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Dickie Bird, who has died at the age of 92, broke the old rule that a sporting official should never be noticed. But he broke it cheerfully and unwittingly, winning respect and friendship through the quality of his decision-making, his natural warmth and his abiding love of cricket. He was, by his own admission, ‘married’ to the game.
When he published his autobiography in 1997, a year after he stood in the last of his 66 Tests, his popularity meant sales passed a million, leaving Dickie – ‘Harold’ by birth – to reflect that he had knocked Princess Diana off the top of the best-sellers list.
The observation was made quite without ego: Bird, who transcended his sport in a manner previously thought possible only by the superstars, never stopped pinching himself.
He believed the book’s success was down to the fact that he and his ghostwriter, Keith Lodge, sports editor of the Barnsley Chronicle, spent 18 months working for two hours an evening to get it right. That, and his uncanny appeal to a wider audience.
And no matter how often he told his favourite stories about meeting the Queen 29 times, or scaling the wall at The Oval because he was several hours early, or answering a surreptitiously hidden mobile phone while the bowler ran in, the public lapped it all up. He was a publishing phenomenon, an umpire and a cricketer, possibly in that order.
The proceeds of his literary success allowed him to buy a £70,000 black Jaguar, though it was a rare extravagance. Bird, the son of a miner who, he said, ‘never missed a shift’ from 13 through to 65, was of humble stock: the loo was outside, and baths took place in a tub in front of the fire.
Legendary former Test cricket umpire Dickie Bird has passed away at the age of 92
Bird (pictured in 1998) was one of the games great characters and he transcended the sport
On Tuesday night, Barnsley’s footballers will hold a minute’s applause before their EFL Cup match against Brighton at Oakwell, where Bird had popped in only 10 days earlier. His ordinariness was part of his charm.
So was his unswerving, almost childlike devotion to cricket. After rubbing shoulders with Geoff Boycott and Michael Parkinson at his home club, he had a nine-year first-class career with Yorkshire and Leicestershire, which produced one great day out – an unbeaten 181 to set up an innings win over Glamorgan at Bradford – and a lowly batting average of 20.
‘He was a very good technical batsman,’ said Boycott, ‘but nerves got the better of him when stepped up to play for Yorkshire.’
And when injury brought a premature end to one career, he transferred his nervous energy to another, quickly establishing himself as one of the most reliable umpires on the circuit.
His reputation, it should be said, rested on a certain conservatism: his first autobiography, in 1978, was called Not Out. Regardless, the life-size bronze statue erected in Barnsley in 2009 shows Bird raising his right index finger in the affirmative, as if it was the gesture which came most naturally to him. And his first act in his final Test at Lord’s in 1996, moments after dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief, was to give out Mike Atherton leg-before third ball to India’s Javagal Srinath.
Only once did he appear to forget himself: during a Test in Trinidad between West Indies and Pakistan, he and the Jamaican official Steve Bucknor upheld 17 lbw appeals, leaving Dickie to enthuse: ‘It were marvellous. A revelation.’ He quickly returned to type, as if the whole thing had been a fever dream. The introduction of DRS was, he believed, a ‘stain on the game’. It was probably just as well the technology arrived after he called it a day.
But Bird did everything with such ingenuousness, such a twinkle, that it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have adapted to an age of reviews and umpire’s calls. For one thing, the very bowlers he would infuriate ended up loving him.
Australian quick Merv Hughes, whom Bird once berated for sledging Graeme Hick, described him as a ‘great bloke’. Anil Kumble, the Indian leg-spinner, said: ‘Dickie Bird didn’t just umpire the game. He owned it, with heart, wit and class.’
Bird (right) quickly established himself as one of the most reliable umpires on the circuit
Bird enjoyed a solid, if unspectacular career for his beloved Yorkshire, and later Leicestershire
He earned an MBE in 1986, an OBE 26 years later and after that the Yorkshire presidency
Boycott added: ‘Players all over the world respected and admired him for his firmness and fairness, and he did it with a sense of humour.’
Sometimes it was tested, for things seemed to happen when he was umpiring. During the 1973 Lord’s Test against West Indies, he sat forlornly on the covers out in the middle while MCC dealt with a bomb scare that held up play for nearly an hour and a half.
At Headingley in 1988, during another West Indies Test, Bird was heckled by spectators after a burst water pipe on the outfield halted play. ‘It’s not my fault, that!’ he protested in vain.
By now, though, his place in umpiring’s hall of fame was secure, earning him an MBE in 1986, an OBE 26 years later and soon the Yorkshire presidency. He was a regular visitor to county and international matches at Headingley, and funded the Dickie Bird Players’ Balcony with £125,000 of his own cash. Another £100,000, meanwhile, went to the neonatal unit for premature babies at the local hospital.
He also stood in the first three World Cup finals, all at Lord’s, and claimed his trademark flat white cap was snatched from his head by a West Indian pitch invader. Years later, Bird reckoned he had spotted the cap on the head of a London bus conductor, who told him: ‘Haven’t you heard of Mr Dickie Bird? I pinched it off his head in the 1975 World Cup final.’
As with much else in his after-dinner oeuvre, the truth of the tale was beside the point: it was told with such humour that it developed a life of its own. Bird once said his only regret was not having a family. He did have one, of course – and cricket will miss him dearly.
