WHY, FOR A person frequently surrounded by sycophants as well as genuine, doting admirers, was Wally Hammond for much of his career a solitary and even friendless figure?

Dozens of people I spoke to – some his confidants – said without a moment's prompting or any suggestion of what the lawyers call a leading question: `He was famous and feted. But he also struck us as a sad figure, unloved as well as worshipped … a loner.' This opinion, expressed in different ways, but meaning the same, was offered with no vindictive relish. Usually it was accompanied by a gentle shaking of the head, as if it was beyond the speaker's comprehension. `Loner' was used most of all. The term is somewhat ambiguous, but it can often be interpreted as a euphemism for a deeply, if privately, unhappy person.

Why did so many of his dressing-room contemporaries fail to warm to him? Distance is inclined to soften sentiments of that kind, in the way we end up eulogising old rascals at their funerals. But a number of Hammond's team-mates continued to express reservations about him for years afterwards. Some still do today. In one or two cases I was shaken by the measure of disaffection.

Why, as a senior player and then a captain, was Wally so sparing in his praise and encouragement of young, emerging cricketers? That was embarrassingly apparent at both county and Test level.

Why did he have to prove himself all the time socially? It was evident to those who knew him best. They noticed how successfully he discarded the gaucheness of his Cirencester Grammar School days, the studied refinement of his vowels. What a pity acquisition of these graces was not complemented by a less remote persona as he assumed power in the dressing-rooms. There was rarely more than a cursory `Good morning'. In moments of self-analysis, he acknowledged that he was incorrigibly moody. Team-mates used to say that on the occasional days when he arrived at the County Ground with cool smile and greeting he had a productive night.

`See Wally?' his mischievous county colleague Charlie Parker would whisper. `Must have dipped his wick last night.' It was possibly true. But one never really knew. Hammond's private life was not shared. He boasted about neither his cricket nor his conquests. Before, during and after his first marriage, he drove away from the ground on his own at the end of the day's play for what were assumed to be clandestine meetings. Speculation was rife among the players; hardly ever was there confirmation of a specific liaison.

It was Parker, the county's socialist philosopher, who one day turned to Tom Goddard and said: `Wally's a deep bugger.'

It was from Bert Williams, trainer of Bristol Rovers (where Wally had briefly been a professional footballer while qualifying for Gloucestershire) that I first heard of the nature of Hammond's illness during the 1925–26 tour of West Indies. Before that I had read about the mosquito bites and hadn't paid too much attention. They didn't seem of any great relevance. Gradually I became aware of the innuendoes, the whispers behind the hand, the odious hints.

 THE BELLS WERE ringing for matins on Sunday, April 4 1926 as the Ariguani docked at Avonmouth, bringing back the MCC party from their West Indies tour.

It was the ship's maiden voyage. There was the invigorating smell of fresh paint. The captain, handsomely attired, preened himself as if inordinately proud to be carrying a team of English cricketers, even if they were not quire the best that the country could muster. He shook them all by the hand, as they stepped in a self-conscious line from the promenade deck in preparation for their descent to dry land.

But where was Wally? Mrs Marion Hammond, a striking figure formidably clothed to protect her from the early spring winds that swept in off the estuary, scanned all those bronzed faces which had for three months absorbed the baking Caribbean sunshine.

Eventually Mrs Hammond spotted her son. Those supposedly stifling maternal instincts of hers caused her face to cloud instantly with concern. Wally was the last to reach the quayside, still gingerly gripping the supports as he stepped ashore. He was a shrunken figure, mostly obscured under his coat. Most of the players wore trilbies; he had a cap, wedged loosely against his ears. He looked listless and desperately ill. His mother could see that he had lost weight – as much as a stone and a half, as she discovered later. She embraced him, noting with alarm that his eyes were watery and unseeing. `Oh, Walter, you look dreadful – whatever's the trouble?'

Freddie Calthorpe, captain of the touring party, came up to Mrs Hammond. `Young Wally urgently needs someone to have a look at him. `He's got a raging temperature. We've been giving him dozens of aspirins, which was all we could do. He wants something more than that.' It was a understatement; for much of the journey back to England, Hammond had stayed in his cabin, sweating and occasionally hallucinating. He had eaten little. When some of the other pros looked in to see him, he had waved them away. It was too much effort to talk.

The following day he had the first of a dozen operations of varying gravity. The staff simply didn't know then what was wrong with him; they were working in the dark. They did their best to mask their concern every time Mrs Hammond looked pleadingly in silence towards them. One of Wally's legs had become grotesquely inflamed and it was learned later that an amputation was already being considered as a final option. His mother must have eaves-dropped on the premature discussion. She had once been tardy in endorsing a livelihood in professional cricket for him; now it was her persistence, springing it would seem from intuitive thoughts of burgeoning skills, mingled with a mother's love and panic, that ended any fears that he might have to lose a limb. `I understand they'd almost given me up for dead at one point,' he was to tell his friends in the eventual days of recovery.

The young Hammond in 1925, shortly before his fateful Caribbean trip

What he steadfastly didn't discuss with any of them, however well-meaning the enquiries, was the true nature of his illness: the reason for the nebulous, desultory statements from the county headquarters. When was he first taken ill? We can't be sure. He maintained that his groin was strained while he was playing in Georgetown (British Guiana, now Guyana) in February, and that was probably quite true. Later he was said to have been bitten by mosquitoes `in the same region', tempting one facetiously to wonder whether he was talking in the geographical or anatomical sense.

It is likely that for some time only the doctors and consultants who attended him at the nursing-home, an official or two from the county club who had been sworn to secrecy, and Hammond's circle of his closest mates – among them Bert Williams and Reg Sinfield, the Gloucestershire allrounder – knew for sure the nature of his illness. His mother never did. Nor, of course, did the girlfriends who visited him. Nor did the thousands who were beginning to pay homage at Bristol, Gloucester and Cheltenham.

A letter in one of the local papers, perhaps from an old soldier incapacitated by malaria, read: `The mosquito is a vicious creature – I can imagine what this young cricketer is going through.' But the truth was that Wally Hammond, though bitten by mosquitoes, was suffering from a far more insidious illness. He had contracted a form of syphilis or a related sexually transmitted disease in West Indies. Wretchedly, his body's reaction to the experimental treatment added to the tortures and uncertainties of his protracted recovery. My belief is that it permanently affected his mental make-up, his traits of character and even, up to a point, his career as one of the world's greatest cricketers.

 DURING A marvellous career, full of sublime innings, nonchalant slip catches, and timely wickets, Hammond often carried Gloucestershire. He went on, of course, to captain them, and then his country.

The latter years of his life were spent, with varying degrees of happiness and loneliness, in South Africa. A dreadful car crash almost killed him. Then, in July 1965, still in his early sixties, he died of a heart attack.

The obituaries had been uniformly glowing. Just a hint here and there of his moodiness, his difficulty or unwillingness to communicate with other players. The words, hurriedly penned by famous contemporaries at the time of his hideous accident, were now retrieved from the newspaper libraries.

After all the column inches of eulogy, after we had all walked away from the memorial service in Bristol Cathedral, it was not long before worrying reports were filtering back from South Africa. Wally had left no money. He'd made absolutely no provision for his family. They, for their part, probably hadn't been aware just how badly off he was. All his life he'd hated talking about money; when he had it he simply spent it – at the bar or the tailor's. His family didn't go short but there were latterly few luxuries for them.

Well-meaning friends back in the West Country made discreet call to bank managers in Durban and spoke in confidence again to Sybil. They had quickly heard enough. A number of meetings were held, one with the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton House.

Barely three months after Hammond's death the Memorial Fund was set up. From the county ground went out a letter to all members and known friends. It was signed by the Dukes of Beaufort and Norfolk, both past presidents of MCC, as well as by Gubby Allen, Bev Lyon, Basil Allen and others.

It is important to reflect again on the extent of the mental burdens that weighed him down. If he became almost paranoid on occasions, imagining that team-mates and opponents were engaged in their whispering campaigns – about past illness and even the colour of his skin – we should not be too surprised. The gossips never let him forget the miseries of his Caribbean illness. For his part, did he, I wonder, every try to work out why he was subject to so many black moods, unpredictable bouts of depression and an inclination to withdraw from those around him? Did he ever consider the possibility, as we now can dispassionately at this distance, that he may well have suffered lasting damage from the toxic chemicals introduced as medication to his ailing system?

 Hammond (circled) fell ill during the 1925–26 MCC tour of West Indies. The full team was (at back) L. G. Crawley, G. C. Collins. Back row: F. B. Watson, C. F. Root, W. R. Hammond, E. J. Smith, W. E. Astill, R. Kilner, P. Holmes. Front: T. H. Carlton Levick (manager), H. L. Dales, Hon. L. H. Tennyson, Hon. F. S. G. Calthorpe (capt), T. O. Jameson, C. T. Bennett

My seeming obsession with his illness has nothing to do with prurience. I see it as an undeniable factor in his unstable temperament which, as all the evidence reveals, took effect from the late 1920s onwards. As my final word on subject, I can only hope that the petty and the pious don't take a censorious view of the great cricketer on this account. If they condemn him, I have failed. Captain James Cook, a farm labourer's son, was no less a hero of exploration because he contracted venereal disease on his travels. Charles Baudelaire, extolled by Hugo and Flaubert, was no less a great poet because of the venereal demons that ravaged his body.

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