Harold Pinter's life-long love for cricket

It would be fair to say that Harold Pinter, the Nobel laureate, who died on Christmas Eve at the age of 78, was rarely happier than when he was playing or watching cricket, writes Michael Henderson in the Telegraph .

George Binoy

25-Feb-2013

For Pinter, as for so many, the game’s ancient home was much more than a place where cricket is played. It was there that he went in his student days, bunking off from RADA to watch ’the Middlesex twins’, Denis Compton and Bill Edrich, and nothing could erase those golden memories.

Appropriately it was Lord’s that provided the stage when the BBC organised a reception to introduce a season of his work in 2003. Pinter, who had just emerged from a gruelling battle with throat cancer, paid tribute to his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, and to his surgeon as he welcomed guests to the Long Room, “the greatest room in the world”.

Andy Bull interviewed Harold Pinter for the Guardian.

Pinter's study was heavy with the clutter of a cricket fan. On one wall was an oil portrait of himself, wearing whites, knocking a drive away to the leg side. The shelves creaked under his cricket library, including all 145 editions of the Wisden Almanack. On the mantelpiece were photographs and memorabilia of the Gaieties, the wandering club side of which Pinter was captain, and, when he gave up playing, chairman. Downstairs, on the wall was a framed copy of WG Grace's autograph.

His favourite, though, was the England great Len Hutton. He first saw him as an evacuee in Yorkshire. "I was sent for a brief period to Leeds, and I went to see some kind of game up at Headingley. I caught Len Hutton, who was on leave from the army. I fell in love with him at first sight, as it were. I became passionate about Yorkshire because of Hutton really. It is my great regret that I could have met him, but I was too shy."

George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo