Viva Lewes Issue #153 June 2019

COLUMN
David Jarman
Flannelled fools
Which winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature appeared in Wisden Cricketers’
Almanac? The answer, as all ‘trivia’
aficionados will know, is Samuel Beckett.
Representing Trinity College, Dublin against
Northamptonshire in 1926/7, he made few
runs and took no wickets, but even so…
Beckett’s cricketing hero was, I guess, Frank
Woolley, the elegant and cultured Kent and
England all-rounder. Writing from Paris
to a friend, on 7 July 1961, Samuel Beckett
reminisced, mostly fondly, about a recent visit
to England. It included a trip to the Lord’s
Test Match – ‘a beautiful day but alas poor
cricket’. It was something else that was going
to stick in Beckett’s mind – ‘Frank Woolley
was in the bar escorting blind
[Wilfred] Rhodes’.
Perhaps this vision of Woolley,
acting as Rhodes’ ‘eyes’, made
up for another visit to the cricket
that Beckett describes in a letter
to Harold Pinter, dated 22 March
1970: ‘I hope if they fix my eyes
that some day we’ll go to Lord’s
together or better still the Oval
where I once missed Frank Woolley
just out when I arrived after having
made something like 70 in half
an hour.’ Pinter was certainly a
cricket fanatic. The characters in
his play, No Man’s Land, are, by
his own admission, named after
famous cricketers. He wrote a,
mercifully short, poem about
Leonard Hutton and an article,
cloyingly nostalgic, entitled
‘Hutton and the Past’. He
sent a copy to Beckett who
wrote back on 1st August,
1973: ‘Many thanks for “Hutton and the
Past”, much relished.’
Someone Beckett might well have bumped
into at Lord’s was Philip Larkin. A friend got
Larkin tickets for the Lord’s Test every year.
Thanking Harold Pinter for sending him his
memoir of the Somerset cricketer, Arthur
Wellard, in a letter dated 5 January 1983,
Larkin wrote: ‘I love your knowing about
cricket. Kingsley [Amis] once said he was in a
box at Lord’s, and seeing someone hit a four,
called Good Shot. (He was no doubt boozed).
Round turns Pinter and says, Thick edge off a
long hop, and you call that a good shot?’
This reminds me of the one and only
occasion I took my Canadian wife to
a county cricket match. It was at
Tunbridge Wells in June 1984, and
we were joined by our great friend,
John Grover who lived close by in
Robertsbridge (source of so many
cricket bats). John was the nicest
man we ever knew. The other reason
for choosing Tunbridge Wells was the
wonderful rhododendrons gracing the
ground, which would please my wife,
even if the cricket didn’t grip. All
was well until a comprehensively
blazered buffoon exclaimed: “Well
left, Sir.” Brought up on baseball, the
idea that you could praise a player for
not hitting the ball, was a step too far for
my wife.
Back to Beckett. During the time he
spent in England in 1961 that included
the visit to Lord’s, Beckett also went
to a certain opera house. He wrote to
Barbara Bray: ‘Glyndebourne Wed.
in flannel bags for Donizetti’s Elixir.
Picnic, at entr’acte. What a people.’
Illustration by Charlotte Gann
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