Peter Walker

Peter Walker is known primarily as a Glamorgan cricketer, an all-rounder good enough to have played for England. A successful batsman and bowler, he was one of the greatest close catchers of all time. In the summer of 1961, he scored 1,347 runs, took 101 wickets and held 73 catches, arguably the best ‘treble’ in the history of the game.

But his life has involved much more than just cricket. Growing up in South Africa, he ran away to sea at the age of 16 and in this book he describes his adventures. He survived an attempt to murder him in the Suez Canal, he discovered what it was like to be almost penniless on the streets of New York, and he developed his extraordinary catching skills while crossing the Pacific Ocean, thanks to his access to a locker that contained the ship’s supply of potatoes.

During his cricketing years he had one extraordinary summer, when in a single week he found himself dropping all the way from the England Test team to the Glamorgan second eleven. Nine years later he was a member of the county’s championship-winning side.

He developed a career in broadcasting that included 18 years as the face of Sunday cricket on BBC2. Later he set up his own highly successful production company, Merlin Television.

He has hunted crocodiles, joined the desperate rescuers in the Aberfan pit disaster, survived cancer, directed the development of junior cricket in Wales, and now he tells the story of it all.

His tale takes in a night draped over a rope in a cheap New York hostel and another lying on a pew in Bath Abbey, sick of the claustrophobia of county cricket. On one page he is recalling his ageing but indomitable captain Wilf Wooller facing up to the fast bowling of the young Frank Tyson; on another he is interviewing an angry Afrikaner pointing a pistol at him.

Peter Walker is a natural story teller, and his book is a wonderfully entertaining read, full of characters and incidents, a rattling good yarn.