Denis Compton

Author:

By Tim Heald

Format:

Hardback (Paperback)

Availability:

Out of print. Try our second hand search facility.

Price:

£18.99

Tagged with:

Cricket, Biography, Dennis Compton, Middlesex CCC, England, Arsenal FC

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Further Details

• Published: 18th May 2006
• ISBN: 1845130898
• Pages: 320
• Size: 234mm x 156mm

From the Publisher:

Denis Compton was one of England's - indeed cricket's - greatest batsmen. In the summer of 1947 alone he scored 18 hundreds. Not only was he a flashing strokeplayer who could take any bowling attack apart: he was also one of a vanished breed who played more than one sport at the highest level. For Compton was a footballer as well, who played on the left wing for Arsenal and won an FA Cup-winner's medal. He also has the unique distinction, unlikely ever to be repeated, of having his kneecap - removed in 1955 after an old football injury threatened to curtail his cricketing career for good - preserved in the museum at Lord's.

And he was a dashing man as well as cricketer: his endorsement deal as the original 'Brylcreem Boy' - hair slicked back, flannels immaculately creased and a silk shirt from Simpson's in Piccadilly - made him a glamorous icon, and perhaps British sport's first true media figure. He played hard outside the game of cricket, a man made in the same mould as his great friend and rival Keith Miller: always partial to a drink or several, with an eye for a pretty woman, but somehow always managing to find his way out to the middle at Lord's after a prodigious night's partying to score another feast of runs.

After his retirement from cricket he was for more than 40 years a sports writer for the Sunday Express, and later a television commentator on cricket for the BBC, and when he died was mourned as the kind of cricketer whose like we shall never see again, who more than anyone really made the game seem fun.

In the last years of his life Compton co-operated with the author to help him produce an authoritative but necessarily incomplete biography. Now, almost a decade after Compton's death, and with the co-operation of his family, Heald is able to put the whole life in perspective, to add new material about the memories and memorials he left behind, and to evaluate a career which remains one of the most remarkable in the history of sport.