‍I sat on the grass, legs crossed, as this fearsome, loose-limbed giant ambled towards me.

‍

‍He was mesmerising, with his air of calculated menace. His white shirt was unbuttoned to the navel. Closer and closer he came, until it felt as if I could reach out and shake his hand.

‍

‍Then he stopped and turned and began to run, jogging at first, loping, then sprinting and finally hurling himself in a windmill of arms and legs towards a quaking England opener. At least, I imagined he was quaking. I knew I would be. For this was Wes Hall, pictured, one of the earliest of West Indies’ ferocious pace bowlers, who for years seemed to come off a production line, like dazzling Welsh fly-halves.

‍

‍I was at the Oval. In those days it was a bus ride from West Croydon, getting off at Archbishop Tenison’s School, from there, a short walk to the Jack Hobbs gate.

‍I would have been 15 in 1963 so didn’t need to spend much on a ticket. It is hard to pass the Surrey CCC shop without popping in and this may have been the year when I bought Ken Barrington’s book, Running Into Hundreds, signed by the great man.

‍

‍Then time to find a spot on the boundary rope and arrange my stuff – a bottle of pop and Mum’s egg salad sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. (If I could persuade her, she might add a “pudding sandwich” – a bread roll slathered inside with golden syrup.)

‍

‍And providing the pocket money would run to it, the accoutrements would also include a programme with the batting order and little pen profiles of the players.

‍

‍I dare say that before the match started, I looked around and took in my magnificent surroundings: the four-square pavilion, the Tenison with (on a Saturday) masters and favoured pupils sitting on the flat roof waiting for the umpire to call “Play”.

‍

‍And the gasholder, of blessed memory. Wait… how can that be? How can you hold fond memories of a gasholder? Yet I do.

‍

‍It wasn’t in the Oval, of course, but Gasholder Number One, as it was properly called, was part of it, looming over the ground within its latticework frame, sinking slowly at lunchtime and teatime as kettles went on all over SE 11.

‍

‍Nothing lasts for ever, of course, and the 135ft gasholder, a listed structure, was decommissioned in 2014 and is now being turned into swanky flats, the most pricey of which will have a magnificent view of the cricket.

‍

‍Tenison’s too has closed down. The former Church of England school dates back to 1928 on that site, though it was founded in 1685 where the National Portrait Gallery now stands off Trafalgar Square. As far as I know, no new use has yet been found for it.

‍

‍All this nostalgia was triggered by an article in The Spectator by Mark Mason, called Lord’s is better than the Oval.

‍

‍Bah, humbug. I beg to differ.

‍

‍Mason acknowledges that Ovaltinies, as he calls us, are there purely for the cricket and fail to appreciate the superior ambience of Lord’s, the “home of cricket”, across the river in St John’s Wood.

‍

‍Lord’s, he points out, has been virtually rebuilt in the last 30 years, preserving the ground’s character, improving the facilities, melding old and new and moving it on from its glorious past to an equally graceful future.

‍

‍It is, Mason says, a metaphor for London, which “retains its greatness through constant reinvention, pairing the best of the new with the best of the old”.

‍

‍Only the 1890 pavilion remains of the original Lord’s. Its famous red shade comes from a mix of brick and terracotta and – I didn’t know this before – is a consequence of a stonemasons’ strike rather than brilliant innovation by the architect.

‍

‍By contrast, the Oval’s refurbishment has been done piecemeal, resulting in the pavilion end looking like “a monster that’s out of control”. Mason says it needs knocking down and starting again.

‍

‍Maybe he’s right: it is higgledy-piggledy and no longer the Oval where I grew up watching cricket. Redevelopment has shrunk the playing area and youngsters may no longer sit beside the boundary rope.

‍

‍He has a point too about the elegance of Lord’s, though I am reminded of a remark by a former Daily Express editor as he sat at the art desk one afternoon, casting his eye over Page One.

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‍“Why does that story line up with that one?” he asked the art director.

‍

‍“Symmetry,” she said. “It looks nicer like that.”

‍

‍He pondered for a moment, then…

‍

‍“Symmetry’s for c****. Change it.”

‍

‍Incidentally, Mason tells a nice story about the catering at Lord’s (which many players think is the best anywhere in England).

‍

‍For 35 years, Nancy Doyle looked after the cooking. One day, Middlesex and England captain Mike Brearley gently suggested she make lighter dishes as her celebrated roasts and puddings with cream lay a little heavy on professional players’ stomachs.

‍

‍“You don’t tell me how to feed my boys,” she said, “and I won’t tell you how to bat, okay?”

‍

‍Mason says that “as well as enjoying a beautiful cover drive, you want a beautiful ground in which to watch it”.

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‍Maybe, but memories, not architecture and aesthetics, are what make grounds special. And mine are from the Oval.

‍

‍*****

‍

‍They have short memories, Socialists. It’s the only way they can remain Socialists.

‍

‍Our new Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, is on a mission to reform the school curriculum. She is troubled that children are forced to concentrate on academic subjects at the expense of technical training.

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‍It has led to a million young people not in formal study, training or work, she claims. So, she told The Times yesterday that she intended to take “ a fresh look at what we are teaching our children and whether we are equipping them for their lives ahead”.

‍

‍But who began the process that led us to where we are now in our thinking about education? Why, that’ll be the Labour Party.

‍

‍Back in the Sixties, when I was at school, Labour were clamouring for change. They were busy discrediting the  system of grammar schools, with a focus on intellectual learning, and secondary modern schools and technical colleges, where the emphasis was on vocational skills.

‍

‍It was less to do with education and more to do with equality. Grammar schools were seen as elitist, the 11-Plus unfair and private schools unconscionable. The cause was espoused by such figures as Anthony Crosland, Shirley Williams and Roy Hattersley.

‍

‍And so we ditched selection by an exam at age 11 and scrapped grammar schools (though some held on to their grammar status while becoming independent schools with entry by selection).

‍

‍In place of the grammars, we got comprehensives, many of which evolved into decent schools. You might also argue that we got grammars back when Academies were introduced.

‍

‍Tony Blair, who promised his Government’s priorities would be “education, education, education”, contributed to the mess by declaring he wanted 50 per cent of pupils to go on to university.

‍

‍All that achieved was to burden students with lifelong debts and create a tertiary education industry that sucked in vast sums from foreign students and eventually became a back door for illegal immigration.

‍

‍Now, without a hint of irony, Powell performs a backflip worthy of an Olympic gymnast to take us back to an educational ethos that informed my schooling.

‍

‍I owe my career, the joy I took from my job and my comfortable retirement to the outstanding teachers at Corby Grammar School. We did not look down on those who went to the secondary modern; they were mostly better than us at the practical stuff.

‍

‍Though she wouldn’t admit it, Powell is taking us back to the future. I applaud that. I just wish she would not present it as a new idea. It’s not.

‍

‍*****

‍

‍Rod Liddle, columnist, acerbic broadcaster and former editor of Radio 4’s Today programme, has died aged 66.

‍

‍I shall miss his mazy route to straight talking in the Sunday Times, the Sun and the Spectator and his growly presence on Times Radio on a Saturday morning.

‍

‍I noticed his absence but it is holiday time so for a while I did not take too much notice. But eventually, he’d had so much time off that it could not be a vacation, despite the assurances of those standing in for him that he was “taking a well-earned break”.

‍

‍I scoured the internet for signs that he might be ill. I even borrowed Kelvin MacKenzies’s headline “What’s up with Lord Lich?” and put “What’s up with Rod Liddle” into Google. But nothing turned up.

‍

‍It seems that all the time he was in The James Cook University Hospital, in his home town of Middlesbrough, where he died on Sunday.

‍

‍He was a funny man with a serious mind. What a pity there are not more like him.

‍

‍*****

‍

‍Our niece and her family have mercifully been allowed to return to their home near Bordeaux, which was menaced by the wildfires advancing on the city.

‍

‍My wife noticed the name of their little town in a list of places that were judged to be out of danger and sent her a message inquiring if it was true.

‍

‍“Oui!!!!” came the reply. The relief was evident but it was tempered by a description of the conditions they found when they returned. Ash was everywhere and the air smelled and tasted of smoke.

‍

‍That will pass but their beautiful corner of France has been ravaged by the flames and will take years to recover, both physically and economically. The tourist board is pleading with holidaymakers to return. But honestly, why would they?

‍

‍The landscape has been changed perhaps for ever; homes lie in smouldering ruins, acres and acres of once beautiful forest are reduced to charred, skeletal tree stumps.

‍

‍France and Spain can expect more of the same in the years to come, and so can Britain. Our land is becoming tinder dry. In such conditions, fires are inevitable, whether started deliberately, as many were in France, or by accident.

‍

‍We should act now to make the flames containable when they come. But with Andy Burnham facing so many other pressing concerns, I doubt we shall.

‍

‍*****

‍

‍Have you noticed the latest trend in TV trickery?

‍

‍We settled down to watch a series call The Crow Girl on Channel 5. With a cast headed by Eve Myles and Katherine Kelly, it promised to be a good watch.

‍

‍But it ended strangely; suddenly and without an obvious resolution. We had made it through six confused and baffling episodes only to find a line, just before they rolled the credits, saying: “To be continued”.

‍

‍It was one of those maddening mid-air endings, so fashionable now, that are meant to ensure you watch the next series. But this one had an extra element.

‍

‍We were invited to watch the rest of the story in a new series on Paramount+. Naturally, a subscription was required.

‍

‍Television has long been home to chancers and charlatans. But they’re going too far now.

‍

‍RICHARD DISMORE

‍4 August 2026