Knocked for six

'I first encountered Roy Jenkins when he was playing for a political cricket side called (with some prescience!) the Gang of Eleven'

In the days following the death of Roy Jenkins I have received many letters of tribute to the great politician and writer, and I would very much like to print some of them today.

From Sir George "Gubby" Trotter

Sir, In all the eulogies which I have read about my old friend Roy Jenkins, I have not seen a single one that mentioned his very real love of cricket, a passion that never left him to the end.

I first encountered Roy Jenkins in the 1950s when I was playing for a cricket team called the Bohemians and he was playing for a touring political cricket side called (with some prescience!) the Gang of Eleven. He was, even then, a delightful companion and had set his horizons far beyond the narrow confines of cricket. I remember in the first innings, when I was fielding at slip and he was batting, we got into deep conversation about William Gladstone.

"The curious thing about Gladstone," he told me, "was that he is now remembered entirely as a series of questions. There was the Balkan question, and the Home Rule question, of course. The Turkish question, and so on. Trouble was, he never really solved any of them."

At that precise moment he was bowled middle stump by our cunning spinner.

"See that?" he told me as he walked out. "I couldn't handle the Chinaman Question."

yours etc

From Mr Dudley Finegan MP

Sir, I can vouch for the foregoing. Roy was always willing to apply the lessons of politics to cricket and vice versa. I remember once we were playing together in a touring parliamentary cricket team called the Fact Finding Mission XI and we were facing a very good local team in the North of England called the Trouble at t'Mill XI, a trade unionist team. One of their batsmen was very good and had knocked up 50 not out, when Roy came on to bowl.

"Underarm, slow," he said to the umpire.

"Underarm, slow," said the umpire to the batsman.

"Vewy slow," said Roy.

"Very slow," said the umpire.

The batsman faced the first ball very suspiciously. Roy bowled it high and very slow, then – before the ball reached the batsman – slumped to the ground with his fingers in his ears as if it were a bomb. The militant batsman, panicking momentarily, avoided the ball instinctively and missed it. It trickled on to his stumps.

"Fight fire with fire," said Roy to me. "Never fails."

Yours etc

From Mrs Sidney Paget

Sir, I often made tea for cricket matches at which dear Roy Jenkins was playing, and I said to him once, jokingly, that perhaps we would get on better with France if they played cricket. To my amazement, he told me that he had actually played General de Gaulle at cricket.

"French cricket, actually," he said. "We were at some weekend house party somewhere, and I told the General about this strange game called 'French cricket', in which one man stood firm against everyone else. Of course, this was exactly how the great Frenchman felt about the world and he demanded that I showed him how it was played. So I took him out on the lawn, gave him a bat and started bowling at his legs. Typical of de Gaulle, he was too proud to bend and defend his shoes so I easily got him out. He was absolutely humiliated to be defeated by a Briton at a French game. The next month, Edward Heath applied for entry to the Common Market. De Gaulle said 'Non!' I think that I may have been to blame."

Yours etc

From Tim Dalyell (no relation)

Sir, I used to play cricket in a team called the Elder Statesmen XI, which only played against non-cricketers, and Roy used to turn out occasionally for us. I once asked him if he did not feel that his political life had been disappointing. How so? he asked. Well, I said, he had cut all his ties with the old Labour Party in order to start a new party, which would be wishy-washy and middle-of-the-road and all things to all men, and it hadn't caught on.

"Oh, but it did catch on!" he said. "The only thing is that it's called New Labour, and Tony Blair has got all the credit."

Yours etc