Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Headline act who brought untold joy to the West cricket faithful
Richard Bache delves into the Western Daily Press archive to recall some of the swashbuckling performances of Gloucestershire and South Africa cricketing legend Mike Procter, whose funeral takes place today
A‘Blond hair swept in the wind and shirt tail in full, aggressive sail, induces phlegmatic farmers from Slaughter and Sodbuy to emit primeval chants devoid of benevolence for the opposing batsman’
S serious a cricket analyst as Scyld Berry this week wrote that Mike Procter was second only to Sir Garfield Sobers as a complete all-rounder.
In a fine piece in the Telegraph he recalled that, albeit over an international career truncated by South Africa’s isolation, Procter boasts the lowest bowling average of any player since the Great War.
Former England captain Mike Atherton, in The Times, said he was – unquestionably – in the bracket of great all-rounders.
He wrote: “He filled the gap between Garfield Sobers in the 1960s and the quartet of great all-rounders that dominated the 1980s – Kapil Dev, Ian Botham, Richard Hadlee and Imran Khan.”
Gloucestershire supporters who fondly remember Procter’s exploits of the 1970s and who will gather today at the County Ground for a live screening of his funeral will no doubt agree with those sage assessments.
And after the service in his hometown of Durban in South Africa has finished, glasses will be filled at Nevil Road and talk will no doubt turn to favourite memories of those halcyon days for Gloucestershire.
Procter would want it no other way. For as fearsome a competitor as he was, the game, life even, was there to be enjoyed.
Procter, who died last Saturday in Durban at the age of 77, seized the moment so frequently for Gloucestershire the county was famously nicknamed ‘Proctershire’.
Recalling all his exploits could fill several books, but a brief trip through the archives revealed that though he had a habit of starring on the biggest stages, he also shone when the county circuit visited some of its more obscure and unlikely outposts.
His first appearance in the pages of the Western Daily Press was in June 1965, when as a teenager he won a single-wicket contest staged at Stapleton Cricket Club’s Sleepy Hollow ground in aid of John Mortimore’s benefit.
The headline ‘Procter is big hit in Sixes’ told how he smashed 80 runs in five overs amid a flurry of sixes to win his semi-final, before beating Bristol Rugby’s scrum-half John Amor in the final.
Procter and fellow South African great Barry Richards were both playing for Gloucestershire IIs in 1965. Procter actually made his first class debut for Gloucestershire against the touring South Africans.
It wasn’t long before Procter was gracing grander stages than Stapleton, with all seven of his Test appearances coming between 1967 and 1970. All were against Australia and Procter never lost, winning six and drawing one as part of an immensely strong South African outfit.
By 1971 it was apparent though that South Africa’s expulsion from international sport due to its Apartheid policies was not going to be short-lived.
Atherton, in The Times, and Mark Nicholas in a moving piece on Cricinfo, both remarked that Procter was on the right side of history by not bemoaning his ill-fortune at missing out on the Test career that his talent deserved, with Atherton writing: “The measure of his humanity was the wise and gentle acceptance he had for an international career that was limited to seven matches, for reasons out of his control.”
Instead, he threw himself into life in the West Country and Gloucestershire supporters were the beneficiaries of his talent.
Procter was particularly fond of the Cheltenham Cricket Festival and often saved some of his finest performances for the College ground.
But it is a report of a match at another of Gloucestershire’s then festival grounds that reminds us how completely different the county cricket of 1971 was to its modern equivalent.
Cricket is still very much played at Tuffley Park – the city’s Tory MP Richard Graham being an occasional Gloucester Cricket Club third XI player – but it is very hard indeed to imagine legends of the calibre of
Procter and Sobers doing battle there today.
Yet in 1971, as the WDP reported, “when the sun is on his back there seems to be no stopping Mike Procter” as he stroked a glorious century at Winget ground, Gloucester, against Nottinghamshire.
The report continued “even the great Gary Sobers, whom he appears to have replaced as the world’s No. 1 all-rounder, was helpless against him”.
It must have been some sight for those lucky fans at the then Winget ground – Tuffley Park today, but also often known as the Wagon Works ground. (Winget owned the former Gloucester Wagon Works)
If Winget is slightly arcane today, it did at least stage dozens of first class games.
Unlike Ashton Gate, which in 1980 hosted one of the more curious and star-laden games the West Country has ever seen.
Procter and Botham had in the previous two summers locked horns in high-profile single-wicket contests that drew bumper crowds to Nevil Road. For the record, Procter emerged victorious on both occasions.
So the entrepreneurial promoter behind those events, Bruce Perry, got them to put together England and Rest of the World XIs for a 30over clash under the Ashton Gate floodlights in mid-September.
And what names they attracted, with Viv Richards, Sunil Gavaskar, Malcolm Marshall, Zaheer Abbas, Clive Lloyd, Clive Rice and Richard Hadlee being among the Rest of the World XI.
Botham hit the headlines for smashing nearly all of the white cricket balls, specially imported from Australia for the occasion, clear out of BS3 on his way to a rapid 80.
But it was that somewhat tasty World XI that took the spoils despite the presence of Graham Gooch, Mike Gatting and Geoffrey Boycott in the England XI, with Richards finishing it with a six “into the by now shellmarked Dolman Stand”.
The Western Daily Press reporter
Colin Price was an enthusiastic convert to the novel floodlit format, which drew a crowd of 8,000, not least because it was “a treat to see supporters thoroughly enjoying themselves again” at Ashton Gate, which was briefly home to a struggling Rovers as well as City that season following a fire at Eastville.
It was only the second floodlit cricket clash in England, a month after Essex had played the West Indies at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge and it took a while for the format to truly catch on in England.
Procter, though, was no stranger to playing under lights, having grasped the opportunity to play in Kerry Packer’s controversial World Series Cricket in Australia in the late 1970s.
In fact, some of his finest cricket for Gloucestershire was delivered while he faced the uncertainty of perhaps being banned by the TCCB
for playing for Packer.
The Silver Jubilee summer of 1977 was a golden one for Gloucestershire, winning the Benson and Hedges Cup at Lord’s and only narrowly failing to win their first County Championship since the days of WG Grace on the final day of the season.
During the denouement of that season Procter and a few other leading stars were playing under a legal cloud as the Packer revolution shook up cricket.
Not that you’d know it from his performances.
Perhaps the most celebrated was the legendary four wickets in five balls – including a hat-trick – in the B&H semi-final against Hampshire at Southampton, with the headline reading “Mike’s Golden Hat-Trick”.
The WDP’s Graham Russell describing how he bowled himself into the record books by “bowling faster than at any time since his knee operation” and “swinging the ball viciously around the wicket.”
It ripped the heart out of the hosts’ batting after Gloucestershire had posted a seemingly inadequate 180 on a good batting wicket.
With Barry Richards and the West Indies Gordon Greenidge among the victims, he struck a decisive blow for Glos, with his 6-13 off 11 overs ultimately seeing them home by a nailbiting seven runs.
His role in the final against Kent wasn’t quite as eye-catching, but his inspirational leadership was praised for paving the way for others to seize glory, notably Andy Stovold with a man-of-the-match performance.
Procter told the WDP: “This has been one of the greatest moments of my life. We had to come through the hardest qualifying group in the competition and have been underdogs all the way.”
They had been cheered on by thousands who had made the journey from the West to the capital on specially chartered British Rail trains with return fares being £2.50. Different days indeed...
A pitch invasion followed the victory and a famous picture of goldenhaired Procter being held aloft by future Test umpire David Shepherd took centre stage on the back page.
Alas it didn’t quite make the front page picture, where Swindon’s own blonde bombshell Diana Dors, bizarrely dressed as an American Indian at a school fete in Chippenham, appeared under the headline “Diana Squaws”.
The following day’s paper showed Procter holding the trophy aloft again for huge crowds at Gloucester Guildhall, following a champagne open-top bus tour from Bristol, via the Rolls-Royce and BAC works at Filton.
The next month Procter and Viv Richards appeared in the news pages of the WDP as part of a profile by the great David Foot headlined “The West’s Packer Test exiles of cricket”.
He wrote: “Two of the greatest cricketers in the world live in the West Country. Quite apart from their monumental natural skills as sportsmen they have much in common – amiable, unassuming personalities, a will to win and involvement with the contentious Packer Circus.”
Of Procter he said: “Blond hair swept in the wind and shirt tail in full, aggressive sail, induces phlegmatic farmers from Slaughter and Sodbuy to emit primeval chants devoid of benevolence for the opposing batsman.
“As a bowler he’s arguably the fastest in the world. That means even faster than Thomson and Holding. Not all the time, but when he scents victory.
“He hurtles in from near the boundary like an Olympic sprinter.”
The article goes on to compare the charisma of Procter and Richards, while noting their somewhat different lifestyles.
Suburban bliss in Westbury-onTrym for family man Procter, wife Maryna and their then two young children.
Richards, five years younger, was said to be enjoying the single life in Taunton with the piece saying “he likes fish and chips and West Country girls”.
“They are one of my favourite hobbies,” he sheepishly tells Foot.
Of the Packer rumpus, Foot concludes: “Diehards, from Alec Bedser down, have spoken out against overseas players. But modern day giants of the game like Procter and Richards have given West Country cricket a pulsating lift.”
The WDP of September 3, 1977, reports how “Mike Procter, the Packer Circus signing who will be lost to county cricket next season, yesterday led Gloucestershire to within sight of their first outright championship title for 100 years”.
A bold declaration against Glamorgan and a four-wicket haul bowling spin after being warned for excessive bouncers saw him become the first bowler to 100 wickets that season.
Sadly the championship dream wasn’t to be with “Greenidge the Gremlin” leading Hampshire to victory at Bristol as Gloucestershire’s bid to add the title to the B&H triumph ended in “misty-eyed” failure as a cricket era was thought to have come to an end.
The WDP reported: “Mike Procter’s year as captain expired with him apologising to the large crowd in front of the pavilion for failing to win the title.”
He and the Hants duo of Barry Richards and Greenidge were three players who at the time were thought to be playing their final championship games due to heading off to Australia and Packer cricket.
When he returned to the UK the following month for one of the High Court hearings a special dinner was held in Bristol in honour of the county’s “greatest cricket captain”.
The Duke of Beaufort and broadcaster Alan Gibson presented him with a cartoon by Western Daily Press cartoonist John Paice, while the Mayor of Cheltenham gave him a plate inscribed with the Cheltenham Coat of Arms.
Mercifully the court cases eventually came to a conclusion and Procter returned to Gloucestershire.
In June 1979 the headline read “Real Magic from Mike” as he took 8-30 at Worcester.
The next month he took seven wickets against a “demoralised” touring India at Bristol with the headline reading “Mike Scalps Indians”. Perhaps the work of the same sub-editor as “Diana Squaws” and not a headline one would read in 2024.
In September it was Procter’s explosive batting that was creating headlines as it was fourth-time lucky in his bid to strike the fastest ton of the season.
“Mighty Mike makes it” read the headline as a 57-minute ton was struck against Northants, following three near misses in the previous few weeks, including scoring 92 in only 35 minutes against Warwickshire days earlier.
The end of his glorious time at Gloucestershire was finally to come in 1981 as a knee injury forced him to focus on playing solely in South Africa as year-round cricket took its toll.
Foot remarked: “As a batsman he was less autocratic than Grace, more scientific than Jessop. He was the fastest bowler Gloucestershire ever had. He talked sadly to me yesterday. He isn’t going to sell his Bristol house in Stoke Bishop. That perhaps, best of all, reflects his current emotions in the year that, ironically, he finally qualified to play for England.”
For the West public that took him to their hearts, a corner of Gloucestershire will always be his.
■ The funeral will be shown in the Grace Room of the Bristol Pavilion at the Seat Unique Stadium from 11.30am today. The funeral itself starts at noon and the bar will be open afterwards for fans to reminisce about his legendary achievements.