Trevor Bailey

64
Trevor Bailey bigraphy, stories - Cricketer

Trevor Bailey : biography

3 December 1923 – 10 February 2011

Trevor Edward Bailey CBE (3 December 1923 – 10 February 2011) was an England Test cricketer, cricket writer and broadcaster.

An all-rounder, Bailey was known for his skilful but unspectacular batting. As the BBC reflected in his obituary: "His stubborn refusal to be out normally brought more pleasure to the team than to the spectators." This defensive style of play brought him the first of his nicknames, "Barnacle Bailey", but he was a good enough cricketer that he has retrospectively been calculated to have been the leading all-rounder in the world for most of his international career.

In later life, Bailey wrote a number of books and commentated on the game. He was particularly known for the 26 years he spent working for the BBC on the Test Match Special radio programme.

Legacy

He remains the only player since the Second World War to score more than 2,000 runs in a season and take 100 wickets, a feat he achieved in 1959, and he achieved the all-rounders’ double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in a season eight times, a post-World War II record he shares with Fred Titmus. He was selected as one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1950. He is also one of three players (the others are Fred Titmus and Ray Illingworth) to have scored 20,000 first-class runs and taken 2,000 wickets since the Second World War. According to the retrospectively-calculated ICC cricket ratings, for most of his career, Bailey was the best all-rounder in the world. In the individual disciplines, his bowling saw him achieve the higher ranking, as high as eighth in the summer of 1957.

Doug Insole, his one-time captain at Essex, described him thus: "Trevor was quite a stroppy lad in his early cricketing years, and a bit of a rebel. He was a very intense character – we used to tease him about that in the dressing room, and he did mellow over the years." Retrieved 13 February 2011.

Simon Briggs wrote: "There was little comfy or cosy about his cricket career. Rather, he fitted into a long tradition of hard-nosed English pragmatists – a lineage that runs from WG Grace, through Jardine and up to Nasser Hussain… To Bailey and company, the best way to honour the gods of cricket was to commit your heart and soul to the fight. For them, a Test match was a contest between two groups of warriors. Its entertainment value was almost irrelevant."

He was renowned for his slow scoring in Tests against Australia, Neville Cardus writing of one innings in his book Cricket of Vintage: "Before he gathered together 20 runs, a newly-married couple could have left Heathrow and arrived in Lisbon, there to enjoy a honeymoon. By the time Bailey had congealed 50, this happily wedded pair could easily have settled down in a semi-detached house in Surbiton; and by the time his innings had gone to its close they conceivably might have been divorced." He was nicknamed "Barnacle" for his implacable defensive batting.

In Cardus’s piece on him in Close of Play, first published in 1956, he was more complimentary: "Some cricketers are born to greatness. Bailey achieved it… He conquers by tremendous effort… Yet Bailey… loves to attack any bowler… He has made catches bordering on the marvellous… It is no small thing to be a Trevor Bailey in a world of anonymous mediocrity."Neville Cardus, Close of Play, Sportsmans Book Club, 1957, pp64-66.

Bailey died in a fire in his retirement flat in Westcliff-on-Sea on 10 February 2011. His wife, Greta, survived. They had two sons and one daughter.

The chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Giles Clarke, described him as "one of the finest all-rounders this country has ever produced", while Jonathan Agnew, who worked with Bailey on Test Match Special, wrote of him: "dogged batsman, aggressive bowler. Intelligent cricketer. Wonderfully concise pundit. Great sense of humour."

Writer and broadcaster

After retiring from cricket in 1967, Bailey continued to play for Westcliff-on-Sea Cricket Club for many years and also became a cricket journalist and broadcaster. He was the cricket and football correspondent of the Financial Times for 23 years.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/965de652-35ca-11e0-b67c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1E3O6fqJZ He was a regular on the BBC’s Test Match Special from 1974 to 1999, where fellow commentator Brian Johnston nicknamed him The Boil, based on the supposed Australian barrackers’ pronunciation of his name as "Boiley". (The Daily Telegraph gives an alternative source for this nickname from the pronunciation of his surname by the East End supporters of the Walthamstow Avenue football team.) During his retirement he would watch Westcliff-on-Sea Cricket club play at their Chalkwell Park Ground where he had played many times for school, club, and county.