by James Philip
Nonetheless, the inclination of the majority was that they just wanted to go home. Regardless of what awaited them back in England – several men knew their wives and families were gone, in their hearts if not for a fact as yet – they had to go home. They had to know what it was really like back home.
For several tourists there would be little of their old lives away from cricket left to return to. Colin Cowdrey, David Sheppard, Ken Barrington, Peter Parfitt and Geoff Pullar got back to England to find their immediate families, including their wives and children had simply disappeared, or tragically died in the aftermath of the cataclysm. Other men discovered – heartbreakingly – that loved ones, including young children had survived the night of the war only to succumb to illness. No family in England escaped; and so it was for the returning cricketers.
In the British Isles the winter after the war – 1962-63 – had been cruel beyond measure, particularly brutal for the old and the young, the infirm and the weakest in society. The whole population was variously malnourished in those terrible months; there were no modern medicines, and no fuel to heat damaged houses.
Ted Dexter, Colin Cowdrey and David Sheppard all flew home to England in May; the other tourists, with the exception of Tony Lock, Fred Titmus and Fred Trueman[108] returned on the former P and O Liner Canberra – which remained requisitioned for Government business under the War Emergency Acts during the rest of the decade – in the first Operation Manna convoy in the autumn of 1963, disembarking at Southampton on 8th December.
On his arrival in England Dexter was summoned to give an account of himself before the newly – largely self-appointed – English Cricket Board in undamaged Nottingham. He found himself before a Kangaroo court convened from distant Melbourne by Gubby Allen[109] and his confederates on the ill-fated re-constituted Imperial Cricket Council, a body neither the Indian nor the Pakistanis would ever have any truck with because South Africa had been re-instated as a full member.
Dexter was by then was working in the office of Airey Neave, effectively as an ambassador for the Ministry of Supply; essentially, what today we would call a public relations – or PR – man. When Neave, a man with a puckish sense of humour and no time at all for the ‘old buffoons who got us into this mess in the first place’ heard about Dexter’s ‘little problems’ he appointed him the Ministry’s ‘Sporting Liaison Officer’; a man with absolute powers under the Emergency Acts to decide which sports premises should be requisitioned for government business, and which ‘sporting bodies’ should be recognised by the UKIEA.
Shortly thereafter the Nottingham Kangaroo court dropped all charges!
It was Neave who introduced the former England cricket captain to his colleague Iain Macleod when the latter was appointed Minister of Information in December 1963, and Neave who subsequently proposed that he should stand for Parliament in March 1965.
Of the men who played in the Fifth Test at Sydney due to the delay in restarting Test cricket[110], anno domini and the vicissitudes of the age only five members of that team ever played for England again: Dexter, Cowdrey, Barrington, Illingworth and Larter. None of the men in the original MCC party who missed out on that match ever played for their country again; and only Colin Cowdrey, Ken Barrington and David Larter ever played Test cricket in Australia again.[111]
Chapter 26 | In Memoriam
The author grants that it may seem trite to view the aftermath of the greatest global catastrophe in human history through the distant prism of a cricket tour. Likewise, it may seem ephemeral to invest significance, moral, spiritual, or patriotic in such endeavours beyond the bounds of the fields and stadia in which they are played out.
This author leaves this to the judgement and the conscience of the reader. However, it seems to me that in great sporting encounters, as in war that we, Mankind, discover things in ourselves that we would never have glimpsed in any other arena. Oh, would that we might explore both the better angels of our nature and the darkness of our demons on a cricket or a football field rather than upon real battlefields.
In October 1962 we – Humankind, not the Kennedys or Nikita Khrushchev and his cronies – turned half the northern hemisphere into scorched and blasted bone fields where the hopes and futures of generations still lie bleaching in the sun, or buried in the rubble of what our parents and grandparents used to call civilization.
Give me sporting rivalry any day!
[The End]
Author’s Endnote
Thank you again for reading Timeline 10/27/62 – Australia - Book 1: Cricket on the Beach. I hope you enjoyed it - or if you didn’t, sorry - but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilisation depends on people like you.
Cricket on the Beach is, as the title promises a ‘cricket book’, albeit a ‘cricket book’ that develops wider themes in the Timeline 10/27/62 verse. I hope it strikes a chord with other readers but it is unashamedly written with my small core of loyal Australian readers and my growing band of Timeline 10/27/62 followers in the United Kingdom front and centre of my mind.
I have written this ‘episode’ as if it is/was a real cricket book...but please remember that anything and everything that happens after 27th October 1962 in this book did not happen (I made it up!). Lots of real people are named, referenced and their actions form the substantial part of Cricket on the Beach; I have no way of knowing if they would have acted or spoken as they do in the pages of this book. Such is the conundrum of writing alternative history; I have written one answer to ‘what might have happened?’ Others – or you - might imagine different outcomes, and they, and you have every right to. This however, is the Timeline 10/27/62 version!
One last thought: if you would like to read about the actual England Tour of Australia in the winter of 1962-63 I can recommend: With the MCC in Australian 1962-63, by A.G. Moyes and Tom Goodman, published by Angus and Robertson [1963] and; Challenge Renewed: The MCC Tour of Australia 1962-63, by John Clarke, published by Stanley Paul, London [1963].
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Notes
* * *
[1] There were ‘unofficial’, privately organised tours to South Africa in the winters of 1964-65, and 1965-66 (neither of which featured truly ‘representative’ parties).
[2] In October 1966.
[3] The Duke had been scheduled to go out to Australia that winter in any event; to oversee the arrangements for the forthcoming Royal Tour by the Queen in the spring of 1963.
[4] Graham Anthony Richard ‘Tony’ Lock had signed for Western Australia that winter (it was believed with a clause in his contract that he would be available for the touring team ‘if required’).
[5] Gifford was still only 22 at the time and therefore, presumably, in the eyes of the selectors somewhat immature for an English spinner.
[6] Alan Christopher Smith – known as A.C. Smith - was the only ‘uncapped’ player in the party.
[7] Statham had 229, Trueman 216 wickets in Test Matches at the start of the tour.
[8] Trueman’s 32nd birthday was in February 1963.
[9] The previous tour to Australia in 1958-59 had made a profit of £44,984 the majority of which was squirreled back into the coffers of the MCC and the English Counties. The players’ kitty was an entirely separate account.
[10] Normal tour practice was to divide the kitty equally among the playing members of the party.
[11] In comparison to modern touring parties MCC travelled ‘light’, other than Assistant Manager Alec Bedser, there were only two other non-playing tourists on the flight: masseur Sam Cowan, and a ‘scorer and baggage master’, Bill Watkins (the Middlesex scorer), both friendly and familiar faces from the staff at Lord’s.
[12] The ‘North Yemen Civil War’. Earlier that day the capital Sana’ had fallen into the hands of the ‘new’ Yemeni government led by Abdullah as-Sallal, who had immediately proclaimed the ‘Yemen Arab Republic’.
[13] Although the ‘Games’ went ahead they were something of a ‘damp squib’; a thing cruelly remarked upon then and in later years by more than one member of the MCC party remembering the ‘physical jerks’ Gordon Pirie had put them through on the passage from Aden to Freemantle.
[14] He was listed to be knighted in the New Year’s Honours list of 1963 subsequent to his appointment to command the Far East Fleet; but of course, that list was ‘scuppered’ by the October War. In the event the Queen made him a hereditary baronet for his part in Operation Manna in December 1963.
[15] At the time of the Cuban Missiles War, Christopher, incidentally this author’s grandfather, was Commander-in-Chief British Far East Fleet (renamed British Pacific Fleet 1st December 1962) based at Singapore flying his flag onboard HMS Ark Royal.
[16] The folly of scheduling this kind of ‘packed’ itinerary was repeated on both of the first post-war England tours to Australia before – not to put too fine a point on it – the players revolted. It might be an honour to be selected for an Ashes XI; but it was no kind of honour at all to be worked into the ground like ‘pack animals’.
[17] Stewart Cathie ‘Billy; Griffith. He had been appointed one of two assistant secretaries at Lord’s in 1952. He had won a Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery at Arnhem as a glider pilot.
[18] Regretfully, in respect of many of the ‘conversations’ recounted in this work, as in other histories of other aspects of human affairs before, around and in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missiles tragedy of October 1962, this author has been obliged to surmise the tone and substance therein. In many cases extant records simply do not exist, having been destroyed in the war and subsequently, and of course the majority of the protagonists have, sadly, long since passed away.
[19] Bedser had passed Australian, C.V. ‘Clarrie’ Grimmett’s record in 1953.
[20] Bedser took 236 wickets in his 51 Test Match career.
[21] Dexter’s wife, Susan Georgina nee Longfield, the daughter of a former Kent cricketer whom he had met at a party while up at Cambridge (and allegedly decided to marry ‘on the spot’) was a model whom it was reported earned in days what any member of the 1962-63 party was likely to earn in six months of hard graft ‘down under’.
[22] Cowdrey’s place of birth is commonly mis-identified as ‘Bangalore’.
[23] Alban George "Johnny" Moyes MBE, MC, a doyen of Australian sports writers destined to die of natural causes during the forthcoming tour.
[24] Trust me, what follows will make a lot more sense if first you become a little better acquainted with our latter day Achilles.
[25] David Warr, with whom Trueman made his debut against Cambridge University in May 1949.
[26] David Frith, cricket historian and author.
[27] He never actually worked underground, being employed above ground in the Tally Office at Maltby Main Colliery.
[28] A thing widely frowned upon in those days as ‘just not done’; if only because it flagrantly contravened the unwritten code that existed between lower order batsmen and other members of the fast bowlers’ union.
[29] Rodney Freer Chapman, Mayor of Scarborough for four successive years (1947-48 to 1950-51).
[30] In this age before satellite communications the cruise the liner was too far from land for voice communications for much of its passage across the Indian Ocean.
[31] Including that of Brian Statham, who had flown into Perth the previous day to join the party.
[32] Remember, other than in Test Matches, at this time England touring sides played under the auspices of the Marylebone Cricket Club. Therefore, this match was styled A Western Australia Country XI versus MCC.
[33] The nickname was one fondly employed. Apparently Pullar was once discovered watching children’s television in the dressing room!
[34] That is ‘M.C.C.’
[35] Graham Douglas McKenzie, then twenty-one years of age.
[36] The ‘Empire’ Games until 1954.
[37] Despite the war the ‘Games’ went ahead as scheduled but were a lacklustre, relatively under-reported affair. Many Commonwealth leaders and dignitaries who had planned to attend were unable, or did not think it appropriate to travel to Perth and at the time the ‘games’ took place Australasia was in a state of shocked mourning.
[38] Twenty-six year old Robert Baddeley Simpson, who played for New South Wales.
[39] Twenty-five year old Victorian, William Morris Lawry.
[40] Twenty-five year old Norman Clifford Louis O'Neill, who played for New South Wales.
[41] Twenty-five year old Barry Kenneth Shepherd.
[42] Twenty-eight year old Desmond Edward Hoare.
[43] Barry Rolfe Knight.
[45] David Arthur Allen, at the time twenty-seven year of age.
[46] Lines included in T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’ thought to have inspired the title of Nevil Shute’s novel ‘On the Beach’.
[47] Sheppard and Dexter had both been 10 not out on Saturday evening but the Duke of Norfolk and the England captain were called to the Premier of Western Australia’s office early that morning to be briefed and to speak on the telephone to the Governor General (William Philip Sidney, 1st Viscount De L'Isle, VC), and had not returned to the WACA until shortly after play was due to resume.