My friend Michael Burns, who has died aged 87, leaves a significant legacy as a cricket historian, both as film-maker and author. Cricket was central to his life – whether playing for many years for Malden Wanderers or coaching Surrey youth teams or being an often sceptical MCC member – and he had a deep understanding of the game, usually but not always transcending partisanship.
His films included histories of Surrey and Yorkshire, reviews of individual seasons, accounts of English tours of the 1950s, and a particularly evocative portrait of English cricket in the 60s. His three books culminated in Seven Summers (2022), the definitive story of how Surrey in the 50s reeled off a record seven consecutive county championship triumphs.
Mike was in some ways a classic product of the 1944 Education Act, which by creating free places at grammar schools did so much to shape the postwar meritocracy, owing everything to ability and hard work rather than connection and family background. The son of Iris and Philip Burns, he was born and grew up in Tolworth, part of south-west London’s outer suburbia; his father was in the wholesale fish business, his mother worked as a sales assistant; and Mike attended Raynes Park county grammar.
After school came a job in a paint-spraying factory and an unhappy spell in a stockbroker’s office, before in 1960 he started at ATV in Elstree as a trainee cameraman. From 1962 to 1974, he was based at Teddington Studios, firstly for ABC Weekend TV and then Thames. The Avengers, Armchair Theatre, Opportunity Knocks, The Sooty Show – these were just some of the popular programmes Mike worked on.
The turning-point of his life occurred in 1974. Applying for a grant to take a social science diploma at Ruskin College, Oxford, he was initially turned down by Kingston council, at a time when higher education grants for mature students were discretionary. That would have been that – until his MP, Norman Lamont, successfully put in a word. It was a two-year course, which led in turn to an undergraduate place at Keble College to study philosophy, politics and economics.
Four decades of largely fulfilling self-employment followed, mainly as a film-maker: not just about cricket, but also a history of the FA Cup as well as films commissioned by Shell, the International Transport Workers Federation, the Princess Alice Hospice, and the Royal Star and Garter Home.
Among much else, he ran the New York and London marathons; kept up his support of Chelsea (Roy Bentley was his first hero); mentored primary school children; read voraciously (Dickens above all); and acted as election agent for a Labour candidate, as it happened against Lamont.
Mike’s politics were solidly leftwing. After the Tory landslide of 2019, he remarked that his last remaining ambition was to live to see another Labour government and last summer’s election gave him considerable pleasure. A man of abiding decency and integrity, with an instinctive love of fair play, Mike was the most loyal of friends as well as wholly committed to his family.
In 1965, he married Mary Miller. She survives him, along with their children, James, Sally, John and Mark.
