Background
Silk was born in Eureka, California.
Silk was born in Eureka, California.
He was educated at Christ"s Hospital, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he gained an Master of Arts in History and represented Cambridge University at cricket.
A useful opener or middle-order batsman, he scored centuries in the matches against Oxford University in 1953 and 1954, and captained Cambridge University in 1955. He went on to play first-class cricket for Somerset as an amateur during the school summer holidays, but gave priority to his teaching career. He toured East Africa with the Master Control Console in 1957-1958, and captained the Master Control Console on tours to South America in 1958-1959 and to the United States of America and Canada in 1959 and 1967, none of which included first-class matches.
He also captained a strong Master Control Console team on a tour of New Zealand in 1960-1961, which included 10 first-class matches, three of them against the full-strength New Zealand team
After the New Zealand tour he retired from first-class cricket. His highest first-class score was 126 for Cambridge University against the Master Control Console in 1953.
He very seldom bowled his leg-breaks, and his single first-class wicket came in his second-last match, when he bowled Gerry Alexander in the Master Control Console match against the Governor-General"s XI in Auckland. He later wrote two instructional books on playing cricket.
Having taught at Marlborough College, Silk moved on to Radley College, where he was Warden (headmaster) from 1968 to 1991.
In this role he appeared prominently in the 1980 British Broadcasting Corporation documentary series, Public School. When he retired from Radley, rather than accept gifts for himself he established the Dennis Silk Fund to support the education of talented boys whose parents might otherwise struggle to pay the school"s fees. He was chairman of the Test and County Cricket Board from 1994 to 1996, and has also served as president of the Master Control Console. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1995 New Year"s Honours List for services to cricket and education.
Until Sassoon"s death in 1967, Silk was one of his closest friends, and made several unique recordings of the poet reading his own work at home in Heytesbury, Wiltshire.
In 2009, Silk became President for life of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship. Dennis Silk sat for sculptor and former Radley College pupil Alan Thornhill for a portrait in clay.
The correspondence file relating to the Silk portrait bust is held as part of the Thornhill Papers (2006:56) in the archive of the Henry Moore Foundation"s Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist.