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Sport and Physical Education

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, for introducing this debate. I never use the word ““congratulate”” because it means to thank collectively, and I would like to thank him individually because I have the advantage of knowing more about what he has done in this world than he knows about what I have done. I have spent most of my life as an ungifted amateur trying to play every game, including politics—never with much success. At school, I was slightly hyperactive, and instead of the required nine hours a week—we should normally have done 11 hours—I would do 20. We had to go on three-mile and six-mile runs. We had to play every game, and I would get up early, probably because I was not sufficiently academic. I wanted to be good at cricket but I was not; I was always the promising cricketer. Although I have been in your Lordships’ House for 45 years, I have been a member of the MCC for 47 years, because I was then a promising cricketer whose career was never realised. I wear the tie today because the ball will be swinging in every direction at Trent Bridge today, no doubt guided by the ancestors of my noble friend here. This physical exercise has its penalties. As your Lordships may see from time to time in this House, there are people wandering around who have certain difficulties. A little while ago, I was one of them. Both my knees went, and I could not admit that anything was wrong. I happened to be abroad at the time, and I saw a very nice French doctor called Dr Villemin, who said after looking at me, ““Monsieur, you are obviously not academic””. I thought he said that I was stupid. He said, ““No, you see, the thing about academics is that they do not take much exercise so their bones and bodies do not wear out. I am sure you will find that in your Lordships’ House when you return””. Perhaps it was my hyperactivity that led one day to a civil servant ringing me up and saying that my name had been put forward to be chairman of a new body that was being established by Peter Shore, with the support of Denis Howell, called the Greater London and South-East Regional Sports and Recreation Council, the mandate of which was to develop sport and recreation throughout Greater London, Surrey, Sussex and Kent—so help me God—looking after one-third of the population for one-third of the time when they were not working or sleeping. I do not know why; I think I was appointed only because the Labour Party in those days would choose for unpaid jobs young, hereditary, chinless-wonder, Conservative merchant-banking Peers. I am not saying who got the well paid jobs at the time. I was then introduced to my secretary, Colonel Boris Garside, a remarkable man who immediately said, ““You may call me Garside or Colonel, but I would prefer not Boris. I will call you my Lord””. For me, who was only a junior officer in the Navy, this was almost an insult, but it was a great promotion. For six years under Peter Shore and another six years under Michael Heseltine, I had enormous fun dealing with the greatest bureaucracy the world has ever created. On our council was every governing body of sport: the Royal Parks Agency, the Army, the Navy, the Royal Air Force—you name it; there was every local planning authority and everyone else. Worst of all, my mother turned up. She was on ILEA and Westminster City Council when she became Lord Mayor. She did not know I was chairman and asked me what I was doing at the meeting. At the beginning of the meetings, someone would say, ““Mr Chairman””, someone else would say, ““On a point of order; it should be ‘My Lord Chairman’””, and someone else would then say, ““It should be ‘chair’””. One of the great leaders of the trade union movement here said, ““When you have your meetings, why do you not hold them on a Friday before a bank holiday, preferably an August bank holiday, send out the letters by second-class post because they are deemed to have arrived on the date of the postmark, and hold the meeting somewhere strange””. So we held our first big annual general meeting at Alexandra Palace on an August bank holiday. The idea was that the chairman would call the meeting to order and there would be the argument about ““chair””, ““Lord Chairman”” or whatever. Then a roll call was proposed, and it was proposed that those who were present should be noted by a show of hands. Those who were not present and who had apologised for their absence would also be noted. Those who were not present but who had not apologised for their absence would also be noted; they had shown discourtesy to the meeting, and the chairman would have the right to their votes. At the time, therefore, I had the majority vote. We had no money. We did, however, have the sports council, and we were allocated the right to something like £27 million a year. When we started to have our fun, we thought, ““Would it not be a good idea if we could be good at cricket again? What about the villages?””. We partly started the village cricket scheme. I went to see the MCC, which wanted a new sports centre. It wanted funding for it, as all those people did, but it did not want it to be available to anyone other than the children of MCC members. After a lot of argument, we agreed that every MCC member who had a child would agree to sign the form for others. We then watched different schools coming to the centre, because cricket was a great leveller. It was then deemed to be a good idea to run and to jog. Robin Marler was a great friend of mine and a cricket correspondent at the Times. Suddenly the Sunday Times decided that it would have a fun run. People would get up early and run around Hyde Park. They got a shock; 3,000 people got up in the morning and ran around Hyde Park, which led to the Sunday Times saying, ““That’s not long enough. Let’s run a bit further””. With Chris Brasher, the London Marathon started. I was asked to deal with the inner city and Docklands. We were asked if we could build a big arena there called the London Arena, but of course no one had any money. We managed to get the marathon to run through Docklands on the Isle of Dogs. In those days, the LDDC had a picture of a crow with the caption, ““Why be in the middle of nowhere when you can fly to the centre of … ?””—whatever it was. I got a lot of friends to dress up in crow clothes, which the LDDC provided. They went around on roller skates with buckets, and we raised £232 and then £15 million. We built the arena, but then came the Bradford fire. With the Bradford fire came an, ““Uh oh””. The arena building was built on the site of an old banana shed. It was a difficult building, but it was allocated and it was big enough to have many tennis courts inside. We were going to have the Amateur Athletic Association, with an up-and-down running track and 12,000 seats that would come out. It was brilliant, but we were not allowed to use it because technically it did not exist; it belonged to the Port of London Authority. For it to exist, it had to come under new planning rules and be deemed to exist. It was therefore not suitable for anyone to be inside it, even though we could put fire engines with pumps outside. We had enormous fun in the end. We held pop concerts there. In the midst of this, I had the difficulty of being a hereditary Conservative merchant-banking Peer down in the East End. What they did not know was that my father went into motor racing after leaving school. He died very young, but he had boxed and wrestled for charity on the Isle of Dogs under the name of ““The White Eagle””. As soon as that was known, one day when I was down there a little old bird gave me a nudge and said, ““Hello, how are you?””. I said, ““Hello, who are you?””. ““Oh””, she said, ““How’s your da?””. I said, ““He died in 1963””. She said, ““I thought I hadn’t seen him around. You know, you shouldn’t be a Conservative””. From that day on I wanted to be an unknown Peer. I became the well known Labour Peer, which opened up everything to me in that part of the world and we got on with whatever we could think of. Then we needed to deal with the inner cities. The East End was fantastic. You have to deal with the street. Your Lordships may remember the Scarman inquiry in Brixton. Lord Scarman was a great chap, so I went there and we decided that we would appoint ethnic minority group leaders. That was the first time I heard the phrase ““ethnic minority groups””. We wanted to give them £10,000 a year and I suggested that we give some of them cash. That was probably against all the rules, but I managed to get the cash from outside the government system. I had a great ethnic minority leader from Jamaica—I was conceived on the beach out there—called Mr Rasta. He called me Mr Lord. Mr Rasta taught me the street business. Up in the streets, you give a bunch of people a ball and two basket nets, which we did in Brixton, and you watch a child bounce a ball off a kerb and send it back over his shoulder to his friends. If he was tall, under the rules he would often be allowed to put a small child on his shoulder so that he could score. That little activity led to tremendous fun. Over that period, we ended up producing the government regional recreational strategy. I shall dig out a copy and send it to the noble Lord, Lord Pendry, because many of the things in it have been discussed today and are still around. The playing fields were being closed. ILEA was selling its land. People were thinking only of money and not of the spirit that you can bring out with a bunch of individuals. I could go on about every sport. My final punishment concerns my fear of heights. I do not know why I have that fear. I should really be sitting on a lower Bench, but I have always thought that. One day, it was decided that I should lead a major abseiling attempt for charity. I had never abseiled. Suddenly into my office in the City came a Royal Marine sergeant and a corporal. They had a rope and said, ““If you’re ready, you can jump out of the window””, and they showed me what to do. Two days later I found myself in the wind, 400 and something feet up, on top of the Prudential building doing a jump for charity. But they did not tell me that if you are that high up, and standing on the edge with your gloves on, the weight of the rope is so great that you have to pull yourself down. I dropped off a plank for about 20 feet and was stuck. Everyone was shouting at me and I have never been so frightened in my life. But there are always benefits, and before I close I shall return to cricket and to my noble friend. I used to be chairman of the Middle East trade committee and take missions out to difficult places like Saudi Arabia. We were trying to take over all the redevelopment of Riyadh when the Saudi Government were going to move there and I was taking out a team. One of the greatest teams in the Midlands—I will not mention the name of the company—made lovely cast-iron street furniture, including lamps and so on. It produced wonderful designs using the Saudi palm leaf. However, the owner of the company fell ill at the last moment and said that he would send a substitute. At the airport, we suddenly found that his substitute, who was in long skirts rather like Madam Thatcher, was his wife. At that time, it was quite difficult for a woman to go on a mission to Saudi Arabia. However, she was there to sell street furniture. The engineers who were with me and others had a sense of humour. She was the vice-captain of the English cricket team, so you can imagine some of the remarks that a tough bunch of men were going to say to her. One of my favourites is a bit near the bone, but noble Lords will not mind. They said, ““How do you protect yourselves. We men wear boxes””. She said, ““We use manhole covers””, which was her main product. That week she sold 300 manhole covers with the coat of arms design to Saudi Arabia. When I came back, a little note in the press, instead of referring to me as a trade man, said, ““Lord of cricket arrives””. Weeks later, I returned to find a letter addressed to His Excellency Sir Lord Malcolm Selsdon Esquire, House of Lords, MCC, London. The letter said, ““Dear Lord, how big are your balls? Our children’s balls are four and three-quarters, but we think they should be five and a half. Could you give a ruling?””. This was a letter from a Pakistan cricket coach wanting to know what size balls should be used for children. In those six years, I had tremendous fun. We did something, but it was the individual people who brought it alive from the grassroots upward and not from the top down. I believe that that is where we should go today.