by James Philip
The New South Wales Cricket Association had organised a reception in the early evening of the day before the state match commenced. As was to be the norm at such events all the stops were well and truly pulled out with over six hundred guests present when Sidney Smith, the chairman of the NSW Cricket Association delivered a lengthy – some considered verbose – address about the history of Anglo-Australian encounters. While Dexter’s men listened with quiet respect, albeit stifling the occasional yawn, others in the throng continued, or re-started conversations around them.
On the morrow the powerful New South Wales side led by that wiliest of Australian captains, Richie Benaud and including seven other Australian Test players, among them batsmen Bobby Simpson, Norm O’Neill, Brian Booth[59], Neil Harvey and swing wizard Alan Davidson[60] went toe to toe with what everybody assumed would be England’s side for the First Test: Geoff Pullar, David Sheppard, Ted Dexter, Ken Barrington, Colin Cowdrey, Barry Knight, Raymond Illingworth, John Murray, Fred Titmus, Fred Trueman and Brian Statham. The watching newsmen knew Tom Graveney was still ‘below par’ and would have liked to have seen David Allen in the side ahead of one of the other two spinners but otherwise, it looked a more than solid combination.
Richie Benaud was already a well respected and feared protagonist among the older hands in the MCC stable. Then in his thirty-third year he had first played for his country in 1951, in those days as a batsman who bowled, since when he had become one of the premier all-rounders in Test cricket, and probably the most dangerous spin bowler in the game.
At the beginning of the series Benaud – with 1,743 runs and 219 wickets - was on the verge of being the first player to achieve the double of 2,000 runs and 200 wickets in Tests. As a younger man he had once hit the third fastest century in Test cricket, scored in just seventy-eight minutes against the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica; and countless times his fiendishly executed leg breaks, googlies, top-spinners and flippers had saved and won matches all over the globe. But it was as a captain that everybody knew his reputation had already been made. There was no more perspicacious man still playing cricket than Benaud; nor a man who watched, thought, developed plans and stratagems to baffle and confound with greater expertise than Richie Benaud.
Presently, he captained an Australian team in flux, with veterans like Neil Harvey, Alan Davidson, Ken Mackay and Wally Grout approaching the end of their illustrious careers; a team younger than many post-war elevens of the forties and fifties.
This then was Ted Dexter’s first real brush with his opposite number and it was not to be in any way an auspicious experience.
It did not help that when, in hot, dry weather Richie Benaud won the toss and put England into the field the pitch was as unresponsive as a road to the guile and toil of the three English seamers. Dexter took a hand to lighten the load only to be clattered around the ground for half-an-hour before he gave in and left his two off spinners wheeling away for much of the second half of a draining first day in front of nearly twenty thousand baying spectators.
New South Wales cruised to 344 for 2 by the close; O’Neill unbeaten on 154, Booth on 62, and with Neil Harvey waiting to come in next.
However, when O’Neill edged to Murray behind the stumps off the first ball of Fred Truman’s second over the next morning hopes were briefly raised, only to be dashed by Booth’s obduracy and a Harvey master class before in mid-afternoon he carelessly clipped an innocuous Barrington leg-spinner to cover point when set for yet another peerless century. Declaring twenty minutes after tea at 573 for 6 with Booth still in occupation on 172 it was hardly surprising that MCC were three wickets down by the close.
At 41 for 3; with Sheppard (13), Pullar (3), and Dexter (18) all out, thankfully there was a blessed day of rest before the struggle to save the match continued on Monday.
Unfortunately, it was to be a brief respite.
On an overcast and humid Monday morning Alan Davidson made the ball talk and MCC were all out just before lunch for 114. Then in the afternoon and evening it was Richie Benaud’s turn to baffle and bamboozle the Englishman. Dexter gave three hard chances before Simpson clung onto a driven edge just in front of his face, and Barrington apart, both men getting into the sixties, the tourists lurched to 220 all out on a wearing but hardly spiteful track.
The margin of defeat was bad enough; an innings and 239 runs. It was the manner of it that was really disheartening. MCC had played with few flashes of intent and the bowling had lacked spark, method, or any evidence of planning against a collection of international batsmen well known to most of the protagonists; the batting had been just plain poor, lacking in application and wanting patience. Englishmen brought up batting against the swinging ball had been all at sea against Davidson; and a casual observer might have remarked that hardly any of the top six looked as if they had ever played against quality leg spin bowling on a slow-turning pitch.
With the First Test less than a fortnight away the omens did not look good!
Chapter 10 | Toowoomba
The match in Sydney having finished a day early presented the party with a free day to relax and to take in the sights of the city, grab a round of golf or to laze by the hotel swimming pool. It also served to emphasise the relative equanimity of the men who had had good news from England; and the natural anxieties of those who had heard nothing and increasingly, anticipated hearing nothing at all.
The Duke of Norfolk, whose wife, Lavinia, had been in Arundel on the night of the recent war and thus survived unscathed and was surrounded by family retainers, had sent him a lengthy cable in which he had learned his youngest daughter Theresa, who had been away at school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Woldingham in Surrey had, after a series of possibly hair-raising escapades returned to Arundel with nothing worse than bruises, sore feet and a ‘sniffly nose’. Fortified by this news he had tried to jolly everybody else along before disappearing that ‘free’ morning on a round of civic courtesy calls in the city arranged when Sydney had been one of the municipalities scheduled to entertain Her Majesty on her now war-cancelled ‘Spring Tour’ of Australia.
Ted Dexter had been unimpressed.
It was one thing for the Grand Old Duke to invoke the wartime spirit of 1945 and then cheerfully shimmy off into the town as if he had not a care in the world; another to somehow piece back together a team. Cricket was an individual sport, with team performances dominated by individual contributions: a batsman had to have his mind on his business every ball if he was not to be bowled; and a bowler had to give his all every ball otherwise he became a weak link; a man distracted in the field might drop a vital catch before the opponent’s best batsman had scored, and so on.
There had been journalists within earshot when the team Manager had spoken, now Dexter suggested to Alec Bedser he should invite the ‘home contingency’ into the room.
‘Before you chaps go out,’ the captain decided, standing - glancing towards the cricket writers and journalists from England who were just as marooned in Sydney as everybody else – while his own men sat in easy chairs, or stood around the periphery. Some men smoked, the mood of the room was subdued; apart from Fred Trueman who was chomping on the stem of his pipe itching to get to grips with the new day. ‘I’d like to have a few words.’[61]
He might have been remembering occasions when he was a subaltern in Malaya, or just trying to imagine how unspeakable things must be at home.
‘His Grace has given you the ‘up and at them’ speech, so I won’t repeat any of that. Some of us have had marvellous news in the last few hours which must, frankly, be dreadful for the rest of you. Even those of us who have had good news can have no idea how good that news actually is, or any true notion of what our loved ones are really going through at the moment. But it is worse for those still waiting, immeasurably worse. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I or anybody else can do about that. It may be that what we are doing here is pointless; why play cricket when the World has gone to pot? I don’t know the answer to that e
ither, other that is, than to say that right now the people in this country could do with a little of business as usual, and it may be that in future years those back home may take some small comfort from whatever we achieve out here this winter.’
Nobody had wanted to talk.
‘Personally, I don’t think Shakespearean analogies such as we happy band of brothers or all that nonsense about filling the breach with our English bodies has anything to do with our role in the present crisis. Between you and me if it was at all possible I’d say knock this tour on the head and go home now. But we are just seventeen cricketers; what difference would we make? And how on earth would we get home anyway? Nobody knows if or when normal flights will be restored, and all ships have been recalled to port. Perhaps, when the Australian government works out how to get aid to the Old Country then we can take passage home; but the priority will be for essential cargo and personnel, not fellows such as us. Besides, from the conversations I had with the Governor General the other week, Viscount De L’Isle is keen for us to complete the tour as ambassadors of everything that was,’ he had corrected himself instantly, ‘is best about Great Britain. I tend to share his view that when eventually, news of our progress reaches home, at the worst it will be a welcome distraction and at best, hopefully, a morale booster of some kind. Piffling though it may be in the circumstances, I hope you all agree with me that it may be in our power to give some small pleasure to our people back at home?’
‘How do we know the people back home have any idea what’s going on down here?’ Fred Trueman inquired, voicing what others feared to broach.
It was at this juncture that the England captain looked sidelong to the older, distinguished-looking man sitting close to the fast bowler who up until that minute had seemed completely lost in his thoughts.
Fifty-five year old Ernest William ‘Jim’ Swanton blinked momentarily as he collected his thoughts, knowing but taking no real satisfaction from the fact that everybody was suddenly turning to look in his direction.
To say that Jim Swanton was the cricket correspondent of The Daily Telegraph – regardless of whether it existed any more – was a bit like saying Donald Bradman was just a batsman. Like it or not Swanton was the de facto senior man in both the British press pack; and actually, in this room.
Born in Forest Hill, London his father had once told him that he had been taken as a baby in his pram to a match at which, W.G. Grace – ‘The Champion’ – then nearly sixty had scored a century against the local club playing for London County. Cricket was in his blood. He had begun work in Fleet Street aged seventeen, joining the staff of the Evening Standard in 1927. The first Test Match he covered was at Lord’s in 1930 when the New Zealanders were the visitors; and he had begun his broadcasting career as long ago as 1934 working for the then Empire Service. Although not an outstanding cricketer himself – he played a handful of First-Class matches for Middlesex in the later thirties without particular distinction – he was a judge par excellence of the game, a man whose eloquently sparse, precise remarks had gone to the nub of cricketing matters for over thirty years.
A prisoner of the Japanese for three years in the Second World War he had survived the privations of the Burma Railway and polio, returning to England to become the cricket correspondent of The Daily Telegraph. Picking up where he had left off with the nomadic eleven he had founded in 1935 - The Arabs – and basically, had become the doyen of cricket writers and commentators: as a writer ‘halfway between the Ten Commandments and Enid Blyton’[62], observed one contemporary, and his wisely understated radio work was a sublime counter-balance to John Arlott’s often wistful romanticism.
It was known that Swanton’s wife, Ann, had probably been at the family home in Sandwich, Kent on the night of the recent war and that first indications were that that part of the county was comprehensively devastated.
Jim Swanton sighed.
‘Mr Trueman is correct, and indeed, he has every right to ask that question,’ he determined with quiet gravitas. ‘For what it is worth I doubt if anybody at home cares at present. I have little doubt that were it not that the Australian agents of The Telegraph were paying my travel and hotel costs I would be homeless, stateless, and unemployed at this time. I have not attempted to send any material home since the night of the war, although every day I write my piece. Religiously, in fact, if only for the sake of form; as indeed do the majority of my colleagues.’ Ian Wooldridge of the Daily Mail and John Clarke of the Evening Standard nodded their concurrence, as did John Woodcock of The Times, and others around the room. ‘I do not pretend that I write exclusively of the cricket, we are living through dreadful times. I think the question of whether we carry on,’ he continued, ‘rather depends on how one views the future. For myself I elect to believe that we have a future, that we are not finished yet. Not by a long way. Insofar as this tour continues, I will continue to chronicle it. Until I hear otherwise I am still in the employ of The Telegraph and I will turn up in the commentary box at Brisbane for the start of the First Test to ‘do my bit’ irrespective of the existence, or otherwise of the British Broadcasting Corporation.’
There was silence.
‘To be perfectly honest,’ Swanton continued dryly, ‘what else are we to do, gentlemen?’
Brisbane in those days was more a town than a city. Hot and steamy, a place which on first acquaintance was new, still an outlier of the Australian nation. It had been a frontier outpost, now it was being subsumed, a little reluctantly by civilisation and its hard edges slowly softening. There were rattling tramcars on the street but the further one walked from the centre the more one felt like one was venturing into a Wild West town where every time the wind blew tumbrels skittered across the road.
Normally the Queensland match would be followed by the First Test, this time an up country game at Toowoomba, eighty punishing miles into the outback had been arranged as the MCC’s rugged final preparation for the Brisbane Test.
It was bizarre but the match was on the schedule so MCC was honour bound to meet its contractual obligations; even though one of the contracting parties – the Marylebone Cricket Club and its home, Lord’s - no longer existed.
There was the normal pre-match reception and dinner before the Queensland match. It began at five o’clock and went on until midnight, not exactly ideal preparation for the English batsmen who might be facing West Indian speed-merchant Wes Hall[63] first thing the next morning.
This was a thing Geoff Pullar was amply able to attest to within minutes of play getting under way!
Clouted painfully in the ribs a couple of times the last ball of Hall’s first over clipped the shoulder of his bat and he was gone without troubling the scorers. David Sheppard looked to have weathered the worst of the barrage before feathering a catch to the slips for 17; then as suddenly as it had burst the storm had passed, Hall had retired to the outer for a rest and Colin Cowdrey was languidly stroking and driving the ball to all parts as an oddly out of sorts Dexter – bereft of his natural timing – clunked and clothed the ball in all directions. No sooner had the England captain seemed to find his touch with two blistering cover drives than he was bowled off an inner edge by his opposite number Ken ‘Slasher’ Mackay.
Before the match Queensland captain Mackay[64] had promised that Wes Hall would rout MCC. The sobriquet ‘Slasher’ was an ironic tribute to his obdurate reluctance to give away his wicket and disinclination to aggressively put bat to ball. Now thirty-seven his long Test Career – which had begun with two obstinate innings at Lord’s in 1956 - was seemingly drawing to its end but he remained one of the most redoubtable of all-round cricketers.
Ken Barrington walked to the middle, took one look at the hard, cracked but true wicket and dug in for a long stay. Cowdrey (144) and Barrington (41) were still there at the close.
MCC was 290 for 3 overnight.
Cowdrey was in such command that there was general astonishment when one of Tom Veivers[65] relatively benign off breaks induced him to
play a lazy-looking stroke to mid-on which ballooned, as if in slow motion into Wes Hall’s strong hands. The Kent batsman had just raised his double century, which might have occasioned a lapse of concentration; in any event the ground went silent for several seconds while the crowd absorbed the dismissal.
After the Lord Mayor’s show things seemed a little tame as MCC subsided to 484 for 8 declared at tea shortly after Barrington had raised his 150.
MCC, fielding Len Coldwell and David Larter in this match to rest Trueman and Statham ahead of the upcoming Test Match bowled for an hour without parting the Queensland openers. That Sam Trimble[66] and Tom Veivers only scored thirty runs in this time had as much to do with Coldwell’s immaculate line and the fact that the English wicket keeper and slip fielders were in a lot more danger from David Larter than either of the Queensland openers. Veivers was livid with himself when he drove a return catch to Barry Knight – afterwards claiming that he was so surprised to receive a ball that was actually ‘in reach’ he could not help but attempt to ‘belt it’ – but thereafter the state side batted to the close without incident.
Queensland were 88 for 1; Trimble on 38, Peter Burge[67] on 24.
Sunday dawned bright and breezy and the MCC party decamped en masse to Surfers’ Paradise, a resort fifty miles south of Brisbane on Queensland’s Gold Coast before returning to the city to resume hostilities on the Monday morning.
Although Trimble batted solidly for 75 it was not until Wally Grout, the Australian wicket keeper joined Burge for the sixth wicket that MCC’s steady wearing down of the Queensland batting line up was arrested. Then with an hour’s play left on day three Mackay suddenly declared, throwing down the gauntlet to Dexter.