County cricketers could once pedal a tandem career in first-class football
until the latter became all-consuming in the 1970s. Ken Taylor, who played
250 games for Huddersfield and was an England Under-23 substitute, made
his Test debut in 1959, opening the batting with Arthur Milton, a double
international. Cricketers who are artists are few enough to be freaks. Taylor,
trained at the Slade, was a forerunner of Jack Russell and Martin Speight.
Imagine Paul Collingwood, Gary Mabbutt and John Piper wrapped
in one and you have Ken Taylor. He was more batsman than bowler for
Yorkshire and a fielder to fear. He was a centre-half, not tall but hard and fair as
the Spurs man 30 years later. His skies, heavily coloured, are very Piper.
Taylor was a 3-D man extraordinary - four counting teaching at Gresham's
School - and none paying well. In Ken Taylor: Drawn to Sport Stephen Chalke works out that his £550 for a full First Division season is £25,000 today,
less than half what top players earn in a week. His cricket wages escape
mention but his father encouraged him in all dimensions. "You can't play
games for ever," he said.
It was the same with Taylor's older brother Jeff, a centre-forward first with
Huddersfield too but later in London to enable him to get a geography
degree and train as an opera singer, a baritone, at the Royal Academy
of Music. Between seasons he sang at Glyndebourne with Pavarotti.
Huddersfield has a choral reputation but this was ridiculous. Nowadays
footballers marry Spice Girls. Jeff became a professor of singing.
Chalke, familiar to readers, works him naturally into a canvas that is
essentially Ken's, recalling his life and the characters he has shared it with
from pre-war Yorkshire austerity to retirement in Norfolk - prominently
Bryan Stott, his special friend among many at Yorkshire, and Huddersfield
football folk including Bill Shankly and the World Cup winner Ray Wilson.
The illustrations are mostly Taylor's artwork, the landscapes and sketches
superb, the colour action portraits recognisable and fine for form and
balance but clearly done from photos and lacking muscularity. Trousers are
notably legless. Photographs include one of him drawing the runner Derek
Ibbotson, with whom he trained, and another of Jimmy Binks shaving him
after Brian Sellers, autocratic chairman, said: "Get that beard off or you'll never
play for Yorkshire again."
Chalke pulls it all together in his precise way, changing shade and pace,
a sketcher too. He will be annoyed at any errors: Guiseppe in The Gondoliers,
Bellini's Il Puritani, Alf Ramsay. His gift is to get people to talk, to listen to what
they say and to assemble it, clippingly, on a background of period fact to
poignant or comic effect. He can make a punchline out of the most ordinary
remark. He makes one wish to know his subjects, especially Ken Taylor.