Middlesex and England seamer Gubby Allen was a pillar of the Establishment. Many laud him for refusing to bowl Bodyline. Others hate him for various incidents including the D’Oliveira affair. Rob Steen weighs up the evidence
Middlesex and England seamer Gubby Allen was a pillar of the Establishment. Many laud him for refusing to bowl Bodyline. Others hate him for various incidents including the D’Oliveira affair. Rob Steen weighs up the evidence
It is difficult to imagine a more powerful cricket figure than George Oswald Browning Allen – ‘Gobby’ to his Eton classmates and ‘Gubby’ thereafter. Here was a man wedded not to a woman – he died a bachelor – but to the game, which he served tirelessly for the majority of the last century.
Whether penning MCC’s coaching manual, refusing to bowl Bodyline, enlisting Don Bradman to end the throwing epidemic of the late 1950s and early 1960s, telling Simon Hughes to cut down on no-balls, or commanding Lord’s groundstaff to tend his neighbouring garden, the title of EW Swanton’s biography was richly deserved: Man of Cricket. Dig a bit deeper, however, and questions arise about Allen’s motivations and prejudices. Of the six stands at Lord’s, four are named after ex-Middlesex players: Compton, Edrich, Warner and Allen. Sacrilegious as it may seem, the last warrants debate.
It is a measure of the esteem in which Allen was held during his career as an amateur that the pompous, tyrannical Lord Harris took his side upon learning of his fury after being adjudged lbw while batting for the Gentlemen against the Players; the offending umpire was struck off the first-class list. Plum Warner, who succeeded Harris as the English game’s most powerful potentate, was an even firmer supporter, leading, as Allen admitted, to his selection for the Bodyline tour despite a modest season. It was on that endlessly controversial 1932/33 expedition that Allen first carved his name in cricket lore, defying his captain Douglas Jardine by refusing to bowl Leg Theory (yet still taking 21 wickets in the series), a stance emboldened by his amateur status.
A letter to his parents, dated January 12 1933, captured the snobbery that riled so many. “DRJ [Jardine] came to me and said the following. ‘I had a talk with the boys, Larwood & Voce, last night and they say it is all quite absurd you not bowling ‘bouncers’… they say it is only because you are keen on your popularity.’ Well! I burst and said a good deal about swollen-headed gutless uneducated miners.”
To Ric Sissons, one of the game’s foremost social historians, Allen the administrator deserves credit for taking the power in English cricket from “the landed aristocracy to the middle class and men from the City”. Perhaps his most important action came in 1952 when he not only set up the MCC Youth Cricket Association and its coaching award scheme, a precursor to the National Cricket Association, but paved the way for the standard text, The MCC Cricket Coaching Book, co-authored by himself and Harry Altham.
As Geoffrey Moorhouse observed in Lord’s, published in 1983, Allen’s influence as a mandarin proved both lasting and all-embracing. As late as his 80th birthday he sat on the main MCC Committee as both trustee and a member of the all-powerful Special Advisory Committee. He was on the club’s Cricket, Finance and General Purposes Committees; an MCC representative on the Cricket Council; a member of the same body’s Emergency Executive, a member of the Cricket, Overseas Tours and Adjudication Committees; the Middlesex Committee; the Coaching Committee of the National Cricket Association; and President of the Association of Cricket Umpires. “There was, in short,” noted Moorhouse, “no sphere of the game in the British Isles where Gubby Allen could not make his voice heard and his views known.”
As a selector, Allen was seldom averse to judging books by their cover. “Dare we say this was Gubby Allen at his most intractable?” pondered the eminently fair-minded David Foot in his obituary of Les Jackson, a fast bowler confined, absurdly, to a mere two caps. “It is difficult not to indict for this omission selector GO Allen, who was happiest in the company of clipped accents and a background that incorporated all the social graces. Jackson, on the other hand, was a miner; his voice carried the vowels of the pit; his brother had died in a colliery disaster and team-mates noticed fleeting moments of working-class insecurity. Maybe Allen and England captain Freddie Brown before him were subconsciously influenced by his rather lugubrious down-to-earth persona.”
Much the same criticism could be levelled at the frequent omissions from England XIs of Tom Graveney, a professional who not only had the audacity to switch counties from Gloucestershire to Worcestershire, but batted with an elegant languor more in keeping with a carefree amateur. To Allen, Ashes performances were the ultimate arbiter of class, and in 22 Tests against the oldest foe Graveney made just one century while averaging less than 32.
One theory relates to Jim Laker’s historic Test at Old Trafford 60 years ago – a game Graveney missed after sustaining a hand injury. When he met Allen after missing nets, the firmness of his handshake helped persuade Gubby that he was not prepared to give his all; it seems highly improbable that his subsequent omission from the winter tour of South Africa was a coincidence.
Fred Trueman was another to endure Allen’s wrath. Having been denied a “good conduct” bonus from the 1953/54 Caribbean tour after some high-spirited behaviour, he found himself out in the cold for the next winter’s Ashes. More galling still, he was subjected to ridicule in the middle of the 1956 Ashes Test at Headingley, when, watched by a large throng during net practice, Allen placed a handkerchief on a length and instructed Trueman to hit it. “There was no malice from Gubby in my opinion,” Doug Insole told Trueman’s biographer, Chris Waters. “Fred, however, was very offended. Afterwards he was going ‘f***ing Gubby Allen this and f***ing Gubby Allen that’. But you can’t kick spectators out of the ground because net practice is going on.”
When Trueman was excluded from the trip to South Africa, MCC took the unusual step of making a public statement, insisting he had not been victimised; few in the press were convinced. “This latest smear on Trueman is unbearable,” fumed Stratton Smith in the Daily Sketch. “The Yorkshire lad… is being pilloried by the cricket overlords as a permanent example to those who might be tempted to be themselves on tour.” Then there was John Snow, whose contentious exclusion from the 1974/75 Ashes was felt in many quarters to be attributable to an incident during the 1971 Lord’s Test against India, when he barged Sunil Gavaskar while fielding off his own bowling. Dropped for the next two Tests, it is hard not to believe that Allen’s lengthy memory did not lead to his omission three years later.
“There are those who will say that Gubby Allen has never been averse to bullying his way through on what he has thought important,” attested Moorhouse, “though it is usually added that his targets have invariably been pompous or weak men. Certainly he seems to divide the world clearly into ‘deadbeats’ and those who are ‘awfully nice’.
Nor, not being “a naturally penitent man”, was he inclined to admit errors, though he did regret supporting the 1935 change in the lbw Law, a measure intended to stop batsmen padding up to balls pitching outside off but ultimately discouraged leg-spinners and slow left-armers.
Revealing indeed is Brian Rendell’s book, Gubby Under Pressure: Letters from Australia, New Zealand and Hollywood 1936-37. In his review for The Cricketer, Stephen Fay perceived the MCC captain as “a control freak who insisted that he chose and ran the team and then moaned when they lost… he seems to have been happiest when he left the team behind and partied with film actors in Hollywood at the end of the tour”. When Walter Robins shelled Bradman during his series-turning 270 in the third Test, Allen resorted to sarcasm: “You’ve just dropped the Ashes, but don’t worry about it.”
All this, though, pales beside Allen’s pivotal role in the most significant selection meeting in sport. At 8pm on August 28 1968, 10 men gathered in the MCC committee dining room to pick the party to tour South Africa: Insole, the chairman of selectors, and his fellow nominators Alec Bedser, Don Kenyon and Peter May; Colin Cowdrey, the captain, Les Ames, the tour manager, plus a quartet of MCC bigwigs: Allen, Donald Carr, Billy Griffith and Arthur Gilligan, May’s uncle by marriage, a former England captain and a member of the British Union of Fascists who once wrote an article for the party’s bulletin entitled ‘The Spirit of Fascism and Cricket’. Of these, only Kenyon, the Worcestershire captain, could not be described as rabidly Tory.
D’Oliveira’s contribution had been decisive in England’s last-gasp, series-squaring victory in the final Test against Australia at The Oval: not only had he claimed the wicket that precipitated their final collapse; he had also fulfilled a promise to his wife by scoring a century. On purely cricketing grounds, to spectators and viewers, he was a certainty for selection. Yet Allen, somewhat perversely, did not rate him.
In fact, Alec Douglas-Home, the shadow foreign secretary and former prime minister and MCC president, had informed the club committee that if D’Oliveira was selected, the odds on him being allowed through South African customs were 5-4 on. Contradicting this, though, was a letter from Lord Cobham, another former MCC president with family and business interests in the Republic, who had discussed the matter with the South African prime minister John Vorster; to his Lordship, the very opposite was clear.
In their decidedly finite wisdom, nevertheless, Allen, together with Griffith and Gilligan – respectively MCC treasurer, secretary and president – decided not to inform the club of Cobham’s letter, though Griffith felt the committee should have pressed for a reply to their own letter seeking assurance that no restrictive pre-conditions be imposed on the selectors. That Douglas-Home was one of the few privy to this does nothing to reduce the sinister undertones (not until April 1969 would Vorster’s warning be revealed in the Daily Mail). When I interviewed him a few years ago, reflecting on the circumstances surrounding D’Oliveira’s original omission from the tour party, Barry Knight, the former England allrounder who would have played at The Oval in Dolly’s place but for injury, reinforced the popular notion of Allen among players. “When the party was first announced, I thought ‘They’re as weak as gnat’s piss. They’re kow-towing to Vorster.’ The pros were revulsed. It was always them and us. We thought Gubby Allen was a bleedin’ snob. He was a bit of an idiot, a bit up himself. And Basil was one of us.”
“For 20 years or more Allen got his way in English cricket,” attested Peter Oborne, understating matters in his biography of D’Oliveira. “His prejudices became MCC prejudices, his enemies MCC enemies, his favourites MCC favourites. It would probably be wrong to say that Allen supported Apartheid, but he regarded anti-Apartheid protestors as enemies of decency, right-thinking and the MCC. Vorster’s white South Africa was an important part of the settled, traditional, closed world that the MCC believed it was there to protect. That is one reason why not one member of the MCC committee raised an eyebrow over the failure to select D’Oliveira.”
While there can be no doubt that Allen, like so many members of the English establishment, was prepared to do anything to maintain links with South Africa, it remains exceedingly hard to suppress the view that this was underpinned by racism. Rendell, to take the most notorious exhibit, cites his response to the sight of aboriginals at train stations along the Nullarbor Plain: “They really are a ghastly sight, and the sooner they die out the better.” Can we be surprised that his rare political defeats not only included unsuccessful opposition to the building of the Lord’s Indoor School (he believed the land could be developed more profitably) but, in 1965, the admission of Ceylon and Fiji as ICC Associate Members?
The temptation to resist adapting CLR James’s ageless adage cannot be resisted: what do they know who only cricket love?