Edging Towards Darkness: The story of the last timeless Test

by John Lazenby

  Eventually, he was caught in the covers off O’Reilly, beaten by exhaustion more than anything. The newspapers waxed lyrical, even the American press thought it worthy of a mention. Among the flood of accolades for the Yorkshire prodigy, the Daily Express exclaimed: ‘England finds her Bradman.’ Many believed that England had already found her Bradman in the form of Walter Hammond. Yet, for all his princely talents, Hammond’s fate – one that rankled miserably with him – was to spend much of his career batting in Bradman’s slipstream. Still, The Oval gave him his first victory as England captain and one to savour; even Chamberlain and Hitler briefly ceded prominence on the front pages. The Australians were routed for 201 and 123, losing by the staggering margin of an innings and 579 runs. Perversely, the Australian Board of Control had spent the days before the game voicing its objection against four-day Tests and promoting a campaign for all future Ashes contests to be played to a finish.

  In fact there were already signs that the clock was ticking for games with no time limit, though few in the crowd, basking in the sunlight of England’s victory, could have guessed they had just witnessed the penultimate timeless Test – despite its many distinguished critics. Howard Marshall, the BBC broadcaster and the first voice of cricket, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that the match was ‘a trial of endurance’, where ‘real cricket was knocked out by the wicket which was so unhelpful to the bowlers that batting was largely a matter of patience and stamina’. The Times took a similar view: ‘the affair [was] reduced to a run-making competition and bowlers were regarded essentially as a luxury’. Cardus, who made no effort to disguise his distaste for timeless cricket, reserved his sympathies for O’Reilly, ‘the best bowler of the age, [who] laboured alone on the lifeless hearthrug’. ‘Chuck’ Fleetwood-Smith, who might easily have been described as the second best bowler in the world, fared no better with his left-arm googlies, and his figures made for grisly reading: 87-11-298-1. ‘The wicket prepared for this engagement was unfair to skilful bowlers and not in the interests of cricket,’ Cardus added, and laced his words with the warning: ‘No match should occur again in which the wicket is contrived so that an innings of 900 is possible against any bowling.’

  Such impressions counted for little among Yorkshiremen everywhere, or with the thousands of joyful spectators who had crammed into every available space at The Oval to roar Hutton towards the 300-milestone – an achievement that was greeted with at least a minute’s standing ovation. The young professionals Hutton and Compton were the gilded duo, the brilliant new stars in the batting firmament, heralding a bold and exciting future for English cricket. Whatever that future might be. England were scheduled to tour Australia again in 1940–41, but nobody was daring to think too far ahead.

  By the end of the summer, government depots had been opened for the distribution and fitting of gas masks, and the sight of shelter trenches in London parks, city landmarks surrounded by sandbags, and office windows painted black, heightened the grim inevitability of war. The signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September sent a brief but palpable surge of relief through the country. Chamberlain, who had succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister a year earlier, returned to Heston Aerodrome to a hero’s reception, brandishing the piece of paper on which he had secured the signature of Adolf Hitler: ‘peace for our time’. But, as many feared, the pact proved to be no more than that – paper-thin – and brought only a temporary postponement of war, though one that was long enough to allow Britain to rearm.

  Two days before Chamberlain’s triumphal homecoming from Munich, Bradman left England bound for Australia. He was taking a detour through France to Toulon (against the advice of his travel agent), where he would catch up with the rest of his team who had already sailed from Tilbury. There had been suggestions that the Australians might sail for home via the Cape, rather than the Mediterranean, in case war broke out while they were at sea. ‘My greatest impression is of the magnificent calm and spirit of our British people during these last troublesome days,’ Bradman told the press on his departure. ‘I know we all fervently pray for peace.’ He had only recently celebrated his 30th birthday and his position as the No. 1 batsman in the world was irrefutable. In addition, Cardus observed during The Oval Test that, ‘His fielding and his eager and sensible captaincy were beyond praise; he nursed his bowlers, talked to them, put his arms in theirs between overs, and cheered them up; he was not only the team’s captain but the father-confessor and philosopher.’

  That would never be Hammond’s style of leadership (some would argue it was not Bradman’s either), but his reappointment as captain of MCC for the winter tour to South Africa was a mere formality. He had triumphantly vindicated Pelham Warner’s championship, and the decision was confirmed on 27 July. Many, in fact, felt England were a better equipped all-round team than Australia, and MCC’s selection perfectly reflected the growing strength of the English game; with its judicious blend of youth and experience, it was considered superior to any that had visited South Africa before. The selectors could even afford to leave behind The Oval centurions Maurice Leyland and Joe Hardstaff along with the Yorkshire yeoman Bill Bowes, who had provided admirable support for the decidedly rapid but inconsistent Ken Farnes of Essex. The most notable absentee was Denis Compton, who was under contract to play for Arsenal, the reigning First Division champions, during the 1938–39 league season. The Gunners, as epitomised by their new, sleek Art Deco stadium at Highbury, were the powerhouse of English football – a club that had succeeded in having the name of the nearest Tube station changed from Gillespie Road to Arsenal – and were determined to keep their man.

  Nonetheless, with Hammond, Hutton, Paynter, Edrich and the graceful Kent amateur Bryan Valentine – a batsman imbued with an abundance of confidence and adventure – in the vanguard, England would not lack for runs in South Africa. Cambridge University and Yorkshire’s Norman Yardley, a future captain of his country, and Sussex’s Hugh Bartlett represented the new intake of batsmen. A compulsive strokemaker and protégé of Frank Woolley, the left-handed Bartlett had already alerted the Australians of his ferocious hitting power, hammering the fastest century of the season off them at Hove in only 57 minutes. ‘It produced a spectacular contrast for the tourists, who had just had to field out to Hutton’s 364 at The Oval,’ Wisden noted. The Kent wicketkeeper Les Ames added substantially to the batting riches, while his understudy Paul Gibb (another Yorkshireman and Cambridge blue), though not first choice with the gloves for his county, was also an accomplished run-maker4.

  The pace bowling would be shouldered by the strapping 6 foot 5 inch Farnes and Worcestershire’s uncapped Reg Perks, a highly effective and consistent performer who could produce spells of genuine speed. In a trade that was almost exclusively the preserve of professionals, Farnes remained that rarest of beasts – the amateur fast bowler. Although he was considered the quickest in England, or indeed anywhere for that matter, he tended to be governed by his moods. ‘He was either destructively hostile or complacently amicable,’ The Times wrote. There were times when he needed to be goaded into action, but ‘in his full fighting feathers’, the newspaper added, ‘he was a danger to any batsman in the world’ – the heir, in terms of pace, to another great amateur and man of Essex, Charles Kortright, a scourge of Victorian and Edwardian batsmen.

  Hammond and Edrich could be relied on to supply valuable back-up to the strike bowlers. Indeed, Edrich was capable of bowling genuinely fast, generating steep bounce from a low, slinging action, despite being no more than 5 feet 6 inches tall. ‘Explosive’ and ‘tearaway’ were epithets regularly applied to his bowling, as Cardus evocatively put it: ‘I expect to see dust and newspapers eddying in the air whenever he bowled fast – like the tremendous atmospheric disturbance which happens on a railway station platform as an express train thunders through.’

  More emphasis had been put on England’s spin attack, led by the left-arm Hedley Verity, the prematurely greying nonpareil of his craft. He would be joined by two leg-spi
nners, Doug Wright and Len Wilkinson, and the off-spinner Tom Goddard. Unusually, Verity, Wright and Goddard had all started life as seamers, before turning their hands to spin in the knowledge they lacked that vital commodity, extra pace. Goddard still displayed the characteristics of his former trade, notably when appealing for lbws in a booming bass, while Wright bowled his googlies and leg-breaks at a brisker pace than any other wrist-spinner, O’Reilly included. Verity’s bowling style was frequently described as slow-medium, and he used his height (almost 6 feet) to obtain sharp lift and turn. The Lancastrian Wilkinson had propelled himself into the selectors’ thoughts with 151 wickets in his first full season, and the world lay before him. A South African proposal that the wickets be covered during the Test series, thereby restricting the effects rain might have in spicing up the surface, had been roundly rejected by MCC, and the spinners could expect to get through a mountain of overs on tour.

  There was no vice-captain, though Yardley, already being groomed as Hammond’s successor, would lead the team in his absence. Flight lieutenant Jack Holmes, the debonair Sussex captain and middle-order batsman, was appointed manager and would be a more than useful replacement in the event of injuries. Goddard, at 38, was the veteran of the party and Wilkinson – Hutton’s junior by only five months – the tenderfoot, at 21; their average age was 27. The full squad was: W. R. Hammond (captain), T. W. J. Goddard (both Gloucestershire); L. Hutton, H. Verity, N. W. D. Yardley, P. A. Gibb (Yorkshire); E. Paynter, L. L. Wilkinson (Lancashire); L. E. G. Ames, B. H. Valentine, D. V. P. Wright (Kent); K. Farnes (Essex); W. J. Edrich (Middlesex); H. T. Bartlett (Sussex); R. T. D. Perks (Worcestershire).

  On Friday, 21 October the 15 MCC cricketers caught the boat train from Waterloo Station to Southampton, where they would board the Union-Castle Line’s Athlone Castle for the two-week voyage to the Cape. When they assembled in London, amidst the jostling crowds and flashing camera bulbs of the press, there was the unmistakable aura of adventure that accompanied any long sea voyage or train journey. Yet, as Edrich wrote, most of the players had mixed feelings: ‘The prospect of cricket and travel ahead of us was delightful; but we all felt anxious about political events and were conscious that war might break out at any time during our absence, despite the Munich Agreement and the subsequent pretty speeches.’ For the shy Hutton, who had barely had a day to himself since becoming a record-breaking celebrity (though judging a beauty contest at Butlin’s Skegness holiday camp was hardly a chore), the four-month tour to South Africa must have seemed like an escape. He was ‘ready for a new world and a change of scene’.

  At Waterloo the press had greeted him with cries of ‘Where’s 364?’ – the name given to the Gradidge bat with which he scored his runs at The Oval. The bat had been insured and was already on exhibition in South Africa, awaiting the team’s arrival; another four, he explained, were safely stowed in his luggage. Once again he was besieged by hundreds of autograph hunters, and several jumped onto the footboards of the train as it moved out of the station, thrusting their books at him through the window. They were joined on the footboards by a telegram boy who had sprinted down the platform, waving a batch of golden-coloured envelopes containing last-minute messages of good luck. The Daily Express even ran the headline, ‘Girls mob players’, above a photograph of a beaming Hammond and Valentine, looking more like city businessmen in their double-breasted pin-stripe suits. A supplementary headline asked: ‘Will they come back smiling?’

  Two

  The Rise of the Springboks

  ‘We were conscious of the fact that we represented nothing like the threat to the supremacy of English cricket that an Australian side does’ – Dudley Nourse

  South African cricket came of age on 2 July 1935 when, after 28 years of almost persistent struggle, it secured a first Test triumph in England. The margin of victory by 157 runs could not have been more emphatic, coming against an England side that included Hammond, Sutcliffe, Leyland, Ames and Verity. Nor was there a more exalted place in which to achieve it than at Lord’s. The young batsman Dudley Nourse, who was on his first tour to England, admitted to finding London ‘rather frightening on first acquaintance, with its unbelievable bustle and crowds’, but Lord’s was simply overpowering. ‘The world seems to be left outside and here inside is a new world,’ he reflected after venturing through its gates for the first time. ‘It is like coming into a temple and being confronted by a beautiful shrine.’ Not surprisingly perhaps, in only his second Test, Nourse was unable to leave his mark on the occasion and was bowled by the hard-headed Verity in both innings, mustering just five runs.

  The eighth South African team to visit England, under the fearless captaincy of Herbert Wade, were a popular and good-natured band who, Wisden noted, ‘drew crowds far above the number expected wherever they went’. They also confounded expectations, both in England and at home, winning 17 of the 31 first-class games they played and losing only two. The first of those defeats came as late in the tour as 13 August, against Gloucestershire, by which time their reputation was assured. Gone were the days when they might be rattled out for 30, as they were by Maurice Tate and Arthur Gilligan in only 75 balls in a Test at Birmingham 11 years earlier. The key to their striking improvement could be traced back to the gradual transition from matting to turf wickets, a policy that had been under way since the end of the 1920s. As a result, Wisden recorded, ‘The players, when they arrived here, did not have to learn – or unlearn – so much as their predecessors and this 1935 side held a pronounced advantage compared with previous South African teams visiting England1.’

  The architects of the Lord’s victory were the wondrously named leg-spinner Xenophon Balaskas – who bowled on a dusty wicket that might have been fashioned for him – the second-innings centurion Bruce Mitchell, and the wicketkeeper-batsman ‘Jock’ Cameron, who hit 90 at a giddy rate to revive South Africa’s fortunes after they had been reduced to 98 for four on the first morning. But it was the opening bat Mitchell who proved the revelation, hitting the ball to all parts of the ground with strokes that few suspected he possessed. South Africa had started their second innings with a lead of 30 and the game hanging in the balance. Apart from the involuntary Mitchell mannerisms – the nervous tugging of the gloves, the continual touching of his cap and collar – he was unrecognisable from the batsman who glorified in defence and chipped his runs out of tablets of stone.

  ‘It was Mitchell’s masterpiece,’ Louis Duffus wrote, ‘an innings with a rich quality of genius.’ Remarkably, for such a prolific run-scorer, he was uncomfortable batting in front of big crowds and never lost his acute shyness. ‘I would wager that he blushes every time he is singled out for applause by an enthusiastic crowd,’ Duffus added. Mitchell was not without a dry sense of humour, though. The slowest of slow leg-spinners who bowled off only one pace, he was asked once for his views on the introduction of the eight-ball over and replied that he would have to cut his run down.

  He had been struck over the eye by the ball in the game before Lord’s and played in the Test with stitches and a plaster protecting the wound. His participation had been in doubt before the start and he appeared in some discomfort during both innings. Yet when Wade declared South Africa’s innings at 278 for seven, setting England 309 to win in just under five hours, Mitchell was undefeated on 164, having reached the highest score by a South African in England. C. B. Fry, in the Evening Standard, announced with a magisterial turn of phrase that Mitchell batted ‘like the schoolmaster of all bowlers ever born’. Nonetheless, Wade’s declaration was adventurous and relied on Balaskas reprising his form from the first innings, when he spun the ball alarmingly at times and propelled his googlies at a waspish pace. The captain kept his leg-spinner going for almost three hours from the pavilion end, and with the versatile ‘Chud’ Langton in support, employing a potent mix of seam and spin, the gamble paid off: England were bowled out for 151 at five o’clock on the third and final day. Only Hammond and Sutcliffe put up a fight.

  Fittingl
y, Balaskas captured the last wicket, luring his fellow leg-spinner, the No. 11 batsman Tommy Mitchell, out of his crease with the final ball of his 27th over. It curled past the outside edge and Cameron removed the bails in a blur. Whereupon, Duffus reported, the wicketkeeper was ‘like a reaper gathering up a wheatsheaf, he wrapped his arms in embrace round the stumps and bolted off with his precious souvenirs’. Balaskas finished with four for 54 and match figures of nine for 103.

  The son of Greek migrants who owned the first restaurant in the diamond mining town of Kimberley, Balaskas was one of Test cricket’s more intriguing characters. A chemist by profession – naturally, he was dubbed the ‘Greek Chemist’ during his playing days – he bounded in off a short run and bowled with wit and invention in an era replete with wrist-spinners. He was also a more than handy batsman, who took a Test century off New Zealand in 1932. On the eve of the Lord’s Test he and Duffus had been strolling near Leicester Square when they chanced upon Greek Street, in the heart of Soho. The little leg-spinner considered it a lucky omen and, with the magical sound of American jazz filling the night, innocently persuaded his companion to explore the neon-splashed street with him. They wandered past the rows of restaurants, pubs and clubs, politely ignoring a chorus of ‘hullo, boys’ from every doorway, before hurrying on their way. Omen or not, Balaska never again produced bowling to match his figures at Lord’s.

  Faced with the deflating prospect of a third successive series defeat (they had lost to Australia the previous summer and West Indies in the winter), England did everything they could to exact a result in the third and fourth Tests at Leeds and Manchester, and South Africa everything they could not to lose. Both games were drawn, though not without a few alarms for the tourists, and it all came down to the final Test at The Oval, as it so often did. The England captain Bob Wyatt won the toss and, in a high-risk strategy, put South Africa in on what looked to be a perfect batting strip. Wyatt gambled on the moisture in the surface assisting his fast bowlers early on to provide England with their best chance of squaring the rubber. But the Springboks did not lose a wicket until the afternoon session, by which time the gamble had backfired.