by James Philip
Although his sternest Parliamentary inquisitor, Gerald Nabarro eventually apologised when he discovered the nature of his ‘foot problems’, and Cowdrey did his best to respond to all the letters he received in the most emollient and explanatory of fashions, 1955 was not a good year for the young Colin Cowdrey. When eventually he turned out again for England he got the ‘working over’ of a lifetime from the South African fast bowlers (Peter Heine and Neil Adcock) in the Third Test at Old Trafford, and was so badly knocked about in scoring 1 and 50 he had to pull out of the rest of the series.
The experience might have made some men bitter but Cowdrey was not built that way. Adversity simply strengthened his resolve, a resolve he always demonstrated on the field in steely determination rather than in off the field declamations. Like Dexter he was a man for the big occasion.
In that he left young children back at home in England when he boarded Flight BA230 on that September day in 1962, he and his captain, and the majority of his fellow tourists, was not alone.
At last we come to ‘Fiery Fred’.
How to describe Frederick Sewards Trueman, the self-appointed and publicly acclaimed – notwithstanding the presence of that peerless Lancastrian, Brian Statham, a man who has a equal rightful claim to be England’s finest professional bowler of the era - leader of the English bowling attack?
Has there ever been a more contrary, brilliant, angrier or more patently – albeit vaingloriously – more honest cricketing son of the South Riding of Yorkshire? He was a force of nature, with an innate and sometimes self-destructive, unrepentant perversity of spirit; but who could justly claim to have been more his own man than Fred Trueman?
This author does not discount the possibility, albeit very remote, that there has been such a man in one or other past age of the game but in his time Trueman was an absolute one-off; Yorkshire and England mislaid – or somebody in authority broke – the mold from which he had been cast in pure Sheffield steel.
Nobody dared murmur that at the age of thirty-one he was ‘at his peak’ because the master bowler would have taken vehement exception to any implication that the only way was down in the coming months and years. In fact, he was not a man often crossed by wise men. No batsman ever fell to his bowling by error or chance; each victim was bamboozled by an inswinging ‘yorker’, or ‘hung out like a kipper’ by an unplayable late swerving express-paced delivery, or struck down by a brutal short-pitched ball. Trueman remembered every dismissal, and never tired of recounting the lurid tales of his Machiavellian guile and searing pace.
‘Did you ever bowl a plain straight ball?’ He was once taunted.
‘Aye,’ the magician replied dourly, ‘I did and it went straight through like a stream of piss and flattened all three [stumps]!’
He was not a subtle man, on or off the field.
If one had but a single word to encapsulate Fred Trueman the cricketer it would be HOSTILITY. Away from the game he was by turns, a rough diamond, or a bully, lacking in ‘airs and graces’ but capable of abrupt kindnesses who never, for a single minute, forgot his roots. To cricket watchers and most cricketers, not to say large portions of the English-speaking world he was the archetypal Yorkshireman, a golden-hearted ogre who always, without exception, knew best.
The Grand Old Duke, his trusty sergeant major, Alec Bedser, Lord Ted and his affable vice captain comprised what in modern parlance might be termed the ‘management team’ in Australia; but make no mistake, the pugilistic, never say die heart and soul of the party was Fiery Fred.
In retrospect we understand now that Trueman more accurately represented and spoke for the traits in the ‘English’ – a word this author employs inter-changeably with ‘British’ in this specific context – character that were to sustain the nation through its coming travails, than perhaps, those old-world, chivalric qualities attached to the Dexters and the Cowdreys of the pre-October War era. However, mercifully in the autumn of 1962 nobody knew what was to come.
Please indulge this author awhile as he spends a few hundred words introducing you to the unique phenomenon that was Fiery Fred.[24] We will probably never see his like again because if any man was a man of his age, it was he!
Born the fourth of seven children at Seven Springs near Stainton east of Rotherham in a terraced house long since buried beneath colliery spoil, all the Trueman boys played cricket. In 1943, aged twelve, Fred suffered a particularly character-building misfortune; struck in the groin he did not play again for two whole seasons. Whether because of the circumstances of his upbringing or in setbacks such as this, the boy grew to young adulthood with a competitive streak several miles wide, yet like so many rebellious Tykes he was a natural conservative – of both the small and large ‘C’ variety – but then ‘our Fred’ was nothing if not an enigmatically, cantankerously free spirit.
Not overly tall – he was five feet ten inches in height when he arrived at full manhood – he was forty-six inches around the chest and broad in the hips, possessing the build of a fairground bruiser yet graced with the sinewy whiplash muscles of a sprinter. From the outset he had an approach to the wicket that was his and his alone. ‘Curving and long but nicely modulated’[25], when he reached the wicket he turned his body classically side on releasing the ball in ‘an awesome cartwheel’ which sent him following through, often most of the way down the wicket towards the batsman in a raging charge that ‘resembled a Sea Fury finishing its mission along the runway of an aircraft carrier’.[26]
John Arlott, the onetime clerk at Park Pruett Mental Hospital in Basingstoke and Hampshire Policeman, turned cricketing sage-philosopher had an uncanny knack of capturing the theatre of the great players.
‘Fred’ he said, ran to the wicket ‘with the majestic rhythm that emerges as a surprise in the Spanish fighting bull’. The ball emerged from his hand like a hand grenade; if a delivery failed to knock down, bamboozle or terrify a batsman he would react as if fate had cheated him of what was rightfully his. Arms would wave, his brow knot thunderously in an act of pure histrionic theatre.’
Whether bowling in his pomp, batting with agricultural amusement, snaffling catches at leg slip with such ease and speed that most eyes on the ground had automatically flown to the boundary before he held the red cherry aloft, or launching the ball into the wicket-keeper’s gloves at ferocious pace with either hand from the boundary, crowds adored Fiery Fred. Around the world they loved to hate him; but everywhere he went one way or another, they loved him.
In the autumn of 1962 England possessed the two real universal box office cricketers in the world in Ted Dexter and Fred Trueman.
Yes, there were the West Indians, Hall and Griffiths, and Gary Sobers, Australia had Neil Harvey, and there were marvellous South African and Indian players aplenty, many of whom were to become true ‘greats’ of the game in years to come; however, when the Canberra docked at Freemantle in Western Australia on Tuesday the 9th October 1962, Dexter and Trueman were men who could fill practically any cricket ground anywhere.
Dexter was just ‘Ted Dexter’, it came naturally to him
Fred Trueman had become Fiery Fred. He was proud that one of his first jobs was at a mine at Maltby.[27] Nothing motivated him more than the sight of an amateur walking to the wicket, or a batsman crouching beneath a broad brimmed floppy ‘green’ Australian cap.
He would watch a batsman walk out into the middle with disdain, his eyes flashing with anger. Once, at Lord’s he sent back an immaculately attired amateur first ball – stumps cartwheeling in all directions – and as his victim trudged past him on his way back to the dressing room he remarked cruelly that it was hardly ‘worth getting dressed up for, were it?’
Called into the England side against the Indians at Headingley in 1952, Trueman took three wickets in less than two overs without conceding a single run. All that summer he terrorised the unfortunate tourists from the sub-continent. It was a brilliant beginning to an international career that was to stutter, stumble and only eventually achiev
e equilibrium in the mid-fifties. Between his debut in 1952 and the end of the 1962 English season Trueman, had he been an ever-present in the England side, might well have earned ninety or more caps as opposed to his forty-nine, and taken goodness only knows how many more test wickets than the 216 already to his name.
He was his own worst enemy.
He had upset so many people that when trouble or ill-luck struck, or he spoke too forthrightly to the wrong person, or just plain behaved badly there was always a risk that he would find himself facing the resultant flak on his own.
He had only played the one test in 1953, then on that winter’s tour to the West Indies he had singularly disgraced himself. His bowling was relatively innocuous on the grassless Caribbean wickets, and his bad language and general charmlessness had antagonised West Indian players and spectators alike. One incident stands out: he felled a tail-ender with a bouncer[28] and went back to his mark while his team mates rushed to the stricken batsman’s assistance. Then the next ball he bowled was a chest high full toss. Trueman was of course, undaunted, and to the ears of many, crudely and unsportingly unapologetic which basically, simply ‘was not cricket’.
Although he got back into the side in 1955 he was not a regular – or first pick – in the England XI until the Third Test at Trent Bridge against the West Indians in 1957, over five years after his international debut.
He had warred with the management of the 1958-59 tour of Australia, survived and thereafter become the ever-reliable spearhead of a powerful and consistent (when at full strength) England side.
In the West Indies in 1959-60 he had taken more wickets than any Englishman before him – 21 in the series – and in 1961 at Headingley he had cut back his pace and ‘made the ball talk’ to finish off the Australian second innings with a spell in which he took six wickets for just one run.
Typically, it was a spell of bowling born out of adversity.
Trueman’s 1955 marriage to Enid Chapman, the daughter of a former Mayor of Scarborough[29], was on the rocks and he had slept the previous night in the back of his car in a Leeds car park. Nobody knew because Fred was the last man on earth who would trouble another man with ‘his’ domestic travails. His marriage, half-patched up now and then had produced a son and two daughters by the time Yorkshire’s proudest son set off for Australia that fateful autumn.
The Duke of Norfolk, Ted Dexter, Colin Cowdrey, Eric Bedser and Fred Trueman voyaged in harmonious common purpose across the great expanse of the Indian Ocean.
The touring party entertained the press corps, whose titular leader E.W. ‘Jim’ Swanton – as several players remarked - dealt with our ‘leaders’ as would an equal, the great man of the cricket-writing ‘first-eleven’, universally respected.
The Grand Old Duke summoned Swanton’s platoon of journalists to a party in their honour, toasted, praised and generally glad-handed among the Fleet Street foot soldiers, and afterwards everybody agreed how much more approachable and friendly this touring party was in comparison to its 1958-59 predecessors.
Plans were laid for the coming months.
Good intentions promulgated.
But as any general in history will attest; no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy...
Chapter 5 | The Fatal Shore
If the cricketers were relieved to finally step onto the fabled ‘fatal shore’ colonized so long ago by the convicts and ne’er-do-wells of Georgian England, the sight of land was greeted with something akin to ecstasy by the voyaging press corps. Cooped up onboard the Canberra most of the journalists had had to spend long hours every day queuing to have their ‘scribblings’ cabled back to England letter by letter at the princely sum of 1 shilling and 8 pence per word![30]
The crème-de-la- crème of cricket writers and reporters always followed the England team to Australasia; and the tour of 1962-63 was no exception. Among the ‘pack’ were E.W. ‘Jim’ Swanton representing The Daily Telegraph, there was J.C. ‘John’ Woodcock of The Times, Ian Wooldridge of The Daily Mail, John Clarke of The Evening Standard, Brian Chapman of the Daily Mirror, Crawford White of the Daily Express, and Charles Bray of the Daily Herald.
Jack Fingleton, A.G. ‘Johnny’ Moyes and Tom Goodman led the Australian press delegation waiting on the quayside as the Canberra nosed into Freemantle passing the cattle ship SS Gorgon.
Fingleton’s prognostications on the coming tour had been broadcast on the Canberra’s public address the day before landfall as the great ship came into range of the local Perth radio stations.
He rated the home side’s chances of retaining the Ashes as ‘fifty-fifty’, which had sounded almost like defeatism coming from an Aussie!
Most of the journalists who were already onboard, or who came aboard at Freemantle for the tour’s first ‘Australian’ press conference were a little surprised by Ted Dexter’s somewhat lack lustre performance. Nobody liked the ritual, stiffly self-conscious introductions of the team members[31] but once that chore was accomplished ‘Lord Ted’ was not, it was agreed, on top form.
Among other things he said he wanted England to bowl ‘20 overs an hour in the Tests’, which would have been ambitious in England but in Australia where an ‘over’ consisted of eight deliveries (not the six practically everywhere else in world cricket), it was positively implausible. And besides, the pressmen had all heard rather too many promises from captains at the beginning of tours to ‘play attractive cricket’ before to take Dexter, or anybody else, seriously.
Notwithstanding, in the absence of TV or film cameras to immortalise the England captain’s less than stellar public relations debut in the Antipodes, his performance was soon forgotten by most of those present on the Canberra that day.
It helped that between stepping ashore in Australia and fulfilling the first cricketing engagement of the tour lay the best part of a week of net practice and general acclimatisation. Released from Gordon Pirie’s regime of physical jerks, stretches and runs the team picked up bats and balls, donned gloves and pads and began to enjoy the Western Australian sunshine. And needless to say the golfing clique within the party headed by Dexter and Cowdrey set about shaking the rust out of their swings after their fortnight in transit, a thing which immediately attracted an inordinate amount of interest in the sporting pages of both local and national Australian papers.
Overseas teams touring England perambulate around the First Class counties between Test Matches; schedules elsewhere are nowhere more different than in Australia. There were fewer ‘first-class’ sides – just the ‘state’ XIs playing mainly in the main population centres (Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney) – and below those teams a structure of ‘grade cricket’, approximately analogous to the ‘League system’ in northern England. However, and it was a big ‘however’, the step up in intensity and quality of the level of cricket played in Australian ‘first-class’ matches from the ‘grade competitions’ was generally much narrower than that between the English County Championship and that say, in the Lancashire leagues. Australia had fewer professional cricketers than England, but no shortage of men playing the game at a relatively high, and very competitive level. Basically, the top ‘grade sides’ would have been quite capable, on their day, of giving most English county sides a run for their money; particularly, in Australian conditions. There was another difference; Australian cricketers tended to be leaner and fitter than many of the men they faced in the English sides of that era. Without overly labouring the point a lot of highly competitive cricket was played even ‘in the country’, or the ‘outback’ in Australia by men who lived and worked in physical and climatic conditions that visiting Englishmen rarely encountered anywhere else. There was, therefore, a huge appetite for bringing touring teams ‘out to the country’ to take on the local heroes; an appetite that made it irresistible to the permanently cash-strapped MCC and to English county treasurers presiding over ever-emptying coffers.
So, not only was Ted Dexter’s side slated to play five Test Matches
against Australia, it was also due to play all the state sides at least once, as well as playing matches in Tasmania, and practically everywhere it went it would be diverted ‘up country’ to fulfil one, two or three-day fixtures against sometimes extraordinarily able ‘country’ teams hundreds of miles from the nearest big city.
Imagine a six month-long footballing tour – on the other side of the World - in which Real Madrid, or Manchester United was regularly playing internationals against the world’s best teams, interspersed with games against top flight professional club sides, and then, every fortnight or so, playing an FA Cup tie away to a second or third tier XI for whom the big club’s visit was the highlight of the decade...
There were no easy games, there were few easy runs to be scored, nor easy wickets to be notched up, and a lot of the travelling was by bus on dirt roads, on trains without air-conditioning, or in relatively small aircraft – many propeller-driven and unable to fly above turbulence – and the tour went on for month after interminable month...
It was hardly surprising that the golfers in the party enthusiastically picked up their clubs at the earliest opportunity for there was going to be little or no respite going forward. Also, because it was Australia, this was a particularly social tour. There would be events, banquets, official receptions in all the state capitals, and at most of the country ‘stops’. The Australian cricketing public expected the visitors to be available to them, accessible, to ignore the banter – a proportion of which was straightforward, uncomplicated, crude ‘pommy bashing’ of the kind we might now categorise as blatant race hate – and to generally get into ‘the spirit of the thing’. In Australia cricket was war by other means and neither Australian cricketers, the press, radiomen, television nor the public was familiar with, or in any way sympathetic to, the wholly alien, sentimental concept of losing gracefully, or allowing of anything like dignity win or lose.