Frances Edmonds: There was horrible bullying on tour with England’s cricketers

Simon BriggsSun, August 23, 2026 at 6:30 AM UTC

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Frances Edmonds remains as effervescent as her prose in an exclusive interview with Simon Briggs - Belinda Jiao for The Telegraph

“Like Oscar Wilde, I’d go to jail for the sake of a good one-liner.” This is more than just a quote from Frances Edmonds – interpreter, author and irrepressible wife of 1980s spin maestro Phil Edmonds. It is a mission statement.

In truth, Edmonds has never been sent to jail. But she was certainly sent to Coventry by several members of the England cricket team in 1986: the year she accompanied her husband on the infamous “Blackwash” tour of the West Indies.

Edmonds was in the process of writing a book at the time: a genre-bending, iconoclastic book, which was eventually published 40 years ago this week. Scabrously funny and wonderfully indiscreet, Another Bloody Tour turned the ill-fated progress of 17 disillusioned cricketers around the Caribbean into a literary sitcom.

“The solids hit the fan in the West Indies on every level,” Edmonds recalls now. “To start with, the home side were a vastly superior team, with four Exocet merchants operating on pitches that suited them. Then, on a political level, we had the South African rebels [who had recently returned from a four-year ban after breaking the Gleneagles Agreement with an unsanctioned tour]. There was this Lester Bird character [the prime minister of Antigua] who was always kicking up a fuss.

“The poor guy who got it in the neck the most was Graham Gooch, who had been the leader of the so-called rebel faction. People kept asking, ‘Is Gooch going to leave? Is he going to stay?’ There was a group of islanders saying they didn’t want the rebels. I mean, it was just a nightmare. And when that happens, that tests friendships. That tests relationships.

“There was horrible bullying behaviour. If you were the dominant person in the dressing room, you would make it very clear that ‘I’m the top dog in here’. It really was an ugly tour. In fact, I’m still on a hit list in Antigua. I wrote something about how the governance of the island was a bit hokey-cokey, because three people ran everything and they were all in the same family. And I got a letter under my hotel door saying ‘You’re not welcome here. Please leave.’”

Forty years on, Edmonds remains as effervescent as her prose. We meet in a cafe near her home in Notting Hill, where she sports a vibrant gold jacket and has placed a copy of Another Bloody Tour on the table for identification, rather in the manner of an undercover agent wearing a scarlet carnation.

On arrival, I bring out my own copy of the book and slide it across to her to be signed. (What can I say? I’m a fan.) It is another sun-kissed day in west London, and the room is busy. What with the tightly packed tables and the buzz of conversation, I fear for the integrity of my tape recording. Happily, though, our neighbours on both sides move on after 15 minutes, whereupon Edmonds leans over with a conspiratorial air and whispers “Thank God they’ve cleared away. We don’t need to hear their paltry melodramas about his business that’s gone wrong and her marriage that’s failing.”

Edmonds was an interpreter before unexpectedly turning her hand to writing - Belinda Jiao for The Telegraph

I had been blissfully unaware of both these narratives, but then Edmonds spent more than a decade as a simultaneous translator at the European Commission in Brussels, which means that she can easily process three conversations at once. She would indeed have made a handy recruit for MI6 if only she were better at keeping a low profile.

Her pivot from interpreting to writing began unexpectedly. When Phil Edmonds was offered a contract for a ghosted autobiography, shortly before that 1986 tour of the West Indies, he replied that he would only sign up if Frances got to write a book of her own. “I was going to come with him anyhow because my brother [an eye surgeon] was out in Jamaica at the time,” she has previously explained, “and Phil said ‘Don’t think you’re going to sit in a hammock for four months drinking pina coladas. You can do something to pay the gin bill’.”

Another Bloody Tour takes withering aim at all sorts of targets, from muck-raking journalists to high-handed mandarins at Lord’s, many of the best passages skewer Phil himself. When they met at Cambridge University, she wrote, he was “an extraordinarily striking man: 6ft 3in tall, tanned, sporting a Blues’ blazer and shocks of blond hair. He is still 6ft 3in tall, but has subsequently lost the tan and the Blues’ blazer. Now he’s losing the hair. I often ask him if he’d continue loving me if I were 15 stone and balding”.

Are they still together today? “Well, we’re still married, but we’re separated – happily separated. He’s a non-dom – a Zambian – and he spends a lot of time in Zambia. I mean, I saw him on Monday. I’ll see him again on Friday. He’s in this country at the moment, so we get on extremely well.

The couple are ‘still married, but happily separated’ - Adrian M/Getty Images

“We disagree on just about everything. On Brexit, of course, he was a Brexiteer. I was a Remainer. But it was always good fun, I have to say. Keeps you sharp!”

Since his retirement from cricket in 1987, Phil Edmonds’s business career has been tarnished by a Global Witness investigation into his dealings in Africa, where he has presided over profitable interests in mining companies and medical clinics. Frances’s view – partial as it might be – is that he has been unfairly smeared by rival operators. She has also previously spoken about his passion for helping Zambian children at a school he has supported in Lusaka.

“Phil always had other things going on,” she tells me. “The cricketing authorities thought he was spending too much time in business, and the business fraternity thought he was spending too much time playing cricket. Eventually, you have to make a choice, and after the success of the 1986-87 Ashes tour [which gave rise to her second book, Cricket XXXX Cricket] it was time to go.”

The question of how to cope with retirement – whether sporting or otherwise – is something that Edmonds addresses in her most recent book, Repotting Your Life. As she points out, the challenge is particularly stark for athletes: a group of people who are often said to die twice, the first time when they hang up their bats, rackets or boots.

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When Cricket XXXX Cricket was republished in 2015, Edmonds wrote a new preface in which she mourned the loss of “two of the cricketers mentioned in this account, both friends and both terrific men, [who] have subsequently committed suicide”. The reference was to David “Bluey” Bairstow and Peter Roebuck, and this tragic pattern has continued in recent times with 2024’s devastating loss of Graham Thorpe. More historically, she observes, the prevalence of post-cricket depression is so high that it inspired a book: Silence of the Heart, by David Frith, the former Wisden Cricket Monthly editor.

“Cricket is so all-embracing,” Edmonds says, “and you feel like part of a family. For Phil, it would be breakfast at Lord’s, lunch at Lord’s, tea at Lord’s, drinks at Lord’s – wash, rinse, repeat. It’s an organising principle that moves you along. And when that organising principle goes, unless you’ve got some structure in your life to support you through that transition, I think you’re in trouble.

“In the days when we were playing cricket, I noticed that as a normal human being going to a cocktail party, you’ve got to make an effort to talk, to find common ground. The cricketers didn’t have to do that. They thought they were all great conversationalists because people were always talking to them in terms of their interests and who they were, even if they were being introduced to the Queen or Margaret Thatcher. Then, all of a sudden, that stops. All those skills that we’ve had to develop in growing up are atrophied with these people, and they have to start working on them.”

While writing Another Bloody Tour, Edmonds found some members of the England family more welcoming than others. Her favourites were the “unflaggingly cheerful” Allan Lamb, another colonial expat like her husband, and David Gower, the long-suffering captain – “a man of such affable kindness, and genuine humanity... his greatest sin is that he continues to treat his players as adults”.

On the other side of the coin was Gooch, who gave her the cold shoulder. Four years before returning to the Caribbean as the captain of a much more competitive England squad, Gooch was clearly miserable, not only because of political persecution from the likes of Lester Bird, but also because he missed his family – especially his young daughter Hannah.

And then there was Ian Botham, always the spiritual heart of the side. Having previously taken a few pot shots at Botham, including one suggestion in the Daily Express that he was “in no way inhibited by a capacity to over-intellectualise”, Edmonds wrote in her book that “he does not appear to harbour a grudge”. But she also pointed out that his close relationship with Somerset team-mate Viv Richards might not have been in the team’s best interests. “Observers have commented sweetly on how nice it is to see Ian Botham at the wicket, having a laugh and a jape with the godfather of his first son and his best chum... [yet] there is only one winner in these Botham-Richards exchanges of wit and repartee... Richards does not have the look of a jolly conversationalist when he’s at the crease.”

Phil Edmonds (right) and Allan Lamb (centre) pour champagne over team-mate Ian Botham - Getty Images

The real villains of the book were the misogynists in the press room and the committee room: men who, she wrote, “seem to find no objection to the multitudes of groupies and assorted bits of fluff that congregate like tumble weed around any touring party... it is only the appearance of the bona fide wives and consorts which is liable to criticism.” In chapter two, Phil received what she described as “an intergalactic bollocking” from the secretary of the Test and County Cricket Board for inviting his wife to be present before the specified “conjugal visit” – which only began six weeks into the tour. Their solution was a simple one: she would book a nearby hotel, then pick him up in the evening from the room he was supposed to be sharing with Peter Willey, before dropping him off again at 6.30am.

Students of newspaper history might observe that 1986 represented a turning point for the “What goes on tour, stays on tour” school of reporting. As Edmonds pointed out in Another Bloody Tour, “It is touchingly surprising how desperately discreet and paternally protective the genuine cricket correspondents are, and the lengths to which they will go to keep the lid on things.” But a new breed of writers, not all of them attached to sports desks, had begun to follow Botham around.

Before the final Test, the News of the World ran the notorious “bed-breaking” exclusive with ex-Miss Barbados Lindy Field, in which she detailed an alleged night of passion with Botham in exhaustive detail. The following winter, the same newspaper would up the ante by sending four prostitutes to Brisbane on a honeytrap operation. The plot was foiled when a reporter tipped off Micky Stewart – who was then the newly appointed England manager, charged with improving the team ethos – and he intercepted them in the hotel lobby.

There has never been another book like Another Bloody Tour. And when I put it to Edmonds that her nearest modern equivalents are probably influencers such as Morgan Riddle, the social-media celebrity who tried to educate her followers about tennis while dating American No 1 Taylor Fritz, she recoils physically.

“Oh, the social-media platforms are not for me. I like a wider canvas. I mean, that’s half the problem, isn’t it? If you can’t get it across in two seconds, then we’re not listening. It’s the same as cricket. Who’s going to sit there for five days, waiting for a result? I’m still part of the old brigade, because I want to go back to the primary source. I say, just give me a blank piece of paper and a pen. It’s a generational thing.”

Edmonds’s eyes widen as her hummingbird mind alights on a related theme. Suddenly, she is coming off her long run in a manner that would have impressed Bob Willis.

“And then, we had the recent resignation of an England captain who just decided to do it on Instagram in the middle of a Test! I mean, in what parallel universe are we working here? The guy’s a great cricketer, but I was quite horrified at that. What are you thinking? Messing around with the batting order? Taking a nice little video recording before you do it? Who do you think you are? Do you care nothing about the game and what it represents? Behaviour, manners, all those things?

Edmonds was ‘horrified’ at the way in which Ben Stokes went about his England resignation - Gareth Copley/Getty Images

“That’s what we love about cricket. Being a decent human being was basically what the game was all about. I love the idea that it never had rules, it only ever had Laws, like the Ten Commandments. If we all behaved like this, cricket says, the world would be a better place. And yes, some of the ‘Spirit of Cricket’ might have been an illusion. But at least there were things to aspire to. Like, if you’re out, you walk. Shake the man’s hand, whether you’ve won or lost. I think cricket of all sports taught people that. When we lose that, we lose something that was elemental and part of the fabric of our cultural life, which I think is as sad as you can get.”

How closely does she follow the modern game? “Oh, I’ll watch if it’s on. You know, I won’t go out of my way necessarily. I used to say that I watched cricket through the meniscus of a large gin and tonic, but I don’t drink gin and tonic anymore, so now it’s through the meniscus of some fizzy water. But I still go to Lord’s. If I’m in a box, not too hot, with the sun shining, there’s nothing like being at Lord’s on a Test-match day.”

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