Cricket On The Beach (Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia)
Page 1
James Philip
________
Cricket on the Beach
The England Cricket tour to Australia
[1962-63]
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Timeline 10/27/62 Australia – BOOK ONE
Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2018. All rights reserved.
Cover concept by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design
The Timeline 10/27/62 Series
Main Series
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon
Book 9: All Along the Watchtower
Book 10: Crow on the Cradle
Coming in 2018
Book 11: 1966 & All That
Book12: Only In America
Book13: Warsaw Concerto
USA Series
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country
Book 5: The American Dream
Australia Series
Book 1: Cricket on the Beach
Book 2: Operation Manna
Standalone Timeline 10/27/62 Novel
Football in the Ruins – The World Cup of 1966
Contents
Chapter 1 | Preface
Chapter 2 | Selection
Chapter 3 | Departures
Chapter 4 | Voyaging
Chapter 5 | The Fatal Shore
Chapter 6 | The Day After
Chapter 7 | South Australia
Chapter 8 | Melbourne
Chapter 9 | Griffith & Sydney
Chapter 10 | Toowoomba
Chapter 11 | First Test
Chapter 12 | On to Bendigo
Chapter 13 | M.C.G.
Chapter 14 | The Southern Oval
Chapter 15 | Second Test
Chapter 16 | Van Diemen's Land
Chapter 17 | Third Test
Chapter 18 | Newcastle-upon-Hunter
Chapter 19 | Fourth Test
Chapter 20 | Enter the Don
Chapter 21 | Dubbo and Tamworth
Chapter 22 | Fifth Test – Controversy
Chapter 23 | Fifth Test – The Battle
Chapter 24 | Fifth Test – Denouement
Chapter 25 | Homecomings
Chapter 26 | In Memoriam
Author’s Endnote
Other Books by James Philip
Cricket On The Beach
The England Cricket tour to Australia
[1962-63]
________
Timeline 10/27/62 Australia – Book One
Cricket to us was more than play,
it was a worship in the summer sun.
[Edmund Blunden]
May Cricket continue to flourish and spread its wings.
The world can only be richer for it.
[Sir Donald Bradman]
A Cricket tour in Australia would be a most delightful
period in one's life if one was deaf.
[Harold Larwood]
Chapter 1 | Preface
In Perth, the capital of the State of Western Australia World War III happened – courtesy of international datelines et al - not on Saturday 27th October 1962, but during the latter part of the morning of the following day. Moreover, in Perth, then as now perhaps the most geographically isolated major city on the planet few people realised that anything was remotely amiss until they turned on their radios – and at that time the very few televisions in the city – and listened to the static-ridden, shocked announcements by the Australian Broadcasting Association that basically, the World, or rather the larger part of the Northern Hemisphere, had gone mad.
The Australian public had been aware of the machinations of the great post-war global superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – over the island of Cuba; but all that sabre-rattling nuclear brinkmanship had seemed an awfully long way away, particularly in Perth.
The city is over thirteen hundred miles from the nearest large centre of population on the Australasian continent – Adelaide – and the best part of two thousand from the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Perth is, and was a world apart, so distant and so apart from everywhere else to be literally, almost a city ‘country’ on its own. But that Sunday morning all that ended because it quickly became apparent that what had happened overnight was a global disaster on a scale hitherto unimagined and unimaginable.
Until then the main news had been not of Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro and medium range intercontinental ballistic missiles; but that of the arrival of the latest English cricket team to tour the Antipodes.
In that – seemingly halcyon - lost age England cricket teams still toured under the auspices of the Marylebone Cricket Club, and outside of ‘test’, or recognised ‘international’ matches they still played as MCC, rather than as ‘England’, a quaint tradition abandoned when next an official[1] international team from the British Isles set out for foreign shores several years later.[2]
At close of play on Saturday 27th October 1962, MCC had reached 25 for the loss of one wicket, that of the visitor’s vice captain, Colin Cowdrey for a duck, on the second day of the third and last match of the opening, Western Australian leg of its winter tour. Confronted by a strong Combined XI at the WACA – the Western Australian Cricket Association - ground MCC found themselves in a little bit of a hole, still 135 runs adrift of their opponents on a typically lively Perth track with the whole of the forthcoming rest day (that Sunday) to reflect on what its travails in this early match might presage for the coming months. MCC had never lost to any Western Australian side in the eighty or so years English sides had been coming to Australia, so the Englishmen’s somewhat indifferent performance thus far in this final ‘warm up’ contest before travelling east to face much sterner challenges, had raised more than a few eyebrows.
That MCC had trounced the full Western Australian state side by 10 wickets only the week before would count for little if the tourists arrived in their next port of call – Adelaide in South Australia – having been ‘turned over’ by a ‘country side’, albeit one strengthened by several international-class imports for the occasion. It would be an open invitation to the Australian press to have a field day!
While members of all English teams in the Antipodes got used to derision ringing in their ears; it was doubly worse when it was actually justified.
However, that Sunday the tourists awakened looking forward to a day off before, hopefully much refreshed, resuming the good fight on Monday morning. In between now and then they would skirt, as seasoned sportsmen often will, around the sports pages of the Sunday newspapers in the lobby of their hotel. Some men planned to attend local churches, others to walk down to the sea front, and several had scheduled rounds of golf. Today was a day to hang up their cricketing whites, to don their ‘civvies’ and to enjoy the still parochial charm of Australia’s garden city by the Indian Ocean.
But of course the World had changed overnight.
When the English tourists straggled back to the hotel that afternoon as the first, dreadful rumours began to circulate, it was to discover that for all anybody knew England no longer existed. Their families at home; wives, children, brothers, sisters, parents, uncles and aunts, cousins and friends were most likely dead. Their homes, their country was gone and suddenly they were all that was left.
The Reverend David Sheppard, the thirty-three year old Sussex amateur who had dropped out of cricket for several years to devote himself to missionary work in the East End of London – an area still recovering from the disaster of the Blitz of 1940-41 – before returning to the game to reclaim his place at the top of the England batting order, responded by leading the majority of his fellows in prayers.
Ted Dexter, the man who by default had ended up captaining the tourists that winter, stood up and addressed his men and the shell-shocked, numb-brained pressmen travelling with the MCC party like the old-fashioned imperial pro-consul that so many people actually thought he was.
The Manager of the party, the Duke of Norfolk, was a man in mourning sporadically venting outbursts of encouragement and defiance, but otherwise, initially rather lost.
Perhaps, it was the one and only Fred Trueman, a man whose Yorkshire grit and never-say-die obstinacy best summed up the mood of the team that evening in Perth.
‘Bloody Hell,’ he complained to a group of journalists as he elbowed his way through the throng to the hotel bar, ‘thank goodness at least you can get a drink on a Sunday in this country!’ And later, appropriately lubricated he prognosticated: ‘Well, I suppose there’s nothing for it but to bloody well get on with it!’
It became the rallying cry of the tour; a cricketing odyssey which has gone down in the annals of the game as the moment ‘England bloody well got on with it!’
Cricket on the Beach is this author’s homage to the gallant cricketers who, more than any other group of Englishmen, forged a new and lasting, unbreakable bond which endures to this day in the Australasian-British psyche.
M.J. Christopher
Garden City Press, New London
27th October 2012
Chapter 2 | Selection
As sometimes happens in England the summer of 1962 had been wet, dull and very rarely ‘summery’.
The same might have been said of the deliberations of the men responsible for the selection of England XIs at home and abroad since the beginning of the sixties. Partly, this was because with the retirement of Peter May, the man who had stepped into Len Hutton’s boots in the mid-fifties and led England with such princely élan until 1960, nobody could make up their mind who exactly should be his long-term replacement.
Colin Cowdrey, a study in elegant batsmanship for a decade was ‘too cautious’, David Sheppard had donned the cassock and surplice in mid-career, and Ted Dexter was well, dashing but wont to put noses out of joint in the Long Room at Lord’s for all that he was the unrivalled darling of the paying public. Cowdrey and May had both refused invitations to tour India and Pakistan in the winter of 1961-62, as had other leading players and Dexter, stepping into the breach, had captained the national side. In England in 1962, he and Colin Cowdrey had both captained in two Tests, defeating a Pakistan side unaccustomed to, and often baffled, by English conditions by four to nil in a series from which the selectors had learned virtually nothing remotely relevant to the forthcoming challenges to be expected in Australia.
In the end ‘Lord’ Ted got the nod.
David Sheppard had only just returned to the game in 1962 after almost five years away, Peter May was out of the frame and frankly, English cricket supporters and most of Fleet Street demanded that Dexter – with his cavalier dash and seductive promise of excitement, fighting fire with fire down under – should captain England in Australia that winter.
With ‘Lord Ted’ in charge on the field it was unsurprising that no lesser figure than the Duke of Norfolk – the Earl Marshal of England - was appointed to manage the tour, assisted by that steeliest of Surrey doyens Alec Bedser (still at that time, several years after hanging up his boots, the leading English wicket taker in the history of Test Match cricket).
When the final composition of the touring party was announced it was hardly short of ‘characters’ and ‘strong men’; with ‘Fiery’ Fred Trueman, Brian Statham his remorseless new ball bowling partner, and Dexter’s own vice captain, Colin Cowdrey among that number. Also in the management ‘team’ was S.C. ‘Billy’ Griffith, a stalwart of MCC and the English game, appointed ‘temporary manager’ for those times when ‘the Duke’ would be tied up with ‘diplomatic business befitting the Earl Marshal of England visiting a Commonwealth country’.[3] So, although it was not without qualms that MCC named Ted Dexter its captain that winter the selectors had good reason to believe that things had been so ‘managed’ as to keep their lion-hearted nomination on a relatively ‘short leash’.
One consequence of the dismal English summer of 1962 was that there had been little opportunity for newcomers to break through into the reckoning for the national team. Or rather, little opportunity for the selectors to get around the county grounds and ‘talent spot’; because it was not that there were no new shining lights that summer it was just that they were either ignored, or went completely under the selectorial radar.
For example, given that England were looking for opening batsmen to develop a long-term stable foundation for its formidable middle order to build on, in retrospect it seems odd that neither Surrey’s John Edrich or Middlesex’s Bob Gale seem to have come into the equation, the selectors opting instead for Lancashire’s Geoff ‘Noddy’ Pullar (who had had a somewhat moderate season, certainly a less distinguished ‘term’ than either of the young tyros, or another young candidate, Northamptonshire’s Roger Prideaux whose availability for the winter tour had been canvassed ahead of the final selection meeting), and David Sheppard, the Sussex amateur recently returned to cricket from his missionary work in the East End. Sheppard was an experienced, very classy performer but hardly any kind of investment for the future. But then the selectors probably thought that playing safe was the best option given that they already had Cowdrey, Dexter, Ken Barrington and Tom Graveney to call upon, a middle order practically any other Test-playing country would have given its eye teeth to possess.
In the end there was only the one glaring omission, or oversight, or possibly, outright blunder in the selection of the final seventeen tourists.
There was no left-arm spinner.
G.A.R. ‘Tony’ Lock[4] whose Surrey and England ‘spin twin’ partnership with Jim Laker had once terrorised county and international batsmen alike had had a disappointing series against Pakistan in 1962, and Worcestershire’s Norman Gifford[5] who had taken over eighty wickets that year were both over-looked. Lock had promptly decided to go to Australia to play in Western Australia and was to appear against the tourists – and wreak a little of his old havoc amongst them – in the pre-war matches in Perth in October 1962.
Otherwise the party had a solid, predictable, if unimaginative look about it. There were four ‘amateurs’, E.R. Dexter (Sussex), M.C. Cowdrey (Kent), Rev. D.S. Sheppard (Sussex) and the reserve wicket-keeper, A.C. Smith (Warwickshire)[6]; and thirteen ‘professionals’, P.H. Parfitt (Middlesex), G. Pullar (Lancashire), K.F. Barrington (Surrey), T.W. Graveney (Worcestershire), wicket keeper J.T. Murray (Middlesex), all-rounder B.R. Knight (Essex), ‘quick’ bowlers F.S. Trueman (Yorkshire), J.B. Statham (Lancashire), L.J. Coldwell (Worcestershire), J.D.F. Larter (Northamptonshire), and three right-arm off-spin bowlers, D.A. Allen (Gloucestershire), R. Illingworth (Yorkshire), and F.J. Titmus (Middlesex).
The average age of the party was twenty-eight, and between them its members had earned 399 Test Match caps, scored forty Test Match hundreds and taken 639 Test Match wickets. If the underlying strength of the party lay in its batting with Barrington and Dexter carrying forward averages of over fifty and Sheppard, Cowdrey, Graveney and Pullar bringing with them averages in the forties, the bowling – Trueman and Statham apart with 445 international wickets between them[7] – looked a little thin. Allen was the most experienced of the three right-arm off-break bowlers, with 71 Test wickets under his belt but Illingworth and Titmus had only 25 between them, and in Australia traditionally it was usually left-arm slow bowlers who did the spinning damage.
However, providing th
e batsmen did their work the bowlers ought to have plenty of runs to defend and Trueman and Statham, notwithstanding they were now 31[8] and 32 respectively, had been and most people still believed were, the finest opening pair in the world, like fine wine undiminished with the passage of time. Moreover, optimists speculated that Larter, the 22 year old six feet seven inch tearaway Northamptonshire fast bowler, given a fair wind, might run amok at least once, and hopefully two or three times during the course of the tour on the hard, bouncy wickets ‘down under’. In the meantime the spinners were – probably - steady enough to keep the Australians in check.
All in all there was a feeling that although England and Australia looked closely matched on paper, that the tourists might well turn the tables and win back the precious ‘urn’ – held since 1882 at Lord’s Cricket Ground in St John’s Wood, London, NW8 - containing the immortal ‘Ashes’ that winter.
Chapter 3 | Departures
The MCC team of 1962-63 was the first English team not to travel all the way to Australia by ship. However, in this, as in all things the Marylebone Cricket Club, mindful that it was essential for the party to ‘get to know each other’ before stepping onto Australian soil, were loathe to completely discard tradition. The decision had thus been made that the party would fly out to Aden, there to embark upon the flagship of the Pacific and Orient Line, the SS Canberra, and sail to Perth, Western Australia, via Colombo, in Ceylon.
On the afternoon before the team flew out from Heathrow on British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) Flight BA230 to Aden - with re-fuelling stops at Rome and Cairo - the touring party gathered at Lord’s and enjoyed an early dinner together in the Tavern before returning to its Paddington hotel. Although three of the four amateurs in the team had made arrangements for their wives to come out to Australia in December – Cowdrey, Dexter, and Shepherd - for the majority of the men in the party they would not see wives, children or girlfriends for several months. Only three of the seventeen party members were unmarried, and in those days it was unthinkable that MCC would countenance, let alone subsidise the transportation of ‘wives’ to the Antipodes.