This interview with the late Ray Illingworth, his last with a British newspaper, was first published on November 30 2021. On Christmas Day, Yorkshire announced Illingworth’s death at the age of 89 after a battle with esophageal cancer. 

The voice is a little softer and frailer but there is no doubt who is on the other end of the phone. It is like going back in time, turning on the television in the 1980s and hearing Ray Illingworth commentate for the BBC on another heavy England defeat.

Illingworth is 90 next year. He lost his wife, Shirley, in March and is a little emotional when he talks about her final years but mainly the conversation is happy and his recall of the 1970-71 Ashes tour, his greatest achievement, is razor sharp.

“It is the hardest tour anyone has ever had,” he says, and it is hard to argue with him.

From Aussie crowds, the English “gentleman press” (as he calls writers from posh papers like the Telegraph), home umpires who did not give his bowlers a single LBW and a tour manager who was “more like another bloody Aussie”, Illingworth had to fight on all fronts but still emerged victorious.

John Snow took 31 wickets, the most by an Englishman in Australia since Harold Larwood; Geoffrey Boycott scored 657 runs at an average of 93; John Edrich sapped Aussie bowlers by batting for 33 hours in the series and England’s four quick bowlers dominated the home batsmen, the tourists winning 2-0 – the only time Australia have failed to win a Test in a full home series. 

England may have legitimate cause to bemoan bubble life as they prepare for the 2021-22 Ashes, but compared to the demands placed on their counterparts 50 years ago, it seems like a cakewalk. 

That tour lasted a gruelling six-and-a-half months, including seven Tests, eight state games, 11 ‘up country’ or ceremonial matches, and cricket’s first ever one-day international – for which England’s players were paid the princely sum of £25 (“I’m not even sure we ever saw the money,” grumbles Illingworth). And all this at a time when no families were allowed on tour. 

“You had no Zoom or whatever they call it these days,” Illingworth points out. “You couldn’t even make a telephone call home. If you said, ‘Hello darling, how are you?’, it echoed back to you down the phone. It was impossible to hold a conversation. The only way of contacting home was writing letters. When you think some left a wife with two kiddies at home for six- and-a-half months, it was hard work. 

“Eventually I got my wife Shirley out there for the last Test. I paid for everything myself. We had to get a charter flight via Karachi, which was all we could afford. Guess what? Her plane broke down. She was stuck in Karachi for nearly a week of the three or four weeks she was going to be in Australia while they fixed it. 

“Don Bradman was a director of an airline at the time. He said: ‘Where is she?’ I said she is stuck in Karachi. But he made no effort to help me get her there. At least she arrived to see the last Test and she enjoyed that. But I was the only one who got anyone out.”

‘Our tour manager was a disaster’

Finding the right blend to win in Australia has proved beyond most England captains, with Illingworth one of only four men still alive to have done it. He cites teamwork, togetherness, good preparation, pace and variety in the bowling attack and a single-minded “we’re going bloody show ‘em” mentality as fundamentals. Clear leadership, too.

“Captaincy is a very, very important part. You don’t need four or five talking to the captain at the end of every bloody over. A captain should have one man he can bounce things off. For me it was [Geoffrey] Boycott. He read the game very well indeed. Even with my own bowling, I would go up to him and before I’d asked a question he had told me the answer. He thought on the same lines as me. That is one of the disappointments that he did not make a really good captain. It was nothing to do with his knowledge. 

“Players felt confident enough to ask me something. There is no point giving them loads of lies and fobbing them off. When you tell them something it must be the truth. I always tried to be very fair with players. Brian Luckhurst said he asked me things he would never have asked Colin Cowdrey and he played for Kent with Colin.” 

Cowdrey expected to captain the tour but was overlooked for the man cut from a rather more rugged cloth – a gruff Yorkshireman who had moved to unfashionable Leicestershire and lacked the airs and graces of an establishment man. It was perhaps why Illingworth ran into trouble with the tour manager, David Clark, who was equally blunt. 

A former paratrooper who had been captured at Arnhem in World War Two, Clark was a tough man with a fixed view on how England should play, and sided with Cowdrey. Having criticised the team’s style after a bore draw in Perth, he then took issue with Illingworth taking his players off the field at Sydney after Snow was bombarded with beer bottles by fans, trying to force the captain to take them back out. 

“The whole organisation was a bit ‘Fred Karno’ to be honest. I liked David Clark as a person but as a manager he was a bit of a disaster. We always thought he was one of their men, rather than one of ours. When they organised the extra Test match he just came in the dressing room and told us it was happening. 

“I said: ‘Hold on a minute, I haven’t been involved in any of the discussions, none of the players have’. 

“‘Oh it doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You have to play’. Then he turned around and walked out.”

‘We felt we were playing 13 people every game’

Half a century later it is umpiring that still rankles Illingworth. He had run-ins with the schoolmasterly Lou Rowan, who warned Snow for intimidatory bowling in the final Test after Jenner “ducked into one” and was laid out.