Frank Tyson

Frank Tyson

Frank Tyson, the England fast bowler who has died aged 85, was dubbed “Typhoon” Tyson on the strength of his demolition of the Australians in the Ashes series of 1954-55; in the manner of such phenomena, however, the storm soon blew itself out.

Tyson arrived in Australia in 1954 with a reputation for great pace, but for little else; indeed, up to that point in his career he had only taken 105 first class wickets. The great Australian journalist Ray Robinson saw him early in the tour, and confirmed his speed: “From a point 30 paces out towards the boundary (he) comes careering up at an angle, after a few preliminary shuffles which (have been) likened to the pawing of an angry bull about to charge. Tyson’s elbows pump like pistons. He twists his left shoulder foward as his splayed boots pound the turf in 15 giant strides. Tyson’s head tilts to one side until he throws it back as he gathers himself in the effort of delivery. The broad shoulders swivel and the right hand hurls the ball in the general direction of the other end of the wicket. His right side comes plunging through, as if to chase after the ball and hasten it on its course towards the quaking batsman.”

Nothing here of beauty or of style; rather a display of brute and elemental power. Robinson noted that 70 yards separated Tyson from the wicket-keeper at the start of his run.

Tyson did well enough in some of the early matches of the tour, without suggesting anything of the destruction to come. And the first Test match, in which Len Hutton put the Australians on a perfect batting wicket at Brisbane, was later described by Tyson as his “black hour”. He took one for 160 from 29 overs. England were defeated by an innings and 154 runs.

Tyson (right) and Brian Statham leading the England cricket team off the pitch after their victory in the second Test match against Australia in 1954 

But Tyson had learnt a valuable lesson. Deciding that his long run up to the wicket was too exhausting in the Australian heat, he chose to revert to the shorter 15-yard run-up he had used in League cricket. Both Len Hutton and Alf Gover had previously suggested he should do this, but the decision was Tyson’s alone. The results were immediately evident in the match against Victoria. Tyson took six wickets, and it was clear that his bowling had gained greatly in accuracy while losing nothing in pace.

He maintained this form in the second Test at Sydney. After England had been dismissed for 154, Tyson helped them strike back with four wickets; greatly daring he even bowled a bumper at Ray Lindwall, which had the Australian fast bowler caught at the wicket.

Lindwall retaliated in England’s second innings, and laid out Tyson, who was carried off the pitch to hospital. He had a lump the size of an egg where the ball had struck him on the back of the head, but the X-ray revealed no other damage.

Australia began the last day needing only 151 more runs to win, with eight wickets in hand. But Tyson, fully recovered, and with a gale blowing over his shoulder from Botany Bay, was a man possessed. In his second over he yorked two men through sheer pace; and he finished with six for 85 as England won by 38 runs. Four of his victims were clean bowled; two caught behind the wicket.

Ray Lindwall had come in to bat wary of a retaliatory bouncer, only to have his stumps scattered by a half volley. For long afterwards his team-mates ribbed him that Australia would have won the Ashes if only he had never cracked Tyson on the head.

Tyson repeated the medicine in the third Test at Melbourne, taking seven wickets for 28 in Australia’s second innings and finishing the match off with a spell of six wickets for 16 runs from 6·3 overs. He ended the series with 28 wickets at 20·82 apiece.

Frank Tyson: he left batsmen 'quaking'

Not since Larwood, and the Bodyline series of 1932-33, had Australia been so humbled; and it is doubtful if Larwood, or anyone else, has ever bowled so fast for England. When England went on to New Zealand, Tyson was timed at 89mph, but that was in the nets, when he was wearing two sweaters. More than most fast bowlers, he needed the heat of battle to give his best.

Perhaps the most curious fact about Tyson’s triumphant tour was that in the course of it his weight increased from 12 to 13-and-a-half stone.

Frank Holmes Tyson was born at Farnworth, near Bolton in Lancashire, on June 6 1930 and brought up in a small council house at Middleton, near Manchester. His father, a foreman in a bleaching works, had no interest in cricket; no more did his mother, though a staunch Yorkshirewoman; or his brother David, who was eight years older.

Even in infancy, though, Frank was fixated on the game, which he used to play on the waste ground behind his house, using an oil drum for a wicket. But it was not until he was evacuated to Fleetwood, near Blackpool, in the Second World War that he attended a school with a proper cricket pitch.

Later, at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Middleton, he did well enough to be selected, at the age of only 15, to play for the town in the Central Lancashire League. It was in this hard school that he honed his talent over the next five years. By 1948, when he helped Middleton to win the Wood Cup, he was beginning to be recognised as a decidedly fast bowler.

He also played for Manchester Schoolboys, and was invited by Lancashire to a trial at Old Trafford. The coach, Harry Makepeace, declared he could make an England bowler of him, and invited him to join the groundstaff, but Tyson’s father would not allow him to consider becoming a professional cricketer before going to a university.

First, however, came National Service. Tyson joined the Royal Signals at Catterick, though his summers continued to be devoted to cricket. Playing for the Army at Lord’s, he bowled “Writer P B H May” for a duck.

In 1949 he had his only game for Lancashire; representing the second XI against Northumberland at Old Trafford, he arrived late and pulled a muscle after five overs. In 1950 he broke his left leg playing soccer (a sport at which he had been good enough to be selected for Lancashire schools). By 1951 the Lancashire committee had clearly lost faith in his durability. “There will be no opportunity for you this season,” the secretary wrote in 1951.

Meanwhile Tyson had begun at Durham University, where he began a long and ultimately successful struggle for a degree, much inhibited by cricket. Even during the 1954-55 tour of Australia he was still swotting at the English poets, giving rise to the story that he recited Wordsworth as he ran into bowl.

Tyson (right) and his fellow Northamptonshire player Keith Andrew in 1954 on the sholders of their team-mates  

Tyson reckoned he was as fast a bowler at Durham as he ever was afterwards, and by the early 1950s stories were beginning to circulate about him – such as that of Frank Russell, founder of the Parasites Cricket Club, who as a batsman survived a terrifying over, only to faint in the pavilion afterwards.

In 1951 he was engaged as professional for Knypersley in the North Staffordshire League, were he did superbly well. He also had an opportunity to bowl against Len Hutton in pre-season warm-up game at Redcar. “Who the hell’s this?” the great batsman enquired after the first over.

As a result of a recommendation from the Australian Jock Livingston, Tyson joined Northamptonshire in 1952, though he was obliged to wait a year to qualify for county championship matches.

He had some modest success in county matches in 1953, and put in a sensational performance against the Australians, when he took two wickets in his opening over. At Old Trafford he delivered a thunderbolt which almost went for six byes; it was still rising from the bounce as it soared over the wicket-keeper, and hit the ground just once more before cannoning into the boundary boards.

Tyson’s progress was maintained in 1954. He made a deep impression against Middlesex at Lord’s in July, laying out Bill Edrich, and beating even Denis Compton for pace. A week later, and the day after being awarded his county cap, he was chosen for the tour of Australia. In August he took five for 57 in his first Test, against Pakistan.

Tyson returned from Australia a hero – “have a Tyson, Frank Capstan” proclaimed a cigarette advertisement – and at first seemed as dangerous as ever on the pitch. In the first Test of 1955, he took six for 28 (including a final spell of five for five) in South Africa’s second innings. Injury kept him out of the second Test at Lord’s (in fact he never played in a Test at Lord’s), but in the Third Test at Old Trafford he secured six more wickets – though England went down by three wickets.

At this stage Tyson had taken 58 wickets at 17·03 apiece in ten Test matches; he was destined, however, to play in only seven more Tests, in which he captured but 14 more wickets. Partly he was undone by injury, partly by the featherbed wickets at Northampton; in his whole career he took only 509 wickets in the county championship.

He did little in South Africa in 1956-57 (apart from preaching a sermon in Johannesburg, and taking six for 40 in the last innings of the final Test), and was lucky to be chosen for the Australian tour of 1958-59, when he played in only the last two Tests, and in two more against New Zealand. Still, his final total of 76 Test wickets left him with a very creditable average of 18·56. He retired in 1960, with a career haul of 766 wickets at 20·92.

Frank Tyson in 2004

Tyson briefly taught in Northampton, but in 1962 emigrated to Australia, complaining bitterly about the difficulties of keeping a wife and children on a salary of £14 a week: “In Australia I’ll be making £34 a week teaching the same subjects.”

For some years he was a housemaster at Carey Grammar School in Melbourne. By 1970, however, he was running an indoor cricket school, and in 1975 he was appointed coaching director for Victoria. From 1982 he fulfilled the same function for Queensland.

He also commentated on cricket for the Observer and The Daily Telegraph. He published an excellent autobiography, A Typhoon Called Tyson (1961, republished 1990) as well as The Test Within (1987), a study of 22 cricketers.

Frank Tyson married, in 1957, Ursula Miels, whom he had met on his first tour of Australia. They had a son and two daughters.

Frank Tyson, born June 6 1930, died September 27 2015

Jackie Collins

Jackie Collins: "Nothing can beat sunsets in Maui which are every colour of the rainbow" 

Jackie Collins, who has died aged 77, was the British-born author of titillating blockbuster Hollywood novels, breaking into bestsellerdom with Hollywood Wives (1983), which sold 15 million copies and became her most successful book.

Her output never varied in format, every one of her 30-odd bestsellers featuring headstrong women and rampant men coupling for graphic sex in a whirlwind of lust, money, power and revenge. “It’s a good slam-bang story,” agreed one reviewer of Hollywood Wives, “punctuated with tongue-in-cheek naughty bits and without pretensions.”

Jackie Collins’s format, while scarcely original, was certainly a winning one; in a career spanning nearly half-a-century, she sold half a billion books worldwide.

Her elder sister, the actress Joan Collins, starred in film versions of two of her early books, The Stud (1969) and its sequel The Bitch (1979), and much was made of the see-saw relationship between the two siblings over the years, particularly when Jackie thought Joan had taken up with the wrong men.

During Joan’s marriage to Peter Holm and again during her affair with Robin Hurlstone, Jackie was distinctly icy, dispensing forthright sisterly advice along the lines of “How can you possibly marry Pete Holm — are you mad?” and “Robin is the worst snob I ever met. How dare he correct my pronunciation?” The sisters were subsequently reconciled.

Jackie Collins (left) with her sister Joan at the 2015 Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills, California, in February 2015  

Having moved to Los Angeles from London in the late 1970s, Jackie Collins wrote of what she found there. “From Beverly Hills bedrooms to a raunchy prowl along the streets of Hollywood; from glittering rock parties and concerts to stretch limos and the mansions of the power brokers, Jackie Collins chronicles the real truth from the inside looking out,” observed one breathless piece of pluggery.

She claimed to offer her readers an unrivalled insider’s knowledge of Hollywood and the glamorous lives and loves of the rich, famous, and infamous inhabitants of an increasingly rackety Tinseltown. “I write about real people in disguise,” she declared. “If anything, my characters are toned down — the truth is much more bizarre.” After one reviewer warned that Hollywood Wives should be read under a cold shower, the actor Roger Moore said he just hoped no one recognised him from one of the characters in the book.

Jackie Collins earned critical as well as popular acclaim, being hailed a “raunchy moralist” by the film director Louis Malle and, perhaps more gnomically, “Hollywood’s own Marcel Proust” by Vanity Fair magazine. Her fiction debut, The World is Full of Married Men (1968), set in “swinging” 1960s London, was said to have ignited the touchpaper of female sexual fantasy in much the same way as EL James achieved nearly half-a-century later with Fifty Shades of Grey. But, as Jackie Collins herself noted, there was one important difference: “My heroines kick ass. They don’t get their asses kicked.”

Her heroines certainly led voracious erotic lives. Jackie Collins wrote about empowered, rich and sexy women before mass-market popular fiction was considered ready for them. Fortunately for her, her early work coincided with the growing use of the birth control pill and the ascent of feminism.

In her eighth novel Chances (1981), Jackie Collins introduced her Mafia princess Lucky Santangelo, a character she placed at the centre of an Italian-American gangster series that progressed through Lucky (1985) and Vendetta: Lucky’s Revenge (1996), and which was still running in 2015.

As a writer she commanded enormous fees for her work, and in 1988 secured an advance of $10 million for three consecutive novels. Her agent, Michael Korda, described it as “the largest amount of money in American book publishing, about the same size as the Brazilian national debt”. Having sped through one of her novels, one Fleet Street critic sheepishly confessed to having rather enjoyed it. “It is a load of tripe, but who cares? This is Hollywood. This is showbusiness. This is Jackie Collins.”

Jacqueline Jill “Jackie” Collins was born on October 4 1937 in north-west London, the younger daughter of a variety agent, Joe Collins, and his wife, Elsa. Jackie started writing short stories when she was nine, which her elder sister, Joan, illustrated.

Jackie Collins in 1954

In an attempt to curb Jackie’s chronic truanting (using letters she forged from her mother) her parents sent her to the Francis Holland School in Baker Street, which bore the motto “That Our Daughters May Be As The Polished Corners Of The Temple”. When her teachers discovered her selling dirty limericks (which she had written herself) to fellow pupils at a penny a time, and instalments of her passionate saga Letters from Bobby, Jackie was asked to leave. “I was finally expelled after they caught me smoking behind a tree on the lacrosse pitch,” she recalled.

At school Jackie Collins aspired to study journalism but her father, counter to the traditional parental stance, insisted that she give up the chance of a steady job and follow Joan to Hollywood to become an actress. At 16, after a short period in repertory in Ilfracombe, Jackie Collins was sent to live with her sister in Beverly Hills. On the day she arrived she found Joan packing for a year-long location shoot in the Caribbean. “She left me alone in the flat with her car keys and some money,” Jackie Collins remembered, “and the one piece of advice she ever gave me: Learn to drive.”

Jackie Collins approached several casting directors and in the course of fending off the inevitable invitations to the casting couch was employed variously as a waitress, pin-up model and mechanic’s assistant in a Beverly Hills garage owned by two brothers. “I used to drag along Sunset Boulevard in an old roadster they gave me,” she recalled. “Of course, I was dating both of them at the time.”

After a less than successful attempt at becoming an actress, in 1960, when she was 23, Jackie Collins married Wallace Austin, a manic depressive and drug addict. Following the birth of her first daughter, Jackie Collins discovered that Austin was addicted to methadone. She began divorce proceedings in 1965, and the following year her husband committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates.

Jackie Collins in 1968 with her first book The World Is Full Of Married Men at her apartment in London

In 1968 Jackie Collins published her first novel, The World is Full of Married Men. Her publishers, WH Allen, urged her remove all the four-letter words to prevent the novel from being banned. “Women didn’t write about sex then,” Jackie Collins noted, “they wrote about women going off to the Cotswolds to have a nervous breakdown over a man.”

In contrast to the rampant promiscuity in her novels, Jackie Collins’s home life remained remarkably incident-free. After the success of her debut novel, in 1969 she married Oscar Lerman, owner of the Tramp nightclub in London, whom she met on a blind date. They had two daughters.

The Jackie Collins fiction factory began in earnest with her second novel, The Stud (1969) and continued throughout the 1970s. Despite having to invent ever more lurid plots, her output was consistent, and she produced a novel roughly every two years. She denied that she wrote to a rigid “sex and shopping” formula with a bedroom scene every 20 pages, and insisted that she never made any plot outlines before starting a novel nor any corrections afterwards.

“I know I’m not always grammatical,” she confessed, “but if I changed the grammar it wouldn’t be authentic Jackie Collins. A lot of people think they can write like me, but they can’t.” Her writing schedule was fixed: at least 10 pages a day, seven hours a day, seven days a week. “I like to write by the pool, she said, “listening to Lionel Richie add surrounded by all those phallic cacti.”

In 1978 the Collins sisters collaborated for the first time on the film version of The Stud. Surprisingly, given that Barbara Cartland had described the novel as “disgusting and filthy” and had claimed to have lost sleep reading it, the film was tepid soft pornography. It told the story of a waiter, embarrassingly played by Oliver Tobias, who makes his way to the top by sleeping with his boss, Joan Collins (in the first of what was to become an apparently endless run of “rich bitch” roles).

Although the film flopped badly in cinemas, the producers felt sufficiently confident to invest in the sequel, The Bitch, also starring Joan Collins. This, too, was a box office failure.

By the late 1970s Jackie Collins had been a bestselling author for 10 years and declared that she wanted to broaden her interests. Disappointed by the failure of her early films, and perhaps inspired by one of her own characters, she determined to retain total control of production on her next film, The World is Full of Married Men (1979). “I like to have power,” she said. “I like to think of myself as strong and positive.”

In the 1980s Jackie Collins attained the kind of fame usually associated with film stars. Her novel Hollywood Wives was an immediate success and was followed by Hollywood Husbands, described by one theatrical agent as “the definitive book about Hollywood in the 80s”.

Jackie Collins in 1985

Jackie Collins claimed that her research was done either at her husband’s nightclub or at real Hollywood parties. “I have to keep nipping off to the loo to make notes,” she remembered, “and I have to tone it all down for publication.” She believed that her books were successful because the public wanted to know who her characters really were. “Often stars come up to me at parties and say: ‘Darling, I’ve got a wonderful story for you, but you must promise not to put me in your books’. I always tell them they’re already in one.”

When Jacqueline Susann died in 1986, the tabloids crowned Jackie Collins “The New Queen of Sleaze”, but by the late 1980s her daily routine was more like that of a corporate executive than a novelist. By 1989 she was simultaneously acting as a consultant on the planned film of her book Rock Star, producing two six-hour miniseries of her novels, Chances, Lucky and Lady Boss, and planning a further novel Hollywood Kids.

“It’s not the money I’m interested in,” she once said, “ and I certainly don’t think of my books as literature, more a mild send-up. It’s the success I love, and, of course, the power.”

Shortly after the death of her husband in 1992 she moved into a mansion in Beverly Hills inspired by David Hockney’s painting of a swimming pool “A Bigger Splash”. She wrote all her books in longhand with a black felt-tip pen. Every morning an assistant typed her previous day’s work into a computer, and she kept the original handwritten manuscripts in leather-bound books in her library.

Jackie Collins was appointed OBE in 2013. Her marriage to Oscar Lerman lasted 27 years until his death. She later became engaged to a businessman, Frank Calcagnini, who died in 1998. Although diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer some six years ago, since when she had written five further books, she only recently revealed her illness to Joan, according to one account, keeping it from her to avoid burdening her sister.

Jackie Collins is survived by her three daughters.

Jackie Collins, born October 4 1937, died September 19 2015

Ron Springett

Ron Springett in 1960

Ron Springett, the footballer, who has died aged 80, was England’s first choice goalkeeper for four years between 1959 and 1963, then mostly sat on the substitute’s bench until 1966, after the mantle passed to Gordon Banks.

Only 5ft 8in tall, but with an accurate technique and lightning-fast reflexes , he was capped for England 33 times, first in 1959 against Northern Ireland and lastly against Norway in 1966. “You think about this nice velvety blue cap and that it’s presented to you,” he recalled. “I got up one morning and I heard this rattle at the door and this parcel tried to come through the letter box. When I opened it, it was my first cap.”

One of six children, Ronald Deryk George Springett was born on July 22 1935 in a working-class area of Fulham, from where he was evacuated during the war. After the conflict ended he was educated at Ackmar Road School, Parson’s Green, from which he sometimes played truant when Chelsea were playing at home at Stamford Bridge.

Ron Springett in 1962

After two years of National Service, including a short time in Egypt during the Suez Crisis, Springett became an apprentice motor mechanic at Shell Mex, and began playing Sunday league football for Victoria United, training during his lunch breaks . A supportive Shell Mex supervisor wrote to Fulham and Queen’s Park Rangers suggesting that Springett might be good enough for a trial. Fulham rejected him as being too small, but QPR’s Jack Taylor seized the opportunity. In 1958 he moved to Sheffield Wednesday for the princely sum of £10,000, at once proving pivotal at reversing the previous season’s relegation. He continued to live and train in London, riding the Master Cutler express train service to Sheffield on Fridays .

His England debut came the following year in the match against Northern Ireland in which he frustrated a penalty from Jimmy McIlroy to help secure a 2-1 victory. In an international career of ups and downs, during an April 1960 tie against Scotland at Hampden Park, he sustained a broken finger. After the match he took a taxi to the local hospital to be treated, the driver refusing to charge him, though observing, “I should charge you double because you stopped us from winning.”

Two years later, during the World Cup quarter final against Brazil at Vina del Mar, Chile, a black dog wandered on to the pitch and Springett would recall how both he and the Brazilian forward Garrincha had tried to catch the animal, but without success. Eventually the England striker Jimmy Greaves got down on all fours and managed to get close enough to grab the dog. But the animal proved a lucky mascot for the south American team which won the match 3-1, Garrincha later adopting the dog as a pet.

Dogs were not the only animal hazards in Chile. Before travelling to the country, the England team had been warned to beware of poisonous spiders, so for a bit of fun, Springett and the England captain Johnny Haynes bought some fake arachnids in a joke shop to fool their team mates. On closer inspection later, one fake spider in Haynes’s bed turned out to be moving, prompting the England captain to run out from the team’s quarters on to the training pitch, where he was bitten by a dog.

Ron Springett in yellow with the England team at Cardiff in 1965

Springett saw two World Cups, though he would watch England’s 1966 triumph from the bench, where Sir Alf Ramsey had placed him following a disastrous performance against France in February 1963, in which Springett conceded five goals. The match had been played under bright floodlights which he always found difficult. Though commanding on the line, his vision was not perfect and he was sometimes susceptible with shots from afar.

In May 1967 he returned to QPR, in a transfer agreement which saw him swapped with his younger brother Peter, also a goalkeeper.

A popular player with football fans, especially during his time at Sheffield Wednesday, he always took time to sign autographs, once signing more than 10,000 photographs in a brochure for a testimonial match held in his honour, in September 1967, between Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United.

In 1966, only the 11 players on the pitch during the final against West Germany received winners’ medals. In 2007, however, Fifa changed the rules to award medals to all the winners’ squad members. In 2009 Springett attended a cermony at 10, Downing Street, where he was presented with his medal by the prime minister, Gordon Brown.

Ron Springett is survived by his wife Barbara, whom he married in 1958, and by their daughter.

Ron Springett, born July 22 1935, died September 12 2015

Brian Close

Brian Close at Middlesborough in 1967 

Brian Close, who has died aged 84, was the youngest cricketer ever to play for England; later, he led Yorkshire to four championship titles, and in 1966 was summoned to captain his country.

Yet Close’s progress in the game was never straightforward. The brilliant young all-rounder, whose left-handed batting initially evoked comparisons with that of Frank Woolley, hardened into a battle-scarred veteran, frequently mired in controversy .

The abiding image of Close comes from his last Test match, against the West Indies at Old Trafford in 1976. On the Saturday evening, he and John Edrich endured the searing pace and hostility of Andy Roberts, Michael Holding and Wayne Daniel for 80 minutes .

Spectators winced as, again and again, the ball thudded into the batsmen, whose combined age was 84 (Close 45, Edrich 39). More than once Close buckled at the knees , yet he refused to rub the spot where he had been hit. Pain, he insisted, was only in the mind. Team-mates who saw Close’s battered torso “as if someone had forced handfuls of marbles beneath his skin” – begged to differ. But no one ever doubted his courage, which sometimes bordered on recklessness.

In order to exert pressure on batsmen, Close would position himself suicidally close at silly mid-off or short-leg. “Catch it,” he would shout as the ball cannoned off his balding pate from full-blooded hits. On one occasion the rebound was snapped up at second slip, after striking Close at short-leg.

“What if you’d been hit in the throat?”, an astounded fieldsman asked. “He’d have been caught in the gully,” Close returned.

He played county cricket for 28 years, between 1949 and 1977, first for Yorkshire and then, from 1971, for Somerset. Statistically he achieved only moderate success with the bat. Indeed, it was not until he moved to Somerset that (on three occasions) he averaged over 40 in a season.

Brian Close batting in 1976  

Close never commanded a regular and certain place in the England side, and over his long career played in only 22 Tests. In 37 innings for England he managed no more than four 50s, and the 887 runs he scored were amassed at the indifferent average of 25.34. As a Test bowler he took 18 wickets at 29.55 apiece.

It was Close’s character and presence , rather than his playing record, that made him the most successful county captain of his day. Yorkshire finished top of the championship table in 1963, 1966, 1967 and 1968.

During the 1950s the atmosphere in the Yorkshire dressing room had been poisonous. Ray Illingworth remembered continual rows, including an occasion when Close threatened to smash up his team-mate Johnny Wardle . Morale improved somewhat under the captaincies of Ronnie Burnett (1959) and Vic Wilson (1960-62). In those four years Yorkshire won three championships, and came second in 1961.

Close, appointed skipper in 1963, maintained this predominance. While inspiring both fear and respect, he gave wholehearted loyalty to players who had gained his confidence. As Richard Hutton put it, the trust he generated “made his verbal ear-bashings more tolerable”.

Close also proved a shrewd judge of talent. Whereas Vic Wilson had advised the Yorkshire committee not to engage a young man called Geoffrey Boycott, Close insisted – perhaps to his subsequent regret – that he should be retained.

Yorkshire were so successful under Close that when, in 1966, England were being massacred by the West Indies, the selectors called him up as captain in the hope of salvaging some honour in the fifth Test at the Oval. He duly led England to victory by an innings and 34 runs.

Brian Close going out to bat for Yorkshire in 1967

Certainly Close was fortunate that Tom Graveney hit his best form with an imperious 165. But there was no mistaking the change in England’s attitude. When Charlie Griffith, the West Indian fast bowler, was hit on the finger while batting, he threatened dire revenge on the English batsmen. “Get on with the bloody game, Charlie,” Close told him. “You’re ready enough to dish it out, but when it comes to taking it it’s another tale altogether.”

Close continued to bring England success in 1967, when he captained them to three victories against India, and two out of three (with one match drawn) against Pakistan. The selectors, however, always harboured doubts about Close’s rough ways, and in particular worried about allowing him to take charge of the potentially explosive tour to the West Indies in 1967-68. And if they wanted excuses to dismiss him, Close duly obliged.

Just before the last Test against Pakistan, he was accused of deliberately adopting time-wasting tactics to enable Yorkshire to draw against Warwickshire. In addition The People charged him with having seized and angrily shaken a spectator in the members’ enclosure at Edgbaston.

Close denied the shaking, and remained unrepentant about time-wasting. The authorities at Lord’s, however, were unimpressed, and he was severely censured.

Shortly afterwards it was announced that Close would not be leading England in the West Indies. This was a shattering blow. “I may not bruise easily,” he wrote years later, “but I do bleed. It was all so bloody, horribly unfair.”

Dennis Brian Close was born at Rawdon, Leeds, on February 24 1931, the second of six children. His father was well known as a wicketkeeper in the Bradford League.

At Aireborough Grammar School Brian proved so able a student that his headmaster wanted him to read Mathematics at Cambridge.

As a teenager, however, he had impressed the hardbitten Yorkshire professionals in the nets at Headingley. In the winter football seemed to offer even better prospects. Close did so well as an inside forward in the Leeds United junior side that he was selected for an England Youth XI against Scotland.

On leaving school in 1948, he signed a contract with Leeds and was soon doing well in the reserves. So when, early in 1949, he was called up for National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals at Catterick, he identified himself as “professional footballer”.

Brian Close in 1949 

Chance, however, reversed his priorities. An injury on the field meant that his Army service was deferred. In consequence he was available in May 1949 to play for Yorkshire against Cambridge University – a match in which Freddie Trueman also made his first-class debut.

Close opened the bowling with Trueman, took four wickets in the match, and knocked up a useful 28. It was enough to keep him in the Yorkshire side; and Maurice Wells, MP for Bradford Central, managed to get his call-up further deferred.

In that glorious first season Close not only achieved the double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets; he was chosen for the third Test against New Zealand at Old Trafford .

Though he failed to score, and took only one wicket, he earned praise from Wisden for obeying instructions to hit out against his own interests.

When Close finally began his National Service in October 1949, he was given 48-hour weekend passes so that he could play for Leeds Reserves. In November, however, he sustained a bad thigh injury which kept him out of football for months. Leeds gave him a free transfer, and in the spring of 1950 he signed for Arsenal.

Close’s military duties restricted him to only one game for Yorkshire in 1950, but he took plenty of wickets for the Army, and against Cambridge University accounted for David Sheppard, Hubert Doggart and Peter May.

When he was selected to tour Australia with Freddie Brown’s team, the Army graciously gave him leave. Early in the tour Close made a century against Western Australia; later he managed another against the Southern Districts of New South Wales. Yet the tour was a disaster for him.

Brian Close going out to the field in 1961 

It was not just that his bowling proved too inaccurate to trouble the Australians, or that his propensity for the sweep made it easy for opponents to plot his downfall as a batsman , it was the hostility he received in the dressing-room from team-mates who judged him to be at once conceited and gauche. “I was sick with misery,” he recalled in his memoirs, I Don’t Bruise Easily (1978).

He related how Ian Johnson, one of the Australian players, had noted his depression and told Freddie Brown that he needed help. “Let the ****** stew,” Brown returned.

Back in England, in 1951 Close showed his resilience by scoring heavily for the Army and Combined Services. And when, next year, he returned to the Yorkshire side, he once more achieved the double.

Early in 1952 he had been selected to play in Arsenal’s first team, only to be foiled by injury. When he was unable to turn out in the Reserves Cup Final, because the game clashed with the Yorkshire v MCC match at Lord’s, Close was given a free transfer. He signed for Bradford City, for whom he scored nine goals in seven games before a torn cartilage finally put paid to his footballing career – and also removed him from county cricket in 1953.

Once more he made a successful comeback, and in 1955 returned to the England side for the last Test against South Africa: the 32 he made as an opener was the top score in England’s first innings. Close also played in two matches against the West Indies in 1957, and at Headingley in 1959 took four for 35 in India’s second innings.

Recalled once more to play against Australia at Old Trafford in 1961, he incurred fierce criticism after being caught from a cross-batted swipe at one of Richie Benaud’s leg-breaks as England failed to chase a winning total of 256 in 230 minutes.

For the next two years the Test selectors ignored him. In 1963, however, Ted Dexter insisted that he should be brought back to counter the menace of the West Indian fast bowlers Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith.

For the first time Close played in a full series, scoring 315 runs and doing particularly well at Lord’s, where he made a gallant 70 in the second innings. His tactic of advancing down the pitch against Wes Hall looked suicidal, but succeeded in putting the great fast bowler off his stride.

Nevertheless Close again found himself ignored by the England selectors, until summoned to the captaincy in 1966. The loss of that role, however, did not seem to affect his leadership at Yorkshire.

It was a shock when, at the end of the 1970 season, Close was unceremoniously sacked as county captain. Various excuses were offered, but the real reason was that he had never troubled to treat the county committee with any tact. It was Yorkshire, however, who suffered: after Close’s departure the county would wait 30 years for another championship title.

Close went to Somerset, where he discovered the best form of his career with the bat. As captain from 1972 to 1977 he helped to develop the talents of Ian Botham and Viv Richards, and succeeded in lifting the county to fifth place in 1974 and fourth in 1977.

In 1976 he was once more summoned by the England selectors to fend off the fury of the West Indies. He did especially well in the second Test at Lord’s, scoring 60 and 46, before his magnificently brave swansong at Old Trafford.

At Taunton, he continued to dominate. One Somerset batsman, having got out in a manner against which Close had specifically warned him, elected to return to the pavilion through a back window, rather than walk up the pavilion steps to face his captain’s ire.

Brian Close in action in 1984   

Viv Richards later told how, after Allan Jones had allowed Leicestershire to win a match by scoring 12 off the last two balls, his team-mates formed a cordon to protect him from the skipper’s assault.

Close retired from regular first-class cricket in 1977, though he continued to play in the Scarborough Festival until 1986 .

In a total of 786 first-class matches, Brian Close scored 33,994 runs (including 52 centuries) at an average of 33.29 (31.94 for Yorkshire; 39.41 for Somerset). As a bowler he took 1,167 wickets at 26.39 each. He held 813 catches, placing him fourth on the all-time list, after Frank Woolley, W G Grace, Tony Lock and Walter Hammond. He even made one stumping.

His highly competitive spirit never forbade a drink with the opposition. “Bomber” Wells recalled how, when Gloucestershire played Yorkshire in the 1950s, “you’d split into two parties. Fred (Trueman) would be one end of the bar, Closey up the other. You could have half an hour of Closey lambasting Fred, then when you got fed up with that you could go and hear Fred lambasting Closey.”

Unlike many professional cricketers Close did not lose his enthusiasm for donning his flannels in retirement. Indeed, he was still to be seen at the crease in 2000.

He was also a fine golfer, who learnt to play the game right-handed so as not to affect his batting, and soon had a handicap of three. Later he performed as well as a left-hander, and once went round in 76, hitting the ball alternately left- and right-handed.

At the end of the 1970s Close served as an England selector. Back at Yorkshire, he became chairman of the cricket committee in 1984, attracting much controversy in the anti-Boycott cause. Later, he led the Yorkshire Academy side. “Doesn’t Mr Close swear a lot?” the young Ryan Sidebottom observed.

Brian Close was appointed CBE in 1975. He is survived by his wife Vivienne, whom he married in 1968, and by their son and daughter.

Brian Close, born February 24 1931, died September 14 2015

Stephen Lewis

Stephen Lewis as Blakey in On the Buses

Stephen Lewis, who has died aged 88, will be chiefly remembered for the comedy catchphrase: “I ’ate you Butler!”

He delivered it week after week in the hit sitcom On The Buses, a saucy slice of life that ran on ITV from 1969 to 1973. Lewis was Cyril “Blakey” Blake, a bus inspector with a Hitler moustache and delusions of grandeur. His nemesis was Stan Butler, a driver played by Reg Varney, who used his route as an opportunity to pick up stray “birds”.

By today’s standards of television, On The Buses has all the subtlety and political correctness of cave drawings. But it was wildly popular, and Lewis’s comic timing reflected a considerable acting talent.

Lewis entered acting in an era of social mobility that is almost inconceivable today. He was born in Poplar, East London, on December 17 1926. His first job was as a merchant seaman; he reconsidered his vocation after he was persuaded to go to a performance of the experimental Theatre Workshop group run by the brilliant Left-wing director Joan Littlewood. After the performance, the audience was invited on to the stage to meet the cast and discuss the play. Lewis enjoyed the experience and, after turning up to others, got to know the Workshop well.

Eventually, Littlewood, perhaps exasperated by Lewis’s suggested stage directions, said: “You’re so blooming clever, why not do it yourself?” He agreed, auditioned and was offered a part. After a successful run, Littlewood asked Lewis if he would like to stick with the company but he said he wanted to return to the sea. The director persuaded him to stay on the stage and he made his West End debut in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage in 1958.

In 1960, he wrote Sparrers Can’t Sing, a play about life in the East End that relied heavily on actors’ improvisations. It was a success and was released as a film (Sparrows Can’t Sing) in 1963, with a cast that included Barbara Windsor and Roy Kinnear – although even their talents could not sell the social realist dialogue to a global audience.

The New York Times sniffed: “This isn’t a picture for anyone with a logical mind or an ear for language. The gabble of Cockney spoken here is as incomprehensible as the reasoning of those who speak it.” It was the first English-language film to be released in the US with subtitles.

Stephen Lewis, Reg Varney and Bob Grant in On the Buses

As Lewis’s career illustrates, a great number of the comedy stars of the 1960s and 1970s came from serious theatre with proudly socialist roots, while television and film started to tap into a growing appetite for working-class drama and comedy. Throughout the 1960s, Lewis took a series of small roles culminating in a large part in the 1969 television play, Mrs Wilson’s Diary, alongside another Theatre Workshop regular called Bob Grant.

That same year, he landed a role in a new series called On the Buses, which also featured Grant as a lascivious bus conductor teamed up with Reg Varney, his equally Dionysian mate.

Although the show was undoubtedly rude, crude and occasionally prejudiced, it offered genuinely witty reflections on the nature of 1970s class conflict. In the world of On the Buses, workers were constantly on strike and after more money; managerial characters such as Lewis’s Blakey were exploitative snobs who thought they had authority just because they wore a badge.

It was plain where the audience's sympathies were supposed to lie: many was the time that a bus “hilariously” ran over poor Blakey’s foot or a bucket of water was tipped over his head. The cry: “I ’ate you Butler” was born of impotent rage. Although Varney the actor was Lewis’s senior, it was still Varney’s character, Reg, that got all the “crumpet”.

Lewis with Reg Varney and Gwendolyn Watts in On the Buses

Lewis was only in his early forties when he took the role of Blakey, but playing ageing authority figures became his stock in trade. In the 1970s, he appeared in the television sequel to On The Buses, Don’t Drink the Water, three big-screen outings of On The Buses and two cinematic sex comedies (Adventures of a Taxi Driver, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate). He later had parts in the films Personal Services (1987) and The Krays (1990).

In 1988, he played a new character in the long-running BBC series Last of the Summer Wine – Clem “Smiler” Hemmingway – which he thoroughly enjoyed. “It’s got so much charm,” he said of the show. “I don’t think any other country in the world has comedy like that.” From 1995 to 1997, he appeared in the equally gentle sitcom Oh, Doctor Beeching! In 2007, he stepped down from Last of the Summer Wine because of ill health.

Stephen Lewis remained a committed socialist. In a stroke of irony, however, in 1981 he was hired to promote CH coaches, in the character of Blakey; it was the first private bus company to break the public transport monopoly of Cardiff city council. This was exactly the kind of Thatcherite revolution of which Blakey would probably have approved.

In his diaries, Tony Benn recalled campaigning with Lewis in 1984, describing him as “very direct” and “extremely amusing”.

Stephen Lewis, born December 17 1926, died August 12 2015

Wes Craven

Wes Craven 

Wes Craven, the film director, who has died aged 76, made his living out of scaring the wits out of people in such films as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), earning the nickname “Sultan of Slash”; later, as audiences became cynical about the franchise-driven genre, he served up horror with an ironic tongue in cheek.

Craven’s work left the critics divided. Some reviewers denounced him as a purveyor of gore with a dazzling technique and nothing to say; others compared him to Ingmar Bergman.

Craven himself recalled, during his early career, that guests would leave dinner parties upon realising who he was. But he always had fans among younger directors who appreciated the intelligence and psychological insight he brought to low-budget film making.

He created some of the most memorable bogeymen in film, culminating, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, in the blade-taloned Freddy Krueger, a murdered child molester in a moth-eaten sweater and filthy fedora who is brought back to life via the dreams of the teenage descendants of his killers.

Made at a time when Aids was coming to public attention and the prospect of environmental Armageddon had become a topic in classrooms, the film seemed to tap into deep-seated fears .

Robert Englund in A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984  

Craven, who had a master’s degree in philosophy, became a prominent defender of the horror genre which, he argued, gives people the mental equipment to deal with a frightening world. “You’re talking about the beasts in the forest that come after you during the daytime or during the night but in a way that’s under control. So in a sense, you can own the beast,” he explained.

His films were often inspired by true stories. Nightmare was inspired by reports in the Los Angeles Times about a group of refugees who had fled the Khmer Rouge, healthy young men in their twenties, who, after fleeing to the United States, were suffering disturbing nightmares, after which they refused to sleep. “They would try to stay awake, and they would describe the nightmares to their families,” Craven recalled. “Finally there would be a scream and the guy would be dead. Death by nightmare.”

The resulting film established Craven as a leading director . His producers established a franchise and went on to make several more Freddy Krueger films of varying quality, without Craven’s input, until 1995 when he released Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.

By this time, as he recalled, “horror had reached one of its sort of classical, cyclical stages of ennui on the part of the audience”. So Craven decided to poke fun at the genre. New Nightmare had the actors, studio head and Craven himself being stalked by Freddy Krueger as they worked on a new instalment of the series.

The Ghostface Killer in Scream 4, 2011

Craven subverted the horror genre again with Scream (1996), the tale of a high-school student who becomes the target of a mysterious killer known as Ghostface. Full of ironic self-reference (“This is like something out of a Wes Carpenter film,” one character observes), the film was a box office hit, taking $173 million worldwide, spawning a lucrative franchise and inspiring the “Scary Movie” parodies.

Wesley Earl Craven was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 2 1939 to strict Baptist parents. Even though he was forbidden from going to the cinema, he claimed that his religious upbringing had shaped his talent as a film maker, encouraging him to “ask big questions about life and death”.

The character of Freddy Krueger, however, drew on an event in his own childhood when, one night, he heard a shuffling sound outside his bedroom window: “I crept over there and looked down. It was a man wearing [a fedora].

“He stopped and looked up directly into my face. I backed into the shadows, listening and waiting for him to go away. But I didn’t hear anything. I went back to the window. He looked up at me again and then turned away. He walked into the door of our apartment building. I’ve never, ever been that scared in my life. I was terrified.”

Craven studied English and Psychology at Wheaton College, Illinois . He later earned a master’s in Philosophy and Writing from Johns Hopkins University, but it was while he was working as a humanities professor at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York state, that he first went to the cinema – and fell in love. In 1971 he left his teaching job to work as a film editor at a post-production house in Manhattan.

Courteney Cox, Wes Craven, and Neve Campbell at the premiere of Scream 4 in 2011

After writing and directing pornographic films under pseudonyms, Craven made his debut under his own name in 1972 with the ultra-low-budget ($90,000) shocker The Last House on the Left, about a gang of psychotic killers who rape, torture and murder two teenage girls, only to meet a more horrific fate at the hands of the girls’ parents.

Marketed under the slogan, “To avoid fainting, keep repeating: It’s only a movie . . . only a movie . . .” the film was a grisly remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Oscar-winning Virgin Spring (1959) featuring sickeningly real scenes of sadism and violence. Released mostly on drive-in screens in America, the film was banned by the censors in Britain, though it has come to be seen as a classic .

His follow-up, The Hills Have Eyes, about cannibalistic mutants stalking a suburban family who have become stranded in the desert, established his reputation as a cult director, but it was A Nightmare on Elm Street that propelled him into the mainstream.

Craven’s other films included Deadly Friend (1986); The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988); Shocker (1990); The People Under the Stairs (1991); Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) and Red Eye (2005). In 1999 he made a rare foray outside the horror genre with Music of the Heart, starring Meryl Streep, who was nominated for an Oscar. His last film, in 2011, was the fourth in the Scream franchise.

People were sometimes surprised to learn that Craven was not, in his words, “a Mansonite crazoid”, but a charming, humorous man whose hobby was bird-watching. When asked by an interviewer to name the thing that most terrified him, he replied “my ex-wife’s divorce lawyer”.

He is survived by his third wife, Iya, and by a son and daughter.

Wes Craven, born August 2 1939, died August 30 2015