Walter Hammond, perhaps England’s greatest batsman, died aged just 62 on July 1, 1965. Fittingly, his Wisden obituary was written by one of the giants of cricket writing.
Read more Almanack tributes
Previous Almanack tribute: Fred Trueman: English cricket’s most enduring & best-loved character
When the news came in early July of the death of W. R. Hammond, cricketers everywhere mourned a loss and adornment to the game. He had just passed his 62nd birthday and had not played in the public eye for nearly a couple of decades, yet with his end a light and a glow on cricket seemed to go out. Boys who had never seen him said, “Poor Wally”; they had heard of his prowess and personality and, for once in a while, youth of the present was not sceptical of the doings of a past master.
“Wally” indeed was cricket in excelsis. You had merely to see him walk from the pavilion on the way to the wicket to bat, a blue handkerchief peeping out of his right hip pocket. Square of shoulder, arms of obvious strength, a beautifully balanced physique, though often he looked so weighty that his sudden agility in the slips always stirred onlookers and the batsmen to surprise.
Wally had a quite pretty chassé as he went forward to drive; and, at the moment his bat made impact with the ball his head was over it, the Master surveying his own work, with time to spare. First he played the game as a professional, then turned amateur. At no time did he ever suggest that he was, as Harris of Nottinghamshire called his paid colleagues, “a fellow worker”. Wally could have batted with any Prince of the Golden Age at the other end of the pitch – MacLaren, Trumper, Hobbs, Spooner, Ranji – and there would have been no paling of his presence, by comparison.
