Tony Greig: A Reappraisal of English Cricket's Most Controversial Captain

By David Tossell

Tony Greig, the captain who "betrayed" England by signingwith Australian media tycoon,Kerry Packer, remains one of cricket's most controversial figures. Through extensive research and multiple interviews—including with Greig himself—this biography examines whether history has been fair to one of England's most successfulcricket players,or if his achievements are condemned to be forever overlooked.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781908051226

Book preview

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

There’s a Starman waiting in the sky

The mythology of Tony Greig begins with his ‘first’ innings for Sussex, a virtuoso knock of 156 against Lancashire early in the 1967 season. The inverted commas are there because, in spite of Greig’s own recollections in his autobiography and Wisden’s eulogy when naming him one of its Five Cricketers of the Year in 1975, it wasn’t actually his debut innings for the county. It was his first County Championship performance, but he’d already batted twice for Sussex against Cambridge University the previous season. Other accounts refer to the Lancashire match as his first-class debut, whereas he’d played three previous games, one for Border in the Currie Cup and one for an invitation team against the West Indies tourists, in addition to that university match.

The point is made not to be pedantic or to highlight flaws in human recall, nor to lessen the drama of that century, but to demonstrate that the essence of Tony Greig as a cricketer was always bigger and more relevant than the strict facts and figures of his career. The images of him carving Dennis Lillee to the boundary again and again in Brisbane in 1974, goading him further with every shot, are more enduring than the final tally of his innings.

My own first clear memory of him can be dated to June 1972. The infamous Manchester weather had already forced the Ashes series to begin an hour and a half late and the clouds that hung stubbornly above Old Trafford had clearly influenced the delayed action on the field. Australia’s opening bowlers, Dennis Lillee and David Colley, were making the ball move in the air and bounce sharply on a patchy green wicket, while four slip fielders waited hungrily as England’s batsmen shoved their dead bats in line and hoped for the best. The evening session was well under way by the time England’s third wicket fell. With Geoff Boycott also off the field after being struck painfully on the arm, it was Greig’s turn to bat. Having run home from school to catch the final period of play on BBC2, I was watching intently as Greig emerged down the steps of the Victorian pavilion.

This was the start of a summer that fell during as carefree a period as I can remember in my life. I was, after all, only 11 and not expected to be taking much notice of headlines such as that week’s arrest of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group. Even the miners’ strike earlier in the year would probably have passed me by but for Arsenal having to replay an FA Cup tie against Derby on a midweek afternoon because of the restrictions on using floodlights during the resulting power shortage.

End-of-term exams that would determine whether I achieved a place at the local grammar school were of less concern than whether T. Rex and Metal Guru could hold on at number one in the face of Donny Osmond’s bloody awful Puppy Love – a battle that divided our classroom along gender lines even more rigidly than the usual pre-pubescent demarcations. The girls, of course, were too wrapped up in collecting posters of Donny and David Cassidy in the latest Jackie magazine to appreciate that the most important battle of the year had arrived: the Ashes series.

Even though it was the first England-Australia contest I would be able to fully immerse myself in, I did already consider myself something of a Test match veteran. My earliest exposure had been when my dad had taken me to The Oval on the Friday of the fifth game in the 1970 series between England and the Rest of the World. Unfamiliar with many of the names and the history they carried I had been conscious nevertheless of witnessing something special as I sat on the boundary edge watching Graeme Pollock and Garry Sobers rattling up a partnership in excess of 150. If I missed the significance of a South African and a West Indian batting harmoniously during a summer when opposition to apartheid had resulted in Pollock’s country being banned from touring, I was at least open to the captivating strokeplay of the two left-handers.

That winter, I recall listening to early morning reports of the Ashes-clinching victory of Ray Illingworth’s side in Sydney. And during the following summer I seem to have spent days wondering if Pakistan’s Zaheer Abbas would ever be dismissed, before trying to fathom how England were managing to lose at home to India. Even though I’d seen them handsomely beaten by that World team in a series since declassified as official Test cricket, this was my first experience of defeat to another nation.

By the first Sunday of June 1972, therefore, I was wise to the vagaries of the England team and I knew exactly how it worked when the selectors named their side. As surely as those German police rounding up their Red Army targets, England would focus on the usual suspects. While younger, energetic types such as Peter Lever, Bob Willis, Ken Shuttleworth and the rebellious John Snow could be entrusted with running up and bowling fast, the matter of blunting the Australian attack was better left to the tried and tested; to the old men, in fact. For the first Test, the top five batsmen were announced as Boycott, the youngster of the group at 31, John Edrich, Brian Luckhurst and, with a combined 79 years in the number four and five positions, former captain M.J.K. Smith and Basil D’Oliveira. All slickedback short hair, that lot reminded me of my dad’s office colleagues. There was barely an athlete among them. Smith even wore glasses, for heaven’s sake. He looked like the scorer. Later in the series, the next batsman to be introduced was Peter Parfitt, comfortably into his mid-30s.

But when Greig, batting at number six, arrived at the crease at Old Trafford, it was clear that here was something different. If English cricket in 1972 could be said to have had a glam rock moment, this was it. It was the Test match equivalent of David Bowie appearing in eye make-up and a multi-coloured catsuit among the likes of the New Seekers and Neil Diamond on Top of the Pops. Greig had played in three of those unofficial England games against the Rest of the World in 1970 but had lost the all-rounder’s place the following year to Yorkshire’s Richard Hutton, an earnest trier whose bowling action I reproduced in garden matches by adopting a slower version of my John Snow.

Yet there was no one you could adapt in order to replicate Greig. He stood alone, literally and figuratively. At more than 6ft 7in. he was taller than anyone I had ever seen on a sports field, unless you counted those Harlem Globetrotters games that were sometimes on television over Bank Holiday weekends. When we saw him bowl it turned out that, for all his blond-haired athleticism, he had a laboured, pigeon-toed approach to the crease, arms pumping like pistons. When, later in his career, he switched from medium pace to off-spinners he gave the impression of a contestant in a slow bicycle race, intent on taking as long to reach his destination as his ground-eating legs would allow. It was almost impossible to properly copy his arthritic-looking action without losing balance.

For now, though, on this Thursday in early June – and again in the second innings a few days later – it was his batting that demanded attention. When he drove at Colley or spinner John Gleeson, he appeared to do so fearlessly, left leg advancing telescopically down the track, right hand punching through the ball as though this was a cement-hard surface in South Africa, from where he had arrived to play for Sussex, rather than a green-top in Manchester. When those drives were really flowing he would seem to literally jump into his follow–through, the way Joe Frazier had lifted himself off his feet to deliver the left hook that had floored Muhammad Ali in the ‘Fight of the Century’ a year earlier. By comparison, his team-mates in this game seemed incapable of anything more than a nudge or nurdle, the cricketer’s equivalent of the tentative jab.

Admittedly, that recollection of Greig’s first innings in Test cricket, reinforced by brief video highlights, has become airbrushed by time. Contemporary reports of the game note him looking anxious early on, being dropped with barely a run scored, and only hitting his stride on the second morning when he began to cut Gleeson and played a pair of stirring on-drives to reach the first of his two half-centuries in the match.

Time might have helped me over-glamorise my introduction to Tony Greig, but even in that first glimpse this 25-year-old was so markedly different from the middle-aged mediocrity around him that I was left wondering what planet, let alone what country, he had arrived from. Had we run out of geriatric blockers? Looking back on the year of 1972 in his book Apathy for the Devil, rock journalist Nick Kent might have been writing about Greig and English cricket when he said, ‘A new decade was actually starting to define itself and anyone with even a hint of talent and personal magnetism stood a fighting chance of making their mark on it provided they had the right instincts.’

To my impressionable young eyes, Greig, in the words of Bowie, truly was some kind of ‘Starman’, about to blow our minds.

By the time Australia were back three summers later, nothing much had changed in English cricket. The batsmen still resembled accountants and many of the intervening years’ highlights, of which there had been few, had revolved around Greig, most notably the 13 wickets he took with his experimental off-spin to grab an unlikely series-levelling win in the West Indies early in 1974. In England, Greig had come to symbolise his sport’s era like few others had done. The 1960s had featured such dominant characters as Ted Dexter, Ken Barrington, Colin Cowdrey, Tom Graveney, Brian Close and a youthful Geoff Boycott. Yet until the likes of Derek Randall and David Gower made their mark from 1977 onwards, Greig was the only batsman established long-term in the England team who had made his debut in the new decade.

The bookish Tony Lewis and the polite Mike Denness had been given their shots at the captaincy and when Denness followed up a crushing series defeat in Australia in the winter of 1974-75 by losing by an innings in the first Ashes Test of the following summer, it was time for a change. Greig, the one shining light to pierce the gloom that hovered over the England team, was the new captain.

If Old Trafford ’72 had been a Bowie moment, then the first day of Greig’s reign at Lord’s was like punk rock kicking at the doors of the establishment. At 49 for 4, England were in trouble again, but Greig was not going to settle for digging in, hoping for the best and earning nods of approval from the crusty old MCC members. He was going to attack, just as he had done in Australia in the winter, when he’d piled into Lillee and then signalled his own boundaries. He was going to spit in the Aussies’ faces. The masses in the Mound Stand needed a folk hero more than the Long Room required another jolly good chap. In little over two and a half hours, he smashed his way to 96, hitting 15 boundaries and dragging his team to a position of strength. Never mind the bollocks, here’s the England captain.

It was an aggressive approach that would characterise some aspects of his captaincy; never more unfortunately than when he told the West Indian tourists a year later that he intended to ‘make them grovel’. Foolishly, he overlooked the implications of such a comment from a white South African at a time of racial tension in Britain and in his home country.

Yet Greig was no mere punk; no Johnny Rotten. He was more like Malcolm McLaren, the svengali who orchestrated the rise of the Sex Pistols and who always knew where the money was. In May 1977, while McLaren was planning to gatecrash the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations, so Greig, on the eve of another Ashes series, announced his part in the biggest hijacking of a professional sport that anyone could remember. He would be captaining a World XI in Australian tycoon Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, in direct opposition to the established calendar of the sport. And, like the 50-odd players who would join him, he would be well paid to do so.

England fans felt betrayed. Bloody hell, within a couple of months, Don Revie – having masterminded England’s failure to qualify for the European Championships in 1976 and led us to the brink of elimination from the latest World Cup qualifying campaign – was quitting the team to become the millionaire coach of the United Arab Emirates. Maybe it was something to do with it being the Chinese year of the snake. Did patriotism and the Jubilee mean nothing to anyone? Having the Sex Pistols at number one with God Save The Queen was unsettling enough for some and now, in a matter of weeks, the leaders of our football and cricket teams had chosen to go off chasing foreign money. Of course some suggested they had expected nothing less. In The Times, cricket correspondent John Woodcock attempted to explain Greig’s behaviour by saying, ‘What has to be remembered is that Greig is English not by birth or upbringing, but only by adoption, which is not the same as being English through and through.’

Even if one shared Greig’s view that Woodcock, an old-school traditionalist, was talking rubbish, it could not dilute the feelings of most cricket fans: that the greatest game in the world was being ripped apart. Only over the subsequent months and years did we come to fully understand the forces that had been at work in the Packer Affair. And while even Greig himself would no longer dare claim that his prime motivating force had been the advancement of the sport and his fellow professionals, it became easier to see that the players and the game as a whole had benefitted in the long term.

Yet many of the wounds of 1977 remained open. When author Quentin Letts wrote a book three decades later called 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, Greig was in there. On a more serious cricketing note, the traditional invitation of life membership extended by the MCC to former England captains failed to materialise for 20 years. By contrast, one future England captain, Graham Gooch, and one previous holder of the position, Mike Gatting, led unsanctioned ‘England’ tours to South Africa, yet both were subsequently welcomed back wholeheartedly into the cricket hierarchy. Derek Underwood, who was both a Packer and a South African rebel, even held the position of MCC president. Greig, meanwhile, remained comparatively invisible and unforgiven. As a commentator in his adopted country of Australia, his voice would appear behind our television screens once every four years when England toured. It does so now with greater frequency, usually in the dark of night, thanks to Sky bringing every Australian series into British homes.

Clearly, nationality has played a big part in the treatment of Greig. Once he defected to Packer his South African background was held against him in the manner of Woodcock’s comment. British fans will only take an adopted sporting hero to their hearts until that first moment of disappointment. Boxer Joe Bugner, a Greig contemporary, experienced the same thing when, after beating the much-loved Henry Cooper, he failed to meet the nation’s expectations. He, too, ended up living Down Under.

Then there is the issue of the betrayal of the England captaincy, the perception that Greig used his position to assist in his recruitment role for Kerry Packer. ‘The idea that I was bound by an unwritten rule of loyalty is laughable,’ is Greig’s defence. ‘If they were insisting on paying us an insultingly small wage while raking in money from television, what could they possibly have expected?’

It is important to remember that only in the 20 years prior to Greig’s appointment had professionals been considered suitable material to captain England, a position that carried an almost royal status. Even after becoming paid employees of the sport, anyone holding that job was still expected to be above commercialism and financial considerations, those dirty-fingernailed guests who had grudgingly been allowed to infiltrate the game. For Greig to have plotted behind the backs of the men who had given him English cricket’s most exalted role was considered unpardonable poor form.

The bleak landscape of mid-1970s Britain is also significant. Greig had been guilty of offering a small piece of glamour and hope in a time when neither the economy nor the fortunes of our national sporting teams could guarantee much of either. The lugubrious Gooch and the cartoon-like figure of Gatting never promised as much, so perhaps the sense of letdown was less.

Finally, the Britain of three decades ago was still somewhat uncomfortable with brash, unapologetic public figures. We booed and hissed at J.R. Ewing and Micky Most, the nasty judge on New Faces. Nowadays, Simon Cowell and Sir Alan Sugar are national treasures. Greig was too calculating in his involvement with Kerry Packer and too unrepentant after the fact. Gooch and Gatting, meanwhile, became somehow positioned as victims; honest, sympathetic family men who were simply trying to earn a living. BBC Radio’s Brian Johnston expressed a not untypical view when he said of those going to South Africa, ‘They are in no way rebels. They are merely following their profession.’ Many managed to maintain that view, even though the Packer games never caused the cancellation of official Test cricket, while apartheid and individuals’ association with the South African regime that practised it was to blame for plenty of lost matches. And that’s without delving into the moral and political arguments surrounding those tours.

That is not to denigrate the likes of Gooch or Gatting, outstanding players and decent men, or to begrudge them the deserved legacy of their achievements. The aim is to tell the story of a man who fascinated, excited and eventually exasperated a generation of cricket followers, while examining two central issues: Why does Greig remain an outcast where others have received redemption? And has isolation from the bosom of the sport condemned him to be forever overlooked as a player?

Greig went on four successive England tours – to India and Pakistan (1972-73), West Indies (1973-74), Australia (1974-75) and India (1976-77) – and was arguably the most effective and dangerous player on every trip. He was Test cricket’s leading wicket-taker in 1974 and, as a batsman, his Test average is higher than recently revered England captains such as Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain and Alec Stewart.

The passing of his all-rounder’s baton to the phenomenal Ian Botham meant that it was not until the long years of searching for Botham’s successor that Greig’s contribution was taken less for granted. Then the eventual emergence of Andrew Flintoff as a world-class player and a folk hero for the modern media age left Greig’s career somewhat unappreciated once more. Discussion in recent years of the great post-war England all-rounders tends to focus on two figures: Botham and Flintoff, two loveable men of the people.

There is a strong argument that Greig deserves his place, if not right alongside the peerless Botham, then at least as part of that group and on a comparable level to Flintoff. The bare facts are that Greig’s Test batting average of more than 40 was well above the other two men, while his bowling average was on a par with Flintoff. Although never appearing as consistently dangerous with the ball as the Lancashire man, he still achieved six five-wicket hauls to Flintoff ’s three – in fewer Tests. Of course, the contribution of all three men to their teams and to cricket in their era went beyond statistics. But the question should be posed of whether Greig has been cast unjustly in the shadow of ‘Beefy’ and ‘Freddie’.

Atherton is in the camp of those who believe history has dealt with him harshly. ‘Greig remains one of the most underrated England cricketers of the post-war period,’ he wrote in the summer of 2009, more than 30 years on from the settling of the dust on World Series Cricket. Others, such as Viv Richards, ‘didn’t see anything that was extra special’, while some acknowledged a man who wrung every drop of potential from limited natural ability through sheer bloody-mindedness and force of personality.

That is the nature of a man such as Greig. As a player, a personality and even now as a commentator, he has always managed to polarise opinion. As early as 1974, Henry Blofeld had written, ‘It is hard for a cricket follower to feel indifferent about Tony Greig.’

He seemed to spend half his career winning approval for his deeds and the other half trying to explain them away. For every act that elevated him there was one that led him down the path of apology and self-justification. But whether it was charming the fans in India, thumbing his nose at Lillee, talking himself into trouble against the West Indies, holding England’s fragile team together or ‘buggering up Britain’, he was never less than the most compelling of characters. According to Alec Bedser, the chairman of selectors who made him England captain and then felt betrayed by him, ‘The enigma of Tony Greig’s many-sided character will no doubt fascinate future generations as much as it has puzzled his contemporaries.’

His story begins with one hell of an innings for Sussex.

PART ONE

ALL-ROUNDER

‘Talents are best nurtured in solitude, but character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world’ – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

‘Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it’ – American football coach Lou Holtz

‘You need talent, but you need more than that. You need this special thing that some people have which makes them play above themselves; a little better than you perceive they should be, based on talent alone. You need to relish confrontation. I adored backs-to-the-wall situations’ – Tony Greig

1

QUEENSTOWN

Alcohol, illness and inspiration

The white numbers on the Hove scoreboard cut through the grey, damp Sussex morning like an accusation. 34 for 3. Not the most relaxing or reassuring of situations for a nervous young cricketer making his way to the wicket for his first innings in the County Championship. At the Sea End of the ground, umpire Albert ‘Dusty’ Rhodes had just sent England batsman and wicketkeeper Jim Parks back to the pavilion. The impossibly tall, blond batsman now approaching the middle cut a striking figure.

‘Who’s this?’ asked Rhodes, turning to Lancashire bowler Brian Statham, the metronomic former England opener who had been the beneficiary of the umpire’s lbw decision. Statham was none the wiser, but a voice in the field piped up.

‘He’s called Greig. He’s from South Africa.’

Taking his guard and looking down the ground, 20-year-old Tony Greig knew all about the man polishing the ball on the way back to the start of his run-up. Christ, he had ‘been’ Statham enough times in his garden back home in Queenstown. He had acted the role of one of Test cricket’s leading wicket-takers – along with Jim Laker, Ken Barrington, Ted Dexter and the rest of the England team – while taking on his friends’ South African XIs in hard-fought back-yard internationals.

Now it was the real thing. Forget his first competitive innings for the county four days earlier, when he’d made 22 in a low-scoring Gillette Cup win at Worcester after a tidy spell of bowling. That paled next to his Championship debut against a Test attack of Statham and Ken Higgs with the ball dipping and swinging in the moist coastal air. He’d tried to prepare by reporting to the County Ground for an extra net session on the players’ day off, but nothing could replicate this moment. ‘I was scared stiff,’ he’d admit later.

The first ball was trademark Statham: fast, straight and full. ‘Being a tall bloke, I didn’t get down quite low enough and it hit my toe just in front of middle stump,’ is Greig’s recollection. His stomach lurched in panic and regret. He knew he was gone. ‘All the Lancastrians were in the air. I couldn’t believe it; out lbw first ball, first match.’

‘Not out,’ Rhodes deadpanned. Greig could have kissed him.

The next delivery was again pitched up, homing in on leg stump. This time Greig managed to drop his bat on the ball, edging it against his boot and scrambling a run. Arriving at the non-striker’s end he was amazed to hear Rhodes ask, ‘Do you know a Sandy Greig from Queenstown?’

‘Yes, he’s my Dad,’ was Greig’s puzzled reply.

‘Ah, great decision,’ muttered the umpire and turned back to the game.

Later that evening, Greig would hear the full story. Rhodes, a former Derbyshire all-rounder, had been sent to South Africa some years earlier while working for an oil company and often met Greig senior in Queenstown’s only pub. He even recalled the barman’s name.

Who knows whether Greig would have got a first-baller had Rhodes’s travels taken him somewhere different? He celebrated his reprieve, though, by launching into an innings that would in later years be recognised as a typical Greig counterattack. There was little consideration of the playing conditions, the match position or the coaching manual. As soon as he saw the ball he took aim at it. ‘You name the mistake, I made it,’ he admitted.

When he next faced Statham he drove him down the ground for four. One over later, he cut him to the boundary and struck him straight a second time. The third member of Lancashire’s formidable seam attack was future Test bowler Peter Lever, who recalls, ‘Greigy certainly came on the county scene with a bang. I can’t remember it all but he had a bit of a slog at it and I think you will find that we dropped him several times. Greigy, being the guy he is, had a bit of a laugh and a grin and got on with it. He didn’t give a damn whether we dropped him once or ten times, he just kept smashing it and everybody immediately said, Who is this guy Greig who has appeared?’

Clear of the threat of early failure, Greig began eyeing the prospect of a maiden first-class fifty, an achievement he believed would justify his aggressive approach. When he got to that landmark he recalled being ‘so overjoyed I couldn’t have cared if I’d been bowled next ball’. He was too inexperienced and excited to set his sights on a century and a big team score. Instead, he blasted away with the abandon of someone released from all pressure. It was only when he reached the 90s that nerves hit him. Peter Graves, enjoying the first of many partnerships he’d share with Greig over the next ten years, recalls, ‘Greigy was a typical South African and had this inner confidence. He talked a lot, perhaps initially to hide his nerves, and he had a good mental approach. I told him, I’ll talk you through to your hundred, but then I got out when he was on 99.’

Greig crept into three figures and, free once more, resumed his assault. He was eventually lbw after swinging once too often at off-spinner John Savage. By then he’d charged to 156, including 22 boundaries. The next day’s Brighton Evening Argus would devote the best part of a page to his innings. Veteran comedian Tommy Trinder was opening that week at the Palace Pier Theatre, but it was thanks to Greig that ‘the crowds will roll up again’, the paper predicted. Sussex captain Parks confirmed, ‘He plays attractive cricket; the type spectators want to see.’

Greig, who would soon be pictured on the cover of The Cricketer magazine, loved his first taste of being centre of the reporters’ attention that evening, beginning a productive relationship with the media that would endure for the next decade. It had been an agreeable end to a memorable day; one that had introduced the name of Tony Greig to English first-class cricket and already gone some way towards helping him meet the challenge laid down by his father.

Like the rest of his generation, Sandy Greig had been forced to put his sporting ambitions on hold at the outbreak of the Second World War in the autumn of 1939. Born in Bathgate, West Lothian, he had been an accomplished rugby player at Watson’s College in Edinburgh, a decent cricketer and big fan of football’s Rangers. Yet, at 17, he left all that behind when he joined the Royal Air Force. A squadron leader by the age of 21, his service to Bomber Command earned him the Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Flying Cross. In 1943, with a remarkable 54 missions over Germany behind him, he was posted to become chief instructor at an air training school in Queenstown, a small community in the farming region of South Africa’s Eastern Cape.

Meeting and marrying Joyce – a 45-year union that would last until his death in 1990 – Sandy remained in South Africa at the end of the war. He advanced quickly in the insurance business, later took up the post of editor of the local newspaper, the Daily Representative, and became a well-known coach and administrator in local rugby and cricket. His inclusive, multi-racial approach to sport prompted broadcaster Alan Jones, speaking after Sandy died, to say, ‘He was loved by blacks and whites alike because he was honest and straight.’

Tony was the eldest of four Greig children – born on 6 October 1946 – with Molly Joy, Sally Ann and Ian following three, seven and nine years later. Sandy wasn’t the only relative able to bequeath sporting genes. Joyce was a good player of hockey, tennis, squash and golf and an uncle, Daniel ‘Dummy’ Taylor, played Currie Cup cricket for Border, as would cousin Roy. Joyce would even volunteer for bowling stints at young Tony in the garden of their well-appointed home away from the centre of Queenstown.

Having moved to such spacious surroundings when he was seven, Tony was able to enjoy the idyllic existence of a sport-mad youngster in a white family in post-war South Africa. Brother Ian explains, ‘It is a fairly small place and there was not much to do other than ride a bicycle around the place or go to the movies. There was one small cinema and that was not on our agenda, so sport and play was very much a part of our upbringing.’ Joyce remembers, ‘Tony would make a pole vault, obstacle races, all kinds of things. All the children came to our house to play because he made it all so interesting.’

There were three live-in servants to cater for the family’s needs, plenty of room for Test matches against friends, and the availability of younger siblings to do the fielding chores. Molly Joy recalls, ‘We used to play endless games of cricket that went on until it was dark and we had to be called inside. We played rugby as well but once I was going through adolescence my father said Tony shouldn’t tackle me.’

Even the gardener, Teki Manzi, spent more time playing cricket than he ever did tending to the weeds. Tackies, as he was nicknamed after the local term for the plimsoll-type shoes he wore, loved to bowl and did so at a fast pace, with a chucker’s action. ‘He was fast, he was tireless and he could bowl straight,’ Greig explains. ‘He used to come at me from one end of our back lawn with a variety of cricket balls, tennis balls and hard rubber balls.’ His role in the development of the future England captain would eventually be acknowledged by a trip to London to appear on ITV’s This Is Your Life when Greig was chosen as its subject in 1977.

Ian recalls playing the important role of stooge when the competition between his brother and his friends reached its fiercest. ‘My earliest memories of Tony are in the back garden when I was about six,’ he explains. ‘These games used to go on, serious matches, and his mates used to say, You are bowling too fast. His response would be, I bowl the same at my brother. He can face this. I’ll show you. Tony would strap the pads on me and whisper, You know the story. The first one is a half-volley outside off stump, so play forward. The second one is a long hop outside off stump, so cut it, and the third is short outside the leg stump, so pull it. I trusted him completely. I played straight to the first and would hit it because I knew what was coming, and sometimes I hit the second and third and sometimes I missed. Tony would say, See, he can do it. Absolutely everything we did had a competitive element to it. If you were skimming stones at the dam you saw who could make it bounce most often. If you were on a family walk, you’d see who could pick up a stone and hit a tree.’

Joyce continues, ‘There was always competition, even with cards. When my mother came the boys would say, Let’s get the table out, and we used to play canasta or some gambling game.’ Molly Joy recalls that even games of tennis against the garage door were fought out as though a Wimbledon title was at stake, while Tony recognises that such an environment helped to develop the defining element of his cricketing career. ‘As a youngster, we played games to win,’ he states. ‘That might have been a contributing factor. Then there was the fact that I was tall even as a kid so, for example, when I was forced to do boxing at school it was against guys who were older than me. I had to force myself to protect myself.’

Greig might have appeared privileged to outsiders, but his childhood was far from being free of suffering and trauma. Throughout it there was the constant presence of his father’s alcoholism. ‘I learned about the impact that alcohol could have on a family,’ he says. ‘My mother was the absolute rock in our family when my dad went through his bad times.’

Ian recalls, ‘Mum was such a special person and shielded us from much of it. Obviously there are things that I clearly remember and they are not wonderful memories; like wondering where the next meal was going to come from. But Mum always found a way. It should have been a very comfortable life for us. Dad was a very clever man and was doing so well after the war. He had the world at his feet in the insurance game and kept on climbing the ladder and we should have been a very well-off family. But, regrettably, that wasn’t to be and one has to say that Dad’s drinking habits were a cause of that.’

Alcohol had become a way of dealing with the stress and losses that one had to endure every single day in the wartime RAF. Only 50 per cent of crews survived 30 bombing missions, yet Sandy, a navigator, had volunteered to put his life on the line many more times than that. ‘If you did a tour and survived you were a freak, and you were without doubt mentally scarred,’ says Ian. ‘He saw a lot of psychiatrists and he very seldom spoke about what happened. My sister reminded me recently of when we were watching a film called Mrs Miniver on television. During this movie Dad just got up and ran out the room and Mum followed him. He came back half an hour later and Mum said, That footage that you see of a raid on Hamburg was taken from Dad’s plane. We were desperate for Dad to put his memories down on paper but there were so many horrific things he saw and did, bombing towns and what have you. My mother went to a very big reunion in the UK, the 40th anniversary of some particular event related to 101 Squadron, and she asked someone why she