Fred Trueman: English cricket’s most enduring & best-loved character – Almanack

Fred Trueman was not just a magnificent fast bowler, he was one of cricket’s greatest personalities. His Wisden obituary in 2007 remembered a character who was more complex than he appeared.

Fred Trueman was – ignoring his own grander claims – probably the greatest fast bowler England has produced. He was at the heart of the England team for more than a decade, during which time it usually beat the world. He was also English cricket’s most enduring and best-loved character, representing a certain kind of Yorkshireness – chippy, forceful, sometimes humorous – that spread his fame far beyond the game and maintained it long after his retirement.

Harold Wilson, the former prime minister, called him the “Greatest Living Yorkshireman”, and only an unusually fulsome Wilson-admirer would have come up with another contender. Jokes, anecdotes and myths clung to him all his adult life: he was the most talked-about figure in the game until Ian Botham arrived in the early 1980s; and until Andrew Flintoff stole the moniker 20 years later, he was instantly recognisable by the simple syllable: “Fred”.

Trueman was born in a terraced house just outside Stainton in the mining country south of Doncaster. He weighed, if not a ton, then a stone when he was born, which must have been an omen. His father Dick was a former stud groom, forced down the pits by the hard times, and weekend cricketer. He was determined his children would do better. Fred’s determination with a ball in his hand was obvious from the start: “We never got a chance to bat properly and it made us cry,” his sister Florence recalled later.

Yet the image was substantially false. He drank sparingly: what Fred loved was chat, especially about cricket, and most especially about himself. He was also curiously insecure, and soft-centred. He was deeply hurt both by being voted off the Yorkshire committee in 1984 in the midst of the civil war over Geoff Boycott, and by his sacking from the TMS team in 1999. Once again, there was no goodbye, and this time it was not his choice. His speeches became less ribald, more elegiac.

In 2004, at the 364 Club lunch at Headingley, to honour Len Hutton, he made a much-admired tribute, then broke down before the end, overcome by the memories. Fred Trueman died on the morning of a one-day international against Sri Lanka at Headingley. (England were terrible, so it was just as well he wasn’t on the radio.) When the news was announced, there was prolonged, appreciative, applause for him before the minute’s silence.