by James Philip
The Australian leg of the tour was not scheduled to conclude until the last week of February 1963, and then most of the party was due to go on to play a three-Test series against New Zealand. On top of that when the party got back to England most of its members would be thrust – without a break - directly into the hurly burly of the new English season in late April 1963.
Notwithstanding the glory and the pride of taking part in an Ashes Tour down under, for the participants the reality of it was that in recompense for over six months separation from their home and their families, the thirteen professional cricketers in ‘Lord Ted’s’ company were being paid a flat rate £250 per man plus, at the end of the tour, a ‘good behaviour’ bonus of £50 and an unspecified, unquantifiable share of the team ‘kitty’.[9] Nor contractually, was it permitted for this modest remuneration to be bolstered by paid private speaking or writing commissions whilst in Australia or New Zealand. Any individual’s extraneous earnings had to be funnelled straight into ‘the kitty’ the ultimate division of which was a thing to be determined by ‘the management’.[10]
Those were strange days to modern eyes and ears; it was almost as if the fact that 1962 had marked the last Gentlemen v. Players fixture at Lord’s and that the amateur-professional era was drawing to an end, seemed not to have registered in the St John’s Wood Committee rooms of the MCC.
Cricket in England was still run by amateurs, for amateurs but the game and the World had moved on past the 1920s and 1930s mindset which still dominated the Long Room at Lord’s. In some respects the touring party that departed Heathrow on Thursday 27th September 1962 – coincidentally, exactly one month before the Cuban Missiles Crisis turned into a global catastrophe – represented the widening fracture lines in post-1945 British society.
The MCC hierarchy had appointed one of its own (Dexter) to lead, supported by Colin Cowdrey (another of his class), a team of mainly artisan professionals who had risen to the top of the game by dint of their skills and perseverance with none of the advantages enjoyed by the clique of amateurs in their midst. Until that time amateurs and professionals had changed in different rooms, lived different lives, rather like officers and men in the Army or the other armed services; in which practically every man in the touring party had served during the post-war period of National Service (call ups to which had ceased only at the end of 1960).
Although the United Kingdom was slowly, reluctantly changing, old social mores were being questioned and there were unmistakeable signs that the ‘age of deference’ to title, authority and rank might be coming to an end, the MCC still thought it could in some sense ‘hold the line’. It honestly believed it was maintaining ‘standards’ and upholding ‘traditions’ but in retrospect what it was actually doing was a passable imitation of King Canute trying to hold back the tide, and like Nelson at Copenhagen, its leading men were wont to hold their telescopes to blind eyes when they did not like the evidence before them.
The tourists’ luggage and equipment took up so much space on Comet G-ADPM that there was little room to accommodate the press corps.[11] The Duke of Norfolk had come to the airport to see off the team but planned to join the party at Colombo; also at Heathrow was Lord Nugent, president-elect of MCC. One man who was absent was Brian Statham whose wife was ill; the Lancashire bowler planned to fly directly to the Antipodes to meet the party when it docked in Freemantle, Western Australia.
Nowadays, practically everybody treats flying with a pinch of salt but back in 1962 there were several members of the party who had never flown before. One, Len Coldwell, the twenty-nine year old Devonian who had forced his way into the England side that summer on the back of Worcestershire’s Championship winning season, went through several iterations of rather more than moderate aviophobia in the next day before thankfully stepping off the jetliner at Aden.
Given that the whole of the north of the country that the party had just flown into, the Yemen, was embroiled in a civil war[12], and that Aden itself was a hotbed of revolutionary and increasingly anti-British insurrection it speaks to the discomfiture of England’s reluctant fliers that their safe arrival was such a blessed relief.
Of course, in those days, a ‘chap was just expected to get on with it’; an expectation and a character trait ingrained in that post-1945 war generation which was going to be tested to the limit in the coming months. In an age when air travel remained the exclusive preserve of – if not just the wealthy – then the very ‘well off’, overseas tours were still adventures, odysseys punctuated with new and fascinating experiences and sensations quite literally foreign to most Englishmen and women abroad.
Aden was, briefly – the party was only there overnight – a revelation. The ancient seventh century port city of the Kingdom of Aswan lay within the bowl of a great extinct volcano. With great jagged cliffs to the north and the aquamarine azure of the Indian Ocean to the south, and desert shores to east and west it was like some sun-kissed oasis like no other on Earth, with Arab souks, and narrow sun-bleached streets. Away from the modern harbour buildings and docks the city was redolent with the same bustle, noise and smells that would have been familiar to a medieval trader in antiquity.
Unlike in the north of the Yemen there was a kind of uneasy peace in Aden, courtesy largely of the presence of the British. The airport into which the tourists had flown was also ‘RAF Aden’, there were Royal Navy warships – at that time only a pair of four hundred ton minesweepers – moored in the harbour, and there was a British Army garrison comprising the equivalent of several battalions of infantry.
In Aden there was a kind of peace.
Aden had been an imperial colony since 1839; there was a British Petroleum (BP) oil refinery adjacent to the port and strategically it commanded the eastern approaches – and therefore access to and from - the Red Sea. North Yemen might be desert, of marginal military or economic interest, but Aden remained British.
The tour party landed after dark and was escorted to its hotel by the Army. Nevertheless, the three intrepid journalists who had managed to find seats on Flight BA230 immediately went exploring. Ian Wooldridge of the Daily Mail, Tiger Smith, Reuters’ man and John Clarke of the Evening Standard found the city asleep in the sultry heat of the night, and the port dimly lit by the lights of the ships moored in the bay. Most of the rest of the press corps had boarded the Canberra in England a fortnight before, although several men had stayed at home intending to fly to Australia to meet the liner when it docked in Freemantle.
In the morning the tourists ventured into the city. The pound sterling had enormous value in the markets, Aden was a ‘duty-free’ port and the Army was delighted to entertain such a band of brothers from ‘home’, while a ‘spare’ day was whiled away waiting for the arrival of the SS Canberra on her maiden voyage to Australia.
The last time MCC had toured Australia – in the winter of 1958-59 - the press men and the cricketers had retreated into two separate camps early in the voyage out from Tilbury. This middlingly hostile armed neutrality was to be a state of affairs which was subsequently entrenched by the lack lustre performance of the England team on the field, as the Australians wrestled back the Ashes in emphatic fashion, winning four of the five Test Matches. England’s revival in the interim had somewhat repaired relations but the ‘big beasts’ of the press pack were by no means in the party’s pocket.
However, in October 1962 cricketers and journalists mingled happily very nearly from the moment the Canberra cast off and steamed into the Indian Ocean on the first morning of the ten-day trip to Western Australia.
It happened that among Canberra’s two thousand passengers were the majority of the home country’s athletes bound for the Commonwealth Games scheduled to be held in Western Australia in November 1962[13]. Unlike the MCC party, the athletes were travelling ‘economy’; which meant that it was ‘by invitation only’ that Ted Dexter prevailed upon the famous long distance runner Gordon Pirie, to assist him in organising ‘keep fit classes’ for his men.
/> The very notion of this unheard of ‘fitness regime’ horrified several of Dexter’s professionals.
Fred Trueman observed, tartly that he ‘was the best fast bowler in the world’ and that he did not need to be told how to keep fit by anybody. Basically, he got fit and kept fit ‘bowling’, a view generally subscribed to by the other ‘quick’ men in the team. In that era a well-supported school of thought among professional bowlers held that ‘wasting’ miles running in training, or even bowling in the nets, was ‘reducing’ the number of miles a man had in his legs when it actually came to playing the game.
Pirie’s exercise regime was distinctly ‘modern’, something of a culture shock to Dexter’s men. He had the cricketers running half-a-dozen times around the promenade deck – a distance of about two miles – and performing a regime of calisthenics each morning. Trueman initially ‘went missing’ but nothing came of his muttered threat to throw Pirie overboard and eventually he too, was toiling around the Promenade Deck with his team mates. In retrospect, the thing many of Pirie’s ‘victims’ remembered from those exhausting sessions was that by the end of them, while the cricketers would be wheezing and staggering, leaning against the rail for support, Pirie would still be talking normally, hardly having broken sweat.
Dexter had stamped his authority on matters from the outset, with Alec Bedser the temporary manager of the party ahead of the Duke of Norfolk joining the team in Ceylon, acting in the capacity of his stern sergeant major. The team obediently sat down to long ‘autograph signing’ stints after their ‘keep fit’ exertions every morning, and unlike on previous tours Dexter mandated that there was to be no ‘us and them’ nonsense onboard; the cricketers would mingle with and ‘enjoy’ the company of their fellow passengers.
In fact the ground rules for the voyage to Perth and for the conduct of affairs going forward had pretty much been set by the time the Earl Marshal came out to greet the Canberra at Colombo in his private launch.
Later many would recollect with a wan smile how Ted Dexter would be seen striding out with the elderly aristocrat scurrying to keep up with him, very much the young lion-heart trailed by an elderly retainer who was increasingly out of puff! But that was not really the case; for as things turned out Dexter and Bedser became the ambassadors of the game and international goodwill, while the Duke ended up playing a diplomatic winner takes all ‘game’ for the highest stakes imaginable with that other great English hero of that distant, dreadful immediate post-apocalypse era; Vice Admiral Sir Julian[14] Wemyss Christopher[15].
By the time the Duke of Norfolk joined the Canberra at Colombo – accompanied by three of his four daughters – the tourists had established the pattern for the rest of the trip to Perth.
If the mornings were taken up with ‘keeping fit’, autograph-signing chores (rather like writing lines at school), and supplying the press corps with invariably friendly, albeit anodyne ‘copy’ to wire home ahead of the commencement of hostilities; the afternoons and the evenings belonged to the cricketers.
The cruise became a ten-day cocktail party interrupted – not so much tiresomely, but certainly inconveniently – by a drawn one day match against Ceylon in Colombo in front of 12,000 people played in sweltering heat and hundred percent humidity. Normal routine was re-established the next day. Tom Graveney was in charge of the bar and along with the captain, Ken Barrington, Colin Cowdrey and Yorkshiremen Ray Illingworth and ‘Fiery’ Fred Trueman he formed the Marylebone Calypso Club.
It was all great fun and the atmosphere was gifted further piquancy by the charming, amiable, although at the outset rather stern, presence of the Earl Marshal of England.
Of his daughters he cautioned his players: ‘You may dance with my daughters. You may take them out and wine them and dine them, but that is all you may do.’
To the press he declared, presumably in the spirit of everybody being in this together, ‘I wish this to be an entirely informal tour. You will merely address me as 'Sir'.’
Oh, yes. In many, many ways there was a growing awareness that in Britain at least, things were on the cusp of change, of an age of deference ending, of a nation in flux long before the Russians and the Americans had their little misunderstanding over Cuba at the end of October 1962.
In a funny sort of way Dexter’s team-building efforts were in no way undermined when it was learned that Gordon Pirie – in an era of Olympian amateurism in his sport – had written an article for the English press in which he accused the English cricket team of being ‘lazy, unfit and overweight’.
Dexter took the opportunity to write a strongly-worded counter article, donating his fee to the ‘team kitty’ to be distributed amongst the professionals at the end of the tour.
When the Canberra arrived in Freemantle on Tuesday 9th October 1962 the tourists were fitter by courtesy of Gordon Pirie’s endeavours, moderately well-oiled on account of their ten-day long cocktail party, on generally good terms with the travelling press, and looking forward to avenging the disappointments of four years before.
But that is to get ahead of ourselves!
Chapter 4 | Voyaging
Cooped up onboard the Canberra and gently locked into the shipboard routine of ‘keep-fit sessions’, the society of the ‘Calypso Club’, meals at the Captain’s Table and mingling with pressmen and passengers alike as the great liner ploughed majestically across the Indian Ocean bound for faraway Australia, the interplay of personalities and wills was subtly at play just beneath the tranquil surface of shipboard life. In every group of men brought together in common cause leaders, decision makers and non-conformists emerge; some will be already known, others not, and so it was as the Canberra steamed east.
In that era an MCC tour was never just a cricket tour. Notwithstanding that the headline object of the exercise was to beat the Australians in the scheduled five-match ‘Test’ series, thereby winning back ‘The Ashes’ – that tiny, cracked urn held in perpetuity much to the Australian’s irritation regardless of who actually ‘held’ it by the MCC at its castle keep, Lord’s – an England cricket team always went abroad to ‘fly the flag’, and, especially when it toured the Antipodes, to earn a large pot of money with which to sustain the increasingly cash-strapped English County game back home.
Thus, the Englishmen abroad with the MCC touring party that winter were ambassadors, entertainers, personalities and international cricketers confronting a demanding program of constant travelling which included as many matches against ‘up country’ teams in the ‘outback’, as first-class contests against the main Australian state XIs in the big cities, in addition to the five ‘Test Matches’ against Australia.
On previous Australian tours Test Matches had been played to a conclusion or over the course of at least six five to five-and-a-half hour ‘playing days’. However, during the last major tour in Australia - by the West Indies two years before – six-hour playing days had been trialled. Everybody had agreed at the time that this was ‘hard going’ for the players and that there was going to be a problem with the fading light late on most days. Nevertheless, for all matches on the forthcoming tour the hours of play would be standardised as 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. Moreover, departing from former practice Test Matches would be allocated only five days each so as to accommodate – effectively twice as many – hopefully lucrative ‘country’ fixtures. The administrators acknowledged that this would leave very few ‘rest days’ for the tourists but, from what one can gather at this remove, accepted it much in the spirit of ‘c’est la guerre’.[16]
It was for good reason that the bowlers in particular were keen to leave ‘as many miles as possible’ in their legs before the tour started in earnest!
Fitness and avoiding, where possible, injury was going to be crucial in the next six months. Superficially, a party of seventeen players ‘covered all the bases’ but actually, the wear and tear of so many matches in a schedule demanding one long journey after another, offered an exhausted or an injured player little or no recovery ti
me between matches. Historically, what tended to happen was that by the end of most Australian tours half the side was carrying injuries, and therefore missed, or began the following English season ‘crocked’ or inevitably somewhat ‘jaded’; it was therefore, essential to get off to a good start.
To an extent, a happy party developed a do or die esprit de corps to compensate for the accumulated iniquities of a long tour away from home; but that was not a thing which could be counted upon in advance.
So who then were the men at the helm during the MCC’s tumultuous Australian expedition of 1962-63?
The man who thought he was in charge was fifty-four year old Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan-Howard, 16th Duke of Norfolk, KG, GCVO, PC, the hereditary Earl Marshal of England. Among his other titles he was Chief Butler of England, Lord Lieutenant of Sussex, Chairman of the Council, the secular Head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, Her Majesty’s Representative at Ascot, and President of Sussex County Cricket Club. His was the premier dukedom – and earldom - in the kingdom; meaning that after the Royal Family he was the highest ranking member of the aristocracy in the land. The Duke was responsible for overseeing state occasions, like the coronation of King George VI, and his daughter, Elizabeth II in 1953; and while he was in Australia that winter no small amount of his time was scheduled to be devoted to the preparations for Her Majesty’s state visit to the Antipodes in early 1963.