Mind You, a Lot can happen in a Week ....

The last post on this blog talked about the extraordinary goings-on on Day 2 of the South Africa vs Australia Test match in Capetown last week. I can’t recall a day quite like it ever in the 50 years of my cricketing memory.

South Africa went into lunch on 49 for 1, and the story goes that their coach, Gary Kirsten then left the ground to visit his wife and third child who had been born a day or so before. He returned after three or four hours, midway through the evening session, to find his team on 72 for 1. Wondering whether there had been rain at the ground which had restricted his side to a paltry 23 runs since he’d been away, he found out that he’d missed 20 wickets and two complete innings.

I only hope that’s a true story!

The next day the pundits on Sky TV were Rob Key and Dominic Cork, both very good ex-England players. Even after a night to ruminate on the sensational day’s play neither of them could offer a real explanation of why such a spectacular implosion had occurred, and on Day 3 the match went on with centuries for both Amla and Smith, and in the end, South Africa won easily.

Later that day, I looked at my Twitter feed to see what the cricketing world had made of it all, and alighted on a report from an Australian writer I followed. His few paragraphs analysed it perfectly simply and logically. A difficult, but not impossible pitch, some classy bowling from the South Africans and a complete abrogation of the defensive and strategic fundamentals of playing the game from most of the Australian team, allied to an increasingly lemming like sense of panic down their batting order. The piece was at the same time deceptively simple, accurate, logical, incisive, perceptive, well-argued and beautifully written. In impeccable English, it addressed, dissected and answered the questions Key and Cork couldn’t.

The writer was an ex-Somerset player who captained England once. After his career ended, he upped sticks and settled in Australia, becoming one of the most outspoken, intelligent and thoughtful writers on the subject, a man with a real conscience. His name was Peter Roebuck, and I thought he was one of the best cricket writers on the planet. To me, his articles and books were something special.

One of his books

A few hours after witnessing this extraordinary day and writing this piece, he threw himself off the sixth floor of his hotel and killed himself. No doubt the reasons will come out in time, although I can’t say I really want to know. His beautiful writing is over, and for me, that is that.

For almost 100 years, the number of people involved in the game who have taken their own lives is horribly high. Men who have played the game at the highest level like Stoddart, Shrewsbury, Gimblett, Robertson-Glasgow, Bairstow, Trott, Iverson, Barnes all ended their own lives. And now Peter Roebuck joins that ghastly list. Does the game create conditions in men’s minds which ferment and develop a sense of despair or hopelessness resulting in suicide? Or is it the sort of game which tends to attract the melancholic and introspective - individuals who end it all with a gun, a noose or a box of pills? I simply don’t know.

All I know is one minute you’re reading an article thinking “Spot on Peter, Nail on the head again”, and the next thing you hear is that he’s gone. It’s all desperately sad. The closing words in the last article he wrote on the day he died were “Mind You, a lot can happen in a week.”

Right again, Peter.

Tabs:

peter roebuck, cricket, suicide

All the Elevens

11/11/11, or as our contrary American cousins insist, 11/11/11.

I know it’s only a number, but there’s something rather disturbingly “Druidy” about it. I’m a reasonably sane individual, but it’s been on my mind for a few days now. This morning, after a bit of test work, I ended up taking a picture of my alarm clock at the appointed hour. I’d even taken the trouble to ensure that the section on the clock face which showed the ambient temperature didn’t disturb the awful symmetry, by the simple ruse of putting it in the fridge for a while. I can’t believe I’m the only one who did that. I’m not a nerd, for Goodness sake!

Another 88 years before it all repeats!

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been wondering if something cataclysmic was going to happen to the world on this “Once in a Lifetime” day. We’ve seen the economic situation in Europe disappearing off, in the words of more than one noted pundit, “to Hell in a hand-cart” with Italy clutching on increasingly desperately for economic survival. Was this the day when the whole Euro debacle would suddenly detonate?

On a much more important level than this however, I’ve been watching the South Africa vs Australia Test match in Capetown, and seen the game twist and turn over 24 hours in a way that has never been seen in a Test match for over 100 years. Yesterday, the fanatic statisticians had something approaching multiple orgasms over the number of cricket records which were re-written during the day. I woke up early wondering what was going to happen today on the field in South Africa. Clearly yesterday was only a cricketing “clearing of the throat” for today’s man event. The TV was on early from 8am – I wasn’t going to miss today’s drama.

It turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax, although things got a bit spooky as 11.00am approached. Now cricket is the game where superstitions and fads run riot. You’d think many cricketers were on the way to the funny farm if you knew what went on in their minds when the game is being played. X will only if he puts his left pad on first. Y will only go out to bat if the toilet seats in the dressing rooms are down. Z would only bat with a red handkerchief in his pocket, while A would only venture into the middle if he had his lucky silver clover leaf with him.

Out on the field, if a player or a team is doing well, you sit tight. I mean, you don’t move, even if the Nature is calling you increasingly stridently. Moving or standing up, even if you are sitting way up in Row 324 of the Grandstand, immediately transfers the vibes to the player and destroys his concentration, and that would never do.

The weirdest ones however are the “nasty” numbers. In Australia, the “Devil’s Number” is 87. Over there, they firmly believe that this figure is toxic, and to be avoided like the plague by any batsman. They get quite nervous when this is their score. The odd thing is that when some guy delved into the statistics of the 2000 Test matches that the World has played since they started in 1877, it was actually the numbers around 87, ie 85, 86 and 89 which were far more often the scores when batsmen perished. But no. 87 it was, and is.

In England, the mystical number is 111, hence its importance for today of all days. For reasons which no-one really knows this number is referred to in the cricket world as “Nelson”. Now, as far as I know, Nelson never played cricket, but it’s a totally ingrained cricketing superstition the world over. There are resonances and echos in a match when a side gets to 222, or 333, referred to as Double Nelsons and Triple Nelsons, but the full force of the heathen pressure is felt on 111.

It gets worse – totally bizarre in truth - because the “release” for Nelson is to stand on one leg while the team is on that score. I mean, seriously, you’ve got 24 grown men (including the 2 umpires) playing a game at the top International level, and, on 111, you can see a smattering of them standing around like a white flamingo. David Shepherd, one of the great umpires of all time, who was a tad on the large size would stand at the bowler’s end, hopping from one leg to another while the game went on around him for as long as the score was 111. It must have completely put the batsman off. You couldn’t make it up.

Today, of course, I couldn’t fail to wonder what was going to happen. The Italian financial crisis had abated a little so it wasn’t going to be that. James Murdoch wasn’t on in front of the MP’s committee just yet, and we’d already had an asteroid the size of Belgium whizzing past the Earth a few hours before, so clearly there must be something else on the cards. The time crept up to 11.00am, and South Africa ominously reached the score of 111 for 1. Could they hang on for another 11 minutes without scoring a run? If that happened the scorers would set fire to themselves and combust in a blaze of glory. However, this “David Eyke” moment passed about 9  minutes too early, and the two South African Batsmen went on their way scoring runs.

The scoreboard at 11.11

The South African Team Bench Flamingoes

On the field a few minutes later, the score-boards finally flashed up the time showing 11.11am on 11/11/11. To a huge cheer, the crowd all stood up on and tried to balance on one leg for the whole minute, with a fair amount of “beer induced” wobbling not helping greatly, but they really tried their hearts out. It was really rather touching, and just the thing you’d expect a cricket crowd to indulge in. Great to watch.

And exactly how many runs do you think South Africa needed to score to win this extraordinary match at that precise minute, when this Stand of Flamingoes (for that is the Collective noun for a herd of these pink things) got to their unsteady human feet?

Yep – 111.

Tabs:

11/11/11,
cricket,
nelson

Bletchley Park - Station X

A building with a tale to tell

This could well be the most important building in Britain. It’s situated in an anonymous little town in Buckinghamshire, about 100 yards from the main London to Birmingham railway line. To look at, it’s a second rate mid-Victorian Pile built in what can only be described as the “Dog’s Breakfast” style of architecture. But it’s not the building that’s important here, it’s what went on in it inside.

This is Bletchley Park, also known as Station X, the home of the UK’s code-breaking activity in the Second World War. If it hadn’t been for the work of the people in this building, this blog, if it existed at all, would be written in German. What was done here 70 years ago quite probably made the difference between winning and losing the war. It certainly shortened it by two years, some say four. It is a unique piece of this country’s history.

Here, people like Dilly Knox, Tommy Flowers, Gordon Welchman, Max Newman, John Tiltman and Alan Turing, together with the other 8,500 people who worked there systematically broke the German Enigma codes, and the even more complex Tunny Codes to put the British Government in a position where they often knew what the German High Command was intending to do, before that message had reached their own German generals in the field. This one achievement tilted the war dramatically in the favour of the Allies.

A German 4 Rotor Enigma machine

A Lorenz 12 rotor machine used by Hitler for his
personal High Command "Fish" codes

The issue which worried Churchill above all others in the War was the possibility (and for much of the time, the probability) of the country being starved into submission by lack of food, fuel and equipment coming over the oceans from other countries around the world. The astounding change in the rate of detection and subsequent destruction of the German U-Boat fleet, when Enigma was working, made all the difference. Who knows what the result would have been if the men and women in Bletchley had failed to break the code? Quite simply, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

If you read about the way they all achieved this, and the unbelievable intellectual power and unremitting dedication that was needed to make it happen you cannot fail to be totally astounded.

There are enough books and articles available on the internet where anyone can find out all the details they could wish for, but two things keep knawing away at me. Firstly, how did it all remain a secret? Over 12,000 people worked at Bletchley Park during the war, ranging from weirdo-intellectual giants whose brains were the equal of anything anywhere in the world, to local girls from just down the road, who did the filing, and served in the canteens. The secret of what went on there did not get out into the big bad world until the mid 70s, some 30 years after the end of the war. You couldn’t imagine that happening today.

Everyone involved at Bletchley Park had signed the Official Secrets Act, and the stories about how they all kept their mouths firmly shut is almost unbelievable in the Twittery, Facebooky world of today. There are stories of people who went to their graves with their children not knowing what they had done there. One of the elder guides there yesterday told me that they had sent out Reunion invitations not too long ago to people who had worked there. A married couple had received two letters, each addressed to one of them. Inadvertently they had opened the letter addressed to the other, and it was only then that they both became aware that their partner had been working there. Extraordinary.

An original 1940s poster

I suppose it was what happened in war. Your country was in the gravest danger of invasion, and you knew that, if the information you were handling became known to the enemy, the results could be utterly catastrophic to the future of England. People working there didn’t even talk to the man or woman on the other side of the Hut they worked in unless their work necessitated it. “Careless Talk costs Lives” wasn’t an idle slogan. After the war, they were all told to say nothing about it to anyone including loved ones and family, and this was exactly what they did – to a man.

The other thing which I still cannot come to terms with is why the Germans went all the way through the war not realising that they had been compromised. I suppose it stems from the fact that, when they developed the Enigma system, they believed it was infallible. And, if you are German, that is it. It had been designed to have in excess of 158,000,000,000,000,000,000 different combinations in the way the settings could be made, so logically, there was not enough time in any wartime scenario for any decryption to be made. So because they could not dream of solving it themselves, then the logical consequence was that nobody else could do it either. It’s an arrogance of course, and one which quite possibly lost them the war.

In truth, their own human fallibility and the genius of British intellectual brainpower undid them. Their operators, once or twice, made huge errors which allowed massive shafts of detective light to shine into the darkness of the code’s secrets. And once the light had shone once, that was all the Bletchley brains needed. They were in.

For all the Germans’ formidable skills in so many areas, their code and cypher organisation were riven with political infighting, and there were something like 17 different organisations within Germany using the system. They were not all as diligent in their operations of the system as they should have been. The Navy was by a long way the most professional, and the Army and Air Force were the most slap-dash.

On more than one occasion, Admiral Dönitz, the German Navy Chief, suspected that their codes had been compromised and cracked, but others around him convinced him that this was not correct. At one time, because of  Dönitz’s feeling that the codes were vulnerable, the Navy had a further, 4^th rotor installed in their Enigma machines, a development which suddenly left Bletchley Park completely blind to the German Navy codes for a period in 1943. Still the Germans didn’t twig what was happening in deepest Buckinghamshire.

The huge volume of data needing decoding made the need for more and more mechanisation an imperative to allow Bletchley Park to deliver the plain text of the German codes to the Intelligence services promptly. Information has a half-life of usefulness. Knowing that a convoy is going to be attacked a day after its ships had been sunk was not much use. So they set out to automate the process to allow massive increases in the speed of decoding, and hence the usefulness of the intelligence they discovered. Go to Bletchley, and you will see fabulous pieces of machinery they developed to do this, codenamed in the weird way this country has - Bombe, Heath Robinson and Colussus.

  

A replica of the "Bombe" machine

The rear of the "Bombe" machine, showing
the internal workings

After the equipment was destroyed following orders from Churchill at the end of the war, volunteers have painstakingly rebuilt Colussus. Forget what our American friends will tell you, what you are seeing when you crowd into the hot electronic valve heated room in one of the rickety wooden huts there is the world’s First Electronic Programmable Computer. It looks like something out of a Dracula Science Fiction film, but, in the early 40s when it was built by Tommy Flowers and his men, it was a staggering achievement. So, just go to Bletchley, admire and pay homage. And also wonder why Tommy Flowers’ name is not revered throughout this country.

Colussus showing the Tape reading section

Colussus - World's first Electronic computer

You will have realised by now that I think Bletchley Park is a stunning place to visit. The atmosphere there reeks of the 1940s. The shabby huts, many of them with peeling paint and rotting windows, and the austere Wartime no-nonsense architecture of the outbuildings takes you straight back 70 years. The guides there are superb. The subject of code-breaking, at this level, is not an easy one, and they wear their knowledge lightly and can answer any question you throw at them.

Outside Hut 6

Hut 1 - Diplomatic Wireless Station

The overwhelming feel there is of being in the midst of real history, where hugely important things occurred. You wander around the huts and tread the floorboards in rooms where monumental decisions and discoveries were made. The museum which venerates Alan Turing is quite moving on many levels. Here is the celebration of a man who was one of the greatest intellects of the 20^th Century. A man who did more than almost anyone in this country to stave off Germany’s advance, who led the way to the development of the modern computer, and who, because of his homosexuality, was hounded and prosecuted by the authorities to the extent that he died, presumably from his own hand, with a cyanide filled apple next to his body.

Alan Turing Statue

"On Computable numbers" - Alan Turing
One of the most important Scientific Papers
of the 20th Century

In the part of the museum dedicated to him is a wonderfully moving statue of him, made from Stacked Slate by Stephen Kettle. Also there is a formal letter of apology from the nation written in a slightly uncomfortable New Labour way and signed by Gordon Brown – 60 years too late.

The Government's formal apology to Alan Turing - 2009
Signed by Gordon Brown

It’s all very moving – I keep using that word – and I can’t recall a museum which has had such an effect on me as this one. It’s all held together on a bit of a volunteer based shoe-string, and you have to wonder if there is another country in the world which would not feel ashamed at not funding the upkeep of such an important place through a miniscule allocation from the public purse.

Go there while you can.

Tabs:

bletchley park,
enigma,
colussus,
alan turing,
bombe

Rain Stopped Play

Rain Stopped Play, a set on Flickr.

Pictures of the Test Match Crowd - Birmingham - July 2010

Hows about that, then?

Jimmy Savile is dead.

I suppose if you’re less than about 30 years old, you may not even know who he was. If you are a little older, then you probably have an image of a guy with a ridiculously long cigar and brittle white hair fronting a Saturday night TV programme called “Jim’ll Fix It”. A weird looking bloke making peoples’ dreams come true.

If that’s what you think, you don’t know the half of it. He really lived one of the oddest lives you could imagine, and he was someone who impacted on me immensely when I was a teenager in the late 50s - the most impressionable years of my life.

JIMMY SAVILE with ELVIS PRESLEY

As I grew up in the late 50s, pop music simply didn’t exist. It hadn’t been invented. Commercial Radio, Radio Caroline and the like was several years away. You couldn’t even be “cool” in those days because the word had not then been invented. But those of us in the know used to listen to a strange radio station broadcasting from Luxembourg - wherever that was. Its signals arrived via the Medium Wave, 208 metres, and its reception, in Bedford where I lived, was the 50s equivalent of a lottery. The signal came and went like the tide coming in and out at the sea-side. Some evenings it was great, others you had to believe that the signal was coming from the Dark side of the Moon.

I used to be sent to bed at around 9 in the evening in those days, and one of life’s childishly clandestine pleasures was to sneak the (just invented) portable radio up to my bedroom, secrete it under my bedclothes and listen away very quietly to Radio Luxembourg, a bit like a wartime spy with one ear clamped to the radio and the other on the creaking stairs listening for my parents’ footsteps.

This was the way in the late 50s we all “found” pop music. It was the only real source of people like Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and the other great singers in the vanguard of Pop. No-one else played that sort of music. The BBC was still a million miles away from that sort of thing. They had the Home Service (R4), the Light Programme (R2) and the Third Programme (R3), and that was it.

Radio Luxembourg was the first meaningful commercial radio station, a total trailblazer and was funded by adverts at a time when ITV was still a figment of someone's imagination. To this day, anyone who knows how to spell Keynsham – K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M, and who smiles knowingly when the name Horace Batchelor is mentioned, will be over 50 and will, almost like one of Pavlov’s Dogs, be immediately transported back to the heady days of Radio Luxembourg.

The highlight of Radio Luxembourg’s week was a programme on Wednesday nights at 10.30pm called the “Teen and Twenty Disc Club”, a half hour programme introduced by a guy from Leeds named Jimmy Savile. He ran it as a club on the radio, where you could send in and join up to be a member. One of his never to be forgotten achievements was to have signed up a young American singer named Elvis Presley as a member. Presley’s membership number was 11321, a number which rather worryingly, I will remember till the day I die. That’s what happens when you’re in your early teens.

Jimmy Savile was the John Peel of his day, introducing us to new bands who later became household names. But, almost solely as a result of his programme, we all knew about them before they were well known. At that age, that knowledge was seriously important.

If you care to look up his history, you will find references to the Mecca Dancehall in Leeds, and him starting the first Discotheque, to his career as a wrestler, as a prodigious marathon runner, as an amazing philanthropist and bizarrely as an unpaid Hospital Porter. He absolutely doted on his mother – The Dutchess – and drove around in the most ostentatious Rolls Royce you could imagine.

Fast Forward now about 25 years and we lived in Aylesbury, about 40 miles north of London. The local hospital was at Stoke Mandeville, and it specialised in nursing spinal injuries. The stories put around by the media were that Jimmy Savile, the famous DJ and TV presenter worked there as a porter, something which any follower of the music world would scornfully dismiss as spin and rubbish – the invention of some sensation seeking newspaper hustler.

One evening, when one of my daughters suffered an accident, we had to rush her off to Stoke Mandeville for treatment, and as we shot in to get her attended to, I glanced into the Porter’s lodge next to the door.

Guess who was there.

There was a man who had made an enormous amount of money for himself, but someone who also had raised millions of pounds for charity, someone whose face was immediately recognisable by almost everyone in the country, and there he was working away for nothing in the Porter’s Lodge at my local hospital.

“Evening Jim.” was all I could manage as we rushed off to the Casualty department.

Forget whatever rumours you may have heard about him. He was a truly fascinating man, a One-Off and someone who played a large part in the development of my love of music.

How's about that, then?

Tabs:

jimmy savile,
radio luxembourg,
208,
teen and twenty disc club

Pictures at an Exhibition - April 2008

Pictures at an Exhibition - April 2008, a set on Flickr.

Some pictures taken on a very rainy day in New York's spectacular Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Spring a couple of years ago.

Watching the people watching the pictures, with Elliot Erwitt, the Worlds's greatest living photographer as my inspiration.