The Shorter Wisden 2013 (46 page)

THOMAS
, MALCOLM CAMPBELL, who died on April 9, aged 82, played four times for Cornwall in the 1951 Minor Counties Championship, scoring 56 at The Oval against
Surrey’s Second Eleven. But he found greater fame in rugby, as a goal-kicking centre who won 27 caps for Wales (two as captain) and played four times for the British Lions. He scored the
decisive try against Ireland as Wales clinched the Triple Crown in 1950, and later that year was the leading points-scorer for the Lions in Australasia.

TINDALL
, RONALD ALBERT ERNEST,
OAM
, who died on September 9, aged 76, was one of that elite band of sportsmen who packed away their bat
as the county season came to a close and immediately donned boots to spend the next eight months playing professional football. Ron Tindall was no makeweight at either sport, appearing in 173
first-class games for Surrey and playing 368 Football League games for Chelsea, West Ham, Reading and Portsmouth. “I was busy all year round,” he said.

Tindall was a south Londoner, born in Streatham, and came to the attention of Surrey while playing in Camberley. An aggressive batsman, off-spin bowler and agile fielder, he signed on at The
Oval in 1952, aged 16, but did not make his first-class debut until four years later, and only became a regular in 1960. Progress in his winter employment was swifter. He joined Chelsea in 1953,
and made his first-team debut in November 1955, in a side in decline after winning the League Championship the previous season. At the start of the 1957-58 campaign, he began a productive
partnership with 17-year-old Jimmy Greaves (“a genius”, said Tindall) that brought them a joint tally of 38 goals that season, and 59 – still a club record – in 1960-61.

He may have been a bigger name in football, but Tindall took his cricket seriously enough to negotiate a contract that allowed him to miss the end of one football season and the start of the
next. These were difficult years at Surrey, no longer the dominant force in the domestic game, and they were grateful for Tindall’s steady contributions. In 1962, he scored 777 runs and took
66 wickets, which included his best bowling, five for 41 against Cambridge University at The Oval. Next summer he passed 1,000 runs for the only time, making a career-best 109 not out, also at his
home ground, against Nottinghamshire.

In truth, though, he was valued in the dressing-room as much for his elaborate jokes, which meandered to a punchline. And, when captain Micky Stewart introduced football as a means of warming up
in the mornings, he was especially popular – at least if he was on your side. Tindall foresaw a future in football coaching or management, and retired from cricket in 1966. By this time, he
was playing for Portsmouth – a defender now, rather than a forward – before becoming player/coach, then manager in 1970. Later in the decade, he joined his former Oval team-mates Tony
Lock and Peter Loader in Western Australia, where he became director of coaching with the state football federation. Over nearly 30 years he established a considerable reputation, and in 2008 he
was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for services to sport.

TOOVEY
, ERNEST ALBERT,
OAM
,
MBE
, died on July 18, aged 90. The record books would suggest Ernie Toovey had an
unspectacular career as a left-hand batsman for Queensland during the first half of the 1950s; his peak was in 1951-52, when he made five half-centuries. He often had to rein in his attacking
instincts to shore up his side’s fragile batting, and his total of 150 runs in the match against Victoria at the MCG in December 1951 took almost seven hours. During his second-innings 87, he
became, according to him, the only batsman to hit mystery spinner Jack Iverson for six in a first-class match, a feat he would recount with relish. Next season, Toovey slipped the leash against the
South Africans at Brisbane, hitting 71 in a partnership of 102 in 89 minutes with Ron Archer. In the outfield, he was both brilliant and sure, and his speed across the ground and the bullet-like
accuracy of his returns saved countless runs. He was a state selector for 25 years from 1961-62, helping to lay the foundation for Queensland’s long-awaited Sheffield Shield title in 1995-96.
Toovey was also proud of having captained his club side, Norths, with Ray Lindwall as his bowling spearhead.

As a 19-year-old, Ordinary Seaman Toovey, unlike 353 of his shipmates, survived the sinking of the HMAS
Perth
in the Battle of the Sunda Strait early in 1942. The price of survival,
however, was three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese, much of it on the Burma railway, where a severely ulcerated leg threatened to turn gangrenous. Toovey dismissed any talk of
amputation and underwent excruciating treatment: “Not on your life, I’m going to need that leg to play Sheffield Shield cricket for Queensland.” Early in his captivity, he took
part in several baseball matches as a member of an Australian team organised by his camp’s commandant. When a match was organised against the Japanese guards, Toovey cautioned his side that
defeat was the better part of valour. After the war, he gave many years to the Returned Services League and the Australian Prisoners of War Association. Much later, he wrote a privately published
book on his experiences as a PoW. David Frith, a long-standing friend, paid tribute to an “archetypal Queenslander of the old school: very friendly and generous. Although his memories of his
wartime traumas dogged him until the end, he was an infallibly cheerful bloke”.

Toovey subsequently represented Queensland in the Claxton Shield, the national baseball carnival. He was appointed MBE in 1985, and 15 years later received the Medal of the Order of Australia
“for service to the welfare of veterans and their families through the RSL, and to cricket and baseball in Australia”.

TRAPNELL
, BARRY MAURICE WALLER,
CBE
,
DL
, who died on August 1, aged 88, was a medium-pacer whose nine
first-class matches – all in 1946 – included one for the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s, in which he opened the bowling and dismissed Cyril Washbrook (although not before
he had made 105). Trapnell had also played in the Varsity Match at Lord’s a fortnight earlier, when his 41 and four wickets could not prevent an Oxford victory. And just before that, he had
taken five for 73 for Cambridge against MCC, also at Lord’s. Towards the end of the season he played his only Championship game, Middlesex’s top-of-the-table clash with eventual
champions Yorkshire at Sheffield in mid-August. After this busy summer Trapnell concentrated on his work, becoming a chemistry don at Cambridge, and later headmaster of Denstone College and Oundle
School. He was the national Rugby fives champion in 1949.

TURNER
, JOHN BERNARD, who died on September 13, aged 63, was a tall opening batsman who scored a record 7,524 runs for Buckinghamshire in the Minor Counties
Championship. He played only one first-class match, for the Minor Counties XI against the Pakistan tourists at Jesmond in 1974 – but made it count, hitting 106 in the second innings against a
new-ball attack of Asif Masood and Imran Khan.

VAN HEERDEN
, CARL, who died on June 19, aged 78, was president of the Free State Cricket Union from 1994 to 1998. Two of his sons played first-class cricket in
South Africa.

VINICOMBE
, JOHN BROOKS, who died on October 6, 2011, aged 82, was the main sports writer of the Brighton
Evening Argus
from 1962 to 1994. In a town
where the football and cricket teams always produced lively copy in good times and bad, Vinicombe was a well-informed and robust chronicler of their affairs. He greeted visiting journalists at
Sussex matches with a warmth tinged by a sardonic humour about the incompetence of the universe, which he would have brought to bear on
Wisden
for being a year late reporting his
death.

VORSTER
, LOUIS PHILLIPPUS, was shot dead on April 17, aged 45, the victim of an armed robbery at a petrol station in Gauteng. “Another senseless
murder,” observed his former team-mate Jacques Rudolph, while Albie Morkel, another South African Test player, said he had “lost a great friend”. Vorster was a much-travelled
left-hander, who made his maiden century for Transvaal against Western Province at Cape Town in January 1988. He entered at 27 for three, against a new-ball attack of Garth le Roux and Steve
Jefferies, but went on to score 174, and spent the following summer at Worcester, where he made one first-class appearance, against the touring West Indians, when Graeme Hick scored 172 to complete
1,000 runs before the end of May. Vorster compiled a further five first-class centuries, but never quite made the weight of runs necessary to push for an international place. He became involved in
coaching in Namibia, for whom he played in the South African domestic first-class competition as recently as 2009-10.

WADDELL
, SIDNEY, who died on August 11, aged 72, was the Arlott of the oche, a man who conferred poetry, literary allusion and a great sweep of history on to
the prosaic business of darts commentary. He first brought darts to the small screen in 1972, when he joined Yorkshire Television and created
Indoor League
as a vehicle for Fred Trueman,
who was required to affect a caricature of a Yorkshireman while introducing skittles, arm-wrestling, table football and, of course, darts. Trueman was Sid Waddell’s sporting hero: he
contributed a wonderful paean to him in
The Wisden Cricketer’s
My Favourite Cricketer series, and remained a fan of the game. He wrote two series of
Sloggers
, a TV programme
about a fictional children’s cricket team in Slogthwaite, Lancashire, for which he won a best scriptwriter prize in the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain awards in 1994.

WATSON
, JOHN MARTIN, died on March 10, aged 90. Jack Watson was an all-rounder who enjoyed a long career in Minor Counties cricket for Durham (for whom he took
394 wickets at 16) and Northumberland. A policeman, he was also prominent in local football, having spells as a scout for Middlesbrough and caretaker manager of Darlington on no fewer than five
occasions.

WHITE
, COLIN DEREK, who died on February 27, aged 74, was a stylish left-hander who looked likely to win a Blue for Ted Dexter’s Cambridge University
side in 1958. White had made a bright start to the season, but never quite recovered after being hit in the mouth by New Zealand’s Bob Blair. Although he later scored 55 against MCC at
Lord’s, White was left out of the Varsity Match after averaging only 15. He appeared sporadically over the next two years, scoring 64 against Nottinghamshire at Fenner’s in 1960, but
never did win that Blue. He later became a banker, and a regular club cricketer in Surrey.

WIGGINS
, ANDREA, who died of cancer on September 6, aged 41, was part of the ECB’s communications team for nine years, and was a popular figure with
colleagues and journalists alike. She was instrumental in devising a lifestyle photography campaign for the England men’s team which attracted widespread media interest, and played a pivotal
role in establishing the domestic Twenty20 competition. She left Lord’s in 2009 to become the International Rugby Board’s communications manager.

WILCOCKSON
, DAVID, died on June 1, aged 71, having been in a coma for 13 days after being hit by the ball while bowling in a club match in Surrey. “The
batsman ran down the pitch and middled it towards him,” said a team-mate. “It went straight into his head and he went down.” He was airlifted to hospital after the incident, in
Old Dorkinians’ match against Grafham, but never regained consciousness. Wilcockson had played for the club since 1959, and set himself a target of 3,000 wickets. He finished with 2,899.

WILLIAMS
, WENDY, who died on March 3, aged 69, was a Welsh-born bowler with a low slinging action which sometimes endangered the umpire. After narrowly missing
selection for England in the first women’s World Cup in 1973, she was chosen for the International XI which also played in the tournament, and appeared in all their six matches. Her six
wickets included 12–6–20–3 against New Zealand at Chesterfield, to which she later added 18 from No. 8 as her side completed a last-over victory. “She was very
popular,” recalled the former England captain Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, a West Midlands team-mate, “not only because of her cheerful personality but because she was also a qualified
physiotherapist, which meant we could get free treatment!” Williams worked with Bernard Thomas, the long-serving England physio, at his Edgbaston sports clinic.

WILSON
, DONALD, died on July 21, aged 74. Don Wilson brought the same unquenchable enthusiasm and broad smile to everything he did in a lifetime dedicated to
cricket – bowling his canny slow left-arm for Yorkshire between 1957 and 1974, instilling inner-city youngsters with a love of the game as MCC head coach, or genially cajoling his pupils on
the playing fields of Ampleforth College. Wilson was one of the mainstays of the Yorkshire team that won seven Championships between 1959 and 1968, emerging from the giant shadow cast by Johnny
Wardle to take more than 1,000 wickets. He also played six Tests for England, but perhaps his greatest legacy was turning Lord’s into a centre of coaching excellence. Wilson welcomed them all
to the Nursery Ground – goggle-eyed schoolchildren, Test players seeking technical or psychological counselling, and the occasional celebrity. He may be the only cricketer whose autobiography
contained a foreword by Peter O’Toole.

His role in Yorkshire’s last great era was almost as treasured for his contribution to the team’s
esprit de corps
as for his playing efforts. Along with his great friend
Phil Sharpe, Wilson was the leader of Yorkshire’s very own choir, and led countless rousing sing-songs in sponsors’ tents and hotel lounges. In a famously combustible dressing-room, the
benefit to morale was incalculable.