Melbourne

Do novelists need credentials? Once, almost a century ago, the vogue for hard-boiled fiction meant that in the masculine Hemingway hegemony then holding sway, novelists needed to be graduates of the ‘University of Life’. Writers, it was argued, had to spend their apprenticeship riding the rails, tending bar in tough-guy saloons and doing almost any work that could be described as manual labour.  This changed postwar, with greater affluence and millions more people in higher education, including women. Among them were a growing number taking postgraduate degrees in creative writing – most famously at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but followed quite credibly in this country at the University of East Anglia.

Lord Hawke, the grand old man of Yorkshire cricket and stalwart of the MCC, was not one to mince words. A century ago, the administrator rejected calls for the national XI to be led by Jack Hobbs. ‘Pray God no professional shall ever captain England,’ Hawke said. ‘We have always had an amateur skipper and when the day comes when we shall have no more amateurs captaining England it will be a thousand pities.’ It took 27 years. Elizabeth II would be less picky about commoners. She knighted Hobbs in her Coronation honours in 1953, the same year that Len Hutton, England’s first professional captain, led the side to regain the Ashes after 20 years. To defend the urn Down Under, however, as he hoped to do in 1954-55, was a hard task.