Founded 1980
Chair:        
Secretary: 
Treasurer: 

Graham Smith
Jan Thompson
Graham Mumby-Croft


BATTING ON A STICKY WICKET - OR THIRTY YEARS AT THE CREASE - By PETER QUINN

‘Issue re-write’ was the instruction to the Censors’ Office once a prisoner had included offensive content in a letter. Hopefully there will be nothing offensive here, but it is a re-write. Versions have appeared twice before, tailored for different readerships. This Time, I can take much for granted. The reader can relax and wait for the game to commence. The wicket however looks decidedly dodgy, and you can’t quite read what the ball will do since the bowler is – Headquarters Postings. I first became aware of the vagaries of team selection at the end of the 27th assistant governor training course. The toss of a coin would decide my fate. I had already been asked about playing for Leicester Prison and said I would be happy to open my innings there. I already knew its vice-captain, Trevor Gadd. Up went the coin and Umpire Rayfield announced that I would be fielding in the deep for Hollesley Bay instead.

Hollesley was a fine place for an opening knock. It had magnificent sports fields: the legacy of a founding borstal principle that team sports were healthy and character building, before a generation of grandstanding politicians declared them evidence of soft regimes. The Governor, Denis Higman, was a talented cricketer who would have been an asset to any decent club side. He captained the staff eleven by dint of his skill, not his position. He also played for the Prison Service national team, the Broad Arrows. An equally skilled cricketer was Dougie Price who, as orderly officer, would make sure that nobody needed for the staff team would be called in for weekends at double time, whatever their feelings on the matter.

When Chelmsford Crown Court sent us a young man who had already played for Essex Second Eleven, Denis appointed him an honorary staff team member. This made it virtually impossible for him to be nicked approaching the weekend, lest it might restrict his availability to play.

Like all good governors, Denis would do his daily rounds. In the days before in-cell televisions, when each borstal house had its own TV room and when Test Matches were free to air, ‘Would anyone like to do the rounds with me?’ became code for an invitation to accompany him from house to house, catching a fair amount of play wherever we stopped.

After some years it was Time to change County. Tony Pearson was in charge of postings at the time. There was a Tony Pearson who had played for Cambridge University and Somerset in the 1960s, but our Tony Pearson was equipped with a much more unpredictable googly. ‘An open prison for women in Yorkshire’ he said. I awaited this to be confirmed on the team sheet and when the envelope eventually arrived, it announced my posting to – Long Lartin. From an open prison for women to a high security prison for men in the same over! Quite remarkable.

Long Lartin was not particularly a cricket prison. Its governor, Jack Williams, had played for Saracens in his day and once a year, we hosted Jack’s old team. The prisoners’ fifteen, which could only play friendlies since they could not meet away fixtures, might have been playing the visitors’ third or fourth fifteens for all they knew but they were still Saracens. Sportsmanship and camaraderie were much as at any other match but without the beer. Our much-respected PEI (and thus rugby coach) had played at a high level of rugby league. ‘It’s not that I was banned for life,’ he would say, ‘it was more a question of sine die’, a distinction lost on most of us.

That it was not a ‘cricket prison’ did not mean that cricket wasn’t played. Annual limited over fixtures were between ‘West Indies’ and ‘England’, all of them prisoners. The closest that most of the former had been to the Caribbean was Brixton and the opening bowler for the latter was an IRA bomber. Who says sport and politics don’t mix? I’m told that an annual fixture at Leyhill, at the time, was Cops v Robbers, all oof them prisoners too.

After Long Lartin, rain stopped play for a while. I was sent to the Prison Service College to train newly joined assistant governors to be all-rounders and more senior governors about prison law. Many hoped that they would never be troubled by litigation but the deluge of prisoner rights cases at the 􀆟me was rather like being hit by Wes Hall without wearing a box. I should like to think that my coaching of them was rather more effective than Stan Worthington’s coaching of me, as a schoolboy, at Old Trafford. 
The touring season resumed, and I was posted to Durham Prison. There was little time for cricket given my weekly commuting back home. But that might be a convenient excuse. Colleagues who played in the Durham Leagues were terrified by the class of player they encountered including a young lad called Harmison who was just star􀆟ng his career with Ashington. Be􀆩er facing a thousand or so prisoners at Durham than facing Harmy on song!

Four years at Durham and I was, once again, packing my kit. Risley Remand Centre had received a damning pitch inspection from Judge Tumin, the third umpire. A new governor, with me as his vice-captain, were chosen to turn out for the Home Secretary’s Eleven v The Rest. Unfortunately, The Rest comprised a staff largely resistant to changes to the field, ably supported by their coach, John Bartell. The management team faced beamers and chuckers and such sledging as we had seldom heard. Each decision that went against The Rest was contested as if the Laws of the game (Cricket has Laws, not Rules) applied to all but them. As for the prisoners, watching in the crowd, they decided to riot. Helpfully, a local farmer rented a field to a television company so that a cherry picker could peer over the boundary. It thus became the first prison riot with a ball-by-ball commentary. Following this, my innings at Risley came to a premature end, without realizing that what had transpired was merely a warmup match for the first-class fixture, shortly to take place at Manchester’s Strangeways, just down the road. Even some of the players were the same.

That innings was over, but the match was not. Eventually I was sent to govern the women’s prison in Yorkshire. Cricket did not play much part in my life there, though it did in my village. An occasional spectator was one of my Durham old boys. ‘Would you like to borrow this book?’ he asked, showing me a huge history of the Royal Navy. ‘When would I get time to read something that size?’ I asked. ‘I got through it in a week,’ he said, ‘mind, I was in Durham nick at the time’. ‘What on earth were you doing back in Durham?’ I asked. ‘Non-payment of fine.’ ‘Why didn’t you pay your fine?’ He gave the most logical of replies, though possibly one not best calculated to appeal to the Bench. ‘Because I’d bought the book!’ 

One more change of team was to come. Rather as knackered old jobbing cricketers are found work in administration to see out their days, I was posted to Headquarters: The Lords of the Prison Service. There, instead of following the Laws of the game, I was helping to write them. And it was there that I was hit by a ball I couldn’t have foreseen.
People, curious about my career, will often say ‘You must have met some tough characters in your day’. Like most of us, the answer is ‘Yes, but I never felt under personal threat’. Only once, in over 30 years, was I physically assaulted and that was by a hopelessly drunken and offensive official at Headquarters. We had called the security staff, but they must have been chasing streakers somewhere else on the ground since they failed to turn up. Together with my colleague, Nigel Hancock, we ejected him from the building. And how he resisted! The official, who had ‘previous’, faced adjudication and was given a life ban. I was awarded Man of the Match in the form of a Battered Phoenix tie and certificate.

So, my life at the crease came to an end and I declared to watch from the boundary. Like many cricketers and governors of old, I reflect with dismay as first-class cricket and criminal justice degenerate into the knockabout world of The Hundred and privatization. But working in prisons can give one an odd perspective. When, a few years ago, three Pakistan international cricketers were jailed in the UK for match fixing with bookies, I couldn’t help but think about three lucky governors – they had the fittest gym orderlies in the country.