Cricket is a game in love with its statistics, and while batting and bowling averages can’t transmit everything about a player they are nevertheless revealing. Those of the mid-century batsman Bill Edrich are unprepossessing: even during an age when Test matches were less frequent than they are today, he was in and out of the England side, playing just 39 Test matches across a 17-year international career. He ended with a batting average of exactly 40 – the benchmark for a good Test player – putting him joint-50th among Englishmen, while his 2,440 runs left him just the 53rd-highest scorer for his country. As a bowler he was again competent rather than sparkling, taking a nothing-to-write-home-about 41 Test wickets.
So, Edrich, his statistics prove, was a good player, but the subtitle of Leo McKinstry’s entertaining biography labels him an England “cricket great”. What bridges this divide, says McKinstry, were things that the numbers can’t show – his personality and how he played the game. As a batsman he was dogged rather than dashing, hitting hard rather than elegantly, but always brave. The examples given are numerous and verge on caricature: returning to carry on batting against Frank Tyson, who the previous day had broken his jaw with a bouncer, or allowing himself to be hit in the body 40 times on a spiteful pitch against Australia rather than surrender his wicket.
McKinstry is a sporting and political biographer highly attuned to historical atmosphere and as he shows, Edrich’s “greatness” is in large part due to the age in which he played. His career was at its most significant just after the war, still the time of gentlemen and players, when the public craved diversion and heroes. Edrich provided both in spades in 1947 when, alongside his Middlesex and England friend Denis Compton, the “twin” with whom he is always linked, they combined to score a barely conceivable 7,355 runs.
Later came the 55 he ground out over three and a half hours at the Oval in 1953 to win the Ashes after 19 humiliating years, an innings that in its bloody-mindedness summed up Edrich’s cricketing persona. Such a sub-glacial pace is anathema in today’s tonking game. The victory came just weeks after Coronation Day and the Times cricket correspondent hailed Edrich for his “natural Elizabethanness of spirit”.
This new Elizabethan was the son of a Norfolk farmer – more yeoman than gentry – whose childhood was marked by the family’s declining fortunes. Edrich was a good enough footballer to play for Tottenham Hotspur until an ankle injury ended a twin sporting career. He was also a decorated war hero, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for his low-level sorties into occupied Europe and Germany itself in Blenheim bombers. He was offered a comfy position when he volunteered at the outbreak of war but refused: “If I am good enough to play cricket for England, I am good enough to fight for England”, and on missions he wore his England cricket sweater under his flying gear for good luck. Nevertheless, the strain resulted in some sort of breakdown: the Ministry of Defence hasn’t released his full war record.
If Edrich took cricket seriously he was even more dedicated to women and drink, and McKinstry catalogues his bottomless capacity for both. The book is a recitation of all-nighters pulled during Test matches, batting – and driving – while under the influence, and a life lived with a glass in hand. Edrich was a man with an uncomfortably close association with booze.
He was also lascivious. In the Cholmondley-Warner language of his peers he was a “twinkling carouser” with “wicked wiles” who indulged in “Bohemian jollities”, but in the words of one of his five wives he was merely a “randy mole”. This seems too indulgent: he was found with a blonde woman in a groundsman’s hut still in his dinner jacket but minus his false teeth; he ran off with a friend’s wife after dinner; he serviced one woman without bothering to take off his cricket boots; another up against a tree in Regent’s Park; and made a further conquest when he passed her car on his way to a game – they exchanged glances, pulled over, he got into her car and reappeared the following day just in time to open the innings. Edrich may have believed himself simply too susceptible to falling in love, but the ladies’ man was as often as not simply a shagger.
Leo McKinstry’s Edrich is proof that greatness in sport and life are very different things.
Bill Edrich: The Many Lives of England’s Cricket Great
Leo McKinstry
Bloomsbury, 272pp, £22
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk