Famous Cricketers No 72 - Lord Cowdrey of Tonbridge, C.B.E.

Lord Cowdrey of Tonbridge, C.B.E. Early years The basic facts of Colin Cowdrey’s life have been oft noted, but for completeness they do bear repetition. Michael Colin Cowdrey was born on the Indian tea plantation managed by his father high in the Nilgiri Hills, a hundred miles to the north of Bangalore in a district known as Ootacamund, on 24th December 1932. In England, the Cowdrey home was Sanderstead, south of Croydon in Surrey, once a village but now swallowed up in London suburbia. Colin Cowdrey’s great-grandfather, Sam, was the estate owner of Sanderstead Court Manor and from 1895 to 1907 was captain of Sanderstead Cricket Club. Indeed there were sufficient cricketing Cowdreys, family rumour would have it, for an eleven of the ilk to make up the whole village team. (Local club records have not survived to confirm this.) Cowdrey’s father, Ernest Arthur, born 4th January 1902 in Calcutta, was a cricketer of some ability who had played for Surrey 2nd XI and Berkshire. In India in 1926/27, he played in a one-day match for the Europeans against the M.C.C. tourists, top scoring with 48. ( Wisden refers to him as “E. Cowdray”.) He also played in one first-class match for the Europeans in the Bombay Quadrangular Tournament in the same season. Cowdrey’s mother, Molly, had been a good tennis and hockey player. The story goes that the cricket fanatic Ernest gave his only child his very distinctive initials quite deliberately, not the least because the baby had barely drawn breath before his name was down for membership at Lord’s. In his autobiography Cowdrey was not so sure, as he admitted he never once discussed the matter with his father. Whatever, the elements of the game were instilled from an early age when house servants served as “net” bowlers to refine the young Cowdrey’s skills. That is until aged 5, when his parents transported him back to England for school. En passage they were overtaken by Bradman’s 1938 Australians, an event marked with some awe by Cowdrey senior. Taking up residence with his maternal grandmother in the family home in Sanderstead, he was enrolled at Homefield Preparatory School, Sutton. His parents returned to India where with the intervention of war they were to remain parted from their son for seven years. At Homefield Cowdrey came under the influence of the autocratic Charles Walford whose “Victorian values” did much to influence the moral development of his young pupil. It was not entirely a happy time, as Cowdrey admitted. But he was soon making his mark as a cricketer. Aged 7 he scored his first century, or at least believed he had. But when a recalculation showed he had been dismissed five runs short, Walford as a consolation drew the attention of the fact to Jack Hobbs. The great man replied with a much-treasured letter and an autographed bat. His stay at Homefield was interrupted for a short period when fear of the attraction of nearby Royal Air Force airfields to German bombers decreed his removal to Holyrood House in Bognor Regis (on reflection just as vulnerable with Royal Air Force Tangmere nearby). Returning to Homefield in 1942 he stayed there until 1945. The complexities of the Cowdrey character were clearly formed at this time. Certainly any tendency for self-expression and exhibitionism were stifled by the Spartan Walford. It is a revealing admission in his autobiography that only on leaving the latter’s care did he realise he was a very good cricketer, a realisation coming about from a period at the Sandham-Gover Cricket School during the winter of 1945/46. 5