Untold lives blog

Sharing stories from the past, worldwide

15 November 2012

TMS – Two Masterly Sportsmen

The 2012 India v England test series opens today in Ahmedabad, so here is a story about two English cricketing heroes with Indian roots.
 
To cricket fans and students of its history, the obvious link between Douglas Jardine and Colin Cowdrey is that both men were Captains of England. However, besides this, Jardine and Cowdrey shared something else in common which may not be so well known – namely that both of them were born in India.

Douglas Robert Jardine was born in Bombay on 23 October 1900. His parents lived on Malabar Hill, an area almost exclusively inhabited by wealthy Parsees. Jardine’s father, Malcolm, had first gone out to India in 1894 and by the time of Douglas’s birth was serving as Perry Professor of Jurisprudence and Roman law at the Government Law School. In 1902 he became principal of the school and continued to rise through successively more important positions, until in 1915 he was appointed Advocate-General of Bombay.

The Jardine family were well-known in Bombay social and sporting circles and it is certain that Douglas’s talent for cricket was inherited from Malcolm who played for Oxford University and Middlesex in a first-class cricket career lasting from 1889 to 1897. One of his team-mates at Oxford had been the great C.B. Fry and it was he who expressed a belief that Malcolm could have played for England, an honour that was of course subsequently achieved by his son Douglas.

Michael Colin Cowdrey was born in Ootacamund – high up in the Nilgiri Hills – in the Madras presidency on the 24th December 1932. His father Ernest, an ardent cricket fan, promptly celebrated the arrival of his son by giving him the initials of the world’s most famous cricket club (MCC) and putting his name down for membership.

Colin Cowdrey

Colin Cowdrey

© ITN/British Library Board (ITN-Cowdrey-Colin-2) Images Online

Ernest had spent some of his childhood in India, and imbued with an adventurous spirit he returned there in adulthood to become a tea-planter.  After 5 successful years he went back to England in 1929 to marry Molly Taylor, and then with his bride accompanying him, resumed his life in India.

It was Ernest who invested his son with a love of sport. He built a miniature golf course on the lawn next to their bungalow home and after practising with Colin in the morning before work, he would then train him in the rudiments of cricket after returning home in the evening. In teaching his son, Colin was receiving tuition from an expert hand as Ernest was an accomplished batsman himself, good enough to have scored 48 for a European XI in a match against the MCC in Madras during their tour of India in 1926-27.  While his father was out during the day managing the 2,000 acre tea estate, Colin would play for hours with one of the servants Krishnan, a friendly teenager who always referred to him as ‘Dear Little Master’.

In coaching his infant son, Ernest left no detail untouched – batting grip, stance and shot selection were all rigorously and precisely attended to. In April 1938, when Colin was aged 5 the family returned to England. Those early childhood years spent in India had been idyllic ones and in the long and happy hours of playing and learning about cricket the foundations of a distinguished sporting career had been laid.

Dorian Leveque, Reference Specialist, Asian and African Studies

Further reading:
IOR/N Baptisms, marriages and burials in India.
IOR/V/12 Records of service for the Indian Civil Service: final record of service for Malcolm Jardine, IOR/V/12/304 p. 290.
Douglas, Christopher. Douglas Jardine: spartan cricketer. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984, ref. X.950/34330.
Peel, Mark. The last Roman: a biography of Colin Cowdrey. London: Deutsch, 1999, ref. YK.2002.a.7504.

Cc-by

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