The complex character of Fred Trueman

FRED Trueman could never be other than himself. Result: he was often a caricature of himself. Just a year before he died, he was asked by Chris Waters, the Yorkshire Post’s cricket writer, the cause of his long and bitter split with Yorkshire CCC. After growling “How bloody long have you got?” he reeled off a catalogue of grievances from his illustrious playing career. Drawing breath, he added: “Then it’s all the little things. Like the car park attendants at Headingley, who won’t let you park even if you point out that you took 1,745 first class wickets for the club at 17.12. Absolutely un-be-liev-able.”

Fred, the author of a thousand hilarious quips, guaranteed to have any sporting dinner in fits of laughter with his endless fund of funny, not to say risque anecdotes, was sublimely unaware of the bathos of quoting his bowling statistics in the context of car parking.

Nor did he recognise the deep hole he dug for himself with what became his trademark observation as a summariser on Test Match Special: “I don’t know what’s going off out there.”

Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s cricket correspondent, swears that Fred once aired this grumble three times at a Test Match before a ball had been bowled. He was probably responding to team-bonding and loosening-up exercises, both anathema to Fred. But his inability to relate to the modern game led to his sacking from TMS – adding to his grievances.

Tellingly, 50 per cent of the letters received by TMS towards the end of Fred’s 25-year tenure were complaints against him.

Any “official” or authorised biography risks being a hagiography – a work of slavish homage. But Chris Waters has exercised firm journalistic independence to produce a fine, fair-minded and well-rounded portrait of the great fast bowler – by his own lights the greatest – who transcended his sport to become an icon of his age. In English cricket, only WG Grace and Ian Botham are comparable.

Drawing on impressively wide sources, in cricket, Fred’s family and elsewhere, Waters doesn’t shy away from some distinctly unappealing traits of his renowned subject. When it suited, Fred didn’t hesitate to “bounce” lower order batsmen, rarely showing concern when they were hit. He once claimed credit that belonged to another bowler, Richard Hutton, for an important breakthrough in a Test match.

And despite often complaining that modern cricketers didn’t seek his advice, he failed to turn up when one bowler accepted his offer of help.

Though a byword for flat-out effort at all times, there was at least one occasion, at Scarborough, when Fred failed to give of his best.

Upset at having been taken off as he neared his 100th wicket for the season, he refused to bowl when his captain recalled him. “Bollocks,” he told him. “You can stick your f***ing ball.”

Perhaps least attractively, Fred, in Waters’ words, “repudiated his modest roots”. Though keeping in touch with family members, he nevertheless virtually turned his back on Maltby, in South Yorkshire, the pit village of his birth.

And while decrying the snobbery that still bedevilled first-class cricket when he entered it, he veered towards becoming a snob himself. A ghost writer of his newspaper column told Waters: “I’ve seen him in the company of John Major and Ken Clarke and I think if they’d asked him to lick their shoes, he might have done.”

But, as Waters notes, Trueman’s story becomes all the more “powerful and poignant”

given his “humble origins”. He worked as a tubhauler, bricklayer and wall-tile maker before his cricketing talent came to the attention of Yorkshire CCC. But the club was slow to establish him, and its clumsy (mis)treatment of its world-class fast bowler truly earned Fred’s favourite dismissive expression: “un-be-lievable.”

AFTER taking Yorkshire to victory with a career best 8-68 in a game in his third season, Fred found himself in the second team – as 12th man. Alone among the counties, Yorkshire failed to send a congratulatory telegram when Fred a) broke the record for the number of Test wickets and b) became the first bowler to claim 300 Test wickets. The club also twice omitted to inscribe silver commemorative gifts, including his retirement present, towards which the club required him to pay more than half the £200 cost. Waters acutely observes: “Trueman and Yorkshire – although synonymous – were never really on the same wavelength.”

Reviewing Fred’s playing career, Waters inevitably revisits many well-chronicled controversies.

He entertainingly covers Fred’s later ventures, not only on TMS but in such unlikely roles as his “brief (month-long) and embarrassing”

appearance as a stand-up comedian at Stockton’s Fiesta Club. Waters says that friends considered Fred’s entrance routine, in which he burst through a paper screen as though bowling at the audience, “a prostitution of the artistry he’s shown on the cricket field”.

Of course Waters provides a feast of Truemanisms, real or imagined. No, he didn’t tell an Indian potentate to “pass the salt, Gunga Din”.

But, arguably better, he did say to Raquel Welch, when she bent down during the wedding of her son to Fred’s daughter (a surreal event if ever there was one): “Gerrup, we can see your knickers.”

But it is Waters’ probing into Fred’s background and psyche – what made him, and what made him tick – that gives his biography true distinction. Fred’s ebullience probably came from his mother – “a total showgirl”, according to one who knew her. But Fred emerges as a man of strong contradictions.

Seemingly gregarious, he was really a loner by instinct. He didn’t even drink much. Behind the bluster and bravado there was a naivety that made him an easy prey for jokes – not least on Test Match Special. There was also genuine feeling, often for others. When his first marriage was failing, largely because of his long absences, he explained to his wife why he turned out for charity matches on Sundays.

“Those matches I play are for little kids who can’t walk, little kids that can’t speak, they can’t see, they can’t hear.” Fred couldn’t bear that some children lacked the fitness that had enabled him to play cricket.

He initiated money-raising efforts to help his former bowling partner, Brian Statham. Towards the end of his life, but before his fatal cancer was diagnosed, he patched up a longrunning feud with Geoff Boycott. Waters’ sole meeting with Fred was to report a fond reunion of these legends and their distinguished former team-mates, Ray Illingworth and Brian Close.

When the conversation turned to Fred’s firstclass wickets, he declared: “I did take enough of the bastards. More than any other fast bowler in the history of the game.” When Boycott asked how many, Fred proudly replied: “I took 2,304 first-class wickets at 18.29.” He singled out his Test tally: “Three hundred and seven at 21.57 – and it would have been 500 if I had played all the bloody Tests I should have played. The selectors seemed more interested in picking decent blokes than decent bowlers.

It was un-be-liev-able.”

Fred was caricaturing himself again. Wonderful cricketer, stupendous character, complex man. All are within this splendid biography, which it is hard to think will ever be bettered.

• Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography by Chris Waters (Aurum Press, £20)