Chris Sandford: John Murray

I suppose the year 1967 was my own private Summer of Love, but not for any of the usual reasons connected with the world of herbally-tinged joss sticks or bare-thighed young women swaggering around London’s Carnaby Street in their shiny plastic go-go boots and Union Jack miniskirts. Social ferment was slow to disturb the now-defunct St Aubyns prep school in Rottingdean, East Sussex, where I found myself detained for much of that supposedly swinging era.

Instead, the object of my desire was the incumbent England wicketkeeper John ‘JT’ Murray. Murray was exquisite. The sheer class of the man communicated itself even on the boxy, black-and-white Baird TV set perched in a distant corner of the St Aubyns schoolroom where I principally watched him.

Murray seemed to me to be much like Cary Grant with gauntlets. Always immaculately turned out in creamy white flannels and a blue cap, he would go through a little routine before each ball was bowled, circling his arms, the tips of the gloves touched together, patting the peak of the cap, and then dropping smoothly down to settle on his haunches behind the stumps. There was something both athletic and sedate about his posture.

Sadly, my own skills as the St Aubyns Second X1 wicketkeeper were limited. There were only two things I really contributed when in the field. I could usually take the ball reasonably cleanly when standing back to the quicker bowlers and, being fat, I presented an inviting target for the spinners to aim at. Probably the most impressive statistic I can glean from the tattered grey-cloth scorebook in front of me is the number of opposing batsmen who were either caught behind or stumped in our team’s eight matches that 1967 season. None. Our head of English Alan Kennington had been a modestly successful novelist in the 1940s, and he showed a literary turn of mind when he said of my keeping in his end-of-term report that I reminded him of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘Like the Ancient Mariner, he stoppeth one of three,’ he wrote.

Despite or because of these limitations, I was seriously obsessed with Murray. I read the match reports in the newspaper every morning from cover to cover, entering my hero’s catches and other data for the season in a large exercise book until the annual was filled up, at which point I started another one. This sometimes drew the scorn of those who didn’t have cricket in the blood, but it’s something any true lover of the game surely knows in their bones.

In a strange twist, about thirty years later I actually got to know Murray socially, and he remained a close family friend. During this time it bore in on me that JT wasn’t quite the same proposition up close he’d been on public view. He was better. Whenever I met him I felt about ten years old again. He never took himself too seriously, and never had a bad word to say about another cricketer. I remember once telling him that, like me, he must have been crushed by the England selectors’ decision to abruptly replace him with the young Kent stumper Alan Knott shortly after he, Murray, had broken a Test wicketkeeping record by taking six catches in an innings, a set of circumstances that seemed to offer a toxic combination of deceit, intrigue, ambition and general duplicity of almost Shakespearean proportions. Not a bit of it. ‘It was Knotty’s time,’ he told me evenly.

John Murray died in July 2018, after having spent the day watching his beloved Middlesex beat Warwickshire at Lord’s. As he was leaving his seat that warm evening he rang his family to say that he had thoroughly enjoyed the day and would be back with them soon. He collapsed by the Harris Garden behind the pavilion. A day or two earlier John had told me in an email that while he’d loved every minute of his playing career, there was something about the innocence and fun of the early part of it in the 1950s that lingered longest in his affections. In his selflessness, warmth and generosity of spirit, his total absence of affectation or any other form of self-consciousness, it seems to me he belonged more to that era than to our own.

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