Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

Foreword By the Rt Hon The Lord Butler, KG, GCB, CVO My father was christened Bernard Daft Butler, being the son of Richard’s daughter, Anne Huskinson Daft, by her second marriage. My father was sensitive about having ‘Daft’ as his middle name. In fact, it was the only thing about which I ever knew he told me an untruth. I remember asking him, as a small boy, what the ‘D’ stood for; and he told me ‘Douglas’. I only discovered some years later that it really stood for ‘Daft’ and that Richard Daft had been one of the greatest cricketers of the second half of the nineteenth century. I suppose that my father’s sensitivity was understandable. By the time he was born in 1907, Richard Daft had been dead for seven years and the days of his cricketing glory had ended some sixteen years before. In Lancashire, where my father grew up, the word ‘daft’ had lost its East Midlands meaning of a meek or gentle person and definitely meant one apple short of a picnic. I can imagine my father would not have wanted his school companions in the playground to know that his middle name was ‘Daft’. By the time I discovered the truth, I was a sports-mad, and particularly cricket-mad, teenager. When I found out my father was the grandson of Richard and I was Richard Daft’s great-grandson, I was thrilled to bits. I felt that if I had borne the great man’s name, I would have blazoned it to the heavens. Much later on, Prime Minister John Major did it for me: whenever my name was mentioned, John never referred to me as Secretary of the Cabinet or Head of the Civil Service, but as Richard Daft’s descendant. To tell the truth, I preferred it that way. There may have been other reasons for my father’s reticence. As Neil Jenkinson’s biography makes clear, Richard Daft’s life story has its low points as well as its high ones. Towards the end he was declared bankrupt, and in my father’s time bankruptcy carried a greater stigma than it does today. Moreover, Anne Daft’s first marriage, which took place in the year before her father died, 7