Book review - A Long Half Hour by Stephen Chalke

The latest book that I've been sent for a review was always likely to be a pleasure, as I have been a fan of the author since his first book came out.

Stephen Chalke's Runs in the Memory is, without doubt, one of the finest cricket books ever written and his easy style makes it one that you can go back to time and again. The basic premise is so simple you wonder why no one did it before - take a sample of cricketers who played in the 1950s and let them talk to you about their favourite match. Mix in a liberal splash of laugh out loud anecdotes, together with stories that were in the press of the day and it is a recipe for a wonderful book. Within its pages is the legendary Derbyshire v Hampshire game that was completed in a day, the events told from the players' perspective.

Several others have followed in the intervening period, all of them written beautifully and doing great credit to their subject. I am a big fan of oral histories anyway, having read the wonderful volumes on the First World War produced by Lyn MacDonald after her chats with veterans over a number of years. One only wishes that Stephen Chalke had started writing twenty years earlier, so he could have done similar volumes on the game in the 1930s and '40s.

A Long Half Hour comprises extended articles on six of the players who made the earlier books so entertaining. Understandably there is some duplication, but the players concerned - "Bomber" Wells, Geoff Edrich, Eric Hill, Dickie Dodds, Ken Biddulph and Arthur Milton  - are brought to life by the author's writing.

A danger in this sort of book is that it descends into hero-worship, but Stephen Chalke presents the individual and is unafraid to mention the fallibilities and foibles that we all have. We find that Arthur Milton needed a challenge to play really well and that Geoff Edrich was not a fan of Cyril Washbrook. The trust of the players in the author is evident from what they tell him, confident that it will appear in the manner intended. Every page has fresh revelations and wonderful anecdotes, with the best perhaps being that on "Bomber" Wells, a character so large that he might well have been invented.

Boundary catches taken with one hand while having a cup of tea, the player tricked into using a bat filled with compressed sawdust and the captain who was unaware of his 'stand and deliver' bowling style. He walked in from mid-off for the first ball of the over, walked back to his position and walked in again, in time for the third ball! Wells retired with 999 first-class wickets, quite proud that while a good few had reached a thousand, no one else had pulled up one short. Then, after he retired, a statistician found he 'only' had 998...

Wonderful stuff and the stories keep coming throughout 128 pages of pleasure. The era is brought to life within its pages and the game seems in many ways different to the modern one, almost certainly the better for it.

A Long Half Hour by Stephen Chalke is published by Fairfield Books and is priced £9.50 on Amazon.