Ladies, Gentlemen, M’dears:
Two Fridays ago, I took the phone call that told me Frank had died, while I was in the hideous centre of Stevenage New Town, a bizarre disjunction I am still trying to process. That has made me extra-conscious of the sense of place that surrounds Jane’s choice of settings for today’s events.
Here we are in the High Victorian, Catholic-Revival-Gothic of this Benedictine Abbey which was also the heart of Belmont Abbey School until the school closed in 1994. And it was here, in the frigid, half-starved second winter after the war that Keating, aged not quite nine I think, arrived to be walloped by the monks for bed-wetting, occasionally dangled from this tower by the older boys, and generally manned up.
There is an assumption that Frank always bathed the past in a rosy glow. His relationship with both his childhood and his faith was actually rather complex. How could it be anything else? It’s the same with all great writers. But he never shunned the past, he embraced it. The whole first third of his life was central to his work and his being. And it is wholly appropriate that we should be here today.
After this service, the family will cross Hereford to the churchyard at Marden, the village where Frank and Jane made their wonderful, warm, welcoming home for the final third of his life.
And they will meet the rest of us again at Lyde Arundell, where we will have what we might politely call the refreshments. But this is Frank’s funeral and it is imperative that we laugh and tell stories in his honour. So let’s say we’ll have a bit of a party. Because he did love a party. Especially in that middle third.
And all of this is happening in Herefordshire. Which means, I know, that many of you have endured interminable journeys to get here. Welcome to our world. But being here is central to an understanding of Frank.
This isn’t like London. I don’t want to be over-romantic about it. Can’t think of anyone who would do such a thing. But I think in a city, when you meet new people, you trust them when you’ve learned to trust them. Here you trust them until you have a reason not to.
And up the road is the little town of Leominster, home of the Rankin Club: it’s supposed to be the Conservative Club but no one takes much notice of that. And every winter month it holds a sports night. And over the years an astonishing array of sporting celebrities have made the journey to speak there. Very largely, in the old days, thanks to Frank’s contacts. They certainly don’t come for the money.
And every month the room is packed, and they love every minute. I’m the least famous of the 400-plus speakers in John Beamon’s big book. And I was so bowled over by the reception I walked on air for weeks afterwards. The audience at the Rankin doesn’t want to hear about the crookery of sport, the cynicism, the corruption, the fakery. Sport is their pleasure. It’s not important but it is important. Frank understood that instinctively. It was fundamental to his work.
This is also a place where you can’t afford to get high-falutin’. The Hereford Times website. Friday January 25, 2013. “A former Hereford Times journalist has died at the age of 75.” Point. New par.
He did a few other things too. A funeral is a recognition that we are all unique. It is also a bridge. Between the rawness of grief and the slow fading towards the back of our memory. But some human beings are more unique than others. And there is no danger that any of us will ever begin to forget Frank Keating.
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Of course he wasn’t just Herefordshire. It takes a one-off background to produce a one-off like this one. Though he was born here, the Keatings soon moved into Gloucestershire, where his family settled down as absolutely bog-standard typical Irish Catholic Cockney Christian socialist Labour activist Cotswold farmers – with a hint of Jewish.
Frank’s education was Catholic. From here he went to Douai, another lost school. And there he flourished, in the most important respects. I’ve received a lot of messages in response to the appreciation that I wrote in The Guardian two weeks ago.
One, from Charles Fox, went as follows: “When I first went to Douai in 1955, Frank was in the 1st XV and I was deputed to keep his white shorts clean before matches. Needless to say I hero-worshipped him.” Needless to say? There must have been a lot of Catholic forbearance at Douai. Not sure cleaning another boy’s rugby shorts would induce hero-worship in most kids. But we’ll come back to that.
Frank arrived at Douai just at the end of the long headmastership of Father Ignatius Rice, who had actually played two matches for Warwickshire in 1920. According to Frank’s autobiography, Half-Time Whistle, which I regard as a reliable source in outline, if not perhaps every single detail, Father Ignatius spoke to him just twice.
Once was to advise him never to call the maids skivvies, as was the school custom. The other was to tell him that, in life, as in cricket, he should play himself in a bit, and then “get on the front foot at every opportunity. You’ll have more fun that way.”
Well, he certainly heeded the second bit. An inability to pass exams saved him from the dead hand of academic advancement. A bit of fibbing got him out of national service. And then, as a young man could in those days, he made his way in journalism and life.
He went via Stroud, the Hereford Times, where he lost his virginity and his job (neither fact mentioned in that website piece), Guildford, Southern Rhodesia (where he acquired his lifelong hatred of white South African attitudes), Bristol, and at some point Slough. Maybe even Stevenage was in the mix somewhere.
He got a job sub-editing on The Guardian. Then he left to go into television. Personally, I don’t believe that Frank was ever quite so incompetent a TV executive as he liked to make out. If he were, ITV would have gone out of business. Then he came back to The Guardian.
He claims to have written a freelance hockey piece for the paper from Slough in 1962. The first bylined piece I can find is dated March 17 1971: “Littlechild gives Durham victory”, a seven-a-side universities rugby match between Durham and Liverpool. Very straight, very factual. Was that Frank obeying Father Ignatius’ instructions and playing himself in? Evidently not. Sources suggest he turned in all kinds of flowery stuff that was duly red-pencilled by the subs.
But his sports editor John Samuel spotted something. And over the next couple of years he started to get a few more cover-drives past the fielders, including a piece I remember vividly: his reminiscence – in 1975, when they reached the Cup final – of the days when Fulham had Johnny Haynes and the rest were hilariously no good. “Haynes suffered 18 glorious, exasperated years for Fulham, carpeting out the world’s most sumptuous passes to a motley crew of single-jointed unappreciative nuts: a Brylcreemed Schweitzer among the Pygmies.” Oh, m’dear; what an exquisite sentence.
There is something that keeps coming back to me that I can’t quite pin down. It was Fred Titmus telling someone who asked him about playing with Denis Compton. “I can’t tell you how good he was,” said Fred. “You’d never believe me.”
I could try to explain how good Frank was. But the day is short, the seats are hard, the food and drink are waiting, and I hope there will be another occasion specifically to celebrate the works of Keating. I will give just a few examples of how our Schweitzer kept rolling out sentences like that that we journalistic pygmies could never match.
The hapless Yorkshireman Richard Dunn attempting to get off the canvas after being hit by Muhammad Ali “like a drunken matelot trying to take off his waders under water.”
John Conteh getting his teeth knocked out: “a faint tinkle of crystal like a chandelier caught in a Waterford breeze”.
There was angry Frank, as at the Centenary Test at Lord’s when the umpires kept inspecting the pitch and refusing to let play start. He began like this. “At teatime the band played that tiddley-om theme tune from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Honest it did. The Royal Marines Band it was and they were conducted by a precise and very well turned-out chap called Hoskins, which is a very Pythonesque sort of name. So was the day.”
“A monumental cock-up. Lord’s and all of cricket should be totally ashamed of itself. Someone should resign. No one will, of course. Their judgment of priorities is unbelievable.”
Or Frank at his most Frankish, slipping away from an England tour in Calcutta to visit Mother Theresa, who starts miming cricket shots. “You are not in awe any more. You are laughing with her and want to call her ‘Luv’”.
And so it went on. This was not nostalgia recollected in tranquility. This was live reporting executed with a sizzle and a panache that had simply never been achieved before. And it changed sports journalism. He broke the rules so successfully the rules had to be changed.
That wasn’t all. There is an old story about some nobleman involved in a scrape being informed by his butler with some distaste: “The press are here, m’lud. And the gentleman from The Times.”
Well, in my day, it would be “The bloody press are here. And good old Frank.” He had that rapport, that easy manner, that belonged to every son of an Irish Catholic Cockney Christian socialist Labour activist Cotswold farming family with a hint of Jewish that I’ve ever known. People in sport just took to him. That showed itself very clearly in the TV series, Maestro, when he interviewed ageing greats. His colleagues’ attitude is shown by the turn-out here today. And then there were the readers.
He wrote for various publications: The Times, The Sunday Tel, Punch, the Speccy, the Oldie, the rugby mags, the cricket mags, at the end the Obs. But in The Guardian it was different. One old Guardian hand – not a sports person at all – said to me that the online tributes to Frank on the website were “An outpouring of something a bit more than respect and affection, more like gratitude and love. I don't remember seeing anything before quite like it.” And I don’t think you ever will. It was a unique relationship between a unique writer and a unique readership.
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I imagine everyone here will have experienced the more exaggerated manifestations of Frank’s good nature. Mention anyone you like. Silvio Berlusconi: “For all that, I do love him.” Vladimir Putin: “Oooh, he is a dear.”
Of course it was largely an act. But then good manners and politeness are always an act. I am inclined to think he took it too far for his own good. Pretending that he didn’t mind what the subs did to his copy was, in my judgment, a serious strategic error. He did mind, believe me.
And it was an act that enhanced the lives of dozens of young journalists who would come seeking advice from Dr Frank about how to make their career better.
Very Herefordshire word: pilgrims. Much used by the SAS. But these were the real Herefordshire pilgrims, coming to the shrine in the hope that they might acquire a little of Frank’s genius, and his beatitude. And if they couldn’t imbibe his genius, they always imbibed his encouragement. And indeed just imbibed.
I return to Charles Fox, the Douai boy who had to keep Frank’s shorts clean. Why on earth would that lead to hero-worship? “Because, said Fox, he was an incredibly nice guy then as always – gentle was a good description.”
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After, let’s say, a rumbustious kind of life in Holland Park, Frank married Jane in 1983 and they produced Paddy and Tess. Late fatherhood is generally accompanied by an extra sense of pride and also a certain mutual bemusement. In Frank’s case this was multiplied by Paddy’s choice of career.
I have been known to tease people who know Frank but not the family, by asking if they know what his son does and offering two hundred guesses. But I can tell you this. He was enormously chuffed last August when Keating PFB, 1st Battalion, the Rifles, passed out of Sandhurst as a second lieutenant and a very fine young man.
And furthermore I sense in Paddy’s determination to pursue his chosen course, the same determination that his father had, but hid beneath layers of self-deprecation and bogus dilletantism.
In Tess’s case I think he was continually surprised by her beauty, forgetting perhaps that Jane’s genes might have been largely responsible for that. But again he lived to see her starting to make her way at the BBC with every prospect of a career in broadcasting to outshine his own.
The most important person comes last. Throughout our own family trauma, when our son Laurie became ill and died, we were hugely grateful for the steadfast support of Frank and Jane. Frank was not in good health for a long time. Through it all, Jane supported him with devotion and heroism. Since the final crisis began in November, that has been doubled and redoubled. She must have been exhausted. Never once did she falter. Never once did we hear her be anything less than positive.
The love that asks no questions
The love that stands the test.
Their last day together, in the lovely surroundings of the Hereford hospice, was a very happy one. Frank was feeling better. He was talking of writing again. There was lots of jollity. He died quietly in his sleep that night. He was blessed, in many, many ways. Having Jane’s love and support most of all.
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One of my favourite Frank pieces is one he wrote in The Guardian at the end of September 1982 when the cricket season concluded with an old masters’ match at The Oval including the likes of 61-year-old Ray Lindwall and Garry Sobers, a mere 46 but well gone from regular cricket. This was the height of the Guardian’s Grauniad phase and the piece has to be translated from the original typesetter’s gibberish. Some of us, however, are well practised.
The piece ends as follows: “Sobers leaves. Lindwall nods goodbye. There is a sudden, awed, hush in the room as Sir Garfield Sobers eases his way out, down the stairs, and across The Oval concourse for, perhaps, the very last time. The lights go out. It is, in fact, the end of many, many summers.”
And so it is today. But Frank leaves behind a warm glow that will sustain Jane and Paddy and Tess and all of us, and which will never be extinguished.