The first time I laid eyes on Julian, my future business partner, it was two in the morning, and he was curled up asleep on someone’s patio, a building brick as a pillow, while a full-blown party raged around him. I later learned that this was one of his gifts: the ability to fall asleep anywhere, and make it look like he’d nabbed the cosiest spot. An hour later he was awake again, and drinking again, and dancing his crazy little shuffle-dance again - the life and soul.
It was 1987 and I’d been living for a few months in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand, a small town where poms like Julian and me were still a novelty. So much so that everyone I met seemed to want the two of us to meet.
A week after the party, I went to meet Julian properly in the factory where he worked: a cricket bat factory. Now, don’t stop reading if you’re not interested in cricket. Or factories. This story isn’t about either; it’s about Julian, eccentricity, and extraordinary craftsmanship.
The factory, the size of a tennis court, was an obstacle course of zinging bench saws, shrieking band saws, and whirling lathes and, despite the background hum of an industrial extraction system, the air was thick with sawdust. I’d never set foot in a factory before, so Julian led me through the labyrinth, explaining roughly what each machine was for. As they trundled trolleys of wood up and down the aisles between the machinery, I noticed the workers all deferentially make way for him. The tour ended at the far end where we came to Julian’s own, personal workbench, raised on a low plinth, strewn with hand tools, as if for him to give batmaking demonstrations to the workforce. And that’s when he offered to handcraft a bat for me.
A cricket bat, if you’ve never seen one, is a sort of mix of the blade of an oar and a baseball bat (it hurts me even to write that – a baseball bat is a blunt instrument and a cricket bat is a thing of beauty): the side that hits the ball (the face) is flat, and the back is elegantly and ingeniously shaped so that when you pick it up correctly, it feels lighter than it actually is. In the words of playwright Tom Stoppard: a cricket bat is “cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout.”
Julian started by putting on a leather apron and clamping a rough, splintery length of cricket bat willow into the vice on his bench. At this point, the wood is known as a blank and it looks as much like a finished cricket bat as that block of marble looked like David before Michelangelo started chipping away at it.
The batmaking process worked from coarse to fine: from rough hewing, to whittling, to sculpting, to sanding and, finally, polishing. After a couple of hours, once the bat was finished, Julian held up the finished article, looking along its length, scrutinising his handiwork, and invited me to do the same, twisting and turning it as I did so to admire its sleek, racing-car contours. Finally, as a salesman might do, he theatrically clouted the bat face with a rounded wooden gavel to give me an idea of the power within. The sound was like the clop of a horse’s hoof on cobbles. I held it, and weighed it, and swished it, and played an array of shadow cricket shots. The feel! The balance! My new bat was the most beautiful thing I’d ever held - a different class to the lumpy, clumsy, machine-made bats I was used to.
Although Julian seemed to have the soul of a wizened, old craftsman, we were, in fact, both in our mid-twenties, single, and twelve thousand miles from home. After my factory visit, it felt like Julian and I were mates, chatting easily and laughing. He told me that he’d been lured to New Zealand on the promise that he’d be handmaking bats, which he loved doing, but instead had ended up being persuaded to set up this factory. Nevertheless, at heart, he was still what he called a ‘podshaver’ - the traditional term for someone who crafted bats by hand. Reduced to a mere factory manager, Julian nurtured his soul by handmaking the odd cricket bat for local professionals and enthusiasts like me and, in his spare time, buying logs of black walnut and fashioning them into gun stocks.
We got on, Julian and I, but we were very different - an odd pair. I was university educated, conventional, well-spoken; Julian had left school when he was fifteen and was scruffy and chaotic. I was tall; he... wasn’t. I was side parting; he was bed head. I was trying to be a writer: writing and studying how to write. I relished and revered language. Julian had no time for reading, or writing, or language. He’d say pacific instead of specific, and make up words like irregardless and misunderstrue, or use malapropisms like “a mind of information” and “one foul swoop”. He’d say things to me like: “What’s the actual point of Shakespeare?” He pronounced ‘anything’ as anythink. As a mutual friend once said of us; I was more culture; he was more agriculture.
Despite our obvious differences, we ended up hanging out over that summer, enjoying the New Zealand lifestyle. We got drunk together, smoked dope together, went to parties together (where he’d drink, dance, fall asleep, then wake up and join the party again, as I’d witnessed that first time I met him). He taught me to fly-fish, even though it was clear to me he didn’t really know how. Which was a pattern with Julian. One windless day, he took me out in Tauranga harbour for my first go in a sailing boat. For an hour we bobbed helplessly in the middle of the busy shipping lane, our sail flapping pathetically, narrowly avoiding being crushed between the hulls of huge container ships. Eventually, over a cacophony of angry ship horns, I bellowed to him:
“What the hell do we do now?”
“I don’t know!”
“But you told me you’d spent your whole childhood on boats... Your uncle has a boat!”
“He does. A motorboat.”
We took up flying light aircraft together; separately, in fact, but at the same time, with the same instructor. Learning something at the same time, that was new for both of us, meant I was finally, empirically, able to gauge how much he knew what he was talking about. Not much, was the answer. But I was also coming to understand that it didn’t always matter. Sometimes just doing it mattered as much as being able to describe it prettily afterwards. Or even accurately.
Meanwhile, when we weren’t fishing, or sailing, or flying, we continued to nurture the seed of an idea that had been sown at that first meeting of starting a business together hand-making cricket bats.
We flew back to the UK at the end of the southern summer, in time for the northern cricket season, intent on starting the business right away, but first we needed to buy willow, find hand tools, design and print labels...
I’d done none of these things before so had to place myself in Julian’s hands. Of course, he threw himself in, acting as if this was all old hat. First, we bought a hundred lengths of willow (at this stage known as clefts) from a merchant’s yard in Essex, then we drove them up to a workshop in Yorkshire, where a man called Colin was going to trim them up, fit cane handles into them and, most importantly, press the flat faces, thus turning them into bat blanks, ready to be shaped by Julian. Colin was seventy years old, hair and beard frosted with sawdust, and had worked at the same big cricket bat company since he was fifteen using that selfsame press; an impressive, wrought iron machine the size of a small car. When he’d left, he’d bought the press from the company and, a couple of years later, when he finally retired, we’d end up buying it from him. As Julian told him what we needed, Colin used his forefinger to write notes into the film of sawdust that covered a nearby flat surface. By the time we left, a couple of hours later, a new layer of dust had obliterated them. If I’d been looking out for it, I’d have seen in Colin a future version of Julian.
The hand tools that Julian needed weren’t easy to find. Although drawknives and spokeshaves and smoothing planes are common, over the centuries they’d all minutely adapted to specific crafts (coopers, fletchers, wheelwrights). This was all pre-internet, and it took the whole summer to find tools with exactly the right depth and angle of blade and quality of steel for podshaving. We found them mostly in auctions and antique shops and, on one occasion, from the widow of the batmaker to whom Julian had first been apprenticed. Perhaps the most unique tool in podshaving is a horse shinbone, soaked in linseed oil; you lean on it and push it along the face of the bat to seal the wood, add a sheen, and show off the grains. I scanned the Yellow Pages for a possible source and eventually found a business that described itself as Horse Slaughterers. I phoned to ask if they might have a horse shinbone lying around and the proprietor informed me, in a rich West Country burr, that he didn’t.
“But I do ‘ave a gira-aaffe shinbone, if that’s any good to you.”
It turned out he’d recently “done a job” for a local safari park. It also turned out that a giraffe shinbone was better than good: it had the same properties as a horse shinbone, but was also long enough that we didn’t need to add a handle at either end.
Our original idea had been to start the business in Somerset, where I was living with my dad, but by the time we were ready it was September, and we’d run out of northern summer. Improvising, we pored over maps of the southern hemisphere. We considered South Africa (too crime-y), Zimbabwe (too chaotic), and New Zealand (well, we knew there was already a bat factory there!), so... Australia? We knew there was a bat factory in Melbourne, in the east, but maybe not all the way over on the other side. Perth, Western Australia, it was.
We shipped our hundred blanks to arrive ahead of us, packed the tools and our new bat labels into our luggage, and flew off. Not only did Julian bring his unique batmaking skills to the business, he’d also brought the most perfect, ye-olde surname: Millichamp. It’s customary in craft businesses to use the founders’ names, so Millichamp & Hall it was to be. A good start, but one that we immediately torpedoed by choosing a Gothic font that would have looked more at home tattoo-ed across the chest of the drummer in a heavy metal band. We then added a green, stripey background that was supposed to represent the mown outfield of a cricket ground but ended up looking like tartan-gone-wrong, and, finally, we superimposed the silhouette of a batsman. It all looked very amateurish and homemade. These bats would need to be good.
We were sweating like drug-smugglers as we went through Australian customs with our still-warm giraffe shinbone (“Any animal products in your bags, parts of animals, meat..?”), but once the officers heard why we were there, we were treated like sports stars. We cleared immigration and got a bus into central Perth, which is when we realised we didn’t have a clue what to do next. Thanks to jet lag, we ended up wandering the deserted city centre in the middle of the night, where we found a sports shop and, peering into the window, discovered that a household name brand of cricket bat sold for around A$200. Which meant... If we could sell all one hundred of ours, we’d be RICH!
Within a couple of days we’d located, in the Perth suburbs, a sports repair workshop run by a man called Chris who was constantly, and compulsively, peeling dried glue off his hands. He’d finish re-sewing tennis nets and re-stringing racquets at six in the evening, and we did a deal with him to take over the work bench from then. As long as the place was cleaned and ready for him to start again at nine the next morning, he was happy.
The only piece of equipment we needed was a motor to spin a shaft that would have a pneumatic sanding drum at one end and a polishing mop at the other. Again, with the help of the local Yellow Pages, we identified a local machine shop called Simmo’s Engineering. As with Colin in Yorkshire, and Chris in the sports repair shop, Simmo, daubed with smears of grease, immediately recognised a kindred spirit in Julian. In no time the two of them were talking ‘A’ frames, and thread directions, and revs per minute. Sensing it was time for me to contribute, I asked:
“How much is it going to be?”
“Hundred bucks,” Simmo growled.
“Don’t you need to see drawings or something?”
“Nah! Everything’s a hundred bucks. Long as it’s not too hiero-fuckin’-glyphic.”
A week later, Julian had installed the motorised spindle in Chris’s workshop, rigged a hood over it, attached to a vacuum cleaner - our extraction system - and Boom! We were on night shifts turning out a half-dozen finished cricket bats per night.
To spread our net as wide as possible, Julian and I joined different Perth cricket clubs. It always amazed me that for all Julian’s extraordinary talent when it came to making cricket bats, he was no cricketer. Nevertheless, Aussie cricketers liked him because he was ‘no bullshit’: he didn’t pretend he was better than he was, or knew more than he did. And they liked me because I was their ‘pet posh pom’, plus I was a decent player, and a qualified coach. Julian and I rehearsed and honed our patter together. And, like fairground barkers, we had tricks: we always kept a wooden gavel with us so we could do the old, clop-of-a-horse’s-hoof trick; we were able to lift anyone’s bat and accurately guess the weight; we never dissed any other brand of cricket bat; and - most importantly - our bats were awesome and new and different. They sold themselves. Also, little knowing that they hadn’t been first on the list, Perth cricketers seemed flattered that we’d chosen their often-overlooked city on the far edge of the continent. One way or another, it wasn’t long before our bats were in demand.
The next step up was when a couple of influential, specialist cricket shops took us under their wing (one owner always used to greet us with a raucous bellow of: “Here they are: Pete and Dud!” – Peter Cook and Dudley Moore). Such shops – and there were one or two in each major city - were usually eponymous, the owners being leading lights in local cricket: ex-internationals, journalists, commentators, or coaches. One way or another they were able to point us in the way of up-and-coming cricketers for us to ‘look after’ and boost our profile. It also turned out we were a good story for magazines and papers and local TV news. Before we knew it, we were being talked about. And selling out of bats.
Choosing Perth turned out to be a stroke of luck. As it happened, back then, Western Australians were well represented in the national side, which gave us direct access to international cricketers; Australians and beyond. And at the time, the Australian team were world-beaters: admired, respected, and revered. We replaced a handle here, repaired a crack there and, before we knew it, a couple of these stars were using our bats, albeit disguised by the labels of their official bat sponsors. But cricketers talk, and when batsmen talk, they talk about bats. At any given moment in any cricket dressing room, someone is always noodling around with someone else’s bat.
After just a couple of years, three-quarters of the forty Deloitte’s top-rated batsmen in the world were using bats that they had bought from us. Bought! Albeit at a slightly discounted price. Nevertheless, these were people who probably hadn’t paid out of their own pocket for a bat since they were fourteen years old. Because in Australia there isn’t the same separation between the amateur and professional game as there is in the UK, it meant that when not travelling the world with the national team, these pro’s would be playing for the same club they played for as boys. That, in turn, meant word of these new, magic bats spread straight back to our potential customers; people who’d buy them at full price.
Pretty soon, if felt like we couldn’t make enough bats. We were making a name for ourselves and making a bit of money. And that was the point of it, after all. But the best part of my job was still hanging out with the cricket superstars who visited our workshop. I would dart out of my office (a cubicle we’d erected in the corner of Chris’s workshop) to intercept them as soon as they arrived; partly because they were my heroes, but also to save them from Julian’s inane cricket waffle. For some reason, Julian always wanted to talk cricket with them, rather than batmaking, and he had a way of garbling the language of cricket. Correct cricket terminology can seem arcane, even comical, but there is a reason for it; as with, say, sailing, cricket involves many people, in different positions, facing in different directions, some left-handed, some right. When you’re fielding, you want to know which way to go when your captain shouts “straighter”, or “finer”, or “wider”, or “squarer”. And when your batting partner tells you “His wrong un’s hard to pick, but he tends to pitch it outside off”, you need to know what he means. Anyway, precise language is beautiful. And I thought that not using it when talking with a professional cricketer made you look a bit of a chump. But it probably speaks volumes about the kinds of people we were: I cared about that sort of stuff and he didn’t. Whether Julian was talking crap or not, it wasn’t long before these legends of the game were as absorbed in his podshaving wizardry as I had been that very first time in New Zealand.
One time, as I walked him out to his car, the Australian captain confided in me: “That bloke’s a bloody, batmaking God!” But it wasn’t just top professionals who recognised his genius. I remember a handwritten (blue biro on lined paper) request for a brochure that we received from a fourteen-year-old in Melbourne, that ended: “p.s. You Make Bloody Good Cricket Bats!”
Apart from trying to protect Julian from himself, I was also learning on the job how to run and plan a small business; accounts, projections, purchasing, we now employed a couple of apprentices, we started selling pads and gloves (imported from India), we improved our labels, we started selling to shops throughout Australia and New Zealand, and we also set up an operation on the other side of the world in Somerset.
My job was to do my job, but also to make sure Julian was doing his. He was unpredictable and high maintenance. Sometimes he went beyond and sometimes he fell short, but you never knew which it would be. Like any eccentric, he could be a pain in the arse. He could be late, or hungover, or even, on one occasion, still pissed. I’d often see him make a bat - a perfect bat, mind you - then curl up to sleep in the resulting knee-high nest of shavings around his workbench. Don’t get me wrong, we really were friends. But I did also feel like the adult.
Sometimes my job was to stop him trying to do my job. In the same way that no one wanted a bat made by me, no one wanted a cricket discussion with Julian, or, honestly, to hear his business ideas. For a short while, for instance, he became obsessed with the idea of a banana-shaped bat handle. I watched him explain its merits to some poor, bewildered club cricketer and get so carried away that he absent-mindedly dropped the last gasp of his still-lit cheroot into the breast pocket of his shirt. If you’ve ever wondered how much smoke smouldering cotton produces, the answer is: a surprising amount.
Not only did Julian do wild things, or normal things in a wild way, he’d then wildly exaggerate them. One time he got off his Olympic Airways flight to Perth in Skiathos, a refuelling stop in Greece. Assuming he was in Perth, he got off and insisted that a cab took him to the city centre. The journey took six hours, cost two hundred pounds, and, to his surprise, got him to the centre of Athens. On another occasion, he stopped-over in India, where our main supplier had invited him to be guest of honour at his niece’s wedding. Julian arrived in Perth a week later, full of stories about the epic wedding. By then we were used to his way of embellishing a story, so we just rolled our eyes and shook our heads as he described the three-day, whisky-fuelled event, with Julian the centre of attention, riding in on the back of an elephant, the only European guest, doing his shuffley dance in the middle of a circle of a thousand Indians, completely overshadowing the bride and groom who were perched atop a droopy, white horse. But then he showed us the photos: every single element was accurate.
On the other hand, I’d also meet people who’d tell me stories about Julian that I knew, categorically, to be made-up, either by him or by them. In that sense, Julian was, literally, a legend.
Our partnership lasted seven years, until we sold the Australian business to PUMA and Julian decided to stay out in Australia. In the UK, Millichamp & Hall exists till this day, forty years on, under the excellent stewardship of Rob Chambers and his team of master podshavers at the Somerset County Cricket Ground.
In those seven years, I always thought of it as an equal partnership. Occasionally, if he’d turned up late yet again, or tired, or hungover, I’d even convince myself that I was the lynchpin of the business, that it should, by rights, have been called Hall & Millichamp. But I was wrong, of course. It was, admittedly, not an overcrowded field, but Julian was, indisputably, the best bloody cricket bat maker in the world. Podshaver. And I’m proud that I got to work with him and call him my friend.
Postscript: this account was approved by Julian Millichamp, who’s alive and well and living modestly on board his own sailing boat, near Brisbane, Australia, with his wife Tracey. Steer clear of the shipping lanes, Jules!
I love your account Jono. What a legend the great Jules is. I am certainly privileged to have spent many years with Jules learning the trade of batmaking.
What a wonderful, beautifully written article. Thank you so much for sharing.