Edging Towards Darkness: The story of the last timeless Test

by John Lazenby

  Swanton also made a similar sortie out to the middle after the game was over and confirmed that ‘the business end of the pitch was still flawless’. The only marks he detected were ‘the shallow indentations behind the stumps made by the wicketkeepers’. It was almost as though 43 hours and 16 minutes of playing time, 1,981 runs and 5,447 balls had been mysteriously erased.

  There is no doubt the 99th timeless Test deserved a decisive result, if only to reward the efforts of Verity, Gordon and Langton, who between them sent down 279 overs, straining every sinew and exhausting every weapon in their armoury, to exact a positive outcome from that pampered pitch. There is no doubt, too, the 22 players – not to mention the Kingsmead faithful – deserved better than the amateur theatrics and high farce that concluded the game. It was, as Duffus dubbed it, ‘the father of all Test match freaks’ – even if, in the end, it was only the wicket that remained timeless.

  Seven

  On Borrowed Time

  ‘A new game has evolved. In the future reports will begin “so and so won the toss but it cannot be said they made full use of the first fortnight”’ – Neville Cardus

  England’s departure from Cape Town on the afternoon of Friday, 17 March was an extravagant affair. Huge crowds lined the quayside, the sky seemed to fill with streamers, and a band played the Athlone Castle out into the smooth waters of Table Bay. There had been no more popular tourists than the strongest MCC side to tour South Africa, the first that could be said to have been truly representative of English cricket, and they received a send-off to remember. Record crowds followed them wherever they went, and in turn South Africa left its lasting impression on the players. Edrich was far from alone when in later years he recalled it as the happiest adventure of his cricketing life: ‘I never remember a tour I liked better than the South African trip of 1938–39.’ It was an appreciation amplified perhaps by the ever-present menace of war and what was likened to a ‘final fling’ attitude. Although anxious to return home each man, in his own way, was sad to be leaving this enchanted land behind.

  Hutton, whose first MCC tour had exceeded all his expectations, told reporters he could not wait to come back; Perks said he would have been quite happy to stay another month; Verity – still proudly wearing the Springbok tie given to him by Bruce Mitchell – was considering an offer to return as a coach to Johannesburg; others, such as Wilkinson, were looking forward to two weeks’ rest and relaxation on board. As they lined the main deck, casting their coins into Table Bay and making their silent pledges, some might even have wished never to see another timeless Test.

  During the coming days and weeks the backlash against limitless cricket would be fast and furious, and was driven for the most part by the players themselves. Whether it was Hammond or Melville, Farnes or Gordon, Hutton or Nourse, both sides were unequivocal in their assessment: ‘never again’. It was Neville Cardus who observed of Hammond that he ‘did not suffer boredom gladly’, and the England captain made his feelings plain before the team sailed from Cape Town. ‘I don’t think timeless Test matches are in the best interests of the game, and I sincerely hope that the last one has been played,’ he stated. Not even Ames, who was one of only two or three batsmen to stay loyal to their attacking instincts throughout, could find anything positive to say: ‘We were naturally disappointed to be robbed of the opportunity of scoring the 42 runs required for victory, but by the end of the tenth day I am afraid few of us cared what happened.’

  The whole weary process left Hutton convinced for the rest of his career that four days was ample time for a Test. Edrich, who benefited from the game more than most, agreed that it was ‘an absurdity for any cricket match to go through ten playing days and two Sundays. There must be a time limit to matches’. In his autobiography, Tours and Tests, Farnes preferred not to dwell on it, pausing only to mention, ‘As day followed day, and we trooped in and out of the pavilion, the whole performance became somewhat ludicrous. It was only raised from this by our amazing last innings, which far surpassed all records for a fourth-innings score.’ A record that remains intact to this day.

  The author Gerald Howat confirmed that for many of its participants the timeless Test became a way of life: Mitchell complained that ‘it was like going to work every day’, while Melville recounted that the groundsman telephoned him without fail at five o’clock each morning for his instructions, and that ‘those five o’clock calls went on and on . . .’ Melville was so exhausted that he was preparing to turn up at the ground on the last Sunday of the match only to be informed it was a rest day1. Dalton, though, had a more pressing concern: his wife grumbled that he woke her up most nights appealing for wickets in his sleep. By the end, Nourse admitted, ‘Most of the joy had gone from it and we played merely because we were compelled to complete a contract we had started.’

  There was a dissenting voice, however. Ronnie Grieveson, who emerged as one of South Africa’s brightest talents and a natural heir to the great ‘Jock’ Cameron behind the stumps, simply did not want the match to end. Nor, of course, did the Kingsmead regulars who departed at the close of play every evening with the familiar and comforting refrain, ‘See you tomorrow.’ Perhaps there was a part of it that appealed, too, to the inner workings of the unconventional loner, Paul Gibb. Grieveson finished the series with a batting average of 57, completing seven catches and three stumpings – Hammond (twice) and Valentine – from only two appearances. His girlfriend became one of the Kingsmead regulars, watching every day of the Test, and he declared later he was so touched by her show of devotion that he married her shortly after.

  Limitless cricket in England had been on borrowed time since before The Oval run-avalanche seven months earlier, and its demise was seen by many as being long overdue. By failing to fulfil its sole objective – namely to guarantee a positive result – ‘this Durban monstrosity’, as Cardus termed the timeless Test in the Manchester Guardian, had effectively sealed its own extinction. If there were any doubts, Wisden tightened the last screw on the coffin lid. ‘The time limitless match we now believe to be dead,’ it pronounced. The public outcry did the rest. In an age that embraced speed with a vigour and passion, and where the British racing ace Malcolm Campbell in Bluebird was smashing world records as the fastest man on both land and water, the timeless Test match had become a national embarrassment2. It was fodder for the music hall and radio comedians, and the headline writers and newspaper cartoonists had a field day at its expense.

  Under the heading ‘This Timeless Pest’, one South African cartoonist exquisitely captured the mood, portraying an England batsman using his umbrella (a unique symbol of Englishness) as a bat, while his stumps were sent flying. Chamberlain was rarely seen in public without his rolled umbrella, and his many critics had seized on it as an emblem of his weakness. The caption read: ‘When South Africa had dismissed Hutton, Hammond and Paynter it seemed that England’s policy of appeasement would have to be abandoned.’ Even ‘The Cheeky Chappie’ Max Miller, Britain’s greatest stand-up comic of the era, managed to wring a few laughs out of the timeless Test amidst his customary rat-a-tat-tat of double entendres. But not everyone was laughing, as Jack Hobbs protested in his column in the Star: ‘Timeless Tests must be stopped; cricket is not a joke.’ His former opening partner, Herbert Sutcliffe, adopted a more subtle approach and, tapping unerringly into the general air of farce, could not resist the mischievous suggestion that, ‘Perhaps in the next series of Tests, they should play one innings in England and the other in South Africa.’

  Yet this was not even the first instance of a timeless Test failing to live up to its own definition – nor, for that matter, of a team having to scramble to catch the last boat home. The last Test of a four-match series between England and West Indies at Sabina Park, Jamaica, in April 1930 (the teams were locked at 1–1) resulted in a similar fiasco. West Indies, set a staggering 836 to win, had reached 408 for five at the end of the seventh day, before the eighth and ninth were washed away by rain. England’s ship sa
iled on the tenth day so that the players could return to their counties in time for the start of the new season, and the match was left unfinished. It yielded 1,815 runs and foreshadowed the plunder that was to come on the decade’s run-drunk pitches. Surrey’s Andy Sandham, at the age of 39, recorded Test cricket’s first triple century – 325 – using a borrowed bat and boots. There was a gleaming double-hundred from the Jamaican George Headley – his 223 remains the highest score by a batsman in the fourth innings of a Test – while Ames, who had the unhappy distinction of playing in both aborted games, hit 149.

  Further back in the mists of antiquity, the fate of two timeless Tests between England and Australia at Melbourne in 1882 was also decided by a steamship timetable. In the first, the ship due to take the England party to New Zealand was scheduled to leave on the morning of the fourth day, 4 January. The authorities put the departure time back to 3.45 p.m. in the hope that it would induce a positive result but Australia, chasing 382 to win, were still 155 runs shy with seven wickets in hand when the tie was abandoned as a draw. The final game of the four-match series in March went the same way after the England team had to depart to fulfil their final fixtures; as it was a private venture, the tour’s coffers were their overriding priority. Once again the contest was left hanging in the balance on the fourth day.

  Neville Cardus, having appointed himself as limitless cricket’s critic-in-chief, continued to mock the concept unmercifully. ‘A new game has evolved,’ he announced in the wake of the Durban timeless Test. ‘In the future reports will begin “so-and-so won the toss but it cannot be said they made full use of the first fortnight”.’ One county chairman even used the club’s AGM to rail against what he called ‘the blighting influence of timeless Tests’, and feared the fad might catch on: ‘Some batsmen might be persuaded to play as if they had a week to bat.’ The South African authorities had already taken a lead by resolving that no more timeless Tests would be played on their soil. They advocated four-day Tests instead, which included two additional days put aside in case of rain or bad light. With draws considered the bugbear of international cricket, they moved that no wicket should be rolled once a Test was in progress.

  Only the Australian Board of Control was convinced that timeless matches had a future, where they remained the hub of the country’s cricket, and continued to push vigorously for all Ashes series in England also to be played to a finish. The matches at The Oval and Durban, it insisted, should be seen in the light of freak affairs and ‘provided no valid argument for the abolition of timeless matches’. Australia’s attachment to the limitless format was the immovable object against the irresistible force of change. ‘In fairness,’ Pollock reported, ‘the Australians understand this highly specialised sort of cricket better than the English or South Africans.’

  One Australian who had no qualms about contradicting his board, however, was the forthright Jack Fingleton. He called for an immediate ban on timeless Tests, predicting that, unless a time limit was imposed, the next series of Tests in Australia could also extend into ten days or beyond. Tellingly, he warned, ‘Players do not look forward with any pleasure to Tests without a time limit, and the strain on them is tremendous.’ In an unusual twist, another Australian journalist claimed later that The Oval and Durban ‘freaks’ were a conspiracy by Hammond and the England team ‘to teach Australians the futility of long drawn-out matches’. The Englishmen, he continued, had ‘purposefully spun out the game in Durban until the boat sailed . . . systematically ruining the Test and turning it into the greatest farce of all time’. If Hammond was guilty of anything, his biographer Ronald Mason emphasised, it was that he did not possess ‘among his techniques of captaincy any very effective plans for avoiding the impasse’.

  Throughout it all Duffus remained the staunchest advocate for limitless cricket, especially the ‘absorbing’ Australian method of playing Tests to a finish, where pitches were consistently fast enough to sustain a positive attitude from both batsmen and bowlers. ‘There is much to commend timeless Test matches,’ he argued. ‘The dullest cricket I have seen was in games of limited life, not magnificently drawn against time and odds but bereft of any hope of a decision by the end of the second day.’ Although he acknowledged the Durban game had cheapened Test match values, it was not because it was timeless that it had done so: it was because of a wicket that was miraculously rejuvenated by rain on three separate occasions to ‘live to an embarrassing old age’.

  The preparation of wickets went to the heart of the matter. ‘Bowlers could exercise every guile and still stand little chance of getting a normally careful batsman out in a week,’ Hammond observed of most South African Test surfaces. During The Oval timeless Test Cardus had urged that, ‘Something must be done to protect cricket from the constant danger of records being reared up and broken almost daily. An effort must be made to get back to the conditions when none but the greatest batsmen could hope to score a hundred in a Test-match innings.’ In Swanton’s opinion The Oval and Durban games were inextricably entwined. The pity for the latter, he explained, was that in following so closely behind the run-frenzy at The Oval it ‘turned everyone decidedly away from timeless Tests. People blamed the lack of a limit instead of the root cause of the ennui, which in both cases was the pitch’.

  R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, in Wisden, cited two chief reasons for the Durban débâcle: the ‘undue solemnity of proceedings’ and the imperishable pitch – it was ‘plumb, but without pace . . . so far overstepping perfection as to be of little use to the bowler’. Yet the batsmen, he added, ‘with few exceptions, cannot be wholly acquitted of blame. Some of them nearly slept on the pitch’.

  There is little doubt that had the other batsmen followed the attacking blueprints of Ames and Valentine, or Dalton and Hutton for that matter, the frustration and farce could have been averted. The game threw up almost as many missed opportunities by batsmen on both sides to force the pace as it did Test records – an astonishing 23 of which were broken in all. South Africa’s decision to stick with their safety-first tactics after tea on the sixth day, when Van der Bijl and Mitchell were entrenched at the wicket and England’s bowlers were all but out on their feet, was probably the most culpable. Hammond and Paynter too, on the final day, might have timed their onslaught a little sooner; after all, everyone knew the storm was coming. Nearly eight decades later, their reluctance to do so never fails to amaze.

  For all that there was any number of heroic deeds to contemplate. Edrich’s blazing double-century and emergence from the furnace of a dire run of low scores was the most heart-warming. ‘I knew, of course, that the selectors would look askance at my record,’ he wrote later, ‘but I had justified myself to myself, and that was what mattered most of all.’ Similarly, there was Van der Bijl’s courage and conviction; the composed assurance of the batting artists, Hammond and Melville; the all-round excellence of Dalton; the rapid-fire stand by Ames and Valentine on the fourth day to rescue the game from an almost asphyxiating torpor. The 95.6 overs (766 balls) delivered by Verity should not be forgotten, nor the 92.2 overs (738 balls) from the tenacious Gordon and the 728 balls from Langton. If on the rare occasion Verity was forced to bowl ‘like a book of instruction and give his soul a rest’, as Robertson-Glasgow put it once, then who could blame him. Of course the ‘deep tragedy’, Duffus reflected, was that all those efforts were in the end to no avail, the countless runs and overs just ‘so much energy fruitlessly squandered’. In their own way, no doubt, these were also records of a sort.

  The wicket was another missed opportunity. It was too good to begin with and played better and better, with the assistance of rain, as the game progressed. In effect, Swanton wrote, the groundsman on each occasion ‘made a new cake, which the tropical sun dried out before the start of play’. Ironically, had MCC consented to the South African proposal that the wickets be covered during the Test matches, the dry soil would in all likelihood have crumbled after four or five days, thereby allowing England to fulfil their last f
ixture against Western Province, and catch the boat home in their own good time – albeit perhaps with the series drawn 1–1.

  The reform of over-prepared pitches became a matter of urgency after The Oval timeless Test, and the Advisory County Cricket Committee in England had already taken steps to ensure that the composition of wickets for the 1939 season did not ‘unduly favour the batsmen’. Surrey would be at the forefront in their efforts to turn The Oval into the most competitive in the land. ‘One of the justifiable criticisms against Test matches of unlimited time is that they encourage batsmen to play unnatural cricket,’ Duffus pointed out. ‘They can do that successfully only because they have confidence in the longevity of the pitches.’ Regrettably, naturally gifted strokemakers such as Nourse, Paynter and to a lesser extent Hammond fell into that trap in the earlier stages of the game in Durban and temporarily deserted their attacking principles. It would have been far better, Duffus concluded, to prepare a pitch that allowed bowlers to exploit their skills and batsmen to lose their wickets, rather than one on which ‘both bowlers and batsmen should lose all character’. That was undoubtedly true, though ultimately it would not have saved timeless Tests from extinction. Their time had passed.

  Hitler’s patience had run out in Europe, too. At six o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 15 March 1939, in dense snow, German troops marched into Prague. The invasion was all over in a matter of hours; aside from a few protestors who hurled snowballs at passing tanks, the full might of the German military machine met with no resistance. The Czechoslovakian army was swiftly disarmed and by the early afternoon huge swastikas illuminated buildings in the city and loudspeakers blared, ‘Heil Hitler.’ Czechoslovakia had fallen. Hitler entered Prague later that day, parading through half-deserted streets in an open-top Mercedes to an eerie silence. ‘The Germans were installed as the undisputed masters of “golden” Prague – without a single shot being fired,’ one newspaper reported.