Sir George Mallaby Recalls His Cricket

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30085, 20 March 1963, Page 11

Sir George Mallaby Recalls His Cricket

[From the London Correspondent of “The Press”)

QIR George Mallaby, a former United Kingdom High Commissioner in New Zealand, provided abundant evidence recently .that he is as brilliantly witty a speaker as he ever was. In proposing the toast of “Cricket” at the LondonNew Zealand Club’s annual dinner, during which the club’s president Lord Cobham was welcomed back to England, Sir George Mallaby contributed to an occasion memorable for the richness of the addresses—with Lord Cobham himself in sparkling form, the New Zealand High Commissioner (Mr T. L. Macdonald) playing right down the line of flight, and with former England captain, Mr G. O. (“Gubby”) Allen, and the president of the M.C.C., Lord Nugent, full of wise saws and modern instances. “We tend to become tedious and longwinded when we talk about the things we love,” said Sir George Mallaby, “and for me cricket has always been a tragic, remorseless, pitiful, unrequited love affair, because, for all my devotion. I was never any good at it.”

Though hope sprang eternal for him—at least at the start of each new season, a century to a cuckoo's call always eluded him. For him it was humdrum, plodding

cricket, and at the end of each season he had the uncomfortable feeling that people were looking at him and saying; “His record taken all in all is not a very good one; “He seldom hit a crooked ball and seldom stopped a straight one.” But what caused Sir George Mallaby perhaps more distress than anything else was that the few wickets he did manage to take were inevitably attributed either to outstanding fielding or to miserably inept batting.

He had always hoped to see in the headlines, “Mallaby Murders Middlesex,” and “even in arthritic old age that ambition has not left me,” he said.

Describing his reminiscences as “shamefully personal and a little embarrassing among men who can play cricket,” Sir George confessed: “These great men make me nervous.” Then, without showing any degree of nervousness whatsoever, he recalled the story of the bowler whose delivery, if it had gone far enough, would “probably have been a wide.” Cricket, he said, had brought so much fresh happiness to him and to his friends. Social reformers and do-gooders might profitably reflect on the light and happiness that street cricket could bring to slum-dwellers. “But green

grass—English grass and New Zealand grass—was the true setting for cricket. That is the setting in which you and I will always think of iL”