Sir Geoffrey Boycott: After everything I’ve been through, I wouldn’t be against assisted dying
Sir Geoffrey Boycott was first diagnosed with throat cancer aged 62 in 2002
On a pristine spring day in Prestbury, a village beloved of Premier League footballers and The Real Housewives of Cheshire set, Sir Geoffrey Boycott is pulling a bottle of his favourite Californian chardonnay from the fridge. He has been waiting weeks for this moment, when his precarious health would finally permit him the odd indulgence at his garden table. “I had 35 sessions of radiation for throat cancer and now I have no saliva gland,” he says. “The laser surgery kills everything in its way. My mouth is dry every couple of minutes, so I need to have a sip of something.” He has long carried water with him everywhere he goes. But today, fortified by the sounds of spring and an overwhelming gratitude that he is still alive, he can finally partake in something stronger.
A small waterfall babbles softly in the background. Boycott had it installed on the advice of Master Li, a feng shui consultant who believed the ambient noise could provide the optimum energy for his convalescence. It is quite the paradox, this idea of the ultimate irascible Yorkshireman being transformed into some latter-day Zen guru.
Still, he has upheld this Oriental belief system for decades, with Li even advising him once to sleep in a southeasterly alignment for the rest of the Chinese year. That was in 2002, when doctors found a tumour the size of a 50-pence piece near his voice box and gave him three months to live. Last year, having wintered in South Africa as usual, he discovered the cancer had come back. While he has been assured the prognosis is more positive this time, he underwent a three-hour operation to remove the cancerous tissue before embarking on a brief but gruelling liquid-only diet.
“The nightmare begins again,” he sighs, sitting down for his first interview about the ordeal. “It has always puzzled me with cancer – why can’t we solve the riddle? The Russians sent that dog into space and President Kennedy said, ‘We’re going to put a man on the Moon.’ I’ve been reading about scientists who detected cancer in Egyptian mummies, but all these centuries later here we are. You can’t begin to calculate how much money is raised for cancer research, just by all these people holding their coffee mornings for Macmillan. Multiply that by however many countries, and yet we still don’t have a cure. It’s odd to me.”
Geoffrey Boycott in a panama hat
Boycott’s voice may be slightly inhibited but his opinions remain as forthright as ever
The year since a dreaded second cancer diagnosis has, Boycott admits, been marked by emotional extremes. “Twice? Can you imagine, twice?” he says, shaking his head. “For a few minutes, you can think how unlucky you are. I get cross and I curse, but in the end, I don’t dwell on it. For cancer patients, the thing that stays with you is the knowledge that it can come back and kill you at any moment. You have to live with that. It’s no good sitting in the corner and crying: ‘Woe is me.’ Just deal with whatever the surgeon says and try to live your life.”
A few days later, he explains to The Telegraph’s Daily T podcast that the return of his cancer has prompted him to consider the debate around assisted dying, explaining he is “very sympathetic” to Dame Esther Rantzen’s view that euthanasia should be legalised. “It’s not just if it comes back and they say, ‘OK, you’ve got a few months and that’s it. You deteriorate, don’t you? By the last few weeks of your life, you’re a total wreck. You’re nothing like the person you were, your loved ones are trying to deal with that issue and help you through the remaining few weeks of your life.
“It must be your worst nightmare, having to help a loved one, knowing that whatever you do, they’re getting worse. People talk about putting their pets out of the misery of pain, don’t they? But we don’t put human beings…or we don’t allow us to choose. I think you should allow people to choose, and I wouldn’t be against it myself. It’s just a strain on your family close to you as well. You haven’t got a life and you’re just like a cabbage waiting to die.”
At 84, in his signature panama hat and sand-coloured jacket, Boycott has lost none of his capacity for navigating the cruelties of fate. While the laser treatment on his throat creates a slight impairment in his speech, he is as bullish as ever in the flesh. “Rach, any more wine, please?” he cries out to his wife Rachael, his taste for alcohol instantly restored. “Darling, you’re shouting a little,” she chides him at one point. “It’s the ‘way’ I talk,” he harrumphs.
Cancer has cast a bleak shadow over his life: in 1977, just four days after he scored his 100th first-class century, his mother Jane – who would later become the punchline to his commentaries about poor cricket: “My mum could play this lot” – told him she had discovered a lump under her arm. His distress was so acute that, while driving to his next match in Warwickshire, he was fined for speeding. “Jesus, terrible,” he reflects, pained by the memory. “My head was all over the place.” Thirteen months and two operations later, Jane died from breast cancer.
The young Geoffrey was devoted to her, living with Jane until her dying day, by which time he was 38. In certain ways, he valued the maternal perspective on his batting abilities above all others. Where some criticised his watchful style, with England’s then chairman of selectors Doug Insole famously dropping him in 1967 for scoring a double century too slowly, his mother saw only the intense concentration that he made his defining quality at the crease.
“Mothers always know their children. She used to say to people, ‘My son has got blinkers on.’ And she was right. Even when I batted, people swore at me, but it didn’t register. I could switch off and focus. For that reason, I think I could have made a better golfer than cricketer. I would have been like Gary Player. I’ve never changed my view that sport, like life, is about character and mental strength as much as ability. Talent only takes you so far – character is everything.”
‘I had never wanted children, it just happened’
There used to be a school of thought that Boycott defied psychoanalysis. After a combative 1987 appearance on Radio Four’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair – to which he agreed only to satisfy his publisher and where he expressed bafflement as to why anyone would be interested in his personality – the interviewer, Dr Anthony Clare, admitted he would have to revise John Donne’s wisdom about no man being an island. But I wonder if age, allied to the acceptance of his own mortality that cancer has brought, has mellowed him. You can detect a softening of the edges when he discusses his two grandchildren – Joshua, five, and Olivia, three – and the credo he intends to impart to them.
“Kids need to go for their dreams,” he says. “Encourage them, help them. They’ll have their knocks later on, so they don’t need anyone putting them down. They want to climb Mount Everest? Have a go. They want to trek through the jungles of Brazil? Go. Don’t stay back, life’s short. We have 70, 80 years if we’re lucky, but the world’s so many hundreds of millions of years old. We’re an infinitesimal speck. We’re here and we’re gone in no time at all.”
For a few moments he is wistful, as if agonised by how fast his time seems to be ebbing away. It is at this stage of life that regrets can intrude, but Boycott insists he only has one. “I think the biggest mistake is that I should have had three girls. I had never wanted children, it just happened – Rachael and I ended up having our daughter, Emma, before we were married, and it has just been a joy. She has never been in any trouble, never been on drink or drugs. She never had her hand out asking for things.”
It was in order to be closer to Emma, who initially worked in law before becoming an event organiser, that the Boycotts chose recently to decamp across the Pennines, swapping their sprawling Georgian home in Boston Spa for this more modern gated property in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle. On Geoffrey’s 82nd birthday, she posted a picture of him walking her down the aisle at her wedding, with the caption: “Forever by my side.”
But why did he want two more girls instead of boys? “I never wanted a boy to follow me.”
The reason was not so much he believed a son would be overawed by the feats of the father but that he feared a sense of estrangement. Boycott recalls Richard Hutton, son of Sir Leonard, among the greatest opening batsmen in history, saying once of his father that they had nothing in common. “I always remember that. Len had paid for him to go to Repton, and he went on to Cambridge, and he was saying that they couldn’t even talk to each other. How sad is that? What a waste. So I always thought, ‘How would a boy do with me?’ I’ve had all kinds of publicity, my career is littered with it. And I decided, ‘No, that’s not fair.’ It would be like living your life with a sack of coal on your back.”
How Rachel saved her husband’s life
We head into the conservatory for lunch. As a consequence of recent surgery, in which he had a section of muscle removed from his throat, the food – ham, potato gratin, a fresh green salad – needs to be soft enough for him to digest. Still, he has known it worse. “I had to have a tube for six months into my stomach,” he says, pulling up his shirt to show the incision. Had it not been for a lightning intervention by Rachael, who noticed on his return home from the throat operation last summer that his blood oxygen saturation level was 35 per cent, he might not be here at all.
“One afternoon I heard this gurgling sound as he slept,” she reflects. “He had to be taken straight to hospital, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia and put on intravenous antibiotics. If I had let him go to bed that night, he wouldn’t have survived.” Nine months on, she cannot help but find a streak of dark humour. “I could have been the merry widow by now and bought the bungalow.”
They share quite the history as a couple. Geoffrey first met Rachael in 1974, at the Lamb Inn near Ripon, little knowing it would be the start of a 51-year, on-off love affair or that she would be the mother of his only child. The publicity that greeted Emma’s birth in 1988, trumpeted on the front page of the News of the World, persuaded Rachael to move to Tenerife for several years, with Boycott not fully becoming a part of his daughter’s life until she was eight.
Still, Rachael’s loyalty was on full display at his trial in 1998, when she stood by him even as he was convicted by a French court of assaulting a former girlfriend, Margaret Moore, during a holiday in Antibes. Leo McKinstry, Boycott’s unauthorised biographer, claimed that the account by Moore – who was awarded damages of one franc – “did not stand up to any scrutiny”. “The French farce,” Rachael calls the episode. Geoffrey would rather not discuss it at all. He “doesn’t want to hear any of this”, he mutters whenever she brings it up.
‘The NHS is finished’
These days Geoffrey is far more preoccupied with regaining his health. While five months in the South African heat, enjoying the couple’s holiday home at Pearl Valley Golf Course near Cape Town, have proved restorative, the travails of the National Health Service are testing his patience back home. “I just had a letter, informing me it would be 13 or 17 weeks until my next appointment,” he sighs. “That’s why you pay,” Rachael says. Not even the privilege of being able to see specialists privately, however, can shake his sense that the country is being badly mismanaged.
“It’s finished,” he says of the NHS. “Brilliant idea, but like everything else in our country, it’s broken. We can’t solve illegal immigration, we can’t solve the NHS, we can’t solve anything. People voted not for Sir Keir Starmer but because they were fed up with the Conservatives. Except we all forgot how bad Labour were 14 years ago. It’s easy to forget, isn’t it? Memory dims. Now they’re doing the same things again. Making false promises, then breaking them.”
What is his deepest frustration with today’s political landscape? After a long pause, he replies: “People don’t follow through with what they say. Truth should matter. If anybody tells the stark truth, he or she is accused of being a rabble-rouser, a troublemaker. This is a wonderful country, but it needs radical change. It needs people who do what they say and say what they mean.”
If this sounds uncompromising, then so does his prescribed cure. “We don’t need all the MPs we have,” he says of the 650 making up the House of Commons. “I’d cut them in half tomorrow and pay them twice as much, maybe even tax-free. The salary’s crap, they won’t get the best people for that.” You can understand why Boycott would regard an MP’s basic annual wage of just over £91,000 as derisory. After all, he auctioned off a collection of his cricket memorabilia for more than twice that five years ago. But he is not finished yet, spelling out his programme for change in striking detail.
“I’d make MPs work from Monday lunchtime,” he explains. “They could fly down on Monday morning. I know you London people think the world begins and ends with you, but there’s a lot more of Britain. Then they’d be in the chamber from two to six, then nine to 5.30 Tuesday or Thursday like every b—– else. Friday, they could finish at lunch and go home. I wouldn’t allow them to have any of these contracts with companies, they’d need to be totally neutral. Otherwise you’re beholden to outside interests. I don’t want that, I want you to put forward what’s best for the country. As an MP, your first role is to do what’s best for the British people. F— the rest of the world. We’ll try to help them if there’s a tsunami or a big fire.”
Asked if he has perceived genuine sincerity in any politician, Boycott replies, unhesitatingly: “Margaret Thatcher. ‘The lady’s not for turning.’” He once expressed similar admiration for Theresa May, who would go on to award his knighthood in 2019, confessing that she used to have a poster of him on her bedroom wall. These days, his allegiances tend more towards Nigel Farage and Reform. Having maintained a friendship with Farage for several years, he says: “I like him. He’s a good guy and talks a lot of sense. More people will turn to him, because they’re fed up with the two main parties not being straight.”
Bazballers are ‘full of s—’
Boycott’s bluntness is central to his enduring appeal. Mark Nicholas, his former sidekick in the studio, recalls how he reacted in 2014 to learning that the inventor of Hawkeye, the technology behind cricket’s decision review system, had been awarded an OBE: “F— me, I might as well hang mine around the cat for all it’s worth.” Sadly, Boycott’s brutal verdicts on batting technique – his verdict today on England opener Zak Crawley is that “Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson wouldn’t take off their sweaters to bowl at him” – can no longer be heard on Test Match Special. He stepped aside from the BBC’s iconic programme in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. “They conveniently used Covid to retire him, so they didn’t have to use the age card,” Rachael argues.
He is more circumspect on this issue, anxious not to be seen to criticise ex-colleagues. But he leaves little doubt about his feelings that the show, synonymous as much with Henry Blofeld admiring pigeons on the outfield as with any actual cricket, has been watered down. “It’s like everywhere – politically correct, instead of employing the best,” he says. Conformity to prevailing opinion is not a trait you could ever impute to him, as he makes clear in his judgments on England’s free-wheeling Test team. Bazball? “If you want to be entertainers and not winners, join the Harlem Globetrotters.” Ben Stokes vowing that his side will never play for draws? “They’re full of s—.” Zak Crawley struggling to open the batting? “Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson wouldn’t take off their sweaters to bowl at him.”
As he polishes off the last of his orange jelly for dessert, Boycott is relishing the fact that he still has a voice to project. Despite the battles with his body and the changes in modern mores, he seems determined to savour every drop of life he has left. “They say a cat has nine lives,” he grins. “But one of my doctors reckons I’ve had at least 12.” He is reminded of a lady who used to watch him play for Yorkshire’s second team in 1962, and who gave her solicitor a letter to pass to Boycott when she died. “It said: ‘Adversity never breaks a good man. It fines him down again, like gold, to rise up again a better person.’”
More than ever, he is keeping that missive close to heart.
Telegraph.co.uk