The Spin | Boris Karloff’s unlikely love of cricket lives on with foundation in his name

Actor known for his haunting film roles was president of Hollywood CC and his estate helps to fund the Windrush cricket festival

September 1954 and with the first Ashes Test just two months and 10 days away a crowd gathered at Tilbury Docks to see off England’s cricketers as they departed for Australia. The previous night the traditional dinner had been held at Lord’s in their honour and according to one report the players indulged so freely of “an endless supply of champagne and cocktails” that, rather than wave at the well-wishers as the boat pulled away, most of them were by then already unconscious, sleeping it off.

So they would probably have been grateful that, as they boarded the boat, the man the signature-seekers seemed to be focusing on was not one of them at all, but a 66-year-old wearing a handsome moustache and an air of discomfort. “These are the chaps you want, I am in the background,” he said. “I would give my boots to go.”

That man was the actor Boris Karloff and it was a call-up he was never likely to receive – though a keen cricketer, he described himself as “a frightful duffer” whose only positive attribute was that he “tried very hard”. More than seven decades later Karloff provides a curious link between a parcel that arrived at Lord’s earlier this summer and a Windrush commemoration event being held in Exmouth next month. Plus, as you do, Don Bradman, Frankenstein’s monster, kidnapping and (alleged) murder.

In May this year Jimmy Colabavala, a former president of Hollywood Cricket Club, died of cancer aged 73. Though he lived in California, Colabavala was an MCC member and his widow, Meher Tatna, duly contacted the club to inform them he was no longer in a position to benefit from its newsletters.

“As sometimes happens a conversation arose about his love of cricket and Meher happened to mention that Jimmy had some interesting material he would have wanted to pass on to us,” says Neil Robinson, the MCC’s head of heritage and collections. “So club services immediately put her through to me and the first thing she mentioned was Boris Karloff’s pads. As soon as I heard that name, I was interested. The Hollywood Cricket Club’s been on our radar for a while.”

For a while Hollywood CC probably had more famous cricketers than any club in the world: as well as Karloff those associated with it included David Niven, Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant and Errol Flynn. It was formed in 1932 by Aubrey Smith, the former England Test captain who made a second career out of playing well-spoken elderly Englishmen in the movies. That year the touring Australians turned up for a game (an unconventional match: Australia scored 209 for five while Hollywood ended on 99 for 17) and visited Karloff on the set of The Mask of Fu Manchu. “It spoils one to see how a simple thing in real life can be transformed into something dreadful in the films,” Bradman said.

Karloff specialised in the scary, most famously playing the monster in 1931’s Frankenstein and also starring in films such as The Black Cat, The Walking Dead, The Body Snatcher, The Mummy and Black Sabbath, the film from which the band took its name. He had an unusual ability to bring darkness to his characters and could draw from some in his own family. Born William Henry Pratt and raised in Peckham, he was the youngest of eight brothers and a sister.

The family’s second-youngest child, Richard, wrote of their father, Edward that “I don’t think the old man was a very admirable character”, and he should have known: when Edward left their mother, Eliza – already his third wife – he disappeared to France taking Richard with him, leading to the child being re-kidnapped by an uncle and secreted back to Britain in a cattle boat. George Marlow Pratt, another brother – and for a while another actor – developed a close friendship with a woman who lived next door to him in Enfield and in 1897 shot and killed her husband. At the resulting inquiry he convinced a jury that he was innocently carrying a loaded gun in his pocket which had gone off accidentally while he was fumbling for some tobacco and they returned a verdict of accidental death.

Cricket was Karloff’s great passion: when he was the subject of an episode of This is Your Life a number of important figures from his past were invited to the studio to help tell his story, forcing the presenter, Ralph Edwards, to explain to American TV viewers the concept of a “Jim Laker”. “He’s probably the greatest bowler – like a pitcher in baseball – of all time,” Edwards enthused, describing his achievement of taking 19 wickets in a single Test as “like a pitcher pitching two consecutive shutouts on two consecutive days in a World Series”. Laker told a story about inviting Karloff to join him on the balcony at Lord’s: “We looked over this great expanse, this wonderful cricket ground, and he turned around to me and said: ‘Well, this is like dying and going to heaven.’”

Karloff died in 1969 and 16 years later Evie, the last of his five wives, set up the Boris Karloff Foundation. When she died in 1993 her entire estate was left to the charity, designed to assist those pursuing his great passions. It still does, to the tune of about £100,000 a year. “It’s the performing arts, it’s cricket and it’s young people, those are the three things we look at,” says Roger Ford, one of the trustees. “We’re not going to give life-changing amounts but, you know, it helps people along, helps projects along, can help get things off the ground.”

So to the Windrush cricket festival, which will be hosted by Exmouth CC next month. The brainchild of Krish Madray, whose father, Ivan, played two Tests for West Indies against Pakistan in 1958, the festival now attracts upwards of 600 people each year for a day of men’s and women’s cricket, food and music, with West Indies United CC sending a team down from London to provide the opposition. It has been part-funded by the Boris Karloff Foundation from the start.

“My aim was to bring an inner-city team of West Indians down to the West Country and to get communities talking but do it through the medium of cricket,” Madray says. “Because of the consistency of the Boris Karloff funding, on top of what we’ve managed to raise, it’s now in its fourth year and we intend to keep building on it.”

Devon Development Education, another charity, brought crucial fundraising expertise to the project. “I get a daily notification of available charities around the place and I go through them,” says Sue Errington, their coordinator. “We saw the Boris Karloff Foundation and we saw the word cricket and that was it, we were off.”

So Karloff’s love of cricket lives on, in the shape of a vibrant new community event in Devon and also a dusty old relic in north London. “It’ll have to be properly assessed before it goes on display, just to make sure it’s stable enough, because textiles do become quite fragile over time,” Robinson says of Karloff’s old pad. “But it’s a lovely story. We’ll find a way to display it, one way or another.”

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