“I love it,” says Geoff Thorpe, poignantly, as he describes the pleasure that he still experiences while watching videos of his son’s stellar cricket career.
“I love it,” says Geoff Thorpe, poignantly, as he describes the pleasure that he still experiences while watching videos of his son’s stellar cricket career.
He mentions the comeback hundred that Graham Thorpe scored against South Africa at the Oval in 2003, exactly a decade after he marked his England debut with an unbeaten Ashes century against Australia. That had not been done for 20 years.
There were also virtuoso performances in conditions as diverse as the WACA in Perth and a turning pitch in Colombo against Muttiah Muralitharan. “I watch the shots: the cover drives, the pulls – it’s a nice feeling,” says Geoff. “I’ve got one video where he got a hundred in the Benson & Hedges Cup. David Lloyd was commentating and he said, ‘Watch his eyes – he’s looking at the gaps’. You watch and think, ‘Yes, that’s where the ball went’.
“I have a lot of pride in what he did. You can’t take it away. It’s just a shame that he couldn’t cope with his mental health. When he died, I received a lot of letters. This suicide… this mental health… it’s a big, big problem. It smothers you if you don’t talk.
“I go to his grave occasionally. You have your moments of grief. But you try to find something to do very quickly. We all grieve differently. Sometimes us chaps are a little bit macho. We think we can cope. In fact we can’t.”
Geoff, alongside Thorpe’s wife Amanda and brothers Alan and Ian, was ever-present last week during a three-day inquest which, having briefly outlined Thorpe’s brilliant career – Sir Geoffrey Boycott, Kevin Pietersen, Joe Root and Sir Alastair Cook are the only Englishmen to have scored both 6,000 Test runs and averaged more than Thorpe’s 44.66 in the past 60 years – focused on the heartbreaking final three years of his life.
Inquests are intimate and necessarily intrusive affairs but the Thorpe family were never less than friendly and accommodating to the various observers – whether media, health professionals or legal representatives – who gathered inside Court Three at Surrey Coroner’s Court in Woking.
A verdict of suicide was recorded after Thorpe was struck by a train on the morning of August 4 last year, but not before the coroner Jonathan Stevens had heard about “shortcomings” in his NHS mental health provision and how his life “came crashing down” after he lost his job as England assistant coach following the 2021-22 Ashes tour.
Friday would have been Thorpe’s 56th birthday and, on the second day of the fifth India Test at the Oval ground he graced for 17 years with Surrey and England, ‘A Day for Thorpey’ will see trademark headbands sold to raise funds for the charity Mind.
Thorpe’s wife Amanda and their two daughters, Kitty, 23, and Emma who turns 20 on Saturday, are determined also to extract some light from the tragedy. Kitty instantly describes her dad as “kind, caring, fun”, who “taught me how to treat people with kindness and respect”.
Emma recalls their table football matches, how her “amazing dad” would “sing and dance” in the kitchen and always kept them “grounded”.
Amanda says that seeing how her “best friend and soulmate” succumbed, despite being the sort of person that people would naturally turn to for advice, was “terrifying” to witness. “It’s real, it is actually an illness and it’s not rational,” she says. “He was just a joy – he lived life but he got very ill.”
The story of this cricketing great actually began in the village of Wrecclesham, a few miles west of Farnham where the Thorpe family became synonymous with the local club.
Thorpe’s 83-year-old father Geoff was once the chairman. Brothers Ian and Alan, respectively now 60 and 58, were first-team captains. Their mother, Toni, was a valued scorer over several decades before her death in August 2022.
Club cricket was the bedrock of their lives and, from conversations during breaks at Thorpe’s inquest, it was clear that some of the happiest days were growing up in the uncomplicated amateur environment of simply playing with your mates before celebrating or commiserating over a few pints.
Alan says that Thorpe was always “head and shoulders” ahead of his contemporaries and recalls how, as a 15-year-old first-team debutant against the locally feared 6ft 3in fast bowler from Ashtead, he simply hooked his first-ball bouncer to the boundary on the way to a score of 90. No helmets in those days, too.
“I said, ‘How did you see that off the pitch?’ He replied, ‘I saw it out of his hand’,” says Alan. “He had so much more time than anyone else and, whenever he went up the levels, he just seemed to readjust.”
The story of how Thorpe came to bat left-handed is also surprisingly little-known.
“Initially he picked it up right-handed – the same as he used to bowl and write – but then he found that he could score easier in the garden left-handed,” explains Geoff. And what made it better to bat left-handed on the 15-foot ‘wicket’ in their garden? “Conifers,” says Geoff. “You scored more runs that way than the flowers in the other direction. The garden was on a slope – and the rhododendron basically was the bowling crease. We played to win. No one went easy on Graham because he was the youngest brother.”
Also an international schoolboy footballer and county-level long-jumper, Thorpe ultimately chose cricket as the focus for his prodigious sporting talent.
It followed being dropped from an under-18 football international against Scotland for being sent off in a local club match. The incident still irritates Geoff, who says that his son, a two-footed midfielder, had simply taken revenge on one of their “animals” after being on the receiving end of a dreadful tackle.
Thorpe was left in tears by the School FA’s decision and had already also taken up a place on the Surrey county staff. Geoff thinks that Thorpe’s comprehensive school upbringing – and experience of rather more unpredictable pitches – was very much to his advantage.
“If you know the bounce is not true then you play each ball on its merit,” he says.
He would quickly progress to rather more serious stages and, as a man who was never much one for rules, the intensely scrutinised environment of elite cricket evidently brought its challenges.
Relentless playing demands, particularly once he had also broken into the England team and was on regular overseas tours, made consistent contact with the wider family more sparing.
Mike Atherton, his long-time England captain, does not hesitate in using the word “great” in describing Thorpe and says that he was easily the best England batsman of that era.
Those innings against Australia in 1993, when he scored an unbeaten hundred on his debut, against Sri Lanka in 2001, where he so skilfully saw off Muralitharan for a series-winning century, and then another 100 on his comeback in 2003, are still talked about with a certain awe. The inquest, however, detailed how Thorpe was sometimes playing amid the backdrop of emotional turmoil.
The breakdown of his first marriage in 2001 had a significant impact, both financially and mentally, particularly due to the estrangement from two of his children. He became a supporter of Fathers4Justice (later wishing that he had gone out to bat with a sticker highlighting the cause) and would meet Amanda in 2003 when he stepped back from an international career that places him in a group of just 17 Englishmen to play 100 Tests.
He retired in 2005 due to a chronic back injury but, after coaching in Australia, returned to jobs with Surrey and then the ECB where, during 13 years, he was part of the coaching team when England so memorably won the 2019 World Cup.
Thorpe was first diagnosed with anxiety and depression in 2018, but continued working before his condition worsened significantly during the Covid pandemic and the England Ashes tour of Australia in 2021-22 that was played amid stringent lockdown rules and testing.
Thorpe’s inquest would hear he was then “distraught, horrified, ashamed and terrified” when a late-night video of a post-series social he had shared with some friends was leaked. He apologised personally to all the players and backroom staff.
England lost the series 4-0 and Thorpe, along with Chris Silverwood and Ashley Giles, was dismissed soon after returning to England. “There’s nothing worse than going to work on a Friday and there’s nothing on Monday,” says Geoff. The inquest heard that Thorpe “felt a failure, spiralled into depression” and became drained of confidence, with issues of anxiety and insomnia, loss of appetite, guilt, feeling a burden and not wanting to meet people.
He made a first attempt on his life on April 30, 2022, which left him unconscious for three weeks, and in intensive care for around five weeks. Geoff says that Graham would still help him around the garden after he came out of hospital – and recalls them planting trees together for the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee along the riverbank in Farnham – before he became even more seriously ill the following year.
According to Kitty, he aged “about 15 years” in this period and even the most simple tasks, like walking the beloved family dog Bertie, became a major effort. Alec Stewart, his old England and Surrey team-mate, says that he stopped responding to messages in March 2024 – the exact same month he last saw his psychiatrist.
Thorpe was not then visited by any member of his NHS care team before his death in August, despite frequently missing further appointments, and openly saying that he wanted to die. “It was awful to see – he just felt that no one could help him,” Amanda said.
Upon releasing news of his death last August, the family were taken aback by the reaction and are rightly determined that Friday should celebrate a life that, first through cricket and now his mental health challenges, has touched people far beyond his immediate circle.
“The girls and some of my friends were saying, ‘We didn’t realise how famous he was’ but that was how humble and normal he was,” says Amanda. “I think he knew how much we loved him, but I don’t know if he knew how much he was loved.”
His daughters are also determined to take forward the values he helped instil. “He made sure we were humble and grounded, and would tell us stories of the things he’d see and people he’d meet on tour,” says Kitty. “He’d see various ways of living and always remind us to be grateful for what we had. He taught me that life can have its challenges. He told me to never lose perspective: Zoom out and look at the bigger picture and will it matter in five years’ time? He taught me to make the most of every opportunity. I love and miss him so much but I’m so grateful to have grown up with him and will take his wisdom advice with me forever.”
Emma adds: “My dad was quite a private person, so for us to share his and our experience is important to help other people who have gone through similar things – to start a conversation, to reduce the shame and stigma there are.”
In concluding the inquest, assistant coroner Stevens took the rare step of speaking more widely about his legacy. He publicly commended the family for their “courage and openness” and highlighted the forthcoming ‘Day For Thorpey’ at which funds will be specifically used to roll out Mind’s ‘Bat and Chat’ community cricket sessions across the country.
“It’s a lovely tribute to a very special man,” said Stevens.
Category: General Sports
