I knew of Dickie as a player, but I was too young to have played against him. He famously made 181 not out for Yorkshire and then wasn’t selected for the next match and rarely got back into the team. He went to Leicestershire but had stopped playing by the time I started. And so I knew him as an umpire when I was a player, and he became a very good friend.
He was a proud Yorkshireman, but he connected with all the Lancashire lads; we had a player called Jack Simmons, and Dickie would stay with him if he was umpiring our matches. There are all sorts of issues that you might think of in that regard – Jack bowled at the end where Dickie was making decisions – but there was never any question at all about his integrity; it was absolute. He was a gentle soul, and in all the years I knew him he never had a bad word about anybody. He wasn’t a drinker – perhaps a nice glass of red wine; he never smoked, but he was a great storyteller and good company.
In those days the umpire had much more authority. There were no challenges, no DRS video replays. I became an umpire myself when I stopped playing, and I umpired a few times with Dickie. He’d chat all day to the players but it was understood that his decision [on whether a player was out or not] was final, absolute, sacrosanct. In the umpire’s room at the end of a day’s play, you would never get any player, coach or manager knocking on the door and asking, “Well, what about this decision?” Now that is a daily occurrence. You just packed your bag, said “cheerio” and went home.
People used to say Dickie never really liked giving batters out LBW; it had to be stone dead for him to do so. And they were right. I remember I umpired at an early season match with him, a county playing against Oxford University at the Parks. In our room, he said, “You know these students? They’re studying hard all week. They love a game of cricket. I don’t think we should be giving them out LBW.”
Perhaps the best times we had were at the annual Scarborough festival, which was like a Yorkshire cricket celebration, a weekend at the end of the season. The weather was usually lovely, and you’d be by the seaside, and Dickie was resident umpire there. We would stay in the Grand Hotel. Geoffrey Boycott and Michael Parkinson were often there; they were all from Barnsley so that had they great bond. In the evenings Dickie had a party piece, which was a song and dance routine. It was that show tune: “Aba daba daba daba said the monkey to the chimp.” He knew all the actions, he’d do both parts; you can probably find him on Google somewhere, doing the aba daba.
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He never resented Yorkshire letting him go. He loved that club right to the end. There have been a lot of factions and arguments there over the years but Dickie never took sides. If they were at loggerheads – and they often were – he would befriend all of them, try to keep the peace. I’d ask him what was going on and he’d shake his head and smile. And he wouldn’t miss a game; he was very close to this present team, even in his nineties. There’s a clock at Headingley named after him; I’d call it the “Dickie ticker”, which made him laugh. I don’t suppose the young players knew what he’d done, but they had tremendous respect for him.
Dickie enjoyed his retirement. He did surprising stuff. He had a peacock in his garden. He was very careful with his money, but he bought himself a beautiful Jaguar, which was his pride and joy. And then he found it was too wide to get through the gate on his drive, so he had to have that modified. He wasn’t happy about that at all.
I did an interview with him at the ground for Sky, when he turned 90. We were getting the cameras set up, and just chatting. I was saying how fit he looked, what was his secret? And without a word he did a couple of star jumps, and then he set off and ran 50 yards around the boundary and 50 yards back. And then we started the interview. He wasn’t even out of breath.
Photograph by Getty Images