Of sacred cows

If those in charge of Thomas Lord’s patch are truly serious about leaving the MCC’s crustily imperialist image behind once and for all – and the admirable new chief executive Keith Bradshaw certainly appears to be hellbent on being just that - now is the time for some prolonged navel-examination and truth-facing.

So, let’s start with the proposed redevelopment of Lord’s, under which the Allen, Warner, Compton, Edrich and Tavern stands are all to be razed and rebuilt. Not all of the new constructions should retain those names. If that sounds sacrilegeous, so be it.

First, let’s dispose of the names that should survive. Few could argue with any legitimacy that the two newest stands, the Compton and Edrich, ought to. These two Middlesex mavericks did more than anyone, with the possible exception of Don Bradman, to recapture imaginations and reignite cricket as a spectator sport in England – and hence, arguably, the planet - after the second world war. A case could be made for a Brearley Stand, or even a Titmus Stand, in recognition of more recent county stalwarts, but not a terribly strong one.

At the other extreme is the Tavern Stand. Since the unpretentiously matey Tavern pub was reborn as the Tavern Bar and Brasserie in 2004, there is no longer any defensible justification for celebration, not least since, for “community relations reasons”, it is not open to the public on major matchdays. Why not – given that the old boy overlooks that part of the ground - the Father Time Stand? Or, better yet, given that no cricketer ever did more – wittingly or otherwise - for human rights, the D’Oliveira Stand?

Which brings us to the two contentious names, commemorating as they do Pelham “Plum” Warner and George “Gubby” Allen, the two MCC kingpins who, between them, effectively ran English cricket from the first world war until the Test and County Cricket Board took over most important matters in 1968 – and, in Allen’s case, beyond that.

Of the two, Warner offers much the fewer reasons for a damning reassessment. Born to privileged stock – his father, Charles, was an effective but divisive attorney-general of Trinidad known for his prejudice against Roman Catholics – Plum, by turns England captain, chairman of selectors, president of the MCC and editor of The Cricketer magazine for more than 40 years, is generally regarded as the most powerful figure in the game in the first half of the 20th century. He was perhaps best known, though, as manager of the MCC party on the Bodyline tour, the man at whom Bill Woodfull famously directed his ire after being felled by Harold Larwood in Adelaide.

Before setting off for Australia, Plum denounced Douglas Jardine’s beloved “leg-theory” (sanctioned, lest it be forgotten, at Lord’s) yet during the trip he stood timorously by, putting up and shutting up. There is evidence to suggest he wrote to the MCC on every aspect of the tour yet not one syllable, curiously, can be found in the Lord’s archives.

The point is not whether Plum was an important figure worthy of lending his name to a stand at cricket’s citadel, but whether he did more for cricket as we now know it than, say, Richie Benaud? A Lord’s for the 21st Century should surely reflect the game’s evolution over the past half a century, on which Warner had no impact.

The same argument could be extended, and a good deal more strenuously, to the Sydney-born Allen, known as “Gubby” because his initials were G.O.B (“Gobby”, one assumes, was considered far too disrespectful). Like Warner, he cornered most of the plum jobs in English cricket; like Warner, he played as an amateur, and brought an amateur’s sensibility to bear (when he died, he left nearly £1m, the legacy of a prosperous career on the Stock Exchange). That’s why he could afford, in his most memorable contribution to cricket history, to refuse to do Jardine’s bidding. He was above “leg theory”, above pretty much everything and everyone. His job was to protect cricket, and if that meant playing politics, well, he wasn’t above that.

A letter to his parents during the Bodyline series, dated January 12, 1933, gives a taste of the sheer unadulterated snobbery: “D.R.J. came to me and said the following. ‘I had a talk with the boys, Larwood & Voce, last night and they say it is all quite absurd you not bowling “bouncers” … they say it is only because you are keen on your popularity.’ Well! I burst and said a good deal about swollen headed gutless uneducated miners…”

Due in no small part to his refusal to besmirch the “spirit” of cricket, Allen has enjoyed the sort of protection normally reserved for gods and religious leaders. In an authorised 1985 biography otherwise devoid of the merest hint of a flaw, his chum and pet journalist EW Swanton noted that one of their mutual friends considered Allen to be “difficult” and “irascible”. There was no elaboration. Ric Sissons, one of the game’s most industrious and respected social historians, hailed him for taking the power in English cricket from “the landed aristocracy to the middle class and men from the City”. Sissons also described him as “one of England's best all-round cricketers; a meticulous administrator and the perfect city-gent, who as Swanton concludes, it would be ‘difficult indeed to imagine Lord's and the game without'.” Less flattering character traits have since come to light, most notably in Brian Rendell’s new book, Gubby Under Pressure: Letters from Australia, New Zealand and Hollywood 1936-37.

The impression left by the letters, contends Stephen Fay in his review of the book in the latest issue of The Wisden Cricketer, is of “a control freak who insisted that he chose and ran the team and then moaned when they lost … he seems to have been happiest when he left the team behind and partied with film actors in Hollywood at the end of the tour.” He could also be cruelly sarcastic, as when responding to Walter Robins’s dropping of Don Bradman during the second Test: “It has probably cost us the rubber, but don’t give it a thought.”

All that might still be forgivable but for the following observation, made after various sightings of aboriginals at train stations along the Nullarbor Plain: “They really are a ghastly sight and the sooner they die out the better.” As Fay notes with witheringly concise precision, those “ghastly” chaps “have lasted rather longer than Allen’s reputation”.

The hints of racism had first emerged during the so-called “D’Oliveira Affair” of 1967-68, when Allen, together with Billy Griffith and Arthur Gilligan - respectively MCC treasurer, secretary and president - decided not to pass on to the club the letter from Lord Cobham that made it clear that D’Oliveira’s inclusion would lead to the Pretoria government cancelling the ultimately abortive 1968-69 tour. “From the moment Allen, Griffith and Gilligan resolved to sit on the Cobham letter,” argues D’Oliveira’s most recent biographer, the political commentator Peter Oborne, “the MCC was deceiving its members, the cricketing public and the British government.”

Allen, it should be added, made it clear that he did not, in any case, rate D’Oliveira as a cricketer, a rather crass and blinkered piece of analysis given the latter’s displays, before and after, against the likes of Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Lance Gibbs, Bishan Bedi, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Dennis Lillee and Graham McKenzie. That this stance may have disguised a lack of sympathy with South Africa’s oppressed black majority is by no means improbable. “It would probably be wrong to say that Allen supported Apartheid,” wrote Oborne, “but he regarded anti-Apartheid protestors as enemies of decency, right thinking and the MCC. Balthazar Johannes Vorster’s white South Africa was an important part of the settled, traditional, closed world that the MCC believed it was there to protect.” Which is one reason why, when D’Oliveira was originally excluded from the tour party, “not one member of the MCC committee raised an eyebrow”.

Not that D’Oliveira represented the only instance of wonky cricketing judgment. For all his invaluable work as an administrator – the source, as with Warner, of his knighthood – Allen, a man in thrall to blood, sweat, tears and fears but threatened by those with natural gifts and a more relaxed demeanour, was also the prime reason as fine a batsman as Tom Graveney endured lengthy periods in the wilderness, notably in the prime years of 1963-65, when Gubby was chairman of selectors. But it was his insistence that cricket come before justice for black South Africa, before human beings, that most disqualifies him from being preserved as a positive symbol of all that is best about the game.

Bar Bradman, Allen and Warner, Gubby and Plum, have long been the most sacred of cricket’s ancient cows. It’s about time both were consigned to the field they belong – and put out to pasture. Renaming the Allen Stand the D’Oliveira Stand would be an apt step in the general vicinity of the right direction.