Jeffrey Hill

Nottingham Trent University

The fact of the matter is that the `real world' is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group.1

Denis Compton died on 23rd April 1997, St George's Day. He was one of a very small group of sportspeople who can be described as a `household name'. That is to say, he was known to people who had no interest at all in the sport with which he was connected. On the last Saturday of 1997 The Guardian newspaper attempted to place in a rank order of fame the `notables' (so called) who had died during the year: `we have decided to list', said the paper, `only those so famous as to need no more description or introduction than the mention of their name'. The list began: Diana, Princess of Wales; Mother Teresa; James Stewart; Denis Compton. It went on to list such luminaries as Robert Mitchum, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Billy Bremner, Deng Xiaoping and A.L. Rowse, who at number 21 was placed below Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, but above Charlie Chester.2 If this list proves anything then the name of Denis Compton, whose sporting prowess was at its peak some 50 years earlier, was still well-known to the general public of the late 1990s. The vast majority of this public had not known him personally, nor in many cases had they even seen him. This was equally true of people whose lives were concurrent with that of Compton. The extensive televising of cricket matches was only beginning when Compton came to the close of his playing career. His football playing was over before television coverage of the sport had properly started. Compton was known, therefore, through a series of carefully selected images, visual, linguistic and oral: newsreel sequences, press reports, biographical accounts, folk memories, radio commentaries and advertisements (especially for Brylcreem). These were the media through which the legend of Denis Compton was mediated to the public.

I

I want first to talk about the constructing of this legend through language. The language chosen to describe some sportspeople, especially cricketers, is the language of quantity and statistics. It presents their endeavour in an objectifiable and quantifiable form. The cricket writer Neville Cardus, who objected to this practice, would have been horrified to find, for example, the art of the cricketer Jack Hobbs reduced to mere numbers, as in Derek Lodge's publication for the Association of Cricket Statisticians.3 Sometimes the grand narrative is of a different order, emphasising hard toil and dedication which brings its eventual reward: sporting achievement is the outcome of a single-minded pursuit of excellence in the face of the many pitfalls, physical and moral, placed in the way of success. Success is portrayed as a triumph of the work ethic, or a Pilgrim's progress to the Heavenly City. The story is one of progress, of becoming.

The story of Compton eschews all this. There is no destination, no grand design. The language of the Compton legend is the language of being, rather than becoming. It is the language of Nature. Like Bernard Malamud's fictional baseball hero, Compton was a `natural'. A natural in the sense that he represented innate, intrinsic human gifts. As a footballer and a cricketer, the books tell us, he was untaught. His exceptional skills were evident before he was a teenager. Before he was 20 he was earning a living at both sports, and representing his country at one of them. E.W. Swanton resorted to the animal world for suitable descriptions of this precocious ability: `.. a natural player of games, who combined the eye of a hawk with an instinctive gift of balance ... no conscious process but an instinctive reflex action'.4 The former Middlesex player John Warr, remembering Compton at the Service of Thanksgiving held in Westminster Abbey, said: `He was a great improviser ... if he ever read a coaching manual it must have been upside down.'5 The Australian cricket journalist A.G. Moyes emphasized the physical pleasure of the moment: `I rather fancy that Denis Compton plays professional cricket and football for the fun of the thing. Earning his living is a secondary consideration - at least that was the impression.'6 Compton was a big run-maker, but the descriptions of his innings dwell less on quantity, and more on visual pleasure. `He lives for me' wrote Moyes, `not by the runs he has made, but for his manner of making them'.7 Style, uniqueness and abundance are the dominant ideas here. His `offi cial' biographer Tim Heald stresses time and again the speed at which he made his runs.8 Not ground out and manufactured through occupation of the crease, but flowing, indeed overflowing, from natural wealth. But like Nature as seen by the romantics he was also capricious, unpredictable, not governed by laws. He was, allegedly, a poor timekeeper. Several stories recount his failure to set off or to arrive on time for engagements. He once turned up at the airport for a plane to Australia with an out-of-date passport. His flaws were further exemplified in the stories of his apparent failure to master the routine of running between the wickets: chaos reigned - `yes, no, come on, go back'; it was said that he did not call for a run so much as open up negotiations, often wishing his batting partner `good luck' when setting off. Had he been as bad as this suggests he would never have made any runs at all. But the stories serve to register not fact but the myth of the individual who is able to live and succeed without regard to the mundane norms by which other people's lives are bound.

Compton's final autobiography, End of an Innings, published in 1958, perpetuated these myths, reinforcing aspects of what, by this time, had become the Compton legend. There was, for example, a visual expression of Compton's `philosophy', achieved through the juxtapositioning of two photographs: one of Don Bradman, the other of Len Hutton. The former was captioned `the killer instinct', and showed an alert predator. What immortal hand or eye could frame this fearful symmetry? The other is described as `joyless concentration' and suggests an ageing Hutton making his painful, martyred way through an innings, as through life.9 There seems little doubt that the inference to be drawn from this is that both poles represent something to be avoided: Bradman's killer instinct made of sport too serious a business - `there was a win-at-all-costs streak in him that could turn him into a less than likeable opponent' noted Compton10. Hutton's introverted caution and his tendency, when captain, to be pessimistic, also drew criticism from Compton. There was no joy in it. Compton attempts to strike a balance between them. Cricket should be about `happiness', as he himself put it in his Foreword to E.W. Swanton's sketch of him.11 End of an Innings is typical of many sporting autobiographies in the sense that it attempts to place the subject's life into a chronological order. It is a history of a life, and to that extent suggests patterns and developments and shape. But it is also episodic and contains little self-reflexion. There is no attempt to explain his success. His art is treated as a mystery, something not to be understood, not reducible to coaching manuals. Failure, as in the Australian test series of 1950-51 which, for Compton was disastrous - the depth of his career - cannot be explained, unless it is either by ill-fortune (a series of `unlucky' dismissals which, on another day, might have gone differently) or by nature (the famous knee problem). Just as Meursault's murder of the Arab in Camus' The Outsider is not an act that can be subjected to rational explanation, so cricket form cannot be intellectually reckoned. Indeed, like Camus, Compton often resorts to nature as the `explanation'. The sun figures prominently. He plays better `with the sun on his back'; this is a frequent Compton comment. Of the 1947 season he says:

I feel a different person, and find cricket almost a different and certainly a more pleasurable game, when the sun is shining down hotly and the perspiration begins to run down the back of my neck. That's when I really want to play cricket. The sun agrees with me. I tan deeply, going almost black ... 12

This is almost existential. Compare it with Camus' evocation of footballing memories in The Plague, one of the best descriptions we have had of the sensuous aspects - the sights, sounds, smells, the `feel' - of sport:

The sky was overcast and, glancing up at it, Gonzales observed regretfully that a day like this, neither too hot nor rainy, would have been perfect for a match. And then he fell to conjuring up, as best he could, the once familiar smell of embrocation in the dressing rooms, the stands crowded with people, the coloured shirts of the players, showing up against the tawny soil, the half-time lemons or bottled lemonade that titillated parched throats with a thousand refreshing pin-pricks.13

Perhaps the comparison with Camus - a `proper' writer - is fanciful, but there comes a point in writing about sport where dissecting, analysing, pigeon-holing is insufficient; it cannot convey the sensuous, the feel of the thing.

The language of the Compton legend has therefore many affinities with the language of romanticism; of nature rather than artifice. It was appropriate that the renowned advocate Norman Birkett, Lord Birkett of Ulverston, should think of Denis Compton to express his feelings about Wordsworth's poem The Happy Warrior:

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he

That every man in arms should wish to be?

- It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought

Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought

Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought;

Whose high endeavours are an inward light

That makes the path before him always bright:

Who, with a natural instinct to discern

What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;

Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,

But makes his moral being his prime care;

Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,

And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!

Turns his necessity to glorious gain;

In face of these doth exercise a power

Which is our human nature's highest dower;

Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves

Of their bad influence, and their good receives: 14

II

The legend of Compton is, however, historically-specific. It was appropriate that the peak of Compton's achievement and fame, and the origin of many aspects of the legend, came in 1947. In that season he exceeded both the previous record aggregate of runs scored in a season (Hayward, 1906) and the highest number of centuries scored in a season (Hobbs, 1925). This coincided with a summer of glorious weather.15 The bounty of sun and Compton's record scoring in 1947 stood in contrast to the political climate of the time. There was ample scope here for the legend of Denis Compton to take a political form, resting on the binary oppositions of natural endowment against rationing; plenitude against austerity; warm sun against cold socialism; Compton against Stafford Cripps (who took charge of economic affairs in September of that year). As Neville Cardus famously summed it up: `there was no rationing in an innings by Compton'. He became, for some, a symbol of what people were generally deprived of, just as H.E. Bates in The Darling Buds of May symbolised the plenty that Labour killjoys were rationing, or as the Ealing film Passport to Pimlico reproached Labour for its bureaucratic restrictions on the freeborn Englishman (or, in this case, Burgundian). The historian Peter Hennessy locates the origins of the Compton legend precisely in this context of austerity: `a talisman of hope', says Hennessy, `amid the drabness of much of life in 1947 Britain'.16

Was there a political undercurrent in all this? There is little doubt that Compton himself, like many professional cricketers, was apolitical and conservative in his thinking. Nor, of course, at the peak of Compton's career, was there any shortage of criticism directed at the Labour Party from which such a narrative might be fashioned. No longer was Labour, as Hugh Dalton had proclaimed in 1945, marching with destiny. The terrible winter of 1947 and the coal crisis, made worse by Shinwell's ill-preparedness as the minister responsible, gave way to what one historian has described as `the financial horrors of the summer of 1947'.17 In July, as Compton was striding towards his records, the decision to make sterling convertible (a condition of the American loan of 1945) caused a run on the pound; fears of dire consequences for economy and society were so great that convertibility was suspended only a month later, American agreement or no. Much criticism came from the popular press. The Daily Express, one of the leading anti-Labour platforms, had conducted a poll of its readers in the early summer and in May ran the headline: `One in three says: I want to emigrate'. 31 per cent of respondents had claimed that, because of lack of opportunity, government controls, low living standards and the weather, they would like to leave Britain. The favoured destination was South Africa, followed by Australia and New Zealand.18 However, although the Express was a consistent opponent of government policies, especially food rationing, there was little overt attempt to utilise the Compton legend as an instrument of propaganda. The most `political' Compton became was when he was taken up by the John Macadam column in the Express as an icon of English/British national pride. `Denis is the Happy Warrior' exclaimed the column's headline on the day after Compton had scored a century against the South Africans at Lord's in partnership with W.J. Edrich. Macadam lamented the fact that in all the world's sporting contests, except, as he put it, `the boxing fly-weight and the knur-and-spell titles', there were no British champions. Compton stood alone `... the Englishman, the Briton, the eternal athlete, the phenomenon ... this scion of a lost race.' What so impressed Macadam was Compton's innate ability: `Alex James', he said ` claims that he [Compton] is the best winger in Soccer ... He doesn't swot books to play golf. He just walks on to the tee and hits the ball. He affects no airs and takes drink and tobacco in the same easy stride as he takes sixes.' To link this British genius to the British people Macadam reminded his readers that Compton was not schooled in any elite institution: `He came from the Arsenal and Lord's ground staffs and developed his style on the Hendon By-Pass.' Here was a true-born English man of the people whom all could admire and who gave to a nation suffering from domestic privation and international loss of status a sense of pride. Macadam no doubt felt that he could with justice indulge in some blatant sporting chauvinism: `They say he is as good as Bradman with the bat. Rubbish! He is better than Bradman.'19

Though not party political there was nontheless plenty of sub-text here. In the legend of Compton there was being fashioned an idea of Britishness, perhaps even Englishness, which, in the context of the late 1940s, had a broadly political function. Macadam's populist tone was not surprising for a paper which affected a `man in the street' point of view in its challenge to government. In this respect Compton is interesting. In British life of the 1940s and 1950s the legend of Denis Compton was a story we told ourselves as a nation about ourselves: in Compton were inscribed myths of the British - our innate inventiveness, our geniality, our ability to combine skill with flair, our capacity to triumph without really trying. It is a story about a young man and the potential of youth but, at the particular historical conjuncture of reconstruction, austerity, and declining imperialism that Britain found itself in at this time, it perpetuated old ideas about Britain and the British. The message was: reach back into the past to find the values that will win the future. In this sense, the Compton legend was a comforting, re-assuring image of what Britain could achieve by re-asserting essentially conservative values.

In some respects he fitted the bill of a national hero in the post-war world. He came, as Macadam pointed out, from a working- class family in North London. Anyone from such a background who played for Arsenal and, still more, Middlesex was pitched into a very different context of social class and power, where the amateur/professional contrast was very marked. Lord's was the epitome of the Conservative Party at play, and even at Arsenal there was something of an `upper crust' atmosphere, with the Hill-Woods controlling the Board and `By Jove' George Allison - a non-footballer - controlling the team. Professionals were not expected to bridge the social gap. Most did not try. Middlesex has a long tradition of London working-class professionals from Patsy Hendren, through Denis's elder brother Leslie to Fred Titmus and Phil Tufnell. They have preserved their distinctive social identity, and even become `characters', whilst always deferring to the dominant group. Their presence affirms cricket's ability to unite prince and peasant, while at the same time confirming the existence of a society which continues to produce both princes and peasants. Denis, however, was socially enigmatic. He confessed that he never had any difficulty in assuming a middle-class accent; Compton never suffered the strangled vowels of Alf Ramsay or even Len Hutton, of the working-class man making the painful vocal transition into `respectability'. The Australian cricketer Keith Miller summed up the ease with which Compton seemed to cross social barriers: `Denis could mix comfortably with Kings and Queens and the working man. Everybody loved Comp.'20 In this there was a sense of the national hero also being a symbol of national unity - of owing no particular allegiance to any one faction or region, of being able to draw all together, of transcending social boundaries and at the same time doing all this at Lord's, the national headquarters and the core of the Establishment. So, whilst in some ways he went against the grain of Labour socialism, in other ways Compton seemed the very embodiment of Mr. Attlee's consensus.

It is, however, less straightforward than this. There were social, regional and gender themes in the Compton legend that worked against the idea of consensus. For one thing, the legend carries many elements of upper-classness. There was, for example, in that idea of his innate ability, a very close link with the idea of the amateur. Compton the professional was portrayed in terms that better suited the ethic of amateurism: natural ability rather than hard-won achievement; the pursuit of glory and greatness with a certain insouciance, not taking things too seriously or earnestly. These were the quintessential characteristics of the English gentleman who knew the boundary between natural skill and mere vulgar expertise. The Compton legend in this sense perpetuated many of the nineteenth-century ideals of the gentleman sportsman, who played for love not money. A.G. Moyes's description of Compton explicitly evokes this spirit. It is also strongly underpinned in the character of Compton's alter-ego, W.J. Edrich. Compton's sporting and social partnership with Edrich, who was an amateur, was presented as a union of kindred spirits, the `Middlesex twins', the two characters merged almost into one. As if to stress the inseparability of the two characters, Middlesex took the unusual step in the early 1950s of making Compton and Edrich co-captains of the county eleven. Even more than Compton, Edrich was the free-wheeler, the war hero, the devil-may-care hell-raiser, banished from the England team for staying up late and arriving back at the team's hotel the worse for drink, the very embodiment of that post-war British male, the so-called `man's man' depicted in films by actors such as Nigel Patrick and Kenneth More.

This metropolitan/amateur/masculine aspect of the legend rendered it problematical as an idea of national unity. Denis, unlike his brother Leslie, not only had no difficulty in losing his accent but moved readily into a clubbable world of public-school bonhomie; judging from Tim Heald's biography `old boy' seems to have been Compton's customary form of address to all and sundry.21 The persona exhibited few of those qualities that Richard Holt has shown us were the baggage of northern heroes.22 And Middlesex's Compton was not always well received in the North, especially in Yorkshire. The animosities beween the two counties, as Dave Russell has pointed out23, were too deep-rooted and ideologically contrasting for the Compton legend to be accepted in Leeds or Sheffield. When Compton twice dropped Eric Rowan in the Headingley test match of 1951 (Rowan made 200) it confirmed the Yorkshire spectators' view that southerners lacked concentration and grit. To them Compton was a playboy - the `Brylcreem Boy' - all show, no substance. When he was bitten by a dog while fielding at Bramall Lane the crowd advised him to `rub some Brylcreem on it'; one wag commented: `it's tekken Len Hutton months to train yon dog to do that'.24

Part of the suspicion that northern crowds harboured about Compton stemmed directly from the essential aspects of the legend: his unpredictability and spontaneity. These were not the attributes that had made the industrial revolution, nor built stable, family-based communi ties. Here was struck another discordant note. Compton was married three times, and before the first marriage had ended he had a reputation. Macadam in the Daily Express had portrayed him as a respectable family man, enjoying listening to his (first) wife playing Chopin on the piano and putting his son to bed with stories of cricket. But this image never became the dominant idea of Compton. Brylcreem ensured for him the status of matinee idol, with the degree of mystery required for such a star. The press stories (persistent but much less flagrant than for later sporting heroes) hinted at womanising. But that is all they did, as if the enigma was more interesting than the answer. How did Compton acquire that black eye in Australia? The `official' explanation (that he caught it on a garden tap) seemed improbably contrived, as though to maintain the mystery and keep us guessing about a possible irate husband. This, it seemed, was what the press thought the public wanted a man like Compton to be.

He was, essentially, portrayed from a male point of view. The Brylcreem advertisements do indeed show a matinee idol, but they speak to men, and they speak of a sexuality it is assumed all men admire. Would not we all do the same if we had the chance ? The womanising was `normal', legitimated by being framed in the context of `normal' male behaviour such as sport and drinking. Off the field Compton's natural habitat was presented as being the bar room. Compton in the bar, or going to the bar, emerges as a key motif in Tim Heald's biography. Having a drink, or thinking about having a drink, figures prominently in the many stories about Compton, and comes across strongly in End of an Innings. It is the ritual that seals friendships and resolves antagonisms. On opening the new Compton and Edrich stands at Lords in 1991 Compton allegedly asked: `How on earth could they erect two stands bearing our names without a bar between them?'25 Compton the drinker was perfectly captured in a television advertisement for Watneys Red Barrel beer in the early 1960s. He appeared fleetingly in the final scene, in a crowded bar into which the viewer was drawn by the camera, to be greeted by a welcoming but wordless gesture from Denis which clearly signified: `come in - what are you having?'. Here was no lounge lizard, but a convivial chap in his element which was, essentially, male company. There was therefore reproduced throughout the Compton legend a particular strain of British masculinity. And, moreover, in the context of gender relations and male hegemonies of 1940s and 1950s Britain, who is to say that this representation of manhood was necessarily rejected by women?

Race became a key part of the Compton legend, though it only fully surfaced after his playing career had ended. South Africa occupies a central place in the legend. In Compton's words he `married into South Africa'. His second wife was South African (of Lancashire descent - a Platt) and three sons of Compton still live in that country. His cricket record against South Africa is outstanding, and it was of course there that he made his famous 300 in three hours in December 1948. His vision of the country, though, was partial. He recounts, in End of an Innings, an arrival in Johannesburg after an Australian tour, remarking on how sunburnt he was: `my face burnt almost black'.26 Beyond this, however, his vision of the country is white. We can again compare Camus. Just as The Plague, a novel set in Oran, Algeria, contains no references to the local Arab inhabitants of that city, so Compton's descriptions of South Africa exclude any mention of the black population and the conditions under which it lived. His memories of South Africa are, cricket aside, bounded by white society and its sociability.27 This was not unusual at the time, but Compton learnt nothing and forgot nothing. His attitude became a source of hostility with the writer John Arlott, a liberal whose conversion to the anti-apartheid cause allegedly took place in South Africa at the very time when Compton was scoring the famous triple century at Benoni.28 When the campaign to boycott South Africa got under way in the 1960s Compton opposed it, seeking, along with many other cricketing notables, to maintain sporting links. By the 1970s, as opinion began to swing against apartheid, Compton became an increasingly isolated figure; his connection with the BBC as a television commentator caused some embarrassment to his employer. It was a measure of how much things had changed that in the Sunday Times the columnist Michael Parkinson was able to describe Compton as a `racist'. This was probably the wrong term. Compton suffered from a political simple-mindedness that caused him to cling to views that were at least 20 years out of date.

III

There are two points to make by way of a brief conclusion: one about sports story-telling, the other about writing history. In one sense, the legend of Denis Compton conforms to existing stereotypes of sporting heroism. If, as the structuralists would have us believe, there are only a dozen basic stories, there are probably less than half that number about sporting heroes. Those who write about them draw from a stock of characterisations that have made up the genre in the past. Heroes have to inhabit one of them, and writers do not try to invent new ones. Thus we are the victims of the structures, in this case linguistic ones, that - as Vico claimed long ago - we have ourselves created.

There is a danger of regarding the kinds of texts upon which this essay has been based as lightweight, banal, anecdotal, predictable. They would not, to be sure, achieve the literary canon. Even for the sports historian they might seem to contain little of substance; they have certainly been lightly regarded in our ranks. In one sense this is valid. But in another sense it underplays their value: read through them, and they contain an immense richness of symbolic or mythological meaning. Subject them to, not a literal reading, but a symptomatic reading, and their significance becomes great. They are rich in ideology.

There is also a point in all this for historians, and for the practice of history. Whether Compton the man was actually like the figure portrayed in the legend is not, I would suggest, the main point at issue for historians. Searching for the `real' Denis Compton, however he might be reconstructed through historical methodology, will always have an attraction for those interested in establishing `objective' truths. But this should not be allowed to mask the importance in society of the myths that surround sportspeople and others. Compton was famous in his playing days and remembered long afterwards because of stories and images that made up the legend, and which had a historical relevance in the Britain of the late 1940s and 1950s. Insofar as people were able to think about Denis Compton, the legend was the means by which it was possible for them to think about and know him. It was the language that gave us our thoughts about Compton. There was no other way. He was a text, his `readers' positioned by that text to `know' him in certain ways. And that, it might be suggested, is very largely what history is. There is no reality behind the texts of history, no history outside the texts, no substance other than that constituted by the texts. The historian's task is one of a constant interrogation of text, upon text, upon text. The `real world', as the American linguist Edward Sapir once told us, exists through the language which structures our thought. `We see and hear and otherwise experience ... because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation'.29 The legend of Denis Compton is one such language, alongside a myriad of others, which offers us a vision of a `real world' which we might, or might not, find realistic.

References

Arlott, John, Basingstoke Boy: the Autobiography (London: Fontana, 1992).

Arlott, Timothy, John Arlott: a Memoir (London: Pan Books, 1994).

Cardus, Neville, Close of Play (London: Collins, 1956).

Compton, Denis, How to Play Association Football (London: Foulsham's Sports Library, 1938).

Compton, Denis, Playing for England (London: Sampson, Low, Marston and Co., 1948).

Compton, Denis, End of an Innings (London: Oldbourne, 1958).

Compton, Denis, In Sun and Shadow (London: Stanley Paul and Co., 1952).

Daily Express, May - September 1947.

Fielding, Steven, Thompson, Peter and Tiratsoo, Nick, "England Arise": The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995).

Giller, Norman, Denis Compton (London: Andre Deutsch, 1997).

Heald, Tim, Denis: the authorized biography of the incomparable Compton (London: Pavilion Books, 1996).

Hennessy, Peter, Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (London: Vintage, 1993).

Holt, Richard, `Heroes of the North: sport and the shaping of regional identity' in Jeff Hill and Jack Williams eds, Sport and Identity in the North of England (Keele: Keele UP, 1996), pp. 137-64.

Midwinter, Eric, `The Mythical Season', The Cricketer (July, 1997), p. 55.

Moyes, A.G., A Century of Cricketers (London: Sportsman's Book Club, 1954).

Pearce, Robert, Attlee's Labour Governments, 1945-51 (London: Routledge, 1994).

Russell, Dave, `Sport and Identity: the case of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, 1890-1939', 20th Century British History (7, 2, 1996), pp. 206-30.

Swanton, E.W., Denis Compton: A Cricket Sketch (London: Sporting Handbooks, 1948)

Notes

1 David Mandelbaum ed, Edward Sapir, Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), p. 162.

2 The Guardian, 27 December 1997.

3 Derek Lodge, J.B. Hobbs: His Record Innings-by-Innings (Derby: Association of Cricket Historians, n.d.).

4 E.W. Swanton, Denis Compton: a Cricket Sketch (London: Sporting Handbooks, 1948), pp. 12-13.

5 Quoted in Norman Giller, Denis Compton (London: Andre Deutsch, 1997), p. 11.

6 A.G. Moyes, A Century of Cricketers (London: Sporting Handbooks, 1954), p. 182.

7 Moyes, Century, p. 184.

8 Tim Heald, Denis: the Authorized Biography of the Incomparable Compton (London: Pavilion Books, 1994), ch. 8.

9 Denis Compton, End of an Innings (London: Oldbourne, 1958), ch. 3.

10 Giller, Compton, p. 141.

11 Swanton, Compton, foreword.

12 Compton, End of an Innings, p. 36.

13 Albert Camus, The Plague (trans. by Stuart Gilbert, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), pp. 195-96.

14 E.D. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire eds, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), pp. 86-88.

15 This is the popular memory, at least. But Eric Midwinter has recently reminded us that 1947 was not a summer of unbroken sunshine. See `The Mythical Season', The Cricketer (July, 1997), p. 55.

16 Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 306.

17 Robert Pierce, Attlee's Labour Governments 1945-51 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 36.

18 Daily Express, 12 May 1947.

19 Daily Express, 32 and 26 June 1947.

20 Giller, Compton, p. 200.

21 Heald, Compton, ch. 1.

22 Richard Holt, `Heroes of the North: Sport and the Shaping of Regional Identity' in Jeff Hill and Jack Williams eds, Sport and Identity in the North of England (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), pp. 137-164.

23 Dave Russell, `Sport and Identity: the Case of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, 1890-1939' 20th Century British History(7, 2, 1996), pp. 206-30.

24 Giller, Compton, pp. 190, 194.

25 Giller, Compton, p. 112.

26 Compton, End of an Innings, pp. 147-48.

27 Compton, End of an Innings, p. 177.

28 John Arlott, Basingstoke Boy: the Autobiography (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 175; Timothy Arlott, John Arlott: a Memoir (London: Pan Books, 1994), pp. 70-71. Arlott had not travelled with the England team on that occasion but instead was taken on a visit to Johannesburg where he saw a black man kicked into the gutter by a white.

29 Mandelbaum, Edward Sapir, pp. 162.