“Not that one, the middle one,” yells out Dickie Bird to a bemused member of the ground staff, who is trying to move the third of four adjacently positioned sight screens.
He waves his arms in animated fashion, completely failing to comprehend why his instructions appear to be so bemusing to the person barely 80 yards in front of him. Details matter to umpires, even when they get them totally wrong. No doubt scorers as well, maybe even coaches, although, for much of Bird’s playing and officiating days, the coach was merely the vehicle that ferried the Yorkshire townies to the seaside Scarborough Festival for cricket, fish & chips, and several pints of bitter.
Umpire Dickie Bird watches Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee in 1981. (Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)
Yet there was no doubting Bird’s eye for detail at the business end, bedecked in his customary white flat cap and coat. There were few contemporaries more effective at the contortionist act of simultaneously watching both the bowler’s front boot and the batsman taking guard.
It’s a situation where the action inevitably unfolds in an instant: the ball thumps the pad, maybe instead there’s a faint hint of a snick; does the ball carry? The variables are many, and there is only a nano-second to compute them all as the bowler turns to give him both barrels. It could be the towering near seven-feet frame of Curtly Ambrose, “Come on, Dickie, man,” or Merv ‘the Swerve’ grunting and spitting through his ludicrous moustache; maybe even one of Yorkshire’s own, like Darren Gough, pleading for Bird’s benevolence as though he were some kind of white-clad deity. It made no difference. He treated them all with the same unimpeachable fairness, regardless of their cap badge or the trim of their sweater. In return for that, he held the unwavering respect of the players.
A hundred years ago, the great Neville Cardus wrote an essay about Middlesex and England cricketer ‘Patsy’ Hendren. In it, he laughed at the absurdity of such a carefree batting spirit being saddled with the Christian name Elias. It smacked of Sunday school and obligation, whereas the nickname the crowds gave him exuded uninhibited exuberance. I think Cardus would have thought likewise about the idiosyncratic Bird, who was always destined to be a Dickie, rather than a grey, monotone, book-keeping Harold.
Bird’s eccentricities perhaps were not for everyone. But you could never doubt that they were the truest manifestation of his character. The personality he projected to players and fans alike was never less than an honest reflection of who he was inside. There is a genuineness and a magnetism to people like Bird who are both consciously conformist and unconsciously un-conformist. Their little idiosyncrasies and oddities are so ingrained that they scarcely seem to be aware of them. This becomes even more visible in a world increasingly preoccupied with a more confected form of eccentricity, one that can be defined as no more than shallow, look at me attention-seeking. These people’s antics are nothing less than boring, despite their utter desperation to be perceived otherwise. But Dickie, well, he was never boring.
It’s now almost thirty years since Bird last officiated in a Test match (Lord’s, June 1996, for those that admire neatly boxed detail). That feels an uncomfortably long time to compute, but such is the curse and blessing of longevity, to be gradually sidelined and slip away from view whilst still living. A man from history, still lurking like a ghost in the present. Like a Normandy veteran or a Battle of Britain pilot wheeled out only at specific times and places to provide a brief, living link to the past, and then it’s back to being obsolete again. A man out of time. A living statue to the past. We take comfort in them still being with us, but we stop really seeing them. Robert Redford left us just a few days before Dickie. How many of us lazily assumed he was already dead?
Back in Bird’s umpiring heyday, it was all very different. It is hard not to smile about it and perhaps get a little misty-eyed, especially if you happen to be here in England and losing the battle with middle age. Memories of Bird come adorned with other permanent markers too. All of them held together by the sound of BBC television and the unmistakeable tones of its Soul Limbo soundtrack, performed by Booker T. & the MGs. How did an American soul-funk group ever manage to inveigle its way into being the instrumental embodiment of Test match cricket? It must stand as the biggest act of stealth prior to England Rugby filching Swing Low, Sweet Chariot straight from the Bible drawer of American gospel music.
Back then, Tony Lewis would have been sat comfortably in the studio. Maybe Tom Graveney beside him as well. Both former England captains running down the clock with a stilted ten minutes of small talk, before throwing Ritchie Benaud the ball from the Commentary Box End. There, the camera would pan on Dickie chatting to the bowler. He’d be all nervous energy and smiles; eager to get started.
The game never got old for Bird. He was like the employee who turns up every day at work after forty years with the same curiosity and passion that he possessed on his first day. In his every thought, action, and movement, you sensed that the game meant nothing less than everything to him. Even on the days when the cricket was dull, or the bowlers and weather were acting up, he was still that nervous, bright-eyed kid batting in the nets in Barnsley with Geoffrey Boycott and future chat-show king Michael Parkinson. Cricket was Bird’s absolute world, and it was impossible not to love him for it.
It was so all-consuming that it left little room for anything else in his life. There was no wife or children, only cricket. His time away from the game was spent quietly with his sisters and nieces, or holidaying in the same unglamorous Devon hotel every year for decades. It was only really the summer game that brought him out of the shadows, that radiated him from a quizzical, bumbling nervous wreck into someone of purpose. “The only time I ever feel in control is when I cross that white line,” he once remarked, to the surprise of almost no one.
In James Hilton’s much-loved novella Goodbye Mr. Chips, there is a scene at the end where Chips lies in his deathbed and one of the other characters laments how sad it was that the elderly schoolmaster had “never had any children.” Only for the old man to suddenly stir and reply, “I’ve had thousands, you know, and all boys,” before reeling off a list of former schoolboys who had long since grown into men. Chips was married to the school and its endless production line of pupils. He was as much a part of it as its walls and playing fields.
That’s how it was with Bird and cricket. If ever there was a person married to the game, it was Dickie.
His arithmetic as an umpire at the highest level was compelling: 66 Test matches and 69 ODIs, including a trio of World Cup finals. It eclipsed a professional county career that started with youthful promise but faded to obscurity. He only hit one ton for his native Yorkshire (being dropped immediately after), before, after just thirteen first-class appearances, he opted to take his chances with the lower-profile Leicestershire. Just one more century in a total of 93 games in all, and an average that barely scraped twenty, was final proof that, as a batsman, he wasn’t a success.
It’s interesting to think that if Dickie had left it at that, then his obituary would have extended to no more than a two-line remembrance in the next edition of Wisden. We can all be glad that in umpiring he found his métier. At the end, it can be no surprise that such a character should lose his wicket in the nervous nineties. But no one who loves cricket would have begrudged him a final, well-earned century.
Garry Whitehttps://https://ift.tt/VtiowSA Dickie Bird: Cricket’s ‘Mr. Chips’
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