Two Fine Men

There were two notable deaths in the world of cricket last week. One, Arthur Milton, was the last person to play both cricket and football for England. The other, Tom Cartwright, is a name with special resonance for me. My father regularly regaled me with stories of Cartwright, a hero of his in the 1950s and 60s Warwickshire teams. He still bristled with disappointment that he had never been given a longer chance at an international Test career – after all, this was a man who Richie Benaud described as one of the most accurate bowlers he had seen in all the time he watched cricket.

The obituaries of both contained stories that typify sportsmen of a different age, where, no matter what the competitive spirit, there was not such a ruthless professionalism in the will to win.

From Cartwright’s obituary:

From 1980 to the present, he ran the Welsh Under-16 team, showing as much concern for sportsmanship as for victory: “Sledging is infantile playground behaviour, isn’t it?”

The story I liked best, however, was this one, about an act of kindness on the part of Milton at the start of a young batsman’s career:

I first met Arthur Milton, who has died aged 79, in the Parks in 1959 when playing my first first-class match for Oxford University against Gloucestershire.

Milton was an established county batsman and had made his Test debut the previous year, thus becoming an international at both cricket and football – the last man to do so. I scratched about against John Mortimore before being dismissed without scoring. On a pair, and again confronted by Morty’s flighty off-spin, I got an inside edge and watched the ball go knee-high to Arthur, one of the game’s great close catchers, at backward short leg.

Arthur, to my astonished gratitude, parted his hands, letting the ball go through for three, his kindly gesture sparing a raw and nervous 19-year-old the ignominy of a pair on debut.

The great American sportswriter Grantland Rice once wrote “For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks – not that you won or lost -/But how you played the game.” Milton and Cartwright will have received top marks in the last week.