GRICEIANA

Speranza

Herbert Paul Grice died on 28th August 1988 at the age of 75 and "The Demi-Johns" lost their first President. 

He had, of course, retired to California in 1967.

One remembers with real affection the almost cherubic smile with which Grice would complete yet another carefully crafted single in the direction of third man, silvery strands of hair streaming behind him. 

Grice had perfected the nudge past gulley, long before the professional one-day game made it respectable and none of its present day practitioners come within a pitch-length of achieving Grice's mastery of it.

For one so young in spirit, Grice had acquired a remarkably protuberant waist line which may, perhaps, account for the fact that his famous stroke was played with a not-quite-straight bat.

Nonetheless, I cannot remember him ever failing to make contact. 

His eye was unfailingly good which probably also explains the other fact that one remembers about Grice: his permanent fielding position at first slip (the ideal post from which to observe lesser mortals' attempts to guide the ball third man-wards?). 

Not, I must hasten to say, that he stood there in purely monumental guise.

Grice took many an exciting catch. 

Indeed, no-one who saw it will ever forget the sight of Paul, flat on his back on an Oxford field, completely winded but with the ball safely cupped, in his elevated navel! 

It happened only the once!

Before becoming an honoured "Demi-john," Grice first achieved cricketing fame as a founder member of "The Barnacles," that inimitable body of well-mannered but viciously competitive academics. 

They were said to rejoice in the motto "Victory is sweet - but no substitute for personal success," though I doubt that Grice ever quite approved, for he took too great a pleasure in other people's success ever to endorse the sentiment seriously. 

Grice was, above all, a truly nice man and a friend to all who knew him, whether as tutor in philosophy or in the even greater subtleties of cricket.

Grice may have been, as his "Independent" obituary put it, a philosopher's philosopher but those of us who know him on the cricket field will certainly prefer to remember him as "a cricketer's cricketer."