Geoff Pullar

I was sad to read of the death of Geoff Pullar at the age of 79 on Christmas Day. The timing probably accounted for the delay in the appearance of the newspaper obituaries. The Telegraph beat the Indy by nearly a month and confirmed my recollection that Pullar had an apprenticeship in the jewellery trade to fall back on if his cricket career had not taken off. However, the Indy gave an alternative and much more plausible explanation for his nickname than the generally-accepted one:

He was known by the nickname Noddy, although not, as once was thought, because of his propensity for nodding off in the dressing room as he waited to bat. It was coined by his Lancashire colleague Ken Grieves, who likened Pullar’s red Triumph TR3 to the sports car Enid Blyton’s Noddy drove around Toytown.