‘Fiery Fred’: Fred Trueman and cricket celebrity in the 1950s and early 1960s

Abstract

Fred Trueman was a hero and anti-hero of English cricket in the 1950s and 1960s. His celebrity reflected his great ability as a fast bowler and flair for self promotion but reveals much about cultural values and social relations in England at that time. Trueman often appeared to be a working-class man victimized by the upper-class cricket establishment because he made it clear that he thought himself as good as his social betters and had little time for what he considered the hypocrisies of cricketing etiquette. His pride in his Yorkshire roots and what he perceived as unfair treatment by southern cricket authorities resonated with widespread assumptions of the South being prejudiced against Yorkshire. Trueman's brushes with cricket authority and his conduct in general made him appear to be challenging the traditionalism of English society and culture but Trueman's political outlook was essentially conservative.

Fred Trueman was one of the biggest stars of English cricket in the 1950s and early 1960s. The cricket journalist and broadcaster Don Mosey, who knew him well, wrote in 1991 that Trueman, ‘was the most colourful and best-known personality in the game’ and ‘one of cricket's most prominent stormy petrels’ whose playing days were ‘marked by storm and tempest, fire and fury, argument and controversy … Fred has always been, and remains to this day, very definitely NEWS’.1 It was difficult for many to have neutral feelings about Trueman. His persona provoked either affection or loathing. More recently perhaps only Tony Greig, for his support of Kerry Packer's challenge to traditional Test cricket, and Geoffrey Boycott have provoked such divided opinions as Trueman. Exploring the context of Trueman's celebrity provides an unusual but none the less valuable perspective on social and cultural relations in England during the 1950s and first half of the 1960s.

Trueman as a cricketing great

Without doubt Trueman was among the best fast bowlers of all time. Between 1949 and 1968 he took 1,745 wickets for Yorkshire at an average of 17.13 runs. Only four other bowlers have taken more wickets for Yorkshire and none of Trueman's contemporaries took more. His total of 2,304 wickets in all first-class cricket is the highest for any bowler of very high pace and none of his contemporaries who took more wickets matched his average of a wicket for only 18.29 runs. In 1964 he became the first bowler to take 300 wickets in Test cricket. He played in only 67 of the 118 Test matches which England played between his first Test in 1952 and his last in 1965, and thus his haul of 309 Test match wickets would probably have been much higher had he appeared more regularly for England. Nevertheless his tally of Test match wickets is the third highest of all England players. Of bowlers who have played for England since the First World War and taken over 100 Test wickets, only Alec Bedser has a better average number of wickets per match than Trueman, but Trueman's average of 4.58 almost equals Bedser's 4.62.

Statistics do not say everything about Trueman's greatness as a bowler. In 2006 Trevor Bailey, who played for England with Trueman, said that, ‘On all pitches, and in all conditions, it is doubtful whether there has ever been a more complete fast bowler’.2 Trueman's side-on action had a classical perfection. His pace was exceptional. Of his England contemporaries, Trueman was considered a shade slower than Tyson but faster than Statham. In his early career Trueman's bowling sometimes lacked direction but he could swing the ball into and away from batsmen like a medium-pace bowler and had a fearsome yorker. Many batsmen feared his bouncer. Brian Close, his captain at Yorkshire for six years, described Trueman as ‘a captain's dream. He would bowl whenever you asked, at whatever time of the day you wanted, and would never give less than his all’.3 Trueman was a big-hitting lower order batsman and regarded as one of the best short-leg fielders of his time.

Trueman's playing abilities would have made him one of cricket's biggest stars in any era but they alone did not fashion the nature of his celebrity. His personality was intertwined with perceptions of him as hero and anti-hero. Trueman's life, John Arlott recalled, was ‘recorded in gossip as well as in Wisden’.4 Anecdotes about Trueman were often only rough approximations to the truth. Don Mosey claimed to have heard ‘men who have never met Fred telling stories which are totally untrue’.5 Extrovert by nature, Trueman seems to have needed attention, and after retiring from playing cricket remained in the public eye as a nightclub comedian, an expert summarizer on radio's Test Match Special and by appearing as the presenter for the four series of the television pub game programme Indoor League. He continued to have a weekly column in the People and put his name to 16 books. His demand for the limelight meant that he was often unable to resist playing up to his public image. While in later life Trueman complained that he was very different from his public image, it is hard to resist thinking that he preferred bad publicity to no publicity. He seems to have wanted to appear a ‘character’, the rough diamond of cricket, and enjoyed the notoriety this brought. In his early cricket career he did not discourage journalists and cartoonists from presenting him as a tough, heavy beer-drinking man from a mining background, though in fact he drank sparingly. David Green, who played for Lancashire and Gloucestershire, recalled that if someone offered Trueman a drink,

and thousands did – he would generally accept but at the end of the evening … those clearing up would find numerous pint pots, each with an inch or so sipped off the top, concealed behind curtains, under chairs or behind plant pots. Hence the many occasions on which one would hear a cricket follower say: ‘Do you know, I was with Fred Trueman last night. I watched him drink 14 pints, and look at him this morning, fresh as a daisy’.6

Trueman was also highly emotional and his demonstrative nature on the cricket field commanded attention. Spectators could see when he was displeased. He glared with ferocity at batsmen when things were not going his way and often indulged in histrionic gestures when elated or disappointed. Some of Trueman's rage may have been simulated because of the attention it brought and was possibly calculated to gain an advantage over the opposing side. Batsmen came to expect a bouncer when he was annoyed but causing them to anticipate a bouncer meant that they would be more likely to be beaten by a yorker.

Part of Trueman's stardom was that there usually seemed to be excitement in the air when he played. He had an innate sense of theatre. His presence and demeanour compelled the attention of spectators. When running in to bowl he exuded ferocity and even those who did not care for Trueman wanted to watch him. Ted Lester, who played for Yorkshire with Trueman, remembered that when Trueman bowled, ‘You felt frightened for the batsman’.7 In 1954 Trueman told the Sunday Graphic ‘Certainly I get mad with batsmen. I hate ‘em … There's nothing personal in it. That chap might be my best friend, but when he gets a bat in his hand, he's my enemy. I am out to get him and there's no sense in being half-hearted about it’.8 Cricket journalists often endowed Trueman's bowling with an animalistic, almost primeval, force. His very black hair was often described as a mane. Waiting to bowl, Trueman was compared to a bull or a lion pawing the ground before making a charge. Arlott wrote that his run-up, like the charge of a Spanish fighting bull, was ‘a mounting glory of rhythm, power and majesty … the peak of the charge is controlled violence, precisely applied in a movement of rippling speed’.9 His bowling had an untamed element. The inaccuracy of his bowling was often described as part of his wild character. When he first played county cricket in 1949, there were ‘serious doubts … his ability to discipline himself and his bowling’.10 After Trueman's first overseas tour, E.W. Swanton wrote that Trueman needed ‘control in all its aspects’ while Alex Bannister urged Trueman ‘with all my force, to make a serious and determined effort to keep himself in control’.11

Trueman was among the first post-1945 stars of English cricket not to have served in the Second World War. Hutton and Compton, the biggest names of English cricket in the immediate post-war years, had played for England in the 1930s and by the early 1950s were approaching the end of their careers. In the early 1950s Trueman seemed to have an aura of youthfulness, and a less deferential youthfulness, than other prominent cricketers whose careers had begun after the Second World War. Brian Close, almost the same age as Trueman, became the youngest player ever to appear for England in 1949, but he never established himself in Test cricket. Post-war batsmen such as May, Graveney and Cowdrey often seemed to be much more like the previous generation than did Trueman.

The dramatic dimension of Trueman's celebrity was related to his capacity to produce sensational bowling feats. In 1952 in his first Test match for England he took three wickets in eight balls as India slumped to four wickets for no runs in their second innings, the worst start to a Test match innings by any side. In the third Test he set a record Test return for a fast bowler of eight wickets for 31 runs in India's first innings. These performances occurred when English cricket was desperate for a bowler of genuine pace. Australia was due to tour England in 1953 and England had not won the Ashes since 1932–33. It was widely believed that Australia's dominance over England since the Second World War had been due primarily to the fast bowlers Lindwall and Miller. Jack Hobbs, or perhaps his ghost-writer, wrote that Trueman had bowled as fast ‘as we have seen from any England player in our time’ and that ‘I can think of no batsman who would have taken up a position confidently’. Hobbs called Trueman a ‘five star MUST’ for the 1953 series against Australia.12 Ralph Hadley of the Sunday People thought that Trueman looked ‘as though he has solved our fast bowling problem for years to come’.13 Not all judges were so enthusiastic. George Duckworth, who had kept wicket for England between the wars, thought it premature to compare Trueman with Larwood, England's leading fast bowler of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and urged, ‘don't let's get too cock-a-hoop because we bowled out India on a cricket wicket on which an ordinary English county would have batted two days against the England attack’.14 S.C. Griffith, who had played for Cambridge University, Sussex and England as an amateur and was secretary of the MCC from 1962 to 1974, wrote in the Cricketer that, ‘sensibly handled and coached he might be just what we have been so anxiously looking for’ but thought that Trueman was ‘somewhat ludicrously hailed as a second Larwood’.15 Despite the great hopes placed in Trueman in 1952, he was selected only for the final Test against Australia in 1953. In this match England regained the Ashes and Trueman took four vital wickets in Australia's first innings, typically showing his instinct for dramatic timing.

Trueman as a Yorkshire hero

Not surprisingly Trueman's heroic status was strongest in his home county of Yorkshire. His benefit of over £9,330 in 1962, higher than those of his Yorkshire contemporaries Wilson, Wardle, Watson, Close and Illingworth but lower than Hutton's £9,710 in 1950, was an indication of his popularity in the county. To his admirers in Yorkshire, Trueman personified Yorkshireness and how Yorkshiremen perceived themselves and imagined how others saw them. This was a recurrent theme in his obituaries. Gerald Mortimer wrote that Trueman was ‘as Yorkshire as it is possible to be’16 and Roy Hattersley, the Labour politician proud of his Yorkshire origins, thought Trueman's ‘greatest pride was not in playing for England but in playing for Yorkshire’.17 The umpire Dickie Bird, who played for Yorkshire with Trueman, and the former Yorkshire captain David Byas, each called Trueman ‘a great Yorkshireman’.18 The veteran sports journalist Ian Wooldridge described Trueman as ‘a Yorkshireman through and through: proud, opinionated, obsessive’.19 In the 1960s Harold Wilson called Trueman the greatest living Yorkshireman, and while this could be taken as a very wily politician's attempt to curry public favour, it also reflected an assumption that Trueman was held in great esteem in Yorkshire. Bob Crampsey of the Glasgow Herald, however, suspected Trueman of ‘playing the professional Yorkshireman’,20 while Brian Statham, another England fast bowler and friend of Trueman, thought that Trueman had ‘a typical Yorkshire attitude. Everything Yorkshire do is best and nobody can match them’, but he also thought that Trueman had ‘a tendency to broaden his accent at times. He puts it on a bit’.21

Trueman always believed that he personified Yorkshireness and the Yorkshire approach to cricket. When criticized, his usual defence was to claim that his behaviour represented the Yorkshire way of doing things. Trueman felt that going all-out for victory was the Yorkshire way to play cricket. When Colin Cowdrey told Trueman that, ‘The trouble with you Yorkshiremen is that you think cricket is all about winning’, he replied, ‘It's a pity you don't think winning is as important as I do’.22 He thought that Yorkshire qualities were the basis of his playing success. When interviewed in 1954 about not being selected for the MCC tour to Australia, he mentioned that his aggressive approach to fast bowling may have counted against him but argued that this was how cricket was played in Yorkshire. The News Chronicle reported his comment that in Yorkshire it was said, ‘“you don't build a fire-eater on lemonade and cream cake”. To be a fast bowler you've got to be a fire-eater’.23 He told the Sunday Graphic that, ‘I TALK STRAIGHT about my cricket. I TALK STRAIGHT about everything. That's the way we're brought up in Yorkshire’.24 While admitting to being disappointed at not being selected for the tour, he stressed that he would put all his energies into trying to help Yorkshire win the county championship.

Being omitted from the MCC tours to Australia in 1954–55 and to South Africa in 1956 enhanced Trueman's heroic status in Yorkshire. His treatment confirmed the conviction of a prejudice among cricket administrators in the South against cricketers from Yorkshire and of a more general belief that Yorkshire's true worth in national life was often not recognized. Frank Stainton, cricket correspondent of the Sheffield Star, mentioned that that 12 of the 17 tourists were from the South, a point also noted by the Daily Herald.25 A letter to the Sheffield Telegraph urged, ‘All Yorkshiremen should refuse to take this lying down. It is a slur on Yorkshire's team as a whole’.26 Trueman said, ‘What matters to me is that the people of Yorkshire are right behind me. I know it’.27 When he took the field at Headingley on the day when the tour party was announced, the spectators were reported to have given Trueman a greater ovation than any Yorkshire player had ever received on a Yorkshire ground, ‘a Yorkshire crowd's tribute to a Yorkshireman who, in the opinion of most people, has been given a very raw deal’.28 Some Yorkshire journalists, and presumably many of their readers, took it for granted that as Yorkshire players Len Hutton, the captain of the touring party, and Norman Yardley, the captain of Yorkshire, both members of the tour selection committee, would have pressed for Trueman to be included in the Australia tour party. Stainton thought it ‘no secret to say that both Norman Yardley and Len Hutton were keen on Trueman's inclusion’.29 Whether they had pressed for Trueman's inclusion is not clear, but Don Mosey believed that Trueman was ‘absolutely convinced’ that Hutton was instrumental in his not being selected for the Australian tour. Although he made no comment at the time, Hutton said later that he was not responsible for Trueman's non-selection and would have ‘dearly loved’ for Trueman to have been in the Australia tour party'.30

Trueman had detractors in Yorkshire but they were less vociferous than his admirers and it is hard to gauge their numbers. When Trueman was omitted from the Australian tour in 1954, one letter to the Yorkshire Post mentioned that many Yorkshire county members did not disagree with the selection of the touring party. Because a touring party had to live ‘in the closest association for many months’, the letter argued that it was essential for the tourists to ‘constitute one happy family’ and went on to mention that there had been incidents at Headingley when the tour party was announced which ‘could not escape the observation of many spectators nor of, possibly, ten members of the Yorkshire team’.31

During his playing career Trueman's relationship with the Yorkshire club was often strained and to his death he felt that he had been treated harshly. In 1997 he said that he had never been ‘generously rewarded’ either by Yorkshire or England. He felt that he took too long to become established in the Yorkshire first eleven. He was often at odds with the Yorkshire committee and Sir William Worsley, the Old Etonian chairman of Yorkshire, was possibly the only senior committee member with whom he got on well during his playing career. He had rows with the Brian Sellers, a dominant figure at the club, but was not alone in this. Twice he was publicly reprimanded over incidents in which he believed he was the innocent party. Don Mosey pointed out that, ‘Fred, in all truth, was never an easy man to handle for any captain or manager’,32 but Trueman seems never to have realized this. Mosey also felt that, ‘So numerous and so regular were these complaints citing Trueman as a malefactor when he was not that it is difficult to blame him for his conviction, with hindsight, that he was innocent on all occasions. He was not, of course. The legends did not grow without a certain substance’.33 Trueman's contretemps with the Yorkshire committee may have boosted his popularity with those followers of Yorkshire cricket who saw all cricket authority as refusing to recognize the merits of Yorkshire players. Despite his pride in being a Yorkshireman and in playing for Yorkshire, Trueman considered playing for Lancashire early in his career when he thought that he was being selected for Yorkshire too infrequently, and in 1972 he came out of retirement to play a few Sunday League matches for Derbyshire.

Trueman's relationship with other Yorkshire players was not always easy but this rarely became public knowledge. Always highly opinionated, always quick to speak his mind, and often unaware of how others perceived his behaviour, Trueman's brashness and self-confidence may have antagonized established first team players. The Yorkshire dressing room was no place for wilting violets. Older players, perhaps worried about keeping their places in the team, gave little praise or encouragement to younger players who were expected to know their place. Don Mosey believed that when Trueman began playing for the Yorkshire first team, established players tried to put him down ‘often in cruel and derisive terms’.34 To survive in the Yorkshire dressing room, young players had to be assertive but Trueman may have been exaggeratedly so. Raymond Illingworth, a year younger than Trueman, recalled that Trueman,

just didn't give a damn what anybody else thought. That was what enabled him to hold his own against the ‘hard men’ in the side – Hutton, Appleyard, Wardle. They got both barrels straight between the eyes in any dust-up with Fred and they were very hard men.35

Trueman felt that the amateur captains Norman Yardley and Billy Sutcliffe did not take a sufficiently strong line with the professional bowlers Bob Appleyard and Johnny Wardle, allowing them to dictate when they bowled and in effect deny Trueman opportunities to bowl. John Arlott wrote that Appleyard did not like Trueman but Stephen Chalke and Derek Hodgson claimed that Appleyard and Frank Lowson tried to make Trueman feel more at home in the environment of county cricket at the start of his career.36 In 1954, when Trueman and Wardle were both in contention for a prize of £250 for the season's best bowling return, Trueman accused Wardle of deliberately dropping a catch which denied him the prize which was won by Wardle.37 Trueman seems to have been something of a loner in the Yorkshire team, preferring not to spend time with the other Yorkshire players in the evening.38 In 1957 he refused to sign a petition supported by other players calling for the captain Billy Sutcliffe to resign.

Trueman approved of the strong discipline imposed by the amateur Ronnie Burnet, who had not played in a previous first-class game and was scarcely worth his place as a batsman or a bowler but who was appointed captain in 1958. Trueman's relations with his next two Yorkshire captains were not easy. According to Don Mosey, Vic Wilson, Yorkshire's first professional captain, had little personal affection for Trueman and with Brian Close, Trueman's contemporary who succeeded Wilson, Trueman had ‘a strange sort of love-hate, respect-contempt relationship … Even the “hate” part had an element of half-amused, half-affectionate regard’. Trueman felt that he ought to have been captain while Close enjoyed winding up Trueman.39

Trueman as a working-class hero

Much of the controversy surrounding Trueman occurred because he did not behave as cricketers had been expected to behave. Since Victorian times cricket had been a metaphor for traditional authority in England. It emphasized the class distinctions and snobbery of English society. The MCC, cricket's governing body until 1968, was a private members club dominated by those with traditional wealth, very similar to those who controlled the Conservative Party. Lord Monkton, the Conservative Minister of Defence who had been President of the MCC in 1956, said that the MCC committee made Macmillan's cabinet appear ‘a band of pinkos’.40 The upper and upper-middle classes controlled the county clubs. Before 1963 county cricketers were divided into amateurs and professionals. Traditionally amateurs, mostly men educated at public schools, captained the England and county teams. In the 1950s distinctions between amateurs and professionals became a little less marked. In 1952 Yorkshireman Len Hutton became the first professional to captain England since the 1880s and by 1963 14 counties had appointed professional captains. At most county grounds amateurs and professionals ceased having separate dressing rooms. But any relaxation of the amateur/professional divide was as much the result of a shortage of suitable amateurs as any sense among the governors of cricket that amateur authority was out of step with the times. Scrapping the amateur/professional distinction was in part an attempt to enable those with traditional amateur backgrounds to continue playing first-class cricket. When he became England captain Hutton was advised to adopt an Oxford or BBC accent, presumably to indicate a continuity with amateur captains. In 1958 the MCC withdrew its invitation to the Yorkshire professional Wardle to tour Australia after he put his name to newspaper articles which claimed that the Yorkshire side had been carrying the amateur captain Ronnie Burnet whose playing skills were below standard. Burnet had just been responsible for Yorkshire sacking Wardle. For the MCC, supporting an amateur captain was more important than sending the strongest possible side to Australia.

Apologists for cricket, often educated at public schools, argued that cricket had higher levels of sportsmanship than other sports. Cricket, they maintained, promoted ethical qualities such as selflessness, moral and physical courage, resolution, modesty, courtesy and camaraderie, qualities thought to be both consistent with Christian morality and transferable to other areas of life. No doubt those who controlled first-class cricket took it for granted that those with similar backgrounds should captain county teams as they were the boss class in so much of English life, but they also justified amateur authority on the grounds that amateurs were the natural defenders of sportsmanship. In 1967 the former professional Brian Close was sacked as England's captain – and he had not lost one of the seven Tests in which he captained England – because he deliberately wasted time to ensure that Yorkshire did not lose a match and subsequently refused to apologize for this; acts which were considered breaches of sportsmanship. Close's sacking could also be seen as another example of the southern cricket establishment victimizing a Yorkshire cricketer.

Other professionals may have disliked cricket's authority structure even more than Trueman did but no other professional in the 1950s and early 1960s was thought to be as critical of it as Trueman. Arlott noted that in his early career Trueman had ‘something of a chip on his shoulder, a mistrust of authority, a feeling that if he did not watch them, “they” would do him some injustice’.41 In 1993 the Guardian columnist Martin Kettle recalled that:

the great thing about Freddie was that he was a rebel. He wouldn't play the game the southern way. He had no respect for the public school officer class who dominated cricket in his era. The amateur captains of most of the teams in which he played were mostly incompetents. He knew it and we knew it and we knew he knew it … this man once seemed to be the scourge of the establishment.42

The broadcaster and cricket writer Michael Parkinson, born in Barnsley in 1935, wrote that ‘people of my background and generation saw Fred not simply as a great cricketer but as an emblematic figure; outspoken, bloody-minded, Jack-as-good-as-his-master’, and that to a new generation beginning to question the old order, ‘Fred – bolshie, outspoken and anti-authoritarian from the start – was a figurehead’.43 Trueman's obituaries stressed his antagonism to authority. Wooldridge described Trueman and discipline as,

not compatible. Obsequiousness was far beyond him and he was frequently at Lord's when cricket was still socially divided between amateurs – mostly public school and university men – and professionals. Fred didn't give a bugger for any of them … this contempt for authority, this determination never to be put down, … made Trueman the fearsome opponent he was.44

Such qualities no doubt added to the dislike of Trueman among those who thought that the working class needed to be kept in its place.

Assumptions about Trueman's antagonism towards cricket authority spread by word of mouth. Anecdotes suggested that he was especially contemptuous of amateur batsmen. After being congratulated on the quality of a ball by an amateur whom he had just bowled, Trueman was alleged to have said that it had been wasted on the batsman, though in his memoirs he denied saying this. Whether true or not, such stories suggest a widespread assumption of his animosity to those from privileged backgrounds. He expected antagonism between himself and cricket authority. When he first played against Wilfred Wooller, the amateur captain of Glamorgan who had been educated at a public school and Cambridge, he thought that Wooller was, ‘the sort of figure that a Yorkshireman from the working-classes, and a fast bowler as well, was destined to regard as the natural enemy’.45 Trueman admitted that, ‘I wasn't always able to keep silent and respectful with members of the cricketing establishment. And, oddly enough, no matter how well I was playing following such an incident, invariably I would find myself dropped.’ He thought Freddie Brown, the manager of the 1958–59 tour to Australia and who had captained England as an amateur, was ‘abhorrent … a snob, bad-mannered, ignorant and a bigot’. On the 1962–63 tour of Australia Trueman had an altercation with the Duke of Norfolk, the manager of the tour party. Trueman made clear his objection to the Duke addressing him in public by only his surname.46 Trueman, however, may not have been as antagonistic to amateurs as was often imagined. When Yorkshire were playing Cambridge University he spent a good part of the evening helping a Cambridge fast bowler educated at a public school to overcome a problem with his bowling.47 This may not have been an isolated incident.

Beliefs about Trueman's bellicosity to established authority were bolstered by the conviction that his omission from the tours to Australia in 1954–55 and to South Africa in 1956–57 was because of his working-class background and rebellious nature. His working-class origins were a recurring feature in press responses to his omission from the Australian tour. Trueman came close to saying that he had been discriminated against because of his background. He said that he had heard that he was not selected because, ‘I was a collier's son and worked in the pits myself. I'm not ashamed of my background. I'm proud of it’, but added that he did not know whether this was a reason for his non-selection.48 Alan Hoby of the Sunday Express wrote that he could find ‘no evidence’ that Trueman had been omitted because of ‘an excess of “old-school-tie” snobbery’ or because as a ‘young blunt ex-miner on his first foreign trip, he sometimes unleashed a few torrid words in the heat of the moment’,49 but Hoby's comments imply that many were taking this view. Frank Stainton mentioned ‘a school of thought’ which considered that ‘one of the first qualifications for such a tour is the knowledge that the soup is not taken with a dessert spoon, and that a black tie is customary with a dinner jacket’ and ‘that such questions are of more importance than cricketing prowess when engaged on an MCC tour’.50 An article with an editorial tone in the Cricketer magazine, which nearly always supported the cricket establishment, mentioned ‘murmurings’ in some quarters over Trueman's omission, but pointed out that ‘selectors have information and facts at their disposal which are not available to the general public … it is certain that on this occasion every avenue of form and temperament, was closely examined and closely debated’.51 In general national newspapers with predominantly working-class readerships maintained that Trueman was discriminated against by the MCC, whereas newspapers with upper- and middle-class readers argued that there were valid cricketing reasons for not selecting Trueman. It was explained that Trueman's ability to swing the ball would be as ineffective in Australia as it had been in the West Indies. The Yorkshire Post, whose layout and journalistic style suggest that it was aimed at the middle rather than the working class, was guarded in its response to Trueman's omission. J.M. Kilburn, its highly respected cricket correspondent, thought that Trueman's omission would provoke ‘the fiercest controversy’ and the ‘wildest rumours and most startling implications’. For Kilburn, Trueman seemed the ‘better bowling proposition for Australia at this moment, but there can be no questioning Tyson's potentiality’.52

The unprecedented announcement from Lord's in 1956 that Trueman had been omitted on his current form and that there was no question of discrimination against him suggests that many people must have been saying this. Several newspapers stressed that Trueman had not been selected for the Australian and South African tours because his conduct on the tour to the West Indies in 1953–54 had not conformed to MCC notions of how tourists should behave, a view which could be interpreted as upper-class prejudice against a working-class man. It is, however, almost impossible to separate myth from fact in accounts of Trueman's behaviour in the West Indies. Charles Palmer, the tour manager and amateur captain of Leicestershire, said that Trueman had ‘been pulled out of Yorkshire and put in a context which was entirely alien to his upbringing. There was no malice in him, but he spoke as a Yorkshireman would speak in Yorkshire and it didn't go down well in a highly sensitive situation’.53 In 1956 Swanton wrote in a letter to the England captain Peter May regarding the South Africa tour that Trueman had ‘plainly been found wanting for reasons other than cricket’.54 Crawford White of the News Chronicle argued that omission from a second successive overseas tour showed that Trueman ‘has indeed paid dearly for the “bad boy” label strung about his neck on the West Indies tour … the MCC here are in danger of carrying toughness to the point of victimization. Trueman is getting a thoroughly bad deal’.55 In 1954 Frank Stainton praised Trueman for being ‘steadfastly honest and forthright’ and being a man with ‘nothing of the smooth diplomatist about him. If he feels he has a good case, he says so – no matter who may be listening.’ Stainton wrote ‘Misbehaved my foot! … Trueman was more sinned against than sinning [in the West Indies]. He objected to certain things because he had good grounds for objecting’.56 Ross Hall of the Daily Mirror claimed that,

the West Indies is still a nightmare at Lord's, with Trueman as the villain. How silly! How unworldly of the MCC to hold the faults of immaturity against one who has shown this season that he has learned from his own mistakes in the Caribbean.57

Even if one takes the cynical view that such journalists were writing what they imagined readers wanted to read, this confirms that many suspected Trueman was being victimized by the establishment for not knowing his place.

Trueman did not observe the modesty and courtesies which the upper and middle classes thought part of cricket's morality. He was possibly the first big sport star of twentieth-century England who did not at least pretend to be modest and unassuming. In 1987 Swanton claimed that the ‘great cricketers of history whom former generations set up as their heroes were, almost to a man, models of modesty and the highest standards of behaviour on the field’.58 Excessive modesty was one reason why Jack Hobbs had been so idolized in inter-war England. The footballer Stanley Matthews and the jockey Gordon Richards, among the biggest stars of English sport at the start of Trueman's career, were noted for not boasting about their abilities and achievements.

Success at the highest level of sport is probably impossible without excessive self-belief. Trueman had no false modesty and never doubted his ability. At the start of his county career he felt slighted because the Yorkshire club rated Ford, Whitehead and Coxon ahead of him. When he suggested to John Arlott who was writing a biography of him, that its subtitle should be The Definitive Biography of the Best Fast Bowler Who Ever Drew Breath, Arlott thought that this was only partially in jest. Trueman also suggested a similar title for a proposed biography to Michael Parkinson who shared Arlott's assessment of the remark.59 Although in later life Trueman admitted that Frank Tyson bowled faster, he was angered by suggestions in the mid-1950s that Tyson was faster. When they played for the Players against the Gentlemen in 1957 Trueman at first refused to bowl into the wind because this could have made him look less fast than Tyson who would have the wind at his back. Trueman agreed to bowl into the wind only when Godfrey Evans, the Players captain, threatened to take the side off the field. Trueman often thrust statistics about his playing achievements in the faces of other players.

Trueman quickly acquired a reputation for not apologizing to batsmen when they were struck by his bowling and of not enquiring whether they were hurt. In retirement he claimed that he had not tried to hit batsmen, but this is not what many batsmen thought at the time. When Trueman burst on Test cricket in 1952 George Duckworth was impressed most by Trueman's ‘fiery attitude towards the opposition’. Some fast bowlers, Duckworth wrote, ‘used to apologise when they hit a batsmen. Some just “apologised” – said it and didn't mean it. But Freddy strikes me as the type who, if he really dug one in and inflicted a painful blow, would say “Why apologise?”’.60 In 1956 the cricket broadcaster Brian Johnston wrote that Trueman seemed to have ‘mellowed a lot’ in the past year but recalled that he had seen Trueman walk back to his mark and ‘scowl in a threatening way at the batsman, as if to say: “Wait and see what's coming to you”’.61 Don Mosey described Trueman as ‘a compulsive threatener of batsmen’.62 On the 1953–54 West Indies tour, Trueman did not join his team mates ministering to the legspinner Wilf Ferguson whom he had just hit. Trueman's next ball was almost a beamer. Trueman maintained that he was incensed by being called ‘a white bastard’.63 First-class cricketers may not have placed much importance on whether a bowler apologized to a batsman. In 1954 Denis Compton explained that when a batsman who had been injured went out to bat again he was signalling his fitness to play and being prepared to face everything ‘the other side puts against him’. The fielding side, he thought, should not handicap itself by refusing to bowl bouncers.64 Such comments, however, suggest that many cricket followers may have taken a different view and would have seen Trueman's reputation for failing to apologize to batsmen as evidence of his disregard for the good manners of cricket.

The etiquette of cricket had always contained a measure of insincerity. Some forms of sharp practice had long been accepted. Bowlers picked the seam and even Jack Hobbs, often regarded as the personification of cricket's tradition of sportsmanship, did not always ‘walk’ when he knew that he had been caught.65 Many may have seen Trueman's disdain for the artificialities and hypocrisies of cricket as the expression of an innate honesty. His honesty was also expressed in the forthrightness of his speech. Mosey thought Trueman ‘loud, brash, and believed firmly in his God-given right to call spades bloody shovels’.66 Trueman's speech could be witty but also mordant and personal. Mosey agreed that Trueman could be ‘brusque’ and that ‘there can be no doubt that occasionally he went over the top’.67 Henry Blofeld, who worked with Trueman in radio, thought that in Trueman's early cricket career ‘impulsive brashness often got the better of him’ and that ‘he was unable to resist telling people what he thought of them’.68 As Mosey remembered, ‘no one – but no one – has the final word in an exchange with F.S. Trueman … more than one captain took away the lasting impression that Fred was an insubordinate and undisciplined so-and-so’.69 While Trueman's honesty, when linked to his belief that Jack was as good as his master, made him a hero to some, it created enemies in high places and promoted his reputation as a trouble-maker.

Trueman in his social and cultural context

Trueman's heroic and anti-heroic status can also be related to the tensions of anxieties of British, and particularly English, society in the 1950s. Conservative election victories in 1951, 1955 and 1959, full employment and rising real incomes for most of the population suggest that this decade was characterized by social passivity. Yet the 1950s were also a period when the cultural and social forces that were to produce much change by the mid-1960s were fermenting beneath the surface. Westminster politicians regarded Britain as a major world power but the Suez misadventure and the retreat from Empire indicated that Britain was not a super power like the United States or the Soviet Union. Immigration to Britain from the Caribbean and South Asia was transforming the ethnic make-up of inner cities and Britain's first race riots occurred in 1958. Television was becoming a major leisure interest with profound effects for radio and the cinema. Teddy boys had provoked concern about youth being out of control. In 1952 the popularity of American singers such as Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine prefigured the explosion of rock ‘n’ roll in 1955 and strengthened alarm about the Americanization of popular culture. Proposals to abolish hanging and decriminalize homosexuality stimulated great controversy.

Peter Hennessey has claimed that it is easy to argue that the long 1930s were coming to an end in the 1950s. Eric Hobsbawm told him that the 1950s were ‘the crucial decade. For the first time you could feel things changing. Suez and the coming of rock-and-roll divide twentieth-century British history’.70 There was a growing awareness, not restricted to the political left, which regarded the high political world as outmoded and removed from the concerns of most people and particularly young adults. In 1955 the political commentator Henry Fairlie coined the expression ‘the Establishment’ to describe those, almost invariably educated at public schools and Oxbridge, who controlled Britain. Only four of the 21 members of the Cabinet in 1962 had not been educated at public schools. The plays and novels of the ‘Angry Young Men’71 attracted admiration but perhaps even more distaste, and while it must be recognized that they had diverse opinions on many issues, David Cooper detected a ‘terrier-like pursuit of all that has a false ring, of all that seems more than it actually is’ and ‘attacks on superficiality, pettiness and snobbery’ as common to their work.72 The satire boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s registered the spread of this disregard for the establishment and its mores which had been festering in the 1950s. Yet for those who sympathized with such cultural movements in the 1950s and early 1960s, many others, and the Conservative electoral victories suggest they were the majority, felt discomforted by them and remained attached to traditional values and practices.

Trueman's status as hero and anti-hero can be seen as further expressions of these cultural changes in the 1950s. Trueman's challenge to, and victimization by, the snobbery, class distinction and privilege of cricket can be related to the growing fuddy-duddism of English society and politics. Although cricket was not prominent in the work of the Angry Young Men, the social relations of first-class cricket in the 1950s exemplified what the Angry Young Men disliked so much about England. Like Jimmy Porter, the main character of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Trueman often seemed to seethe with rage against the Home Counties bourgeoisie and what he took to be the hypocrisies of their values and assumptions of superiority and of their entitlement to exercise social leadership. Like Porter, Trueman was a man of strong emotion, acutely aware of his talents going unrecognized and resentful at being patronized yet easily prone to self pity. Parallels can also be drawn with Arthur Seaton, the chief character of Alan Sillitoe's novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Seaton and Trueman were provincial, cocksure young men with brash personalities who showed no respect for traditional values and did not defer to their elders or supposed social betters. Trueman's status as a Yorkshire hero victimized by a South of England authority resonated with the emphasis on working-class provincial resentment found in the early novels of John Braine, David Storey's This Sporting Life and Shelagh Delaney's play A Taste of Honey. Even the physical resemblances between Trueman and the actor Alan Bates, who regularly appeared in stage and film versions of the work of writers regarded as Angry Young Men, were often noted. One suspects that those who were outraged by Look Back In Anger would have also have disapproved of Trueman's persona.

Trueman was admired and reviled for challenging and being victimized by the cricket establishment but he was far from a political radical. Most of the Angry Young Men writers supported the Labour Party or some form of socialism in the 1950s. Although he and his father had worked in coal mining, Trueman always voted Conservative and supported the monarchy. He had little time for trade unionism and later detested Arthur Scargill. He embraced economic individualism and from early in his cricket career eagerly exploited financial opportunities presented by his fame and seemed to take it as read that being mercenary was a Yorkshire characteristic. As Stephen Wagg has pointed out so perceptively, while ‘the essence of Trueman's philosophy was that Jack's as good as his Master; he never questioned the system itself … He confronted authority, but wanted to be governed by an iron fist. He angrily demanded to be put in his place.’ Trueman ‘accepted existing class relations, but not the condescension that went with them’.73 Trueman seems to have craved the respect of the cricket establishment and of his so-called social betters in general. Don Mosey believed that Trueman was delighted to be designated the senior professional on the MCC tour of the West Indies in 1959–60 after Statham had to return home. Mosey also thought that Trueman believed that he, not Close, should have become captain of Yorkshire.74 The irony of Trueman's celebrity in the 1950s and early 1960s is that while his personality, sense of self worth and background made him appear a foe of the established order and a hero to many, his political sympathies lay with the establishment. Always convinced that he was as good as his masters, he accepted the social order provided that he was accorded the respect which he believed he was due.

Notes

 ¹ Mosey, Fred, ix, 3.

 ² Yorkshire Post, July 3, 2006.

 ³ Birmingham Post, July 3, 2006.

 ⁴ Arlott, Fred, 11.

 ⁵ Mosey, We Don't Play It For Fun, 127.

 ⁶ Daily Telegraph, July 7, 2006.

 ⁷ Cited in Hill, Brian Close, 58.

 ⁸ Sunday Graphic, August 1, 1954.

 ⁹ Arlott, Fred, 49.

¹⁰ Mosey, We Don't Play It For Fun, 118.

¹¹ Sunday Express, August 1, 1954.

¹² Sunday Express, July 20, 1952.

¹³ Sunday People, June 8, 1952.

¹⁴ Empire News, June 22, 1952.

¹⁵ Cricketer, June 16, 1952, 193.

¹⁶ Derby Evening Telegraph, July 5, 2006.

¹⁷ Observer, July 2, 2006.

¹⁸ Daily Post, July 7, 2006; Evening Gazette, July 7, 2006.

¹⁹ Daily Mail, July 3, 2006.

²⁰ Herald, July 3, 2006.

²¹ Statham, A Spell at the Top, 30.

²² Sunday Express, July 2, 2006.

²³ News Chronicle, July 30, 1954.

²⁴ Sunday Graphic, August 1, 1954.

²⁵ Star, July 28, 1954; Daily Herald, July 28, 1954.

²⁶ Sheffield Telegraph, July 31, 1954.

²⁷ Sunday Graphic, August 1, 1954.

²⁸ Telegraph & Argus, July 28, 1954; Star, July 28, 1954.

²⁹ Star Green ’Un, July 31, 1954.

³⁰ Mosey, Fred, 44; Trelford, Len Hutton Remembered, 162.

³¹ Yorkshire Post, July 30, 1954.

³² Mosey, We Don't Play It For Fun, 134.

³³ Mosey, Fred, 53.

³⁴ Mosey, Fred, 23.

³⁵ Illingworth and Mosey, Yorkshire and Back, 55.

³⁶ Chalke and Hodgson, No Coward Soul, 166.

³⁷ Illingworth and Mosey, Yorkshire and Back, 50: Trueman, Ball of Fire, 37–8.

³⁸ Mosey, Fred, 65.

³⁹ Mosey, Fred, 59, 95–6.

⁴⁰ Swanton, Plumptre and Woodcock, Barclay's World of Cricket, 51.

⁴¹ Arlott, Fred, 28.

⁴² Guardian, June 22, 1993.

⁴³ Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2007 , 42.

⁴⁴ Daily Mail, July 3, 2006.

⁴⁵ Trueman and Mosey, Fred Trueman Talking Cricket, 132.

⁴⁶ Trueman and Mosey, As It Was, 2, 219, 249.

⁴⁷ I am grateful to Mark Whitaker, the Cambridge bowler whom Trueman helped, for telling me about this.

⁴⁸ Sunday Graphic, August 1, 1954.

⁴⁹ Sunday Express, August 1, 1954.

⁵⁰ Star, July 28, 1954.

⁵¹ Cricketer, August 7, 1954, 359.

⁵² Yorkshire Post, July 28, 1954.

⁵³ Wisden Cricketer, August 2006, 36.

⁵⁴ Allen, Jim, 199.

⁵⁵ News Chronicle, August 15, 1956.

⁵⁶ Star Green ’Un, July 31, 1954.

⁵⁷ Daily Mirror, July 29, 1954.

⁵⁸ Cricketer International, February 1987, 16.

⁵⁹ Parkinson, Michael Parkinson on Cricket, 282.

⁶⁰ Empire News, June 22, 1952.

⁶¹ Illustrated, July 28, 1956, 32.

⁶² Mosey, Fred, 23.

⁶³ Mosey, Fred, 43.

⁶⁴ Sunday Express, July 25, 1954.

⁶⁵ Williams, Cricket and England, 79, 82.

⁶⁶ Mosey, We Don't Play It For Fun, 132.

⁶⁷ Mosey, Fred, 55.

⁶⁸ Express, July 3, 2006.

⁶⁹ Mosey, Fred, 85.

⁷⁰ Hennessy, Having it so Good, 490–1.

⁷¹ Angry Young Men was a term widely used to describe a number of young writers whose work provoked controversy in the mid and late 1950s. Those most often identified as Angry Young Men were the dramatist John Osborne, the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and Alan Sillitoe and the philosophers Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd. The playwright Shelagh Delaney was sometimes called an Angry Young Woman. Not all of them were happy to be labelled Angry Young Men and they never formed an ideologically or aesthetically coherent movement, but much of their work expressed impatience with established cultural and social values and had a tone of provincial resentment against metropolitan assumptions of superiority.

⁷² Cooper, ‘Looking Back on Anger’, 262, 265.

⁷³ Wagg, ‘Muck or Nettles’, 80.

⁷⁴ Mosey, Fred, 77, 96.