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C. B. Fry – Part 2 – with Iain Wilton
310 Plays1 year ago
There are few cricketers from the Golden Age who remain such an enigma as C. B. Fry. Captain of the England cricket team, footballer, world-record long jump holder, classicist, politician, naval captain, novelist, journalist, academic - there was no end to his talent. He even came close to becoming the King of Albania. English commentator John Arlott described him as 'probably the most variously gifted Englishman of any age.' On more than one occasion during his playing career, he was the undisputed best batsman in the world; yet he never toured Australia as a player, had questionable ties to some senior figures in Nazi Germany, and was troubled throughout his life by mental health issues, probably ignited by a less than ideal domestic setting.
In Part 2, Tom is joined by biographer Iain Wilton, and they discuss Fry’s relationship with some senior figures in Nazi Germany and how this might have been influenced by his younger brother Walter's death during the Great War, his mental health, his remarkable batting statistics, and his overall cricket legacy.
ABOUT IAIN WILTON:
Iain has enjoyed a varied professional career in fields of politics, statistics and sport, including six years as the MCC's Head of Communications, at Lord's. He's now in the process of making a career change, after completing some professional exams to become an independent financial adviser, based in the Essex/Suffolk area, where he now lives with his family. More than 20 years after his biography C. B. Fry – King Of Sport was first published, Iain is now hoping to write, much later than planned, a second cricket book - this one focusing on the first Cricket World Cup, back in 1975.
Iain's early research and interviews are going well but, if any of 1975's competitors are listening, he says that he'd absolutely love to hear from you! Please contact Tom at [email protected] and he'll pass the email on.
CREDITS:
Presenter & Producer: Tom Ford
All music used in podcast comes from the University of California Santa Barbara’s remarkable collection of wax cylinder’s from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which are free to download and use. You can donate to the upkeep of these recordings via their website.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Biography
00:00:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to part 2 of this episode on the marvel that was C.B. Fry with my special guest Fry's Biographer Ian Wilton. My name is Tom Ford. Don't forget to listen to part 1 to hear Ian discuss Fry's early life, his writing and batting style and his relationship with his wife Beatrice.
C.B. Fry's Controversial Meeting with Hitler
00:00:35
Speaker
A large asterisk that has always existed next to Friar's name has been his meeting with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and how he never quite disassociated himself from the horrors of the Holocaust. How do you explain this relationship today? I think it's one of those things that you have to see in the round. I think the first thing to say is that
00:00:59
Speaker
C.P. Fry had sort of demonstrated a fair bit of political naivety when he was standing for parliament in the 1920s. And that political naivety, I think, endured right through the 1930s, up to and including the period when he went to Germany. And he wasn't the only person to, I think, prove to be regalable in his dealings with Hitler regime. Most obviously, David Lloyd George, former British prime minister, went to Germany and he was impressed by
00:01:29
Speaker
what he would have shown and spoke favorably about it afterwards. And he was someone who normally would regard as very politically astute and hard-headed. So he made serious mistakes there, which have obviously negatively affected his reputation. And likewise, C.B. Frye, a much less sophisticated figure, politically did the same. So it's absolutely not to his credit that he made those mistakes.
Fry's Mental Health and Writings
00:01:55
Speaker
I think one point I would make in his favor is that
00:02:00
Speaker
He had that meeting, that visit to Germany in the sort of mid 1930s, not long after he'd emerged from this sort of six year period of seclusion and acute mental illness. Then he went to Germany and then he wrote in those sort of unwisely positive terms about it in Life Worth Living published as the Second World War approached. And he shouldn't have done that, he should have revised his opinions in the meantime. But in a sense, there is an element of
00:02:30
Speaker
which I suppose you have to admire might be too strong a word. But yeah, he wrote in 38, 39 about the perceptions that he hit him about Germany in 34, 35. And he didn't change his words to take account of subsequent events. Again, I think that's a naivety on his part. He should have done. He should have realized more what was going on.
00:02:59
Speaker
and changed his verdict and his words accordingly. He didn't do that, and he's paid a heavy price for it reputationally, and certainly his daughter-in-law said to me that she thought that one of the reasons why he didn't get honors in public life subsequently was because of what he had undertaken and how he'd written about it in the late 1930s. A couple of things there. One is, a number of people have written,
00:03:29
Speaker
a sense some kind of pro-Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer was he was one person even made a claim that CB4 was at risk of being interred in the 1930s as a sort of Nazi sympathizer. I think that's wrong and in particular I think that's wrong because of a film evening that was organized by David Frith, the great cricket historian, and he found something
00:03:53
Speaker
at the Imperial War Museum, and it was a film made in about 1939 or 1940. And it was a sort of official government propaganda piece. And to my amazement, it was C.B. Frye, interviewed at the Mercury, lots of footage of boys at the Mercury playing cricket and doing other stuff. So certainly the British government view of C.B. Frye at the time was he wasn't someone who epitomized
00:04:22
Speaker
German values, Nazi values, anything like that. On the contrary, you know, he knew of this sort of propaganda film. He was a representative of, you know, Britain, Britain, his finest fighting spirit, independence and so on. So I think that was significant to see that that was really significant. It was a really low profile film that David found with his sort of characteristically power and research. So that made me think that the sort of the official establishment and government view of C.B. Fry
00:04:52
Speaker
hadn't been that negatively affected by the visits to Germany or what he subsequently wrote about it. But yeah, he did pay a price for it. I think that's one of the reasons why he didn't get the obvious that it might have come his way in later life.
British-German Relations and Personal Loss
00:05:03
Speaker
I think another really important fact to bear in mind is the First World War and what happened to his brother. Now, when I wrote the book, I knew very little about his brother, but discovered more and more about it as time went by. And in particular, there's a great book I read
00:05:21
Speaker
And by someone who wrote about the experience of British prisoners of war in the First World War, we know a lot about the experience of British prisoners of war, allied prisoners of war in the Second World War, once that great escape shown every Christmas in the UK, for example. But I read this book about the experience of allied prisoners of war in the First World War as a real eye opener. And in particular, there was a reference there to a major fly from the Royal Army Medical Corps and what had happened to him and a bunch of his colleagues.
00:05:50
Speaker
And it's a terribly, terribly sad story. But basically, CB's younger brother Walter was in the Royal Army Medical Corps, was captured early on in the First World War, probably by about December 1914. And not long after being captured and held prisoner, even a bunch of Royal Army Medical Corps colleagues were told, well, would you be willing to go to a prisoner of war camp?
00:06:15
Speaker
where, amongst others, we've got, you know, there are Russians, there are French prisoners, and there are British prisoners, which would be willing to go and help them meet their medical needs. And Freine and his colleagues said they were happy to do that. And then they're on the train to go to this camp called Wissenburg, and it's only on the train that also Freine and his colleagues get told that there is a big typhus outbreak at this camp, and there's virtually nothing in the way of medicines or medical equipment to help anyone who's, you know, looking to
00:06:44
Speaker
to assist the prisoners of war there. And the conditions are appalling, genuinely appalling. And Walter Frei goes there, gets shown round, gets shown round the sort of, particularly the British prisoners of war and their conditions. And there's an official inquiry to this episode in this prison of war camp later on in the war. And it says, black and white Walter Frei went into this. And he came out and broke down because of what he'd seen, the condition of the conditions in which the British troops were being held, the sort of lighting
00:07:14
Speaker
lice infestations and lice just transmits like this really, really quickly. Gangrene sets in, the conditions are just absolutely appalling. And without any sort of proper medical equipment to protect them or to treat people, water fry catches the disease and diet within a matter of weeks or a couple of months. And this becomes a pretty notorious episode in the First World War. As I said, there's later on,
00:07:43
Speaker
an official British government or British army inquiry into what happened. And it was called Remembering the Horrors of Bittingborough County. Some reports written and published at that time might be exaggerated perhaps for propaganda purposes, but a lot of what's in there comes across as very factual and very, very, very grim indeed. And that is, it explains
00:08:11
Speaker
how and why Walter Fry died in the First World War. And so there must surely be at least an extent to which Stephen Fry is conscious of that, conscious of the way he's lost his only brother. And so maybe that might explain why in the 1930s he's so determined to pursue the sort of rapprochement between Britain and Germany, as were
00:08:36
Speaker
so many other people and it was even the official policy of the government in time, late in the zone, it was the official policy of the national government's board of NMM, particularly Chamberlain. So maybe that explains to an extent why C.B. Frye was willing to do the visit to Germany, to have actually some boys from the hippie youth visit the military subsequently. But yeah, what he wrote and what he did with benefit of hindsight
00:09:07
Speaker
doesn't look good. But I think it does need to be seen in the context, particularly what happened to his brother. And also let's bear in mind that when he went to Germany, this was not long after he'd been in seclusion for six years. So I think there are, you know, allowances you can make, not excuses, but there are allowances you need to bear in mind who he was, the family experience that he'd had, and the acute mental illness that he had.
00:09:36
Speaker
thought he went to Germany, but I think fundamentally, as he'd shown earlier in his career, he was perfectly very naive and so he reached some very flawed judgments and made the mistake of writing about him perhaps too honestly when he did any service.
Mental Health Insights
00:10:08
Speaker
So Fry had many faults as a human, as we know, many eccentricities, and he was prone to nervous breakdowns. But as you interpret in your book, he was also clearly suffering from some form of mental illness, something which just wasn't easily diagnosed in his day. Firstly,
00:10:31
Speaker
How did you come to this conclusion? And should this change our modern assessment of his character today? Yeah, I think it's one of the things I discovered as a result of the Hartback being published. So I put in a fair bit about all that I knew about his mental difficulties at Oxford and then his breakdown, his fuller breakdown in the 1920s. And one of the great things about the Hartback was that someone came back to me.
00:10:59
Speaker
who had impeccable medical credentials, and he said, okay, from what you've written, this is what I think he had, and this is how it would be treated now. And it was a form of depression, acute depression, and it was a form of bipolar disorder as well. So for CB Fry, life was never gray. It was always either technicolor with the highs, or it was very dark and black with the lows.
00:11:27
Speaker
And as I've indicated earlier, I think he had some of these problems first manifested themselves at Oxford when he faced a variety of pressures, not least financial. And then there were some signs of things not being quite right at various stages in his counting international cricketing career. But yeah, they come to a head in the 1920s. And that's when he sort of disappears from public view for about six years. And it's interesting, I mean, a couple of reasons why sort of
00:11:57
Speaker
got attracted by the subject of C.B. Fry in the first place, where a couple of things I learned sort of from my grandfather. He actually met it. I heard this from my mom, his dad. And two things. One is that my grandfather had been in the crowd once at Southampton when C.B. Fry was playing for Southampton as the only amateur in the team. And someone from the crowd shouted out to him, Fry, you're the biggest pro of the lot, sort of confirming this thing that he was a amateur.
00:12:26
Speaker
And the second thing I heard was that my grandfather had bumped into C.B. Fry in, I don't know when exactly it would have been, but it was in the New Forest. And I found out, during the course of my research, that one of the people who could get through to C.B. Fry in the late 20s, early 30s, when he had this really serious mental illness, was a guy who was the head teacher, head master, who had been called in those days, of the school in the New Forest.
00:12:56
Speaker
So my grandfather had bumped into CB Fry when he was on one of these visits to this guy who could get through to him. He seemed to have a sort of calming influence on him during that period of acute mental illness that he had. So that's the sort of family connection that led me to CB Fry. And yeah, it's helpful. It provided a couple of insights to him, a sort of sham of a thing, but also to the extent of the mental health difficulties that he had expected.
00:13:24
Speaker
Well, let's turn our attention now to slightly happier
Cricket Career Highlights
00:13:29
Speaker
subjects. Let's return to his cricket statistics. And they're fascinating to pore over for a multitude of reasons. So sit back in. I'll just read these through. Jump in if you want to. We can discuss them afterwards. So CB Fry made his test debut in February 1896.
00:13:50
Speaker
in the first test of a three-match series in South Africa. It was a match made famous for George Lomond's 15 wickets for the match. And he made his final test match appearance, as you mentioned earlier, in that triangular series in August of 1912 versus the Australians. At a lower level, at first-class level, his career spanned from 1892
00:14:15
Speaker
Until 1921-22, so quite an extraordinary long first class career. You mentioned earlier how he came back after the First World War for a handful of first class matches, no test matches though.
00:14:32
Speaker
If we look at the actual numbers, I'll just briefly go over the bowling figures because we can't forget he did do a bit of bowling. It's not really what he's remembered for. He bowled 10 balls in test cricket for a total of three runs. At first-class level,
00:14:52
Speaker
He took 166 wickets for 4872 runs, best bowling 6 for 78. A question without notice, Ian, what sort of bowler was he? Was he a medium pace bowler, spin bowler? I think from memory he was sort of medium brisk. Obviously the thing that he's most remembered for is the sort of questionable action that he had.
00:15:21
Speaker
which is why he sort of starts off as an all-rounder, and then Osman becomes, like you say, a sort of specialist batsman because his action is very much sort of frowned upon increasingly over time. He's regarded as a thrower, gets no bold frequently. So that brings an end to his bowling career. Well, one of the things that sort of on rereading the book that I'm sort of struck by in a way that probably hadn't hit me before,
00:15:45
Speaker
was the gap between his bowling average, I think it's about 30, and his overall first-class average, which is just over 50. That's a hell of a gap, because you always say that if your batting average is better than your bowling average, that's the sign of a good or rounder, and if it's like five months better, 10 months better, that's a seriously good or rounder. But I don't know whether many people have actually got the net plus 20 that CP Fry had, batting average of 50, bowling average of 30, based on, you know,
00:16:15
Speaker
not insignificant number of first-class wickets, I think 166, you said. I've been interested in what other people think and what figures they can put forward about people who've got an around-as-you've taken a minimum of 100, 150 first-class wickets and who've then ended their career with a plus 20 gap between their passing average and their folding average. It's pretty impressive.
00:16:37
Speaker
I'm sure someone is listening who will no doubt be able to tell us, so please write in if you do know. So if we turn our attention to his batting, I'm going to actually start with the first class figures. So he played 394 first class matches, batting 658 times.
00:17:00
Speaker
for 43 not outs, scored 30,886 runs with a high score of 258 not out. So his average first class cricket was 50.22. And you mentioned earlier, fell six centuries short of the 100, so 94 centuries, 124 half centuries, and he took 239 catches
00:17:29
Speaker
Now in the test arena he played for England 26 times, batting 41 times. Three not outs, he scored 1,223 runs with a high score of 144, an average of 32.18. So the average
00:17:50
Speaker
at first class levels 50 it drops to 32 at test level. So two centuries he scored in those 41 innings and seven half centuries. So Ian I'm going to pose this question to you. 94 centuries which I think at the time of the First World War
00:18:16
Speaker
was the third most behind W.G. Grace, of course, and Tom Heywood. But he just couldn't seem to transition the first-class form, which was often extraordinary form, like form first-class cricket had ever seen before. He couldn't quite transition that into the test arena. And there's this great imbalance between his first-class and test record. Why do you think that is?
00:18:48
Speaker
I think there are a number of factors for it. I think first and foremost is the fact that he did suffer from nerves. There are a number of contemporary articles that refer to him being quite highly strong. And in particular, he seemed to struggle early on. So he could settle, he could then get more confidence and play well. But there are a whole number of instances where he got out quite quickly because he was nervy, scratchy, and liable to that early dismissal.
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah, he tended to, once he settled, then he could play a lot better, and yet some of the best innings that he played were regarded by his competitors as extremely good innings. And as with his first-class career, a lot of people would say he could score runs on wickets that other people just couldn't cope with. I think there was an example in the triangular tournament, which we talked about, but it was a terribly, terribly wet summer. There was a wet wicket, and he'd mastered it in a way that no one else could.
00:19:49
Speaker
And you can see before I, from memory, gets out, Tiger Smith, the England weekkeeper, comes in and he says to Smith, you know, just effectively hang on in there. And Smith's view was, no, no, no, no, I don't want to hang on in there. I want to get out, I want all my teammates to get out as quickly as possible, because we want to get the Australians in on this pitch as soon as we can, because it's such an awful batting surface. But, you know, Brian might have been able to cope with it, but no one else can.
00:20:15
Speaker
and he did actually get out for a naught, I think, rather than looking at the lower rules. The backs and tool design got out very quickly as well. They got these straight into that and wrapped it up quite quickly. So that sort of showed CB frying at his best. But yeah, I think you're right. When you have as big a gap as 50 to 30 between your first class average and your test average, then it doesn't mean that people are going to say, that suggests that that's not a very, very
00:20:44
Speaker
And I think, you know, there are comparisons we can make with players from the more recent past, like Graham Hick, who just scored runs for the founding county crickets, but have found test crickets much, much harder thing to cope with. And, you know, I think remember players like Merv Hughes trying to sort of rough him up, not only with the ball, but with the glares and everything like that, because they sort of felt that temperamentally Graham Hick wouldn't
00:21:13
Speaker
enjoy that and that would affect his performance. So I think CD Fry was the same. I think he did struggle mentally when he was out of the middle from time to time. And so again, it's one of these things, like we were saying earlier on, I think there are a number of things he had this extraordinary sporting career, but there are just a few things where you wish he'd done things just slightly differently because then that would put him just out there ahead of anyone else. So if he had got the FA Cup in his medal, that would have been the sort of crowning glory on his footballing career.
00:21:44
Speaker
Likewise with cricket, if he'd got 100 hundreds, and likewise if he'd actually made a better test cricket, and I think he'd be averaged late 30s, 40. No one would be querying whether he was a genuine test batsman. But I think, yeah, if you look at the overall scores that he had, the weight of runs that he scored, the record numbers of centuries, double centuries, et cetera, et cetera, and also all these sort of contemporary
00:22:12
Speaker
saying how he could cope with attacks, and particularly with wickets that no one else could really master. That does suggest that despite the modest test record, it wasn't that very, very high score. I just, again, rereading the book the other day and I was, came across a section, I think it might've been a, sorry, a Sussex versus Leicestershire match, something like that. And yeah, I was amazed by what I wrote, which said that, you know, not only did CB4i score as many runs as all his teammates put together,
00:22:42
Speaker
But in this one match, he scored as many runs as everyone else in the match put together. I mean, that's an extraordinary trade. And then again, you look at the double hundreds and the six excessive hundreds, things like that. These were truly extraordinary beats. And they had some amazing years. And there were other times when sometimes he was playing cricket, sometimes he's writing, sometimes he's writing the Mercury. He was a bit in and out. He didn't.
00:23:10
Speaker
had the opportunity to devote himself to cricket as fully as he might. Had he been able to do so, and had he been able to do those Australian tours that we were talking about earlier on, I think you'd undoubtedly be talking about something that got 150 plus, first-class 100ths, rather than the night show that he did that.
00:23:27
Speaker
It's quite extraordinary. And just on that point, I want to actually read a section from your book. It comes from page 461 because his statistics or the numerical statistics that I read out before, don't do justice to all of his achievements because, and you touched on it just briefly there, there's an extraordinary number of
00:23:53
Speaker
uh feats he achieved which perhaps are largely forgotten today so I'm just going to quote you from your book you wrote he achieved a number of feats which had been beyond every other batsman in the history of the first class game as a century maker for instance CB's record was truly historic he hit more centuries in a season than anyone else
00:24:15
Speaker
He created a new record by scoring a hundred in each innings of a match on no fewer than five occasions, and he achieved the unprecedented feat of following a century with a double century in the same game. He also hit more first-class double hundreds than any of his predecessors, even though they included figures as illustrious as W.G.
00:24:38
Speaker
Moreover, Fry established a new world record by scoring six successive centuries, twice as many as any previous batsmen, and a performance which, over a century later, is still unsurpassed. And of course it has that last feat, the six successive centuries, has been equalled by two other batsmen, and it took someone like Don Bradman to equal it. So
00:25:05
Speaker
it really does put his astonishing first-class feats into context when we think of what he achieved but what he achieved really as a pioneer no one had done this until he did and unfortunately it's largely forgotten today again also rereading the book I was struck by the number of occasions where he also got a hundred of warnings of a match and then getting 90 something in the other and I don't know whether that was
00:25:32
Speaker
nerves, like we talked about before, when it was nerves afflicting him, we got into the nervous 90s. But yeah, he did get a sort of record number of, you know, 200s in the same game, and he came close on a whole bunch of occasions to doing it, even the treatment.
Fry's Literary Contributions to Cricket
00:25:55
Speaker
Now, following his playing career, Fry remained involved in cricket as a writer, which you've already spoken about. What can you tell us about his post-playing involvement in the game and how it progressed from the playing field to the writer's box? I think you have that sort of gap between him finishing playing in sort of 1921-22.
00:26:25
Speaker
Then there's a sort of period of disengagement with the game, quite a long period of disengagement with the game, because that's this negative period of mental illness. But the extraordinary thing is then, when he comes back with a bang, writing about cricket and the secret tribe, it says according to the standard. And it's a bit like when we're talking about him writing about conditions in Australia where he'd never actually played, you have him writing about players like Bradman in quite an informed way. And I don't think he'd seen Bradman before, 1934, when he was writing about him
00:26:55
Speaker
in the evening standard. But yeah, he has that confidence to just immediately pontificate about a player, or sum a player up, or offer some real insights into the sort of player, his character, or his technique. So I think, again, Mike Rosengora here reflects his supreme sort of technical understanding of the game, but also this confidence that he can write confidently and make judgments about people he's never really seen before.
00:27:26
Speaker
Um, but it works brilliantly because the, as we were saying previously, the CP Fry says column is a great, great success. Um, and so, yeah, you'd have this extraordinary record of CP Fry as a writer from, uh, you know, it starts in the 1890s, um, goes through to the 1930s and it covers everything from his magazines, his autobiography to his front page columns of the evening standard. And I just don't think anyone else, uh, played the game as a rematch on that record.
00:27:55
Speaker
I was particularly struck actually by something I read about C.B. Fry says, when someone pointed out that he ceased being the inner captain in 1912, he then comes back to write C.B. Fry says from 1934. So he's getting the job in the stand of 22 years after being the inner captain. So it's not like he's trading on immediate or recent glories. He's doing it.
00:28:22
Speaker
on the basis of his ability, I think, as a writer, yes, there's an enduring reputation. It's really through his merit as a writer. And the remarkable thing is that, you know, C.B. Fry says, Colin, is unlike anyone in Britain, I think, who's read before. It's an entirely new type of sports writing. And he masters it at that sort of late stage of his life. He masters that completely for the writing. And it's a brilliant success, a late-life success.
Fry's Legacy in Cricket
00:28:50
Speaker
I was really shocked to read in your book, Ian, how he was grossly snubbed in his lifetime from the Sussex, Hampshire and MCC establishments, possibly because of his eccentricities. Has there been a correction since? I think I sort of reflected on this and thought, well, you know, why didn't he have this sort of honorary post-related Sussex, which he left quite acrimoniously, Hampshire or MCC?
00:29:20
Speaker
And yeah, each of them probably should have done more to recognize the contributions that he made to the game. But I do actually sort of sympathize with the people who are on the Sussex Committee, MCC Committee, or Hampshire Committee, because I think he would have been a very difficult committee man, if you like. By the time he was sort of well into his retirement from cricket itself, he had become logic centric. He had
00:29:48
Speaker
developed a real liking for the sound of his own voice. So I do think that we've been a difficult person to have on some of those committees. I think he would have not only did he backframe it, but I think he could have talked through those committee rooms. So I think he might have been a difficult person to have on that kind of role. Maybe he'd have been better at some sort of figurehead role as an active committee member. So I do understand, I think, why some of those sort of honors didn't come his way.
00:30:18
Speaker
There was a sort of little bit of a sense of readjustment at MCC. Actually, when I worked there, because Charles Fry, his grandson, became the chairman of the government and the president of the government, perhaps not surprisingly, that was the point at which a portrait of C.B. Fry, a very good portrait of C.B. Fry in later life, came into the committee room. So C.B. did get into the MCC committee room, but in portrait form rather than in real life form. But that was a sort of, you know, a measure of respect to the man. Also,
00:30:48
Speaker
Wharton College commissioned, probably 15 years ago now, a painting of C.B. Frye that was given reasonable prior to place in their dining hall. And myself and my family were kindly invited by the college to go up to a dinner that marked it some daily. I didn't think it was as good as the portrait of C.B. Frye that did the painting of the Committee of the Lords, but it was nice to see Wharton College honouring C.B. Frye that way.
00:31:16
Speaker
One final question, Ian, and my listeners will know I like to end each interview with this line of question. What would CB Fry think of modern cricket today? Would he enjoy, for example, day-night cricket, T20 and women's cricket, or would he hold on to the traditions of the grand old game? Goodness, that's a really big and a really hard question. I think women's cricket could have been quite
00:31:45
Speaker
positive about. And there's a photograph in the book of C.B. right towards the end of his life at Lord's coaching. I think it was the visiting New Zealand women's team. And so that indicated a degree of positivity about women's cricket at that stage in the early 1950s. So I think he was ahead of the game there probably. I think he encouraged his daughters to remember to play cricket. So again, it's that sort of positivity about women playing the game.
00:32:12
Speaker
And as we've said earlier, he could be a real innovator. We've talked about the way he changed batsmanship by paying more off the back foot, paying more onto the leg side. Also an innovator in terms of his role in bringing the triangular tournament about. So I think there are lots of things that he would have been, a lot of these innovations that he'd been quite receptive to. But some of the others, I wonder, I wonder whether Bazzball would have quite been up CB Fry's street, for example. I think maybe not. I think he would regret
00:32:42
Speaker
things like, you know, the decline of Oxford v. Cambridge and stuff like that, those sort of very traditional features, I think you would miss them. But I think there was an innovator in there. Yes, a sort of gentleman amateur and a traditionalist in some ways, but an innovator as well. So I think it's quite hard to judge which way to go on some of these things, but I do think a women's cricket for the U.S. has been very successful.
Conclusion and Book Promotion
00:33:08
Speaker
Well, Ian, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today and for returning to the subject of CB Fry. Your book, CB Fry, King of Sport, is a truly exceptional biography of not only the cricketer, but the man as a whole. A reminder to anyone listening that Ian is currently researching about the first cricket World Cup from 1975, and he'd love to hear from anyone connected with that first tournament. Ian, thanks again.
00:33:53
Speaker
Thank you Tom, thanks for watching.