“Can you pass me one of those chocolate biscuits? You’re not doing very well with ‘em.”
David Steele is 83 and getting up out of his armchair is not as easy as it used to be. “I love the game. The game was me. I’ve been with it all the way through but it has worn out my legs. I’ve got a stick. I get up and down out of my chair like this, 50 times a day,” he stands up and back down again. “It is hard but back of your mind you know it has got to be done. I’m still going, I’ve got a few more overs in me yet. I’m batting well.”
Steele approaches old age with the same determination he did with fast bowling.
He plays an imaginary straight drive with his walking stick, his left elbow high and straight – technically spot on – as if Dennis Lillee were still running in and calling him “Groucho” because of his grey hair and glasses. “I go down to the village cricket club because it is good to get out and walk and, although it’s bloody hard, I swing my stick [like a bat]. I can still hit it.”
He is prepared for this interview, with a list of notes to jog his memory of his deeds of 1975 when this drily humorous and unassuming man won the nation’s hearts with a series of brave performances in a losing Ashes series.
Across an hour, bolstered by coffee and biscuits brought in on a tray by Steele’s wife of 54 years, Carol, and aided by his notes, he chats away about cricket and those he met.
There was Len Hutton, who supposedly called him Derek on debut rather than David. “I don’t care. He was Len Hutton.” Lillee and Jeff Thomson: “One day when I was batting, Rodney Marsh said ‘you’re driving Lillee round the twist’. Why? What’s up with him? Well, he can’t get you bloody out for a start.” On Ian Chappell: “He refused to walk at Northampton. We then had lunch and there was a real atmosphere. He asked for cheese after his pudding. It wasn’t allowed, you could only have one thing for dessert and he’d already had his. The waitress said no. He said: ‘Stick it up your a— then.’ That was the captain of Australia! But he went out and scored a hundred.”
Steele on Eric Morecambe: “He came in the dressing room [before the Lord’s Ashes Test] because I think they thought we needed a bit of humour before going out and facing that lot.” He pays respect to Sir Geoffrey Boycott. “Tough bugger, like me.” On Colin Milburn: “Treated appallingly by the selectors but what do they know?” More about Steele’s views on selectors later.
And then there is his sporting family. His uncle Freddie played up front for Stoke City with Stanley Matthews and scored eight times for England – “football was proper in those days, winger beats full-back and crosses it to uncle Fred. My dad used to take me to watch him.”
His brother John played county cricket for Leicestershire and Glamorgan. Brian Crump, his cousin, was a Northants team-mate. Crump’s father Stanley was Steele’s coach and mentor as a youngster. “He played Minor Counties for years, he faced the great SF Barnes. Wonderful man. You see, cricket is born in you.”
On the mantelpiece is a framed portrait of Steele wearing his England cap, his glasses slightly wonky. “I tried contact lenses, but they weren’t for me.” Next to his armchair in a glass cabinet is his replica of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year trophy. He shows me the original cartoon strip of Steele facing the Aussies by The Daily Express’s legendary Roy Ullyett; all memories of a summer that changed his life. The adjacent street in the beautiful Northamptonshire village of Geddington, with its Eleanor Cross, 13th century bridge and ford, is called Steele Way.
It is impossible now, with talent identification, player pathways, Lions programmes and franchise cricket, to imagine a 33-year-old unknown from county cricket plucked out to bat at No 3 against a pair of rampant Australian fast bowlers.
But that is what happened half a century ago when Steele, a Northamptonshire stalwart, was shoved out the door at Lord’s on Test debut to face Lillee and Thomson with some fearing for his safety. “Coming in now we have Steele playing in his first Test match. This really is a toughie. Now he is a tough little man full of guts,” said Don Mosey on Test Match Special.
“Dennis Lillee must be thinking, ‘I can bowl this England team out any time I want’,” said Fred Trueman as Steele reached the middle after famously getting lost on his way down from the dressing room, ending up close to going down the next flight of stairs to the loos instead of going through the Long Room. “‘The other way, sir’, said the steward. “The trouble was I was thinking about being out there before actually getting there.”
Steele made 50 in that innings, pulling and hooking Lillee with only his England cap for protection. He scored four fifties in six innings, the papers lapped up the underdog story.
The Sun described him as the “bank clerk who went to war” and the tabloids loved the tale of the local butcher who sponsored him a lamb chop for every run up to 50, with a steak for every one thereafter. “When I scored 73 and 92 in my second Test he phoned me and said ‘slow down, I’m running out of lamb’. Took me two years to eat it all.”
It all added to the Everyman image, making him relatable to the viewers who voted him Sports Personality of the Year. “The English like a fighter, that Churchillian spirit. It was needed at the time. It was just the timing of it,” he says.
The country also needed a lift, a hero to cling on to. Inflation was over 20 per cent, the IRA pub bombings brought the reality of terrorism to the streets and a week after Steele’s Test debut, football hooligans went on the rampage.
So you can see why viewers voted Steele, a figure of old-fashioned values of hard work and application, as Sports Personality of the Year. It will be 50 years in December since a plaid-suited, kipper tie-wearing Steele stood in front of the cameras and accepted the award from the then chairman of the IOC, Lord Killanin, who clearly had no idea who he was, with the modesty that had endeared him to the British public. “They got in touch with me to say you’re in the first three so come down to Shepherd’s Bush. So I get there and see all my mates from Staffordshire cricket. I thought what are you doing here? Bloody idiot. I should have realised then that I’d won. But I didn’t until they announced my name. I’m proof aren’t I, that you can live a dream. I love it. Been to the show every year since.”
The Test match fee in 1975 was £180, not much to go out and face a fire-breathing Lillee. “Yes, Dennis called me Groucho when he saw me. ‘What kept you, Groucho?’ He called me a lot of other names as well. You better not print them in the paper.”
County cricketers earned little and relied on a benefit year to see them into retirement. Steele worked as a printer in the winter in between the odd off-season coaching in South Africa, where he came across a young Allan Lamb in 1970. He was awarded a benefit in 1975 to give him a retirement pension pot and it changed his game.
“For all my career before then I thought about cricket. I was too intense. But in 1975 I only thought of the benefit. For a lot of cricketers they would have a bad year in their benefit because it distracted them. But I was totally the opposite. I had my best year because I wasn’t thinking about cricket. I just walked out there and played, and I felt great. My hands were good, I was on the top of my feet, everything felt right.
“In the second match of the season Warwickshire came down to Northampton. I’m batting in the middle and Dennis Amiss said ‘Steeley, you’re standing up’. That’s a great statement. It meant I was not crouched, intense. I was standing up. Beautiful, beautiful feeling. That was with me all season, even when I played Test cricket. I went in there and felt bloody marvellous. I always played the quicks well. I played the bloody spinners all right as well but those selectors…”
Steele performed even better in 1976 against a great West Indian fast-bowling line-up revved up by Tony Greig’s “make them grovel” quote. He scored his only Test century in the first Test at Trent Bridge and we watch footage of it together on YouTube. “Here it comes, four on the legside for my hundred. Marvellous.” Steele just doffed his cap as the crowd cheered and Jim Laker, on commentary, said: “My word, if any England batsman has earned a hundred in a Test match it is David Steele.”
He made 106, the concentration took its toll. “I had this red Mini. I drove home on the Saturday night [Sunday was a rest day] and going down the motorway, bloody hell, my legs were killing me. So I pull up, get out and lay on this bank next to the motorway and this copper pulled up. ‘What you doing? Are you p—-d?’ No. I said ‘my legs are knackered, I’ve just scored a hundred in a Test match’. ‘Well stay there then as long as you like’. And off he went.”
Despite a batting average of 42 from eight Tests, and scoring 42 and 44 in his final Test, Steele was not picked for that winter’s tour to India because the selectors did not think he could play spin. He never played for England again. “I played well. I should have stayed in the side, but I got stuffed. Selection was terrible when I played. Selectors haven’t got a clue because they’re old players and it’s wrong. They’re wrong, they are past it.
“What knocked me was a game at Wellingborough against Middlesex. Now Wellingborough has these trees around the ground. Phil Edmonds was bowling out of the trees. I should have gone off. But I got bowled. Who was there? Alec bloody Bedser [then a selector]. But he wasn’t there when I played the best innings of my life at Northampton on a rain-affected pitch against Kent. I faced Underwood, best bowler on a wet wicket, and I got 84 out of 138. Bedser had made his mind up from that game in Wellingborough. Great bowler, but what did he know about batting?”
His brief Test career gave him a long line of after-dinner stories, a little bit of gravy poured on them for good measure, and he will always be part of a very illustrious set of cricketers to win Sports Personality of the Year: Laker in 1956, Ian Botham in 1981, Andrew Flintoff for 2005 and Ben Stokes in 2019. Steele was there when Stuart Broad was runner-up in 2023. “He should have won it but they gave it to the goalkeeper for the women’s team, even though they lost. It was wrong,” he says.
Broad and Steele have a long history. Steele was his coach for five years at Oakham School. “Even at 14 he had a great cricket brain. I always used to carry a tennis ball. One day he is walking to class carrying his books. I said, ‘Hey Broady, catch this’. I threw it at him and he dropped his books, and caught the ball. Whenever I go down there, one of the teachers always brings that up. What a cricketer Stuart was. His dad was good, too. See, you are born with cricket in you. My granddaughter, she is 13. She’s bloody wonderful, right. Throw her a ball and she catches it. Yeah, it’s born in you.”
Time to finish the biscuits.
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