Fred Bakewell: ‘Among the Bright Colours’
£16.00
by Mick Pope
Between 1928 and 1936 the Northamptonshire opener Alfred (Fred) Harry Bakewell scored 14,570 first-class runs, a figure that included 31 centuries. His six Test caps for England yielded an average of 45.44 and a Test hundred against West Indies at The Oval in 1933.
At the crease, his open and crouched stance did not please the purists, but he was unafraid of tradition and played his strokes with boldness and flair. The writer RC Robertson-Glasgow thought Bakewell ‘could have batted with Bradman on not uneven terms’. He was also an outstanding fielder, particularly at short leg, where his fearlessness and dexterity brought him 225 first-class catches.
Yet a dark thread of tragedy, turbulence and disorder was woven in ‘among the bright colours’ of Fred Bakewell’s troubled life. His upbringing was clouded by a spell in a reformatory school following teenage misdemeanours.
At the height of his cricketing powers in 1936, he was badly injured in a road accident on the journey home from Chesterfield, where Bakewell had scored 241 not out against County Champions-elect Derbyshire. The 27-year-old never played again. A messy divorce followed, together with claims of neglect, money troubles, family despair and charges of theft and shoplifting amongst the general chaos.
Uncovered by the cricket writer and historian David Frith in 1981, after many years in the wilderness, Bakewell recalled his remarkable and sad story without regret or remorse. This once-thrilling batter and most complicated of characters died in 1983, leaving one to wonder just what might have been.
