Author, publisher and founder of Fairfield Books
MikeProcter could have been an all-time great of Test cricket. Bowling at speed in his seven Tests, all against Australia, he took 41 wickets at a breathtaking average of 15, and he had a second string of effective off-breaks. As a batter, one of only three men alongside CB Fry and Don Bradman to score six successive first-class centuries, he could turn a match with his powerful, classical hitting.
Yet, after the age of 23, with South Africa excluded, he played no Test cricket. Apart from the two seasons of Kerry Packer’s World Series, his stage was the domestic game: in South Africa and England. Some of his contemporaries became infected by bitterness, not always able to motivate themselves for what seemed like county cricket’s relentless treadmill, but that was not in Procter’s nature. He lived life to the full, on and off the field. For 15 summers he was an exciting figure at the heart of Gloucestershire’s cricket, so much so that the county came to be known as Proctershire. As all-round cricketer, captain and inspiration, I doubt if a county has ever had better value from an overseas signing.
In the summer of 2017, as chairman of a cricket society in Bath, I was asked if I would stage a meeting to raise funds for a charity Mike had set up – the Mike Procter Foundation, supporting children in need at Ottawa School near his home town of Durban. It was a stiflingly hot afternoon, the hottest day of the year, and Mike arrived casually in t-shirt and shorts. It was my job to interview him.