by James Philip
The bowler leapt, his arm came over as his back foot dragged after him and the ball hurtled towards the batsman.
Dexter’s bat flashed through a savage in to out arc.
There was a sound like the crack of a Lee Enfield rifle.
Moments later the ball thudded into the fence at extra cover eighty yards distant. The fielder placed to negate precisely that sort of blazing cover drive some thirty yards from the bat had not moved a muscle until the ball was half-way between him and the boundary.
The ground was silent for a split second; the next it erupted.
Dexter, having played the shot leaned on his bat while the ball was recovered and Hoare, muttering in exasperation stormed back to his mark.
The bowler turned, ran in, and pitched the ball half-way down the wicket. The batsman watched it balloon harmlessly over his head. And then he did a thing nobody did at the bouncy, lightning fast Western Australian Cricket Ground ever did, he took a pace down the wicket and called: ‘Leg stump!’
In advancing his guard down the wicket towards a fresh, and now angry fast bowler he was making the sort of statement that perhaps, only three or four batsmen in the world could have made that day.
I don’t think that you are fast enough to bowl bouncers at me!
Hoare’s next delivery was short and wide.
The next, the penultimate of the eight ball over, was a full toss clipped nonchalantly to the square leg boundary.
The final ball of the over would have taken Dexter’s head off had he not pirouetted like a ballet dancer and dismissively deposited it twenty yards into the crowd at mid-wicket.
There was a simmering interregnum while Australia’s young fast bowling discovery Garth McKenzie ‘worked over’ Dexter’s partner, David Sheppard, who finally nudged the last ball of an uncomfortable over for a long single to third man.
Allegedly, Dexter went up to ‘the Rev’ between overs and suggested that ‘today is a day to fight fire with fire’.
Sheppard obediently surrendered the strike two balls into Hoare’s next over.
Shortly thereafter there was another delay to retrieve the ball from the stands...
In cricketing folklore it tends to be forgotten that MCC actually lost the match, with the Combined XI lurching across the line with two wickets to spare shortly before the scheduled close of play on the fourth day.
What everybody remembers were the 153 runs the England captain blitzed that magical morning in Perth.
When he fell to a catch in the deep five minutes before the luncheon interval England had thundered to 208, a lead of 48. What followed was dogged, hardly dashing in any respect, and drably mundane in the wake of such a monumental demonstration of controlled hitting. MCC was eventually dismissed just before the close for 362, mainly due to Ken Barrington’s obdurate unbeaten 71, leaving the hosts to score 203 for victory on the last day. This they ought to have achieved with ease after Simpson and Lawry again frustrated the Englishmen until mid-afternoon with a partnership of 131 runs. Fittingly, it was Ted Dexter who broke the stand, persuading Bobby Simpson to miss-hit a wide ball to Tom Graveney in the covers. Recalled to the attack Fred Trueman blasted out Norm O’Neill and Barry Shepherd but in the end it was to no avail. The MCC spinners toiled economically but without penetration and not even the belated clatter of wickets as the Combined XI approached a historic victory saved the day.
No matter: it would always be ‘Dexter’s Match’.
Chapter 7 | South Australia
The MCC party arrived in Adelaide early on the afternoon of Wednesday 31st October after a four-and-a-half hour flight under the stewardship of assistant manager Alec Bedser, and vice captain Colin Cowdrey. The Duke of Norfolk, Ted Dexter and David Sheppard had boarded another aircraft at Perth bound for the Australian capital, Canberra, where meetings had been hastily scheduled with the Governor General, officials of the Australian Foreign Office, and with the Australian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies.
In a funny sort of way by then all the news that was going to come through – for the moment – had already arrived in Australia. None of the news was good but perversely, nowhere near as bad as it might have been.
For example, it was apparent that nobody – certainly not in the scientific community - seriously foresaw an imminent ‘On the Beach’ scenario in which the globe was slowly enveloped in a deadly radioactive cloud.
American broadcasters were purveying the party line that the Soviet Union had been ‘damaged to an extent which makes it impossible for it to threaten the United States further’. It seemed several American cities had been hit and there were hundreds of thousands of dead and injured.
The White House said that the Soviets fired the first shot...
It was evident at that early stage that if Russia had been terribly wounded, Western Europe had suffered no less. Germany was said to be a radioactive wasteland and other areas of Central Europe likewise. Northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands and most of the Scandinavian Baltic ports were severely damaged or assumed to be totally destroyed.
If the American networks were preoccupied with their own North American continental casualties, not so the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which was lukewarm about taking US accounts of ‘who fired the opening shots’ at face value, and significantly less interested in the cost to the Americans, which seemed – in the horrific scale of the disaster – piffling in comparison with those in Europe, the Soviet Union and China, and tragically, in the Old Country.
Even that soon after the event the apparently massive Soviet attack on China baffled everybody, and even fifty years on seems, well, bizarre; but that has been the subject for numerous learned works of history so in these pages this author will leave the subject ‘well alone’.
Herein we are concerned with the MCC cricket tour of the Antipodes and the interplay of Australian-British relations in the wake of the world catastrophe of late October 1962.
It was known within about twenty-four hours that the Soviets had destroyed London, and that missiles had also targeted the Kentish Medway towns and the Thames Estuary. It was known, therefore, before the cricketers boarded the 8:00 AM flight bound for South Australia that millions of their fellow countrymen and women were dead. It was also known that the former Conservative Government of dear old Harold MacMillan had been replaced by something called the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration – UKIEA - under Edward Heath, the man who had been Lord Privy Seal, the minister whose attempts to negotiate Britain’s entry into the European Common Market had thus far been frustrated by French President Charles De Galle. There were also rumours of bombs hitting York and all down the East Coast, and hopes – mostly fears, terrors - for the survival and safety of loved ones were cruelly playing in the minds of the men disembarking at Adelaide.
However, very little consideration was given, not even lip service to any notion of selecting the team to play South Australia with half-an-eye on a particular individual’s ‘state of mind’. The party had adopted a wartime mentality. The tour was going ahead; there was a job to be done so ‘we had better just get on with it’.
Even in Dexter and Sheppard’s absence the priority remained to give everybody as much cricket as possible before the First Test in Brisbane, still over four weeks away while attempting to rest men with persistent ‘niggles’ and minor injuries.
Another factor in selection was that the Adelaide wicket was among the flattest in Australia so there was no profit in profligately ‘wasting’ – or overly wearying - the whole front line bowling attack in a mere ‘state match’. It was decided that while Statham would play, Trueman would be held back.
In rehashing the selectorial debate over the makeup of a touring cricket team in the circumstances of those days even at this remove, many decades later, one cannot but be struck by a sense of all-pervading unreality. But right then, so soon after the cataclysm had struck many subsequently freely confessed to living in a state of incredulity, unwilling or unable
to accept what had happened thousands of miles away.
This author recollects a conversation with his aunt, Elspeth, then in her sixties, about the mood in Sydney in the weeks after the October War. She had married a civil engineer and they had gone to live in Australia in 1958[48] shortly after my maternal grandmother’s death.
‘We all felt disconnected from whatever was going on at home. We were worried but in those days England seemed so far away that it was almost as if London was a place on another planet. We looked around and nothing had changed, the bridge was still there in the harbour, the weather was the same, people were still going down to Bondi Beach in the evenings. I know it must sound dreadful but unless you read a newspaper or turned on the radio nothing at all changed in those first weeks.’
It did not last, of course.
‘I suppose it was about a month later that it really sank in. I cannot imagine how awful it must have been for those who had relatives in England.’
MCC put out a strong, well-balanced eleven, in batting order: G. Pullar, M.C. Cowdrey, K.F. Barrington, T.W. Graveney, P.H. Parfitt, B.R. Knight, F.J. Titmus, A.C. Smith, R. Illingworth, J.B. Statham, and J.D.F. Larter. A pragmatist would have swapped at least one of the batsmen for another bowler given the nature of the placid Adelaide wicket but South Australia for all that they boasted an overseas star, West Indian all-rounder Gary Sobers[49], all-rounder Neil Hawke – a prospect for the coming Ashes series - and Test wicket-keeper Barry Jarman, were a relatively modest combination.
It was assumed in Adelaide that the touring party’s ‘delegation’ to Canberra was a ‘special courtesy call’ of some kind, a distraction from the cricket which everybody else was keen to bury themselves in. For the tourists anything was better than reading the newspapers or listening to the news reports on the radio or facing up to the true awfulness of what awaited them when, or if, they ever went home.
Oddly, at that time it was little understood how severely events in the northern hemisphere had rocked the Australian Government – and the psyche of the Australian people – to the core. The globe was in the hands of madmen; and many in Canberra half-suspected that the next American move would be to consolidate its hegemony by physically asserting its overwhelming military, diplomatic and economic pre-eminence over those undamaged, resource-rich regions of the planet over which it did not – yet - have complete control. It was pure paranoia; but Prime Minister Robert Menzies did not know it at the time or that and within weeks the reassuring presence of the British Far East Fleet[50], nominally still based at Singapore, in Australian waters was going to offer the sort of realpolitik reassurance – to Menzies’s administration and to the Australian people – that mere words simply could not.
In the meantime the positively surreal calm and normality of Adelaide was a temporary comfort to the tourists in those days before, to a man, they confronted the logic of their situation. That week they were still just far from home, not yet strangers to hope plying their trade in a foreign land among – if not always on the field of play – friends.
By the time the small MCC delegation met up with the Governor General and his aides in Canberra late on the afternoon of 1st November the first cables from Cheltenham, the then ramshackle seat of the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration had reached Australia granting the Governor General plenipotentiary powers to ‘do whatever you see fit to promote Commonwealth unity and the interests’ of the Old Country in the ‘current emergency until further notice’. The UKIEA had also made it known that ‘Her Majesty’ had requested that the Duke of Norfolk ‘do everything within his power to assist Her Governor General’ in the ‘current situation’.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation had wasted no time beaming the news that the Queen was alive – she had been at Windsor Castle on the night of the war and thereafter had been spirited away to Scotland for safety – and that there was ‘a properly constituted provisional government in charge’ in England.
On the morning the South Australia versus MCC match was due to commence the front pages of every paper in Australia were dominated by a photograph of Sir Robert Menzies flanked by Viscount De L'Isle, the Duke of Norfolk, Ted Dexter and David Sheppard outside Parliament House in Canberra.
The inside pages speculated about the subject of the ‘overnight talks’ which had taken place between the Prime Minister and ‘senior parliamentarians’, and carried numerous pictures of the bigger ships of the British Far East Fleet; Vice Admiral Christopher having requested replenishment and docking facilities to be made available to his ships at Perth, Darwin, Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne.[51]
De L’Isle’s personal papers have only recently been lodged with the National Archive in Oxford. This author was fortunate to have an early sight of them and the papers relating to this early post-war period make fascinating reading. It was my father’s[52] opinion that De L’Isle, his predecessor as Governor General, had never got the credit he deserved for being the man who ‘single-handedly, granted with the assistance of a motley crew of cricketing heroes and the Royal Navy, enabled Robert Menzies to put the Empire to bed and in effect, create the modern Commonwealth which was to be the bedrock of British recovery in those dark years after the October War’.
While the MCC’s batsmen made hay in the South Australian sunshine at Adelaide six hundred miles away the tentative blueprint for the special Commonwealth arrangements that would eventually tie in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and in time many of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong and India, Malaya, Malta, Cyprus and island dominions and territories all over the globe, was being drawn up by De L’Isle, in consultation with the United Kingdom High Commissioner to Australia Lieutenant General Sir William Oliver, Murray Tyrrell[53], the Duke of Norfolk and bizarrely, the England cricket captain and his ex officio ecumenical advisor, the Reverend David Sheppard.
Of all the players in this initial diplomatic drama Dexter was, perhaps, peripheral in every respect other than in the public presentation of the ongoing ‘talks’. However, although the Earl Marshal of England and the Governor General might have been the main movers it was Lord Ted who put his indomitable, insouciant signature on the deal. Afterwards, no man was more eloquent, no man more unswayable in locking together two peoples separated by half the world.
Of course, it was De L’Isle and Robert Menzies who called the shots, and when some weeks later he entered – in typically spectacular style left stage – it was the patrician figure of Vice Admiral Julian Wemyss Christopher who did, at least as much, to set the new Commonwealth on its radically altered path.
This author was fortunate to meet De L’Isle in later years and cannot help but thinking ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’ whenever he recalls the old man he knew in his youth.
Born in 1909, the 15th Governor General of Australia was in his fifty-fourth year at the time of the Cuban Missiles War. The younger of two children and the only son of the 5th Baron De L’Isle and Dudley, he was a member of one of England’s oldest and most distinguished families, descended directly from King William IV by that monarch’s mistress Dorothea Jordan. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, notwithstanding his lineage he had qualified as a chartered accountant before joining the Reserve of the Grenadier Guards in 1929. His wife, Jacqueline, the daughter of Lord Gort[54], whom he had married in 1940 and by whom he had five children, was seriously ill at the time of the October War and sadly, would die the following month.
De L’Isle had won his Victoria Cross at Anzio in 1944 personally leading an attack on a German position, blazing away from the hip with a Tommy Gun. After being wounded – shot through the buttocks – and weak from loss of blood he had refused all treatment until he was certain that an enemy counter-attack had been repulsed. Asked in later life where, exactly, he had been wounded he would invariably remark ‘in Italy’.
Elected Conservative Member of Parliament for Chelsea in a by-election in November 1944 he had retired from the Commons upon the death of his f
ather in 1945, and joined Churchill’s administration in 1951 as Secretary of State for Air. Before the October War he had got to know Robert Menzies on visits ‘down under’ to Australia in connection with atomic and other weapons research projects and tests; and when the Governor General’s post became vacant in 1961 due to the untimely death of Lord Dunrossil, Menzies had immediately recommended De L’Isle.
At that time both men had confidently anticipated that his would be the last Governor Generalship discharged by a non-Australian.[55]
Back in Adelaide Colin Cowdrey proceeded serenely to a double hundred (206), while Tom Graveney (183 not out) and Ken Barrington (102) kept their hosts in the field for the best part of two broiling days before MCC declared its first innings at 602 for the loss of four wickets.
With Dexter absent in Canberra players and crowd alike wilted in the heat when the match resumed after the rest day. David Larter, the lanky Northamptonshire speed merchant took a couple of early wickets but otherwise, the South Australian batsmen, led by Gary Sobers (174) exacted a wearying toll on the Englishmen throughout the third day, declaring at 476 for 9 at tea on the fourth day upon the dismissal of a combative nineteen year old newcomer, Ian Chappell (82), who had succeeded in getting under the skin of practically every bowler. After tea Geoff Pullar and Peter Parfitt, both of whom had missed out on the run feast in the first innings batted out time, the match concluding when the pair had reached their fifty run partnership.
The MCC delegation to Canberra had planned to return to Adelaide to attend a dinner organised by the Governor General of South Australia Lieutenant-General Sir Edric Montague Bastyan, at which State Premier Thomas Playford was due to propose the toast to the tourists. In the end the Duke of Norfolk had sent an apologetic telegram to the longest-serving of all the State Premiers and staunchest of Labour Party stalwarts.