Whatever the fortunes of England's cricketers as they battle to retain the Ashes, their hardcore supporters will never take a backward step. Tim de Lisle meets the general and footsoldiers of the Barmy Army


When the last Ashes series took place, in the summer of 2005, two startling things happened. For the first time in 18 years, England won. And for the first time ever, the England supporters went mad - not just at the end, in the delirium of victory, but consistently, throughout the summer, as one heart-stopping finish followed another. In Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham and finally at the Oval in London, the England players found themselves carried along on waves of raucous exuberance. 'The grounds this summer have been totally different to what I've experienced before,' the England captain, Michael Vaughan, said afterwards. 'The support has been very intense and it's certainly driven us on to play some good cricket.' It had been, he added, like having an extra player.

For decades, the sound of the crowd at Test matches in England had been much like the sound of silence. If you couldn't quite hear a pin drop, you could certainly make out the popping of a cork or the rustle of a Daily Telegraph. The loudest noise would be a ripple of polite applause, prompted by a batsman reaching 50 or a bowler completing a maiden over. The atmosphere was closer to church than to a sporting arena.

But last year, things changed dramatically. There was singing, led by a trumpeter playing in the stands, and the songbook ranged from Jerusalem to chants for individual players set to well-worn tunes such as Yellow Submarine, and laced with humour or vitriol. There was even dancing. The Barmy Army, as England's most vocal fans call themselves, had taken over the asylum. Like the monarchy in 1997, cricket had reached its Diana moment, and found that its traditional stoicism could not hold back the tide of mass emotion.

The day after winning the Ashes, the England team took a triumphal open-top bus ride through central London. They arrived in Trafalgar Square and gave interviews live on television: like a royal wedding, the occasion was so big that it was shown on two channels at once. (Unlike at a royal wedding, the central figure, Andrew Flintoff, was palpably plastered.) The Barmy Army's part in the victory was acknowledged with a separate stage set up to accommodate its leading members, notably Vic Flowers, the cheerleader who looks so like Jimmy Savile that he is often addressed as Jimmy. One of the star players, Kevin Pietersen, beckoned to Flowers and the Barmy Army's trumpeter, Bill Cooper, to join them on the main stage. A security man barred their way, but the England coach, Duncan Fletcher, intervened to let them through.

There has long been an archetypal image of the English cricket lover: white, male, middle-class, wearing a panama hat and an MCC tie, possibly carrying a picnic hamper. That figure is alive and well, especially at Lord's. But the Barmy Army phenomenon has provided a new stereotype: young, boisterous, carrying a tray of lager, and wearing either a replica shirt or a fancy-dress
costume - for reasons that are mysterious, groups of fans have taken to turning up at Test matches clad as everything from nuns to root vegetables.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, while other areas of British life were loosening up, English cricket remained largely hidebound. The reserve of the old guard left a space to be filled by the exhibitionism of the new breed of fans. If cricket hadn't stayed so starchy for so long, there would have been no demand for its army to get barmy.

The Barmy Army get talked about, written about, and argued about in a way that has never happened to cricket fans before. Now, as battle resumes for the Ashes in Australia, they are making the Australian authorities a little nervous, and a little jealous. Last month, television ads were running in Australia urging fans to form an 'Aussie Posse' to beat the Barmy Army at their own game. And the Australian actor Hugh Jackman is making a five-part docu-reality show called An Aussie Goes Barmy, which follows the exploits of a home fan who spends 'every waking moment with the Barmy Army'. The Barmies are hot property - but who are they, and where did they come from?

To find them, you have to go to a rented room behind a travel agent's in Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey. This is the headquarters of Barmy Army Ltd. The room is cluttered with piles of T-shirts, two workstations, and pinboards full of pictures of young people, laughing and drinking. Sitting at one of the work­stations is a solidly built man in his early forties with a tanned complexion, green eyes and spiky hair, called Paul Burnham. He has a Barmy Army business card, but no job title. If pressed, he calls himself the 'chief organiser'.

For 11 years, Burnham worked for British Airways, mostly in cargo, but his first love was always cricket. He captained the BA team as well as playing in the Surrey Championship. After doing a degree in sport business as a mature student, he spent the winter of 1994-95 in Australia, backpacking and following the England team, which is when the Barmy Army was born.

It all started, appropriately, with a song and a dance. Burnham was at the first Test in Brisbane, and England were losing, as usual in those days, when he noticed something strange happening on the far side of the ground. An England fan was singing, 'We came here with our backpacks, you with ball-and-chain,' and doing a one-man conga. Before long, Burnham recalls, about 10 other people had joined the conga. 'And each time they went past the Aussie fans, they moved very slowly, as if they had a ball-and-chain round their leg. They were getting pummelled with beer and some of them physically hit. But instead of retaliating, they just carried on singing their songs. When you're sitting among thousands and thousands of Aussies and you're losing, they're not backward in telling you how poor you are, so it does get quite draining. You need quite a thick skin not to retaliate. So we started singing these songs to put them back in their place. And the great thing is that they were incapable of coming back with anything. Right from the word go, they were winning the cricket, but we were winning the song contest.'

The singing drew heated reactions from traditional cricket lovers. Ian Wooldridge, the veteran Daily Mail sports columnist, went so far as to write that this new breed of England fans should be gassed. The original lone conga dancer, Dave Peacock, responded by writing a piece in the London Evening Standard, and in the headline, for the first time in the British press, the fans were referred to as the Barmy Army.

The Australian press were amused rather than horrified: they couldn't believe that anyone would spend £5,000, as Burnham had done, to follow such a poor team across the world. 'They started writing very nice pieces about us and the fact that we would sing even when we're losing. The British press still viewed us very much as football fans, because all they could see were football shirts.'

The idea that there might be a demand for replica cricket shirts hadn't occurred to the people running the English game, Burnham says. 'There was nothing you could buy, but by the time we got to Adelaide for the fourth Test, we decided to make our own T-shirts, which said atherton's barmy army [in honour of England's captain at the time]. Those shirts arrived on day three of the Test, and we won on day four. People kept saying, "Where did you get that shirt? We want to buy it." We'd sold 3,000 T-shirts by the end of the next Test.'

A pattern had been set that is still visible years later. The Barmy Army flourishes overseas, thanks to a combination of cheaper travel and fans being drawn together by the away-game mentality. But the Barmies continue to attract scorn, verging on outright horror, from some traditionalists. The premier of New South Wales, Morris Iemma, wrote to Tony Blair recently asking him to pass on details of 'known hooligans' who might be following this winter's tour. The superintendent of Victoria Police, Mick Williams, however, said he was more worried about the Australian fans, and pointed out that while there is 'a lot of banter' from travelling England fans, 'they've always been pretty well behaved'. There are very few arrests.

In July this year, a pile of copies of the Barmy Army magazine, Barmy Harmonies, found its way into the press box at Old Trafford. 'Exterminate, exterminate,' Martin Johnson, the Telegraph sports writer, muttered under his breath. 'Try sitting next to them,' he said. 'With those chants droning on, you just get sick of them. They have ruined every England tour I've been on for the past 12 years.'

'It is understandable that sometimes the opinion of the Barmy Army has been negative,' Burnham says. 'From the other side of the ground they do look quite intimidating. But anyone who bothers to come down from their ivory towers soon realises that these guys just love their cricket.'

This summer, at the Pakistan Tests, the Barmies were relatively sotto voce. Three factors conspired to turn the volume down. First, many core members were saving their money, and precious time off work, for the Ashes. 'There's only a certain number of days' cricket you can watch,' Burnham says, 'and they'd rather watch in Australia than here.' Secondly, he says it is much easier (and more fun) to take the mickey out of Australian players and fans than those from Pakistan. Thirdly, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) banned the Barmies' trumpet, which made it harder to get the singing started. None the less, about 150 members turned out for each day of each Test, except at Lord's, where the MCC - a private club, built on exclusivity - managed to freeze the Barmies out by passing regulations outlawing 'unnecessary noise', musical instruments and fancy dress.

I went to meet some of the Barmies at the final Test in August, at the Oval. The match ended in one of cricket's periodic eruptions into diplomatic chaos, as the Pakistan team, wrongly penalised for ball-tampering, refused to take the field. But that was on the Sunday. On the Saturday morning, a few Barmy Army regulars assembled at a pub round the corner. I got talking to Andy and Ricky, two members in their early thirties. They follow England every winter and play for the Barmy Army cricket team in the summer. Ricky was there at the beginning, in 1994, although he had never been to a cricket match before. He was backpacking in Australia, and a couple of friends took him to the Melbourne Test on Boxing Day. 'It was massive,' he says. 'There were 100,000 people, the beer was flowing, it was a really joyous occasion.'

Ricky runs his own plastering company. 'So I can manipulate my own holidays. And wintertime in the construction industry is a little bit quieter. But saying that, I go to every summer Test as well. You meet people in the winter series and then you meet up again at the home Tests. A lot of my close acquaintances now are in the Barmy Army.'

Andy grew up watching cricket on TV, dreaming of going to the Caribbean to see a series there. 'I finally got out there in '98, went out for just one Test match, got the bug, and ever since then I don't think I've missed a Test match anywhere. In Australia, this time, I'm doing the whole lot.'

How can he fit it around his job? 'I've got a flooring shop based in a furniture store that's open seven days a week, so it's quite difficult. My wife's being trained up to cover for me as we speak.'

His wife and their two children will join him for Christmas. How much will it cost? 'To be honest, I'm not sure. I'd have thought about £10,000. But I don't go on any other holidays. I work seven days a week, the only days I take off are coming to Test match cricket.'

Both men were aggrieved about the ECB's decision to ban their trumpet. 'It's ridiculous,' Ricky said. 'Flags, banners, too. It's really taken away the atmosphere. The purists would say it's nice to sit in the Oval and not hear any noise. But there's a lot of people who've come here for the day, paid £40 or £50, and it's not just about what's happening on the field - it's about the crowd entertaining you, too.'

He argues that when you take away the trumpeter, spectators get more restless during the 'slight lulls' to which Test cricket is prone. 'Then they're going to start throwing things, beer glasses and so on, and that's the sort of element really we don't want to see in the Barmy Army.'

Andy says, 'It's like when the Mexican wave starts up, it goes round the whole ground, stops when it gets to the Barmy Army, then starts again, because we don't do it. It's disrespectful to the players. Whereas by singing, we're supporting the team.

'I'm quite a traditionalist, really,' he adds. 'It's just that I don't sit there and watch cricket the same way the purists do. I sit there with other like-minded people that know as much about cricket as the man sitting in the members' with his panama hat. If anything, we probably know more about cricket than they do. Everyone thinks we're not really interested in the cricket, but the fact is that with 90 per cent of the people in the Barmy Army, there's a real passion for the game - and a real knowledge.'

Early on, one of the England players' agents suggested that the founder members register the name Barmy Army as a trademark. Burnham thought he was probably joking, but decided it was worth doing anyway, and in March 1995 Barmy Army Ltd was founded. Burnham ran the company part-time for seven years, combining it with jobs at a bookmaker and a memorabilia firm, before going full-time during the last England tour of Australia in 2002-03. He owns most of the company, with Dave Peacock and another founder, Gareth Evans, as minority shareholders.

The merchandising side is now run by a former England bowler, Tim Munton, who has a stall at each home Test. On the playing side, there are two Barmy cricket teams, adult and colts. The organisation has a mission statement - 'to make watching and playing cricket more fun and much more popular'. As well as the magazine and a website, it publishes books, attracts sponsors, raises thousands for charity, and its travel arm, licensed out to another company, is taking 2,000 fans to Australia this winter on package tours. Many members prefer to make their own arrangements, and Burnham expects another 5,000 or so to make the tour.

But the company is far from a conventional business. 'We try to sell things more cheaply than everybody else, that's our philosophy,' Burnham says. 'I'm told our motto is "High risk, low profit" - that's what it's about.'

Burnham pays himself only £1,000 a month. 'Plenty to live on, I'm not an extravagant guy.' Still, it seems modest. 'It is modest, but as long as it pays the mortgage here, I can use my company credit card for most of the things that we're doing, because it's all Barmy Army-related. I live my life for Barmy Army. It's more than 40 hours a week, but what a great job.'

Rather than a business, it is a supporters' club with a business arm, Burnham says. He points to his database, which holds the e-mail addresses of 32,000 fans. But even as a club, it is an unusual beast. There is no membership, no subscription. So how does anyone know if they are a member? 'The definition is that if you've ever sat at an international match and sung for your country, you're a member. It doesn't matter who you've travelled with, whether you've sung for one session or you've been on every single tour since it started, in my book it's anybody that ever vocally gets behind the team. That's the Barmy Army.'