by James Philip
For an Englishman during an Ashes tour Australia could be and often was a lions’ den.
The first Australian ‘lions’ awaited the arrival of the English invaders at the Sir Richard Moore Sports centre, in Kalgoorlie, some 370 miles from Perth – not quite in the middle of nowhere but pretty close – in the form of a Western Australia Country XI. The match was scheduled over two days, Tuesday 16th and Wednesday 17th October.
MCC[32] batted first. There was a tradition – which seemed to fall into abeyance as the tour progressed - that the tourists batted first regardless of who won the toss; the home captain putting the visitors in because it avoided the possibility of the notionally weaker home side being skittled out in no time flat and the match being ruined as a spectacle at the outset.
After an opening partnership of 95 between David Sheppard and Geoff ‘Noddy’ Pullar[33], with the twenty-seven year old Lancastrian going on to make a hundred, Dexter was run out cheaply before Ken Barrington and the young Middlesex tyro Peter Parfitt both got in useful practice scoring forties. In front of a crowd of 4,888 Dexter declared at 247 for 4 in mid-afternoon. As often happened in these matches the locals put up – for spells – embarrassingly staunch resistance. Against ring-rusty bowlers the home team only lost a couple of wickets before the close of play that night, ending the day 142 runs behind MCC
It was a practice match; nobody inferred any great significance from the events of the first day of the tour.
16th October 1962 was of course the day John McCone, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency learned that a spy in the sky mission over Cuba had ‘revealed an MRBM (Medium-Range Ballistic Missile) launch site and two new military encampments located along the southern edge of the Sierra Del Rosario in west central Cuba’.
It was the day that United States National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy had to wake up President Kennedy to report to him that Soviet missiles were in Cuba.
That was the day Kennedy ordered the ExComm – a group of seventeen key senior military, political and diplomatic advisers - to convene at the White House at 11:50 AM Washington DC time.
That was the day the clock started counting down to World War III...
Half a world away in the Western Australian outback the next morning MCC went about its business with casual aplomb. Ken Barrington’s occasional, more than respectable leg spin and a short burst of Trueman belligerence ensured the locals subsided long before they threatened MCC’s first innings score. Thereafter, Dexter invited his men to have a little batting practice.
David Sheppard accumulated – he was never a remotely flashy, or even overly kind on the eye sort of player, very much a collector of runs, now and then of the remorseless kind – 59 runs, and wicket-keeper John Murray, helped himself to a rare century. The locals, turning up in strength again for the second day, were disappointed to see Dexter fall for just 4, but as the match petered out into a draw they went home happily enough. MCC having finished on 312 for 8, the honours were fairly evenly shared with ‘the Club’[34] having made a satisfactory profit of £500 from the winter’s first sortie ‘into the country’.
The first ‘state’ match began on Friday 19th October at the WACA (Western Australian Cricket Ground) at Perth. It was a four-day match due to be played over five days; Friday to Saturday, Sunday as a rest day, then on Monday to Tuesday. It finished on Monday 22nd, with MCC bowling out the home team for 77 on the second day, after which no amount of spirited resistance was going to delay the inevitable overlong. MCC ran out the winners by ten wickets. It was to nobody’s surprise that despite the presence of G.A.R. ‘Tony’ Lock, and G.D. ‘Garth’ McKenzie[35], the fast bowling ‘find’ of the last Australian tour to England the previous year MCC brushed aside what was possibly the weakest of the State sides. Even without the services of Fred Trueman; the tall Northamptonshire fast bowler David Larter, Brian Statham and MCC’s spinners had far too much hostility and guile for the Western Australian batsmen.
The combined crowd of 12,200 over the three days was disappointing but then attention in Perth was already turning to the forthcoming British Empire and Commonwealth Games[36], and the tourists’ second ‘big match’, against a much stronger ‘Combined XI’ which had been much trailed ahead of the opening ‘state’ match.
Thus far Ted Dexter’s men had enjoyed a deceptively undemanding introduction to the tour. Things were about to get a lot tougher.
Chapter 6 | The Day After
In a well-covered event on the 24th October, MCC and the Press had played the Governor’s team at golf at the Royal Perth Club on the south bank of the Swan River. The Duke of Norfolk and John Woodcock of The Times went down 4 and 3 to the Governor and his partner, and the cricketers and pressmen were soundly beaten. The next day the press pack was given a guided tour of the stadia and facilities for the forthcoming British Empire and Commonwealth Games.[37] Everybody was filling in time before the real business of the tour commenced in earnest.
The so-called Western Australian Combined XI was a more formidable proposition than the state team which MCC had brushed aside the previous week. Three of the first four men in the Combined XI’s batting order – R.B. ‘Bobby’ Simpson[38], W.M. ‘Bill’ Lawry[39] and N.C.L. ‘Norm’ McNeill[40] were fixtures in the Australian team, its captain, Western Australian Barry Shepherd[41], was on the fringes of the national side, while the local’s attack was led by Garth McKenzie and D.E ‘Des’ Hoare[42], another international and in Tony Lock the home side possessed, on his day, the canniest left-arm spinner in Christendom.
The match was scheduled to be played over five days - Friday 26th to Tuesday 30th October with Sunday 28th set aside as a rest day.
The contest began with low farce and things got worse for the Englishmen as the day progressed. Barry Shepherd had won the toss and said to Dexter; ‘well, you take the blade’.
Something had got lost in translation because the MCC’s captain had thought his opposite number had actually said: ‘we’ll take the blade’, and not unreasonably supposed this meant ‘we’ll bat!’ Dexter had been somewhat taken aback to discover Shepherd running out onto the field after him as he led MCC onto the field in front of a crowd already numbering several thousand to call him back.
Accompanied by the hoots and catcalls of the home support, with the English opening batsmen robbed of time to collect their thoughts to and to prepare themselves for the fray, much of what followed that morning was predictable. On a lively track MCC hardly covered itself with glory staggering to 14 for 4 in the first six overs of the match. Cowdrey (0), Dexter (2), Graveney (1) and Barrington (0) were all back in the pavilion and only a dogged stand of 71 between David Sheppard and the twenty-four year old Essex all-rounder Barry Knight[43] steadied, for a while at least, the sinking ship. In the morning the main damage was done by McKenzie and Hoare, in the afternoon Tony Lock rubbed salt into the wound with three wickets to hasten MCC all out for just 157; after which Simpson and Lawry batted out the day relatively untroubled by MCC’s pace bowlers or spinners.
On the morning of Saturday 27th October there had been reports – albeit on the inside pages - in the Perth papers of the crisis in the Caribbean and of the Sino-Chinese war.[44]
On the second day Simpson – until the 1960-61 season a stalwart of Western Australian cricket – went on to his century (109) and although Trueman and David Allen[45], the Gloucestershire off spinner gradually worked their way through the Combined XI’s card, by the time David Sheppard and Colin Cowdrey came out to bat again late that afternoon MCC was adrift 160 runs on a wicket that was no kind of batsman’s paradise. With just seven runs on the board Cowdrey succumbed for a duck for a second time in the match to Des Hoare, and the tourists were lucky to finish the day without further embarrassment on 25 for 1.
The Australian press was already scenting a notable scalp, beginning to taste the blood in the waters and licking their lips at the prospect of telling their English colleagues: ‘We told you so!’
Cuba a
nd the high Himalayas seemed an awfully long way away that evening as MCC’s golfing ‘gang’ – Dexter, Cowdrey and Barrington at its head – planned rounds at the Royal Perth Club on the morrow little thinking that in the morning they would awake to a new world...
‘In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.’[46]
The 1959 movie On the Beach had played in cinemas and town and church halls from Adelaide to Cairns, from Sydney to Launceston in Tasmania, and from Melbourne to Perth. In it its stars, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire had lived through the last days of life on the Earth. A nuclear war in the northern hemisphere – set, eerily presciently, in 1963 – had poisoned the planet and now the killer radiation was slowly, surely spreading south...
But nobody knew if that was what had happened, or if Mankind was doomed that Sunday afternoon of the day of the war. In Perth nothing had changed; the sun still shone, the air was clean and salty off the great western ocean and yet, numb shock quickly threatened to give way to understandable mental ferment.
‘Now look here!’ The Duke of Norfolk blustered, increasingly red-faced as his cricketers, the milling press corps and countless strangers off the street filled the ballroom of the hotel. ‘We are a long way from,’ everybody anticipated him to say civilization next, but actually he said ‘home. Clearly the Russians must have started something. Equally clearly, our side seems to have hit back as hard as it might. Do you remember the way things were in the last war? Things happen and it takes a Devil of a time for the dust to settle...’
The trouble was that his audience understood – viscerally even if they did not begin to comprehend the properties of ionising radiation – that in a nuclear war the dust might settle but it stayed radioactive for...generations.
The meeting had commenced a couple of hours before dinner was scheduled without the titular manager of the tour in the bar while the Grand Old Duke had gone off to phone the office of the Premier of Western Australia, David Brand to find out ‘what was going on’. In the event Brand was none the wiser than he but the Earl Marshal was not about to say a thing like that in public.
Several of the Australian reporters following the tour had turned up at the hotel after drawing a blank from their own ‘normal’ sources. Although land lines to other parts of Australia were still intact; long distance radio communications were – allegedly - pure ‘white noise’.
Already at that early stage, it was known that the other big Australian cities were undamaged.
New Zealand also seemed untouched.
That, however, was that. There was no contact with anything to the north of the continent nor was there likely to be until ‘atmospheric conditions moderated’; a thing which might take several days, perhaps longer.
That morning all that was generally known – or rather – surmised was that (a) there had been an atomic war, (b) that everywhere in the northern hemisphere seemed to be out of communication with Australasia, (c) there might not be much more news for several days, possibly weeks, and (d) that the Old Country might no longer exist...
The Englishmen abroad in that hotel ballroom were in varying degrees of shock, each man beset by a sick sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach; knowing that their families, friends, and likely, everything they held dear at home was...gone.
The fools in the Kremlin and Washington – no doubt aided and abetted by those other fools in London who still honestly believed that Great Britain was a World power – had finally done it. They had blown up the planet; thousands of years of European civilisation had been blasted to smithereens in minutes and for what?
For some third world island in the Caribbean!
‘The tour will go on!’ The Duke of Norfolk announced.
This was greeted by silence, silence of the sort which was so complete that a pin dropping on a carpet would have sounded like a hand grenade going off.
Dexter gave the Earl Marshal a quick look as if half-suspecting the older man had had some kind of hysterical episode, and then, jerkily he had nodded.
‘Yes!’ He acknowledged, suddenly finding his second wind and bristling with intent as his keen gaze swept across the faces of his fellow tourists.
Colin Cowdrey forced a smile, ashen-faced.
‘I should bloody well think so, too!’ Fred Trueman had growled stepping from the body of the crowd to dare anybody to disagree.
Alec Bedser had stood by the Duke of Norfolk’s shoulder like a deaf mute in a transcendental trance, his eyes glazed for some minutes.
‘That’s what we must do,’ he agreed quietly, his voice hollowed out.
Ted Dexter had switched his attention to the press men.
‘And what about you chaps?’ He had demanded. ‘Will you carry on with us?’
The England captain had left his twenty-four year old wife and eight month old son in Sussex. Georgina, a former Hardy Amies model, had been due to fly out to Melbourne on 9th December for a two month stay to fulfil a number of lucrative modelling engagements. Their son, Thomas, would be looked after by Georgina’s parents in her absence. That day he was, for all he knew a widower, his wife and baby son dead. All bar three of his sixteen touring compatriots had left wives at home in an England that might no longer exist; and there was absolutely nothing any of them could do. London was nine thousand miles away, two to three days and half-a-dozen flights distant even in normal times and these were suddenly the most unnatural of times.
‘The tour will go on,’ the Duke of Norfolk vowed defiantly, as if to convince himself before softening and addressing his next remarks to the tourists and the journalists from the Old Country. ‘In the meantime, I will endeavour to ascertain what information I can through whatever channels survive about our families and friends at home. If the gentlemen of the press would furnish Mr Bedser with the names, addresses and personal particulars of loved ones I will use my influence to expedite inquiries on your behalf.’
And that was it; we shall carry on carrying on.
That was how the Empire had been built, that was how all the wars of the last few centuries had been won and that was the defining national characteristic of the British people.
Psychologically, there might also have been the consideration that to carry on ‘as normal’ allowed men who would otherwise be traumatised by their forebodings to pretend, for a little longer, certainly until they learned the worst, if any part of their personal worlds still survived. It helped that in this the members of the MCC party were in the main, predisposed. No man, or woman, gets to the top of their profession or sphere of interest without a guiding sense of purpose, an innate belief in themselves and an often steely resolve. Sportsmen at the top level perform, and sometimes live within a bubble that insulates them from distractions, from anything which is likely to impair their performance.
Denial was the best defence in those first hours and days; and if denial was not enough; a man could always resort to anger, rage at the abomination those criminals in America and Russia had just perpetrated upon the World.
Late that afternoon Ted Dexter, Colin Cowdrey, Ken Barrington and several members of the press corps went golfing, just to play a few holes before it got too dark. There was nothing to be gained by moping around the hotel. In the evening it is not recorded how many members of the party drowned their sorrows. Several men did, but none of the cricketers slated to continue the game at the WACA in the morning carried obvious hangovers onto the field.
Outside in the streets of the capital of Western Australia policemen and a scattering of Army reservists patrolled but there was no public disorder; no great outpouring of angst. It was too soon for that.
On Monday morning – the day after the war – over fifteen thousand people filed into the WACA ground before a ball had been bowled. It was to be the first of countless communal demonstrations of support and goodwill towards the representatives of the Old Country, of a solidar
ity that was to be repeated spontaneously wherever the MCC party went that winter.
It was as if Australia, a country which had been gravitating towards – dancing enthusiastically into, in fact – the American camp had recognised overnight its post-1945 folly; and that the country had been within an ace of placing its fate into the maw of a monster, a destroyer of worlds...
As David Sheppard and Tom Graveney[47] walked out to bat the Western Australian Combined XI formed a reception line. On the first morning of the match so much had been lost in translation that Ted Dexter had not known if his side was to bat or bowl; but that morning hosts and visitors were speaking exactly the same language.
It was a dreadful anti-climax when Graveney fell without scoring. He had grubbed about for fifteen minutes, clearly out of sorts while David Sheppard, as he always did calmly played himself in, propping and nudging three singles.
Enter Lord Ted; bat under his arm pulling on his gloves, looking around, and sniffing the air with the confidence of a man seven foot tall knight in armour hefting a broadsword confronted by pygmies threatening him with green bananas. The polite approbation of the huge crowd seemed to vex him a little, as if he had been hoping for a bear pit not a mutual admiration society.
‘Leg stump!’ He called to umpire Jack Gillott standing at the Swan River end of the wicket. Such was the peculiar quiet, hush of the ground that Dexter’s patrician tones carried all the way to the outer, prompting a strange round of clapping and cheering that swept the stands and grassy banks packed with spectators.
Dexter took his guard, shrugged his shoulders, settled as the burly figure of Des Hoare – who had caused the Englishmen so much grief on the first morning of the match – rushed towards the bowling crease.