by John Lazenby
Not long after, the Yorkshire players left the ground by coach on the start of their long journey back to Leeds, stopping only briefly at Leicester en route to snatch an hour or two’s fitful sleep in a pub lounge. ‘The further we got from Brighton, and the more we saw and heard of England on the eve of war – already there were evacuee children, and searchlights, and a blackout in every town and village we rode through – the deeper was our conviction that we would be lucky if we ever played cricket again,’ Hutton remembered.
That same night, two days before Britain declared war on Germany, Pollock jotted in his diary, ‘The start to evacuate three million people, mostly children, has begun and kids with labels stuck on them and bits of luggage in their hands have poured into Brighton. On the Star billboard I saw for the first time the word “Evacuees”.’ His final entry was suitably stark: ‘Brighton is blacked out tonight . . .’
And time had never felt so precious.
Epilogue:
The Timeless Men
Timeless Test matches were never officially abolished after 1939 – instead, they were left to wither on the vine and simply fade away. In truth, the administrators didn’t need to do anything: the titanic failure of the Durban timeless Test to produce a result had done it for them and ensured there would be no repeat. ‘The impression it made was so deep that there has never been another since,’ Swanton wrote. To a certain extent the concept was also overtaken by events and, when first-class cricket resumed after a gap of seven years in 1946, the world had changed irrevocably. Timeless Tests were already the unlamented relic of another age.
Indeed, the emergence of the fledgling one-day game during the war years proved such an unqualified success with the public that it opened up a whole new world of possibilities. One-day cricket was staged regularly at Lord’s on Saturdays and, because it provided the instant gratification of a result, especially at a time of war, became hugely popular. Its lionisation even prompted Hammond to wonder whether the game would not need to adopt ‘new forms and revolutionary changes’ if it was to preserve its popularity: ‘It has been suggested that three-day matches would make too great a demand on the time of spectators in this world of rush and hurry.’ Surprisingly, the public would have to wait until 1963 before a one-day knockout competition, the Gillette Cup, was finally introduced to English cricket.
Bradman also concerned himself with the future of the game, and in an article in the 1939 edition of Wisden – ‘Cricket at the crossroads’ – he urged the administrators to adapt to the quickening tempo of the world, adding that, ‘We cannot arrest nor impede the tenor of everyday life whether in business or sport.’ He cited the Leeds Test of 1938, where Australia retained the Ashes, as the shining exemplar for modern Test cricket:
The match was one succession of thrills. People fought to get into the ground, not out of it. Their hearts beat frantically with excitement, mine along with the rest of them. Did anyone think of that curse of modern cricket – batting averages? No! It was the game which mattered. Australia won. She nearly lost and if she had it would have been a greater game still. It was stirring, exhilarating cricket. There wasn’t even time to think of timeless Tests at Leeds.
Australia duly took note, and the 1946–47 Ashes series was the first to be staged in Australia where Tests were not played to a finish. The matches were of six days’ duration, though it seemed Australia could not give up the format completely, after it was agreed that the fifth Test would be timeless if neither side led the rubber by more than one. As it transpired, it was not needed and trial by timeless Test was avoided. Australia’s system for limitless cricket, it should be pointed out, had served them perfectly well for 62 years, where the climate and the hard wickets invariably encouraged positive play and a decisive result. ‘They are tough out there,’ Hammond recalled, ‘and do not like no-decision fights.’ In fact, the two drawn Tests of the 1946–47 series were the first of their kind to be played in Australia since 1882.
Timeless Tests in Australia and England had always been two very different beasts. In England, they were usually regarded with a mixture of suspicion and loathing – to the extent that one critic, the wife of the author and former cricketer Robert Lyttelton, condemned them for their ‘stodginess’ and what she called ‘suet-pudding tactics’ after England had been roundly defeated by Australia in the 1930 timeless Test at The Oval. But even worse, she had commented in the Sunday Times, was ‘the severe attack of sciatica brought about by timeless sitting’.
The Durban timeless Test of 1939 was the final gasp of a cricketing epoch, a sparkle of innocence and glamour that disappeared for ever. It also represented the last international appearance of nine of its participants, six South Africans – Van der Bijl, Dalton, Grieveson, Langton, Newson, Gordon – and three Englishmen: Ames, Valentine and Farnes. At least six of them had to accept that their Test days were over after losing six years of their cricketing lives to the war, while another was too badly wounded to continue his; but Farnes and Langton were not so fortunate. Both men died on active service within a year of each other. Pilot Officer Farnes was the third English Test player to lose his life in the conflict, on 20 October 1941, after Geoffrey Legge (Kent) and George Macaulay (Yorkshire), and only the fourth international cricketer to do so. Flight Lieutenant Langton died on 27 November 1942 and was the second South African fatality after the batsman ‘Dooley’ Briscoe, who won the last of his two caps against Hammond’s team in the second Test at Newlands on 31 December 1938.
Verity, who played his final Test for England against West Indies at Lord’s in June 1939, was the eighth out of nine international cricketers from around the world to make the supreme sacrifice, and the third from the timeless Test. A fervent patriot and proud Yorkshireman, Captain Verity of the Green Howards believed utterly in the cause for which he gave his life on 31 July 1943. Farnes and Verity, of course, could justifiably lay claim to being the two finest bowlers of their type available to the England selectors in the period just before the Second World War. The all-rounder Langton had been an integral part of the South African side since his debut in 1935, when he came to England as the youngest member of Herbert Wade’s popular and triumphant 15-man party and endeared himself to the crowds. In the assessment of Robertson-Glasgow, he was a ‘resourceful and artistic bowler’.
Sergeant Observer Ross Gregory, of the RAAF, became the first Australian Test cricketer to be killed in action, on 10 June 1942, and there is a haunting and enduring poignancy attached to his death: he played his last Test against England at Melbourne in February 1937 when he was dismissed 20 short of his maiden century – caught Verity, bowled Farnes. David Frith, the cricket historian and author, wrote that there is ‘no parallel in Test history in terms of future tragedy’.
THE FALLEN
Kenneth Farnes (1911–41)
Cambridge University and Essex
Record in the timeless Test: bowled 68.1 overs for five wickets, including second-innings figures of four for 74. Scored 20 runs in England’s first innings.
Farnes died on his first unsupervised night-flying exercise at RAF Chipping Warden, in Northamptonshire, when his Wellington bomber crashed in the village after he attempted to abandon his landing. He was just a week away from becoming operational. Farnes had been based at Chipping Warden for only a month after earning his wings in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada, where he passed out top of his group. He would have chosen to fly Spitfires had he had his way but was unable to squeeze his 6 foot 5 inch frame into the cockpit, so he volunteered instead for night flying. According to David Thurlow, the author of Ken Farnes: Diary of an Essex Master, he was killed on impact and his co-pilot died later in hospital: ‘He managed to avoid most of the houses, hitting the ground in a tennis court and coming to rest in a garden at Hogg End. The crash set the roofs of some thatched houses on fire but no villager, incredibly, was killed. It was appalling for the woman he loved because she was waiting at the airfield for him . . . Within moments of the disaster she knew.�
�� Thurlow explained that Farnes ‘wanted to be a flyer, not a gunner nor the man who pressed the button to release the bombs because he told his family he could not do that, not drop a bomb on someone hundreds of feet below whom he did not know nor see’. A commemorative plaque, unveiled at Chipping Warden in November 2013, marks the spot where he died, aged 30.
Farnes took 60 wickets in 15 Tests at 28.65 and achieved his best haul of six for 96 against Australia during the fifth Test at Melbourne in 1937. He also returned match figures of ten for 179 on his Test debut against Australia at Nottingham three years earlier, one of only six Englishmen to have achieved the feat. It was not, however, enough to prevent England from suffering a 238-run defeat. In an article for Boy’s Own Paper in August 1939, Farnes vividly described what it was like to bowl to Bradman on his England debut, though modesty precluded him from mentioning either the ten wickets or his dismissal of Bradman for 25 in the second innings: Bradman merely ‘made low scores in each innings of the Test’. Farnes was never tempted to write about the timeless Test, and certainly not in Boy’s Own, whose readers might have dismissed it as too far-fetched even for their tastes. His fellow pace bowler, the Yorkshireman Bill Bowes, tells an affecting little tale about him. The young freshman was playing for Essex against Yorkshire at Scarborough in 1932 and had the misfortune to run into the England batsmen Herbert Sutcliffe and Maurice Leyland on a flat track, in the form of their lives. Farnes bowled four overs for 75 runs, and the faster he bowled the further they hit him. After the game, Bowes discovered him in tears. ‘I’ll never make a fast bowler,’ Farnes said. Bowes told him it was a matter of experience, that’s all.
And so it was. In all first-class cricket Farnes captured 690 wickets at 21.45 in 168 games, despite the fact that the surfaces of the era often sapped his venom. He had few pretensions as a batsman but once hit 97 against Somerset at Taunton in two hours; his failure to convert it into a century elicited only laughter from him on this occasion. He would have undoubtedly played more Tests for England had his commitments as a teacher and housemaster at Worksop College not taken precedence. In a moving tribute to Farnes, the headmaster of Worksop College, the Reverend B. C. Maloney, wrote in The Times:
The news of his death has come as a great shock to all who knew him at Worksop. To the majority of his countrymen the news has come of the loss of one of the greatest fast bowlers; to masters and boys at this school it means the loss of a valued friend and counsellor. Farnes was an energetic and untiring teacher of history and geography and an able and much-loved housemaster. To this latter position he was appointed at an unusually young age and his success therein was largely due to the quite natural modesty of the man, which made him as willing to learn from boys as they were from him. A giant in stature, he had the greatness of voice and manner which so often accompanies great size and strength and, though on the cricket field he would rouse himself to devastating action, he never let his strength run away with him.
He invariably reserved his most potent performances for the Gentlemen versus Players fixture at Lord’s. One such occasion was the game in 1938 when his eight for 43 in the Players’ first innings was considered by Swanton to be the most ferocious spell of fast bowling he had seen in England. ‘Larwood was fast in 1930, Lindwall and Miller in 1948, Hall and Griffith in 1963, and at their peak all these were probably faster than Farnes. But he could be roused by an occasion to a different degree of speed,’ he wrote. Jack Fingleton, who faced him on numerous occasions, also admired the rugged fury of his pace and celebrated him as the ‘most handsome Test cricketer of his age, a movie star in looks, but better than his looks was his modest, cheerful and cultured company’. Had he survived the war he would have been about to turn 35 when cricket resumed again, and in all likelihood his fastest days were behind him. However, his autobiography, Tours and Tests, provides an intriguing insight into an engaging, erudite man and the game of that time, and he would have had much still to give the sport, later perhaps as a writer, a vocation for which he nurtured serious ambitions. Sadly, the warehouse stock of Tours and Tests, published in 1940, a year before his death, was destroyed in a bombing raid and has since become something of a rarity.
Arthur Chudleigh Beaumont Langton (1912–42)
Transvaal
Record in the timeless Test: bowled 91 overs for four wickets, including first-innings figures of three for 71. Scored 33 runs in two innings, and held one catch.
The red-haired ‘Chud’ Langton came to prominence as an all-rounder of note at Lord’s in 1935 when, with match figures of six for 89 and an invaluable second-innings knock of 44, he helped South Africa complete their first Test victory in England. In the words of Wisden, the 23-year-old was ‘the big discovery of the tour’, claiming 15 wickets in five Tests and boasting a batting average of 30.25. A versatile right-arm bowler, he could switch between fast-medium, medium, or spin, depending on the conditions. In his faster style he made the most of his 6 feet 3 inches to telling effect, obtaining awkward lift while swinging the ball appreciably. His batting was at its best when he went after the ball, as he did at The Oval in the final Test of 1935, stroking his highest score – an undefeated 73 – in a ninth-wicket stand of 119 in 137 minutes with Eric Dalton, cutting, pulling and driving the England bowlers to his heart’s content.
His record in the 1938–39 series, when he captured 13 wickets at 51.69 and scored only 115 runs, did not suggest great things, but England always remained wary of his all-round ability. Invariably, he was the first bowler Melville threw the ball to and retained his captain’s faith throughout the series. He produced his best figures in the fourth Test at Johannesburg, returning five for 58 on a rare occasion when the conditions favoured the bowlers. But, after making an aggressive 64 in the first Test – he was an imposter coming in as low as No. 10 in the order – his batting tailed away. He played with a strapped back during England’s second innings in the timeless Test, yet still managed to flog his way through 56 overs, delivering 91 in all, placing him fifth on the all-time list for the most balls bowled in a Test (728). Only Verity and Gordon exceeded that number in the match.
He enlisted in the South African Air Force during the war and achieved the rank of Flight Lieutenant. He died when his Lockheed B-34 Ventura bomber spun and crashed on landing at Maiduguri in Nigeria. His death, at the age of 30, was deeply mourned in South Africa and Dudley Nourse recalled him as a ‘lion-hearted bowler’. He would almost certainly have returned to England in 1947 when the Springboks undertook their first post-war tour. His 15 Tests brought him 40 wickets at 45.67 and he scored 298 runs at 15.68.
Hedley Verity (1905–43)
Yorkshire
Record in the timeless Test: bowled 95.6 overs for four wickets, and scored three runs in England’s first innings.
News of Verity’s death broke on 1 September 1943, exactly four years to the day that he took seven Sussex wickets for nine runs at Hove in the last match of the 1939 season and had wondered aloud whether he would ever play there again. Two days later the War Office and the Red Cross confirmed that Captain Verity, a prisoner of war, had died of his wounds in an Italian military hospital in Caserta on 31 July. In the all-conquering Yorkshire side of the 1930s, blessed with an apparently limitless seam of extraordinary cricketers and characters (Hutton, Sutcliffe, Leyland, Bowes, Yardley, Wood), it would be no exaggeration to say, as many did, that Verity was the greatest and the best loved of all.
He joined the Green Howards, more frequently known as the Yorkshire Regiment, in 1939 and was soon posted to the 1st Battalion. He served in Northern Ireland, India and Egypt – where, in the words of another Green Howard, Yardley, he helped himself to his ‘usual bag of wickets’ at Cairo’s Gezira Sporting Club – before the regiment landed in Sicily for the allied assault on Catania in July 1943. B Company, led by Captain Verity, launched the Green Howards’ offensive against the German positions in the early hours of 20 July, supported by a barrage of artillery fire. Verity commanded around one hundred m
en and was experiencing his first taste of combat. Doubtless the responsibility weighed deeply on him but he was already a highly regarded officer, having applied the same analytical brain and tactical acumen of the cricketer to his soldiering. The onslaught on Catania, however, would test him in ways that he could never have foreseen.
Initially, B Company had to stay dug in for an hour while the artillery shells screamed overhead. When the big guns fell silent, they advanced for at least half a mile in moonlight across ditches and water courses towards the German positions, before entering a cornfield. There they ran into a torrential hail of tracer bullets and mortar fire. Soon it was coming at them from all angles; the trees and corn had started to burn, too, leaving them trapped and exposed. Surrounded on all sides, Verity was left with no option but to urge his men forward. He had remained steely and calm under the withering fire, staying at the head of his company, but realised he needed to act swiftly and decisively if they were to survive. The strong point appeared to be a farm building to their left. Verity gave the order for one platoon to attack the position and another to provide covering fire. Moments later he was hit in the chest by flying shrapnel but, still leading his men, shouted, ‘Keep going. Get them out of the farmhouse and me into it.’
Verity’s loyal batman, Private Tom Rennoldson, stayed with him after he fell, while the remainder of the company continued to advance. The two had formed an inseparable bond after serving together in Ireland, India and Egypt. Rennoldson, a Geordie, used to joke that he’d never watched a game of first-class cricket: ‘I used to say to the captain that I couldn’t understand how anyone who bowled ’em so slow as he did could get anyone out. He would laugh and say that some day he would show me.’ By 4.30 a.m. the battle was over and the remnants of B Company had retreated, leaving Verity and Rennoldson stranded behind enemy lines. Later that morning the Germans came and the pair were captured. Verity was put on to a broken mortar carrier, packed with sheaves of corn, and carried to a field hospital, where he underwent an emergency operation. As they lifted Verity on to the operating table, a grenade rolled out of his shirt pocket and there was a moment of panic before Rennoldson calmly unprimed it. After the operation Rennoldson was taken away and transported to a POW camp in Austria; he never saw his captain again.
