Cameron was a top cricket brain

Frank Cameron went from a reliable stock bowler to chair the selection panel at the start of New Zealand men’s cricket’s most successful era.

Cricket great John Reid once told of the ‘‘remarkable display of courage’’ which typified the career of former New Zealand bowler and master selector Frank Cameron.

Reid recalled how Cameron bowled ‘‘without a murmur’’ against Rhodesia on New Zealand’s 1961-62 South Africa tour despite ‘‘a most painful minor operation on the morning of the last day’’.

‘‘In the dressing room Frank stripped to shower and it was seen that his socks were saturated with blood,’’ Reid wrote in his biography Sword of Willow. ‘‘He must have been in agony. If ever I had admiration for a man’s silent fortitude it was then.’’

Cameron’s downwind durability continued to serve him well. His wife Lynne recalled how he ‘‘carried thousands of rocks up a steep slope while landscaping their home at Sumner’s Clifton Hill in the 1990s. ‘‘After all those hours of bowling in hot weather, working in the garden was a piece of cake.’’

Teaching, travel and poetry were also lifelong interests, but Cameron – who died on January 2, aged 90 – was best known for a near-unbroken 25-year career with the national men’s cricket team as a player and selector.

Francis James Cameron was born into a family of seven children in south Dunedin in 1932. He and his two brothers all became teachers.

At Christian Brothers College, Cameron was captain of the college first XI cricket team, a first XV rugby team wing, a cross-country champion and track sprinter. ‘‘At one stage it was a toss-up between athletics and cricket,’’ Lynne said.

Cricket won. Cameron made his first-class debut for Otago in the 1952-53 season. He toiled away in the Plunket Shield arena for eight seasons, taking six wickets against the touring 1956-57 Australian team and 6-29 for the South Island v the North in 1957-58 without cracking the New Zealand team.

Cameron finally got his break, aged 29, for the 1961-62 tour and justified the selectors’ faith en route with 7-27 – his best first-class performance – in the searing Perth heat against Western Australia.

His test debut came in Durban where he took 3-60 and 3-32.

He was pivotal to New Zealand’s first overseas victory in the third test at Cape Town, taking 5-83 in the first innings.

New Zealand also won the fifth test and Cameron finished the drawn series with 20 test wickets for 493 runs after bowling 200-plus overs. He took 77 wickets across the entire tour.

He also showed his stickability as a No 11 batsman, with 20 not outs in 24 innings, including 13 in a row, believed to be a world record at that time.

New Zealand cricket writing doyen R T (Dick) Brittenden declared that Cameron’s ‘‘lively pace, whip off the pitch, his movement and stamina all contributed to a great tour’’.

Dick Whittington, a South Africabased former Australian state cricketer and journalist, wrote New Zealand had in Cameron ‘‘the Gary Cooper [a famously unflappable American movie star] ... a bowler of cunning and class’’ who ‘‘went on and on like the trans-American express’’.

Cameron, who had bowled despite a muscular complaint for the latter part of the tour, won the NZ Cricket Almanack’s bowler of the year award in 1962.

One of his finest hours came at Eden Park in Auckland in 1965 when he recorded his highest test figures of 5-38 in Pakistan’s second innings. His ability to swing the ball both ways secured him 9-70 for the match on a flat-track pitch, prompting Brittenden to write in The Press: ‘‘If ever a cricketer rehabilitated himself overnight, it was Cameron’’.

Cameron’s final tour came in 1965 to Pakistan and England where he took one wicket in each of the first two tests but was dropped for the third. He still finished second in the tour bowling averages behind speedster Dick Motz, and his neversay-die batting at No 11 saw him top the tour batting averages with 45 after a string of doughty not-out performances.

His most memorable resistance came in the second innings of the second test at Lord’s where he and Victor Pollard put on 44 runs in a defiant last-wicket stand before Cameron ran out Pollard after reportedly losing concentration while calculating how best to defend the next over.

Cameron finished with 62 wickets in 19 tests at an average of 29.82 runs per wicket. He took 447 wickets at 21.60 between 1952 and 1967 in a firstclass career featuring 21 five-wicket bags and totalling 26,959 balls bowled. In 23 years of club cricket in Dunedin he took 1133 wickets at an average of 10.04.

Brittenden hailed Cameron as ‘‘the best cricket brain’’ in the 1965 team and later described him as ‘‘one of the greatest men of endeavour New Zealand cricket has known’’, always open to sharing his ‘‘experience and natural sagacity’’.

A few short years after bowling his last test match ball, Cameron was appointed to the New Zealand selection panel in 1969.

Lynn McConnell, writing for Cricinfo in 2003, noted ‘‘when [Cameron] first joined the selection panel, New Zealand had won four tests in 37 years. By the time he left [in 1986], New Zealand had won another 21.’’

Cameron became panel chairman in 1975 and oversaw a first-ever win over England in 1978.

His craftiness came to the fore ahead of the first test in Dunedin when the West Indies toured in 1980.

‘‘I wanted them to play Derick Parry because he had looked to be an average offspinner in the one-dayer in Christchurch,’’ Cameron told McConnell in 2003.

‘‘So I called the press over the day before at practice and said we were going to add John Bracewell to our side because we thought the track might take spin. And the West Indies fell for it.’’

Bracewell wasn’t picked, but Parry was, and he was hammered for three sixes by Lance Cairns as New Zealand completed a one-wicket win in a match notorious for West Indies fast bowler Michael Holding kicking down the stumps in frustration.

Cameron was regarded as ‘‘one of the great selectors’’ by former New Zealand opener John Wright. ‘‘In his team talks, he generally had the opposition out for 50-odd with us bowling inswingers and outswingers,’’ Wright said in his 1990 autobiography, Christmas in Rarotonga, penned by Paul Thomas. ‘‘As he talked, he acted it all out with his wrist snapping away and fingers flicking, and we’d get 500. We called him ‘Chung’ – because he used that expression when he talked about the ball zipping off the pitch. At dinner he was always either smashing one through the covers or bowling the unplayable delivery.’’

Wright also gave an insight into Cameron’s trademark dry wit after the Kiwis had been dismissed for 74 in a one-day international.

New Zealand Cricket chairman Bob Vance addressed Cameron and the players in the dressing room, saying they’d let down the cricketing public. ‘‘As soon as Vance left the room, Frank got up and told us if we kept playing that way, he’d get the chop,’’ Wright and

Thomas wrote. ‘‘Then he paused and added: ‘But rest assured some of you will before I do’’.

Cameron received a MBE for services to cricket in 1987 and the Bert Sutcliffe Medal from New Zealand Cricket in 2003. He was a match referee at the 1992 World Cup.

His passing, soon after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, prompted many tributes from cricketing contemporaries, with 1961-62 tour colleague John Guy telling Cameron’s family: ‘‘Frank was a stalwart in South Africa – the gutsiest bowler’’.

Dayle Hadlee – a New Zealand bowler in the 1960s and 70s – said in a eulogy that Cameron was a meticulous planner with superb match awareness, had an eye for young talent and ‘‘broke the often perceived notion of fast bowlers by being an intelligent thinker of the game’’.

He oversaw ‘‘one of the most productive periods in our cricketing history, where the national team evolved from being easy-beats to a highly competitive unit’’.

Cameron fitted his cricketing duties around his professional career as a teacher at Otago Boys’ High School from 1956 to 1989. He rose through the ranks to become senior master then deputy rector before taking early retirement at 57.

Des Smith, an OBHS colleague for 22 years, said Cameron successfully coached the first XI cricket team and cross-country squads and was ‘‘a shrewd liar dice player’’ in the staff room where he also enjoyed table tennis and bowls.

‘‘Frank Cameron was a special man,’’ Smith wrote in a tribute on the OBHS Old Boys Foundation Facebook page. ‘‘The attitude of ‘it has to be good, it must be good’ determined the outcome of many events at the school. There could be no errors in planning and the expectation was that nobody, student or teacher, would give less than their best. That determination will be remembered by us all.’’

The OBHS flag was lowered to half-mast after Cameron’s passing.

After a brief spell in Queenstown Cameron returned to teaching at 62 in 1994 when offered a job by Christchurch Boys’ High School principal Colin Croudis, an OBHS alumnus.

Cameron taught his specialist English and history subjects but also oversaw woodwork classes where, Lynne said, he displayed ‘‘an uncanny ability to spot a boy about to use a chisel in an unseemly manner’’.

‘‘He was very passionate about education and encouraging boys into sport,’’ she said.

Cameron eventually retired at 75 and lived happily with Lynne, his third wife, in Sumner in his latter years.

He retained his love of sport, watching avidly on television, and would also recite his favourite poems by heart, often breaking out John Keats’ Ode to Autumn while driving down tree-lined Linwood Ave.

Lynne Cameron said she ‘‘always loved his sense of humour and his honest, straightforward nature’’.

‘‘But sometimes in the garden we had slight disagreements,’’ she said in her eulogy at a funeral service attended by over 250 people and led by the cricket-playing Rev Mike Hawke.

‘‘I loved mass blue planting and Frank always wanted to add a dash of yellow. Perhaps it was just his love of Otago. That never left him, especially if Canterbury were playing Otago.’’

Francis James Cameron. Born: June 1 1932 in Dunedin. Died January 2, 2023, in Christchurch. Survived by wife Lynne, four step-children and seven step-grandchildren and sister Joan.

‘‘In his team talks, he generally had the opposition out for 50-odd with us bowling inswingers and outswingers.’’