Miles Kington: The joy of life at third man

For the whole of the innings he patrolled the boundary like a lone sentinel on Hadrian's Wall

From Sir George "Gubby" Trotter

Sir, I am amazed that in all the acknowledgement of the achievements of the late Edward Heath, there has been no mention of his great abiding passion for cricket.

It was without doubt the one game that suited him best. Heath was a shy man, a loner, not given to expressing his emotions. That is why he liked to sit alone at that most unsociable of instruments, the church organ. That is why he liked sailing, and being out of sight of land and humanity. And that is why, to come back to cricket, he liked to field at deep third man, a position where you meet nobody and are only bothered by the occasional lone passing cricket ball.

I once went to visit him down there, to see if he wanted a slice of orange, and was surprised to find him writing his memoirs in a notebook.

"Your memoirs, Edward?" I said. "But you haven't done anything yet!" He merely grunted, which I came to learn was his favourite mode of conversation.

From Sir Basil Cranberry

Sir, I can vouch for the foregoing. I first met Edward Heath in the 1950s when he and I were picked for a Westminster-based cricket team of politicos called The Out Of Office Eleven. Our first fixture was against a CND XI called The Foot and Mouth Boys ("Foot" was Michael Foot, and "Mouth" was Tony Benn) and when we fielded first, I well remember Heath asking to be put at third man.

For the whole of the innings, he patrolled the boundary like some lone sentinel on Hadrian's Wall, but what was more surprising was that when we went in to bat, he still remained aloof and remote at third man, fielding for the other side! When someone went to ask him if he cared to don pads and come and bat for us, he received only an inimical grunt in return.

"Frankly," I remember someone saying, "if that chap is ever put in charge of us going into Europe, I can't see General de Gaulle putting up with all that grunting." How prophetic those words were.

From Mrs Martha Grow-Bagge

Sir, I well remember, when I was working in publishing in the late 1950s, that Edward Heath came to us with some ideas for a book about cricket. He wanted to call it The Joy of Cricket, I think, though "joy" is not a word I ever willingly associated with him.

My boss, Quentin Constable, was frank with him. "What you have written, Mr Heath, would not sell on its own merits, I fear. If you were famous, we might get away with it. What profession are you in, as a matter of interest?"

When he said he was an obscure MP, Quentin said that in that case he should go away and come back when he was prime minister. Much to our surprise, he grunted, went away and came back 20 years later as PM, with the book neatly written.

From Quentin Constable

Sir, I can vouch for what "Figgy" Grow-Bagge says. I had undertaken to publish "The Joy of Cricket if he became PM. But by then I had to tell him there had been a recent bestseller by Alex Comfort called The Joy of Sex, and it would look as if we were cashing in on the trend with his proposed title, so we would have to change it. To Life at Third Man, perhaps. But at the mention of the word "sex", he went a deep red, grunted several times and left the office. I never saw him again.

From Mr Digby Frankle

Sir, I never knew Sir Edward as a cricketer, but in his declining years he could occasionally be tempted out as an umpire. He disliked doing this, as people had always made fun of the Kentish vowel sound he made in words like "house" and "ours", so he hated saying "Not out". Instead, he evolved a system of grunts - one for Out and two for Not Out. Once, I heard him give three grunts! I asked him what that meant. "Sorry, old boy," he told me, "I must have been thinking about Margaret Thatcher."