by James Philip
In the England dressing room nobody could bear to watch.
Larter wafted at a ball which seemed to spin almost sideways.
He jammed down on a ‘flipper’ so belatedly that it seemed to the Australian close fielders that the ball was already past his bat.
The third ball took the leading edge of his blade and dropped agonisingly exactly between two desperately scrambling, diving fielders.
Next there was a concerted appeal for LBW; Umpire Colin Egar thought long and hard, weighing the pros and cons, his heart beating as fast as any man on the field, and eventually...he shook his head.
Unaccountably, David Larter flashed at the fifth ball of the over. It was pitched up, it was a tempting half-volley and he could not stop himself. The ball took the edge and scudded away in the direction of third man.
‘RUN!’ Barrington yelled.
Changing ends the batsmen watched with baited breath to see if the ball reached the boundary.
It slowed, rolled, escorted all the way by Norm O’Neill – willing it to go for four - looking like it must come to a halt and then with its last slow turn it came to rest against the fence.
Larter and Barrington trudged, very nearly disconsolately back to their original ends leaving the big fast bowler three more balls to face.
England 362 for 9.
There was a flurry of bat swishing; the audible thud of the ball onto pad and Bobby Simpson gleefully snaffled the ball in his hands at slip as the whole stadium erupted.
Again...Umpire Egar shook his head.
Benaud gave the umpire a very hard look but said nothing.
The entire Australian team – Benaud apart – was now standing within feet of the besieged ‘rabbit’. Larter, boyishly handsome with a mop of sun-bleached fair hair exuded an odd, phlegmatic calm as if he knew that what will be, will be because all things being equal there was not a lot given his dearth of skill with the bat that he could actually do about it.
The penultimate delivery spun out of Benaud’s hand, its trajectory briefly taking it above Larter’s eye line before it dipped and bit hard into the arid turf. Dust puffed explosively and the ball leapt across the batsman as he spontaneously pushed at it.
And by a fraction of an inch...missed it!
‘Get forward and try to keep your bat behind your front pad,’ Barrington coached his partner in a hoarse whisper hoping against hope that Benaud would not serve up one of his perfectly pitched googlies.
This delayed the final ball of the match.
The crowd was maddened.
It was hard to say upon whose shoulders the weight of the World lay in that moment. If Larter got out to the last ball of the match the Ashes were probably lost, the series also; while for Benaud the calculus was at once less critical, yet a kind of immortality beckoned. It was his fate to be either the man who won a famous match, or lost it...
Psychologically, if Larter survived the whole of Australia would feel as if it was a match lost...
David Larter very nearly contrived to hide his bat behind his lunging front leg, thrust aggressively impossibly far down the wicket.
The ball, emerging from another incendiary puff of dust clipped the shoulder of his bat.
It looped improbably high – perhaps twenty feet in the air – and for a split second Bobby Simpson, having turned and sprinted, running like a hare must have believed, as did everybody else at the ground, that he was going to catch the still spinning ball as he dived headlong...right up until the moment the scuffed once red cherry hit the turf a dozen inches beyond his despairing right hand.
Chapter 16 | Van Diemen's Land
After the high drama of Melbourne the trip across the Bass Strait to Tasmania was inevitably something of an anti-climax. In the sixties the state side did not compete in the Sheffield Shield meaning that its best players tended to migrate to the mainland, or to be lost early to the game.
To make the ‘island leg’ of the tour more competitive it was the practice of the Australian Cricket Board to despatch a bevy of Test or ‘Test hopefuls’ to bolster a Tasmania Combined XI in a four-day first-class fixture against the tourists, and to permit the local ‘Tasmanians’ only a second-class two-day fixture.
By 1963 this was increasingly a source of frustration in Tasmania. Bringing in top players from outside might theoretically boost attendances and ‘even up the deck’ but it denied local men the opportunity to pit themselves against the highest class opponents, and often, the ‘guest’ players were jaded from recent international tussles. This latter was definitely the case as the MCC flew into Launceston on the evening of the miraculous ‘great escape’ at Melbourne. Whereas, the Englishmen were tired but in celebratory mood, Bill Lawry, Brian Booth, Bobby Simpson and Western Australian Barry Shepherd, who had been twelfth man at Melbourne, who now accompanied the tourists to Tasmania, were not!
Idiotically, the Combined XI match was listed to commence at the North Tasmanian Cricket Association Ground approximately sixteen to seventeen hours after the scheduled denouement of the Second Test. Mercifully, rain washed out the first day at Launceston.
MCC substituting Warwickshire glove man Alan Smith for John Murray and resting the four main bowlers at Melbourne brought in Ray Illingworth, Len Coldwell, Barry Knight and a half-fit Geoff Pullar, who was having a miserable ‘cricketing’ tour.
Put in to bat on an English-type ‘green top’ wicket on Saturday 5th January MCC faltered briefly and then prospered in conditions reminiscent of May at home. Dexter came and went after a dashing hour, and Cowdrey and Graveney batted through the afternoon before Ken Barrington, batting sixth joined Geoff Pullar for the final session. With 325 for 4 on the board Dexter declared at the close of play. There was a civic reception to attend that evening and tomorrow, the Sunday rest day, beckoned.
Of the imported players only Barry Shepherd impressed for the local team, scoring a fluent 87 before he was last out in a total of 207 shortly after tea on the second actual day’s play on Monday. Eschewing the temptation to bat out the match MCC, with Illingworth and Smith advanced in the batting order to gain a little match practice threw the bat and declared on the final morning inviting the Combined XI to chase a score of 250 in four-and-a-half hours on the last day. After Lawry and Simpson had perished early to Len Coldwell’s seamers, Ray Illingworth and Ken Barrington spun out the Combined XI for 127 with an hour to spare.
The whole Tasmanian adventure was a rushed affair with little thought given to allowing the tourists time to draw breath before the Third Test due to begin on 11th January in Sydney. Other than to give MCC the opportunity to allow Ray Illingworth – for England might well play both Lock and the Yorkshireman at Sydney, where the red earth invariably assisted slow bowlers – to turn his arm over, there was little profit in the diversion for the tourists. It was just another wearying slog primarily designed to fill the coffers of the Marylebone Club.
Tasmania – without their imported Test men and ‘prospects’ – unaccountably caused MCC no little embarrassment on the first morning of the two-day match following immediately after the Combined XI fixture, played at the Tasmanian Cricket Association Ground at Hobart some hundred miles south of Launceston.
Notwithstanding the tourists had recovered to 225 for 6 at the tea interval, with Geoff Pullar finding a little more of his normal form with his unbeaten 63; and unleashed Fred Trueman in fading light. Trueman had demanded to play so as to confirm he was fit for the Sydney Test, having ‘stiffened up’ after the fourth day of the Melbourne match. His three quick wickets for hardly any runs satisfied him that all was well and thereafter he stood at leg slip for the rest of the contest. Once again, it was spin, this time Tony Lock in tandem with Ray Illingworth that bowled out the home side for 145. England took the field again on the second afternoon only for the rain to curtail proceedings.
From what little of it they had seen Tasmania had reminded the Englishmen – painfully – of home. The island state was known to be rugged but the tourists had
only seen green rolling hills, and picturesque Launceston beneath mainly overcast skies. Even the rain had felt ‘English’, and the temperature was mild like most summer days back in England.
While in Launceston the tourists had listened to a recording of the Queen’s New Year message to the Commonwealth, a crackly, noisy tape of the radio broadcast relayed via the post-October surviving Atlantic and Pacific undersea cables.
It is all too easy at times such as these to despair for all which has been lost, and for all those who may have perished. However, what has happened has happened and we must look to the future and draw what comfort we may from the solicitude and support of our loved ones, and from our brothers and sisters throughout the Commonwealth.
The party had listened in silence.
Here in the United Kingdom we have suffered grievously and it will be a long time before the true measure of our loss can be sensibly counted. An accounting is a thing for the future; now my Government has a duty only to the living and to those places which escaped the cataclysm of the Cuban Missiles War. You will know that I, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne were by chance at Windsor Castle at the time of the attack, and the Queen Mother in Scotland. My dearly beloved sister Margaret Rose was in London and nothing has been heard of her or of many other loyal members of the Royal Household since that night.
There was steel in the Queen’s voice that no amount of static or frequency attenuation could hide or distort.
Now is the time for us to pull together. Perhaps, never in the long history of our island race have we faced a disaster on the scale of the recent sad war but spare a thought for those overseas, far from home thinking of loved ones whom they may never see again. Spare a thought for our brave cricketers in Australia carrying on because especially at a time like this it behoves us all to play up and play the game as never before...
At this point there was probably the genesis of a tear even in Fred Trueman’s eye!
A Vickers Viscount turboprop aircraft had been chartered to take the party back to the mainland on the Thursday morning – the day before the Third Test – so that there would be time in the afternoon for net and fielding practice at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Before the Dexter-Bedser axis took charge of touring affairs the initial plan had been to fly into Sydney that evening; time ‘for practice and or, training’ being thought superfluous to the penny-pinching, mainly old men who had been solely responsible for the arrangements up until that time.
None other than George Oswald Browning ‘Gubby’ Allen, the man who now thought he ran English, and therefore World cricket was waiting for the MCC team at Sydney Mascot Airport having contrived to inveigle a valuable seat – a sign that the post-war priorities which would soon rigidly govern such things had not yet been sufficiently aggressively impressed on British airlines, all of which had been nationalised under the first tranche of the War Emergency Regulations now governing every aspect of life in the United Kingdom – on one of the three Comet 4s assigned to ‘shuttle’ VIPs, essential military, technical and diplomatic personnel and ‘the mails’ to Australasia and ‘British missions’ along the route.
Allen had been born in Bellevue Hill, Sydney, the second child of a lawyer and the daughter of a former Minister in the Queensland state administration; and his family had only settled permanently in England when he was in his teens. He was a powerful man at Lord’s and over the years he had, like all successful men, rubbed a goodly number of his peers the ‘wrong way’. He had never married and thus, sometimes had the air of a man unrestrained in his prognostications possibly for want of a calming, balancing feminine influence in his life.
This had occasionally caused comment which, like circumstantial rumours about the possibility that another ‘great’ from the golden days, Pelham ‘Plum’ Warner, might have been his real father, swirled just below the surface in troubled times. Such whispering had started in the 1930s, supported by the fact that Allen in his playing career and his ascent of the towering heights of the English cricketing establishment had been supported at every step by Warner. Warner, it was said, had been smitten by Pearl Allen – Gubby’s mother – and had actually been in Australia around the time of his conception. In support of this it was cited that – apparently - Warner’s wife had always ‘had it in’ for Pearl, her rival. At the time the rumours first circulated people had started to mention that they had always thought Allen had looked awfully like Plum Warner in his younger days...
Such tittle-tattle was an irrelevance; unfortunately, it could easily become grist for the mill for those from whom the object of the gossip was now claiming unquestioning fealty as if he was some regal emissary from the Old Country.
It was generally accepted that Dexter would not have been Allen’s first choice to lead that winter’s Australian tour, Lord Ted had suspected that it was Allen who was behind the decision not to seriously consider Tony Lock for the tour simply on the grounds that questions had been raised about his bowling action after the previous Australasian tour four years ago.
Ted Dexter had been living with the consequences of the unimaginative – possibly blinkered - selection of three, high-quality but essentially similar right-arm slow bowlers when there had been a perfectly good, very experienced left-arm ‘tweaker’ available – Tony Lock - ever since the party disembarked from the Canberra. Moreover, if for no other reason than that the great man was standing in front of him, the England captain, fresh from the pointless Tasmanian diversion was in the mood to blame him for the dog’s breakfast of the itinerary as well!
None of which probably occurred to Allen who was distinctly more concerned with his own importance than the trifling complaints of his cricketers. Allen’s nose had been seriously put out of joint – and he had been chaffing over it all the way out to Australia - because he had only been permitted to bring a single confidential secretary with him to Australia.[87] He was to be doubly annoyed two months later when he was informed by the Australian authorities that if he wanted passage home he was going to have to (a) pay for it himself or find somebody to stand surety for him, and (b) take passage on a vessel ‘heading in that direction’ like everybody else. Given that he had not been specifically invited by the Australian Government; his onward travel arrangements were therefore his own affair.
That ‘little unpleasantness’ lay in the future; on the afternoon – MCC’s aircraft landed just after mid-day – Allen, apparently unimpressed by what he had heard third, fourth or fifth hand about the ‘Brisbane Incident’ and the ‘general conduct’ of the tour to date, was preoccupied with taking charge of the ‘situation on the ground’.
Allen was astonished when – with impeccable civility Dexter informed him that while he was ‘welcome to accompany the party all practical decisions were his [Dexter’s] responsibility’.
The Marylebone Cricket Club might exist as an idea; in reality it was a ghost without the wherewithal to meet its contractual obligations to its employees [the professionals in the team], or to anybody else in Australia. Had the Duke of Norfolk still been ‘actively involved in the tour’ then his prestige entitled him to his leading role in cricketing business. However, Allen was simply an interloper who had greeted the England captain frostily as he got off the aircraft returning him and his team from a pointless, tiring week in Tasmania ahead of what was likely to be the most important Test Match of the Ashes series.
Increasingly, the fact that tour revenues were being held by MCC’s agents – self-appointed worthies or state cricketing authorities pending a decision on what to do with the ever mounting ‘kitty’ – was becoming an issue since the men holding the monies had decided amongst themselves that they did not actually have the ‘right’ to disperse any part of the same to the tourists other than that minimally contracted ‘to remit at the conclusion of the tour’. Miserly payments on account – issued as loans to be paid back, deducted from any ‘final’ payments – excepted, the English cricketers amateur or professional had essentially been playing
for ‘expenses alone’.
Had it not been for Dexter’s and Bedser’s decision just after the Brisbane Test to permit all the professionals to accept paid journalistic or other work ‘not prejudicial to the tour’ there might have been a mutiny by now.
Rightly or wrongly, Dexter blamed Gubby Allen for the financial stranglehold MCC’s ‘agents’ and the other ‘relevant authorities’ were exerting on the financial arrangements for the tour, and assumed that sooner or later Allen was going to try to blackmail him and his men with ‘our own money’.[88]
‘What’s this nonsense I hear about cancelling the country games in New South Wales?’ Allen demanded within earshot of a dozen correspondents and players.
It had been too late to do anything about the Tasmanian leg of the tour but during the Melbourne Test Alec Bedser had sounded out – by telephone and cable – the NSW Cricket Association about the feasibility of modifying the MCC’s itinerary. Not least because it was feared that if any more players picked up major injuries, to add to the persistent strains and ‘niggles’ many were already carrying, or went down with illness like poor David Allen had in Brisbane, then there would be no tour at all!
Little had come of these inquiries, other that was, than that somebody, somehow had managed to bend Gubby Allen’s ear. Given that there was nothing whatsoever to prevent Dexter and his men simply giving up, throwing in the towel and dispersing into private life, or more likely employment in schools and with grade clubs all over Australia, where their services would be keenly appreciated as high profile sports masters and coaches, or in Dexter’s case a man that several large combines had already approached to fill marketing and or, board positions, there were many well-informed Australians in cricket administration, and government, who wondered why the Englishmen were still ‘putting themselves through the wringer’ in such a masochistic fashion. Frankly, if Dexter had held a press conference and declared that ‘we will play the Tests and disband’, most Australians would have applauded the tourists for ‘sticking it’ so long.