Colin Cowdrey was not just one of England’s greatest batsmen, he was also one of the most influential figures in the game. His Wisden Almanack obituary explored a complex character.
Cowdrey, Michael Colin, Baron Cowdrey of Tonbridge, CBE, died on December 4, 2000, aged 67, after suffering a stroke earlier in the year.
Michael Colin Cowdrey was successively known to the world as Michael Cowdrey – when Wisden reported on him as a 13-year-old schoolboy prodigy – Colin Cowdrey, Sir Colin and finally Lord Cowdrey, when he became the first English cricketer to be given a peerage. In an era of outstanding English batsmen, he was the most durable, with a Test career spanning more than two decades. On his journey from teenage phenomenon to sporting statesman, he was at the heart of the game for half a century: Cowdrey was the first man to play 100 Tests, captained England 27 times and scored almost 43,000 first-class runs – 7,624 of them in Tests.
In later years, he played a major role behind the scenes in marrying the traditions of international cricket with modern demands. Yet it was still possible, and only mildly unkind, for one of his contemporaries, Fred Trueman, to describe Cowdrey on his death as “a terrific talent who never fulfilled his potential”. Amid the triumphs there was often a vague sense of unease: of unexpected failures, opportunities not taken. Despite everything, Cowdrey never achieved the greatest accolade English cricket can offer: he toured Australia six times, which equalled a record held by Johnny Briggs, but never once was he selected as captain; every time a more forceful figure shoved him out of the way when it mattered.
In retirement, his involvement was thus more successful than that of all the men preferred to him for on-field leadership: May, Dexter and Illingworth all failed as chairman of selectors, and Smith was an absurdly invisible tour manager. Cowdrey’s reputation as a kindly elder statesman grew and grew: he was knighted in 1992 and in 1997 became a life peer, the second cricketer after Learie Constantine to be elevated to the House of Lords. He enjoyed himself there but never quite bestrode the Lords in the way he bestrode Lord’s: there turned out not to be time, and perhaps his non-cricketing destiny should have been as an ambassador rather than any kind of politician.
His last great service was to initiate “The Spirit of Cricket”, the Preamble to the 2000 Code of Laws. Through his last years, he would often travel hundreds of miles to make beautifully crafted speeches to cricketing gatherings, expecting no money at all. “He loved to be loved,” said a friend, and perhaps a man, however great, needs reassurance forever when he spends seven years of childhood apart from his parents.
He was loved. And the memory of him in later years – portly, a fraction stooped, his fey voice ever-solicitous about all-comers – will remain, almost as indelibly as the memory of him in his pomp: fairly portly even then, caressing the best bowlers’ finest efforts past cover as though it were the simplest trick in the world.
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