A tribute from Andrew Hignell
Bob Harragan died at his home in Llanelli on 26 January 2016 at the age of 62. Born in Romford in 1954, he had been a sports journalist in West Wales since 1973, working chiefly for the Llanelli Star, besides serving as their court and assizes correspondent.
Bob had a lifelong passion for cricket, and undertook coaching duties with various age-group teams in Carmarthenshire, where he saw a number of promising junior cricketers – including Robert Croft and Simon Jones – rise up from the ranks of schools cricket to club, county and international honours. With his sharp interest in facts and figures, he was the Honorary Statistician of the Welsh Schools Cricket Association, as well as the national side which, since the early 1970s, had taken part in the annual Triple Crown competition. At the time of his sudden death, Bob was working on an extensive set of records for the schoolboy cricketers, including youngsters who found fame in other sports, such as Welsh rugby international Rob Howley.
His forte was early cricket in Wales, as well as club cricket in West Wales, and the fruits of his labours were several books, including the highly-acclaimed History of Llanelli Cricket Club in 1991, as well as anniversary brochures for Bridgend Town (1990) and Dafen Welfare (2001), for whom he acted as scorer. Bob also had a great interest in rugby, and in 1997 produced a book on Llanelli RFC for the Images of Wales series from Tempus Publishing.
A member of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians for over forty years, Bob wrote many articles for the Journal on a variety of topics, and books on Don Shepherd and C.P.Lewis. Over the past couple of years he had commenced research and writing on Ernest Vogler in the Lives in Cricket series, as well as Whites on Green, a volume of historic matches at the St Helen’s ground in Swansea for the new Cricket Witness series.
The Association has lost a good and loyal friend, and a man who through his assiduous research helped to unearth a mass of information about the early years of cricket in the Principality.
Douglas Miller added:
Many of those who share their opinions with us are mere names, but Bob was something different for me. He had already compiled his book on Don Shepherd in the Famous Cricketers series when I was asked to do a book with Don for Fairfield. I visited Bob at his home in Llanelli, where he lived as a bachelor caring for an ageing mum. I think I had just been to see Jeff Jones, who also lived in Llanelli.
In those days there was something of an unwritten rule that the subject of the book should never be spoken to for fear of compromising objectivity – or perhaps because famous cricketers were felt to be beyond the access of the general public. So I found myself with Bob, a local journalist, who had never met the man he called his hero – and Don Shepherd was unaware that the book had ever been written. I am pleased to say that Bob travelled up from Cardiff for the launch of Born to Bowl in Cardiff, where he was able to meet Don. By this time Bob had been wholly responsible for digging out a verbatim snatch of Radio Wales commentary by Don that I was delighted to be able to use.
Bob was in touch again later when I was engaged with a history of Bucks County Cricket Club, drawing my attention to happenings at his local Llanelli station that became quite the most dramatic passage of the history. I will share it with you:
The three-match tour to Wales was a unique experience for a Bucks team, and it brought the players more excitement than they had bargained for after their victory at Llanelli. This was a time of industrial unrest on the railways and strikers in Wales were set upon imposing a blockade to prevent the free passage of trains. With militant protesters thronging the level crossings at both ends of Llanelli station, it was only with the help of an armed guard that the players managed to catch the last train out of the town that evening. Lucky to escape, they later heard that the Riot Act had been read out and troops had opened fire killing two bystanders. Amid the ensuing mayhem an ammunition train was blown up causing a further 18 deaths. The team managed to reach Cardiff, but the start of their match with Monmouthshire the next day was delayed when the players found that there were no trains running and they were obliged to find cars or taxis to complete their journey.
Thank you, Bob, for that. Would I have found it without you?
I also had the experience of editing Bob’s book on Essex in the county grounds series. I soon grew to understand that Bob was the old-style reporter, used to firing his story down the telephone to a copytaker whose principal skill would have been to operate the keys at the speed of light. Sorting it all out later was a job for the sub-editors. This same total disregard for the number of typos – half a dozen in a paragraph was standard – stayed with Bob as he threw his words into an ancient word processor and left it to the editor to see if he could make sense of it. And, of course, sometimes buried in the undergrowth were some gems that he had managed to unearth.
Roger Heavens added:
Bob Harragan has been one of my great supporters in producing further volumes of Arthur Haygarth’s Scores and Biographies. He always provided important new scores that Arthur did not know about and also many details of games that the detail had eluded him. I still have lists of the games he thought important for the forthcoming volumes from 1883 onwards. He made significant contributions to Volume 20 (1882) which is being printed at the moment, unfortunately too late to dedicate it to him.