Early Bird, Bonkers Bird, Dickie Bird

Harold Dennis “Dickie” Bird, who has died aged 92, became cricket’s most recognisable umpire. His presence was announced less by the finger that sent men back to the pavilion than by the rituals that filled the long hours in between: the cap set square, the shuffle from foot to foot, the arms flicking out of his sleeves, the hand brushing at motes of dust that were rarely there.

He twiddled his hair until it stood like chapel hat pegs, hunched over the stumps with a grimace that seemed half anguish, half devotion, and even rehearsed his signals on empty grounds as if they were lines in a play. His mannerisms were noted everywhere, from county dressing rooms that ribbed him to the Queen, who once remarked on his fidgets with amused precision.

They became part of the day’s play, yet what endured was rarer. In an age before slow-motion replays or snickometers, when an umpire’s call was final, he was trusted for a blend of firmness and fellow-feeling that gave his judgments their authority.

He was born in Barnsley in 1933, in a brick row house where winter walks to the toilet were part of life and a Sabbath routine that was never broken. His father came home from the colliery worn out from crawling through eighteen-inch seams, sometimes waist-deep in water, yet still carrying the quiet resolve that work instilled. Money was scarce, but there was polish on the shoes and food on the table.

For boys in these streets, games were the only escape from the pit. Winter meant football on a patch of rough ground, summer meant scraping out a wicket and dreaming of Willie Watson, the Yorkshireman who played for England at both sports.

Among his friends were Tommy Taylor, “Tucker,” who would one day lead the line for Manchester United and die in the Munich crash of ’58, and broadcaster Michael Parkinson. Geoffrey Boycott, the youngest of them, looked on and stored up the lessons that would one day make him Yorkshire’s run-machine.

The nerves that gnawed at him were visible even in boyhood, though beneath them ran a stubbornness that never quite let go. When Arthur Mitchell told him after a rain-sodden trial against the tearing Trueman not to bother coming back, he turned up the next day.

Maurice Leyland, gentler in manner, steadied him, and in time he played alongside the very bowlers who had terrified him. From that bruising initiation he carried away a creed of the coalfield: turn up early, know your job, keep faith.

His record as a batsman will not detain historians for long, save for one day at Bradford in 1959 when he made 181 not out and felt, briefly, that the game would be kind. It was not for very long.

He left Yorkshire soon after, played for the laggard Leicestershire, and was done with the professional game in his early thirties. A knee had ended his hopes in football; cricket seemed to have turned away as well.

For a while he coached in Devon and Johannesburg. Then came the change of coat. Umpiring was said to demand a cool head; he found in it a way to steady his own nerves. In 1970, when he first walked out in the white coat, it seemed the game had at last found where he belonged.

He prepared as though time’s deficit could only be recovered by turning up absurdly ahead—like an early Bird. For his second county match, Surrey against Yorkshire at The Oval, he asked for a 4.30 call, reached the ground before six, found the gates locked and tried to climb over.

A policeman stopped him. “I am one of the umpires,” he said. “Go on,” came the reply, “you will tell me next you are the Prime Minister.” On the morning of his first Test at Headingley he was there at seven, waiting with the groundstaff.

For his MBE he turned up at Buckingham Palace four hours early and learned that zeal has no queue. Invited to Chequers (the Prime Minister’s residence), he parked in a lane for two hours, then talked cricket with John and Norma Major before the other guests had arrived. If punctuality were an entry in Wisden, he would have led the averages.

He stood in 69 one-day internationals and 66 Tests, the last of which was the first for two young Indians, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid. But the tally is just a ledger entry; what endures is the way he stood.

Captains sometimes groaned at his caution, for they wanted twenty wickets while he wanted certainty. He had been raised among those who prized a straight answer, and he carried that habit into the middle. Doubt, in his view, was common enough in life; why add to it in cricket?

His sense of fairness and humour kept matches from coming apart. At The Oval in 1974, when Sarfraz Nawaz ended a session with a beamer, Tony Greig came striding down the pitch, promising to wrap his bat round the bowler’s head.

Bird lifted the bails and advised the gentlemen that it was time for tea. Years later the six-foot-seven Greig would say that in that instant his career had been saved.

In another match, when Dennis Lillee bowled off-spin in protest at not being granted a new ball, Bird, deadpan, told Ian Chappell, “I wouldn’t change either. He is the best off-spinner I have seen all season.” The new ball came with the next over. The point had been made without a sermon.

Cricket has always had its share of oddities; odder still were the moments that seemed to seek Bird out. At Lord’s he once sat serenely on the square through a bomb scare, persuaded that no charge could reach him there.

At Old Trafford in the mid-80s he stopped play because a flash of sun from a greenhouse behind the bowler’s arm made the ball vanish. At Headingley once, during a county match, a burst pipe sent water through the run-ups, and he apologised to a crowd that seemed to think he governed the mains.

His marbles, which he kept in his pocket to count the six balls of an over, spilled across the turf one afternoon, and he went on hands and knees to collect them, the players laughing that he had lost his marbles at last.

After the first World Cup final in 1975 his trademark white cap was swept away in the pitch invasion. A year later, on a London bus, he noticed the conductor wearing it and boasting to passengers that he had won it off Dickie Bird’s head at Lord’s. Bird let him keep the story, and the cap.

India gave him some of his most vivid days. He admired Gavaskar for his balance and judgment, and once, at Lord’s, produced a pair of scissors to trim the opener’s fringe when hair fell into his eyes.

Years later he would say that the best player of his time was Sachin Tendulkar, recalling a boy of sixteen at Sharjah who drove the West Indies with the calm of a veteran and made 86 as if the West Indian quicks were village bowlers. In Bombay he filmed a commercial with Tendulkar, dressed as a judge, hammering blocks of ice under a wig and gown while the prop men shouted for more.

On the way to the 1987 World Cup he swallowed a dental crown and found himself in the chair of a harassed Indian dentist, who dropped the drill once but fitted a cap that never failed. In Madras he and David Shepherd walked on the beach and stepped, unsuspecting, into a patch of sewage. During the Golden Jubilee Test he hid indoors at the warning of well-meaning locals who said a solar eclipse could send a man blind, and laughed at himself afterwards when the moon had passed.

Most of all he remembered Lord’s in 1983. India had made only 183, and the West Indies waited for their prize. As the reply began Kapil Dev walked by him and said the champions had already decided it would be easy, that they would undo themselves if the ball was kept up and aimed at the stumps. Later Kapil passed again with a smile. “We have got them now, Dickie.” The last act was his: Michael Holding trapped in front, the finger raised, and India owned the World Cup.

His Christianity ran through him like a seam in Yorkshire stone. As a boy he sat in the Elim Pentecostal church in Barnsley; as an adult he found a Methodist chapel near his cottage in Staincross. He held to simple rules: keep your word, keep your temper, keep faith with those you served.

On the field he sometimes asked a fielder to be honest about a catch, reminding him quietly that the Lord was watching. More often than not the answer came straight. His authority lay in that mixture of conscience and trust.Ian Botham called him “the best and fairest of them all,” then added, with a grin, “a great bloke and completely bonkers.”

Home was White Rose Cottage at Staincross, where John Wesley had once slept on his travels. The walls filled with photographs, letters and trophies; he answered strangers’ notes by hand.

In Barnsley a statue was raised of him with finger aloft, set on a higher plinth because the townsfolk could not resist hanging things from it. He gave Yorkshire a balcony and gave young sportsmen a foundation in his name. He lived simply. He never married, regretted not having children, but chose cricket and gave something back to it.

At Headingley one day, the mustachioed Merv Hughes couldn’t stop sledging Graeme Hick. Bird wandered over, patient and firm, and asked why the language was necessary, what harm Mr Hick had ever done. The next ball Hughes turned to the umpire with a bristling handlebar smile: “Dickie, you are a legend.”

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author. Nikhil Kumar is an independent writer.