"To be disliked again": Memories of Roy Hattersley, the Sheffield MP who loved Yorkshire CCC
SOME things transcend the political divide. Yorkshire cricket is one of them.
When Fred Trueman passed away in 2006, Roy Hattersley paid tribute to the Tory loyalist.
Writing in The Guardian, the former Labour deputy leader said that he was “an unambiguous admirer” of Trueman, whom he considered “the greatest fast bowler of his age - perhaps of all time”.
He added: “I recall seeing him on television at a Conservative rally during the 1983 General Election and thinking, unusually for me, that it did not matter that he worshipped Margaret Thatcher.”
Cricket was a huge part of Hattersley’s life; as his former boss Lord Kinnock put it, he was “obsessive and encyclopaedic" about Yorkshire County Cricket Club and Sheffield Wednesday also, his other great love, after his former right-hand man’s death at the age of 93.
“Results of either would dictate his early morning mood, usually lasting into the afternoon,” said Lord Kinnock. “He was therefore euphoric or deeply depressed at regular intervals.”
Hattersley’s admiration for Trueman came to the attention of this correspondent when writing a biography of the player in 2011.
I was exploring how Trueman, born on the edge of the Maltby Main pit in South Yorkshire, a true working-class hero if ever there was one, had no political affinity with his working-class roots, going on to live in the Yorkshire Dales and becoming something of a self-styled countryman.
A phone call to Hattersley proved helpful and illuminating.
He said that Trueman, who went on to become a famously outspoken summariser on Test Match Special, never missed a chance to tell him he was politically misguided.
“Fred was always so aggressive about it,” he laughed. “I’d meet him three times a year and we’d have a pint together and talk about cricket - particularly Len Hutton, my great hero.
“The conversation would always begin by him reminding me that he and I were of different political persuasions. It didn’t matter a bugger to me, but it seemed to matter to him.
“But in my experience, very few sportsmen, footballers or cricketers, who start off as working-class lads remain that after they’ve got some money in their pockets.
“I’m not saying everyone, but it’s certainly not unusual, and I suppose Fred had got on in life and thought everybody else could if they tried.”
Trueman once claimed to have turned down the chance to stand as a Conservative candidate in North Yorkshire.
Specific details were sketchy, though, and as with so many stories relating to him, it was hard to separate fact from fiction.
The thought of Trueman serving in Parliament was a bit like imagining Hattersley taking the new ball for Yorkshire and England.
“Er, er, Mr Speaker, er, I just don’t know what’s going off out there...”
Hattersley’s love for cricket came out in print.
When Yorkshire won the County Championship in 2001, their first title for 33 years and the days of Trueman, Close, Illingworth and Boycott, he wrote an essay in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack proudly entitled: “To be disliked again”.
He was referring to how, as a youngster growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, when the county’s cricket was strong, the club “attracted the animosity that goes with near invincibility”.
However, his hope that “with any luck, we will soon begin to attract it again” proved unfulfilled; Yorkshire did not win the Championship again until 2014 - and have not won it since the following summer, 2015.
Maybe there was a bit of the conservative - small “c” - about Hattersley after all.
He lamented in his essay that “Darren Lehmann, the star batsman of 2001’s success, is Australian, and I wish that Michael Vaughan had been born in Yorkshire”, sentiments Trueman would have endorsed.
No doubt the pair are discussing it all now in the great pavilion in the sky, the conversation having begun, as it always did, with Trueman reminding Hattersley that they were on opposite sides of that political divide.