Enoch Powell – a Second World War brigadier who never saw combat – once said that his biggest regret was not to have been killed by the enemy. There was also a large cohort of those too young for the war who had a similar death wish. Many tried to make it come true and often succeeded.
Post-war Britain was full of crazed young men determined to do themselves in one way or another: RAF pilots keen to prove they were as brave as their predecessors, steeplechase jockeys wearing nothing to break their falls, and Grand Prix drivers, whose deaths were regular staples of weekend news bulletins.
But perhaps the greatest headcase of that era was, of all things, a cricketer. Brian Close died in 2015, aged 84, which was miraculous. He was a maniac on the roads – sometimes brewing tea or studying racing form or napping at the wheel. Most famously he put himself in harm’s way any time he could on the cricket field. He would take the fiercest blows from the world’s fastest bowlers and then went out to lurk bare-headed at very short leg or extremely silly point to eyeball the batsman. He disdained pain and thought youngsters should practise without pads. Had his national service not been interrupted by an Ashes tour instead, he would have been a prime candidate for a posthumous VC in Korea.
He was also an excellent, ambidextrous golfer, nearly played for Arsenal and swam like an Olympian. He could also lie face down and pick up a matchbox in his mouth without spilling a glass of wine perched on the back of his head. He refused to defer to the cricket hierarchy, swore continually and smoked 60 a day. His (successful) courtship would have been described today as stalking.
And still Close had one of the longest cricketing careers of anyone. He played for England when he was a callow 18 in 1949 and a bald 45 in 1976. But it was a zig-zag course. In those years England played 244 Tests and Close took part in just 22 of them. Through four decades they kept turning to him and then turning away. He could do everything in cricket: bowl seam, bowl spin, bat high up, or in the middle order, even keep wicket. But he was never indispensable and had a habit of screwing up when England needed him most.
Yet he turned into a magnificent captain. He was at first marked out as a malingerer by the cricketing hierarchy (improbable) and bolshie (definitely). But he studied the game, weighed up risks, kept the opposition guessing – a foretaste of both Mike Brearley and Ben Stokes, with a more solid record than either.
In 1966 when the usual posh captains had failed against the West Indies, the selectors in desperation looked to Close. The great Garry Sobers who had dominated the series was out first ball, playing the ball on to his own box whence it popped into Close’s waiting hands. Close won six Tests out of seven, and drew the other one. Then there was a bit of alleged gamesmanship in a county match and the selectors went back to their preferred Oxonian, Colin Cowdrey.
Close was of course a Yorkshireman, and took the team back to their long-lost place as expected county champions for four years out of six. But eventually he got the boot in the usual graceless Yorkie fashion. Close went to Somerset to finish his career and arrived to be mentor to the likes of Ian Botham and Viv Richards. He led them to the brink of their first ever trophy but, like Moses, never quite reached the promised land.
And he still wasn’t done as a player. The 20 bruises on his torso, a symphony in red and mauve after being battered by Michael Holding during his last hurrah, would have broken any other man’s spirit. Not him.
Fred Trueman, Ray Illingworth, Boycott and Close, the four best Yorkshire players to emerge in that era, were all difficult buggers. But Close bore no malice and made no enemies. Stephen Chalke quotes a magazine piece from the 1970s of him at home in Yorkshire with his boxer Skipper. “Don’t be fooled by him,” said Close. “He does his best to look ferocious and makes a lot of noise, but he’s just a great soft thing really.” Well, dogs take after their masters, don’t they?
Chalke has done great service to cricket by his interviews with old players, and his stewardship of Fairfield Books as the game’s most stalwart publishing house. This is not a conventional biography – there is almost nothing about his subject’s childhood or family life – but, bear with him, he has done justice to a magnificently idiosyncratic cricketer. There are heaps of cracking anecdotes and I have not enjoyed a cricket book so much in years.
One Hell of a Life: Brian Close: Daring, Defiant and Daft
Stephen Chalke
Fairfield, 240pp, £20
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[See also: A battle for the soul of English cricket]
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