County cricket in
100 objects
No.9 The ‘six sixes’ ball
that never was
The catalogue for a sale of sporting
memorabilia at Christie’s, South
Kensington, on November 15 2006
included the following entry:
‘Lot 173: A red leather “Special County”
cricket ball manufactured by Duke & Son,
Nottingham, signed “G. Sobers” (seam
stained, quarter seam split, general scuff
marks); with a certificate of provenance
signed by Sir Garfield Sobers, stating “that
this signed cricket ball was bowled during
the over in which I [Sobers] hit six sixes
off Malcolm Nash...”’It was indeed a ‘special’ ball. Until
Sobers, the great West Indian allrounder,
famously took on the hapless Glamorgan
left-arm seamer Nash at Swansea’s
St Helen’s ground on the afternoon of
Saturday, August 31 1968, no one in the
history of first-class cricket had hit a six
off every delivery of a six-ball over.
Christie’s were confident their estimate
of £5,000–£8,000 would be realised,
perhaps a little more. After all, they had
sold the bat Sobers used on the day for
£54,257 at their sale rooms in Melbourne,
Australia two years earlier.
In the event, bidding for the ball reached
£26,400 before the hammer came down- a world record. The successful bidder
was an anonymous collector in India.
The proceeds, with Sobers’ blessing,
went to Jose (pronounced Josie) Miller, a
former secretary of the Nottinghamshire
Supporters’ Association, who had been
given the ball in 1975 by her predecessor,
John Gough, and had decided to sell it only
when health issues meant she needed to
make costly alterations to her house.
And yet, although Christie’s themselves
have never acknowledged it, the ball they
sold almost certainly was not the one Sobers
hit. To borrow a piece of cricketing parlance
from another context, it was a wrong’un.
Sobers signed the certificate of
provenance to which Christie’s referred
when he met Miller at a Nottingham
hotel shortly before the sale, at which
point none of the parties involved had any
reason to believe the ball was not genuine.
There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing.
But doubts about the ball’s authenticity
surfaced when Grahame Lloyd, a journalist
and broadcaster, was researching a
book to mark the 40th anniversary
of the dramatic over and interviewed
Malcolm Nash, then living in California.
Nash pointed out that the Christie’s
lot notes referred to the ball being made
by Duke & Son, yet Glamorgan’s balls
were supplied by another manufacturer,
Stuart Surridge.
“If anyone from Christie’s had bothered
to contact me at the time I could have
told them,” Nash told The Cricketer.
“Glamorgan had been using the Stuart
Surridge ball for 40 or 50 years. There
would have been no reason for us to
change the balls for one game only.
“And I think I would know more about
the ball than the guy who was whacking it
at the other end. I’m quite sure [Sobers]
wasn’t reading the label as it was being
propelled towards him.”
Nash’s insistence that the ball was a
Surridge was supported by a Glamorgan
county newsletter that Lloyd uncovered.
It carried a picture of 17-year-old Richard
Lewis, who had found the ball in nearby
St Helen’s Avenue after Nash’s last delivery
soared out of the ground, presenting
it to Sobers to take back to his county,
Nottinghamshire, as a gift. Glamorgan
had dutifully name-checked their ball
supplier, Stuart Surridge, in the caption.
When the ball appeared at auction
again in 2012, this time with Bonhams, the
evidence gathered by Lloyd was enough
for the lot to be withdrawn. Yet Christie’s
insisted they were happy with the 2006
sale, even after Nash wrote to their
chairman, Viscount Linley.
So how did this case of mistaken
identity arise?
John Parkin, who was the batsman
at the other end on that late summer
Saturday in Swansea, believes there is
probably an innocent explanation.
“I’ve talked to some of the lads who
played – Bob White, Brian Bolus, Mike
Smedley,” Parkin said. “You have to
remember that this was 1968, when cricket
memorabilia was not what it is now and
people would put something in their bag
and not think of it having a monetary value.
“When Sobers came back to
Nottingham we think he would have
reached in his bag, picked the ball out
and given it to John Gough, who had no
reason to doubt it was the genuine article.
But it was quite probably just one of
several in his bag and that would be where
the mistake was made. He simply gave
him the wrong one.”
In fact, Christie’s own sale notes actually
support that theory by referring to the
inscription ‘Duke & Son, Nottingham’.
Duke and Son’s factory was in Kent but it
was their practice to stamp balls with the
name of the county being supplied. The
ball sold belonged to Nottinghamshire.
Jon CulleyOLISCARff/GeTTYIMAGeS/C
HRISTIe’SThe ball as it
appeared for the
Christie’s auction
in 2006, and
above, in 2012
Simon Hughes on Sobers, p 3678 | thecricketer.com