Tom Graveney, one of England’s greatest post-war batsmen, died on November 3, 2015. Here we remember his long and sometimes controversial career by revisiting his obituary from the 2016 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
GRAVENEY, THOMAS WILLIAM, OBE, died on November 3, aged 88, nine days after his brother Ken. When it came to earning marks for artistic impression, or inspiring lines of poetic enchantment, few England batsmen have ranked higher than Tom Graveney. Not everyone was keen to rhapsodise: many of cricket’s more pragmatic minds – Len Hutton and Peter May among them – remained immune to his charms, and doubted his temperament for Test cricket. Like David Gower, Graveney became the subject of anguished national debate.
Perhaps only in England could a player of such natural talent have been treated with suspicion: Richie Benaud, Ian Johnson and Frank Worrell insisted he would have been an automatic selection in their sides. It was hard to argue with his weight of runs: in a career lasting more than 20 years, he scored nearly 48,000 at almost 45, including 122 centuries. Of English players since the war, only Geoff Boycott has been more prolific. And, in a fragmented Test career that began in 1951 and ended in 1969, he scored almost 5,000 at 44, with 11 hundreds. These were hardly the figures of a dilettante.
Graveney had been vindicated in his second coming as a Test batsman, but he knew it could not last. His benefit year was in 1969, and a businessman offered him £1,000 to play in a Sunday charity match at Luton – on the rest day of the First Test against West Indies at Old Trafford. What happened next was for ever disputed. Graveney insisted he called Alec Bedser, the chairman of selectors, explaining the situation; when he was refused permission to play in the benefit game, he asked to be left out of the Test squad. When his name was included, he assumed Bedser had agreed to his absence. It was only as he soaked in the bath on 56 not out at the end of the first day in Manchester that he was told the ban remained. Determined to collect his fee, Graveney took a desultory part in the match at Luton, but retribution was swift: next day, while he was in the field, the Old Trafford PA announced he had been summoned to a disciplinary hearing at Lord’s later that week. It was his 42nd birthday; he knew his international career was over. He was officially banned from the next three Tests, and never chosen again.
He stayed on at Worcester, where he had assumed the captaincy, until the end of the 1970 season, and was then briefly player-coach of Queensland. He was for many years the landlord of a pub near Cheltenham racecourse, and spent more than a decade as a BBC commentator, rekindling his love of the game. His job as an ICC match referee ended when he was appointed in 1992 to a West Indies-Pakistan series, and the Pakistan Cricket Board excavated some injudicious remarks he had made in the wake of the Shakoor Rana affair: “They’ve been cheating us for 37 years.” His greatest honour came in 2004, when he was the first former professional cricketer to be named president of MCC.
Perhaps the most famous of the many tributes to the fragile grace of Graveney’s batting, of which the cover-drive remained his signature shot, was by Alan Ross, who discerned “a player of yacht-like character, beautiful in calm seas, yet at the mercy of every change of weather”. Following the deaths of Bob Appleyard and Frank Tyson earlier in the year, he had been the last survivor of the stellar squad that brought home the Ashes in 1954-55. It was the end of a glorious era in English cricket.
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