“Absent, caught fire” and other great moments from Scotland’s cricket heritage

Oborne & Heller on Cricket

To most English cricket-lovers Scotland is an exotic foreign country, but it has a rich, independent cricket history, as Peter Oborne and Richard Heller discover from an expert guide in their latest cricket-themed podcast. Fraser Simm is an author, historian, analyst and collector who has been chairman of the Cricket Society of Scotland for over 25 years.

Fraser speaks of his first introduction to cricket – from Richie Benaud’s Australians visiting Edinburgh at the end of their long 1961 Ashes-retaining tour. They became lifelong heroes to him for playing on through constant drizzle which (said Benaud) turned his normal legbreaks into off-cutters (he still took seven wickets with them, and scored over 70). Fraser picks out some eminent names in the Scottish team including Ronnie Chisholm, Jimmy Allan, Rudy Webster, later a sports psychologist and ambassador, and a young future England captain, Mike Denness.

He also recalls Bradman’s last two playing matches in the British Isles, in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, where he scored a century, after which King George VI invited him and both teams to Balmoral. A surviving member of the Scottish team later told Fraser that Balmoral was very untidy, that Keith Miller was seen walking with his arm around Princess Margaret and that there was a phoney press row about Bradman with his hands in his pockets talking to the King. Fraser says that the King gave permission for this but cannot answer whether Bradman gave the King permission to put his hands in his pockets. All of these scenes were mysteriously omitted from The Crown.

Fraser delves into the early history of Scottish cricket. He cites the earliest known recorded match near Alloa in 1783, but also mentions evidence that cricket was played by Scots at home and as emigrants to Georgia fifty years earlier. He traces the influence of the English soldiers in the Hanoverian army in Scotland after the suppression of the 45, and that of English workers in Scotland’s textile, paper and iron works during the Industrial Revolution. Cricket became popular all over Scotland in the nineteenth century, and had a major stimulus in 1849 when many of England’s best players in the All-England XI came to play 22 of Scotland: they won easily although Scotland’s Charles Lawrence took all ten English wickets in an innings. Fraser sets out his interesting afterlife: he became a major cricket “missionary” to Australia and managed the first Australian tour of England, by Aborigines, in 1866. As in Italy many famous Scottish football clubs began life as cricket clubs, but cricket in Scotland was held back by lack of a central organization. Although Scotland received many visiting teams from England, including several led by W G Grace, and provided a vital two-year apprenticeship to Wilfred Rhodes, English cricket gave little support to its development.

Although largely denied first-class or professional cricket opportunities in their own country, many important Scottish personalities played cricket enthusiastically and in some cases with real ability. Fraser sets out the astonishing multi-sporting achievements of Scotland’s cricket champion, Leslie Balfour-Melville (a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson). J M Barrie loved cricket and formed his own literary team to play it. It included Conan Doyle, who once had to leave the field on discovering his flannels were ablaze after the ball ignited a box of matches in his pocket. Hesketh Pritchard, educated at Fettes, refused a cap for Scotland in order to play for his house at school. Later as a literary explorer his search for the giant sloth inspired Conan Doyle to write The Lost World.

And more...