At
Lord’s cricket ground, there is a stand named after Sir Pelham
Warner, who dominated cricket in the first half of the twentieth
century. He captained Middlesex and England before the Great War, and
after the war combined extensive writing about cricket with serving
on MCC Committees and for several years acting as Chair of the Test
Selectors. He was a key influence on world cricket’s direction and
moral tone, especially in supporting the traditions of cricket and
the distinction between amateurs and professionals in the English
game. He became a legend at Lords; affectionately known as ‘Plum’
or, later, ‘the Grand Old Man of English cricket’.
A
few years ago, however, the suggestion was raised that Warner’s
name should be removed from the Lords stand, on the grounds that his
grandfather, Colonel Edward Warner, owned plantations in the
Caribbean that had been worked by slaves. At once, the Dailies Mail and Telegraph rose up in spluttering dudgeon. How dare the good name
of one of cricket’s greats be besmirched in the cause of wokery?
Slavery had been abolished long before Warner was born, and he had
never benefited financially from his grandfather’s ill-gotten
gains. The storm in the teacup subsided, and the Warner stand
remains.
But
if Warner can’t be cancelled on grounds of his connection to
slavery, are there any other reasons to cancel him? What about
excessive self-regard, Machiavellianism, duplicity, favouritism,
blame avoidance and being an implacable reactionary? Presumably these
are not capital sins in the worlds of the Mail and Telegraph, but in
this article we will examine the life and career of ‘dear old
Plum’, and his influence, for good or ill, on English and world
cricket.
Early
Life and Playing Career
Pelham
Francis Warner was born on 2 October 1873 in Trinidad, in the
Caribbean, where his father, Charles Warner was Attorney General.
Pelham was the youngest of 21 children, thus making any financial
legacy from his slave-owning grandfather extremely dilute. At the age
of 13 he was sent to Rugby school in England, where he captained the
first XI. He also became a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club
(MCC), the private members’ club that effectively ran world
cricket, and was dominated by men from the public schools and
Oxbridge. Members had to be nominated and elected, and it was highly
unusual for a schoolboy to become a member, a sign that Warner was
beginning his ascent early. After Rugby, Warner went to Oriel
College, Oxford, where he gained blues in 1895 and 1896. He studied
law and was called to the bar, but never practised. After Oxford he
dabbled in stockbroking and for a while was a part-time officer in
the fashionable Inns of Court regiment, but for the rest of his life
he made his living from cricket.
 |
Photo taken from 'Plum Warner' (Mynell, 1951)
|
Warner
made his debut for Middlesex in 1894, and for most of his career was
an opening batsman. He became captain of Middlesex in 1908, and
retained the job until his retirement at the age of 47, in 1920.
During his playing career, he was a ‘shamateur’, with the status
and privileges of an amateur, but living off expenses earned for
playing in matches, which often exceeded the fees paid to
professionals. In the years before the Great War, English cricket was
dominated by two peers of the realm, Lord Harris, captain of Kent and
influential MCC administrator, and Lord Hawke, captain and later
President of Yorkshire. Warner ingratiated himself with both from the
outset. He boosted his income by spending off-seasons playing in and
often captaining touring sides, some put together by Lord Hawke, with
accompanying expenses. Between 1897 and 1899 he toured the West
Indies, USA (twice), Portugal and South Africa. During the latter
tour, two matches were played between the touring side, captained by
Lord Hawke, and a South Africa XI, that were subsequently awarded
Test status. In the first match, Warner made 132, thereby
retrospectively scoring a century in his first test match (it proved
to be his only test century). Then in the winter of 1902-3 he
captained a tour on behalf of Lord Hawke to New Zealand.
In
1903, the MCC took charge of international tours, and Warner was
appointed captain of that winter’s test-playing tour to Australia.
His was a controversial appointment. MCC’s first choice was
Yorkshire’s F.S. Jackson, but he was not available. Popular opinion
then switched to Lancashire’s Archie McLaren, but he was a prickly
character who had rubbed some in the corridors of power up the wrong
way. Warner, aged 30, was well on his way up the establishment ladder
and was Lord Hawke’s choice. Despite being labelled “an inadequate nonentity”, and making little contribution to the Test
matches as a batsman, Warner led England to victory in the Ashes
series, assisted by the newly-developed googly bowling of B.J.T.
Bosanquet.
.jpg) |
| Photo taken from 'Plum Warner' (Mynell, 1951) |
By
now, Warner had embarked on a parallel career as a journalist and
writer of books on cricket. He began by writing reports of the tours
he had been on, and match reports for newspapers during the English
seasons. A theme of his writings was his self-promotion and dodging
of responsibility for mistakes and failures. He wrote a book on the
1903-4 tour in which he declared himself innocent of any involvement
in the captaincy controversy regarding McLaren (and also became the
first to use the term ‘The Ashes’ for a test series between
England and Australia), and once penned an anonymous match report in
which he wrote, “Mr Warner played a faultless innings of 159”.
Warner
captained the MCC in South Africa in 1905-6, suffering a rare setback
by losing the series 4-1. His final MCC tour was to Australia in
1911-12. He was taken ill after the first match of the tour and did
not play again, the captaincy passing to J.W.H.T. Douglas.
Ill-health, probably of a digestive nature, was a recurring theme of
his life, and caused him to have a thin and gaunt appearance (and to
lose his hair early), but did not prevent him from living to a ripe
old age.
Following
the Great War, during which he interviewed candidates for officer
training and helped organise morale-boosting cricket matches at
Lords, Warner returned to Middlesex for two final seasons. He
captained them to the county championship in his last year, 1920,
retiring a hero of Lords. During his first class career he made
29,028 runs at an average of 36.28, with 60 centuries, a record that
many county players would be satisfied with (and far better than Lord
Hawke or Lord Harris). In test matches he was less successful, ending
up with a record of 622 runs in 15 matches, average 23.92, owing most
of his England caps to his habitual touring.
Between
the Wars: Plum the Panjandrum
The
epithet ‘panjandrum’ was given to Warner in a recent book by
David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts. ‘Panjandrum’ is defined by
Collins dictionary as ‘a pompous, self-important official or person
of rank’, and fits Warner like a glove. After his retirement as a
player, he spent
much time at Lords, serving
on MCC committees
and for several years chairing
the test
selectors.
Sir Derek Birley noted that “Warner was rapidly becoming the
central figure in cricket, doubly influential because of his
extensive writing about the game”. Once his playing career was
over, Warner’s income came from journalism. He was founder-editor
of The Cricketer magazine,
cricket correspondent of the
Morning Post and other
newspapers, and wrote many
books, completely unconcerned
about any conflict of interest between his writing
career and his work for the
MCC. Indeed,
when it was, as he put it,
“urged in certain quarters that a member of the committee should
not be allowed to write”, he defended himself by airily asserting,
“you must get the right men to do the chronicling, men who are
imbued with a genuine love of the game and a respect for its
traditions” (i.e. himself).
The Cricketer’s website
today comments that Warner held “a portfolio of roles that seems
incomprehensible now”.
Under
Warner’s editorship, which he held for forty years, The
Cricketer became the mouthpiece
of the Establishment. In the
first edition, he wrote, grandly,
“Cricket, as Tom Brown has told us in the best of all school
stories, is an institution and the habeas corpus of every boy of
British birth”. As Derek Birley remarked, “The
Cricketer had no more desire to
move with the times than MCC, unless they could somehow have been put
into reverse”.
The
cricketer and writer R.C. Robertson-Glasgow gave a striking account
of his first meeting with Warner, in 1920:
“Here
he was in the flesh, bald as an ostrich-egg under his Harlequins cap,
slight, small-boned, pale of face, and with nothing but cricket in
his conversation”.
The
Harlequins cap, which Warner habitually wore, was
reserved for those who had played for Oxford University, that bastion
of the Establishment, and signalled Warner’s tribal affiliation.
Warner,
along with his mentors Lord Harris and Lord Hawke, put his energies
into upholding the traditions of cricket, encapsulated by the public
school and Oxbridge slogan,
“Play up, Play up and Play the Game”. To this end, he was a
lifelong advocate of the distinction between amateurs and
professionals, and of ‘the amateur spirit’ as being the lifeblood
of first-class cricket.
It was believed that only
amateurs, who did not rely on the game for their livelihood, could
truly play the game with the correct spirit – playing to win but
playing fair. It was particularly important that a team’s captain
should be an amateur, as the captain set the moral tone for the rest
of the side. Lord Hawke once (drunkenly) roared at a Yorkshire
end-of-season dinner, “Pray Heaven no professional may ever captain
England!” Warner subsequently wrote, Sir Humphrey-like, “What no
doubt Lord Hawke meant was that it will be a bad day for England when
no amateur is fit to play for England”, saying exactly the same
thing in more oleaginous language.
.jpg) |
| Photo taken from 'Plum Warner' (Mynell, 1951) |
Warner’s
adherence to the ‘spirit of cricket’ was at odds with the reality
of the first class game. Firstly, many leading amateurs, including
Warner himself, were ‘shamateurs’, making their living directly
or indirectly from cricket. Secondly, as we will see, not all
amateurs took the ‘play up, play up and play the game’ principle
as seriously as Warner purported to. Thirdly, it belittled the role
and contributions of professionals, many of whom knew far more about
cricket than the amateurs employing them. But
the ‘spirit of cricket’ was really about class, and the
distinction between amateurs and professionals was no more or less
than the British class system applied to the game. Amateurs came from
the public schools and were members of the ruling classes, and the
relationship between amateurs and professionals was essentially that
between the gentry and their servants, officers and enlisted men or
factory owners and workers. Those with privilege did what they liked
and those without did what they were told.
In
the 1920s, the fear among the ruling class was of Bolshevism, with
the masses forgetting their allotted place and rising up against
their betters. Warner despised such notions and sought to crush any
uppityness among professional cricketers. In 1924, Cecil Parkin, a
professional spin bowler for Lancashire and England, wrote
an article daring to criticise the then England captain, A.E.R.
Gilligan, for not using him more in a test match against South
Africa, which England lost. Warner, in The Cricketer,
wrote an outraged editorial
demanding that Parkin apologise for such insolence, and that
Lancashire took action against him, prophesying that, “the cricket
world [would] regard him as the first cricketing Bolshevik and would
have none of him”. Sadly, he was proved right; Parkin did not
apologise and after further outspoken articles, Lancashire sacked
him.
Warner
maintained his belief in the sanctity of the amateur/professional
divide to the end of his life (though, as we will see, with an
occasional undercurrent of pragmatism when it suited him). As late as
1955, when in his 80s, he wrote in Wisden,
“The
game is enriched by the amateur and I know this view is shared by
many famous professionals...the amateur brings much of value to the
game but we must not forget the professional. Few...men owe more to
the professional cricketer than I do...I have always found him loyal
to a degree and a splendid, happy companion both on and off the
field”.
Note
that the qualities Warner values most in professionals are
loyalty to their betters and
happiness with their
lot.
In
passing, if we can’t cancel Warner on grounds of benefiting from
slavery, can we accuse him of racism? In truth, Warner was probably
no more racist than most of his generation and class, and less so
than the likes of Lord Harris, who actively sought to exclude the
Indian K.S. Ranjitsinji from playing for England because of the
colour of his skin (Warner, as Chair of Selectors, picked
both Ranji’s nephew Duleepsinhji and the Nawab of Pataudi for
England; aristocrats both,
but brown-skinned). Warner
made much of his upbringing in Trinidad and liked to relate how he
learnt to bat from the bowling of a black boy named Killebree
(Hummingbird). Warner was an imperialist who regarded cricket as a
way of bringing (British, upper-class) civilisation to the less
developed parts of the Empire. His granddaughter, the historian and
writer Marina Warner, believes that Warner helped establish
multi-racial cricket in the West Indies. At the same time, neither he
nor anyone else had a problem with playing against all-white teams in
South Africa. In short, his view of people of colour was probably
similar to his view of professional cricketers – they were jolly
good chaps so long as they knew their place.
Plum’s
Modus Operandi
Duncan
Hamilton writes,
“A
Machiavellian streak ran through Warner like fat in streaky bacon. He
was also Macavity-like – always scheming for or against something
or someone, working paths that were afterwards difficult to trace
back to him...Social status was blood and breath to Warner. He was
oleaginous towards those he believed could advance his career. He was
condescending to those he considered beneath him”.
Derek
Birley adds that Warner,
“was
dedicated to the principles of sportsmanship and the unwritten code,
and he was prepared in their defence to bury his head deep in the
sand (though...he was quite good at protecting his rear)”.
Warner’s
machinations were all in the cause of furthering the success of the
England team, along with his belief in the ‘spirit of cricket’,
and himself as its guardian (and doubtless with at least half an eye
on the knighthood that he would eventually be awarded). We will
examine some examples of Warner in action, and his involvement in the
controversies of cricket in the inter-war years.
Arthur
Carr and the 1926 Ashes Captaincy: Warner
was first appointed Chair of the England Test Selectors in 1926, when
Australia were the opponents. England had lost the three Ashes series
played since
the Great War and naturally the pressure was on to turn the tide. The
choice of captain was Nottinghamshire's A.W. Carr, a stockbroker’s
son who had been educated at Sherborne school, and was therefore
deemed to have the ‘right stuff’. But
unusually for an amateur in those days, he subsequently wrote an
acerbic autobiography, Cricket
with the Lid Off’, in
which he claimed that Warner never gave him a free hand as captain.
The first test was virtually washed out, but
in the second test, Carr
controversially declared
England's first innings closed on the last morning, giving Australia
a chance to win the game, though in
the end the match was drawn.
Carr bluntly
wrote, “P.F. Warner told me to declare the innings closed”. Then
in the third test, Carr put Australia in to bat and was punished by
the visitors scoring 494, insult being added to injury by Carr
dropping Charlie McCartney early in his innings of 151. Again, Carr
held that the decision to bowl first was urged on him by Warner.
Plum, naturally enough, downplayed his involvement in his own
subsequent account of the
series.
Carr
was struck down by tonsillitis early in the fourth test and was
unable to continue. With the
only other amateur in the team the young and inexperienced G.T.S.
Stevens, the captaincy
passed to the professional Jack Hobbs, who led England to another
draw, but Carr was fit for the final, deciding test. However,
despite turning up for the
selection meeting, he was
told he was not in the team,
the captaincy passing
to Kent’s Percy Chapman. Given the
events of the previous
matches it was not surprising that Carr was replaced, but the manner
of his sacking by Warner had all the duplicity of a modern day
football club chairman declaring full confidence in the team manager
the day before dismissing him. Warner subsequently wrote a smoothly
apologetic and cant-filled letter to Carr after stabbing him in the
back, and making no mention of his (Warner’s) involvement in the
bad decisions that led to Carr’s removal. England
famously won the final test
and the Ashes series 1-0,
with the 48-year-old professional Wilfred Rhodes returning to the
England side and taking four wickets in Australia’s second innings,
while also, in a good example of Warner’s occasional pragmatic
bending of his own principle of amateur captaincy, acting as the
‘power behind the throne’ for the uncerebral Chapman.
So
Warner achieved a famous victory in his first series as Chair of
Selectors, but the MCC dismissed him and his fellow selectors at the
end of the year. While professing no hard feelings, Warner felt moved
to note “the opinion of many” that he “had had something of a
raw deal” (though perhaps not as raw a deal as Arthur Carr). Warner
did not return to the test selectors’ chair
for another five years.
Prejudices
and Favourites:
Through
his journalism, back-stage influence and particularly as Chair of
Selectors, Warner wielded considerable power over players’ careers.
Some thrived under Warner’s patronage, while others found
themselves frustrated. An
example of the latter happened prior to the third test in 1926, when,
despite the conditions favouring bowlers so much that Warner
urged Carr
to
put
Australia in to bat, the Gloucestershire off-spinner Charlie Parker,
though in the squad, was controversially left out of the final
eleven. Parker took 3,287 wickets in his career, third only to
Wilfred Rhodes and Kent’s ‘Tich’ Freeman in the all-time list,
but only ever played one test, in 1921.
In
1929, Warner was a guest speaker at Gloucestershire's end-of-year
dinner, and
afterwards, when Parker and his teammate Reg Sinfield tried
to get
in a lift at the hotel, the lift-operator insisted that Mr. Warner be
allowed in first. Parker’s patience finally snapped. Grabbing
Warner by the lapels he responded: “I’ll
never in my life make way for that bugger. He’s never had a good
word to say for me. This so and so has blocked my Test match career…
Make way for him? Mr Bloody Warner will go to bed when I’ve
finished with him.” He
was finally persuaded to let Warner go. No complaint was made and no
disciplinary action was taken.
Charlie
Parker was not the only professional bowler to be entitled to feel
aggrieved by the way he was treated by Warner and the rest of the
cricketing establishment. ‘Tich’ Freeman, a leg-spinner who took
3,776 wickets in his career, played 12 tests during the 1920s, and
took 66 wickets, more than any other England bowler during the decade
apart from Sussex’s Maurice Tate, but
only played twice against Australia. Like Parker, Freeman was a
victim of Warner’s prejudice against professional
bowlers
who
were at their best in English conditions,
though he lacked Parker’s fieriness and never complained about his
lot.
Accusations
of anti-professional bias were behind an unspoken feud between Warner
and the leading cricket writer of the day, Neville Cardus. In
the 1930s, Cardus wrote, regarding
the work of the test selectors,
“Consciously
or unconsciously, a ‘local’ prejudice is at work; more than ever
the amateur player well known in London is given preference over a
professional player of equal or superior skill who comes to London
only once every summer”.
Without
mentioning him by name, both Cardus and Warner knew that he (Cardus)
was referring to G. O. B.
(Gubby)
Allen, a fast-medium paced bowler for Middlesex who had been educated
at Eton and Cambridge and who was a particular favourite of Warner’s.
Indeed,
Warner treated Allen like a son and there
was even
a
rumour that he was
Warner’s son, stemming from (the married) Warner’s lifelong
closeness to Allen’s mother. Warner,
needless to say, quickly picked
up his pen to repudiate
Cardus’s criticisms, and served a
dish of revenge, very cold, in 1949, when he was instrumental in
blocking Cardus’s membership of the MCC, also objecting to Cardus’s
low birth in a Manchester slum, where his mother supplemented the
family income through sex work.
In
1936, Warner as Chair of Selectors appointed Allen captain of
England. However,
Allen was not the only England captain whose ascendancy was promoted
by Warner, and in this case from a starting-point far removed from
the cloisters of Eton and Cambridge. Wally Hammond of Gloucestershire
was England’s best batsman of the late-1920s and 1930s and was a
professional. Warner hugely admired Hammond, and in another display
of pragmatism, wanted him, despite his background, to captain
England. He therefore persuaded Hammond to become an amateur,
dropping hints regarding the reward that would
be forthcoming if he did so. Hammond duly found a sinecure job as a
sales ambassador for a car dealer in Bristol and in 1938 he followed
Gubby Allen as captain of England.
Warner
and Bodyline: The
biggest cricketing controversy of the inter-war years was the 1932-3
Ashes series between Australia and England, which became known as the
Bodyline series. The events of that encounter
came close to destroying the MCC’s reputation as the guardian of
the Spirit of Cricket, and even threatened Anglo-Australian
relations. And Warner was in the middle of the controversy, as the
Chair of Selectors who picked the MCC team and captain, Douglas
Jardine, and as Tour Manager of the MCC party.
‘Fast
leg theory’, as Bodyline was officially known, was a style of
bowling where a fast bowler deliberately bowled short-pitched balls
at the batsman’s body, with a semi-circle of close catchers on the
leg side. Although he did not invent it, Douglas Jardine, educated at
Winchester and Oxford, saw
it as a means of curbing the batting power of Australia’s Don
Bradman, believing
that Bradman had a weakness against that kind of delivery. Jardine
ensured that a quartet of fast bowlers was selected for the 1932-3
tour: Harold Larwood and Bill Voce of Nottinghamshire, Bill Bowes of
Yorkshire and Gubby Allen (yes, that one) of Middlesex. He developed
his strategy in secret, at pre-tour meetings with Larwood and Voce
brokered by their captain Arthur Carr (yes, that one), and at team
meetings on the passage to Australia.
Bill
Bowes had bowled ‘fast leg theory’ in a county match for
Yorkshire during the 1932 season, and Warner wrote a condemnation of
the tactic, asserting,
“Now
that is not bowling, indeed it is not cricket”, but as Chairman of
Selectors he
was
instrumental in the choice of Jardine as captain, and the selection
of Bowes, along with the other fast bowlers.
The
MCC team used bodyline bowling in some of the early games on the
tour, but it was kept in abeyance in the first test by Bradman’s
absence through illness and stifled
in
the second by a docile pitch. Then
in the third test, Jardine unleashed it with full force. In
their first innings, Australia’s captain Bill Woodfull was struck
over the heart by a ball from Larwood and later wicketkeeper Bill
Oldfield was hit on the head and was unable to continue. Ironically,
neither injury
was due to bodyline bowling, but bodyline
played a significant part in the game, and a
general mood of aggression permeated the whole match, with Australia,
lacking fast bowlers, unable to retaliate.
Outraged
protests of ‘Not Cricket’ rose up from spectators and the
Australian press, and a condemnatory cable was sent by the Australian
cricket authority to the MCC. Lacking full information about what was
happening in those pre-television and pre-internet
days (even
telephone communication was difficult),
the MCC assumed that the Aussies were wingeing and cabled back in
support of Jardine. The Australian government got involved and the
atmosphere turned
so bad that the tour came close to being cancelled. Even
diplomatic relationships between Australia and Britain were
threatened. The tour continued and England won the series 4-1, but as
the cricketer and writer Rockley Wilson had
predicted when
Jardine was appointed as captain,
they nearly “lost a dominion”, and
the reputation of their amateur captains for ‘playing the game’
received a damaging blow.
So
what was Warner’s involvement in the Bodyline controversy? Warner
has two questions to answer. Firstly,
was he
aware when selecting Jardine and the quartet of fast bowlers of what
Jardine was planning, and did he collude with Jardine in that plan?
And secondly, once the series was underway and the controversy had
broken, could he
as
manager have
stopped the use of Bodyline?
For
reasons we will mention below, we will never know the definitive
answers
to these questions. But for what it is worth, this is my guess.
Warner
selected Jardine as captain for his aggressive attitude and
determination to defeat the Australians, and gave Jardine what he
wanted by way of players to achieve that goal. But Warner did not
anticipate Jardine using Bodyline as a tactic, assuming that an old
Wykehamist would not do anything so
clearly against
the spirit of cricket. We do not know if Jardine and Warner discussed
Bodyline
before the tour or if Jardine gave Warner any assurance that it would
not be used. Warner
may even have felt that his condemnation of Bowes’s use of Bodyline
in a county championship match may have been sufficient to warn
Jardine off. But it is clear that Jardine had long intended to employ
Bodyline against Bradman.
On
the second point, it seems probable that Warner did not try to forbid
Jardine from using Bodyline once
the test matches were underway,
and that if he had, Jardine would have ignored him. Following
Woodfull’s injury in the third test, Warner
visited the Australians’ dressing room to commiserate and
apologise,
but was met icily, Woodfull saying, “I don’t want to see you, Mr
Warner. There are two teams out there. One is trying to play cricket,
the other is not”. The comment was leaked to the Australian press
(by Bradman), and when Jardine heard about it he was livid that
Warner had undertaken the visit,
and the England team issued a statement in support of their captain.
Overall, the impression that emerges is that Warner was duped by
Jardine regarding his
plan to
use
Bodyline, and once Jardine had unleashed it, lacking support from the
team or from the far-off MCC, Warner
was powerless to stop him,
despite the damage that Bodyline
was doing to his vision
of the spirit of the game, and to his own reputation.
Jardine
and his team returned to England as heroes. Warner tried to claim as
much credit as he could for their Ashes victory while distancing
himself from Bodyline (to
Jardine’s disgust).
Jardine
had done all that had been asked of him and was duly re-appointed
captain for the 1933 test series against the West Indies. But during
the 1933 season, the tide of opinion started to shift. More
information became available as to the events of the Bodyline tour,
including dramatic film clips of Woodfull and Oldfield’s injuries,
and of Bodyline being bowled to a field of five or more leg-side
close catchers. Then during the test series, England had Bodyline
used against them, by the West Indies fast bowlers Learie Constantine
and Manny Martindale, leading to some players, notably Wally Hammond changing their view of it (Bodyline was even used in that bastion of
respectability, the Varsity match). Jardine did not help matters by writing a defiant book in which he refused to apologise for his use of bodyline.
Jardine was again made captain
for the 1933-4 tour of India, but Australia was due to tour England
in 1934 and
Warner was advised by his political contacts in the Antipodes that
Jardine would not be acceptable to them as England’s captain.
Rather than make the decision, Warner resigned as Chair of Selectors
– prematurely, as it turned out, as soon afterwards Jardine
announced that he had no intention of playing against the tourists
and was retiring from first-class cricket. He was replaced by his
vice-captain on the Bodyline tour, the
more emollient R.E.S.
Wyatt of Warwickshire, and slowly the fuss died down. Warner duly
restored himself to the Selectors’ chair in 1935, and in the same
year the MCC finally passed legislation to outlaw Bodyline bowling.
And in 1937, Warner received his knighthood.
But
why can we not know for sure what Warner’s role was preceding and
during the 1932-3 tour? Well, during WWII, Warner acted as deputy
secretary of the MCC, keeping Lords open for cricket and, as in the
Great War, organising morale-boosting exhibition matches. And
sometime during Warner’s time in that role, key documents related
to the Bodyline series mysteriously disappeared from the MCC’s
files. Teflon Plum had covered his rear.
Plum
in Later Life
By
the time the war ended, Warner was 72, and while he would live for
another 17 years, his influence began to wane. The MCC acquired
another panjandrum, in the person of Warner’s former protege Gubby
Allen, who served on many committees (sometimes
voting against his one-time mentor) and
in the 1950s took Warner’s old role as Chair
of the Test Selectors. Warner
was given the honour of the Presidency of MCC in 1950, but his power
was diminishing. In 1955, Neville Cardus was finally admitted to
Associate Membership of MCC, Warner now unable to stop him. Warner
remained as editor of The
Cricketer until
1962, but by then
was a figurehead.
.jpg) |
Photo from Hamilton (2019)
|
Allen
was scarcely more progressive than Warner, but during the 1950s the
MCC was being forced to consider change by the decrease in popularity
of county cricket. One issue that needed to be addressed was that
most sacred of Warner’s sacred cows, the amateur/professional
distinction. In the late 1950s, an advisory committee was set up to
consider whether it should be abolished.
Warner’s
granddaughter Marina Warner recalls as a child visiting her
grandfather in the flat he shared with his wife in South Kensington.
Some
years before, when Warner first met Marina’s Italian mother, he
immediately set about teaching her the principles of cricket. Marina
recalls the flat being filled with immodest memorabilia of Warner’s
career. She also remembered Warner’s frugal appetite, a legacy of
his years of ill health. Once, when asked at dinner if he wanted
seconds, he replied, “Just one pea please”.
Pelham
Francis Warner died on 30 January 1963. The next day, the MCC
announced the abolition of the amateur/professional
divide in English cricket.
Sources
Used
Birley D (1979) The Willow Wand: Some Cricketing Myths Explored. London: Queen Anne Press
Birley D (1999) A Social History of English Cricket. London: Aurum Press
Foot
D (1996) Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why.
Robson Books
Hamilton D (2019) The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus. Hodder & Soughton
Kynaston D & Ricketts H (2024) Richie Benaud's Blue Suede Shoes. Bloomsbury Publishing
Meynell L (1951) 'Plum Warner'. Phoenix House
ESPN Cricinfo
...and various editions of Wisden Cricketer's Almanack
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
