Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero

For all his many faults, the game has been richer for his presence.

2 ‘A Very Quiet Boy’

There can be few more depressing streets in England than Milton Terrace in the village of Fitzwilliam, near Wakefield. Several of the two-storey, red-brick properties are boarded up or derelict, while the shell of a burnt-out car lies along the gutter. Many of the local residents seem without jobs or hope. Truancy among the children is rife, police drugs raids common.

Number forty-five, Milton Terrace, is now as bleak as the rest of the houses in this brick-built warren of despair. Yet this neglected edifice was once home to one of Britain’s greatest sporting legends. For almost forty years Geoffrey Boycott lived here, from his early childhood until his mother died in 1978. But when Boycott was growing up in Fitzwilliam in the forties and fifties, the same air of abandonment did not hang over the street. With most of the men working at the local Hemsworth colliery – now long closed – there was a strong sense of community and neighbours knew each other well, a spirit also engendered by the much closer family ties of that era. As Boycott wrote in his own Autobiography in 1987: ‘As I have got older I’ve realized that growing up in a community like Fitzwilliam did me a lot of good. In many ways I was lucky to experience a sense of belonging and togetherness which seems to have been lost in so much of life nowdays.’

Geoffrey Boycott – his straightforward Yorkshire parents dispensed with the frivolity of middle names – was born in Fitzwilliam on 21 October 1940. At the time of his birth, his parents did not actually live in the village but in neighbouring Ackworth. In Britain of 1940, because of the lack of antenatal facilities, home births were usually a working-class necessity rather than a fashionable middle-class lifestyle choice. So Geoffrey’s mother, Jane Boycott, delivered her first-born in the home of her parents in Earl Street, Fitzwilliam. He was a healthy child, weighing eight pounds, ‘a smashing little kid with curly blond hair’, in the words of his friend from Ackworth, George Hepworth, who remembers visiting the newborn Boycott.

Both Geoffrey’s father Tom and his paternal grandfather Bill were employed in the local pits. As president of the Ackworth Working Men’s Club, Bill was a figure of some standing in the local community. The Boycott family originally hailed from Shropshire but had come to West Yorkshire in 1910 in search of work in the coal industry. One Fitzwilliam resident, Arthur Hollingsworth, remembers them both. ‘I worked on the coalface with old Bill Boycott, he were a grand chap. Geoff’s father Tom were also a gentleman. He were a roadlayer down pit, and he used to look after ponies. He were a quiet chap, very harmless, never liked to cause any friction. Never did much talking either, unlike his son.’

When he was three years old, Boycott’s parents moved from Garden Street, Ackworth, to Milton Terrace, Fitzwilliam. Though money was short, his childhood appears to have been happy. He indulged in most of the pursuits followed by boys of his age, cricket and football in the street, trainspotting, going to the pictures, playing with his two younger brothers Tony and Peter. ‘He definitely had ball sense from an early age,’ says George Hepworth. ‘I was five years older than him and I remember once, when he can only have been about two or three, I nipped over the wall, took his ball out of yard and then played with it in the street with his cousin, Gordon Naylor. It was only little plastic football, but he created such a fuss, running to the gate and demanding it back.’ His aunt, Alice Harratt, remembers him as ‘a quiet boy, pleasant and polite, who kept himself to himself, and always tried to avoid trouble. He was bright as well, and was very neat, always smartly dressed. He became a choirboy and altar server in the Anglican Kingsley parish church.’ One of his Milton Terrace neighbours from boyhood, Bernard Crapper, recalls a less angelic side of Boycott: ‘Everybody got into fights in those days. We had a gang in our street and a couple of streets down were the enemy. We might throw a stone at them and they’d throw one back. He could look after himself, Geoff. It was the way we were all brought up.’

Much of Geoffrey Boycott’s outlook on life was shaped by his upbringing. The long hours and permanent danger endured by his father inspired his famous work ethic and titanic self-discipline. It is also probable that the intensity of Boycott’s ambition was fired by his desire to escape the austerity of a Yorkshire mining village. Sensing early on that he had a special talent for cricket, he could not afford to squander it and thereby lose the opportunity to build a new life for himself. ‘It’s better than working down pit,’ Boycott often used to tell fellow professionals, when they complained about their lot. And Boycott’s delight in luxury and the accumulation of wealth is understandable in a man who lived in a house with an outside toilet until he was 25.

But the mining background cannot entirely explain the peculiarities of Boycott’s character, that strange mixture of toughness and sensitivity, boorishness and charm, passion and dourness. After all, many others in the cricket world grew up in exactly the same sort of environment: Fred Trueman, Dickie Bird, Harold Larwood to name but three. When I put it to Doug Lloyd, an Ackworth local with long experience of Boycott, that economic circumstances might provide a clue to Boycott’s attitudes, he exploded: ‘We all went through those experiences, work down pit, outside toilets, we’ve all been brought up that way round here, not just Geoffrey Boycott as he likes to make out. Everybody in this area has been in the same position, learning to rough it. When I left school, what did I do? Went down pit. Boycott didn’t. He worked in an office. He were really quite fortunate.’

Part of the answer to the riddle of Geoff Boycott lies in the huge influence his mother Jane had over him. Theirs was an intensely close relationship, so close that Boycott never considered leaving the family home while she was alive. Even when he was an international sporting star in the seventies, she still washed and ironed all his laundry. ‘I owe it all to Mum,’ Boycott has often said, and there is no doubt that Jane doted on her eldest child, doing everything she could for him. Not surprisingly, he says that he resembles his mother much more than his father, believing that he inherited her characteristics of fortitude and resolution. ‘She was a very, very determined lady, with a lot of inner strength in a quiet way,’ he has said. ‘She would never be easily got down.’

Boycott may have also inherited his notoriously sharp tongue from his straight-talking mother. Local Fitzwilliam newsagent Harry Cordon told the Yorkshire Post in August 1977, the day after Boycott scored his hundredth century: ‘His mother comes in here a lot, a marvellous lady, but like everybody in this part of the world, she’s not averse to calling a spade a spade. I suppose Geoffrey himself is very much like that, and that’s why some people may not have taken to him.’

The attention that Jane lavished on young Geoffrey may have had a number of paradoxical consequences. One was the feeling that, with such unquestioning parental support, he could achieve anything he wanted – psychiatrists have often referred to the almost messianic sense of purpose that can grip an eldest son who is close to his mother. But on the negative side, the intense love may have also made him suspicious of the outside world, leading him to appear a loner, unable to trust others. Throughout most of his playing career, the only two places he appears to have felt totally safe were either at home or at the batting crease. His neighbour and childhood friend from Fitzwilliam, Bernard Crapper, recalls how Geoffrey’s mother appeared over-solicitous towards her son: ‘She was all right, but she was over-protective of Geoffrey. She was always coming out to see where he was, checking who he was with. She and Geoffrey were very close. I was in and out of his house, used to play in his yard. But then, after an hour or so, his mother would come out and tell Geoff he had to come in.’

Even worse, Geoffrey may have become somewhat spoilt, at least in emotional terms, a trait that could have lasted to this day. One television producer told me: ‘The impression I have long had of him is that of a spoilt child, the brat who always wants his own way.’ Despite wartime rationing and low wages, Geoffrey was treated generously by his family. His uncle Albert Speight – Jane Boycott’s brother – recalls: ‘When he was born during the war, things were very hard to get. My parents used to collect all the sweet coupons so that Geoff would have some chocolate. You see, with him being the first grandson in the family, it was a tremendous boost.’ Even his shoes were polished by his parents.

Such a warm atmosphere may have provided Geoffrey with a security that few other children enjoyed. Yet at times, it seems that it was almost smothering, creating a mood of claustrophobia. In fact, Boycott occasionally voices his dislike of the pattern of family and community life in which he grew up. Before the onset of cancer, the themes of freedom from commitment, not being tied down to one place, ran through his adult life. In an interview on Radio Five in November 1998, when Nicky Campbell asked him about his ‘unconventional’ lifestyle, he said: ‘I grew up in a mining community, saw everybody have kids, have greyhounds, pigeons, an allotment and I wanted to travel.’ Again, cricket offered the means of escaping such a narrow existence.

Some observers from Fitzwilliam would argue that the most telling characteristic Boycott took from his mother’s side of the family was the Speight gift for causing social friction. ‘The Speights could be a bit obnoxious. They had this sort of tough, ruthless attitude,’ says Bernard Crapper. Arthur Hollingsworth, the local newsagent, is perhaps most revealing of all on this subject, since he knew and worked with both sides of the family: ‘Geoffrey was not a Boycott. The Boycotts were very different from the Speights; they were quiet, whereas the Speights were as awkward as bent nails. I used to drive to his grandfather, old Ned Speight, in my pony and cart to deliver a tub of coal for him. And he wouldn’t give you the sweat off his brow.’

Whatever the feelings about the Speights, two of them, Boycott’s mother and his uncle Albert (known as Algy), were to play a crucial role in the early development of his cricket, which soon became the driving force of his life: his uncle by introducing him to league cricket and his mother by conducting games in the backyard of 45 Milton Terrace. In the 1850s, it had been W.G. Grace’s formidable mother Martha who famously encouraged her children’s initial steps in cricket in the family orchard. Ninety years later, in the 1940s, Jane Boycott was to act in a similar fashion, organizing playing sessions at the rear of the house with just a bat, a bin and her two younger sons, Peter and Tony. ‘Mum kept on making my brothers and I practise shots and techniques in the backyard until we learned every shot in the book,’ Boycott said in 1963.

Because of his special talent for cricket, his parents made considerable sacrifices to further his career: buying him equipment, paying for cricket lessons and helping him through grammar school. But there was no sense of resentment from his two younger brothers at the support Geoffrey was given. Peter Boycott told me, ‘All three of us were treated exactly the same way by our parents. Yes, Geoff got extra help with coaching but as far as Tony and myself are concerned, there was absolutely no favouritism.’ Tony, the middle son, is three years younger than Geoff, and worked as a fitter in the coal industry before taking early retirement. Peter, eight years younger than Geoff, followed his father’s advice ‘not to go down pit’ and works as a transport manager. To this day the Boycott brothers remain close. ‘There has never been any rift in our family. Geoff puts great store by loyalty. He has always been there for us, a great brother, and, likewise, if he wants help on anything, all he has to do is pick up the phone,’ says Peter.

Both Peter and Tony have been useful cricketers without aspiring to the heights achieved by their elder brother. Tony, an opening batsman and left-arm spinner, is still playing, while Peter, a former middle-order batsman, now umpires in the West Riding League. ‘Geoff and I are different characters,’ says Peter. ‘If I had shown the same total dedication as Geoff I might have made it as a professional. But, from his earliest days, Geoff was so self-motivated, determined and single-minded. Anything he puts his mind to, he succeeds at. I’m very proud of him.’

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Boycott, from his earliest years, should have had an enthusiasm for the game, for cricket then was as much part of life in Fitzwilliam as the colliery. Given the great strength of Yorkshire in the 1930s, winning the county championship seven times in nine seasons up to 1939, few local schoolboys could have ignored the game. And cricket then was far more important to our national culture than it is today, especially in the north of England. But what was unique about Geoffrey Boycott was the depth of his passion for it. As his childhood friend from Fitzwilliam Malcolm Tate recalls: ‘Going back to his very earliest days, he were always cricket mad, just like me. We used to go for long walks in the fields around the village and we would talk about nothing but cricket for hours on end.’

His ability was also obvious to Bernard Crapper, though it was helped by the fact that Geoff, as a result of his family’s support, had better equipment than the other boys in Milton Terrace: ‘We used to play games in the cobbled street. The wicket would be a dustbin or a chalk mark on the wall. Only Geoff had a proper bat, the rest of us had to make do with crude bats made from planks or wooden fencing. For bowling we used a well-worn tennis ball with no fur. The ball would bounce off at awkward angles from the cobbles, shooting away in one direction, or keeping low, or going straight up in the air. I have often thought that is where Geoff got his great technique from dealing with the ball coming at all heights and directions. The rest of us would never last very long, with the dustbin often rattling after only three or four balls but Geoffrey, of course, could stay there for quite a time. He did used to sulk if he got out and could be a bit tempestuous.’

Cricket was also played on the tarmac playground of Fitzwilliam Junior School, which Boycott attended from the age of five. The school adhered to the traditional approach of the time, strong on discipline and short on sympathy. Bernard Crapper, who later became chairman of the governors of Fitzwilliam Junior, remembers the headmaster, Mr Perry, as a ‘big, ruddy-faced man, who looked like a farmer. He had hands like shovels, with one finger missing from the right one. When you’d get those hands whacked across you, you really knew you’d been hit.’ But, in the memory of Crapper, Boycott seems to have been a good pupil. ‘Geoff was a little bit better behaved than the rest of us. I think that was his mother’s influence. In lessons he would knuckle down. He was certainly a bright lad, good in all subjects, even in music with his recorder. He always seemed to understand everything.’

But some elements of the Boycott temperament were apparent even then. According to Crapper: ‘I thought he was a decent lad, and I usually got on well with him. But I knew he could be awkward and was prone to moodiness. I could generally tell what mood he was in and then I would leave him alone. Towards others he could have a standoffish attitude. Some people at school thought he was big-headed, probably because of jealousy at his ability, “He thinks he’s somebody just because he’s got a bat,” they would say.’

Before he had reached the age of 10, Boycott suffered two setbacks of the kind with which his life has been littered. The first occurred when he was just seven years old. Playing with some friends on the railings at the back of his house, he slipped and fell on a mangle lying in the neighbour’s garden. There was no obvious external injury but he bled internally through the night and had to be rushed to Pontefract Hospital the next morning. Due to the foresight of the doctor examining him, a ruptured spleen was diagnosed and an emergency operation was performed to remove the damaged organ. As his uncle Algy puts it, ‘In those days anyone with a ruptured spleen was very lucky to survive and he was in a critical condition. But he was taken to the hospital just in time and he pulled through.’ Situated in the upper left side of the abdomen, the spleen filters bacteria out of the bloodstream. Therefore, anyone who has been through a splenectomy is far more prone to infection. According to some medical experts, the risk of being infected, especially with septicaemia, may be eight times higher. This largely explains why Boycott used to be reluctant to tour south Asia, an attitude that blighted his Test career in the seventies.

The second, even more serious, misfortune occurred in March 1950, when his father was badly injured working down the mine. Tom Boycott’s job as a roadlayer meant he was responsible for laying and maintaining the underground tracks on which the coal tubs ran. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in November 1998, Boycott described what went wrong and the sorry aftermath: ‘Some idiot sent these empty coal tubs along the line while my dad was still working on it at the coal face. Just mangled him up. Broke his back, broke his pelvis, both knees, ruptured his insides. What a mess. It destroyed his life. From then on he was a broken man. He had a rolling, shambling gait instead of being a six foot one inch upright man.’ If any such accident happened today, the employee would, rightly, receive substantial compensation. There were no such rights for miners in 1950 and, despite Tom Boycott’s poor health, he eventually had to return to his job underground. ‘There were just promises, promises from the union but no compensation. He only got a few tomatoes, eggs and apples when people called,’ recalled Boycott. His father never properly recovered from his injuries and died prematurely, seventeen years later. This experience further hardened Boycott. Not only did his family have to go through severe financial hardship as they struggled on his father’s meagre sick pay immediately after the accident, but also the treatment by both the union and employer must have made Boycott all the more distrustful of those in authority. Throughout his adult life he has clashed with such figures, whether they be Yorkshire committee men, England selectors, BBC bosses or French judges.

Yet one of the hallmarks of Boycott has always been his willingness to battle through any crisis. Even as a child, he let neither family disaster nor personal health problems disrupt his pursuit of success at cricket. So, at the age of nine, he was selected for the Fitzwilliam Junior School team. The following year, he was its captain. His developing reputation as a talented young cricketer was further enhanced when he won a national newspaper competition, organized to coincide with the 1951 Festival of Britain, for the best all-round performance in a schools match. He had been nominated by Fitzwilliam Junior after taking six wickets for 10 and scoring 45 not out from a total of just 52 in a fixture against Royston. The prize, appropriate for a would-be Yorkshire and England opener, was a Len Hutton bat.

Outside school, Boycott’s increasing passion for cricket was deepened by his uncle Algy, who was captain at Ackworth Cricket Club. ‘I talked cricket with him from his earliest days,’ he says, ‘and on Saturdays, for a day out, I would take him on the bus to the ground, maybe give him some tea there, and then he would have some lemonade and fish and chips on the way back. That’s really how he first got involved in the game. He was so single-minded as a child. Nothing else mattered to him except cricket.’ George Hepworth, who was secretary of Ackworth for more than thirty years, says that Algy was Boycott’s first real mentor: ‘I can see the pair of them now, Algy with his Brylcreemed hair, and little Geoff alongside, carrying Algy’s case and boots. It was Algy who really fed his passion for the game. He was a wise old bird, great at encouraging youngsters.’

George Hepworth has a clear recollection of an early game that Geoff played for the Ackworth Under 15s. ‘We were playing against Featherstone and I was captain of the side. Geoff was only about nine years old and he came in as last man, with eighteen still needed. He stayed there and we managed to scrape fifteen runs towards the target before Geoff got out. His mum and dad had been watching and there were tears streaming down his face. He thought he had let everyone down but in fact he had batted well for a little lad. And I thought to myself, This kid, he’s got a touch of steel in his makeup, a look of eagle in his eye. I had a gut feeling then that he would go right to the top.’

Recognizing that Geoffrey had genuine ability at the game, Algy suggested that he should receive proper training at the coaching clinic at Rothwell, run by the former Somerset leg-spinner Johnny Lawrence. The combined cost of the cricket lessons and the bus fares to Rothwell came to about 10 shillings, more than Boycott’s parents could afford, so Algy and other relatives assisted. Boycott’s cricket lessons involved not only a considerable sacrifice by his parents but also real dedication on his part, for he had to make two long bus journeys plus a mile’s walk to reach the clinic, often in rain or snow.

Johnny Lawrence’s indoor school, the only one of its kind outside London, was little more than a large shed with a wooden floor. It had no proper heating, which meant near-freezing conditions on a winter morning. Each of the two nets had different surfaces: one was a turning wicket, the other fast. What the school lacked in facilities and warmth was more than balanced by Johnny Lawrence’s talent as a coach. A deeply religious man who refused to play on Sundays, he had a gift for conveying both enthusiasm and technical advice. Jack Birkenshaw, who attended the school with Boycott, says: ‘He was a great coach, one of the best I have ever known. He loved the game, had a passion for it, made you enjoy it, taught you all the subtleties of batting and bowling.’ George Hepworth agrees: ‘Johnny was an absolute genius as a coach, always able to end a session on a positive note. He should have been put in charge at Yorkshire but the establishment derided him because he hadn’t played for England. It was all bunkum. He was something special.’

An impeccably straight technique and confidence against spin were two of the legacies of Boycott’s early years at the Rothwell school. The Yorkshire left-arm spinner Don Wilson, another Lawrence pupil, remembers: ‘When I bowled at Geoffrey, I could never get him out. He had no strokes but an unbelievable defence.’ This is Jack Birkenshaw’s verdict: ‘He was very defensive and I would not have said he would have ever been a Test cricketer then. There were a lot better than Boycs at that age. But he just kept coming along and improving all the time.’ Throughout his playing career, Boycott continued to turn to Lawrence for advice and support. Before an overseas tour, for instance, he would usually have several intensive net sessions at the school.

Boycott was soon able to show his increasing skills in a proper playing arena. When he was twelve, his uncle Algy managed to find him a place in the Ackworth second team. It was not an auspicious start for he made precisely nought but he played well enough in the following game to win his debut for the first team at the end of the season, making nine in a match at Goole. At the start of the next summer, 1954, still aged just 13, he played his first game for the Ackworth senior team at home. George Hepworth, on leave from duty in the RAF, was playing in the match. ‘We were 87 for 7 when he came in and we took our total to 119, making the scores level. Then I was out to the last ball of the over. The very next ball Geoff put his foot across and cracked a terrific cover drive, which rattled the boundary railings.’ Boycott’s winning hit brought his first press notice, a mention in the local Pontefract and Castleford Express, though thanks to the scorer misspelling his name, he appeared as ‘Jeffrey Boycott’.