Silence of the Heart by David Frith

Author:David Frith [David Frith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
Published: 2011-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

Soon ‘some of the colonels were very angry’ at his ‘inane asides and abominations’ and demanded Warner’s return.

He told gleefully of once walking through Manchester and seeing his name on his newspaper’s poster. It read, ‘READ R.C. ROBERTSON-GLASGOW IN THE MORNING POST’. Alongside was another poster: ‘READ THE TIMES AND SEE WHAT REALLY HAPPENED’. He loved that – or at least he professed to.

His essays over the years grew into something substantial, to be prized by connoisseurs of the recording and interpretation of cricket. Hammond ‘came from the pavilion like the Victory sailing to destroy Napoleon’. Of Bradman, ‘poetry and murder lived in him together’. O’Reilly ‘came up to the wicket like a perambulating pump-handle’. Woodfull reminded him of ‘a master who gets the whole school to and from a bank holiday picnic without losing his reason or a boy’. Miller’s distaste for bowling reminded him of ‘the executioner who claimed to prefer stamp-collecting’. Woolley ‘batted as it is sometimes shown in dreams’. And Gimblett was ‘too daring for those who have never known what it is to dare in cricket’.

Robertson-Glasgow was of the Cardus mould, to cricket’s enduring benefit. But it did not come easily, this craft of words, to a man whose temperament was as brittle as a teatime wafer. Another breakdown in 1938, soon after his father died, brought him and Elizabeth, a 40-year-old widow who had nursed at St Andrew’s, closer together, and they eventually married in 1943. She was to love him and buoy him up through depressions for the rest of his days, riding through untold hours and days of despair.

‘One thing about being ill,’ he wrote of that setback, ‘you get to know who are your friends, during, and immediately after.’

He started again, this time at his brother’s prep school near Pangbourne, Berkshire, mercifully in remission now for what transpired to be a period of 15 years. And he joined The Observer, which paper he was to serve for many years. Watching Len Hutton bat for over 13 hours in making 364 in the 1938 Oval Test must have given him a renewed vision of eternity.

During the Second World War, ‘Crusoe’ donned Home Guard uniform, exercising in the Berkshire hills, his imagination doubtless working overtime. Afterwards, sharing the populace’s exhaustion which misted over the elation of victory, he began to mourn the lost England. He deplored the rising egalitarianism and missed intensely the dreamy pleasures of Oxford in the 1920s and the innocent sporting joys of the 1930s, as reflected in his autobiography. The widespread decline in values disturbed him: ‘Tradition knows how to die bravely. Theories will not fill the empty chair.’ He was fortunate to have been spared the dumbing-down and iconoclastic vandalism which characterised the end of his century.

Robertson-Glasgow covered the 1950–51 MCC tour of Australia for The Observer, and also for The Times when its man, Beau Vincent, succumbed to drink. He also wrote for various Australian papers, broadcast, and contributed commentary to the Swanton/Woodcock film of the tour, Elusive Victory.

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