Extract from
CHARLES PALMER - More Than Just A Gentleman
On Saturday 21st
May Charles Palmer produced one of the most extraordinary performances in the
whole history of first-class cricket.
The early weeks
of the season had been damp and cold, and on that Saturday morning the visitors
to Grace Road were champion county Surrey, who had already won their first five
matches. Jack Walsh had chosen the match for his benefit and when, going out in
place of Charles, he won the toss, Leicestershire opted to bat first.
Alas, little went
right from this point and by tea-time they were all out for 114, with the mighty
Surrey already 42 for one in reply. There had been an early wicket for Spencer,
but Peter May was striking the ball with commanding ease.
The pitch had now
dried out except for one spot. “The covers weren’t great in those days,”
Terry Spencer explains, “and there was this wet patch about the size of a
dinner plate.” The two finger spinners, Jackson and Munden were bowling, and
they approached Charles during the interval. “We’re bowling at the wrong
ends,” they said, fancying that Jackson’s off-spinners might make more of
the damp spot. “Fine, I’ll change you round,” said Charles.
“It was only as
we were walking out after tea that I suddenly thought, ‘Oh heck, who’s going
to bowl this one over?’ I might as well do it myself.” This was Charles’
sixth match of the summer, and he had bowled only four overs. He had never
regarded himself as much more than an occasional bowler, and now, suffering from
back trouble, his doctor had advised him against bowling at all. “‘Oh
well,’ I thought. ‘One over won’t hurt me.’”
“Go easy on
me,” he said to Peter May. “I haven’t bowled this year.” He measured out
his run and prepared to bowl a containing straight over. With his second ball he
clean bowled the best batsman in England. “Back or no back, I had to continue
then, didn’t I?”
The fourth ball
of his next over saw Bernie Constable caught by Gerry Lester from a skier, then
the young Micky Stewart was bowled first ball for a duck. “I just bowled
straight,” Charles claims.
“What people
don’t realise,” says Tony Diment, “is that he was a good yard quicker than
he looked. He just used to amble up and throw his arm over, but he came off the
wicket a good yard quicker than you expected. And I think that’s where the
deception came in.”
Charles’
accuracy meant that he was striking the wet patch with great consistency, and
each time the ball hit the spot it appeared to hasten on. “Of course he was
very accurate,” says Jeff Goodwin, “but it was the skid that did it. He hit
that little patch every time. It takes some doing, you know, but he did it.”
According to The Times, ‘His medium pace swingers whipped viciously
into the batsmen.’
In his fifth over
Charles bowled Fletcher, the opening bat. The next over saw the end of Ron
Pratt, bowled again, and he had figures of five wickets for no run.
“He just treated it as a joke,” Terry Spencer recalls. “After each wicket,
he would say, ‘I suppose I’d better have another over now.’”
He had not conceded a run, and his
team - enjoying the fun - fielded with tigerish determination. His eighth over
brought him two more wickets: McIntyre and Surridge, both bowled. His figures
now were seven wickets for no runs. After two more maidens, he bowled Tony Lock.
Surrey were now 67 for nine, and his bowling analysis read: 11 – 11 – 0 –
8.
Wisden’s
list of Remarkable Analyses showed no complete analysis with a bowler having
taken more than five wickets without conceding a run. Of those who had taken
eight, the meanest return was Jim Laker’s for just two runs, in the Test Trial
at Bradford in 1950. ‘Next to me,’ wrote Crusader in the Leicester
Evening Mail, ‘someone muttered between his teeth, “I just pray he
won’t bowl any more. There’s bound to be a run against him.”’ In the
pavilion Jeff Goodwin, not in the team for the match, remembers Chairman Neville
Dowen saying, “For Christ’s sake, don’t bowl again. You’ve got a world
record that will never be beaten!”
Laker himself was now at the crease with Alec Bedser for
company, and they each survived a maiden over. Terry Spencer, bowling from the
far end, was at his most testing, but Laker then managed to take a single off
him so that he was facing as Charles began his thirteenth over. The
Leicestershire captain’s figures stood at 12 – 12 – 0 – 8, but now the
spell was broken.
“Jim took to
smearing me,” says Charles. “He hit a two that lobbed into the gap between
cover and extra cover, then a two that went off an edge down to fine leg. Then
there was a three. So I finished up with eight for seven. It could so easily
have been nine for nil.”
And what of the one that ballooned into the covers? Maurice Tompkin and Vic Munden were both in the vicinity of the ball. “But we couldn’t have caught it,” says Vic, “even if someone had dived.”
Eventually Terry Spencer bowled Jim Laker for 14, Surrey were all out for 77 and the Leicestershire players formed a guard of honour for Charles as they left the field. Years later he still regards his 90-minute spell as one of life’s oddities, the sort of extraordinary freak that the game loves to throw up from time to time. “According to my wife,” he now says, “Peter May said that I went into the Surrey dressing room, opened the door and said, ‘Gentlemen, I do beg your pardon.’”
That evening the celebrations got under way. “The only thing it taught me,” he now says, “was how much whisky I could drink. And I think that I found out the answer very quickly.”