Captain 1974-1985; President 1999-2005; died 14 October 2024, aged 84.

Chris was proud of achieving one of the last ‘fourths’ at Oxford before they were abolished, thus confirming that he had not spent too much of his student time in the lecture halls at the expense of the playing fields.  He joined the staff of Framlingham College in 1966, where he taught Latin and coached rugby, hockey and cricket before moving to Fettes College in Edinburgh in 1973, where he was a housemaster and later left teaching to take over as bursar. He had a long association with Grange CC, where he was President from 1976 to 1982 and 1^st XI Captain in 1983.  He was Chair of the Scottish Cricket Union from 1991 to 1996 and President of Cricket Scotland in 2002-03.

 A stray but interesting fact gleaned by Marion from hours of scoring with him on tour is that he was a junior show jumping champion on a horse called Benjamin, no doubt encouraged by his mother, world famous as a designer of Olympic show jumping courses. There must be so much more about Chris that we will never know.

Chris first played for the club in Cambridge in 1970, at the invitation of Paddy and Julyan Heazell, and later that season, in a way that was typical of him, waited nervously outside the Seaton pavilion, unsure as to whether or not the AGM would promote him from candidate to member. Within four years he was Captain, a role he fulfilled for 12 years with dedication, controlled passion and notable unselfishness.

As a cricketer he was a sound left-handed batsman with Brian Close’s attitude to quick bowling, a medium pace bowler with, over the years, a run-up of evolving idiosyncraticity, a cover fielder surprisingly light on his feet for a man of increasing girth, and a safe pair of hands, which were not found wanting when, in a vain attempt to embarrass a wicket keeper not ready to resume duty at 2.10 pm, he kept wicket at Sidmouth for a few overs without gloves or pads. He is one of only 10 Sou’Westers to have done the Double for the club, taking 100 wickets and scoring 1,000 runs, and his 53 catches makes him the equal 6^th highest outfield catcher in the club’s history.

He was ever ready to delegate responsibility for captaincy on the field, and uncritical of the result if things then went wrong – notably in 1976, the year of the drought.  As the tour progressed this became known as the year of the DABS ( ” declare and be stuffed “), as a series of Sou’Wester skippers ” kept opponents in the game ” all too successfully.
One of his major contributions was to bring on tour in 1981 a teenager from Fettes called Jonathan Kennedy, who 4 decades later began skippering the club in the best Carruthers’ tradition.

Chris last played for the club in 1986, after which he continued to make the long journey, driving from Scotland at high speed to the south west where he continued to be a dedicated supporter of the club, often to be found in the scorebox, and writing the tour reports in his own inimitable style.  In 1996, the club awarded him the Bruce Hart Memorial Trophy for his outstanding service, and in 1999 he became the club’s 7^th President, a post he served with distinction until 2005. In the winter months back in Scotland he maintained the club’s playing statistics and made fair copies of scorebooks.

In 2013, his own account of the tour wrote of its final match ‘there was early drama at Falkland; neither the scorer nor the scorebook appeared, and both were missing for three days, stuck in lonely isolation in Yeovil hospital, less than well, without telephone or relevant numbers’.  We were mighty relieved to hear from him a few days later when he had made it back north of the border.

His final appearance in the west was in 2016, when he had become increasingly less mobile.  The final paragraph of his tour report included these poignant, self-effacing words: ‘So another tour ends. This is, I’m afraid, not up to what I see as par for a report.  My own feebleness made me a rather self-conscious passenger, and though I was omnipresent it all seemed a bit remote. I have now shot my bolt and will enjoy future tours through the yearbook.  Memories will be of those lovely grounds and pubs and of course of the company.  It has been a serious privilege to have been allowed along since 1970. Thank you for having me’.

We did not see Chris again but fond memories of him remain:  the only man on tour known to have pulled a muscle whilst combing his hair, bending sideways to look in a Prep School height mirror at Sparkford and then trying to straighten his neck;  his encounters in the Sidmouth pavilion trying to electronically change the scorebox on the other side of the ground; when in his run-up to bowl he ground to a complete standstill, scuffing the ground with his own version of the ‘yips’; but above all, his laconic sense of humour, his obvious enjoyment of the Sou’westers and the cricket we play and the huge contribution which he made to the club. Oh, and it really is true that, spotting that Jacky Kingdom, landlady of the George, had hired a particularly bonny barmaid, he was moved to say ” Please allow me through – I wish to engage her in a little light badinage “.

Mike Barford
Christopher Dean

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 15th, 2025 at 2:20 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.