by Mayukh Ghosh
Early 1980s.
Middlesex visiting Northamptonshire for a County Championship match.
Before play on day two, three aspiring cricketers embark on the outfield to enjoy an impromptu game of cricket.
Out of the blue, Graham Barlow approaches them to bowl at him.
They happily oblige.
Soon play begins with Middlesex resuming their innings.
Barlow, who was unbeaten overnight, scores a fifty.
One of the boys, named James Hawkins, finds a new hero that day.
From that day he takes a keen interest in Barlow’s cricket and, in the process, collects a lot of information about him.
About thirty-five years later, this became invaluable as James decided to write a book on his childhood hero.
“I was born and grew up in Northampton and still live in a village just outside the town. I am the youngest of three children and did not come from a cricketing family, but it was a sporty family. Both my parents played tennis, my mother was a keen hockey player and my father also played golf. My parents owned and ran a sports goods business, which I later went on to run. The business supplied sports goods and footwear to retail sports shops all over the United Kingdom. I was educated at my local comprehensive school, but I decided not to go to university, opting to go straight into the family business after returning from a winter in Australia playing and coaching in 1986/87.”
Fairly early days, James got introduced to the charm of the summer game.
“ My earliest memories of cricket are watching Sunday League matches on the television in the 1970s and also Test Matches. I used to play cricket in the garden with my Father and my friends at a local park. In 1979, when I was 11, my parents took me to the County Ground, Northampton to see a Gillette Cup match, which Northamptonshire won and I was hooked on the game thereafter. A couple of years later, I started attending cricket coaching and joined a club playing junior cricket. I played to a reasonable standard, appearing once for Northamptonshire Second XI and playing over a hundred times for MCC. “
James favoured batting, even while watching the game. No wonder most of his favourite cricketers are batsmen.
“ Watching cricket has always been about batting for me, especially opening, so I have admired many players but the following stick out: Wayne Larkins and Geoff Cook from Northamptonshire, Geoff Boycott, Graham Gooch, Wilf Slack, Michael Atherton and Sir Alastair Cook. I also admired stalwart county players like Andy Moles and Allan Butcher. When I was a lot younger people used to say I looked a bit like David Gower, so he was another hero.”
And, among the scribes, some of the regular writers on the county game caught his imagination.
“ I am an avid Wisden collector with every edition since 1960 safely stored in my Wisden Cupboard. I enjoy reading journalistic accounts of different periods. For example Christopher Martin Jenkins is a favourite and I loved his Who's Who of Test Match Cricketers as a teenager. I have been a Cricketer Magazine subscriber for as long as I can remember. I think Stephen Chalke and Andrew Radd are excellent writers as well.”
But he had never written anything on the game before 2015.
“In 2015 I had a change of circumstances with the end of the family business. I did have some time on my hands and I wrote an article on Graham Barlow, for the Cricketer magazine, which I was surprised to get published. During the process of winding up the business, I discovered all the old clippings, statistics and other items that I had collated on Graham in the 1980s. The idea for the book had been sparked and I started tracking him down. It never crossed my mind to write the book without him or his consent on the content. In 1984 during Graham's benefit year we had met briefly at Lord's and he seemed to be a very approachable person.
“I was aware that Graham was no longer living in the UK and his name had been mentioned as a possible new head coach of Middlesex following his success with Central Districts in 2005/06, however this was now almost ten years ago. I contacted Central Districts and they told me Graham was now working as a teacher in Whangerai and provided an email address.
“At that point I started a new work role and the book idea had to be shelved. Three years passed and in February 2019, I switched roles to fulfill a lifelong ambition and work in cricket. I was now employed by Northamptonshire CCC assisting with the development of cricket clubs locally and increasing participation for all groups. The role undoubtedly reinvigorated my passion for the game and in my appraisal, my manager asked me if I had any personal ambitions. I answered by saying I wanted to write a book on cricket. After that I took the plunge and emailed Graham. An email trail followed and eventually I reached him. Initially Graham seemed sceptical about the interest in a book about his life. At this point I didn't have a publisher, I just wanted to write his story and had created a timeline with some possible chapters. Graham was also in the process of retiring from teaching and relocating to Queensland so he suggested we talk again once he was settled. Delays due to Covid meant this didn't happen until November 2020 when Graham and I zoomed to discuss my ideas in detail and the writing process began. I still had no publisher at this point, but that didn't concern me, I was just excited to be underway..”
Things began to fall in place pretty soon.
“After the first zoom with Graham, I was put on flexible furlough which allowed me the time to crack on with the research, which included contacting a number of Graham's former Middlesex teammates. It was during one such conversation with Ian Gould that he suggested I contact Pitch because they had recently published his book. I put in an online submission and Paul Camillin responded quickly expressing an interest in the project. At this point I had only written an introduction, which I shared with Paul. I was then asked to supply a draft of chapter 1 which I did and an agreement in principle was in place.
“The process with Graham's invaluable insight was achieved through a series of zoom calls. We shared 15 in total, some being longer than others. Before each call I would set a sort of agenda of topics for discussion. This method gave Graham some direction but as memories were triggered it didn't matter if we went off on a tangent. As I wrote the chapters, my role was to bring all the research together chronologically or otherwise for the benefit of the reader. Graham and I would also message each other via Facebook if there were smaller queries to iron out.
“In February 2021, my father passed away and there was an inevitable pause in the process. Once I resumed it was agreed with Pitch that all content needed to be complete by mid February 2022. I was now back working full time so my spare time became heavily focused on the book. Pitch provided me with an editor who gave me feedback as I completed each chapter.”
A first time writer often finds the job daunting and it is even more so if there’s a collaboration with a former international cricketer who was once a hero!
But Barlow was a delight to work with.
“On the whole Graham's memory for the cricket related content was pretty good even though his brief Test career ended 45 years ago and he retired from Middlesex in 1986. There were some county matches that he had no recollection of so his perspective was not included. In the chapters covering his playing career, I tried to make Graham's content as anecdotal as possible with my summary of scores and the team's results in a given season running alongside. I did the same with his coaching career, but in less detail.
“As we chatted, one thing I found interesting was how Graham would remember new incidents or characters from earlier periods in his life/playing career that we had already covered and the chapter was largely written. It then became a sort of jigsaw puzzle for me to go back and include the added content. As the process went on, Graham's trust in me as a writer appeared to grow and it was obvious he was enjoying the zoom call chats.
“The vast majority of Graham's content is in the book. The only content that I omitted was spoken material that appeared to have little relevance to the overall story of his life. There was also other content that Graham would state as 'off the record'.”
James was candid while discussing how he learnt the tricks of the trade, sometimes the hard way….
“One aspect that I have not mentioned was my total nativity to the process of writing a book. I recall Pitch asking how many words that I would write. I had no idea and suggested 50000, I wrote 70000 in the end. It was a lot more work than I ever imagined, but I loved doing it and feel extremely privileged to have written a book on my childhood cricket hero. I sincerely hope people enjoy reading it.
“For my first book, I am very happy with both the structure and content. It started as a fun project, a sort of bucket list thing I suppose and unravelled into something much larger than I ever expected. It was tough at times researching, writing and editing whilst being employed full time, fortunately my wife was very understanding. It would have been great to meet with Graham in the flesh, whether that would have affected the content, I will never know.”
It is important to support honest efforts, more so if it is the debut project for the writer.
Hopefully, the book will do well enough to ignite the flame once again and make James write about another of his heroes….
The book can be obtained from Pitch Publishing and the standard retail outlets on the web..