by James Philip
This was the week that the office of the Queensland Premier put out a terse statement reporting that ‘monitors state-wide recording background levels of ionising radiation, having shown a statistically insignificant rise in November, rose by an average of eighteen percent during the course of December 1962...’
In Victoria cinemas had been forbidden to show the film ‘On the Beach’ until further notice.
People were getting jittery and questions were being asked in an emergency sitting of Parliament in Canberra whether international travel, particularly air travel involving flights from above Latitude 10 Degrees South – that is, north of the Australian land mass - should be suspended until the dangers of ‘irradiated persons and goods’ to the health of Australia and its people could be ‘properly investigated’.
‘The chaps are tired, sir,’ Dexter had reported to Gubby Allen. ‘Let’s not beat about the bush, the matches we are talking about are a complete waste of time. From the moment the touring itinerary was first published we knew that the proliferation of country matches was always going to be a damned distraction and that is exactly how it has turned out!’
Gubby Allen never forgave Dexter.
The old man’s mistake lay in the fact that he never really understood that Lord Ted did not give a damn!
Chapter 17 | Third Test
Gubby Allen had stalked around the two-hour long net session at the Sydney Cricket Ground on the afternoon the tourists flew in from Hobart. He had followed Dexter, Bedser, Cowdrey and the bowling triumvirate of Trueman, Statham and Lock - after engaging David Sheppard who had had no part of the ‘misunderstanding’ at the airport in affable conversation - out to inspect the wicket which had been prepared for the forthcoming match. Sheppard also had gravitated into the huddle as the Englishmen studied the rock hard, oddly mottled brown strip and its patches – mostly at the ends – of dead, rolled in grass.
‘We must play Illingworth,’ Allen decided. ‘Shame Allen isn’t fit,’ he added, presumably ignorant of the fact that only forty-eight hours ago Alec Bedser had received a confidential cable in Tasmania warning him that the Gloucestershire professional was ‘critically ill’. Dexter and the Acting Team manager had kept this to themselves; there was nothing anybody could do.
Despite the odd ‘mottling’ at first sight the wicket looked like a ‘belter’ which would take spin later in the game. The England captain did not respond. Richie Benaud had mentioned, almost in passing that the square had been ‘wet’ earlier in the week and that ‘the curator was unhappy with the wicket’.
For all that they were deadly foes on the pitch Benaud and Dexter maintained friendly relations off it, recognising in each other steely competitors. For his part the Englishman was to comment some years after the event, ‘Benaud was undoubtedly the best cricket brain and captain in my era’. Both captains realised that the wicket was probably under-prepared, liable to deteriorate sooner rather than later.
The question was: how long would it last?
Across the other side of the ground Peter Parfitt, the Middlesex left-handed batsman and right-handed off break bowler was ‘turning over his arm’ in the nets. That had been Dexter’s suggestion. For all that he was something of a part-time bowler Parfitt had taken five wickets in an innings on more than one occasion in first-class cricket. On a helpful surface he would be less reliable than Yorkshireman Illingworth but Dexter had no intention of blunting his pace attack by dropping David Larter, or weakening his batting by resting, say, Tom Graveney to accommodate Gubby Allen’s preference.
Barry Knight was a flamboyant all-round cricketer capable of scoring hundreds in any form of the game but Tom Graveney was, well, a class act.
That evening back at the MCC’s hotel in Rushcutters Bay, handily located less than a mile from the SCG, the members of the selection committee were called out of their deliberations to view the sight of HMS Ark Royal, the flagship of the British Pacific Fleet, escorted by the destroyers HMS Cavendish and the Australian HMAS Voyager nosing cautiously into the harbour and anchoring in the shadow of the city’s world-famous bridge. Surrounded by a numberless flotilla of yachts and launches it was a sight set to stir any Englishman’s soul.
By all accounts after Allen followed the ‘selection group’ back into the hotel and adopted the attitude of Chairman, Dexter had asked him pleasantly: ‘Forgive me, sir. What do you think you are doing?’
‘Why, convening our meeting!’
‘That is my job, sir.’
‘Carry on, then!’
Gubby Allen still wanted to ‘rest’ Larter and Parfitt and bring in Knight and Illingworth.
Apocryphally, one account maintains that Fred Trueman inquired: ‘Young David will make the beggars jump about and who opens if Peter is in the stands?’ Other accounts embellish this with suggestions that Fiery Fred was not alone in inquiring of the newly arrived interloper ‘when was the last time you saw any of us getting stuck in?’
Ted Dexter had stamped down hard on any hint of incivility.
‘I’m for going into the match with the Melbourne eleven,’ he declared. ‘Larter had a disappointing time of it but sooner or later he will come off. Besides,’ he had added, to wry guffaws from the cricketers and blank incomprehension from Allen, ‘the man’s batting saved the match!’
Dexter has always refused to discuss the fifteen minute, closed-door session which followed between he, Bedser and Allen. Afterwards Alec Bedser was red-faced, irate, and Tony Lock and Ken Barrington, former team mates and men he had mentored at Surrey years before took him for a long ‘sobering walk’ to ‘stop him from saying something he would regret later’.
That in the heat of the argument Allen had raised the inflammatory subject of Dexter’s employment of ‘blatant leg-theory bowling’ at Brisbane, is disputed by nobody.
Nor that Allen had failed to grasp that after what the party had been through in the weeks since the recent war the ‘selection committee’ for the Tests was actually a committee of one – Dexter – who consulted with other senior players but retained the absolute last word on all matters. The eleven that that took the field at Sydney was going to be ‘Dexter’s XI’.
For all that Gubby Allen had been rubbing shoulders with the great and the good most of his life and he remained a ‘cricketing institution’; in the last few weeks Dexter had become one of the last Englishmen standing in Australia, a figure on a par with the patrician ‘Fighting Admiral’ whose mighty flagship now rode out in the tideway below the iconic Harbour Bridge. The Governor General, De L’Isle, Julian Christopher and Dexter had become the faces and the voices of the old, home country down under, and Allen – no matter that he claimed to speak for MCC - was out-gunned.
One must conclude that Allen still did not understand this when he joined Dexter and Bedser for that evening’s pre-arranged press conference.
‘I think the chaps did a sterling job at Melbourne,’ Dexter announced without ado, ‘the same eleven will turnout this time.’
The trouble was that the press had got a whiff of a real story at the airport; a story it was always going to shake like a dog with a bone. It would be wrong to claim that there was a barrage of questions; it was more of a ragged salvo aimed primarily at Gubby Allen.
Firstly, was the team selected unanimously?
Secondly, is it true you have taken your Captain to task over the leg-theory ‘episode’ at Brisbane?
It probably never occurred to Allen to dissemble.
‘The Eleven is the eleven picked by the England captain,’ he replied will only wafer-thin grace. ‘And, yes, I have spoken with Mr Dexter about our bowling in the First Test.’
Dexter and Bedser stared stonily to their front as the inevitable follow up questions started to fly.
Allen told the increasingly wide-eyed correspondents that he, personally, based on his ‘lifetime’s experience of wickets and playing conditions around the globe’, had favoured ‘selecting Illingworth over Larter’ and the all-rounder Knight
over one of the batsmen.
It was not until, starting to wax lyrical, he used the word ‘deplorable’ in the context of the Brisbane ‘defeat’ that he paused for breath.
The old man was a little perplexed when he realised that nobody was paying a blind bit of notice to him, in fact they were not even looking in his direction.
Instead, every eye was following, and several men were already on their feet pursuing, the erect, furious figure of the England captain as he marched out of the room.
Alec Bedser had hesitated then he too was abandoning the now chaotic conference.
‘I say!’ Allen protested angrily. ‘Come back, I say!’
Nobody was listening.
Dexter was later to write that:
When I walked out of that press conference having been publicly undermined and insulted by a man of that class and generation which had just negligently overseen the war to end all wars I knew that there were three courses of action available to me, and to all intents, the rest of the party.
Option one was to step down from the captaincy. Playing cricket with the whole world in a complete shambles seemed, frankly, something of a selfish indulgence at that time unless some greater good might come of it. It would have been intolerable at the best of times to have had Gubby Allen sitting on my shoulder, acting as judge and jury in his own Kangaroo court. I confess that in our circumstances, leading a band of men many of whose families had been obliterated a little over two months before bore much more heavily on me at the time than I let on.
Option two was to propose to the other members of the party that, in essence, we abandon the tour. Practically speaking, promises had been made to the professionals that they would be paid their full contractual dues at the end of the tour; but actually, we had nothing in writing since the night of the war. Monies were accruing in accounts in the names of the MCC and its agents in Australia, but only a subsistence trickle of funds was actually reaching the team. Had I not subsequently taken soundings with my men that evening, offering them the opportunity to be released from their cricketing obligations to be free to accept work in Australia or to make their own way home at the earliest time, and established that they like I, regarded the current tour as ‘unfinished business’, the tour would have been abandoned that night in Sydney.
Option three was to carry on but only upon a new, sound footing along the lines of that suggested to me by contacts in industry and commerce I had made since arriving in Australia. The Duke of Norfolk was otherwise detained by official duties of national importance; he had left Alec Bedser and myself in charge and I was not prepared to cede the management of the rest of the tour to a self-appointed grandee of an institution [the Marylebone Cricket Club] which for all we knew no longer existed in any meaningful way. My attitude was that if he [Allen] wanted to revive the Imperial Cricket Council, well and good, let him get on with it and leave us to get on with the job in hand.[89]
Regrettably, when I put the situation to him [Allen] in the small hours of the following morning he rather flew off the handle. Colin Cowdrey, Alec [Bedser] and I had gone to visit him in his room to ‘clear the air’.
It was never my intention to ‘hijack the tour’ for private profit; simply to ensure that I – since my family business in England had literally gone up in smoke I was now, in effect, a professional sportsman for however long I continued to play cricket – and the rest of the party, including the three other ‘nominal’ amateurs, should be certain of receiving just remuneration at its end.
Had we gone down the ‘Ted Dexter’s England XI’ route I am reliably informed we would all have ‘made a mint’; but that is not what we planned to do, or spoke of to Allen. His statements to the contrary during the course of the Sydney Test were to my mind unfortunate, and ill-timed.
In the end, as you know, I resigned the captaincy at the end of the Ashes series, and offered my services to Colin [Cowdrey] as a loyal player in the New Zealand leg of the tour[90], and thereafter in England for those matches for which I was subsequently selected in later years.
The odd thing was that once that meeting with Gubby Allen was out of the way and we had settled upon our path, I felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I am sure that this spurred me on!
Looking at the pitch just before he and Richie Benaud tossed the next morning – well, for Dexter, the same morning after his nocturnal ‘discussions’ with Gubby Allen – the England captain was a little taken aback by the state of the wicket. Overnight it had turned grey-brown, it looked ‘worn’ and the rolled in dead grass of the day before had about it a dusty sheen particularly at the Paddington End.
Notwithstanding, when he got the call right he elected to bat first. If in doubt an England captain can do no more than bat; much in the spirit of a Navy man who can do no wrong if he lays his ship alongside an enemy in the heat of battle.
The Australians had made two changes since Brisbane.
One was on account of a finger injury suffered by Peter Burge, for whom the Western Australia captain Barry Shepherd, left out of the Australian eleven at Brisbane and Melbourne deputised. Behind the wickets Barry Jarman replaced Grout, as many of the papers had touted he might from the outset.
Twenty-five year old South Australian Barrington Noel Jarman had made his Test debut as long ago as 1959, and snapped unavailingly at Wally Grout’s heels ever since. Thirty-five year old Queenslander Grout probably offered a little bit more as a batsman – or rather, he had in previous years - than the younger man, otherwise it seemed a like for like replacement, a straightforward changing of the guard.
That first morning the wicket, as its changed overnight appearance suggested, was a deal livelier than hoped and had Alan Davidson, bowling from the Randwick End, contrived to demonstrate his legendary mastery of the art of swing and swerve that morning the match might easily have been decided before luncheon that second Friday of 1963.
As it was Peter Parfitt perished alone before lunch, bowled neck and crop by a wicked ball from Garth McKenzie that cut into him off the wicket and snaked between his bat and pad to bowl him when he was on 8 after some forty minutes of play.
England were 74 for 1 at the interval; David Sheppard (his prayers obviously bearing fruit) having survived two low chances in the slip cordon in reaching 28 not out, and Ken Barrington, standing like a calmly composed, superbly organised island in the stream of the storm, strangely untroubled on 35.
The wicket calmed down after lunch; something of a lull before the storm although even at that early stage in proceedings no batsman ever felt remotely ‘in’, or made the mistake of trusting ‘the bounce’.
After lunch the seam bowler who caused the batsman the most trouble was Ken Mackay, who took up residence at the Paddington End for over an hour. He was a medium pace ‘trundler’ in comparison with Davidson and McKenzie, but persistent, accurate, his length nagging and he had one of those afternoons where the batsman despair of actually receiving a delivery they can throw their hands at, or drive or pull into the outer.
The day was half done by the time England raised the hundred. There would have been a lot more ironic cheers had not the crowd, nearing the fifty-eight thousand capacity not been swelled by hundreds of men from the Royal Navy warships moored in Sydney Harbour. A thousand tickets had been held back to be issued freely to any man in uniform from the Ark Royal and the Cavendish who presented himself at the gates on any of the five scheduled days play.[91]
David Sheppard had reached 47 when his luck ran out and Bobby Simpson hung onto a mis-cued drive off Mackay. Dexter, like Barrington initially looked like he was playing on a blameless surface, moving smoothly into the twenties before, once again a false shot against the innocuous Mackay was his downfall, this time it was wicket keeper Jarman flinging the ball high in triumph. Enter Colin Cowdrey, one of the heroes of Melbourne to face Richie Benaud’s probing leg breaks.
An unhurried forward defensive shot, the sound of two nicks – the edge of the bat
and of the pad - the ball loops into thin air and Barry Jarman snaffles a scrambling, diving catch.
At tea England were 149 for 4 with only Ken Barrington staunching the tide, 52 not out having scored only 17 runs in the whole afternoon session.
Tom Graveney had been notoriously in and out of form, and touch, from the outset of the tour; troubled by nagging minor knocks and injuries, and never really match fit at any time. He had actually awakened that morning feeling out of sorts and had Dexter not opted to take his word for it that ‘it would be fine’, Graveney might not have played that day.
It is one of the – countless – fascinations of the summer game that pitch and atmospheric conditions, the timbre of the light, the makeup of, and the strengths and weaknesses of a given bowling attack can on occasions, bizarrely compliment the skills of a truly high class batsman of Tom Graveney’s ilk.
Within minutes of the resumption of play the ball was sliding, gliding, now and then cracking like a discharge from a rifle, off the full face of the Worcestershire batsman’s bat.
Thirty-five years of age Graveney had made his debut for his country as long ago as 1951 but having disappointed on the previous Ashes tour down under he had been dropped. After changing counties from Gloucestershire to Worcestershire, and spending 1961 out of the game as a result - having to ‘qualify’ for his new county - he had rediscovered his form and rightly earned his place on the plane (and boat) to Australia that winter. That said, he had realised this was perhaps his last tour overseas and that his international career was drawing to an end. A marvellously decent, level-headed man he had learned to take adversity with the same grace he had accepted success over the years. So when he had gone out to bat that day he had not been worrying about failing, so much as just doing his best and basically, enjoying the occasion.