Harry Brind MBE, the groundsman widely credited with introducing pace and bounce in the UK’s cricket pitches, has died at the age of 85.
Brought up in Hammersmith, Harry was a keen footballer who played for Chelsea Youth until injury forced his retirement at the age of 23. He turned to life as a groundsman, and in 1965 a near-bankrupt Essex appointed him after they had purchased the Chelmsford ground. Working with rudimentary equipment and no assistant, Harry created a square that became amongst the best in the country. "We had no proper covers," he recalled. "Only trestles with sheets draped over them.”
In 1975 he moved to Surrey CCC, becoming head groundsman at The Oval. His first impression was of a tired and slow square. He said, "If you dropped a ball from a 16-foot pole, it should bounce two or three feet, but when I arrived at The Oval, it was bouncing three inches.”
He persuaded the committee that the whole square had to be relaid and after some teething problems it became the best in the land. For his last Test in 1994, when Devon Malcolm bowled England to a dramatic victory over South Africa, "the surface shone; it was the best pitch I ever prepared".
It was Harry’s work with loams and clay mixes to produce pace and bounce that won praise and to this day, some debate in the media over the quality of home cricket pitches. When the cricket authorities saw the results he had achieved at the Oval by relaying the pitches with a mix of Surrey Loam and Ongar Clay, they decided that this was the way forward for all major cricket venues. Even that came about by chance. When Harry decided to relay the Oval square in the 1970s and 1980s he discovered that there was no subsoil to speak of, so returning to his native Essex he was offered and accepted a load of soil dug out during the building of the M11 motorway running through the county.
However, the one size fits all approach has not been universally welcomed. Geoffrey Boycott said, “Subsoils vary county to county, what works in Surrey may not be suitable for other venues where the soil structure is different.”
Even Harry acknowledged that his pitches would last 25 to 30 years before the demands of the modern game might cause a re-think. The inability of today’s players to adapt to different surfaces was perhaps illustrated most vividly during this year’s Ashes series, when technique and temperament were the cause of matches only lasting 3, barely 4 days, rather than the quality of the pitches.
Harry himself preferred the ‘au naturel’ pitch. "That's the best pitch for cricket. Now the pitches are not natural because they're covered when it rains,” he said. But he was speaking before the days of big sponsorship, massive gate receipts and TV income and influence.
After he retired from The Oval, Harry was appointed as TCCB (now ECB) Inspector of Pitches, succeeding Bernard Flack, with his son Paul succeeding him as The Oval head groundman in 1994.
Last year, Harry and his wife Pat celebrated their 60th (Diamond) Wedding Anniversary, and Harry boasted that with Pat’s help, they had the best lawn in Chelmsford!
ECB Pitch Consultant, Chris Wood told TurfPro, "Harry was a visionary, his methodology and principles transformed the game. In the field of groundsmanship and in the world of cricket, he was a legend and never to be forgotten."
Writing on Twitter yesterday, Surrey CCC Director of Cricket Alec Stewart said: “Harry produced some of the best pitches I ever played on, with terrific pace and bounce. He was one of the most forward thinking groundsmen in the world and relaid the whole square in the late 1970s – allowing the club to produce the best pitches in the world in the late 1980s and 1990s. We are very happy that Harry’s legacy is being continued with the work of Lee Fortis and his team today.”
Photos: Kia Oval, Home of Surrey Cricket
