Yorkshire buried their Fred in his beloved Dales last week. Umpire Dickie Bird gave the main moist-eyed address. Brian Close remembered their debutants’ county curtsey in 1949, both just 18, against Cambridge at Fenners. At the snooty University Arms, the dinner menu was in French. The haughty waiter hovered. Bewildered Brian, the Guiseley mill-worker’s son, passed it blankly to the Maltby miner’s son Fred, already unblinkingly brimful of bluster. ‘Right, sunshine, I’ll begin w’a large plateful o’that,’ he demanded, jabbing his finger at the menu’s top line. It read: Mercredi le deuxième mai.
The tales of Trueman were up and running. The fables of Fred. To Fleet Street and the nation he was ‘Fiery Freddie’. To Harold Wilson ‘the greatest living Yorkshireman’. To the BBC’s Brian Johnston he was ‘Sir Frederick’ (it rankled that he was not awarded his overdue OBE until 1989 when he was 58).
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