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fred titmus
“For F.J. Titmus read Titmus, F.J.”
By Jonathan Calder last year, mid-November, 2 Comments »
There is a famous cricket story from the days when a strict divide was maintained between amateurs and professionals. It maintains that there was once an announcement at Lord’s that ran:
For F.J. Titmus read Titmus, F.J.
The point was that amateurs had their initials placed before their names and professionals had them afterwards.
I always suspected that this story was apocryphal, but a few months ago I came across of a copy of Titmus’s autobiography. In it he confirms the story and dates it to a match between the MCC and Surrey which took place in May 1950.
Thanks to the wonders of CricketArchive I can show you the match scorecard. It was quite an achievement for Titmus to be picked for an MCC side that was not far short of test strength at the age of only 17.
Sadly Titmus chose as the title of his memoirs the mundane My Life in Cricket rather than Fuckin’ ‘ell it’s Fred Titmus.
Jonathan Calder blogs at Liberal England
2 Comments »