The remarkable case of Charlie Parker, whose career merits wider publicity

PAUL EDWARDS: For those of us who have long been lost to cricket a line in a scorebook amounts to poetry. It is not only Gloucestershire supporters who read c Hammond b Parker and are returned to blue afternoons at Nevill Road or the College Ground

Given a following breeze and a tolerant editor I had hoped to be reporting on cricket in Worcester this May, although there is nothing very startling in that. I rarely need any urging to visit New Road and even typing the name just now prompted fond memories of Shantry’s Match. But instead of watching Charlie Morris I have been writing about Charlie Parker, a Gloucestershire slow left-armer who took more wickets in his career than anyone in the history of the game except Yorkshire’s Wilfred Rhodes and Kent’s “Tich” Freeman.

The statistics of Parker’s career deserve wider publicity. He only started bowling spin after the First World War but by the time he retired he had taken 3,278 first-class wickets. In 1925 alone he took five in an innings and ten in a match more times than Simon Harmer, the excellent Essex spinner, has managed in his 11 years in the game. Between 1907 and 1935 Parker bagged a five-fer on 277 times occasions and took ten in a match on 91 occasions.

He also bowled a total of 7,719 maidens; Jimmy Anderson has so far delivered 8,317.5 overs in his entire first-class career. Having taken 467 wickets with his left-arm seamers before 1914, Parker picked up another 2,811 after the war until a modest return of 108 wickets in 1935 convinced him it was time to turn to coaching and then umpiring. He was 52.

But as I browsed through my Wisdens and smiled in gentle astonishment at Parker’s achievements, one line from the printed scores attracted my attention, if only by virtue of its frequency: c Hammond b Parker. The best cricket writers of the day – and even some of the lousy ones – drew attention to the potency of the partnership between Parker and one of the finest slippers our game has seen. R C Robertson-Glasgow noted the bowler’s skill before adding “and there was Walter Hammond roaming, predatory, at very short slip.”

For those of us who have long been lost to cricket a line in a scorebook amounts to poetry. It is not only Gloucestershire supporters who read c Hammond b Parker and are returned to blue afternoons at Nevill Road or the College Ground. But lyricism and history aside, I wondered how often that line had appeared and how its frequency compared to that of other dismissals.

Fortunately Andrew Samson, the incomparable Test Match Special scorer and statistician, was pleased to answer my query. He informed me that Hammond/Parker is, indeed, the most common fielder/bowler combination with 237 dismissals in the 285 matches the pair played together. The only other fielder/bowler combination above 200 is Frank Woolley/Tich Freeman with 222 in 499 matches while John Tunnicliffe/Wilfred Rhodes sent back 199 batsmen in 300 matches.

^{Charlie Parker took 3,278 first-class wickets}

As ever, though, Andrew supplied some extra statistics which extended my initial enquiry. For example, there are wicketkeeper/bowler combinations with more dismissals than Hammond/Parker. The most productive was the alliance between Les Ames and Tich Freeman which resulted in 82 catches and 259 stumpings. No, that isn’t a typo; Ames stumped more batsmen off Freeman’s leg spinners than Hammond snaffled catches off Parker.

There are two other notable combinations but both involve quicker bowlers and wicketkeepers. In the late 1920s and 1930s Surrey’s Ted Brookes pouched 250 catches off Alf Gover while in the post-war era George Dawkes, the Derbyshire keeper, caught 252 batsmen off the bowling of the laughably underrated Les Jackson.

“Quite simply the best six-days-a-week paceman in county cricket,” was Fred Trueman’s assessment of Jackson, who took 1,733 wickets in 16 seasons for Derbyshire yet played only two Tests for England. Bowling in the era of Bedser, Trueman, Statham, Tyson and Loader cannot have helped the former miner but it is still interesting to consider the career of a man who bowled with a low arm off a 13-pace run and who Ted Dexter described as the best bowler he ever faced.

Playing for Derbyshire probably didn’t help Jackson’s case just as staying at Gloucestershire didn’t increase Parker’s chances of playing more than the single Test for which he was picked. That, though, is another story, one well told in David Foot’s book Cricket’s Unholy Trinity.

Even when one takes a second look at the achievements of cricketers like Parker and Jackson some of the figures are astonishing. But what I like most is the way our game records co-operation with a degree of detail and diligence unmatched in any other sport. It ensures one thinks a little more about the relationship between a bowler and the rest of the team; how a wicketkeeper knows without being told that a googly or a quicker one is on the way.

A later Kent keeper, Alan Knott, always said he knew when Derek Underwood was going to bowl an arm-ball or a delivery that was even quicker than his normal medium pace, even when the bowler had given him no indication it was on the way.

That relationship between slower bowlers and the wicketkeeper is obviously central to a team’s success, yet it is often only made noticeable by its absence. In 1961 it was decided the Hampshire captain, Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie, should keep wicket to enable an extra bowler to be played. At first things went reasonably well – Ingleby-Mackenzie was no novice with the gloves – but then Hampshire travelled to Edgbaston to play Warwickshire: “It was a match I don’t particularly want to remember since my performance behind the stumps was ghastly,” wrote Ingleby-Mackenzie in his extraordinary autobiography Many A Slip.

^{Les Jackson took 1,733 wickets for Derbyshire but played just two Tests}

“I dropped two of the easiest catches ever seen in their first innings, which cost us four points, and I began to realise what a testing business six days a week wicket-keeping can be.” The quietly skilful and utterly dependable Leo Harrison was restored for the next game and nearly two months later Hampshire won the championship for the first time in their history.

Other games have similar partnerships: rugby writers talk about the link between scrum- and fly-halves; the football hacks rattle on about twin strikers - or at least, they used to in the 1980s. But in cricket the interdependence is recorded. In 1928 Freeman took 304 wickets in first-class cricket – yes, I know it’s an absurd number – but one wonders how many fewer he might have taken had not Ames been behind the stumps.

Does all this have any particular connection to our current situation?  Perhaps so. Cricket manages to be both an intensely co-operative game and a profoundly solitary one. That applies to the media as much as to the players. When we arrive at Emirates Old Trafford on a summer morning – typing those words wasn’t easy either – it is almost certain that Stan will be the steward on the gate and Dave will be on desk duty in the Media Centre.

Both will offer a cheery greeting and Dave may even have the lift doors open for us. As soon as we get to the press box Paul will tell us when the coffee is brewed and over the next two hours a stream of scorers, scoreboard operators, radio broadcasters and public address announcers will drift in and out of each other’s rooms, often for  a fairly desultory word or two.

All this, you may say, is extraneous to the main business of the day and you would be right. But during these weeks in which to be alone has become almost virtuous, some of us have craved the social interaction we thought we could take or leave.

We thought we’d miss the cricket and we were right. We miss it like hell. But we’ve missed the people, too.

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