it!’ Would Kingsmead be one of your favourite grounds? ‘It wasn’t the best appointed ground in the world. But you always have a special affinity with your home ground, don’t you?’ I could not but agree. I loved Northlands Road in Southampton, home to Hampshire cricket, now sadly a housing estate. ‘I enjoyed playing at Dean Park in Bournemouth,’ he said. ‘It had such a beautiful and peaceful setting.’

    And the best cheese rolls on the circuit. His stomach rumbles in agreement. He then cut short our wistfulness. ‘The highlight of the year when at school was the Fathers v Boys match on the hallowed turf of Kingsmead. It was a great thrill. I can remember the excitement even now.’ Barry doesn’t do misty-eyed sentimentality but anyone who does not recollect with a little frisson of joy that special moment when he steps on to the grass for the first time at the theatre of his dreams cannot call himself a true cricketer.

    In 1959, when he was 14, he moved on to Durban High School, the oldest and certainly one of the most highly regarded schools in Natal, with a list of notable alumni as long as your arm. In cricket alone, it boasts among its old boys: Trevor Goddard, Hugh Tayfield, Geoff Griffin, Denis Gamsy, Lee Irvine, Lance Klusener and Hashim Amla. There was little doubt that the young Barry Richards would flourish in that environment. On the sports field, that is; he is refreshingly candid about the mark he left on the school’s academic status. ‘I was lazy,’ he admitted. ‘I mean, I didn’t want to dissect anything!’ Except a bowling attack. He grinned. ‘My speciality was blowing down a Bunsen burner, so that it wouldn’t ignite when the teacher lit it.’ He found himself in the B stream, and there he stayed. The teaching was, by and large, ‘boring’ and there seemed to be no continuity on the staff; rarely did they have the same teacher for one subject throughout the academic year. Furthermore, the way the curriculum was set up did him few favours. ‘You had to choose between History and Biology, for example. And Latin and Geography. Where’s the logic in that?’ Indeed. And Afrikaans? ‘That was compulsory. So we had to learn a language that we knew we would never use. Why not Spanish, or something more relevant to the world outside? No one speaks Afrikaans except the Afrikaners in South Africa. Surely it makes sense to have one national language and as practically everybody in the world speaks English, then…’ Politics again.

    What about the teachers outside the classroom? You know, when they met you in the corridor or on the stairs or down on the games fields? ‘They were unapproachable and severe, very old school. Strict!’ The cane – was it still used? ‘Huh. The cane was no weapon of last resort.’ Did you get beaten? ‘Plenty! The prefects were allowed to cane as well, you know. That was hard! You can pull the wool over the masters’ eyes but you can’t fool your peers!’ That was the way it was in those days. It was part of school life. Many petty rules and regulations were applied strictly and without favour. Minor infractions, such as not wearing your basher or not wearing the uniform correctly or bunking off compulsory watching of the First XV, were ruthlessly punished. That is why the trip to England with the South African schoolboys came as such an eye-opener for them all. Is it true that every boy, when taking guard in a school game, before addressing the umpire, would have to take his cap off? ‘And call him Sir! In England, the umpires, who were deaf anyway, would go, Eh, what did you say? [As they were] not used to being addressed so.’ In point of fact, he bore little or no resentment for the strict regime.

    But it was through cricket that he felt he could express himself and cement his identity. His potential was evident to all. ‘He was a small boy when he first came to DHS in 1959, aged 14,’ Lee Irvine told me. ‘He already had an immaculate defensive technique. No one could get him out!’ Not strong enough to pierce the inner ring, his run scoring at this time was not prolific but his judgement of line and length was faultless and his determination to succeed unshakeable. This is what set him apart from other gifted players was Irvine’s contention, no stranger himself to burning ambition. ‘You could see straight away that he had been well taught.’ Not in the classroom though. ‘No, not in the classroom. But ask him about Alan Butler.’ I did.

    Barry’s father, aware that his son had a special talent and needed proper coaching, engaged the services of a friend of his, Alan Butler, who was a reasonable club player and an experienced coach. ‘He was a stickler for technique,’ said Barry. ‘He drummed into me the basics of an orthodox technique, you now, left elbow well up, lead with the top hand, point the left shoulder – all that sort of stuff.’ He also insisted on the classic, but uncomfortable, grip that Barry used. His left hand had to be round the front of the handle, not further to the back, which is more comfortable and used by most players these days. In addition, he held the bat further up the handle than most.

    Yes, I’ve noticed in the photos of you playing that there was a fair bit of the rubber grip visible below your bottom hand. ‘In those days we had lighter bats, so I needed more leverage – a longer swing to hit the ball. I needed a flow to my strokes; now, all they need is a bunt,’ he added, with a grin. Playing predominantly with the top hand in control did not feel entirely natural but that was the classical method and it gave him a textbook style of batting, especially on the off-side. I remember the purr of appreciation from the Hampshire members whenever Barry unfurled one of his off-side attacking strokes, off front foot or back, balanced, elegant, orthodox, perfectly timed – a thing of beauty. ‘I can go home now and die a happy man,’ said one old gentleman to no one in particular in the pavilion at Southampton and everybody knew precisely what he meant. ‘He was inflexible about it,’ said Barry of his mentor. ‘I’m not exactly sure I would coach it to young boys now but it made me into a good off-side player.’ Good? Well, I suppose you can say that perfection is good. ‘It restricts you a bit on the on side though.’ I was astonished. It never occurred to me, nor to any of the perspiring bowlers who toiled to get him out, that he was ever restricted in his strokes on the on side. He laughed at that. ‘Well, I basically looked around and whichever side had fewer fielders, I would hit it there.’ He was adamant, however, about Butler’s influence on him and remains grateful to this day for the hours and hours of patient coaching that he bestowed on the young boy. ‘He made me,’ Barry said simply.

    Another one who had more than a passing influence on the young Richards was Les Theobald, the master in charge of cricket at the school. In the words of Lee Irvine, ‘Theo was the best schoolboy coach in the world – bar none!’ Considering the precocious talent of the skinny 14-year-old whom he picked for the school First XI, it is probable that Theobald would have had to do no more than tinker with Barry’s already secure technique. But it was in other ways that his clear direction was felt. ‘He was a firm believer in the etiquette of the game, upholding all the traditions and manners,’ said Barry. ‘He expected you to turn up correctly dressed, with your kit immaculately clean and your equipment in perfect order.’ In that sense, the discipline he instilled sank in; Barry’s corner was ever an oasis of tidiness in the midst of the clutter and disarray of a dressing room. His kit and equipment were the tools of his trade and he meticulously looked after them. ‘Theo – he was damn strict!’ said Barry affectionately. ‘Cricket’s ethos was very important to him.’

    He taught Latin, not that Barry ever met him in the classroom, and was, by all accounts, a pillar of the establishment at DHS; to the boys it seemed that he had been there forever. A conservative to his bootlaces – literally – he held no truck with modernity in any of its guises. ‘Not a great humorist,’ Barry commented wryly, ‘No twinkle in his eye.’ For all that, Barry had enormous respect for him. He did not coach him as such; Barry was, to all intents and purposes, already the finished article but he encouraged the boy and recognised immediately his rare talent. He was no great player himself but he was steeped in the game, its history, its spirit, its ethics; it totally absorbed him. ‘A groupie!’ said Barry cheerfully. Before his time then – a trailblazer. But we both recognised the type. The prim and proper Les Theobald may have been no trailblazer – despite his blazer being an essential component of his wardrobe – but he was to play a significant role in Barry’s early career.

    One other teacher at DHS whom Barry remembers with fondness is Grayson Heath, who taught Geography and who looked after ‘the dregs who had little interest in academics but who had a disproportionate interest in rugby and cricket’. Heath was at the time playing in the Natal side and notwithstanding his modest assertions that he ‘clung on’ to his place in the team, Natal were a strong side at that time and Heath was certainly no mug. He related accounts of Geography lessons on a Monday morning following the weekend’s cricket. ‘It was almost impossible to get a discussion going on the country’s climate zones when there were the weekend’s cricket results to analyse,’ he said. At one stage, he was going through a poor patch of low scores – and his class knew it. Loudly they demanded to know his score. When he admitted that he had not greatly bothered the scorer, the cry went up, ‘Sir, Richards scored more than you.’ The free-scoring and precociously talented Barry Richards was sitting smugly at the back of the class and, with his toothy grin, he confirmed his score.

    And so it went on. Eventually it was time to turn the tables on his unsympathetic pupils. Every Monday, he would summon Barry to the front of the class. He was asked how many he had scored. If it was 37, he was berated for not scoring 50. If it was 52, he was admonished for not scoring 100. So to the following Monday…

    ‘The lesson was as before except there was a heightened air of anticipation in the class, almost as if they were privy to something a bit special because in answer to my question about his score, Barry triumphantly blurted out, I scored 101, Sir. My answer was that if he could score 100 then it should have been not out!’ All good knockabout fun. But it was then that Heath – a provincial player, do not forget – realised ‘what a batting genius Barry was.’ Genius. That is a word you will hear frequently used by Barry’s contemporaries to describe his batting.

    The second story that Heath recounts deserves to be quoted in full:

    ‘The tradition at the time was an annual cricket match between the school staff and the First XI. The year was 1962, which just happened to be the year of DHS’s best cricket team of all time, boasting three South African Schools players in Barry Richards, Lee Irvine and Bruce Heath, my brother. Both Richards and Irvine went on to play Test cricket for South Africa. The Staff XI on the other hand was a collection of social cricketers, the odd has-been league cricketer and two current first-class players in Pat Schulz and me. Pat was a genuine quick with a dubious action that had him called out of the game for throwing in the wake of the Geoff Griffin throwing saga and I bowled offies that despite my best efforts refused to turn in from the off. The two of us were essentially the staff attack.

    ‘My classroom was on the second floor of the school building looking straight down the wicket, providing a classic view for the cricket connoisseur. The fact that the windows were bulging with most of my class leaning out was no proof that they were all connoisseurs. The significance of their enthusiastic following of the match was not lost on me, as it was certain I was going to have to bowl to Barry. Sadly for me, the swimming pool was at long on and while every run that Barry scored off me was cheered by his classmates, there was a resounding roar when he lofted an effortless six off me into the pool.

    ‘The die was cast! As soon as things had settled back into a sense of normality, there was this loud call from the classroom, Barry – swimming pool! to which he duly obliged by lofting me again majestically into the pool, to their collective glee. I lost count of the number of sixes all of which were delivered on cue after the call from the classroom.’

    As Lee Irvine said of his friend, Barry could never resist a challenge.

    As we’re talking about swimming pools, were you any good at swimming? ‘There was a time when I was going to give up cricket and become a lifesaver.’ I don’t think he could have said anything that would have astonished me more. ‘As you know,’ he went on to explain, ‘Durban is a surfer’s paradise and I really loved the life of sand, sea and sun. I got quite good at it.’ That isn’t surprising as Barry becomes accomplished at most sports that take his fancy. I remember once stepping on a squash court with him. He wiped the floor with me. Golf is his current passion. He plays off a handicap of five and he did not start playing seriously until he was 40. He was a good swimmer and was in the school swimming team and to him it seemed a wholly logical step, to leave school and to take up lifesaving. It was a job after all and his academic career was going nowhere. As for professional cricket – the possibility never entered his head. There was no professional cricket in South Africa. How did your parents react? ‘They were horrified. But the impulse

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