Douglas Robert Jardine – Gentleman and Player
Martin Chandler |Published: 1993
Pages: 6
Author: Rosenwater, Irving
Publisher: Private
Rating: 4.5 stars
Words aplenty have been written on the subject of Douglas Jardine, and very many of them found their way into print long after his death at the far from advanced age of 57 in 1958. Thirty five years on from his passing Irving Rosenwater contributed just a very few of those words, but his homily to a man he considered to be amongst England’s very best captains is as fine a piece of writing on the subject as I have ever read.
It is remarkable that a man as prickly as Rosenwater had the ability to see a man’s character so clearly, and he distilled the very essence of the man into the four pages of narrative content in this, as ever, beautifully produced piece of work.
Rosenwater had the advantage over modern writers in that he actually met Jardine, and spent half an hour or so in his company at Lord’s one afternoon when both managed to turn up early for a function at which Jardine had agreed to speak. The occasion was a couple of years before Jardine’s passing, when Rosenwater was a mere whippersnapper of 24.
There is little said by Rosenwater of Jardine’s cricket, the extent of his talent as batsman and tactician effectively taken as read. The subject of Douglas Robert Jardine – Gentleman and Player is much more Jardine the man, what Rosenwater made of that in those precious 30 minutes and, by way of corroboration if such were required, the views of others on Jardine, men such as ‘Crusoe’ Robertson Glasgow, Walter Hammond and Learie Constantine.
There are fifty copies of this one, so more than of some Rosenwaters, but the appeal of and continuing interest in Jardine is such that Douglas Robert Jardine – Gentleman and Player is not easy to find and, when it is located, far from cheap.
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