Profile: Tony Lewis

Captain of England on Test debut, Millennium President of MCC, Chairman of Glamorgan County Cricket Club, a writer and broadcaster on the game internationally for twenty-five years, Tony Lewis has been a central figure in English and Welsh cricket since his debut for Glamorgan while still in school, at the age of 17.

While at Christ’s College, Cambridge he read history and also won a double Blue as a freshman – rugby and cricket – leading the University cricket team in 1962.

During his six year tenure of Glamorgan’s captaincy, he led his club to the County Championship title in 1969. His first Test series was against India, and at Delhi in December 1972 led England to a Christmas Day win with his second innings score of 70 not out. At Kanpur in the fourth Test he scored his one and only Test century, 125. After a series against Pakistan he eventually gave in to seasons of knee trouble and became the Sunday Telegraph’s cricket correspondent, Test Match Special commentator and soon, the front of BBC TV cricket until 1998.

For years Lewis and Lord’s have been inextricably linked: he played for the Gentlemen in the last ever Gents v Players match in 1962 before making tours with the Club to South America, captaining MCC tours to Ceylon and the Far East, and to the United States. He wrote the Club’s official history, Double Century in 1987. During his two-year presidency, 1998-2000, he oversaw revolutionary changes.

In 1999, women were admitted to MCC for the first time in the Club’s 212-year history, and the Club fielded its first women’s team. He was a prime mover in the creation of the new Media Centre, opened during his presidency; the spirit of cricket entered the Laws in his second year, May 2000. Lewis next took over the Cricket Committee, 2003- 2008, with responsibilities for the Laws of Cricket and all of the Club’s cricket matters.

Believing that MCC should ‘do’ something not just ’be’ something he persuaded the England and Wales Board to allow MCC to run the Universities Centres of excellence and in 2006 Lewis founded and chaired MCC’s World Cricket Committee, composed of the highest calibre of contributors to world cricket. It has given the Club a strong, independent voice in world affairs and, linked to the Club’s custodianship of the Laws of the Game, has created a more robust regime of research and development based on the Nursery End at Lord’s.

But Lewis’s whole career was not only in cricket. He wrote and broadcast on many subjects, especially the arts; for eight years he chaired the Wales Tourist Board and sat on the British Tourist Authority; he chaired the successful Welsh bid to stage the Ryder Cup in Celtic Manor in 2010; for five years he worked as a consultant for Newport University on the development of a new city centre campus.

All his work for MCC, since his first sub-committees in 1967, has been in honorary roles, as with Glamorgan cricket and his recent chairmanship of the Welsh National Opera company.