Illness, racism, poverty and mental health: Why Yorkshire's rebuild is in good hands with Lord Patel

HUW TURBERVILL looks back on an interview with the new chairman at Headingley from December 2017 during his spell as an independent director on the ECB board

Yorkshire have a good man in Lord Patel: an emollient figure, someone who knows how to bind communities together and act in a non-tribalist way.

I interviewed the 61-year-old for The Cricketer in 2017 at the House of Lords, when the ECB was launching its South Asian plan.

Kamlesh Patel – otherwise known as Baron Patel of Bradford, OBE – is no longer on the ECB board, but still advises the ECB… or at least he did before he was made interim chair of Yorkshire CCC this week.

Our lengthy interview described a life filled with tragedy, and it took in his work in mental health; how he was cold-shouldered when coaching at Headingley; and what he thinks of Geoffrey Boycott (he likes him).

Although he was a Labour peer, he showed he was prepared to work with politicians across the spectrum.

He has played a huge role in regenerating the Bradford Park Avenue ground.

He said “cricket has to change” and explained his ideas to engage Britain’s three million people of a South-Asian background. Those skills will now be laser-focused on Yorkshire.

His shocking description of his early life left me humbled. 

“I came from Kenya at one," he recounted for the December 2017 edition of The Cricketer Magazine. "I’d been born under British rule. We were thrown out of Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta. You were either a foreigner, or you became Kenyan, so my family left. It was an exodus of East African Indians mainly. Most of my family went to Leicester because they had cousins there and so on, but we came to Bradford because my father had a sister there.

“We were one of five or six Asian families in Bradford in 1961. It was a poor upbringing. We lived in a one-bedroom back to back, with no bathroom, and an outside toilet. I had four siblings. There was lots of racism. I’m not sure whether my parents really understood why they would be called names, or abused for the colour of their skins on a day-to-day basis – I never quite figured out why I got chased regularly by skinheads shouting that they were ‘P*** bashing’ – suffice to say I didn’t hang around to seek an explanation! I became a good runner!

“People talk glibly about poverty. I think I understand what it was. My oldest sister died at the age of 12 of rheumatic fever (an illness clearly linked to poverty). My oldest brother in his late teens got a heart problem. He had open-heart surgery. He was extremely bright – the first Indian to go to university from the whole ‘clan’. But he had a medical accident because of his heart condition.

^{Yorkshire's new era can't come soon enough}

"He ended up in an old people’s home at the age of 30, and died in his 50s – he had a series of strokes, but the community didn’t understand – they thought it was an evil sign – black magic – and we received little or no support from social services.

"My other sister, again very bright, an optician and accountant, developed schizophrenia, faced domestic abuse (again we received no advice or support from the public sector) she died about five years ago. My other brother, bright as well, became a social worker, like me, and is now disabled. He had an eye injury when young and it was never treated. He went blind in that eye and his one remaining good eye has had serious problems – so he sees little. Mum and dad died of strokes. Dad literally worked himself to death.”

Hearing an account like that makes you realise an inhospitable place Britain was to immigrants. Fortunately, he channelled all that heartache to help people. Countless people.

“My career is an odd one. My upbringing set the tone for me to work for social justice. My cousins in Leicester are all businesspeople. I’m the only one who has not gone down the business route. I left school, became a silver service waiter, a head barman, sold life insurance, did accounts, worked for Ladbrokes, retail, careers, police force, ambulance service then ended up a social worker. Then I left my role as a generic social worker to work with drug users… when it was early days for Heroin use in the UK. I set up one of the first mother and baby drug users rehabs in the country, alongside needle-exchange schemes and community drug services.

“My path could have been like all the people I have helped over the years who ended up in the prison system. Some have mild learning difficulties; 70 per cent plus have been diagnosed with mental health problems; 90 per cent have used drugs. People are vulnerable and poor. They get called ‘vulnerable adults with complex needs’, then they do something wrong and they get put in prison and they become ‘offenders’. Then they leave prison and they become ‘ex-offenders’, but they are still vulnerable adults with complex needs.

“Then I ended up being an academic and set up one of the biggest research and consultancy centres in the country employing more than 120 staff. I took my entrepreneurial skills to academia. I wrote a lot, and luckily I had a lot published a lot. In 1986, I published a paper on Asian heroin users. Everyone said it was crazy. There’s no such thing. I said it’s going to become the biggest problem we will have: Afghanistanis, Pakistanis. It is going to hit us in a big way. Twenty years later that is exactly what has happened – I wish I’d been wrong.

“Then I developed services for women with mental health problems. I saw people suffering, that something was wrong, and there were no services for them. I was way ahead of my time. Nobody wanted me to set up a mental-health centre for Asian women. Even the local Commission for Racial Equality did not want to acknowledge there were problems with mental health. They thought it may worsen the situation. 

^{Michael Vaughan has been named in the report into institutional racism}

“I was told Asian women don’t have mental health problems. It was seen as taboo, and I was told that they did not want to be pathologised anymore. Services just didn’t see them coming to them. They thought they didn’t have any problems because they were religious and had extended family to care for them if they needed help. I set it up anyway, and it’s been full for the last 35 years. 

“I got noticed at a national level, doing conferences, papers, doing a lot of policy. Then I served on loads of national committees. I wrote a five-year strategy for mental health. I was asked by the then PM to assist on the extremism strategy, and I worked alongside Scotland Yard to work on organised crime amongst South Asian communities. I also wrote the Patel Report – a government report on drugs treatment in the prison system. 

“Why does any of that matter to cricket? I had a bleak childhood, but one thing I always loved was cricket. I have no idea why. No one ever taught me. I know my dad, Sudhindra Kumar Patel (known as Govind), was great. He played for Mumbai. He was a teacher, a Sanskrit priest and a masterchef – and yet here the only job he could get for 40 years was cleaning buses.

“He only ever saw me play cricket once in his life. I bowled two overs. I took a wicket and then he left. We never talked about cricket. I played in the back streets. He made me watch cricket on TV for the first time – England against West Indies in the 1970s – stumps flying out of the ground. He explained what was going on and I said, ‘Wow!’ That is why, when I am asked about the ‘Tebbit Test’, and I am asked if I support England or India, I say neither! My first love is West Indies. When you grow up to full-on racism and this team comes here and wins, they became my heroes and always have been. I thought like many others at the time, ‘actually we have some worth in the world’. It’s so sad to see the recent demise of West Indian Cricket.

“It was a great school, but I got bullied loads. I was a tiny, weedy kid, but I became captain of the school cricket team and that gave me a different standing. I didn’t get beaten up anymore. The whole school came to watch the team take on the staff. I was 16 and had to catch two buses to get to the ground. I was not a great batter, and it was only now I was told I was holding the bat too low down, by Yorkshire’s Phil Sharpe. I didn’t even know who he was.

“A few years later a friend and I saw an advert in the paper for coaching. We thought we’d give it a go, but when we got there we realised it was to become a coach and not be coached. We stayed anyway. I’m good with kids, and came top of class. I was asked to go and do some sessions at Headingley. It was great, but also the worst thing that has ever happened to me. There were five of us, and I was the only brown face in the place. No one talked to me. I never coached a brown kid. The other four coaches disappeared for lunch and left me there, it was when Yorkshire still had the bar on people born outside the county in place. 

“Then the 2005 Ashes came along, and my youngest son, Dru, he had just turned 16, and he said ‘I want to play cricket, Dad!’ I said, ‘It’s too late!’ But he said, ‘I have seen it on the telly!’ Sporting moments do influence lads like that. He said, ‘let’s go to the nets’. So I coached Dru properly, and he clearly had a talent.

^{Azeem Rafiq had two spells at Yorkshire}

“I am good at governance and running things, and getting on with people, and so out of the blue Colin Graves invited me to have a chat with him to apply to be an independent director of the ECB. I didn’t know Colin, and I said: ‘You’re joking!’ But he said they had been talking to people around the country and my name kept coming up. I had worked with people like Derek Brewer at Notts, and also when he became CEO at MCC, all about how to use cricket to do other stuff… but I guess my passion came across. It’s the best thing in the world. I have had 40-odd years of being involved with cricket. If I could give everything up and play cricket I’d do it.

“I love Yorkshire now. I love listening to Geoffrey Boycott. I have met him many times. He was single-minded and wanted to do something, and he did it, and you cannot take that away from him. I think Yorkshire is a great county – what they are doing now for community cricket, south Asian cricket, is phenomenal.

“Cricket has to change. Because we have been losing lots of young people. Council pitches are derelict. We have to improve. This is where my belief about the South Asian community comes in. A third of Britain’s three million South Asians want to play/engage with cricket every day. I see it with the taxi drivers playing at Park Avenue and local nets. Clocking off shifts and netting between 1am and 4am! That population will double in the next 20-30 years. This is not about equality and social justice – this is pure business sense

“You know what I said earlier about public services that cannot access communities early enough to do a lot of prevention work – diabetes, coronary heart disease, obesity, mental-health issues, education, integration.

“Cricket is the only sport in England and Wales that has the South Asian community knocking the door down and we have been shutting the door! In the UK 30 per cent of recreational cricket is played by south Asians. If you add backstreets, tape ball cricket etc, it’s nearer 40 per cent. Despite living in urban areas, in poverty and deprivation, they will still spend money on cricket – equipment, pitch hire and so on.

“So we have devised a strategy. We have looked at every aspect of the game – 70,000 pieces of data, a heat map. It is a 10-point action plan for all aspects of the game recreation cricket, a pathway to elite, women’s cricket, girls’ cricket – every aspect of governance, media and attendance at grounds.

“If we don’t crack in the next few years we will never crack it."

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