‘Godfather of English cricket’ set stream of young players on the road to success
David English was at home on the night of the England cricket team’s dramatic victory over New Zealand at Lord’s in the 2019 World Cup final when the phone rang. It was Joe Root on the line. After a few words with England’s star batsman, the wicketkeeper Jos Buttler spoke to English, followed by Ben Stokes, then other team members. ‘‘They were in the hotel and they had had a few Coca-Colas,’’ English recalled. ‘‘They all passed the telephone around and said, ‘Dave, thanks for everything you did for us.’ ’’
Ten of the starting XI had cut their teeth as junior players in English’s Bunbury Festival and they never forgot his role in their development. The team that won last weekend’s T20
World Cup final wore black armbands in his honour.
English, who has died aged 76, took over the annual week-long under-15 tournament when the game’s authorities ran out of money in 1987. Over the next 35 years, hundreds of young cricketers participated in the festival under his benign stewardship. Among them were 118 who progressed to England colours, also including Michael Vaughan and Andrew Flintoff.
‘‘They are like an extended family for me,’’ English said proudly. ‘‘There’s a real satisfaction to having known them when they were 15 and watching them go through the ranks to the England team.’’
English aimed not only to impart cricketing wisdom but also to offer lessons in life to his teenage charges. ‘‘At that age you are not a child but you are not an adult. I taught them at the festival to relax and have fun along the way.’’
In parallel with the schools’ cricket festival, English also ran the Bunbury’s celebrity charity cricket team. ‘‘It all started when we had a game in Eric Clapton’s garden and I suggested getting an XI together,’’ he recalled. ‘‘So I phoned up all the famous people I knew and at our first game we had Phil Collins as wicketkeeper and Eric and Bill Wyman as first and second slip.’’
The Bunbury matches, which over the years raised more than £14 million for charity, also featured professional cricketers including Viv Richards and Ian Botham alongside a host of other celebrity friends from Elton John and Roger Daltrey to Will Carling and Rory Bremner. Cricket-loving politicians and even a prime minister also turned out for English’s side. ‘‘No-one ever gets grand in the dressing room. It’s ‘John Major, meet Donny Osmond’ and ‘Eric Clapton, meet Ian Botham’,’’ English said.
His closest friend in cricket was Botham, and English had the scars to prove it. ‘‘It was great fun but he did get boisterous,’’ English recalled. On one occasion Botham took him out for a day’s ocean fishing and English got horribly seasick. ‘‘I had never felt so ill. I
staggered back to the hotel only to find that Beefy had installed a water bed in my room.’’
English joined Botham on his charity walks and hosted the cricketer’s roadshows in Australia and Britain. In a foreword to English’s 2003 memoir, Mad Dogs and the Englishman: Confessions of a Loon, Botham called him ‘‘the funniest man I’ve ever met’’. Botham was best man at English’s wedding to Robyn (nee Dunckley). The marriage was dissolved; he is survived by their two children and by his partner, Lia Lanaja.
His schools’ festival and charity team were both named after the Bunbury Tails, a series of children’s books he wrote about cricket-playing rabbits. They led to him recording We’re the Bunburys, written with Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees and with Clapton on guitar and vocals.
David Stuart English was born in west London. He learnt to play cricket at Bell Lane primary, where the school’s most famous old boy, Denis Compton, became his idol.
After leaving school with no idea what to do, he took a gap year around Europe, encountering Brigitte Bardot in a St Tropez nightclub. ‘‘I went up to her and in my best O-level French asked her to dance, introducing myself as David Anglais,’’ he said. ‘‘We started kissing. It was going very well until her boyfriend, Gunter Sachs, came out and I had to hide behind the dustbins.’’
Back in England he was briefly on the MCC ground staff at Lord’s but soon realised he was never going to be quite good enough as a cricketer, even though he claimed to have once clean-bowled Viv Richards. He vigorously rejected suggestions that Richards had gifted his wicket so that English would have a good after-dinner story to tell.
His other passion was rock music and after a brief stint as a showbiz reporter for the Daily Mail, in 1971 he landed a job as a press officer for Decca Records, handling publicity for artists including the Rolling Stones and Tom Jones. Two years later he was headhunted by Robert Stigwood, to head RSO Records. He found himself in ‘‘a massive office with chandeliers, secretaries and marketing managers’’ but with no artists and no product.
Eventually, the label signed Clapton and the Bee Gees. English became particularly close to Barry Gibb, who sang at his wedding. One night, when staying with the group in a hotel in Paris, a drunken English decided to climb along the edge of his balcony to the nextdoor suite, followed by Barry and his brothers Maurice and Robin.
‘‘We looked in and saw a couple making love. The woman looked up and saw a madman followed by three Bee Gees,’’ he recalled. The next day they encountered the woman in the hotel’s dining room where one of the band told her how nice it was to see her with her clothes on.
As Clapton’s closest confidant, English was there when the guitarist wrote the hit single Wonderful Tonight while his wife Pattie Boyd was upstairs taking rather too long to get ready for an evening out.
‘‘She was taking ages and he wrote the song while he was fuming at her.’’
In between running a record label and managing some of the biggest acts in popular music, English somehow squeezed in a parallel career as an actor. He played a corpse in Z Cars and there were further TV appearances in Emmerdale, Secret Army and Bergerac. There was also an appearance in Richard Attenborough’s 1977 war epic A Bridge Too Far. During a break in filming he pulled out a cricket bat and taught Robert Redford to play.
Yet of all his exploits, it was his schools’ cricket festival of which he was most proud. ‘‘People haven’t heard of David English and I’m quite happy about that,’’ he said. ‘‘I can’t play guitar like Eric, I can’t sing like Barry and I can’t play cricket like Ian. But I can help people achieve their dreams.’’
‘‘I can’t play guitar like Eric . . . and I can’t play cricket like Ian. But I can help people achieve their dreams.’’