Remembering Ken Barrington: a sudden departure, most unlike his batting

SportblogCricketThis week marks 35 years since one of England’s finest Test batsmen, and coaches, passed away while on tour in the West Indies as assistant manager

To this day, Graham Gooch remembers vividly the moment he found out that The Colonel had died: around half past seven on another beautiful warm Barbados morning 35 years ago this week. A gentle knock on his door in the England team hotel in Aquatic Gap, south of Bridgetown. Waiting were the team manager Alan Smith and captain Ian Botham to break the news that Ken Barrington, much loved by all who knew him but a mentor to Gooch and a huge influence on him as a batsman, had suffered a massive heart attack after going to bed late the previous evening and had passed away.

Gooch, and the team, were devastated. Ken was Smith’s assistant in the West Indies and a confidant to everyone and they had needed him on what was rapidly becoming a horror tour. It was Frank Keating, following the team for this paper, who called his account of that trip Another Bloody Day In Paradise, and now the bloodiest day of them all had begun.

The team gathered on the pier that juts out from the hotel into the blue waters of Carlisle Bay and the news was broken to them. There were tears, of course, and a stunned silence. Here one day – “Night, Colonel” – gone forever the next. Hard to believe. But then there was business to attend to. The team were about to start the third day of the third Test, and already they were under the hammer from one of the greatest cricket teams ever assembled. They needed Kenny’s presence, the reassuring arm around the shoulder for beleaguered batsmen blasted from the crease from one who knew what it was like to be thrown into the furnace of tooth-and-claw Test match cricket.

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Ken Barrington was a great batsman – genuinely so – which, in an era that saw Peter May, Colin Cowdrey, Ted Dexter and Tom Graveney, we tend to forget. His England contemporaries were glamorous batsmen. Spectators paid attention when they were at the crease but switched off when Ken was entrenching himself. He always saw himself as paving the way, the pathfinder, the hand preparing the stage. It was, of course, self-deprecating. Ken made himself into an obdurate, cussed batsman because that is what was needed. He it was who pioneered the double line of defence in which his back leg swung round as he played forwards.

His statistics, as much as we can judge any player by them, are remarkable. He played 82 Tests between 1955 and 1968, and scored 6,806 of his 31,714 first-class runs in them. There were 20 centuries. Of those who completed Test careers (so for now we exclude Adam Voges and Steve Smith) his Test average of 58.67 is behind only Bradman, of course, Graeme Pollock, George Headley, Herbert Sutcliffe and Eddie Paynter, although Pollock, Headley and Paynter played a quarter of the matches that he did, and all only two points or so above him. This against a first‑class career average of 45.63.

I have a personal snapshot of Ken the batsman, at The Oval, a fleeting moment in my own first‑class debut match for Surrey against Gloucestershire. His career was in its last throes in 1968, and it was clear even then that he was not a well man. His Test career, so it subsequently proved, had come to a close just days before, with a drawn fourth Test against Australia at Headingley (49 and 46 not out) and his heart problem was to manifest itself during the following winter. He batted just the once in that Gloucester match and scored only 13 but there was a cover drive, not the grace of Cowdrey or Graveney, nor the power of May or Dexter, but a textbook, elbow-high, totally efficient, rifle crack ping to the Harleyford Road.

Ken was manager on the single tour that I had with England, to India, Sri Lanka and Australia in the winter of 1976‑77, a role he embraced with energy, enthusiasm, boundless optimism and humour, unable to pass up any invitation for the team to tea somewhere, or to meet the local “Mr Chief Minister”.

His malapropisms were a thing of beauty, his exhortation to batsmen to “book in for bed and breakfast” a cliche in the game now. I treasure the net sessions he spent trying and failing to teach me how to play leg-spin (a forgotten fact is that he is the second most prolific England leg‑spinner of the past 50 years: Bob Barber the first). The occasion in Hyderabad, where he put on his touring blazer to find the shoulder had been eaten away in his wardrobe by Roddy Rat, remains legendary to this day.

Now he was gone. On his last day he had seen England blitzed by the West Indies pacemen for 122, starting with Michael Holding’s famous first over which culminated in Geoffrey Boycott’s off stump being detonated from the ground. After two days West Indies had a first-innings lead of 143, and were just embarking on their second innings. Gooch had made 26 in the first innings, joint top scorer with Botham. In the second, he made 116 out of England’s 224, and it was an innings of strength and determination drawn from grief.

“I thought of Kenny all through,” Gooch told Keating, his autobiographical ghost. “‘Make it count. If you get to 40, make it to 60; get to 60, make it to 80. Make it count. Don’t give it away.’” It was Gooch’s second Test century. “All I know,” he said, “is that it was a century I will always treasure. It was all for Kenny. I hope he was proud of me that day.”

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