by James Philip
It was said in a tone which suggested that as the words spilled from his lips the Earl Marshal of England instantly regretted them.
But the damage was done.
‘If that is your opinion, Your Grace,’ the England captain sighed, ‘then I shall, of course, resign herewith.’
Alec Bedser elected at this moment to walk into the room. He took two steps before he registered the atmosphere was deadly silent, chilled. Nobody wanted to meet his eye.
‘What have I missed?’ He asked sternly, looking around.
Nobody said a word.
It was one of those moments when the bell actually does save the day. Distantly, the five minute bell warning the umpires and the players that the evening session was about to commence tolled...
‘Right,’ Dexter decided as the England team took the field. ‘We’ll have a fielder at third man and another at cover; everybody else is ‘packing’ the leg side. He looked to Fred Trueman. ‘How do you feel about two or three quick overs at leg stump or a tad outside pitched to clip the batsman’s shoulder?’
Bobby Simpson was the first to depart for 9, top-edging a steepling catch into Alan Smith’s gloves off Fred Trueman. Norm O’Neill tried to hook every other delivery he received, hitting two fours before he deflected a ball off his ribs into Trueman’s hands at leg slip off Statham. Lawry, uncharacteristically losing his temper promptly trod on his wicket trying to smash the second ball of Trueman’s next over.
Australia lurched to 23 for 3; the crowd booing and now and then occasional bottles flew over the pickets onto the outfield.
Ah, the spirit of cricket in the Antipodes...
It happened that in Ted Dexter and Richie Benaud two unbending wills had clashed. The Australian skipper had wanted to wear down the English by making them field again beneath the Brisbane sun; Dexter had decided that if he had to get ‘hot and bothered’ he would ‘damned well’ exact a price and ‘eat up’ as much time as possible just in case the rains wanted to come to his rescue later in the match.
Test Match cricket is the game of cricket in its most ruthless, red in blood and claw incarnation. It was ever thus. The only thing that is unforgivable in a Test Match player is surrendering a single inch to one’s foes.
Benaud now retaliated by sending out Ken ‘Slasher’ Mackay to block up one end; the game virtually ground to a standstill but that did not matter because the England team was still in the field, beneath the broiling sun.
Neil Harvey got fed up with the stalemate, began to move around his crease to force the bowlers so far to the leg that runs began to accumulate in byes, and now and then he caught up with a ball and sent it skimming towards or between the Englishmen on the boundary. He scored 40 before Barry Knight, after watching his foot movements for a dozen balls suddenly speared a delivery at the base of Harvey’s stumps as the batsmen stepped away in anticipation of yet another leg-side ‘bumper’.
Australia reached 71 for 4 at the close of play; Mackay on (8), Burge on (3) with England now 444 adrift of the hosts with two whole days left to play.
The furore broke even as the players left the field.
‘If I was Richie,’ Dexter told his inquisitors as the press cornered him in the Pavilion. Chinese whispers about the ‘row’ with the Duke of Norfolk – who had not yet disentangled himself from the company of State dignitaries and was absent at the critical juncture - had raged throughout the final dismal session of the day’s play. ‘I might have tried to keep me and my chaps out in the sun, too. This is one match of a five match series. He may have reasoned that England might, the conditions having eased this afternoon, preferred to bat again before the wicket deteriorates further. In any case, it is not my job to justify my opponent’s decisions. We came down under to win back the Ashes, not to dance to Mr Benaud’s tune.’
Oddly, on the back pages of the morning papers it was Benaud who came in for the most vitriolic criticism One must have wondered at his thoughts as the storm clouds skirted the Gabba the following morning delaying play until half-an-hour before the scheduled luncheon. Needless to say he had declared Australia’s innings concluded before proceedings commenced anew.
This time the Australian seamers laboured to no avail until deep into the afternoon before Peter Parfitt tried one aggressive shot too many and Neil Harvey scooped up a low catch behind the wicket. Parfitt’s 57 out of an opening stand of 90 turned out to be the top score of the innings. Once Dexter – batting in his normal imperious style - succumbed to a ball from Benaud that hit a crack and virtually rolled along the ground to trap him leg before wicket for 34 the innings had subsided, rather in the manner of a house of cards undermined at its base, in an undignified heap.
England were 166 all out; Richie Benaud taking 5 for 28, McKenzie 3 for 40 with Australia winning with twelve minutes to spare on the fourth day by 278 runs.
And nobody really knew if England had lost its captain also...so what with one thing and another MCC’s next excursion up country was somewhat serendipitous.
Chapter 12 | On to Bendigo
To say that several additional dark clouds hovered over – some said ‘pursued’ - the MCC party on its next expedition up country would be something of an understatement. Although the travails of the tourists were hardly on a par with what was going on at home in England there seemed few reasons to be happy.
A much depleted party bade farewell to Brisbane for the eight hundred and forty mile flight north to Townsville on Thursday 6th December 1962 without its manager, the Duke of Norfolk, its Captain, Ted Dexter, the leader of its bowling attack, Fred Trueman, spinner David Allen, and opening batsmen David Sheppard and Geoff Pullar.
The Grand Old Duke was ‘flying the flag’ in Canberra, accompanied – as had been arranged prior to the Brisbane Test - by Dexter for a day or so before he travelled down to Melbourne to rejoin the party. Everybody knew about the ‘confrontation’ in the Pavilion at the Gabba by then and the absence of any public pronouncement confirming – or otherwise – if Dexter remained the England captain was like pouring petrol on a fire. In retrospect the situation was not helped when Colin Cowdrey, laconically fending off a barrage of questions at Brisbane Eagle Farm Airport observed that ‘I’m sure Ted will pick up the reins in Melbourne’.
Fred Trueman’s back was ‘playing up’ again and he, Geoff Pullar whose injured ribs still needed time to mend and David Sheppard were due to go down to Victoria ahead of the party as a group. It was clear that Sheppard was now prioritising the ecclesiastical over the temporal, raising doubts as to how long he would remain with the tour. Most worrying was the situation of David Allen, the Gloucestershire off spinner who had been diagnosed with advanced symptoms of the particularly virulent influenza – later erroneously categorised as a ‘war plague’ – which had broken out in Brisbane while MCC had been in the city. Staying behind in the city to recover, within two days he was to be rushed to hospital as the epidemic threatened to overwhelm Brisbane’s medical resources. At the time rumours were rife that the ‘disease’ had been brought to Queensland by sick men offloaded from several of the merchantmen ‘collected’ by the British Pacific Fleet during and after its brief visit to Brisbane.
At the time nobody thought to quarantine the rest of the MCC party or indeed, the city – later identified by epidemiological studies to have been the nexus of infection in the resultant near nationwide pandemic – then or later. But then at the time nobody could know that in the weeks before Christmas 1962 over seven hundred people would die in the fever wards of Brisbane’s hospitals and at least as many in their own homes or that it would be several months before, after claiming perhaps as many as five thousand lives, the ‘plague’ eventually ran its course in the city.
Townsville, MCC’s destination on that first Friday of December 1962, the most northern Australian outpost ever visited by an English team at that time, was to suffer dreadfully from the sickness which came to the city, causing the deaths of an estimated one in eight of the pre-October War population during the fir
st six months of 1963.[72]
Much nonsense was talked and written in the late sixties about the role of the MCC tourists in ‘spreading the contagion’; myths and legends robustly refuted at the time and since comprehensively disproved by the Australian Centre for Disease Control in Canberra[73], among other unimpeachable authorities. Independent studies by researchers in the United States and elsewhere have proven conclusively that the initial nexus of infection was most likely passengers on several Pan Am and American Airlines flights who travelled to Australasia – both Australia and New Zealand – from various locations in the United States, ostensibly to escape the ‘next war’. This ‘traffic’ in mainly wealthy ‘refugees’ from North America, continued at a steady pace for some years, peaking[74] in the mid-1960s after the first rush – or ‘panic’ - subsided after January 1963.
However, as the English cricketers boarded the plane for the flight to Townsville under the leadership of Alec Bedser and Colin Cowdrey for what was to be the least reported ‘cricketing week’ of the tour nobody had heard of such a thing as ‘war plague’ and the mood of the party was again somewhat down in the dumps.
The punishing schedule hardly helped; directly after the First Test the tourists were expected to travel the best part of two thousand miles to fulfil three ‘country’ fixtures in northern Queensland and Victoria. Even had the English cricketers been in the finest of fine physical condition and their mental spirits elevated, this itinerary would have tested the patience of saints and the endurance of any athlete. Tellingly, only a handful of correspondents bothered to journey with MCC on this latest cross country – and in cricketing terms, utterly meaningless – odyssey.
Few realised at the time the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England would only have a ‘walk on’ part in the rest of the tour. Parking his daughters at the Embassy in Canberra he was about to embark on a three month long period of what we would now call ‘shuttle diplomacy’[75] which would carry him to Ceylon, India, Singapore, New Zealand, Fiji and on one famous occasion, acting as Her Majesty’s personal emissary, to Hawaii thence to San Francisco and Washington DC on an ultra-secret mission to diffuse the fallout from a stand-off between British, Commonwealth and American warships in the Coral Sea.[76]
In later years Ted Dexter stoutly refuted any suggestion that he and the Duke had ‘fallen out’; in reality it mattered little because from this point onwards the two men’s paths crossed infrequently and the management of the tour effectively passed to Alec Bedser with Dexter captaining the Test side and Colin Cowdrey the ‘First-Class and Country XI’.
The oddest thing was that while the main party was in Townsville the Australian press seemed interested in only one thing: Fiery Fred’s back. He had been X-rayed – for the second time on the tour – and it was mooted, ‘taken advice’. One story had it that he needed an immediate operation, another that his tour was finished and yet the man himself was dismissive of bad news when he and Geoff Pullar held an impromptu ‘conference’ with the newshounds at Brisbane Airport.
Consequently, rumours abounded that the real reason he was going down to Melbourne ahead of the rest of the party was that – having heard a medical opinion that was not to his liking - he was in need of a second ‘expert’ opinion!
With the team going off into the country, its star bowler ploughing a lonely furrow down to Victoria, and the MCC’s figureheads both on and off the field going their separate ways it seemed to some that the ‘wheels had come off the enterprise’. Questions were even being asked if England would, or were in fact, in any position to actually carry on with, or to complete the tour.
The majority of Australians had already written off England’s prospects in the remaining Tests; it was all a little sad and practically everybody was beginning to pity the lot of the English cricketers abroad. Richie Benaud’s side’s easy triumph at Brisbane was already feeling hollow and but for the ‘leg-theory affair’ of the third afternoon, much of the customary Ashes ‘spice’ would already have bled out of the series.
It is a universal fact known to all cricket lovers that when Australian crowds row back on their barracking and start to feel sorry for ‘the Poms’ that things must indeed be looking desperately dark.
That week was probably the low point for Ted Dexter personally and his men. It was the week his wife had planned to meet him in Australia; one ‘fixture’ on the schedule which circumstances had cancelled, yet a date that reminded both his deputy, Cowdrey, and his old friend David Sheppard of their likely loss. Dexter later confessed to what we would now call ‘survivor guilt’ every time he looked at those members of his team who had almost certainly been widowed, and who would never again see their young children.
‘It made one sick to one’s stomach,’ he reflected. ‘What does one say? What does one do? What right has one to ask, or expect men less lucky than one self to buck up? I think it was that week when the party returned from the country to Melbourne that it all sank in. It was hardly surprising our showing at Brisbane was an absolute stinker.’
Up country the MCC had cleft through relatively moderate opposition. Ken Barrington and Peter Parfitt had hit hundreds in the two-day match at the Sports Reserve Ground at Townsville before David Larter, the erratic but occasionally terrifying six feet seven inch Northamptonshire quick bowler had given the local batsmen a torrid time. Len Coldwell, the Worcestershire fast-medium exponent of line and length had taken as many wickets as his partner in the match, seven, simply by ‘picking up the unnerved’ pieces of the Queensland Country XI. For the record MCC won by and innings and 12 runs an hour before the close of play on the second day.
The next morning the tourists flew back down to Brisbane to catch another – three-hour - flight on to Melbourne, where a bus was waiting to drive the party to Bendigo, some ninety or so miles north west of the state capital of Victoria.
An England team had toured these parts as long ago as 1862 when Bendigo, like Castlemaine and Ballarat to the south had been gold mining boom towns; back in those days England had trounced XXII of Bendigo and lost, albeit narrowly, to XXII of Castlemaine.
By the time the tourists arrived just after sunset at their hotel in Bendigo, The Shamrock, they had been travelling the best part of twelve hours on this, a day pencilled in as a ‘rest day’. Understandably, the drive through the rolling, vaguely English countryside from Melbourne to Bendigo, other than to prompt dispiriting memories of home, did little to raise the morale of the party.
The goldmines of Bendigo had produced hundreds of tons of gold since 1851 and although the runaway boom years were over their legacy remained in the form of grand public buildings, every inch the equal of those in the big industrial cities of the midlands and the north of the Old Country bearing mute witness to the greatness that had once been Bendigo.
On the first day – in front of a crowd of around four thousand - of the two-day match against a Victoria Country XI it was Tom Graveney’s turn to find a little form but his hundred, and fifties by Cowdrey and Knight were the only real highlights of the contest. David Larter, mercurial to a fault bowled a succession of no-balls and seemed to completely lose his sense of direction and with it much of his pace. Brian Statham bowled steadily; without exerting himself once a couple of straightforward catches had gone down in the slips off his opening spell, and on the last day the hosts’ second innings meandered to 130 for 4 and the game was drawn. Perhaps, around two thousand had been present at the Queen Elizabeth II Oval in mid-afternoon but most of them had gone home by the close.
‘Where next?’ One wag asked Alec Bedser as the jaded party sat down for a shepherd’s pie dinner under the football grandstand before a moonlit drive to the tour’s next port of call, Shepparton, some eighty miles away.
It seems quaint these days but rather than organising a bus for the MCC to convey the tourists to their next stopover, the players and officials of the eleven due to turn out against them on the morrow had driven their own cars over to Bendigo to collect the Englishme
n. Moreover, at the Victoria Hotel in Shepparton it was as if the whole town had turned out to welcome the team; pressing ice cold beers into the hands of the weary cricketers and tempting them with oyster and lobster patties to ameliorate the pain of still more speeches and the enthusiastic conversation of local worthies.
Racing along uneven country roads at breakneck speed in the moonlight so as to not delay the long-planned reception was one of the memories of the tour that lingered forever.[77]
MCC’s visit to the town, located some one hundred and ten miles from Melbourne was a major event for the former sheep station and modern railway centre.
The match against the local country eleven was a tame affair; but the match was not the ‘thing’ that day. It was the occasion of the opening of the new McDonald Grandstand of Shepparton’s Deakin Reserve Ground during the luncheon interval by Premier of Victoria, Henry Bolte[78], named for his predecessor as premier of the state, Sir John McDonald.
In a much extended ‘break’ during which Bolte, Sir John who despite being native-born in Australia had inherited his parents’ Scottish accent, and the Mayor made fulsome speeches about the importance and the strength of the ‘Commonwealth ties’ that bound all of those present. Colin Cowdrey, talking with charm and ineffable grace echoed these sentiments before the ceremony was rounded off by a girls’ bagpipe band playing a Scottish air.
Either side of lunch MCC scored 250 for 7 and declared. It was but the work of one hundred and five minutes to bowl out their hosts for 74. David Larter had reduced the Country XI to 17 for 4 before he was removed from the attack to avoid the embarrassment of seriously injuring one of the local batsmen; and Fred Titmus and Raymond Illingworth had spun out the survivors, stoically bearing with good humour the occasional agricultural heave to the boundary.
One or two of the handful of cricket correspondents who had pursued MCC up country made passing comments about how Northamptonshire’s David Larter had ‘at times found his second wind’ against second rate opposition; but none cared to speculate out aloud that this form was liable to carry over into the full state matches, let alone the Test Match arena. The fellow was too erratic, too profligate and if – horror of horrors – Fred Trueman was unavailable then Len Coldwell was the obvious, safe, steady, reliable man to step into his shoes.