LIves in Cricket No 31 - Walter Robins

106 Changing the Law four matches leading the Middlesex seconds. This should have allowed Robbie plenty of time to follow England’s fortunes which culminated in winning back the Ashes in Coronation Year under the professional captain, Len Hutton, but he was often otherwise engaged. He and Kathleen had found an ideal property at Froyle in north-east Hampshire, a small village astride the old Pilgrim’s Way from Winchester to Canterbury and about 50 miles from London. ‘The Shrubbery’ was a large house, partly eighteenth-century, with a walled garden and meadows rolling down to the banks of the River Wey, but it was in a bad state of repair. So in 1953 they moved into the adjoining cottage until all the renovation work had been completed. There was also plenty of work to be done in the garden and grounds, but until a gardener was engaged Kathleen recalled that ‘Walter threw his heart and soul into the garden, cutting down trees, sawing wood, working the machines on lawns and meadow, and gravelling the paths and patios.’ Later that year the house was ready for them but not long after they had moved in, Robbie’s father Vivian had a heart attack and had to leave his flat at Belsize Park, where he had lived since Mabel passed away in 1950. He took up permanent residence in the cottage, from where he was soon back on his feet and going to the office in London two or three times a week. * * * * * * * By the start of the 1954 season Robbie was back as a member of the England Selection Committee, working to put together a team to win a four-Test series against Pakistan, then new kids on the block, but also looking for the right team, and captain, to send to Australia the following winter capable of retaining the Ashes. Hutton’s success as captain in the previous summer had been tarnished by events in the West Indies during the MCC tour that followed, when he was criticised for the use of defensive bowling wide of leg stump in the First Test. Eventually Hutton confounded his critics by winning two of the last three Tests to square the series, but back in England there were those who continued to regard Hutton’s overall leadership as far too defensive and unsuitable to lead an MCC tour to Australia. His detractors wanted the captaincy to go to David Sheppard who, in the previous summer, had spurred Sussex into second place in the Championship with youthful zest and had demonstrated undoubted flair for leadership. For reasons that he doesn’t explain, Alan Gibson wrote later that it was Robbie acting alone ‘who tried, in 1954, to replace Hutton by Sheppard as the England captain, and did it in a cloak-and-dagger way’, suggesting that he was working independently from the other selectors. Although it isn’t hard to imagine that Robbie would have been outspoken in his criticisms of any negative tactics employed by Hutton, ‘cloak-and-dagger’ was never his style, and in any case, some of the other selectors may have been nursing their own doubts about the suitability of Hutton. Within MCC, Warner was certainly one of a group who favoured Sheppard, and he encouraged C.B.Fry to write an article in The Cricketer in which it was assumed that recent developments had made Sheppard’s place certain. In fact, it was Ronny Aird, the MCC secretary, not Robbie, who secretly