In early 1959, ahead of the start of a new cricket season, the Gloucestershire vice-chairman, Sir Percy Lister, met a 21-year-old Lloyds insurance broker for lunch at the Savoy Hotel, London. Tom Pugh, an amateur cricketer and Old Etonian, had been recommended to Lister by the former Surrey captain, Percy Fender. Pugh had the potential, Fender believed, to be the next Ted Dexter. Over lunch, a contract was agreed whereby Pugh would take four months’ leave from his Lloyds’ job, move to Bristol, and attempt to gain a place in the Gloucestershire first team. The lunch did not end entirely satisfactorily for Pugh, however. Having ordered fish soup, he went down with food poisoning and was later rebuked by his father for drinking red wine with seafood. As a start, it did not bode well.
Pugh spent much of his first summer on the fringes of the Gloucestershire First XI, playing only a handful of games. Profiled in Bristol’s Green ‘Un newspaper, he was described as a “promising opening batsman … one of the few amateurs left in the accepted sense.” Pugh’s chances of selection were limited as the Gloucestershire captain, Tom Graveney, favoured picking young professional cricketers. Whilst Pugh struggled to gain much playing time, he had plenty else to keep him occupied. He regularly played rackets competitively and, at the end of his first summer in Bristol, he went off to the USA for six weeks to take part in a rackets competition. Suave and good-looking, Pugh also advertised cigarettes on TV; from these he caught the eye of the producers of the first James Bond film, Dr No, and made it on to the shortlist of actors to play 007 himself.
Although Pugh was beaten to the role by Sean Connery, he had other links to Bond. His first wife, Kitty Green, was a model who appeared in the Bond film Thunderball. It is said that the director of the film stopped her from sitting near Connery in one scene, for fear that her beauty would overshadow that of the leading lady, Claudine Auger. He even played cricket at Eton with Henry Blofeld – a man whose family name provided an inspiration to Bond author Ian Fleming for the supervillain. At Eton, Pugh stood at first slip whilst Blofeld kept wicket. Blofeld, who went on to have a successful career as a cricket commentator, remembered Pugh as “a man-made batsman, rather than a natural, a terrific fighter.” Pugh enjoyed reading Fleming’s Bond books but was said to have been unimpressed by the films; according to the Telegraph, he considered Roger Moore far too old to play 007.
Pugh’s second year at Gloucestershire marked his breakthrough. During the summer of 1960, an injury crisis led him to be selected regularly. Playing 23 Championship matches, he found that his lack of natural talent limited his achievements. The fighting qualities which Blofeld described were on full display in June against Derbyshire at Chesterfield. After being hit on the head early in his innings, he went on to score his maiden (and only) first-class century. In the course of compiling his 137, he put on 256 for the second wicket with his captain, Graveney. This became Gloucestershire’s record second-wicket partnership and remains so against Derbyshire to this day. It was one of contrasts. Whilst Graveney stroked the ball around fluently, Pugh showed off his own man-made technique. As the Gloucestershire all-rounder Tony Brown later recalled, Pugh’s batting was in some way influenced by his rackets background. “He was used to a high bouncing ball, so when they pitched short, like that day at Chesterfield, it played to his strength,” he said. “Instead of three slips, they should have had three third men.”
Pugh became an established member of the First XI during the summer of 1960, but he only averaged 22 with the bat. His form matched that of the team – who finished eighth in the Championship (having been runners-up the previous summer). It seemed as if Graveney, as captain, was blamed for this disappointment. In November, he was removed from his position by the committee and, to the surprise of many, replaced by Pugh. The committee had always wanted an amateur as captain and Chairman Sir William Grant said that Pugh “should develop into a first-class captain who would lead the players successfully and give every assistance to the club.”
Graveney was disappointed to be replaced, although he later admitted that he “never enjoyed being captain”. He was, however, outraged by the way his removal had been carried out and discovered that the committee had decided to groom Pugh to take over two years earlier. He concluded that he could no longer play for the county. “I felt they treated me appallingly and I had no choice but to leave.” Graveney left Gloucestershire but was forced to sit out the whole of the 1961 season, having to wait until 1962 to qualify to play for Worcestershire.
Pugh was faced with problems from the very start of his captaincy. Described regularly in the press as an “unknown”, he was displacing a Gloucestershire legend, was not necessarily considered worth his place in the First XI and seemed to be hand-picked by the Gloucestershire committee because of his background rather than his abilities. Ian Wooldridge summed up his problems in the London Weekly Dispatch: “Old Etonian Tom Pugh. The two-word description is dangled almost accusingly in front of his name every time it appears in the newspapers. By implication it is as damaging as a ball and chain. It hints darkly, though not directly, that an upper-class cartel has again been meddling in the many affairs of our sport. That Tom Graveney, idol of a decade of young cricketers, has been deposed from the professional captaincy of Gloucestershire simply because an amateur and a gentleman has happened across the horizon in their direction.”
Graveney, Wooldridge wrote, had done little to dispel this narrative. Whilst that may have been the case, it does not seem that Graveney had an animus with Pugh. The two men met for a game of golf in January 1961 after Graveney had made clear he would no longer play for Gloucestershire. Pugh was, Graveney later said, “mad enough to take [the captaincy] on and could easily have done it well”. He did not appear, however, to greatly rate his successor’s ability as a cricketer – “he could bat but his main asset was his enthusiasm”.
Pugh’s captaincy got off to the worst possible start when, during only his fifth game in charge, he suffered a broken jaw playing against Northamptonshire at Peterborough. To add insult to injury, he was given out lbw as he lay on the pitch. Expecting a bouncer, he had ducked a full toss bowled by the Northants quick, David Larter, and ended up in hospital. He did not play for another two months but was reappointed captain at the end of the 1961 season. 1962 was not without its successes – Gloucestershire won 14 first-class games under Pugh’s captaincy, finishing 4th, yet by July the Gloucestershire members were already seeking to petition the committee to replace him as captain. They believed that he was simply not worth his place as a batsman – averaging under 15 – and, by the end of the summer, the noise for him to be removed had become unrelenting. The Gloucester Citizen campaigned for his dismissal and ran a headline For God’s Sake Go; by November, he had, replaced by the 38-year-old Ken Graveney, brother of Tom, who had not played first-class cricket for a decade owing to injury.
Having been replaced, Pugh got a sympathetic hearing in the Bristol Evening Post. He had been on a hiding to nothing, wrote Peter Godsiff: “he was a good club cricketer with little first-class cricket experience, and he was asked to follow Gloucestershire idol Tom Graveney as captain amid the biggest cricket controversy for decades. It was an appointment that never should have been made. The committee, at the time, were largely to blame for asking him to take over… His enthusiasm, charm and gritty determination never made up for his cricketing deficiencies.”
The end of Pugh’s time as Gloucestershire captain marked the end of his cricketing career. He never played a first-class game again and was said to have felt very bruised about the whole business. Such bitterness never left him, it seems, and he later declined to attend old players’ reunions.
Pugh instead turned his attention to business – selling flowers and setting up a landscaping gardening company in South Kensington – and his other sporting love of rackets. In January 1964 he beat Colin Cowdrey in the quarter-finals of the amateur rackets championships at Queen’s Club in London before being beaten himself in the semis. The sport attracted several cricketers; Sussex wicket-keeper Mike Griffith played in the same tournament whilst Pugh had previously played doubles with the Hampshire captain Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie.
Able to concentrate fully on rackets following his departure from cricket, Pugh thrived. He won multiple doubles titles – both amateur tournaments and Combined Services Past and Present events – and was, according to The Times, “one of the foremost doubles players in the world”. Pugh’s rackets exploits would, from time to time, be featured in the press. In 1970, he told the Bristol Evening Post of how he had struggled with injury for several years and had had a disc removed from his back. Despite fears that he may not walk again and another injury setback when snapping his Achilles tendon, Pugh continued to win amateur tournaments until he was 40 and successfully competed in Old Etonian competitions until he was nearly 50.
In many ways rackets was a successful hobby for Pugh. At the same time, he continued to build up commercial interests. Alongside gardening and landscaping businesses, he organised karaoke evenings and later opened a nightclub. He imported karaoke machines from the USA and initially ran nights at Queen’s Club – which he knew well from rackets. He later branched out to arrange profitable nights in Florida. He was said to have even designed t-shirts to be sold at the karaoke nights proclaiming, “At Last Your Chance To Murder Barry Manilow”. Manilow was later offered one but was reportedly less than impressed.
In time, however, Pugh’s thriving business empire was threatened. His Chelsea nightclub, King Sauna, was raided by police who believed it was being used as a brothel. Pugh found his name in the News of the World and was later charged under the Sexual Offences Act with ‘keeping or managing a brothel’. With his business interests and liberty in jeopardy, he was eventually acquitted in a magistrates’ court.
In the end, the court case marked just another part of Pugh’s extraordinary life. In some ways, his life could be seen as that of a nearly man, a man who did not become James Bond, who did not become a successful county cricketer. But that would be to underestimate his successes – a true great in rackets, surely the only county cricket captain to have been considered for the role of 007, the man who captained Gloucestershire to their most first-class wins in a season, and a highly successful businessman. From rackets to advertising, karaoke nights to court appearances, his story was full of adventures. One of the last true amateurs, he really was a genuine one-off.
