At the batting crease

British sport loves a rogue. George Best, Alex Higgins and Paul Gascoigne remain among the UK’s most admired sporting greats. They could surely have achieved more if they had managed to keep their appetites for women, drugs or drink under control, but their frailties seem to make them more like us. The cricketer Bill Edrich’s sheer dur­ability makes him very much part of the same club.

Edrich’s latest biographer, Leo McKinstry, roots his hunger for life in a single unfortunate moment from his formative years. In 1932, when Bill was sixteen, his family were forced to swap their home, Upton Hall in Norfolk, where his father farmed 500 acres, for a small cottage nearby. His father, who had an impetuous streak, had been bankrupted by the Great Depression, leaving the family reliant on food packages from their neighbours. “Conquests at the batting crease, the bar and in the bedroom became central to Edrich’s self-validation as a man”, McKinstry surmises.

Not much came easily to Edrich; that he became one of the most successful postwar batsmen is entirely because of his determination to prove himself. On the eve of his trial with the MCC at Lord’s, he sliced his hand on the family’s horse chain. He was given a contract not because of his batting, but because the coach was impressed by his courage when he removed his gloves and blood dripped from the wound. In his first ten Test innings he made just 87 runs, but found the mental fortitude to respond with a score of 219 when another failure would have seen him dropped. Even his womanizing took work. Compared with his glamorous teammate Denis Compton, to whom women flocked, Edrich was “a hunter who made a great deal of effort”, according to his England colleague Trevor Bailey.

Edrich escaped from numerous potential disasters, from waking up in bed with the wife of the chairman of selectors to fleecing teammates in a financial scam and leading perilous RAF missions during the Second World War. McKinstry is admirably clear-eyed about the emotional impact of his subject’s determination to prioritize his own pleasure. He walked out on four of his five wives. His children and step­children were baffled and hurt by his inconstancy.

A party in the middle of an unsuccessful Test match convinced the selectors to curtail his international career, trimming years from a record compromised by the war. Edrich was embittered by this, but in McKinstry’s retelling, he never showed contrition or awareness of the connection between his behaviour and its consequences. He died from a fall on the stairs at his home after a day-long party. Like the sporting carousers who came after him, he never knew any other way to be.

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