Edging Towards Darkness: The story of the last timeless Test

by John Lazenby

  Mitchell, having revealed the hidden side to his batting at Lord’s, simply reverted to type and scored a typically defensive century, occupying the crease for almost five hours. There was a hundred for Eric Dalton too, batting as low as No. 8, and an unbeaten 73 from Langton as the last four wickets realised 222 runs. Rapid centuries in reply from Leyland and Ames kept the contest simmering before Wyatt declared on the third day, leaving his bowlers two sessions to force a result. It was not enough and, though Mitchell fell cheaply for once, Wade and Dalton dug in to bat out the draw and earn South Africa a momentous series victory2. In the sage words of the journalist R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, England’s reverse amounted to ‘a rude but helpful shock’. So helpful, in fact, that within three years English batting was back in the rudest of health, electrified by the heady potential of Hutton and Compton.

  Some of the press were quick to point out that had the Tests been played over four days instead of three, England would have won or at least drawn the series. The uncomfortable truth was that the fortunes of the national team were at a decidedly low ebb, and had been for a couple of years. Yet, as Dudley Nourse noted, ‘We were conscious of the fact that we represented nothing like the threat to the supremacy of English cricket that an Australian side does.’ The fact that the Tests had been allotted only three days, he suggested, ‘was proof enough that we were not yet considered a Test match force by comparison with Australia’. If South Africa’s record in England before 1935 was not of a standard to merit four-day Tests, their triumph at Lord’s did much to change that perception, certainly among the public who cheered them as they would their own. England had played Tests of four days’ duration in South Africa since the inaugural MCC tour there in 1905–06, but the notion that they required only three days to defeat the Springboks at home no longer held true. However, South Africa would have to wait until 1947 before playing their first four-day Test in England.

  After five months on tour Wade’s team departed Southampton aboard the Windsor Castle on 20 September and docked in the Cape two weeks later, a weary but contented crew. ‘We had set out unheralded but returned with something very precious: Test match success,’ Nourse wrote. ‘There was much still to be done, but at least there seemed a solid enough foundation.’ Tragically, that foundation would be shaken to its core by the sudden death of ‘Jock’ Cameron at the age of 30. The man the victorious Springboks regarded as their rock, a rallying point and talisman, had contracted typhoid fever on the voyage home after putting in at Madeira and died within a month of his return. ‘It was an irreparable loss,’ Nourse recorded, ‘and cricket suffered a mortal blow by his passing.’

  Wisden posthumously named him one of their Five Cricketers of the Year for 1936 (alongside Bruce Mitchell) and ranked him second only to Australia’s Bert Oldfield as a wicketkeeper, likening his stumping style to the ‘nonchalant gesture of a smoker flicking the ash from a cigarette’. There were few more destructive or cleaner strikers of the ball either, and in a game against Yorkshire in 1935 he memorably thundered 30 off an over from the seemingly unassailable Verity.

  Louis Duffus, who covered the tour of England for the Star in Johannesburg, had good cause to remember the thrill of another Cameron innings: his match-turning 90 in the Lord’s Test. He was on the telephone to Johannesburg, dictating his copy for the late Saturday sporting edition while Cameron was still in full swing. ‘There is no need for alarm at South Africa’s poor score,’ he reported. ‘The wicket is bad and England will have to fight for runs. Cameron is playing the innings of his life . . .’ Just four months later those words would prove especially poignant3.

  The first full tour of South Africa by Australia, therefore, could not have come at a worse time for the Springboks. Australia had made only two brief visits to the Union before, always on the back of tours to England, and on 14 November 1935 they docked in Durban amidst much anticipation. As South Africa were now the conquerors of England, and Australia had successfully reclaimed the Ashes a year earlier, some newspapers saw fit to promote the five-match series (the Tests were scheduled for four days) as a battle for the world championship title. If it was, there was only one side in it, and the Australians – ‘as cocky as ever’, in the opinion of Duffus – breezed to a 4–0 victory. At least there was no Bradman, who had stayed at home because of ill health, to compound the pain, though as Dudley Nourse put it: ‘They might have let us keep our fame for a little while.’ Nourse, in fact, was the one bright spot for South Africa, hitting a magnificent 231 at Johannesburg to score over 500 runs for the series: the innocent at Lord’s had grown into a fully-fledged Test match batsman.

  The reasons for the Springboks’ capitulation were no great mystery. The distressing loss of Cameron so soon after their return from England and the rigours of the ‘most fatiguing tour any country has undertaken’, Duffus concluded, had sapped their last drop of resolve: ‘Many of them were patently stale.’ The Australian batsman Jack Fingleton may have flogged South Africa’s bowlers far and wide during the Tests but he was more than sympathetic to their plight. ‘Anybody who has played 54 innings or who bowls six thousand balls in a short English summer has been not on a sporting so much as a business tour,’ he reasoned. ‘Someday somebody will realise just how damaging it is to the sport and the individual to play cricketers into the ground over a short period.’ It is an argument that has echoed loudly down the years.

  Before returning to South Africa after the tour of England, Duffus had closed the typewriter case and taken a short excursion through Europe. After five months of punishing deadlines and the daily slog of churning out copy to order, he was jaded and as much in need of a break from the game as the players themselves4. He motored through France and Belgium, with no special destination, and on into Germany. In Munich he observed the swastikas and ‘the spreading militaristic mood’, but paid it little heed: ‘It was 1935. We were not thinking of war.’ The Rhine, Mosel Valley, Bavaria and Baden-Baden proved the perfect tonic and a welcome rest, before his thoughts turned to cricket once more. ‘They were saying “Heil Hitler”, but it seemed less important than “how’s that?”’, he remembered.

  Louis George Duffus was South African cricket’s constant companion and its foremost writer on the game, though he liked to dabble now and again in tennis, golf, rugby union, athletics and baseball. He reported on the ups and downs, the ebb and flow of his country’s fortunes for almost 40 years, never missing a beat or a Test match in that time. In fact he covered 110 in all, making seven tours of duty to England and three each to Australia (the country of his birth) and New Zealand. He also played cricket and baseball for Transvaal and was a good enough wicketkeeper to earn selection for a Test trial but not quite good enough to win a cap. He was a journalist who ‘went unashamedly for vivid imagery’, Wisden declared, ‘priding himself as a stylist on no more vain grounds than that he abhorred hackneyed composition’. He was among the fortunate ones, who operated during a period when cricket writers were granted the ultimate luxury of space by their newspaper editors. His route into the profession was hardly conventional, though.

  He had been working as a bookkeeper in Johannesburg when, on a whim and a prayer, he decided to hand in his notice and follow H. G. Deane’s 1929 South African side to England. His prime motivation, he admitted, extended no further than a burning desire to see the world. So, armed only with a commission to provide fortnightly articles for the Johannesburg Star and a cheap return ticket on a Union-Castle steamship, he traded accounts and a steady income for adventure and uncertainty. ‘I resolved to leave Highveld, home and ledgers for whatever kind of wicket St. Christopher thought fit to roll out.’

  On arrival in England he made his way to Fleet Street and knocked on the doors of its sports editors, offering to supply regular progress reports and advance information on the touring Springboks. His reward, much to his surprise, was to find himself in immediate demand (this was in the days before news agencies regularly gathered such material for the press) and art
icles by Louis Duffus soon appeared in the Evening News, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail carrying the byline, ‘The Transvaal wicketkeeper who is covering the tour’. Buoyed by his success, the rookie reporter purchased a baby Austin and set off to follow the Springboks around England – a venture that would turn into a glorious road trip.

  ‘What a life it was,’ Duffus wrote, ‘rising on summer mornings in quaint countryside hostelries, piling a bag or two into the back of the little open car, bowling up hill and down dale to the next cricket ground.’ There were perfect roads, ‘with none of the dust or corrugations of the highways of the veld, foolproof signposts and faithful maps, and England in all its fresh loveliness. This was the idyll of the journey’. And there were days when he had to shut himself away, typing into the small hours in order to catch the mail for South Africa, before returning to the road ‘with all the greater relish when the tasks were done’. He got to know Neville Cardus along the way, took an icy plunge in the Lake District with Bruce Mitchell, ‘slept blissfully under one of England’s immaculate haystacks’, and rubbed shoulders with the greatest bowler the world had known.

  The glowering Sydney Barnes was 56 years old when he opened the bowling for the Minor Counties against the South Africans at Stoke. ‘A tall lank figure, he stood erect, grey temples and a hard weather-beaten face autographed with outdoor life,’ Duffus recalled. He had retired from Test cricket 15 years earlier, but figures of eight for 41 in the tourists’ first innings showed he had lost none of his legendary skill or aura of menace. His fast-medium spin – an art form that has long since disappeared from the game – still spat and sizzled off the surface, just as it had during an epic South African summer in 1913–14.

  It was in the last tour before the First World War that Barnes collected a world record 49 wickets in a series, from only four Tests. He would have plundered more but, notoriously hard to handle and disagreeable at the best of times, he refused to play in the fifth at Port Elizabeth after a wrangle over money. Barnes by all accounts was simply unplayable on matting, and a South African side that included Herbie Taylor, the country’s first great Test batsman, and the stolid left-hander ‘Dave’ Nourse (father of Dudley) were routed 4–0. Yet Taylor managed to score 508 runs in the series and, despite being dismissed five times by Barnes, engaged in one of Test cricket’s truly titanic duels. The Englishmen were unanimous that nobody had ever attacked Barnes, at his best, with more consistency and panache than the young Springbok.

  Taylor played his last great Test innings – 121 – in the fifth Test at The Oval during the 1929 tour; but he was past his prime by this time and had been unable to prevent England from sealing a 2–0 series victory. Described by Duffus as an exuberantly young side the Springboks were far from humbled. Cameron embellished his reputation while Mitchell and Dalton successfully served their apprenticeships, emerging as cricketers who would guide their country’s fortunes in the years running up to the Second World War, and beyond in the case of Mitchell. After 39 matches Duffus had sailed to South Africa with the rest of the team – his faithful baby Austin loaded into the hold. Unemployed now that the tour was over, he ruefully accepted he had no other option than to return to the world of bookkeeping and ledgers. But three days away from Table Bay he received a telegram that would change his life for ever. It was from the sports editor of the Johannesburg Star: ‘If you care to consider a post with us, I’m sure the company would be glad to make you an offer.’

  South Africa played their first Test match against England at Port Elizabeth in March 1889, though for those who participated in it the status of Test cricketer was not conferred until some years later. Sussex’s C. Aubrey Smith brought with him a cast of amateurs, professionals and adventurers (six had not even played a first-class game before) that was clearly not meant to be representative of English cricket. Nonetheless, they won a low-scoring game convincingly enough by eight wickets inside two days. Smith captured seven for 61 with his medium-pacers before heading to the Hollywood Hills, where he found fame playing a succession of impeccable English gentlemen in movies such as The Prisoner of Zenda and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. He was, as Wisden quaintly put it, ‘The only England captain to star in a film with Elizabeth Taylor (Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Women).’

  Smith’s men also brought with them something more tangible: the Currie Cup. Sir Donald Currie, chairman of the Union (later the Union-Castle) Line and the tour’s sponsor, donated a trophy for Smith to present to the side who put up the best performance against them. Kimberley were the beneficiaries and it duly became the country’s premier domestic trophy.

  Seventeen years later an England side flying the colours of MCC arrived in South Africa, led by Pelham Warner. The Boer War had been over for only three years and the tour was seen in some quarters as a fence-mending exercise, though the Springboks visited Britain in 1901 while the war was in progress but played no Tests. However, in keeping with many of the early teams that left for the Cape, Warner’s party carried too many passengers and was more significant for the players left behind than those selected. England regularly kept their best players at home in preparation for sterner battles ahead with Australia. Warner, despite appearing to be all things MCC, was not even first choice as captain. Instead Jack Mason, the highly regarded Kent all-rounder, had been approached on 3 July 1905 to lead the side. Mason was revered by the county’s professionals, among whom Frank Woolley was not alone in considering him the best captain he had played under. But he was also a full-time solicitor and declined the invitation: perhaps he knew something that Warner didn’t, for MCC was comprehensively beaten 4–1, becoming the first England side to lose a Test series in five visits to South Africa.

  The Springboks employed four googly specialists – Reggie Schwarz, Aubrey Faulkner, Gordon White and Ernie Vogler – and by the end of the series their mastery over the England batsmen was complete. Bernard Bosanquet, an Englishman, is acknowledged to be the inventor of the art, but it was the South Africans who first cultivated and exploited the effectiveness of wrist-spin on the international stage. Bosanquet taught Schwarz the googly while they were team-mates at Middlesex, and the magic formula was passed down ‘like an heirloom’, in the words of Duffus, to Faulkner, White, Vogler and Balaskas.

  By 1912 South Africa were established as the third Test-playing nation, though they were very much the junior partner, and competed in the star-crossed Triangular Tournament – a world championship in all but name – with England, the hosts, and Australia. The competition was the creation of Abe Bailey, a South African diamond tycoon, but suffered from one of the wettest summers on record. Although the Springboks had defeated MCC 3–2 in 1909–10 fielding their four-pronged leg-spin attack, the sodden wickets negated their bowlers and befuddled their batsmen to the extent that they lost all but one of their six games in the tournament. The final was won by the hosts, who beat Australia by 244 runs at The Oval on the fourth day of the inaugural timeless Test to be staged in England.

  In 1922 MCC returned to South Africa to contest the first series between the countries after the First World War, bridging a gap of eight years since Sydney Barnes had been in fearsome, full flow. It was agonisingly close and the tourists finally prevailed in a timeless decider at Durban, winning by 109 runs after the Essex professional ‘Jack’ Russell became the first man to score a century in each innings of an England–South Africa Test match. The game lasted six days and was the first to be played to a finish on South African soil. Bizarrely, the start of one day’s play had to be delayed while groundstaff removed handfuls of frogs from the coconut matting.

  The changeover from matting to turf was well under way when Percy Chapman’s MCC party visited at the start of the 1930s. For the first time, a Test match in South Africa was played on a grass pitch, at Newlands in Cape Town; another two were played in Durban. But England had the rug pulled from under them in the opening Test in Johannesburg when ‘Buster’ Nupen produced figures of 11 for 150 to bowl the Springboks to the onl
y victory of the series, by 28 runs. The Norwegian-born Nupen bowled fast-medium and spun the ball like a top on the mat, with what Duffus described as ‘a delightful flowing action, pace off the pitch and a sharp break-back which he combined with a periodical slight turn from the leg’. Uniquely, perhaps, Nupen was as innocuous on turf as he was majestic on matting.

  Hammond, on his second tour of South Africa, batted beautifully, scoring 517 runs for the series, and in the second Test at Newlands he not only opened the batting and the bowling but later kept wicket after George Duckworth tore a ligament in his hand. The tourists could have done with the likes of Harold Larwood, ‘Gubby’ Allen, Douglas Jardine, Hobbs, Woolley and Sutcliffe, all of whom were either unavailable or had been left at home. In the end their attempts to get back into the series were thwarted by a combination of rain and the fighting qualities of the Springboks, who at Newlands passed 500 for the first time in a Test against England; on turf, too.

  South Africa had closed the gap, and for the next two years during an interval between 1932 and 1934, when there were no tours at home or abroad, their cricketers bedded in and worked hard to sharpen their skills on turf pitches. Duffus considered it at the time to be ‘probably the most important [period] in the history of the game in the Union’. The transition from matting to turf was designed to make South Africa more competitive abroad (though Australia would remain their nemesis for some years to come) and, in the English summer of 1935, perhaps sooner than anyone might have expected, ‘the harvest was reaped’. The fact that South Africa turned out so many proficient first-class players during those years, ‘having little more than weekend cricket’, was a constant source of wonder, as the England fast bowler Ken Farnes explained: ‘When they have touring teams out there even the Currie Cup languishes, and Test teams have to be selected on known form, club matches, and actual performances against the touring team. As in Australia, there is no professional cricket.’