Dennis Silk

Dennis Raoul Whitehall Silk CBE (born 8 October 1931) is a former schoolmaster and international cricketer. He was also a close friend of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, about whom he has spoken and written extensively.

Early life and cricket career

Silk was born in Eureka, California. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he gained an MA in History and represented Cambridge University at cricket. A useful opener or middle-order batsman, he scored centuries in the matches against Oxford University in 1953 and 1954, and captained Cambridge University in 1955. He went on to play first-class cricket for Somerset as an amateur during the school summer holidays, but gave priority to his teaching career.

He toured East Africa with the MCC in 1957–58, and captained the MCC on tours to South America in 1958–59 and to the USA and Canada in 1959 and 1967, none of which included first-class matches. He also captained a strong MCC team on a tour of New Zealand in 1960–61, which included 10 first-class matches, three of them against the full-strength New Zealand team. After the New Zealand tour he retired from first-class cricket.

His highest first-class score was 126 for Cambridge University against the MCC in 1953.^[1] He very seldom bowled his leg-breaks, and his single first-class wicket came in his second-last match, when he bowled Gerry Alexander in the MCC match against the Governor-General's XI in Auckland.^[2]

He later wrote two instructional books on playing cricket.

Teaching career

Having taught at Marlborough College, Silk moved on to Radley College, where he was Warden (headmaster) from 1968 to 1991. In this role he appeared prominently in the 1980 BBC documentary series, Public School. Eric Anderson, head master of Eton from 1980 to 1994, regarded Silk as the best headmaster in England, who transformed Radley from "a pretty ordinary place" to one of England's top schools.^[3]

When Silk retired from Radley, rather than accept gifts for himself he established the Dennis Silk Fund to support the education of talented boys whose parents might otherwise struggle to pay the school's fees.^[4]

He was Chairman of the Test and County Cricket Board from 1994 to 1996, and has also served as President of the MCC. He has been an Honorary Life Vice-President of the MCC since 2000.^[5] He was made a CBE in the 1995 New Year's Honours List for services to cricket and education.

Friendship with Siegfried Sassoon

During the early 1950s, Silk was introduced to the cricket-loving poet Siegfried Sassoon by a mutual acquaintance, Edmund Blunden. Until Sassoon's death in 1967, Silk was one of his closest friends, and made several unique recordings of the poet reading his own work at home in Heytesbury, Wiltshire. These formed the basis of a BBC Radio 4 programme on the subject: Siegfried Sassoon: a Friend. In 2009, Silk became President for life of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship.^[6]

In 2014, Silk and his wife, Diana (who also knew Siegfried Sassoon well), appeared on the BBC programme Countryfile in a feature on Sassoon's residence at Heytesbury.^[7]

Portrait bust of Dennis Silk

Dennis Silk sat for sculptor and former Radley College pupil Alan Thornhill for a portrait^[8] in clay. The correspondence file relating to the Silk portrait bust is held as part of the Thornhill Papers (2006:56) in the archive^[9] of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist.

Works

• Cricket (Hart-Davis, 1964)
• Attacking Cricket (Pelham, 1965)
• Siegfried Sassoon (Guinness lecture) (Michael Russell, 1975)
• T E Lawrence and Siegfried Sassoon: a Friendship (Reading Room Press, 2010)

References

Bibliography

• Siegfried's Journal (journal of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship) – no. 10

External links

• Dennis Silk at Cricket Archive
• Dennis Silk at ESPN Cricinfo
• Photograph of Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon and Dennis Silk listening to Test cricket on the radio
• How Silk transformed Radley
• Siegfried Sassoon reading 'The Dug-Out' with comments by Dennis Silk