Legendary umpire Dickie Bird recounted a memorable meeting with Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe in a wide-ranging interview in the Daily Mail.

An interview between Bird and BBC Yorkshire about his time during the COVID-19 pandemic went viral this year, accumulating over a million views on Twitter alone. In his interview with the Mail, Bird – who recently received his second COVID-19 vaccination – reflected on his life in the game.

In the interview, Bird spoke about his encounter with Mugabe prior to Zimbabwe’s first Test match in 1992.

“The teams were lined up and Robert Mugabe came down shaking our hands,” said Bird. “He got to me and said, ‘Are you a friend of Margaret Thatcher?’ I thought, ‘What do I say here?’ and then told him, ‘I know her very well, sir’. He said, ‘If you are a friend of Margaret Thatcher, you are welcome in my country’. He was surrounded by men with machine guns — it was a good job I said the right thing!”

The Yorkshireman also talked about his fondness for the Queen, describing a lunch with the monarch as the best day of his life. Bird said: “I was sat in the house one day and the phone rang. The voice said, ‘This is the master of the household ringing from Buckingham Palace, I have been commanded by Her Majesty the Queen to see if you are available to have lunch with her at Buckingham Palace’.

“I said, ‘If I’ve been invited to have lunch with the Queen, I’ll walk it from Barnsley’.

“I had to be there at 1pm and I arrived at 8.30am. The policeman on the gates said to me, ‘We’ve got to have the Changing of the Guard first — we can’t stop that even for Dickie Bird’. So I went into a little coffee shop and sat there for four hours. I then had a marvellous lunch with her and sat with her all afternoon. That was the best day of my life.'”

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