| ‘Founded in 1974 for recreation and refreshment.’ So it says on the fixture list, and true enough as it goes but only part of the story. | |||
| The Erratics was founded in 1974 to fill an aching void. Trevor Milne-Day and I and our flatmate Colin Bruce were suffering from acute cricket deprivation. The prospect of joining an established club was unappealing. It implied a minimum of ability, training, dedication and competition, the prospect of shame and condemnation at the blind swipe, the dropped catch, the slow legside full toss which would inevitably accompany our efforts. There was no team around which promised tolerance of these foibles. Indeed, in my case there was no team around that was likely to let me bowl at all. | |||
| We all reached a similar conclusion and decided to form the Erratics there and then. Its inspiration, if not its direct parent, was the Balliol Erratics, the Oxford college side for which Trevor and I had performed. It was a side open to all comers, which played mostly local villages. Results were irrelevant (indeed for many years the Erratics were constitutionally forbidden to win). We became the London Erratics, and when the Balliol Club fell into decay we took over the brand ourselves. | |||
| The original London Erratics had a core of Balliol in exile (myself, Trevor, Chris Dunabin, Roger Leech, Julian Stubbs), as well as Trevor’s brothers Rodney and Christopher (when available from the West Country), Rodney’s best friend Rod Franklin, Colin and his best friend Mike Payn. (My apologies to other founder members: records and scorebooks are lost and senility has blotted your names.) | |||
| Having more or less formed a team, how were we to get fixtures? The answer in those early days came mainly from Colin’s parents and their friends the Hackforths (Norman Hackforth was a radio celebrity, the legendary voice who declared ‘And the next object is...’ on Animal, Vegetable, Mineral). They had several connexions with some extremely attractive villages in accessible parts of Sussex. By writing to one of these, I secured our first invitation — to the village of Udimore. | |||
| In this era, pre-email and for most people, pre-answerphones, raising a team for the Erratics usually required two full evenings on the telephone, and considerable time during the day. By Friday evening (I think that the match was a Saturday) I had established an Erratic tradition: we were two players short. Chris Dunabin and I are the last survivors of the gallant nine of Udimore: others I remember are Rodney and Chris Milne-Day (for some reason Trevor was unavailable), Colin Bruce, Roger Leech, Mike Payn, Rod Franklin. My apologies to Number Nine. Our hosts, as so often, looked ominously talented and well-organized. I decided to cancel a fielding practice, to avoid giving them encouragement. I tossed with their captain, and lied about our missing players — on their way, sure they know where to go, willing to start without them. I lost the toss and we were sent into bat. I gave the team a pep talk and told them that we were discarding the Balliol tradition of compulsory defeat. The new Erratic policy was to play hard and play to win. I did not tell them that a policy of compulsory defeat would, in all the circumstances, be otiose. | The 9th man at Udimore was Julian Stubbs. I know this because — as Julian has reminded me several tmes since — talking to the locals in the pub beforehand, I said words to the effect of ‘Oh, we’re a load of spastics’ just before noticing that my interlocutor was sitting in a wheelchair.... | ||
| We were dismissed for 93. We did not even get to the prescribed tea interval and we had to give them some batting to allow the urn to boil. I recall that Rod Franklin, our stylist, made the top score in the 20s. I also recall setting another Erratic tradition of playing for the asterisk, grobling a few runs and then getting down the other end to preserve the not out. I gave the new ball to our openers, Roger and Colin, a fearsome attack for any side defending a low total, and gave them attacking fields. Udimore won in something like 25 overs, without breaking sweat. As a courtesy they lost about four wickets. Their captain commiserated with me on my (mythical) missing players. I agreed that they had created a void, hinting that they were all-rounders of near-Test match class. To compensate for our performance we bought many large rounds of drinks. | |||
| We were not asked back the following year. We have never played Udimore since. But nonetheless the Erratics were launched. We played something like seven matches that opening year, including I recall the Balliol Erratics, Robertsbridge, R V Milne-Day’s Invitation XI, and a side I quickly dubbed the Old Queens (since most of them came from Queens’ College, Cambridge). They provided our first victory. It was a turbulent year for me, 1974. I was working for a mad martinet (he appears fleetingly in the first story in A Tale of Ten Wickets and more extensively as a character called Himmler in my online novel The Speculator). After being thrashed at work all week, it was wonderful therapy to be thrashed on the field at the weekend. | |||
| We survived 1974 and slowly over the following seasons accumulated new players and new fixtures. My work colleague, and fellow Himmler victim, Peter Jenkins, got us our long-running contest against Evenley; another friend, Tricia Farrer, got us our annual mini-tour of Stogumber, in Somerset. Media and political contacts gave us matches against the New Statesman and The Times. The team grew. Balliol exiles joined us (Steve Dobson, Jacob Franklin, who sadly died, Robert Waller, Peter Andrews). Friends begat friends, rather like the generations of the Bible ‘... and Milne-Day begat Given-Wilson ... and Hodge begat Berrigan ... and Evans begat Walker and Rivington ... and Dunabin begat Graham ...’ We also made many impromptu signings at our fitful practice sessions at Holland Park. These produced our long-serving adhesive opener, Robin Bean, who also sadly died, and wily slow-left-armer Piers Jessop, with whom some of us reconnected recently in Tangier. | Other ex-Balliol men who featured in early
games included Jonathan Green, and Tony Klouda (the bouncing Czech) who went off to fight AIDS in Kenya or
some such. Who begat Hodge? (Hodge also begat Rowland and Jackson, and therefore indirectly — because James and Tony lived next door to Jenny and invited her to Tony’s 40th — Khawaja.) |
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| Somehow, year by year, we got better. On a good day we would beat some villages and more often than not, the Erratic policy of batting second would allow us to granny through for a draw. Marriage and children produced some attrition in the ranks, but somehow new signings appeared to cover them and some spouses and children were press-ganged into service. | The Kirdford game in 1974 or 1975 is worth a mention if Richard hasn’t blotted it from memory: undoubtedly our heaviest defeat (though the scorebook has happily been destroyed): my recollection is vague but I know there were a lot of 3s in it, something like Kirdford 330 for 3 dec, Erratics 33 all out. | ||
| The Annual Dinner with its glittering Oscar ceremony began in that first year of 1974 and I can still remember the total bill of £123.45. In those days you could ask for a pint of beer, put 10p on the counter and still get change of a punch in the mouth... The first dinner had about 20 attendees, including in our now established tradition, spouses, partners and groupies. Gradually the numbers built up and the Oscars had more competition. From our inauspicious beginnings at Udimore, we were turning into the fierce, invincibles of today. | |||
In later episodes
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