da realbet： Jeremy Alexander reviews Ken Taylor: Drawn to Sport by Stephen Chalke
da dobrowin： Jeremy Alexander17-Mar-2006
County cricketers could once pedal a tandem career in first-class footballuntil the latter became all-consuming in the 1970s. Ken Taylor, who played250 games for Huddersfield and was an England Under-23 substitute, madehis Test debut in 1959, opening the batting with Arthur Milton, a doubleinternational. Cricketers who are artists are few enough to be freaks. Taylor,trained at the Slade, was a forerunner of Jack Russell and Martin Speight.Imagine Paul Collingwood, Gary Mabbutt and John Piper wrappedin one and you have Ken Taylor. He was more batsman than bowler forYorkshire and a fielder to fear. He was a centre-half, not tall but hard and fair asthe Spurs man 30 years later. His skies, heavily coloured, are very Piper.Taylor was a 3-D man extraordinary – four counting teaching at Gresham’sSchool – and none paying well. In Ken Taylor: Drawn to Sport Stephen Chalke works out that his £550 for a full First Division season is £25,000 today,less than half what top players earn in a week. His cricket wages escapemention but his father encouraged him in all dimensions. “You can’t playgames for ever,” he said.It was the same with Taylor’s older brother Jeff, a centre-forward first withHuddersfield too but later in London to enable him to get a geographydegree and train as an opera singer, a baritone, at the Royal Academyof Music. Between seasons he sang at Glyndebourne with Pavarotti.Huddersfield has a choral reputation but this was ridiculous. Nowadaysfootballers marry Spice Girls. Jeff became a professor of singing.Chalke, familiar to readers, works him naturally into a canvas that isessentially Ken’s, recalling his life and the characters he has shared it withfrom pre-war Yorkshire austerity to retirement in Norfolk – prominentlyBryan Stott, his special friend among many at Yorkshire, and Huddersfieldfootball folk including Bill Shankly and the World Cup winner Ray Wilson.The illustrations are mostly Taylor’s artwork, the landscapes and sketchessuperb, the colour action portraits recognisable and fine for form andbalance but clearly done from photos and lacking muscularity. Trousers arenotably legless. Photographs include one of him drawing the runner DerekIbbotson, with whom he trained, and another of Jimmy Binks shaving himafter Brian Sellers, autocratic chairman, said: “Get that beard off or you’ll neverplay for Yorkshire again.”Chalke pulls it all together in his precise way, changing shade and pace,a sketcher too. He will be annoyed at any errors: Guiseppe in The Gondoliers,Bellini’s Il Puritani, Alf Ramsay. His gift is to get people to talk, to listen to whatthey say and to assemble it, clippingly, on a background of period fact topoignant or comic effect. He can make a punchline out of the most ordinaryremark. He makes one wish to know his subjects, especially Ken Taylor.