By Charles Randall

25 November 2011 14:38

Trueman and the French menu: His start in the adult world

That revered Yorkshireman Fred Trueman enjoyed a short meteoric rise through club cricket and entered the world of professional sport as a poorly educated gauche youth who knew little about life outside a small mining community.

The latest book on the great England fast-bowler (Fred Trueman: The Authorised Biography by Chris Waters; Aurum Press, £20) is a work full of interest on every page as a biopic with a strong social narrative. An anecdote about his Yorkshire debut in 1949 at Cambridge University is an amusing example.

Trueman, an 18 year-old, dined with his new colleagues in Cambridge on the first evening and was alarmed to see that the menu was in French. He blustered through by copying what others had ordered for the first two courses until he could not resist going alone for the dessert. "I think I'll have that," he told the waiter, pointing to the bottom item, which read Jeudi le douzieme Mai. He probably never forgot the howls of hilarity.

His club career went like a dream. He was rejected by his local mining village club Maltby CC as a 15 year-old and joined his brother Arthur at the neighbouring village Roche Abbey CC. When young Freddie took 6-9 against Maltby, his father had great pleasure in refusing their overtures to join them.

In a cup visit that summer by a strong Sheffield League team, Roche Abbey were bowled out for 47 on a rugged pitch. At the interval eight of the Sheffield players changed in anticipation of an easy victory, despite warnings from Freddie's father about a youthful fast bowler. Sure enough, they were shot out for 11 in half an hour. Freddie took 6-1 and was carried off the field shoulder-high by his team-mates. The next season he was taken to Sheffield United and made his senior Yorkshire debut two years later.

From an impoverished early life Trueman took more wickets for England than anyone else up to that era, played professional football, tried stand-up comedy, had a beer named after him, attended his daughter's wedding to Hollywood star Raquel Welch's son, flaunted his status as a 'controversial' character and yet becoming the sourest of summarisers on Test Match Special. He was treated dismissively as a player by the public school orientated England authorities and should have played many more times for his country.

Trueman made his spectacular Test debut in June 1952, against India at Headingley, while on National Service. Among the spectators watching India slump to nought for four was a young boy called Geoffrey Boycott. The two would clash in later life and reconciliate before Trueman's death from lung cancer in 2006.

The author Waters uses painstaking research and dozens of witnesses to piece together the unusual life of a complicated man. This book is a cut above average