On the 18 August 1920, ‘arguably the best wicket-keeper the game has ever seen’, Godfrey Evans, CBE was born in Finchley. Middlesex. Evans played for Kent and England, collecting 219 dismissals in 91 Test match appearances between 1946 and 1959. And a total of 1,066 in first-class matches. He was the first wicket keeper to reach 200 Test dismissals, and the first Englishman to reach both 1,000 runs and 100 dismissals and 2,000 runs and 200 dismissals in Test cricket.
As a teenager Evans was an all-round sportsman, who gained his colours, and captained the cricket, football and hockey teams at Kent College, Canterbury. He was also a very good boxer, who won all his fights, as an amateur and a professional. At the age of 17 Evans was forced to choose between cricket and boxing.
He chose cricket, and in 1937 worked on the ground staff at Dover, operating the scoreboard on the occasion that Kent made 219 runs in 71 minutes to beat Gloucestershire.
He made his Kent debut in July 1939 against Surrey at Blackheath. He made 8 runs in the first innings, and the match ended in a draw.
World War II interrupted Evans’ career, when he served in the Royal Army Service Corps. But a strong season on his return in 1946 earned him a Test call-up. Evans made his Test debut in 1946 against India, in the third Test at The Oval. In a largely rain affected contest he didn’t bat or was involved in any dismissals.
Evans made his fourth tour to Australia in 1958-1959, but it was a disappointing one for him. And although the England team went into the series as favourites, having won the previous three Ashes series, they lost convincingly 4–0. Evans played in three of the Test matches, missing the third with an injured finger, and despite returning for the fourth Test, a recurrence of the injury caused him to missing the fifth. With the bat Evans scored 27 runs in six innings, in four of which he only contributed four runs. Wisden wrote in its report that Evans was among several established players who had showed a ‘decline in power’.
In 1959, India toured England, in the first home series since the Ashes defeat, and a number of experienced players were dropped. However, Evans retained his place, and in the first Test of the summer justified his selection, with a run-a-ball innings of 73, which contained 12 boundaries. Wisden described it as ‘daring hitting’, which ‘reduced the hitherto keen Indian bowling to a thing of shreds and patches’. In the second Test at Lord’s Evans uncharacteristically missed four potential stumpings in the space of a quarter of an hour, otherwise he kept wicket well and didn’t concede a bye in the match. Evans was dropped from the team for the next Test, ‘in the interests of team building’, as the selectors chose to describe it.
Godfrey Evans earned 315 Test caps for England. After his retirement from professional cricket, sporting mutton-chop whiskers, similar to those he had so admired as worn by grandfather, he ran the Jolly Drover pub on the main A3 road through Hill Brow in Hampshire. The pub was adorned with cricketing photographs, and Evans was always ready to reminisce about his cricketing days.
Later he became a cricket expert for the bookmakers Ladbrokes, famously offering odds of 500 to 1 on an England victory against Australia at Headingley in 1981, the match in which Ian Botham and Bob Willis fought back, after England had been forced to follow-on when trailing 227 runs behind the Aussies, to achieve an improbable victory.
Evans published two memoirs, Behind the stumps [1951], and The gloves are off [1960]. He also played himself in an episode of the television adaptation of the play Outside Edge.
Godfrey Evans died in Northampton in May 1999, aged 78.
18 August, 2019