From Tony Greig – My Story 1980
By Tony Greig with Alan Lee
Anthony William Greig
born Queenstown, South Africa 1946
died Sydney, Australia 2012
p30
My father, Sandy, joined the RAF in 1939 at the age of seventeen. He was a squadron leader at the age of twenty-one and had been awarded a DSO and DFC while flying with Bomber Command. He was posted to Queenstown at the end of 1943 and was chief instructor at the air training school there when he met my mother Joyce.
P32
Dad spent his schooldays at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh. Apart from rugby, he played a lot of golf and soccer, and swam and boxed. Being Scotland, little cricket was played, but he did reach a reasonable standard in the game.
P33
Dad was strict about my schoolwork and disturbed that I was never the brightest boy in the class. This could have been brought on by the fact that he had been a good scholar, and he could not understand why I wasn’t so good.
P39 & 95
My father’s idols were Don Bradman and Vera Lynn. The only time that silence was demanded in our Queenstown home were when Vera Lynn was singing, the BBC was crackling a Glasgow Rangers soccer commentary on the radio, or Dad was talking about Don Bradman.
P34
Children in South Africa have to do very little for themselves. White families such as ours have servants doing all the menial household chores, and it unheard of, for instance, for me or my sisters to have to do the washing up. I only began to see how youngsters in other countries are disciplined into a household routine when I spent a year living in Scotland. My brother Ian and I were included in a roster for doing the washing-up, drying-up and stacking, and each day we had to bring in the coal.
P50-51
My school was Queen’s College, Queenstown. I was captain of rugby, tennis and cricket. For four successive years I represented Border Schools in Nuffield Cricket Week. In my last two years at school I was a member of the South African Schools side.
P53-54
Mike Buss, the Sussex all-rounder was our cricket coach at Queen’s College. I asked Mike if there might be an opportunity for me with Sussex during the next English season. Mike wrote to Sussex putting my case. They replied, ‘Tony Greig has not got a sensational record, but if he is willing to pay his own fare, we will give him a year’s trial at £15 per week.’ I was nineteen years old.
My father agreed that a season in English cricket would be useful and enlightening and pointed out that I would be able to visit my relatives in Scotland.
I was able to borrow £125 from a good friend of the family and I sailed on the Pendennis Castle.
P57
My first fortnight in Sussex was spent at the home of Alan Oakman, a senior professional in the side and the first in the long line of Sussex players who had coached at Queen’s College. I then moved into digs with Mrs Flo Cooper just 200 yards from the county ground in Hove.
During the 1977 season, my brother Ian joined the Sussex staff and followed my footsteps into Mrs Cooper’s house.
P58-59
My record in the second team was far from impressive. Sussex had probably seen little to persuade them that I was worth persevering with, but two games changed their mind.
The first was for Colonel Steven’s XI against Cambridge University. I scored a century in each innings.
Later in the season I was included in Arthur Gilligan’s XI against the touring West Indians. My success came with the ball, when I took the wickets of Rohan Kanhai and Conrad Hunte in a satisfying spell of seamers. At the end of the season I was offered a three-year contract starting the following summer.
P60
To qualify to play for England I was allowed home for only two months. Having chosen the Christmas period for my return, I then settled into a winter job in the family department store complex in Scotland.
Cricket had occupied me so completely during the summer that it was September before I had any opportunity to visit the Scottish countryside about which my father had told me so much. My grandfather, who owned the stores, gave me a job in the main branch at Bathgate, near Edinburgh. He insisted that I begin at the bottom of the ladder.
I started work in the electrical department with responsibly for delivering, installing and collecting television sets which we rented out. Occasionally, I was let loose on the sales side in the store, which normally led to a protracted discussion on the family history of the Greigs from customers who would grow curious about my accent and ask who I was. By the time I left the store I don’t think there was much I didn’t know about my ancestry.
Every job has its headaches. Mine arrived every time a family failed to pay the rent on their television and I was dispatched like a reluctant bailiff to retrieve the set.
I witnessed some heart-breaking scenes among the city slums, where large families lived in sparsely furnished flats with only the television for comfort. I felt cheap and cruel as I denied them their simple single pleasure, and once, sympathy and conscience drove professional duty out of my mind.
There was nothing new about the scene as I drove up in the firm’s van. Another block of tenement flats, dirty and impersonal, and an indigent family who couldn’t pay for their viewing. But, somehow, this was different.
When I walked into the flat, the depression surrounded me. There were six lads, all watching the television, while their mother tried to keep the place in some semblance of order. It wasn’t that difficult to tidy up, because there was no furniture left – they had lost it all to the bailiffs.
Outside, the city shambled away despairingly. It was a rough area and there was nowhere for the kids to go, nothing for them to do. If I had taken the television I could have been responsible for a suicide – the place was that bad.
I left empty-handed and drove back to the store lost in a mix of grief for the family and guilt over my failure to complete what should have been a straightforward collection.
Back at Bathgate, I was given a lecture by the store manager. If everyone behaved like this, he told me, we wouldn’t have a business at all.
I went back to the flat the following day and confronted the mother with an ultimatum that was more a plea than a threat. I explained that, if I valued my job, I should just pick up the set and go, but told her that she must do everything to get the money together. I even offered to loan it to her myself.
Eventually, they did scrape the rent together and they kept their television. But I wasn’t sorry when the bailiff role passed out of my life.
P61 & 63
I went home for Christmas Then came back to Sussex for the 1967 season.
P67
I scored 156 in my debut match for Sussex First XI against Lancashire.
P70
I had planned another winter working in the family store in Scotland and that, indeed, was how it began. But bad news brought a pleasant surprise. My grandfather became ill, and when my father was told he decided to bring the entire family up to Edinburgh. So instead of the three-year separation I had feared, I was reunited with my folks only nine months after leaving them.
P91 & 93
In 1970, I was selected to play for England against the Rest of The World. I was not chosen for the MCC tour of Australia 1970-71. I still count my omission from that team as the biggest single disappointment in my career, for the tour was a magnificent English triumph under the masterful captaincy of Illingworth.
P94 & 97
In late 1971, Donald Carr, secretary of the Test and County Cricket Board, asked if I would be available to tour Australia with a Rest of the World team captained by Sobers.
That tour gave me experience that was to prove vital. It gave me confidence, developed my technique and my temperament. I also felt that I must have done enough in Australia to merit an England place in the Ashes series in the summer of 1972, and so it proved.
I went into the team for the first Test at Manchester and, between then and the end of the Ashes series in England five years later, I was to complete an unbroken sequence of fifty-eight Test appearances.
P101
I went on the MCC tour of India in 1972-73. Tony Lewis was captain. I was ’Man of the Series’.
P103 & 117
In 1974 I was made captain of Sussex and in 1975 I became captain of England.
P150-151
While in Sydney, Australia, I made an appointment with Kerry Packer, owner of Nine-Network, in the hope of being given some TV work. Television commentating was something that appealed to me and Packer was one of the big names in the business.
I arrived at his home without the slightest knowledge of the plan he had already set in motion which was destined to shake the cricket establishment of the world.
When we met I spelled out my requests to Mr Packer then sat back while he made the most extraordinary counter-proposal I have ever heard. After much deliberation I signed up with Packer and helped him set up World Series Cricket in 1977. Because of this I lost the captaincy of England.
P157
In July 1978, I decided to move to Australia.
P160
J.P. Sport Pty Ltd, the company headed by Kerry Packer, Paul Hogan, John Cornell and Austin Robertson, issued writs in the High Court in England against the Test and County Cricket Board and the International Cricket Conference to prevent either body from banning any of the WSC players.
Mike Proctor, John Snow and myself joined with J.P. Sport in their action against both the TCCB and the ICC as it became apparent that WSC players were facing a total ban. To us, that was restriction of trade.
In Sydney, Packer was issuing writs against Australian cricket authorities for the same reason.
P167
World Series Cricket, in its independent form, operated for just two seasons. I have no regrets, none whatsoever, about my part in WSC.
I was guest of honour on This is Your Life.
P167
The Test fees of England’s players have risen 600% since the advent of WSC. County players have also reaped the benefit.
P175
The challenges are all there, just as Kerry promised they would be. If over the years I have hurt anyone I am sorry. At 33 not many people can say in all honesty that they have never been happier. But I can.
From The Times June 6th 2020
The Greatest England Cricket Captain – Jardine the daring tactician or Greig the revolutionary?
Mike Atherton writes in favour of Douglas Jardine while Simon Wilde chooses Tony Greig:
‘If there was one man who upset the establishment more than Douglas Jardine it was Tony Greig. He, like Jardine, was born overseas of Scottish stock…Greig demonstrated that you had to treat players like professionals and human beings rather than serfs.
There has been no bigger evolutionary in English cricket.
He was England’s best cricketer throughout his time; in 58 Tests he averaged 40.43 with the bat, 32.20 with the ball and took 87 catches at a rate per innings superior to any other England outfielder. These figures are better than Ian Botham’s.
Alec Bedser, chairman of selectors for 12 years, described Greig as the best of the six captains he worked with, and these included Ray Illingworth and Mike Brearley.’
From The West Lothian Courier
29th September 1967
Two seasons ago an eighteen-year-old South African boy entered into the fold of English County cricket. Since then he has become possibly the most exciting new force in the game, and this year, in a prolonged stay with the Sussex First Eleven hit 1299 runs and captured 67 wickets.
For Tony Greig, 20-year-old grandson of Mr. William Greig, founder of Greig’s Emporium in Bathgate, the rise to celebrity has been a swift one.
Now, in the close season, Tony is working in the electrical department of the Greig’s Emporium in Bathgate. In January, he goes off on a world tour.
His family, however, have taken up permanent residence in Edinburgh, and his father Mr Alex Greig D.F.C., D.S.O., has entered the business.
5th January 1968
The grandson of Bathgate businessman William Greig looks almost ready for a great cricketing career. For 21-year-old Tony Greig, who came here with his family from South Africa two years ago, the 1967 season has been a good one.
From the beginning of the close season he has been selling electrical equipment in his grandfather’s emporium at Bathgate and has kept fit by playing squash.
A few months ago he was delighted to hear that the professional cricket writers had named him ‘Young Cricketer of the Year’. He heard that announcement on an emporium wireless.
That afternoon photographers from the national press appeared at his home in Cammo Gardens, Edinburgh.
At twenty-one he is doing very well. Test fame seems near.
This news item is accompanied by a photo of Tony Greig in Greig’s Emporium. He has his hands on a television set.
Bathgate Golf Club
On a visit to the golf club, Tony threw a golf ball a prodigious distance. The golfers were amazed.
Sybil Cavanagh helped me a great deal with putting this item together. I give her my most sincere thanks.
From Tony Greig – My Story 1980
By Tony Greig with Alan Lee
Anthony William Greig
born Queenstown, South Africa 1946
died Sydney, Australia 2012
p30
My father, Sandy, joined the RAF in 1939 at the age of seventeen. He was a squadron leader at the age of twenty-one and had been awarded a DSO and DFC while flying with Bomber Command. He was posted to Queenstown at the end of 1943 and was chief instructor at the air training school there when he met my mother Joyce.
P32
Dad spent his schooldays at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh. Apart from rugby, he played a lot of golf and soccer, and swam and boxed. Being Scotland, little cricket was played, but he did reach a reasonable standard in the game.
P33
Dad was strict about my schoolwork and disturbed that I was never the brightest boy in the class. This could have been brought on by the fact that he had been a good scholar, and he could not understand why I wasn’t so good.
P39 & 95
My father’s idols were Don Bradman and Vera Lynn. The only time that silence was demanded in our Queenstown home were when Vera Lynn was singing, the BBC was crackling a Glasgow Rangers soccer commentary on the radio, or Dad was talking about Don Bradman.
P34
Children in South Africa have to do very little for themselves. White families such as ours have servants doing all the menial household chores, and it unheard of, for instance, for me or my sisters to have to do the washing up. I only began to see how youngsters in other countries are disciplined into a household routine when I spent a year living in Scotland. My brother Ian and I were included in a roster for doing the washing-up, drying-up and stacking, and each day we had to bring in the coal.
P50-51
My school was Queen’s College, Queenstown. I was captain of rugby, tennis and cricket. For four successive years I represented Border Schools in Nuffield Cricket Week. In my last two years at school I was a member of the South African Schools side.
P53-54
Mike Buss, the Sussex all-rounder was our cricket coach at Queen’s College. I asked Mike if there might be an opportunity for me with Sussex during the next English season. Mike wrote to Sussex putting my case. They replied, ‘Tony Greig has not got a sensational record, but if he is willing to pay his own fare, we will give him a year’s trial at £15 per week.’ I was nineteen years old.
My father agreed that a season in English cricket would be useful and enlightening and pointed out that I would be able to visit my relatives in Scotland.
I was able to borrow £125 from a good friend of the family and I sailed on the Pendennis Castle.
P57
My first fortnight in Sussex was spent at the home of Alan Oakman, a senior professional in the side and the first in the long line of Sussex players who had coached at Queen’s College. I then moved into digs with Mrs Flo Cooper just 200 yards from the county ground in Hove.
During the 1977 season, my brother Ian joined the Sussex staff and followed my footsteps into Mrs Cooper’s house.
P58-59
My record in the second team was far from impressive. Sussex had probably seen little to persuade them that I was worth persevering with, but two games changed their mind.
The first was for Colonel Steven’s XI against Cambridge University. I scored a century in each innings.
Later in the season I was included in Arthur Gilligan’s XI against the touring West Indians. My success came with the ball, when I took the wickets of Rohan Kanhai and Conrad Hunte in a satisfying spell of seamers. At the end of the season I was offered a three-year contract starting the following summer.
P60
To qualify to play for England I was allowed home for only two months. Having chosen the Christmas period for my return, I then settled into a winter job in the family department store complex in Scotland.
Cricket had occupied me so completely during the summer that it was September before I had any opportunity to visit the Scottish countryside about which my father had told me so much. My grandfather, who owned the stores, gave me a job in the main branch at Bathgate, near Edinburgh. He insisted that I begin at the bottom of the ladder.
I started work in the electrical department with responsibly for delivering, installing and collecting television sets which we rented out. Occasionally, I was let loose on the sales side in the store, which normally led to a protracted discussion on the family history of the Greigs from customers who would grow curious about my accent and ask who I was. By the time I left the store I don’t think there was much I didn’t know about my ancestry.
Every job has its headaches. Mine arrived every time a family failed to pay the rent on their television and I was dispatched like a reluctant bailiff to retrieve the set.
I witnessed some heart-breaking scenes among the city slums, where large families lived in sparsely furnished flats with only the television for comfort. I felt cheap and cruel as I denied them their simple single pleasure, and once, sympathy and conscience drove professional duty out of my mind.
There was nothing new about the scene as I drove up in the firm’s van. Another block of tenement flats, dirty and impersonal, and an indigent family who couldn’t pay for their viewing. But, somehow, this was different.
When I walked into the flat, the depression surrounded me. There were six lads, all watching the television, while their mother tried to keep the place in some semblance of order. It wasn’t that difficult to tidy up, because there was no furniture left – they had lost it all to the bailiffs.
Outside, the city shambled away despairingly. It was a rough area and there was nowhere for the kids to go, nothing for them to do. If I had taken the television I could have been responsible for a suicide – the place was that bad.
I left empty-handed and drove back to the store lost in a mix of grief for the family and guilt over my failure to complete what should have been a straightforward collection.
Back at Bathgate, I was given a lecture by the store manager. If everyone behaved like this, he told me, we wouldn’t have a business at all.
I went back to the flat the following day and confronted the mother with an ultimatum that was more a plea than a threat. I explained that, if I valued my job, I should just pick up the set and go, but told her that she must do everything to get the money together. I even offered to loan it to her myself.
Eventually, they did scrape the rent together and they kept their television. But I wasn’t sorry when the bailiff role passed out of my life.
P61 & 63
I went home for Christmas Then came back to Sussex for the 1967 season.
P67
I scored 156 in my debut match for Sussex First XI against Lancashire.
P70
I had planned another winter working in the family store in Scotland and that, indeed, was how it began. But bad news brought a pleasant surprise. My grandfather became ill, and when my father was told he decided to bring the entire family up to Edinburgh. So instead of the three-year separation I had feared, I was reunited with my folks only nine months after leaving them.
P91 & 93
In 1970, I was selected to play for England against the Rest of The World. I was not chosen for the MCC tour of Australia 1970-71. I still count my omission from that team as the biggest single disappointment in my career, for the tour was a magnificent English triumph under the masterful captaincy of Illingworth.
P94 & 97
In late 1971, Donald Carr, secretary of the Test and County Cricket Board, asked if I would be available to tour Australia with a Rest of the World team captained by Sobers.
That tour gave me experience that was to prove vital. It gave me confidence, developed my technique and my temperament. I also felt that I must have done enough in Australia to merit an England place in the Ashes series in the summer of 1972, and so it proved.
I went into the team for the first Test at Manchester and, between then and the end of the Ashes series in England five years later, I was to complete an unbroken sequence of fifty-eight Test appearances.
P101
I went on the MCC tour of India in 1972-73. Tony Lewis was captain. I was ’Man of the Series’.
P103 & 117
In 1974 I was made captain of Sussex and in 1975 I became captain of England.
P150-151
While in Sydney, Australia, I made an appointment with Kerry Packer, owner of Nine-Network, in the hope of being given some TV work. Television commentating was something that appealed to me and Packer was one of the big names in the business.
I arrived at his home without the slightest knowledge of the plan he had already set in motion which was destined to shake the cricket establishment of the world.
When we met I spelled out my requests to Mr Packer then sat back while he made the most extraordinary counter-proposal I have ever heard. After much deliberation I signed up with Packer and helped him set up World Series Cricket in 1977. Because of this I lost the captaincy of England.
P157
In July 1978, I decided to move to Australia.
P160
J.P. Sport Pty Ltd, the company headed by Kerry Packer, Paul Hogan, John Cornell and Austin Robertson, issued writs in the High Court in England against the Test and County Cricket Board and the International Cricket Conference to prevent either body from banning any of the WSC players.
Mike Proctor, John Snow and myself joined with J.P. Sport in their action against both the TCCB and the ICC as it became apparent that WSC players were facing a total ban. To us, that was restriction of trade.
In Sydney, Packer was issuing writs against Australian cricket authorities for the same reason.
P167
World Series Cricket, in its independent form, operated for just two seasons. I have no regrets, none whatsoever, about my part in WSC.
I was guest of honour on This is Your Life.
P167
The Test fees of England’s players have risen 600% since the advent of WSC. County players have also reaped the benefit.
P175
The challenges are all there, just as Kerry promised they would be. If over the years I have hurt anyone I am sorry. At 33 not many people can say in all honesty that they have never been happier. But I can.
From The Times June 6th 2020
The Greatest England Cricket Captain – Jardine the daring tactician or Greig the revolutionary?
Mike Atherton writes in favour of Douglas Jardine while Simon Wilde chooses Tony Greig:
‘If there was one man who upset the establishment more than Douglas Jardine it was Tony Greig. He, like Jardine, was born overseas of Scottish stock…Greig demonstrated that you had to treat players like professionals and human beings rather than serfs.
There has been no bigger evolutionary in English cricket.
He was England’s best cricketer throughout his time; in 58 Tests he averaged 40.43 with the bat, 32.20 with the ball and took 87 catches at a rate per innings superior to any other England outfielder. These figures are better than Ian Botham’s.
Alec Bedser, chairman of selectors for 12 years, described Greig as the best of the six captains he worked with, and these included Ray Illingworth and Mike Brearley.’
From The West Lothian Courier
29th September 1967
Two seasons ago an eighteen-year-old South African boy entered into the fold of English County cricket. Since then he has become possibly the most exciting new force in the game, and this year, in a prolonged stay with the Sussex First Eleven hit 1299 runs and captured 67 wickets.
For Tony Greig, 20-year-old grandson of Mr. William Greig, founder of Greig’s Emporium in Bathgate, the rise to celebrity has been a swift one.
Now, in the close season, Tony is working in the electrical department of the Greig’s Emporium in Bathgate. In January, he goes off on a world tour.
His family, however, have taken up permanent residence in Edinburgh, and his father Mr Alex Greig D.F.C., D.S.O., has entered the business.
5th January 1968
The grandson of Bathgate businessman William Greig looks almost ready for a great cricketing career. For 21-year-old Tony Greig, who came here with his family from South Africa two years ago, the 1967 season has been a good one.
From the beginning of the close season he has been selling electrical equipment in his grandfather’s emporium at Bathgate and has kept fit by playing squash.
A few months ago he was delighted to hear that the professional cricket writers had named him ‘Young Cricketer of the Year’. He heard that announcement on an emporium wireless.
That afternoon photographers from the national press appeared at his home in Cammo Gardens, Edinburgh.
At twenty-one he is doing very well. Test fame seems near.
This news item is accompanied by a photo of Tony Greig in Greig’s Emporium. He has his hands on a television set.
Bathgate Golf Club
On a visit to the golf club, Tony threw a golf ball a prodigious distance. The golfers were amazed.
Sybil Cavanagh helped me a great deal with putting this item together. I give her my most sincere thanks.
Bathgate Old Times 