Before their time

THE recent death through illness of the Zimbabwean batsman, Trevor Madondo, was a body blow to that country's plans to integrate its sports. For Zimbabwe's cricket team has always been dominated by Whites. Only the odd Black bowler has fitfully been capped. This division of labour seemed to mirror the cleavages of race and class, since batsmen are cricket's aristocrats, bowlers its underpaid proletarians. Trevor Madondo challenged the stereotype, which is why his death is to be especially mourned.

I saw Madondo on the box only once, and was struck by his quick foot movements and his high, flourishing backlift. His passing provoked memories of other cricketers who died when still active in the game. I thought first of Archie Jackson, a batsman of a sinuous grace and a person of enormous charm regarded as the natural successor to Victor Trumper. An Australian video I own has snatches of him on film; jumping out to drive, and playing that lovely shot that has now gone out of the game, the late cut.

Jackson was a near contemporary of Don Bradman. He was born in September 1909; the Don in August 1908. They played together for New South Wales and made their international debut at the same time, during the Ashes series of 1928-29. In the fourth Test of that series, played at Adelaide, Jackson and Bradman shared a long partnership. Jackson was 96 not out at lunch and, as they went back to the wicket after the interval, the Don told his younger colleague to play carefully for his 100. Jackson answered by cracking the first ball from Larwood to the point boundary. At this time, there was little to choose between these precocious talents. When the Australians toured England in 1930, however, the Don pulled rapidly away. Jackson was sick through most of the summer, but recovered to play in the Fifth Test and share a stand of 243 with Bradman.

Archie Jackson died of tuberculosis in February 1933. Among the pallbearers at his funeral were William Woodfull, Bill Ponsford, Stan McCabe, Bertie Oldfield, Vic Richardson and Don Bradman. His memory lingered on. When, in 1947, Vijay Hazare scored a century in each innings of an Adelaide Test, Arthur Mailey wrote that "he was as graceful as Archie Jackson". This remains the most generous tribute that an Australian critic has paid an Indian cricketer.

Jackson died 25 years before I was born. A cricketer's passing I felt more directly was that of the New Zealand wicket-keeper- batsman Ken Wadsworth. In the summer of 1973 I was myself seriously ill, with asthma. In between bouts I would read old issues of Sport and Pastime and listen to the radio. New Zealand were touring England, and making an unexpected impact. The long- time holders of cricket's wooden spoon were now throwing up players of world-class. The composed Glenn Turner opened the batting. The new ball was in the capable hands of Richard Collinge and Richard Hadlee's elder brother, Dayle. The captain, Bevan Congdon, was a batsman of courage and determination. And there was Wadsworth. A burly man with a huge mop of blond hair, he was a free-stroking batsman who, with his bigger gloves, kept adeptly to the seam of Collinge and Hadlee as well as the spin of the left-armer Hedley Howarth.

I remember especially listening to the commentary of the last two days of the Trent Bridge Test, when the Kiwis set off chasing a victory target close to 500. A couple of wickets fell early, but then Congdon and Vic Pollard had a long partnership, both scoring hundreds. Wadsworth hit a dashing 46 at the end, but his side lost by about 40 runs. Shortly afterwards he was stricken by cancer, dying in 1976, well short of his 30th birthday. His wicket-keeping gloves were placed next to his body, and his colleagues from the 1973 tour respectfully lowered his coffin into the grave. The obituary in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack was a typically English mix of praise and condescension. Wadsworth's outlook, it said, "was more typical of an Australian or a Yorkshireman than a New Zealander and this made him proportionately more valuable to his side".

Sportsmen still succumb in the prime of their life through disease, but once upon a time they also went to their deaths in bloody combat. Among the 40 million who perished in the two World Wars, were some very fine cricketers. Among those who died in the war of 1914-18 were the great Kent and England left-arm spinner, Colin Blythe, a gentle man who was a violinist in his spare time; and the Australian fast bowler, Tibby Cotter, he of the slinging action and penchant for breaking stumps. Among the victims of World War II - were, again, some gifted but luckless bowlers. They included Ken Farnes, a six-foot, four-inch giant who was England's fastest bowler after Harold Larwood, and the peerless Hedley Verity. Verity was a left-armer with a high, classical action and superb control, lethal on a wet wicket. He will be particularly remembered by that stalwart of Madras cricket, M. J. Gopalan, who played against him when the Englishman came here with Jardine's team of 1933-34.

Jackson, Wadsworth, Blythe, Cotter, Verity, Farnes: all players who before their deaths had left their mark on the international game. Let me end however with a man who never played a Test, but whose name - or, at any rate, surname - is better known than that of any other cricketer, Bradman only expected. This fellow was a talented all-rounder who played for Warwickshire and would probably have played for England had he not been killed during World War I. To quote Wisden, he "was a right-handed bowler on the quick side of medium pace, and with an easy action came off the ground with plenty of spin". His first name was Percy; his last name, Jeeves. To P.G. Wodehouse, who watched Jeeves bowl in a county match in 1913, the action also suggested sagacity and omniscience, the characteristics he later endowed on the butler named after him.

Postscript: As this column was going to press, news came of the wonderful 100 hit on debut by the 17-year-old Hamilton Mazakadsa, the successor to Trevor Madondo in more ways then one.

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

The writer is the editor of the Picador Book of Cricket.

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