Lives in Cricket No 2 - Johnny Briggs

Chapter Fifteen What are we to make of him? ‘It’s not what ah do, it’s what t’others think ah do as matters.’ Johnny Briggs So what are we to make of Johnny Briggs? It is both futile and fallacious to compare sportsman across the generations. What we do know is that Briggs was one of the most popular players to have graced the game. He was truly a working-class hero. Coming from humble beginnings he had made it to the very top of his chosen profession. The fans, largely working class themselves, were able to identify with him. I wasn’t fortunate enough to see Briggs perform, so perhaps it might be best left to Neville Cardus, one of the greatest writers on the game, to tell the reader what Briggs was all about. Although Cardus was only 11 when he first saw Briggs play, in 1900 at the tail-end of his career, he seems, like the prescient observer that he was, to have captured much of the essence of the player. Cardus himself came from a poor Manchester family and had little formal education so there was a certain symmetry between the two men. After doing some cricket coaching and spending some time as secretary to the headmaster at Shrewsbury School, Cardus, who had been rejected for military service, went into journalism with the Manchester Guardian where he remained for the rest of his working life apart from a spell in Australia between 1939 and 1947. In 1970, Cardus was elected president of Lancashire. He wrote equally well and perceptively about music as he did about cricket. In Briggs, Cardus saw something of the sad clown figure of Joseph Grimaldi suggesting that Briggs might not always have been as happy on the inside as he looked on the outside. Cardus obviously developed a deep love for Briggs the cricketer and wrote of him in his book ‘Days in the Sun’. ‘He was surely born for the game, for he was a sort of little indiarubber ball of a man, and he seemingly remained in one position more than a second at a time only by strong will-power.’ 87