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Icki Iqbal grew up in Pakistan in the fifties. As a right handed batsman and left arm spin bowler he set his sights on being selected for the tour to England in 1962, as a seventeen year-old. His role models were Peter May (batsman) and Tony Lock (bowler). His hero was Imtiaz Ahmed.
Alas, he had to take a reality check when he found that he wasn’t good enough to make his House Second XI at school. He came to England in 1964 six days before Harold Wilson came to power. He played some cricket and watched a lot.
He ended up being a city actuary.
The Tebbit Test is his story. Why should it interest you? Well, as you’d see from the expert comments shown on the back page, it is a good read.
• To a cricket fan, it is the odyssey of a die hard cricket fanatic of limited skills. Enjoy his personal travails on the pitch and off the field over the past fifty-odd years.
• To the sociologist it chronicles life in Pakistan in the post colonial fifties and the experience of a British Asian from the mid-sixties onwards and how the host community and he have dealt with each other. Is the Tebbit Test relevant?
• To city-watchers, it shows how life has changed over that period
• To actuaries who started out in the sixties or earlier, a nostalgic look at office life as it was then
• To actuaries who started out later, to see what a bunch of time-wasters their predecessors were
Date of publication: 4th Nov. 2011
Hardback with dust-wrapper
Price £15.00 plus pp
An e-version is under preparation.
Treat yourself to a good read; better still treat your friends too. Christmas is coming. Contact Icki Iqbal on 01372 841881 or IckiIqbal@yahoo.co.uk. Alternatively, if your mind is already made up, fill in the order form.
What the experts say
Icki Iqbal has written a book which appeals to several audiences…This is a thoroughly good read, full of hard fact and wise opinions about both cricket and life.
Lord Tebbit
It has a lovely, engaging honesty, and I do like the way you oscillate between your own life story and the events of the cricket world……What you write (in the last chapter) is powerful….I do hope that one way or another it finds its way into the print. It deserves to. It's very nicely written. Gentle, honest and in places very funny.
Stephen Chalke
Author of ‘Runs in the Memory’, ‘At the Heart of English Cricket’ et al
One of the funniest books I have read in many a year, I was genuinely impressed by the quality of writing. If someone had said to me that a Pakistani Ramchandar Guha was waiting in the wings to establish his independent credentials, I would have scoffed at him. Yet here is a tale, written tongue in cheek, which gives the reader no warning of what awaits him, in the final chapter. The final statements are as tragic as those of William Shakespeare writing on Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Dr Khadim Hussain Baloch
Author of ‘Encyclopedia of Pakistan Cricket’ et al.
I have just finished reading The Tebbit Test. Let me say how entertaining I found it. I couldn't put it down.... I think that you have something here…. it's really rather good, although, like you, I am a cricket nut and therefore I may be somewhat biased towards the book's contents. Having said that, I was fascinated by your childhood experiences as well as your portrayal of working life in the sixties and early seventies.
David Holland
Captain of Bacon & Woodrow IMC’s most successful cricket team
Samples of the prose
First steps to mediocrity
Being small for my age, I couldn’t get the ball off the square but I could block…. My only strokes were the straight drive, a hoick to mid-wicket and the cut and the leg-glance…I once connected with a leg glance with such exquisite timing that the ball sped off the bat like a bullet. I was still bewitched by the beauty of the stroke when I was clean bowled next ball. I seldom got into double figures and my highest score ever was 39 but, truth be told, that was in a single-wicket contest, against my younger sister. My highest in a proper match was 20. As Glenn McGrath said about batting at number eleven, ‘No sooner have you got your eye in, the other guy gets out.’
* * * *
Genesis of Geniuses (Not)
I got a job as an actuarial student at the Northern Insurance Company. The Head Office was in several buildings within half a mile of Bank station in the city of London. I was to work in a rectangular concrete-and-glass building on 29 Gresham Street. …Holidays were only two weeks a year but we had free lunch. The office hours were 9am to 4.45pm. An attendance book was kept at the ground floor reception and we had to sign in on arrival. At 9am a blue line was drawn to see who were late. At 9.05 a red line was drawn and the attendance book taken to the office of a formidable looking manager and we had to sign in his presence. Everyone wore a sober suit and tie with a plain white or light blue or cream shirt. Some of the senior staff wore bowlers.
For lunch we had to go to the plebs’ canteen in Basinghall Street, some two hundred yards away. Lunch was of good quality. We had three courses… , Between 9.15 and 9.30 a tea lady would come with tea, which was free and spam rolls and such like for which we paid. Plebs like me poured tea out of a tap into paper cups. Section leaders got tea served in china cups and superintendents were served in their own pots delivered on a tray.
The Actuarial Department was headed by Brian Dawson who was a superintendent. He had his own cubicle with five foot high translucent glass on three sides. My boss Dave Reynolds was a section leader who reported to Brian. He had a team of junior and more experienced students working for him. I started as the only junior who had to do all the work whilst others such as Colin Coles were the ‘checkers.’ .. We had salesmen, called ‘Inspectors’ who .. all wore bowler hats…….
One thing I had to get used to very quickly was protocol. The Actuary of the Life Department was a Ken Le Cras. He could only be addressed by us as Mr Le Cras. That was fair enough. But if he wanted to talk to Colin Coles who was just a student or even Dave Reynolds, a qualified actuary on the first rung of the managerial ladder, he’d call them by their surname: ‘Coles, can you come here’ or ‘Have you got a minute, Reynolds.’
When they started calling you by your Christian name, you have arrived.
We worked hard but we also had a lot of fun. Modern managers would not tolerate the extent to which we wasted time. But it wasn’t just us kids who were inefficient. Looking back there were quite a few people marooned in middle-management who, these days, would have been got rid of…The late Peter Clark….told me that promotion at the Pru to Superintendent, the first step on the managerial ladder, reduced the working hours from 9 to 5 to 9.30 to 4.30!
Adjacent to the Actuarial Department was the Valuation Department and there were two guys there who spent a major part of the day playing chess. Each of them had a pocket chess set in his drawer. They’d make a move and hand it on a scrap of paper and the other guy would open his drawer make the move on his chess board, mull it over and send his response. Work would pile up, so they did paid overtime.
* * * *
Psychobabble
Why does a person become a sports fan? Is there a defining gene and does it transcend race, generations and sport? …
The first clue is the fact that the word fan is short for fanatic. The allegiance is blinkered, possibly blind. Why else would you stay loyal through thick and thin, through changes in playing style, your personal circumstance or team’s circumstance? Few marriages are that strong. Even political loyalty is not that strong. An Englishman who emigrates to the US or Australia will after a while shift his political allegiance to align it to his economic interests. He’d still continue to support Tottenham at football and England at cricket. Perhaps it is a metaphor for some part of your personality that is constant and unchanging; sport can fulfil that role because in truth it does not matter; we only think that it does. Bill Shankly was utterly wrong when he said, ‘Football is not a matter of life and death; its much more than that.’ It’s precisely because it is NOT a matter of life and death that we surrender ourselves uncritically to it. That is why poorer communities are more devoted to sport than affluent ones.
* * * *
The best ever?
England are playing superlative cricket, have a strong team ethos and unbelievable bench strength in the fast bowling department. Best English team ever? I’ve selected six possible contenders post WW2. They’re all actual teams: Oval 1953, Oval 1957, Sydney 1970/1, Leeds 1981, Leeds 2005 and Lords 2011. Have a look at them. What do you think?
In terms of the quality of the team and its bench strength, … the best is…
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Human frailty
A couple of months ago I resolved to hit Murdoch where it hurt most. I decided to cancel my Times online subscription and my Sky TV subscription.
Did I do it? No Sir. ‘I will do it,’ I kid myself.
As St Augustine said, ‘Oh God, make me chaste, but not yet.’
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