Edging Towards Darkness: The story of the last timeless Test

by John Lazenby

  To the memory of the fallen cricketers of World War Two

  Contents

  Introduction: When Time Ran Out

  One Raking Over the Ashes

  Two The Rise of the Springboks

  Three The Call of Africa

  Four A Threepenny Opera

  Five The Cut-Price Test

  Six The Long Reply

  Seven On Borrowed Time

  Eight The Wrong End of a Telescope

  Epilogue: The Timeless Men

  Timeless Test Scoreboard

  The Records

  MCC in South Africa 1938–39

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Plates

  A timeless Test match is played under no limitation of time and is designed to guarantee a decisive result. It is played until one side wins, however long that may take: hours, days . . . weeks. In theory, therefore, the timeless format eliminates all possibilities of a draw – the bane of international cricket played on the benign and often contrived wickets of the 1930s. As it has the luxury of time at its disposal, a limitless match is also meant to ensure that any interruptions for bad weather will not prevent a game from reaching its ultimate destination: a positive outcome. Unfortunately, timeless cricket was sometimes prone to failing its own test . . .

  Introduction

  When Time Ran Out

  Norman Gordon, the last surviving man to play in a Test match before the onset of the Second World War, died peacefully in his flat in the Hillbrow district of Johannesburg on Tuesday, 2 September 2014, aged 103. Gordon was also the first international cricketer to reach a century in years and a last cherished link to the age of steamship timetables, eight-ball overs and tall scoring, in the language of the day; when batsmen gorged themselves on perfect wickets and bowlers, more often than not, fed off the scraps.

  Once a thriving suburb of colonial villas, bookshops and cosmopolitan values, Hillbrow is now regarded as one of the most notorious neighbourhoods in the city: a hotbed of crime, poverty and squats; a world many times removed from that of the genial former Test cricketer, who was still practising as an accountant deep into his 93rd year. In the words of one writer, it is a place ‘much closer to hell than the heaven it used to be’. But Gordon could not have moved away even if he had wanted to. The small flat he bought in the once fashionable Hillbrow, some 60 years earlier, would have cost more to sell than it was worth.

  His good friend Ali Bacher, the former South African Test captain and cricket administrator who interviewed him for the television channel SuperSport shortly before his death, remembered an imperturbable character of strong personality, modest, engaging and always ready with a smile or a wry quip. Gordon refused to become a prisoner to his environment and told Bacher that all the time he lived in Hillbrow he never felt intimidated. ‘There was only one occasion when he was bothered by someone at night,’ Bacher informed Cricinfo, ‘but in general everybody knew him there. He lived life to the full and was much loved.’

  There was not much that could alarm a man who had seen and heard it all – from the cataclysm of world war, the rise of apartheid, his country’s sporting excommunication, rehabilitation and subsequent regeneration, to the seismic shifts within the game he loved. He abhorred sledging, however – ‘I never heard a dirty word uttered in my entire career’ – and reminisced unashamedly about a time when kinship between opponents was an essential tenet of the sport. Longevity was a recurring theme throughout his life. An avid golfer, he accomplished a hole-in-one at the age of 87 and played regularly until he was 96. As he explained once to SA Cricket magazine, with his customary gusto, he had no intention of spending his last days ‘sitting in Hillbrow watching TV’.

  Gordon succeeded the New Zealander Eric Tindill as Test cricket’s eldest son after the hardy wicketkeeper-batsman passed away, aged 99, on 1 August 2010. A gifted all-rounder, Tindill also played rugby union for his country, winning a solitary cap at Twickenham on Saturday, 4 January 1936 in a match revered for two imperishable tries by the Oxford University undergraduate and Russian émigré, Prince Obolensky, and for England’s first victory over the All Blacks. Years later Tindill confessed to smuggling the match ball off the pitch, tucked under his jersey on the final whistle, and returning to New Zealand with his prized trophy.

  The young Gordon performed his own conjuring tricks with a ball. A right-arm fast-medium bowler who seldom tired, he was known as ‘Mobil’ for the handfuls of Vaseline he rubbed into his dark unruly hair, though on the pitch he was the antithesis of a showman. He possessed an equable temperament, along with a priceless ability to swing the ball both ways at a lively pace, and was rated by none other than Walter Hammond as a bowler to bear comparison with the legendary Sussex and England seamer, Maurice Tate. Gordon preferred instead to compare himself to his countryman Shaun Pollock, whom he said he matched for pace and the similarity of their actions. In short, Norman Gordon of Transvaal was a captain’s dream.

  Yet, for all his undoubted qualities, he played only five Test matches for South Africa, all against Walter Hammond’s MCC tourists of 1938–39, in a series pitched against the backdrop of impending war. The last of these, at Kingsmead in Durban, was timeless and is now universally acknowledged as the timeless Test. Weighing in at a prodigious ten days – the match stretched from 3–14 March 1939 and allowed for two rest days, while one day’s play (the eighth) was lost entirely to rain – it is quite simply the longest Test ever played. A litany of records also perished in its wake and ‘whole pages of Wisden were ruthlessly made obsolete’. If that was not enough one player, the fastidious South African batsman Ken Viljoen, felt the need to have his hair cut twice during the game. Extraordinarily, the contest had not been expected to last beyond five days – a distance that in all probability it might not have achieved, but for an unforeseen quirk of fate. Only the timeless games between Australia and England at Melbourne in 1929 (eight playing days), and West Indies and England in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1930 (seven days), come remotely close in terms of their durability, though the latter also ended farcically.

  Timeless Tests are as old as the dawn of international cricket itself. Melbourne’s Grand Combination Match, as it was billed in 1877, and later designated as the first Test match to be played between England and Australia, was limitless but consisted of only four-ball overs and concluded shortly before lunch on the fourth day. In fact, all Test matches played in Australia before the Second World War were timeless, and the format was an integral part of the country’s cricketing culture for more than 60 years, before its inevitable extinction. In England, South Africa and the West Indies, timeless Tests were played only sporadically, where the concept was seen as nothing more than a last resort: a means of engineering a positive result if a rubber was all square or a side was one-up going into a final Test. England were leading South Africa 1–0 before the fifth Test at Kingsmead in 1939 and, as the series still remained alive, both sides agreed, under the conditions of the day, to play to a finish.

  The Durban epic consisted of 43 hours and 16 minutes of playing time, yielding a veritable glut of runs – 1,981 – and 35 wickets from 5,447 deliveries, or 680.7 eight-ball overs. The new ball was taken a staggering 12 times. Norman Gordon contributed a back-breaking, sometimes heart-breaking, 738 balls (92.2 overs) to that aggregate, which remains to this day the most delivered by a fast bowler in a Test. His second-innings figures of one for 174 from 55.2 overs did not make for good accounting perhaps, but his long spells of sustained pace and swing – around the wicket, aiming into a worn patc
h on leg stump – deserved better and he still had the ball in his hand when, ironically and not a little embarrassingly, the timeless Test ran out of time.

  Rarely can one cricketer have expended so much energy to a lost cause, though it is fair to say that 21 players – there was one exception – felt by the end as if they were all part of the same losing side. The Durban timeless Test was the last and, fittingly, the 99th of its kind to be played; and few could argue that it deserved to reach its century. However, the match remains vibrant with history and, in the age of immediacy when the future of five-day cricket has never looked so imperilled, it retains a fascination and an allure that is difficult to deny. There has even been talk of a comeback.

  In July 2011 the International Cricket Council announced its plans for an inaugural World Test Championship. The tournament, which was scheduled to take place in England in 2013, would involve the four highest-ranked teams, two semi-finals, and a showpiece final at Lord’s to determine the world champions. But what if five days of Test-match cricket failed to produce a winner? The ICC, it seemed, had a ready-made solution: a timeless final. In a press conference at Lord’s, during which he appeared to be gloriously unaware of the elephant in the room, Haroon Lorgat, the then chief executive of ICC, declared that ‘the final may be a timeless Test’. A South African of Indian descent, Lorgat continued, without a trace of irony: ‘The committee is looking into the mechanics, but I would favour finding a winner because you need a world champion. It is not a good idea to end up with a drawn match . . .’

  It is sometimes hard to believe that the ICC was serious about returning to a format that not only produced the stalest of stalemates in the history of the game, but prompted public outcry and a healthy dose of player power. One former player, Jack Hobbs, may have helped to win a timeless Test for England against Australia at The Oval in 1926, in tandem with Herbert Sutcliffe, but was now among its sternest critics. In his column in the London Star on 15 March 1939, he accused timeless Tests of ‘killing the game’ and could not resist noting that, ‘Australia is the only country where they are popular.’ But not just with Australians, it seemed. As the respected South African journalist Louis Duffus, who imbibed the timeless Test’s every ball, memorably put it, ‘It was fantastic . . . the father of all Test match freaks.’

  Not surprisingly perhaps, the World Test Championship did not come to fruition in 2013. The ICC committee failed to unravel the mechanics, the tournament was placed on indefinite hold and the timeless format returned to the shelf in the dusty box marked, ‘Do Not Open.’

  Yet the concept of a modern match with no time limits had not been without its enthusiasts when it was first mooted. In the Independent, the former England seamer Matthew Hoggard remarked that, ‘It would be fascinating to see how the players of today would tackle a timeless Test. More and more games are finishing inside four days, and even inside three days in some cases, so would the tempo of batting change just because time was irrelevant?’ The Guardian sports writer Andy Bull was similarly beguiled: ‘It would be a wonderful tonic in a time of Twitter and Twenty20, Big Macs and Blackberrys.’ The opinion that mattered, however, belonged to Norman Gordon. The timeless Test’s only surviving participant was less than a month shy of his 100th birthday at the time and made no attempt to dilute his words. ‘I bowled 92 eight-ball overs in the timeless Test, which equals 120 six-ball overs, to get just one wicket,’ he was reported as saying when asked for his response. ‘And I hope nobody has to go through something like that again.’

  South Africa had adopted the eight-ball over in the Currie Cup competition of 1936–37, and the exertions of bowling flat out on a Kingsmead ‘shirt-front’, tailored to strokemakers of the quality of Walter Hammond, Len Hutton, Les Ames and Bill Edrich, to name but a few, remained indelibly etched on his memory.

  Nonetheless, Gordon proved the pick of South Africa’s attack by some distance and emerged, in the vaunted estimation of Hammond, as a bowler of ‘striking potential’. His 20 wickets were more than any other bowler in the series and he pipped the great Yorkshire spinner Hedley Verity by one. He returned figures of five for 103 on his Test debut at the Wanderers in England’s first innings, including the wicket of Hammond whom he dismissed on four of the seven occasions they opposed each other. In the opinion of William Pollock, the seasoned cricket correspondent of the Daily Express and the only national newspaper journalist to cover the tour (he was bylined to that effect), Gordon was ‘the outstanding newcomer of the series’; he even included him in his notional World XI. ‘He looks like being one of the bowlers cricket has been waiting for: another Maurice Tate.’ The gimlet-eyed journalist spotted that Gordon polished only one side of the ball, leaving the other side rough – a trick, he believed, that accounted for his late and often abrupt swing. ‘He has a great heart and we look forward to see what he makes of English pitches in 1940,’ he reported, with what could have only been commendable optimism.

  On Friday, 1 September 1939, barely six months after the timeless Test’s untimely coda, Hitler invaded Poland, and two days later Britain declared war on Germany. Australia, New Zealand and India followed within hours, and South Africa joined the conflagration in a matter of days. As the South African wordsmith Duffus vividly phrased it: ‘Many cricketers, from the veld and elsewhere, through six dark years, played the finest innings of their lives.’ Some of those ‘restless young men’, he ventured, ‘who, ten years previously, had lived on day dreams and hankered for travel, saw strange places they would never have included on their wander lists’. And some, of course, would not come home. The Englishmen Hedley Verity and Ken Farnes, and South Africa’s ‘Chud’ Langton, all of whom contributed significantly to the timeless Test, just as they enriched and influenced every game of cricket they played, were grievous losses.

  Gordon enlisted in the army, where he spent the war stationed at home and did not see action. But he did his bit, along with some 330,000 of his fellow countrymen for whom valour on the battlefield became a common theme. He returned to the Transvaal XI after the war but retired at the end of the 1948 season, leaving behind a tantalising glimpse of what might have been. Instead, he will always be celebrated as Test cricket’s first centenarian and for shouldering the withering burden of 92 eight-ball overs through the timeless Test – a supreme feat of endurance for a bowler of his pace and wholehearted energy.

  The humidity was so oppressive during those closing overs it felt as if someone had emptied a glue pot over him. The sweat saturated his flannels, he remembered, his shirt stuck to his back, and just running up to the wicket – he operated off a ‘fairly long and easy’ approach – required a marathon effort. He admitted later that he had been over-bowled. ‘I was noted for my fantastic stamina and often bowled ten or 15 eight-ball overs at a stretch,’ he told the Daily Telegraph. And all on a batsman’s paradise: any blemishes on the Kingsmead ‘shirt-front’ were ruthlessly ironed out by the groundstaff, moving the South African batsman Dudley Nourse to recall how it ‘sneered at the bowlers’ throughout. This was the first Test series against England in South Africa to be played entirely on turf, the old coconut matting of previous tours having been finally jettisoned. Indeed, the wickets during the summer of 1938–39, at the Wanderers, Newlands and Kingsmead, were so plumb that they were referred to by one England batsman as being ‘preposterously perfect’.

  There is a photograph of the scoreboard of the timeless Test, taken after the final curtain, with England’s second-innings total frozen for all time on 654 for five. It may not possess the glorious abandon of George Beldam’s iconic portrait of Victor Trumper jumping down the track, nor capture the peerless authority of a Hammond cover-drive (a blue handkerchief curling from his hip pocket), as depicted by Herbert Fishwick’s camera; but it is just as telling in its own way. The Kingsmead scoreboard is the recorder of a hundred images: the dwindling crowds, day by day; the ransacking of the record books; the immaculacy of the 766 deliveries sent down by Hedley Verity; Hammond completing h
is 21st Test century to equal Don Bradman’s mark; the jarring juxtaposition of play ticking over at the pace of a grandfather clock winding slowly down, while Europe hurtled inexorably towards war; the black thunderclouds swooping low over Durban; the symbolic fading of the light; Gordon running in to bowl the 5,447th and final ball of the match.

  That evening, on Tuesday, 14 March, the England party caught the 8.05 train out of Durban for the 1,000-mile journey to Cape Town, where the mail steamer, the Athlone Castle, bound for Southampton, strained at her moorings awaiting their arrival. Two days later they stepped onto the platform at Adderley Street Station into a world already tipping towards chaos: news of Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia was splashed across every placard. It had been six months since Neville Chamberlain had purchased ‘peace for our time’ in Munich. Now Hitler was installed within the ancient battlements of Prague Castle – once the seat of the kings of Bohemia and the Holy Roman emperors – and cricket’s longest day would soon turn to night.

  One

  Raking Over the Ashes

  ‘No cricket match should occur again in which the wicket is contrived so that an innings of 900 is possible against any bowling’ – Neville Cardus

  Walter Hammond was appointed captain of England on Tuesday, 2 June 1938. The announcement that he would lead his country in the first Test of the summer against Australia was made during the England trial at Lord’s, a game blighted by rain and freezing conditions. ‘A screaming wind seemed to blow straight off the Polar ice,’ Hammond – or more probably his ghost writer – lyrically recalled. As he had been invited to skipper an England XI against the Rest ahead of his two principal rivals for the job, the Middlesex pace bowler ‘Gubby’ Allen and the Warwickshire batsman Bob Wyatt (a third candidate, the all-rounder R. W. V. Robins also of Middlesex, did not even warrant selection at Lord’s), the call came as no great surprise. Only the timing of it, midway through the game, raised a few eyebrows. Pelham Warner, the chairman of selectors, had almost certainly decided in advance of the trial that Hammond would lead his country in the first Test at Trent Bridge and could probably no longer keep up the pretence1.