'Undaunted and unflinching, John Edrich was one of England's bravest cricketers'

John Edrich began his Test career at Old Trafford, facing Wes Hall and Charlie Griffiths. He ended it on the same ground 13 years later, batting against Michael Holding and Wayne Daniel. Some of his innings in the intervening period were more hazardous.

Edrich accepted every blow from fast bowlers as the price he must pay for the trade he had chosen. "Some of my best friends have put me in hospital," are the first words of his 1970 autobiography Runs in the Family. "Fred Trueman did it the first time we met. He broke my hand. Frank Tyson… broke it again and a surgeon had to scrounge a piece of bone from my leg to mend it. A spring-heeled South African called Pollock crumpled me like a puppet without a string, with a broken head. Big boisterous Charlie Griffiths rushed me into a casualty ward with an arm like a balloon."

Yet every ruddy time Edrich returned, undaunted and unflinching. Eleven days after Peter Pollock hit him on the temple and "broke his head" in the 1965 Lord's Test he was back at St John's Wood, opening Surrey's batting against Middlesex. The lexis of military conflict does not seem insensitive or tasteless when applied to some of his innings. Batting was frequently analogous to trench warfare where Edrich was concerned and by the end of a career which comprised 20 English seasons and four full MCC tours he had accumulated 39,790 first-class runs. That puts him 19th on the all-time list, while Frank Woolley and Philip Mead are the only left-handers to have bettered his total of 103 centuries. He was the highest run-scorer in three English seasons in the 1960s; no one else in the decade managed it more than once.

As ever with left-handers it is tempting to accept the conventional distinction between artist and artisan, and then place Edrich firmly in the latter category. Yet his unbeaten 310 against New Zealand at Leeds in 1965 included 52 fours and five sixes, and although it took him only 30 fewer balls to make his 175 against Australia at Lord's ten years later, the final stages of that innings included some cover-drives Woolley might have envied. It's just that Edrich was something like five hours into a seven-hour marathon before he felt confident enough to play them.

One could see his point. The Australia attack in that match included Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, against whom Edrich had some scores to satisfy. The previous winter Lillee had fractured his hand in the first Test at Brisbane and broken two of his ribs in the fourth match at Sydney. But that series, which England lost 5-1, encapsulated Edrich's valour and value. He "dug in grimly", reported Christopher Martin-Jenkins, making 48 in 210 minutes at the Gabba and then returned to the team for the third Test. Even with his ribs fractured he came back to the crease at the SCG - he was captaining England in place of Mike Denness - and was unbeaten on 33 when both the game and the Ashes were lost. A month later he was in the side again for the final game at Melbourne and made 70 in the visitors' only victory. They'd knocked him down but he'd got up again. "I am tattooed with scars but unfortunately pain is something you cannot remember," Edrich had written nearly five years earlier. What he didn't know when he returned from Australia was that the most severe test of his courage was yet to come.

For those who remember the garish highlights of that 1974-75 series - it was the early days of colour TV and those Tests were a blood sport - images of Edrich's innings come easily to mind. They include the England cap, never a helmet, and the MCC touring sweater, but they also feature the high right shoulder and straight right arm in his stance, the latter almost brandished like a knightly shield towards the bowler. Runs came without flourish and were often worked slightly forward or backward of square in the classic opener's fashion. Edrich's forearms were hawsers and his wrists cracked down like the bolts on a miser's strongbox. He used one of the heaviest bats in the game and played a thousand square cuts with it. When he first netted at The Oval, most of the professionals looked at his technique and doubted he'd ever get near the professional game. Then Bernie Constable, who always looked more closely than anyone else, pointed out that he'd not yet missed the ball. "It was all unspectacular, thoughtful, determined and sound," wrote John Arlott of Edrich. "He had many technical limitations, knew them, and played within them, never assuming too much; knowing invariably what to hit, what to play and what to leave."

In his first Championship match Edrich batted at No. 5 for a Surrey team that included eight current or future Test cricketers and would end that 1958 season celebrating its seventh successive title. In the second innings the home side needed 171 to beat Worcestershire but were 7 for 3 when the 21-year-old debutant went out to face Jack Flavell, one of the most underestimated fast bowlers on the circuit. Edrich could not prevent his team being bowled out for 57 but he was unbeaten on 24 when the last wicket fell. A small marker had been put down. The following May Edrich offered a rather larger indication of his talent when he made a hundred in each innings of the match against Nottinghamshire. He finished that summer with 1799 first-class runs, his second lowest aggregate in his first 11 seasons. In 1963 he was capped by England.

For something like five years Edrich was never quite an automatic pick in the Test side. Unsurprisingly he was more likely to play in the tough series overseas and didn't miss a five-day match on the West Indies tour of 1967-68 or the Ashes trips of 1965-66 or 1970-71. That latter adventure was arguably his finest hour (and perhaps explains the special attention Lillee and Thomson paid him four years later.) In Ray Illingworth he had a captain who prized his approach to his craft and he responded by making 648 runs in the six matches. That series included two of his 12 Test centuries and only twice was he dismissed for less than 30. The following summer he found India's spinners more of a challenge but still made over 2000 first-class runs as Surrey won the County Championship.

His final Test innings was viewed by many as his most famous, even if it was played on an infamous Saturday evening at Old Trafford. Accompanied by Brian Close, a man who sought out challenges rather than funking them, he faced the West Indies trio of Daniel, Holding and Andy Roberts for 80 minutes on an atrocious Manchester pitch. By the close England were 21 without loss with Edrich unbeaten on 10 and Close having a single to show for his many wounds.

"[Edrich] was thirty-nine years old, and that evening he came back in after taking the biggest physical hammering anyone ever saw inflicted on a batsman," wrote Arlott. "He ducked sometimes but rarely took evasive action. That performance was, without exaggeration, heroic; though that kind of comment generally persuaded him into a broad and friendly grin, or some wrily (sic) dismissive remark."

Edrich had ended his Test career rather as he had begun it: squeezing every run out of a gruelling game while also being overshadowed by more charismatic colleagues. That Saturday evening people in Tommy Ducks, a famous Manchester pub, were chattering about Close's bravery; the following days' papers were filled with pictures of the Yorkshiremen's bruises and tales of the medicinal Scotch he had drunk to ease the pain. So it had been in 1968 when Edrich had made 164 in the Oval Test against Australia but everyone was talking about Basil D'Oliveira's 158 and the forthcoming South African tour; so it had been in that 1975 Ashes Test at Lord's where the opener's century was a sidebar in papers celebrating David Steele's half-century on debut; and so it had been in 1977 when Geoffrey Boycott's 100th first-class hundred caused far more fuss than Edrich reaching the same mark.

Perhaps he was content with that. Fame and celebrity were never Edrich's style. He remained to a strong degree the 17-year-old Norfolk cricketer who had asked for a trial at Surrey so that he could not be compared to his cousin, Bill, who was at Middlesex. He had even written to The Oval in the winter of 1954-55 when Bill was on an Ashes tour and was therefore unable to put a word in. Geoff Edrich, another cousin and also a warrior batsman for Lancashire, would have understood such behaviour very well. He might also have acknowledged that the youngest of the five Edrich cousins to play first-class cricket was also the best of them.

There is a poignant postscript to Edrich's career, albeit his afterlife featured some of the usual honours, including the presidency of Surrey. In 2000 he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia and given seven years to live. "You can't fight it," he said, for maybe the first time in his life. "You have to have faith in your consultant and the treatment. They said I would feel tired from time to time and would have to live with it. I think we've got to be grateful for what we've had. I did something which I loved and had the ability to play cricket at the highest level."

In 2012 Edrich announced that injections of mistletoe extract had cured his cancer. He now lives in Aberdeenshire. One wonders how many people in his small town know their neighbour is one of the bravest cricketers England has ever produced.

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