A Tribute to Neil Jenkinson at his Memorial Service on 9 August 2016 at the Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty, Winchester (by Dr Roy Birch)

Some of us here may remember the decade of the 1960’s as “the Swinging Sixties,” but Neil Jenkinson probably didn’t. He wasn’t the swinging sort: he was the cricketing sort.

(Which will be news to not many of you)

On 25th April 1964, Neil drove me to Arundel to see the Ossies play. If Neil was telling you about this game, it would go something like this: “Roy Marshall and David Sheppard opened for the Duke of Norfolk – Marshall got 50; Colin Cowdrey got 70 – but they beat us by 4 wickets; oh, and Shack took one for 20. From 10 overs.”

My part in these outings was to bring the picnic: almost certainly cheese sandwiches and a pork pie. If there was anything Neil loved more than a pork pie it was cheese – the only thing he liked better than cheese was a pork pie.

His car was a pre-War Morris something-or–other (neither of us knew what), and it was very…upright, I remember; but not at all reliable. About two miles from home we coasted to a halt on Hamble Lane and he sent me off to walk the rest of the way. There were no telephone boxes in sight – and no-one to telephone anyway – and I doubt whether at that stage of the day we had more than two shillings between us, but Neil was supremely confident: “Something’ll turn up,” he said (he loved a good quotation).

Next time I saw him was a couple of weeks later: someone had indeed turned up. There were so few car drivers then that most of them did their own maintenance and they all had theories about what went on under other people’s bonnets, and an urge to try their theory out … so, someone usually turned up for Neil.

[He had a motoring theory too, it involved fan-belts. I see him peering intelligently at whatever’s going on and murmuring “Perhaps it’s the fan-belt?” to his current rescuer.]

I’m telling this story, which has neither plot nor climax, because it captures something of the man whose life we’re here to celebrate: i.e. it involves First Class Cricket; and cheese; and a style of making one’s way through the world. His style.

When Jilly asked me to put together some thoughts and memories about Neil, we were of the same mind over what Neil would enjoy being talked about today, and Ben and Dan agreed with us. “Nothing too solemn,” Jill said, “let’s not have a lamentation, but a celebration.” So, on with the celebration.

We’re celebrating someone famous. Neil’s famous among ‘all his friends and relations’, (as Rabbit, and he, would say) because in every phase of his life he’s remembered for his patience, kindness and warmth, for the earnestness of his endeavours on behalf of all sorts and conditions of people. For his benevolence, someone remarked. He’s famous in my eyes for the way he smiled in adversity and faced down his troubles… be they a cripplingly painful condition of the spine, or his fear of treading in snakes’s nests when we were out walking.

He was born in Winchester – I’m not sure where exactly, [but Aunt Elinor perhaps? will tell me afterwards.] I do know his dad came from Lincolnshire to a post in a Primary school; and his mother’s parents kept a pub in the Stockbridge Road called The Roebuck Inn (still there).

Most of us know how proud he was to be a son of this city; but he was also proud of his Lincolnshire antecedents. He told me his father was reputedly a good footballer (played for the City at Airlie Road), and his father, Neil’s northern granddad, was even better – a professional player, no less, who appeared for Gainsborough Trinity in the Football League, around 1912.

Neil was born just before the out-break of WWII. His father joined the RAF but was killed in a plane-crash during a training flight. I guess the little boy and his then widowed mother were probably very close – whenever he spoke of her to me it was almost with awe – and later, after she’d remarried, another keen local sportsman, Bill Ricquier, Neil very happily gained a brother too – who’s Bill as well, of course.

The family lived in Fordington Avenue, only a couple of long boundary throws from Peter Symonds’ School, which Neil joined in 1950. When he published his history of the school in 1994 he included an anecdote about the first headmaster, The Reverend Telford Varley, and I include it here because it gives just a taste of what a good, fluent and funny writer Neil was.  “Telford Varley had a knack of making the punishment fit the crime…a boy caught climbing through a classroom window (was) invited to climb in and out of it fifty times while Varley sat in the room, marking….and

Some of the masters at the school in Neil’s time were his neighbours, so he was already on terms with them, and when he and I first became friends in 1954, he was known, to boys and staff alike, as ‘Jenks’.

He occupied a peculiar status: he seemed to me then almost as much adult as child. He was already famous – for his cleverness, and for a sort of dignity (not an easy achievement, dignity, among a rabble of teenage boys!). He wasn’t exactly aloof, but he was certainly never a sailor on any Ship of Fools {more of that shortly}. He seemed larger than the rest of us, somehow, not just because of his build but for his maturity and self-possession.

How he and I became friends is the subject of a much longer story - one that Jilly and everyone in their family, and mine, have heard so often I hesitate to bring it up again - but Jill thought I should, and Neil, that lover of shaggy-dog stories, always said ‘the old one’s are the best, aren’t they.’

We’d both joined the RN Section of the Combined Cadet Force - principally because that uniform had no requirement to polish boots or blanco belts. The annual ‘camp’ in 1954 had us travelling by train to Avonmouth to board HMS Teazer, an anti-submarine frigate that was to give us the opportunity of ‘sea-time’ – a precious experience, sailing around Land’s End and on to Plymouth via The Western Approaches.

The crew members consisted mostly of a pukka RN skipper, and real seamen, but the rest of the officers were ‘Wavy Navy’ – Royal Naval Reservists, with day jobs in offices and factories and schools, on a fortnight’s training; and of course, there were the Naval Cadets from Winchester.

I mentioned The Ship of Fools earlier, because Neil used to liken the first verse of Auden’s poem about Atlantis to what befell us boys in that adventure:

                                                             Atlantis p52

Well, we never got a chance at the hard liquor: in 1954 they still served tots of rum to Her Majesty’s Ships companies, but when we lined up for it they threatened us with the brig. We did get plenty of Horseplay however: the Wavy Navy horse-played with us, the regular seamen horse-played with us and our fellow cadets played with Neil and me in particular. We were not One of The Boys. Neil, for example, was simply too big for HMS Teazer, with its Lilliputian hammocks and companionways and mess decks and galleys.

Wherever they put us, we were in their way; whenever they moved us on, we were surplus to requirements. The CPOs in particular had never seen anything like us (which is a paraphrase of what they actually said, not a quotation).

The noises kept us awake at night and the all-pervading smell of diesel oil made us feel sick – at least, we thought we felt sick until Teazer was redirected to the Bay of Biscay, to aid a tramp steamer. Then we felt sick.

It’s truly said that friendship is forged in the fires of adversity: Neil and I clung together (metaphorically) from that time onward when I first observed him honing his skills of modest self-effacement, that (helpful) hovering about on the edge of an action, willing to strike but afraid to wound, the skills he perfected for use in uncertain times; like… repairing broken-down cars, climbing trees to reach Ben and Dan’s ball, or assembling flat-pack bookcases in BW. They also served him well when he played cricket.

If he’d been born a Welshman they’d surely have nicknamed him Neil the Cricket. Before Jilly rescued him from bachelordom, Neil played cricket on every day of every season, when he wasn’t watching it. He was captain of the school second XI, sometimes opening the batting, sometimes going in last. His leg-break bowling was a thing of wonder. When he was on form, the right shoulder delivered a gorgeous, looping flight that dropped the ball down in time to turn from leg to… middle-and-leg… and when he wasn’t on form, he was philosophical.

The stately Morris-whatever-it-was gave way to an even more alluring vehicle – a retired Post Office van with an open back – in which he rattled around the south of England, anywhere in pursuit of a game (sometimes he toured with it as well) carrying spare oil-cans and his kit; which could be described as ‘venerable.’ Stylishly venerable. Famously, even.

While he bowled right, he batted left. He was better at deflecting than driving on the up because his eyesight meant he only saw the ball very late. The same applied to close fielding, and as he couldn’t throw his best position was a sort of deep gully where he could shoot out a (very small) hand to clutch the ball then put it in his pocket (in the manner of Colin Cowdrey) while looking enquiringly behind him.

Neil the Cricket was a member of MCC, a Vice President and former Archivist of the County Cricket Club, an historian, a statistician, a collector, a co-founding member of the Hambledon Club (revived 250 years after its first demise), and a raconteur in the footsteps of his friend, John Arlott.

He produced a canon of books and articles about cricket and cricketers: my own favourite passages include the foibles of the great Philip Mead, who used to call for impossibly short singles then mutter ‘good luck’ as he crossed with his despairing, diving partner. There’s another about the Hambledon Cricket Club, at a time of national rationing in 1945, having to get a Licence from the Board of Trade to buy three bats and three balls. (They were turned down for gloves and pads).

Neil the Lawyer took articles with the law firm of Shenton’s on his return from studying at King’s, and prospered there under Peter Pitt and Gerry Moss until becoming a partner himself. He once appeared for me, against a barrister opponent from the London Circuit, and won my case for damages to property. The Recorder of Southampton then took them both to task for not settling the matter out of court. When I asked Neil if he minded that: ”Oh no,” he said, “after all, the other side’ll never get paid.” They didn’t.

He left Shenton’s in a later stage of his professional career to chair Industrial Tribunals in Southampton, Reading and Brighton; this time he was the judge and not the appellant. He had other claims on his time too, his voluntary work for the Playing Fields’ Association and for The Forces Help (once the Lord Roberts’ Workshops). In acknowledgement of those services, he met Prince Philip at the PFA and was presented to The Queen at a reception in St James’s Palace; where Pam Ayres provided the entertainment.

Neil had a great love of poetry: it’s not possible to pursue much of that now, but he was still reciting passages, long after he became ill, in the voice he used to suggest great solemnity… with a hint of mischief. ‘Post-modern irony,’ I might call it; but he wouldn’t. It was just fun.

To be fair, he loved almost anything that appeared in book form – diarists especially (Pepys, Parson Woodford, Creevey), biographies of C19 politicians (Gladstone, Disraeli, Lord Salisbury) and other historians. His most relished imitation was of George III’s reply to the squire of Buriton who’d presented him with a volume of Decline and Fall: “Another damn thick book eh, Mr Gibbon? Scwibble scribble scwibble.” Houseman was another favourite, and once he started on “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now...” you knew he was in good form and you were in for a good evening.

Many and many a good evening there was at Downend, Chilbolton Avenue. Neil and Jilly, imitating the newly reformed Ebenezer Scrooge, knew very well indeed how to keep Christmas - and every other festival in the calendar, including some that aren’t.

In summer there might be cricket on the lawn in front of the terrace, or looking for the croquet ball in the shrubbery (always with an eye out for snakes’ nests and remembering to avoid Middle Class child battery) and always there were the sweet-natured little dogs, Poppy and Clover, Bertie and Flora, who loved company too.

Neil took his greatest, simple pleasure in his family, the ever-beloved Jill and the ever-beloved boys; and, later, the boys’ families too. He loved laughter and good fellowship, and oysters; and cheese. And cricket, naturally. He’s my friend of 60 years and I’ve always, always felt happier for knowing him.

My older daughter, Neil’s godchild, asked me if he really was as good a man as she always found him (he gave her only one piece of god-fatherly advice, which was “Whatever you do it’s all right with me.”) and that was such an easy question to resolve for her. ‘Such a likeable man, such a loveable man,’ people have been saying today, ‘such a gentle giant, such a gentleman.’

Yes, my dear old boy. Yes.