John Major by John Major

Author:John Major [Major, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007400461
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2000-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Protecting our Heritage

CULTURE PASSED ME BY as a boy, apart from a rough-and-ready understanding of music hall and theatre, learned at my father’s knee. Sport filled much more of my life, and often the most enjoyable part.

When I was first at the Treasury, cricket was as likely to be on the agenda as economics. Nigel Lawson is a keen follower of Leicestershire, and Peter Brooke knows more about the history of the game than almost anyone I know. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of which cricketing clergyman scored a hundred before lunch in Bangalore in the 1860s, and with Sir Michael Quinlan, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, used to set a very stiff cricketing quiz for the Spectator. Peter and I have challenged one another with cricketing questions for twenty-five years, often to the bemusement of others.

Michael Heseltine was always baffled by this. Cricket is a mystery to Michael. After he became deputy prime minister he would sit beside me in Cabinet looking quizzical and puzzled as notes were brought in for me to read. I showed them first to Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary (grandson of Richard Daft, a great batsman in Victorian days) who sat on my other side, and then threw them across the table to Ken Clarke. Prime Minister, Cabinet Secretary, Chancellor: at first Michael assumed the markets were playing up. After a while I took mercy on his eagerness to know what was happening, and showed him one of the notes: it was the latest Test score. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he muttered, shaking his head and pocketing the note ‘for posterity’. He built up quite a collection of these notes, which will no doubt form part of the Heseltine Papers in due course. But I don’t believe he ever came to know the game.

Some years ago Sir George Edwards, the aircraft designer who was to design the Valiant, the Viscount, the VC10 and the British half of Concorde, tried to discover how the great Surrey and England bowler Alec Bedser made the ball swing in the air. For months he took measurements and made calculations, but in the end he failed: it was, he concluded, ‘something indefinable’. That is as good a definition of cricket as there is: ‘something indefinable’.

And there is actually more to cricket than leather on willow. When Sir Barnes Wallis was testing the ‘bouncing bomb’ that was to be so successful in destroying German dams during the Second World War, he tried to make it skip across the water by imposing top-spin on it. At first he failed. The bomb bounced a few times, then sank. Wallis’s experimental manager at Vickers was George Edwards, and he argued that back-spin would increase the number of bounces. At first Wallis was sceptical, but eventually he was persuaded. The bomb was redesigned – and it worked. The bombs skimmed along and took out the great German dams of the Ruhr valley with back-spin – something akin to a ‘flipper’ in cricket jargon.

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