by John Lazenby
Hammond was only too aware that to play anxiously would be to play into South Africa’s hands and, as long as the pitch continued to sap the bowlers’ strength and didn’t suddenly turn into a raging powder-keg, he believed England had nothing to fear. To this end he openly encouraged the batsmen to be positive and to play their natural game. Later that morning he would shuffle the England batting order – another courageous call that was to have considerable impact on the bearing of the game. ‘No side has ever won a match with a total like that against them in the final innings, but we intended to give it a try. If it was batting they wanted, we were a batting side,’ he insisted. It was paramount that Hutton and Gibb gave England a solid start, and the Yorkshire pair carried out Hammond’s instructions to the letter.
Hutton gave an indication of what was to come in the first over, twice driving Langton through the covers to get the scoreboard moving and immediately looked in supreme touch. Langton, handicapped by a strapped back, was one of several players already feeling the diminishing toll of the past six days, and for the first time in the series he struggled to control his line. The bowler whom Melville invariably turned to in a crisis would finish the match ‘lame and at half-pace’ after ploughing his way through 56 second-innings overs for a solitary wicket. Dalton, the partnership-breaker par excellence, was swiftly introduced but could make little impression on Hutton, who continued to score at every opportunity, quite impervious to the dangers of the situation.
Gibb, scampering quick singles and nudging the ball cleverly into the gaps, proved the perfect foil for his more adventurous partner and England’s 50 was posted in 70 minutes. Hutton’s half-century followed 12 minutes later, with his fifth boundary. He appeared set fair for his first hundred of the series when, ten minutes before lunch, he aimed a cut at an innocuous leg-break from Mitchell and smeared the ball into his stumps for 55 – one of half a dozen batsmen to lose his wicket in that manner during the game. It was a sorry end to an innings that promised so much, and he banged his bat angrily into the ground before departing. At 78 for one Hammond sprung a surprise, and it was not the jaunty figure of Paynter who emerged down the pavilion steps and out into the middle, but Edrich.
Hammond argued that Edrich’s lack of Test runs was more to do with ill-luck than poor form, and his advice to the all-rounder before pushing him up the order had been simple: ‘Don’t be afraid to go for the ball, Bill.’ Despite an average of only 4.02 for the series and a reputation among the South Africans as a walking wicket, Hammond was convinced that he could make good. Only the day before he had received a cable from his fellow Middlesex reveller and swashbuckler Denis Compton, offering him similar encouragement, and he slipped it in his pocket before going out to bat. On the players’ balcony it was noticeable that the Springboks exchanged glances – one or two expressed wry amusement, some of the crowd even sniggered – as Edrich made his way to the wicket. ‘It was quite evident that they felt Hammond’s gamble, at this crucial stage of the match, had provided them with a proverbial “lamb to the slaughter”,’ Paynter recounted.
Mitchell was waiting for Edrich at the bowler’s end with a wide grin, tossing the ball impatiently from hand to hand in his eagerness to get at him. ‘The grin finished me,’ Edrich wrote, but he kept repeating Hammond’s words in his head. Mitchell’s first ball pitched on leg stump and Edrich drove it confidently, straight out of the middle of the bat, past mid-on to the boundary. He played the same stroke an over later, watching the ball ripple across the turf to the fence, and remembered that it felt ‘as if I had taken a large dose of strong tonic’.
In fact, there was more than just a dose of tonic coursing through Edrich’s veins. The previous night he had attended a party thrown by another Middlesex adventurer, the former South African batsman ‘Tuppy’ Owen-Smith, at the Athlone Gardens nightclub, just a rickshaw ride away from the team hotel1. It was no secret that the outgoing Edrich enjoyed a party and a drink or two, and his decision to subject himself to ‘a regime of early nights and strictly rationed drinking and smoking’ in an effort to heighten his game and eradicate the mistakes would have required a serious amount of willpower on his part. On tour in India with Lionel Tennyson’s XI a year earlier, his ‘bohemian jollities’ had not gone down well at Lord’s and prompted a written reprimand. By adopting a more sedate routine, Edrich had commuted the element of danger and risk on which he thrived.
On the night of Owen-Smith’s party he no doubt reasoned he had nothing left to lose – after all, his form couldn’t get any worse – and he proceeded to tear up the rule book in style. As his biographer Alan Hill explained: ‘He drank freely. It lasted until the early hours of the morning, and it was a champagne tonic for Edrich’s flagging spirits. He forgot all his worries amid the camaraderie of the party.’ He was so worse for wear that his team-mates had to put him to bed that morning, but ‘he was smiling when they shook him awake . . .’
He was still smiling when he passed his previous highest Test score of 28, with a fortunate snick to the boundary off Gordon, and soon overhauled Gibb. ‘The South Africans began to trek out into the great open spaces away from the wicket,’ Hammond noted with a glow of pride. His powers restored, Edrich farmed the strike and celebrated a maiden Test half-century with his eighth boundary in 99 minutes, the fourth quickest of the game after Hutton (82 minutes), Dalton (95) and Ames (97). Like Gibb, he would not perhaps win any prizes for elegance but his uncomplicated methods proved hugely effective and he was always in his element in a battle. Predominantly an on-side player the keynotes to his batting were his unflinching courage – one writer called it a ‘nonchalant contempt for danger’ – his wonderful eye and pugnacity, fortified by the sturdiest of defences. He was also a ferocious and fearless hooker of fast bowling, who would rather take a blow than a backward step, drove heartily and played the late cut as well as anyone. The eminent sports columnist Ian Wooldridge perfectly captured the essence of the man when he wrote:
Bill Edrich epitomised the particularly British breed of incurable scallywag. He loved life too much to harbour grudges, sustain feuds, or niggle opponents with whom, like as not, he’d be out on the tiles at the close of play. But there was a bottom line to all this roistering. You had to be there before the start of play, next day. Then, hungover or otherwise, you had to fight . . .
As ever, Gibb continued to sell his wicket dearly and was the bulwark at the other end while the partnership burgeoned. Nicknamed ‘Gibbralter’ by the South African crowds for his rock-like presence at the crease, he also provided spectators with a constant source of amusement. ‘His very zeal made him an addict of idiosyncrasies,’ Duffus wrote, whether it was repeatedly adjusting his sleeves or glasses while he waited for the bowler to run in, batting in a white tennis eyeshade to the amusement of the crowd, or swishing imaginary drives at the non-striker’s end to ‘refresh his memory of a stroke that might be otherwise forgotten’. A steady drizzle during the afternoon caused his glasses to steam up, and at one point after stopping the game to appeal to Melville and the umpires about the conditions, he made off towards the pavilion only to double back when he realised that the rest of the players – including Edrich – had decided to stay on the field. By this stage Gibb’s eccentricities had become almost second nature to his team-mates, and even it seemed the Springboks.
Edrich continued to dominate the strike after tea, moving ever closer to a century despite Melville taking the tenth new ball of the game. The crowd had swollen to at least 4,000 by this time and was cheering, whistling and clapping his every run. He reached 99 with a drive for two off Langton and completed his milestone with a comfortable single in the same over – courtesy of a misfield by the bowler – and was soaking up the applause before he reached the other end. He had struck 12 boundaries and batted for three hours and 13 minutes to end one of the most fraught baptisms in Test history. ‘There was an enormous reception,’ Norman Preston recorded in Wisden. ‘The crowd gave him an ovation, the South Africans congratula
ted him and high up on the balcony shouts of triumph came from his comrades.’
There was acclaim, too, for Hammond’s ‘masterly stroke of leadership’ in elevating Edrich. The England captain rarely allowed himself to act on a hunch, but on this occasion it had paid off handsomely. ‘Probably it is not an exaggeration to say Edrich’s whole cricket future hung on success or failure today,’ Pollock reported. ‘But he rewarded his captain, and did himself an incalculable turn by coming to light with a real cricketer’s innings.’ No wonder, either, that Edrich wrote later of Hammond’s call, ‘It was the stuff of which great captains are made.’
When bad light ended play at 5.40 p.m. England were 253 for one, with Edrich on 107 and Gibb 78; in putting on 175 the pair had whittled away South Africa’s lead to 443. ‘The odds are still very much on the Springboks winning the game,’ Jack Gage, the cricket correspondent of the Daily Tribune, filed that evening. However, he acknowledged that by their refusal to yield so much as an inch, England had not just created doubt in the minds of the South Africans for the first time in the match, but awarded themselves ‘an outside chance of pulling off what would be the most sensational Test win in cricket history’. Then came the rain.
England: 316 & 253-1 (Edrich 107no, Gibb 78no, Hutton 55) require 443 runs to beat South Africa: 530 & 481.
Day eight: Saturday, 11 March
As much as half an inch of rain fell overnight, but it had eased off to a drizzle again by Saturday morning when the teams arrived at the ground. At first the Springboks believed it to be the answer to their prayers. ‘When we woke up to see the rain drizzling down, we thought we had the match in the bag,’ Grieveson confessed. Although the heavy roller had been used to dry the surface, the contention was that the uncovered wicket would retain enough moisture to assist the bowlers and enable them to work their mischief. Nourse was convinced that ‘there would be some fun and games at last’. However, after much urgent pacing of the dressing-room while they waited for the drizzle to subside and the sun to come out, the South Africans had their hopes dashed by another torrential downpour. Once more the wicket was swamped and at 2.40 p.m. on the eighth scheduled day of the match, following an inspection by both captains, play had to be abandoned without a ball being bowled.
By now the tourists’ valedictory fixture against Western Province at Newlands was supposed to have been under way but, as with so much to do with the timeless Test, it had long since gone by the board. The Athlone Castle had already steamed out of Durban without the players, bound for Cape Town on the first leg of her return journey to England, while they were still in the field. ‘The captain, just to let us know he was sailing, sounded three farewell blasts on the ship’s siren as if to say, “I’ll see you in Cape Town,”’ Wright recalled. That had been on the Thursday, during the sixth playing day of the match. The mail boat was booked to depart Cape Town for Southampton on Friday, 17 March, and no one in their right mind wanted to still be playing then. ‘Suggestions that had been made facetiously earlier in the week that England might have difficulty in catching the boat home – Cape Town was two days’ journey away by rail – were now a reality,’ Duffus remarked. ‘The timeless Test was running out of time.’
Day nine: Monday, 13 March
The fickle weather continued to impose its own test on the players and Kingsmead was bathed in scorching sunshine, fanned by a cooling sea breeze, when they clocked in again for the second Monday of the match. Saturday’s washout and Sunday’s rest day had, in effect, provided them with an additional day off and there were rumours of ‘more parties – and more champagne2’. There also appeared to be a renewed public interest in the contest and almost 1,000 spectators filed into the ground for the start of play. ‘The astonishing pitch came up smiling again for the eighth playing day,’ Pollock reported, though he added that there were some cracks at which Edrich gazed intently during the early overs. In fact, the pitch had now entered its third incarnation of the game. It had been cut and rolled on the Sunday and, according to Grieveson, ‘looked as good as it had on the first day’.
The second-wicket pair quietly played themselves in and, after establishing that there were no hidden demons in the surface, simply carried on where they had left off on Friday. A light breeze was blowing diagonally across the wicket when Newson bowled the first over to Edrich, who clipped two runs off the fifth ball and survived a confident shout for lbw off the eighth, attempting to repeat the stroke. The breeze appeared to be assisting Langton more than Newson and he bowled to Gibb with three fielders close in on the leg side. Newson was soon replaced by Gordon, who bowled to four slips in the hope that it would encourage his swing, but Gibb cut him neatly for consecutive twos. Edrich was also batting with increasing comfort and, when Melville introduced Mitchell’s leg-spin, he lofted him over square-leg to the boundary, bringing up the 200-partnership in the process.
At 12.30, after batting for two minutes over six hours (he had started his innings in the gloaming on Thursday evening), Gibb flicked Gordon off his pads for a couple of runs to long-on and collected his second century of the series. Slowly but inexorably the tide was turning. Edrich passed 150 with his 18th boundary not long after and continued to lead the cavalry charge, ploughing away through the on side and testing the equanimity of the South Africans with every run. At 333 for one at lunch, having added a further 80, England were 363 away from their objective, the second-wicket partnership already worth 255 runs.
At this point Bill Ferguson, the meticulous Australian scorer, had been reduced to the last five pages of his scorebook and feared he would be unable to record the closing stages of the match. Pollock thought Ferguson’s dilemma worthy of a mention in his report of the day’s play, explaining that, ‘the MCC scorer didn’t know where to get another book.’ Hammond recalled that, on all their travels together, it was the only time he had ever seen ‘Fergie’ agitated. ‘He is an MCC institution, and has watched more big cricket, I suppose, than any other man living.’ Although his official title was scorer-baggage master, it failed to do justice to the multifarious duties he performed on tour: to use the words of Duffus, he regularly doubled up as ‘manager, artist, organiser, soul of efficiency and guardian genius’. He even found the time to invent cricket’s wagon-wheel, the chart that illustrates in minute detail where a batsman has scored the bulk of his runs. On one occasion on tour in England, he was memorably asked by King George VI if he used an adding machine whenever Bradman went to the wicket.
He made his first tour in 1905 when he travelled to England with Joe Darling’s Australians and had been following the sun without fail ever since. An indispensable presence, he was the lifeline to many a hapless cricketer on his first tour, and a source of infallible knowledge to countless journalists on deadline. ‘How many maidens has Gordon bowled now, Fergie?’ ‘Bill, when did Gibb last score a run?’ He is there in the back row of England’s official team photograph in South Africa 1938–39, a suited, diminutive, silver-haired figure with stooped shoulders, the legacy of all those years bent over his scorebook in press boxes across the world. No series would have been complete without him, whether it was England, Australia, South Africa, West Indies, New Zealand or India who were doing the touring – he had accompanied them all. The fabled ‘Fergie’ was on his 34th tour by 1938–39, and his eighth with England: in all that time he had never lost so much as a single item of luggage … or run out of pages in his sacred scorebook3.
Edrich and Gibb extended their partnership by a further 25 runs after lunch to set a record for any wicket in Tests between England and South Africa, eclipsing the 268 scored by Hobbs and Sutcliffe at Lord’s in 1924. By now the crowd’s appeals for a wicket were growing ever more insistent. Melville appeared to have missed a trick by not bowling Dalton earlier, and some of the spectators let him know. Belatedly he summoned Dalton into the attack for his first over of the day, and the all-rounder with the icy nerve responded immediately, conjuring a top-spinner out of nowhere that hurried off the surface to k
nock back Gibb’s middle stump for 120 with the score on 358. The Kingsmead regulars had not cheered a wicket since before lunch on Friday, and the roar that greeted Gibb’s dismissal was tinged with relief. The pair had added 280 and Gibb’s century, occupying seven and a half hours and including just two boundaries, was the slowest recorded by an England batsman at that time. Nonetheless, Duffus hailed it as a ‘masterpiece of patience and concentration’.
Hammond joined Edrich and watched approvingly while the 22-year-old continued to gorge himself; he mixed the orthodox with the improvised, repeatedly going down on one knee to sweep the waning Langton to the boundary. Hammond had started tentatively, particularly against Gordon, and survived a huge appeal for leg-before early in his innings. Gordon remained a tireless presence for South Africa, bowling unchanged for an hour at Edrich and Hammond in the broiling heat, and was the most difficult of the bowlers to put away. Farnes was an avid admirer and noted how his ‘neat, well-proportioned build and easy run-up, together with his keenness and consistently good length, enabled him to bowl for long spells at just above medium pace’, concluding that he was ‘one of the best bowlers on either side’.
