The pavilion was a bit less crowded than this…actually a lot less crowded
John Fry and I had not really kept in touch at all after leaving Alleyn’s School back before the dawn of time. We were in the same class for, we think, just one year – the third year for me and the first year for him. We were both fast-tracked into the Bear Pit when just 15 – in John’s case on the grounds of talent and in my case possibly because I was in the right place at the right time to look the part.
Anyway, for reasons too daft to explain, John re-engaged with me earlier this year and invited me to a delightful lunch at his club, The Union Club, in late January 2026.
I wanted to reciprocate, but I don’t really have a club. Well, I suppose I do – the MCC, but John doesn’t much like cricket.
The solution was to invite John to Lord’s on a minor match day, when the ground is not crowded, the lunch is still a decent lunch and the cricket is as important or unimportant as you want it to be. John had never seen the place before and liked the idea.
Hence MCC Women’s Day.
I played tennis first thing against Paul Buchanan-Barrow who, coincidentally, had been my doubles partner 18 months earlier in the famous international fixture against the visitors from Newport, Rhode Island. Coincidental, because Paul and I had done battle with a women’s pair that day.
Paul wasn’t sticking around for the women’s cricket, so I waited alone for John, taking in a bit of the atmosphere of the day. Despite the early season scheduling, it was actually a bright sunny day which offered to be warm enough to watch in the great outdoors by afternoon.
But first, on John’s arrival, I thought I’d give him the informal pavilion tour. Rather unexpectedly, we ran into the Club President, Ed Smith, who greeted me warmly as we had not seen each other for some time, and later also the Chairman and CEO, all of whom were showing their faces and/or entertaining folk on this quiet but iconic day.
The potentially pompous experience reminded me of the following 2009 evening I wrote up for King Cricket…
…in which my old friend Stentor Baritone and I showed young Lavender and Escamillo around the pavilion.
That made me wonder what had become of Stentor, as I hadn’t heard from him since before the pandemic. Nor had he heard from me. I resolved to get in touch with Stentor by e-mail some time soon, but, strangely, Daisy and I bumped into him at The Royal Court Theatre the very next evening. Now that’s weird.
John seemed to be enjoying the cricket more than I thought he would, but I managed to wrestle him away from such distractions from our main purpose, taking lunch in the Long Room Bar, then showing him the library and the tennis court and the Performance Centre. There we took some tea in Filipa’s and watched the sun starting to come out in reasonable force.
That gave us the courage to watch some cricket from the Mound Stand, where normal people sit and watch and where you can take a little early season sun.
The day flew by, as Lord’s days do.
While gently watching on, John mentioned, in passing, that he had “a little bit of cricket heritage” in his family. Somewhere in the cousinhood, he couldn’t quite remember, women cricketers – twins as it happens. He’d try to track down the reference later.
The next morning, this reference/link arrived from John.
I felt a surge of imposter syndrome – wondering whether my guests have more right (at least by birthright) to be hosts at Lord’s than I do – similar to the feeling I had when I took John Random to Lord’s seven years ago. Another friend who claimed no connection with cricket…except for his grandfather Herbert Ireland who was a doyen of Widnes CC to the extent that the function room at that club is named after him. See the Thursday entry “A Random Ramble Around Lord’s” in the diary piece below.
It must be something about people named John with equity surnames and left leanings.
Joking apart, it was a most enjoyable day milling around Lord’s with John Fry.
“And the cricket?”, I hear you cry. Really? You can read all about it here. In fact, if you really want to, you can even watch it all on the stream recording, below:
