Hosepipe bans? Standpipes in the streets? Ah, yes, I remember them well. Prepare for a host of anniversary paeans from us old sweats of 30 summers ago. ‘Sweat’ being the word, or ‘Phew!’ as the headlines had it all through that heatwave summer of 1976, the most relentlessly parched since records began in 1727. By all accounts, an official drought was announced as early as 15 May and (with the help of Wisden) I see that was the very day I was dispatched to the County Ground, Southampton, to write up a newcomer of promise, an appealing, callow West Indian batsman called Vivian Richards. The summer before, I had seen a couple of his innings — short, sweet and swaggering — for Somerset, but in 1975’s inaugural World Cup he had failed to shine for the West Indies. Now on a sublime day in mid-May at Southampton, he played like a belligerent god, scoring a blazing 176 in no time. Wheezing like a grampus in the heat, John Arlott walked photographer Patrick Eager and me for a cheese and onion lunch in the Southampton Police Club canteen and pronounced that he had never seen such vindictively savage batting on his favourite ground.
We followed the tourists to Lord’s. Richards hit a spectacular 113 against MCC. Chairman of England selectors, Alec Bedser, admitted he ‘looked all right, I suppose — for a slogger’. Lovely Trent Bridge was already baked to a turn for the opening Test match in the first week of June. Richards made 232, including four sixes and 32 fours. By his final Test innings at the Oval in the mid-August (a crowning 291 — 38 fours), his series aggregate of 829 runs in seven innings had been bettered only by Bradman’s 905 in 1930.
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