by John Lazenby
The team’s visit to Pretoria preceded by a week the centenary celebrations of Dingaan’s Day, or the Day of the Covenant as it is also known, when the Voortrekkers’ victory over the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River on 16 December 1838 is commemorated. It is an event ingrained in Boer history. The celebrations, Farnes recalled, were not entirely devoid of anti-British feeling, ‘and large numbers of Dutch youths had grown beards to make them look like the forefathers they were honouring’. Pollock detected that the atmosphere in the city was ‘tricky and electric’ and, like any good newspaper man, filed a piece on Verity and Wright for the Daily Express, only to have it, in his words, ‘sub-editorially sensationalised’. The story read as though the pair had been involved in a street brawl, rather than acting as the good Samaritans they were. ‘I wasn’t very popular with Walter Hammond and Jack Holmes over that,’ he remembered.
Hammond, nonetheless, decided to take all precautions and Verity was rested for the seventh game of the tour, against a powerful Transvaal at the Wanderers in Johannesburg, where the first Test would be played a week later. The tourists had yet to concede a century but immediately found themselves up against Bruce Mitchell on a plumb wicket after South Africa’s new captain Melville won the toss. The bowlers would have needed no reminder of Mitchell’s qualities as a relentless accumulator of runs, but they got one anyway as he mixed stern defence with controlled strokeplay in a chanceless 133. Another Test batsman, Ken Viljoen, almost completed a second before Wilkinson, the pick of the attack, wheedled a top-spinner through his defence, allowing Melville to declare at 428 for eight at lunch on the second day.
The crowd had barely settled into their seats after the interval when Eric Davies, pitching short, struck Hutton on the head with the third ball of MCC’s reply. Hutton was not only knocked out but the ball rolled from his head onto the stumps, and he was carried from the field and rushed to hospital. A tall, athletic right-arm quick bowler who made his Test debut against Australia in 1936, Davies could be distinctly slippery for a few overs – Farnes reckoned he was ‘the original fast merchant’ – but lacked accuracy and stamina. Hutton confessed that he simply lost sight of the ball: ‘Les Ames told me that he did not see his first ball either. Fortunately it passed by his head six to eight inches away1.’
For the first time the tourists’ batting faltered. The sight of the stricken Hutton crumpling slowly to the turf appeared to have unsettled a few minds, and Edrich, Paynter, Hammond and Yardley were soon retracing their steps to the pavilion. Hammond’s dismissal, aiming a back-foot drive to a lifting delivery from the lively Norman Gordon, was more the result of ‘Chud’ Langton’s stunning reflexes in the gully. The ball travelled so fast that the force of it spun the fielder around and he ended up with his back to the wicket in completing the catch. Only an assured 109 from the unflappable Ames saved MCC from further embarrassment. The hallmarks of any century by Ames – the speed and fluency with which he scored his runs, the nimble footwork and booming straight-drives – were much in evidence. He had batted for 145 minutes when he was undone by a rapid inswinger from Davies, who wrapped up the tail on the third day to finish with six for 82 out of a total of 268.
Melville, however, declined to enforce the follow-on, opting instead for batting practice, and the game drifted towards an inevitable draw. During an afternoon session punctuated by showers, Davies learned that he had been recalled by South Africa for the first Test, starting on Christmas Eve. He would be joined by his fellow pace bowler Gordon and the Western Province opening batsman Pieter van der Bijl, an Oxford blue and former amateur heavyweight boxer, who were among five new caps named by the selectors. The solid and familiar core of the side was provided by Mitchell, Nourse, Langton, Viljoen and Dalton.
Hutton’s name was missing from the England XI after Hammond judged that it would be ‘unwise and unfair’ to pick him. His place at the top of the order went to his fellow Yorkshireman Gibb, who was one of three Test debutants alongside Yardley and Wilkinson. Gibb’s experience of opening the batting for his county tipped the vote in his favour, though he was short of runs and confidence having managed a highest score of 28 from only three innings on tour2. There had been no such problems for Yardley and Wilkinson, who were in the full flush of form. Wilkinson’s zip and accuracy against Transvaal had impressed Hammond, and he would form a triumvirate of spinners with Verity and Goddard. Wright was the odd man out on this occasion. The success of Australia’s spinners during the 1935–36 Test series in South Africa, when the ball turned prodigiously on the turf and Clarrie Grimmett filled his swag bag with 44 wickets, had not been lost on the England selectors. Hammond believed it was an area where his side held an advantage, too, and Wilkinson could expect to be busy on his debut.
Instead, it was Gibb who exceeded all expectations in a Test that acted as a barometer for the batting excesses to come3. England amassed 713 runs in their two innings, setting a record aggregate for matches between the two countries at that point; in all a total of 1,211 runs were scored during the four days. ‘The first thing we discovered when the Tests began was that the wickets were either over-prepared or else were unnaturally fine,’ Hammond wrote. ‘They were batsmen’s wickets all the time, and it is no reflection on the fine batting performances of our men to say so.’ Indeed, Hutton’s absence was barely felt. To Paynter went the distinction of scoring a century in each innings, while the bespectacled Gibb hit 93 and 106, amply rewarding his captain’s faith in him; the pair also shared in second-wicket partnerships of 184 and 168.
Gibb had seized his opportunity, making the most of a reprieve early in the first innings after cutting Langton hard towards Melville in the gully. The captain could only parry the ball into the slips, where Van der Bijl juggled with the rebound but failed to cling on. Yet, as Gibb was expected to be no more than a stopgap until Hutton’s return, his success presented Hammond with a dilemma: what to do with Edrich? The all-rounder’s failure in both innings (he was dismissed by the fourth ball of the match from Davies and contributed a scratchy 10 in the second) was the continuation of a run of low scores that had plagued him since the series with Australia in 1938. By his own admission he was struggling: ‘As soon as I saw a Test crowd my bat felt loose in my hands, and whether I attempted stonewall defence or tried to force the pace, all that happened was my wickets rattled down. I just could not get going.’
Edrich cut a doleful figure in Johannesburg set against the exuberance of Paynter. The diminutive Lancashire left-hander may have been no more than 5 foot 4 inches but he batted with a tall man’s stride; not for him any suggestions that he was too small to play Test cricket. A hearty puller and cutter – ‘me fancy cuts’, as he liked to refer to them – Paynter delighted the huge holiday crowds with his sense of adventure and belligerence. During the first-innings alliance with Gibb the spectators left neither man in any confusion as to which they preferred to watch. Pollock was even moved to wonder whether Gibb ‘with very few strokes in his bat was not one of the worst-best batsmen I have ever seen’. Wisden, too, was inclined to damn him with faint praise: ‘It would have needed a shrewd critic to discern, when watching him play a long innings, that he was more than a determined and solid university and county batsman.’ Gibb’s idiosyncrasies, though, endeared him to all his team-mates, whether it was befriending dogs, eating vast quantities of ice-cream (he was reputed once to have consumed 22 at a sitting) or finishing all the fruit on the table after every meal. He was also, unsurprisingly, the butt of many a prank.
The British Pathé newsreel of the first Test offers a rare and fleeting glimpse of Gibb and Paynter batting together. At just on a minute it is all too short, but shows Gibb with shirt sleeves rolled high, driving into the covers for runs and studiously shouldering arms to a ball outside off stump. He usually batted in a headband, or a tennis eyeshade, to prevent sweat from dropping onto his glasses. Paynter, in a cap, scores through the on side with two perfectly timed strokes off his pads and is off scampering down the wicket
as soon as the ball leaves his bat. Johannesburg was often described as a miniature New York and most of the action is filmed side-on, against a backdrop of skyscrapers that are so close they almost appear to be encroaching on the pitch. ‘Even the cars on the wide streets are of American design,’ Paynter noted. There is an elegant glance off his hip by Hammond for a single, while Ames executes a robust pull to the boundary off Davies, whose bowling is characterised by a long gallop to the stumps and an unusual follow-through that sends him veering in the direction of cover-point at the last moment, like a train coming off the tracks.
The footage concludes with a shot of the Christmas Eve crowd filing out of the ground at the close of the first day, leaving a sea of bottles, glass and strewn newspaper in their wake. Pollock reported that play was accompanied by regular announcements reminding spectators not to throw glass onto the adjoining greyhound track, where the almost space-age tote dwarfed the scoreboard.
A crowd of 22,000 – a record for a Test in South Africa – was in place on the Boxing Day resumption to see England bowled out for 422 and Valentine fall three short of his century4. Batting, however, was not so straightforward for the Springboks. Van der Bijl and Melville failed to resist the wiles of Verity, and the captain was snaffled for a duck in his first Test innings. Contrasting half-centuries from Mitchell and Nourse appeared to have averted the danger, before Goddard deceived Nourse in the flight, triggering a late clatter of wickets. The off-spinner had the nightwatchman Gordon stumped off the next ball and completed a memorable hat-trick by dismissing Billy Wade, the wicketkeeper, with one that turned sharply and unexpectedly.
For E. W. Swanton, a freelance journalist commentating for the BBC at the time, it was the equivalent of cricketing gold dust. Swanton, with half-an-hour’s slot to fill each evening, was pioneering the first live broadcast of an overseas Test match to be relayed to England, where the year was fading in a flurry of snow and freezing temperatures. As Cardus put it: ‘Cricket girdles the earth nowadays.’ Desperate to make an impression, Swanton was running out of patience, if not words, to describe the monotonous run-gathering and Mitchell’s stonewalling. ‘As I sweated in my tiny enclosed box I imagined English listeners by the thousand falling asleep over the Yule log,’ he recalled. Then Goddard struck. In the next few moments Swanton’s future, and that of ball-by-ball broadcasting, were simultaneously assured. ‘So Tom was on a hat-trick. Here was a situation the drama of which even this tyro at the mike couldn’t miss. Wade came slowly in, went nervously through the business of taking guard, looked around – and was promptly bowled. Only five Englishmen in Test history had done the hat-trick before Tom Goddard. It was quite a story5.’
Yet, despite Goddard’s timely intervention, South Africa finished only 32 shy of England’s total after the leg-spinning all-rounder Eric Dalton hit 102, staging a bold recovery in the company of Viljoen and Langton, who struck an unbeaten 64, batting at No. 10. The talented Dalton can have rarely played a more invaluable innings for his country. He scored his runs with an unusually heavy bat and even the snicks flashed like lightning to the boundary in the rarefied air. Hammond declared England’s second innings on 291 for four, setting the Springboks a target of 324 to win in just under three hours. It was never a realistic proposition and Mitchell, occupying the crease for the entire 165 minutes for his 48, dead-batted the game into submission.
Ironically, the most lucrative Test to be played in South Africa at that stage terminated in barracking – much of it aimed at Mitchell – and criticism of Hammond’s tactics. The local press accused the England captain of sacrificing the game to allow Gibb to complete a Test century on debut, the eighth Englishman to do so. The opener had spent several anxious minutes becalmed on 98, before reaching his landmark in just under three hours. After Gibb’s dismissal Hammond made every effort to speed up the scoreboard, often advancing down the track to the quicker bowlers and swatting the ball to the boundary with what Pollock likened to tennis shots. ‘It was a disappointing end to a good match, but Hammond must take the blame for killing the game,’ one journalist wrote. ‘Despite this, Gibb’s feat is remarkable in Test cricket, but the point is whether the game is worth more than an individual performance.’
Hammond had shuffled his bowlers like a card sharp when South Africa batted again, but Mitchell would not be moved and walked off at the end with the jeers of the home crowd ringing in his ears. Pollock rarely wasted an opportunity to inject some colour into proceedings and remarked of Mitchell: ‘No wonder that while some people swear by him, others swear at him.’ He added, in much the same vein: ‘Someone asked me, when the game had gone to sleep for a time, if I thought that four days was long enough for a Test match. I said there were occasions when I thought it was too long.’ The newspapers agreed that both sides would need to raise the tempo considerably if the second Test at Newlands was not to go the same way.
England: 422 (Paynter 117, Valentine 97, Gibb 93; Gordon 5-103) & 291-4 declared (Gibb 106, Paynter 100, Hammond 58); South Africa: 390 (Dalton 102, Mitchell 73, Nourse 73, Langton 64no, Viljoen 50; Verity 4-61, Goddard 3-54) & 108-1. Match drawn.
England would at least have Hutton back to form a new opening partnership with Gibb at Newlands. Edrich retained his place, despite his lack of runs, and Yardley dropped out of the XI. For South Africa, Dalton and Viljoen were unavailable and Balaskas and Rowan, two architects of the 1935 conquest of Lord’s, were recalled. There was only a three-day turnaround before the start of the second Test on New Year’s Eve; so, shortly after the conclusion at the Wanderers, both teams boarded a train and headed south on the 900-mile journey to Cape Town. The long trek passed through the Great Karoo, an arid, desolate place of soaring temperatures, made more bearable by the soothing tones of Valentine’s gramophone. The Kent amateur never travelled without it, rarely missing an opportunity, as Duffus put it, ‘to remind us of revue and glamorous nights at Drury Lane’.
During the trip the players briefly stretched their legs at De Aar junction, where the desert heat easily nudged 90°F and beyond in the sun. ‘The Karoo looked a merciless region from our hot carriages,’ Farnes observed. ‘But at sunset the land became much more friendly, and cool purple shadows gave a quiet blessing to the earth after the brazen torture of the day.’ In his 1940 autobiography, Tours and Tests, Farnes revealed a fascinating glimpse of the writer he aspired to be, often creating the impression that he was on a restless quest for greater fulfilment. He had been working on a novel on tour but appeared to have lost confidence in it, abandoning it halfway through. He also sketched, scribbled some poetry, and found the time to attend an art exhibition and a classical concert, along with a couple of nightclub jaunts in the company of the irrepressible Valentine. A young housemaster at Worksop College in Nottinghamshire, Farnes was eloquent and deep-thinking and, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, did not require the services of a ghost writer. On his return to England he was commissioned to write several articles for Boy’s Own Paper, from whose pages he could so easily have stepped.
He had struggled badly in the high altitude of Johannesburg, however, finishing with one for 104 from 30 overs. ‘After chasing the ball the fielders found they had no breath left, and I found that after bowling only a few balls I was completely blown,’ he admitted. ‘I came to dread playing there, for the eight-ball over was gruelling.’ One glance at the Newlands wicket after their arrival in Cape Town was enough to confirm his worst fears: it was another batsman’s paradise. Mercifully, for his bowlers, Hammond won the toss for the sixth successive time in a Test, and England reached 131 for two on a rain-interrupted day.
New Year celebrations were muted by normal standards and the players’ thoughts naturally turned to home, where Chamberlain had assured the British people that 1939 would be ‘a more tranquil year than 1938’. The cricketers kept a constant eye on events in Europe, Duffus reported; they were always frantic for the latest newspapers and often discussed Hitler’s speeches. As young men who would be called up t
o fight in the likelihood of another war, they were unpersuaded by what Yardley referred to as ‘the frightful soothing of statesmen’, and most had already made up their minds that conflict was inevitable.
Verity, in fact, had been convinced as early as 1937 that war was coming and predicted it would last for six years. According to Hutton, he prepared himself by spending much of his leisure time on tour meticulously studying a small arsenal of military manuals and training pamphlets he had brought with him. Farnes, on a more introspective bent, had concluded that, ‘God isn’t interested in man’s affairs in the slightest and Hitler’s disturbances won’t be altered by any amount of prayer.’ Such fears and doubts, Yardley remembered, steeped their days: ‘There was something unreal about that winter away from home. We used to look hastily at the newspapers first thing every morning to see whether the Luftwaffe had bombed our homes, and everyone wondered whether we could get one or two more seasons of cricket before we had to take up something more deadly.’
On the pitch, 1939 carried on where the old year left off and runs continued to pour from the bat, as though someone had left the tap on. There were centuries from Hammond – on his favourite ground – and Ames and Valentine, when play restarted on 2 January in front of another capacity holiday crowd. The captain’s 181 was undoubtedly one of his finest, an exhibition of great freedom and power, before he declared at 559 for nine early on the third day. Valentine’s roistering 112 contained so many strokes that, according to Wisden, it ‘almost amounted to recklessness’. Nobody suffered more at their hands than the little ‘Greek chemist’ Balaskas, whose figures of 24-0-115-0 would be his last in Test cricket. The alchemy had evaporated.
