Edging Towards Darkness: The story of the last timeless Test

by John Lazenby

  He won everlasting fame when, in the fourth Test against Australia at Brisbane in 1933, he rose from his hospital bed (he was suffering from tonsillitis) to rescue England with a battling 83. He valiantly refused a runner and, during a brief second-innings knock, finished the match with a six. He was also the victim of a cowardly assault during the series when a group of men deliberately knocked him down from behind while walking to the Adelaide Oval, leaving him sprawled on the pavement.

  After the war he resisted several requests from Lancashire to return but, in 1947 during two festival matches at Harrogate, compiled scores of 154, 73 and 127 (the latter in only 85 minutes) to suggest that his run-making abilities were far from undimmed. In all first-class cricket he scored 20,075 runs at 42.26 with 45 centuries, and played his last Test match against West Indies at Old Trafford in July 1939. His 653 runs at 81.62 on the 1938–39 tour remained a record for an Englishman in South Africa until eclipsed by Andrew Strauss (656) in 2005. Paynter, who did not serve during the war, died in Keighley, Yorkshire, on 5 February 1979, aged 77. To Wisden, he was simply ‘a wonderful cricketer’.

  Paul Anthony Gibb (1913–77)

  Cambridge University, Scotland, Yorkshire and Essex

  Record in the timeless Test: scored 124 runs, including 120 in second innings. Relieved Ames of the gloves in final session during sixth day.

  After enlisting in the RAF during the war, when he piloted Coastal Command Sunderland flying-boats, Gibb returned to the Yorkshire side in 1946 after an absence from the game of seven years. He was 32 at the time but appeared still to have plenty of cricket left in him. So much so that he was selected to keep wicket in the first two Tests of the summer against India, and made 60 at Lord’s batting at No. 6. He was included in Hammond’s side to tour Australia in 1946–47 but, after being preferred to the technically superior Godfrey Evans for the first Test, endured a horrible match behind the stumps. He was promptly dropped and never played for England again. He was not the most naturally gifted of wicketkeepers it has to be said, and it was the journalist William Pollock who suggested during the 1938–39 tour of South Africa that, ‘he is better at fielding well away from the wickets than he is behind them’.

  After the tour of Australia, Gibb disappeared from the game for four years before reappearing for Essex as a professional, becoming the first cricket blue to abdicate his amateur status. During that time his form, both behind the stumps and with the bat, was good enough to earn him a Test trial at the age of 40 in 1953. He retired three years later and from 1957 to 1966 was a first-class umpire, living a somewhat nomadic and unconventional existence while he carried out his duties, driving from ground to ground in an old van with a caravan in tow.

  The bespectacled Gibb bore more than a passing resemblance to Geoff Boycott during his younger days, though in deference to Boycott the similarity ends there. In eight Tests Gibb scored 581 runs at 44.69 with two centuries, both against South Africa, and 12,520 in first-class cricket; he caught 425 batsmen and stumped 123. He was working as a bus driver in Guildford when he died suddenly on 7 December 1977, aged 64. He never talked about his past and many of his colleagues were surprised to learn that he had played cricket for England. He was erroneously excluded from Wisden’s obituary section the following year.

  Bryan Herbert Valentine (1908–83)

  Cambridge University and Kent

  Record in the timeless Test: scored 30 runs in two innings, and was at the crease with Ames when the game was abandoned.

  Valentine played no more Test cricket after the 1938–39 tour of South Africa. He was 37 when he resumed playing for Kent in 1946 and no longer under consideration as an England player. Like so many batsmen of that era, his Test opportunities were limited by the superfluity of talent available to the selectors. One of a long line of gifted and popular amateur strokemakers, in which Kent specialised, he captained his county for three years before retiring at the end of the 1948 season. He ended his first-class career on 18,306 runs at 30.15 with 35 hundreds. His Test record was far more impressive: 454 runs at almost 65 with two centuries. He made his highest Test score against India in 1933, hitting 136 on his debut in Bombay, and was selected for all five Tests in South Africa, completing 275 runs at 68.75, including a brazen 112 in the second Test at Newlands. A Lieutenant in the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, he served in North Africa with distinction and won the Military Cross. He died in Otford, Kent, aged 75.

  Douglas Vivian Parson Wright (1914–98)

  Kent

  Record in the timeless Test: bowled 69 overs for five wickets, including second-innings figures of three for 146. Scored 26 runs in England’s first innings.

  Wright was in his early thirties when the war finished and continued to propel his leg-breaks on and off for another five years in Test cricket. He made his last appearance for England in 1951 against New Zealand at Wellington’s Basin Reserve, capturing five for 48 in a six-wicket victory. He finished with 108 Test wickets at 39.11, and 2,056 in all. He claimed his best Test figures of seven for 105 against Australia in the fifth Test at Sydney on the 1946–47 tour, bowling Bradman for 12 in the first innings and having him dropped at slip by Edrich on two in the second, when for just a brief and tantalising moment – it was no more – it looked as though he might win the game for England. He was a highly dangerous bowler on his day but, as Wisden is at pains to point out, there could also be days of ‘abject frustration’ and ultimately he promised more than he delivered. When he did it get it right, he was unplayable, as his record of seven first-class hat-tricks handsomely testifies. It was to his credit, also, that it was said of him he never bowled a ball defensively; ‘every ball was bowled to take a wicket’. Bradman retained a healthy regard for his bowling, and his was one of the first names opposing batsmen always looked for whenever an England side was announced. He was appointed Kent’s first professional captain in 1954 and retired three years later to take up coaching. He died in Canterbury, aged 84.

  Reginald Thomas David Perks (1911–77)

  Worcestershire

  Record in the timeless Test: bowled 73 overs for six wickets, including first-innings figures of five for 100 on his debut. Scored two runs.

  As a cricketer Perks had more reason than most to lament his six lost years. He was 28 at the outbreak of war and ‘almost true fast in pace’, in the words of John Arlott, having just embarked on his Test career. When the sport recommenced he was nearly 35 and, for a bowler of his type, past his prime. During the 1939 season he took 159 first-class wickets, adding materially to his reputation, and in only a couple of Tests, against South Africa and West Indies, claimed two impressive five-wicket hauls. In the last of those two matches, ‘on a deadly easy wicket’ at The Oval, Arlott noted that ‘he never bowled better and generated quite remarkable pace’. Tall and powerfully built, Perks played for another nine years after the war, taking a hundred wickets a season on 16 occasions, including nine consecutively from 1946 to 1955. In 595 first-class games he claimed 2,233 wickets at 24.07, and 11 in two Tests at 32.27. He died unexpectedly, aged 66, in Worcester.

  The Men Who Sat Out the Timeless Test

  Norman Yardley, England’s perennial 12th man in South Africa, succeeded Hammond as captain of his country, leading the side against South Africa in 1947 and Australia the following year. He captained England in 14 of his 20 Tests, scoring 812 runs with a highest score of 99 against the Springboks at Nottingham; in all, he hit 18,173 runs at 31.17 and took 279 wickets. He was a brave batsman and a handy medium-pacer who once dismissed Bradman in three successive innings. He joined the Green Howards in the war, serving in the Middle East and Italy. He died of a stroke, aged 74, in 1989. His great friend Hugh Bartlett was selected to tour India with MCC in 1939–40 and would almost certainly have won a Test cap in that series but for the war. He captained Sussex from 1947 to 1949 and scored 10,098 first-class runs in 216 matches. He collapsed and died while watching a Sunday League match at Hove in 1988, aged 73. Bartlett served
in the Glider Pilot Regiment, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross at Arnhem.

  The off-spinner Tom Goddard appeared twice for England against West Indies in 1939, finishing with 22 wickets at 26.72 from eight Tests. He continued to play for Gloucestershire after the war and retired in 1952 at the age of 51. He took 2,979 wickets at 19.84, claiming one hundred or more in a season on 16 occasions, during a period when off-break bowling was often seen as an unfashionable adjunct to leg-spin. He died in 1966, aged 65. The leg-spinner Len Wilkinson never fulfilled the rich promise he showed in 1938 when, at the age of 21, he captured 151wickets in his ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ first season for Lancashire. Only Yorkshire’s Wilfred Rhodes, with 154 wickets in 1898 when he was 20, took more at a younger age. There were 63 wickets in 1939 for Wilkinson but, according to Wisden, he was virtually unrecognisable as the same bowler. He suffered a serious knee injury in the opening game of the 1946 season at Fenner’s and managed only two more appearances for his county, retiring to the leagues and a newsagent’s. He played three Tests, all against South Africa, taking seven wickets at 38.71, and died in 2002, aged 851.

  SOUTH AFRICA

  Alan Melville (1910–83)

  Natal, Oxford University, Sussex and Transvaal

  Record in the timeless Test: scored 181 runs, hitting 78 and 103.

  Melville’s Test career resumed in 1947 when he led a raw and experimental party to England on what was South Africa’s first post-war tour. His presence in the side, however, had been a cause for some concern. He had spent a year in a steel jacket, recovering from a fall while training with the South African forces in the war. Injury-plagued at the best of times, there had been fears he might never play again. They were swiftly dispelled. Melville revelled in the role of elder statesman on tour – he was 37 by then – and scored centuries in the first two Tests: 189 and an unbeaten 104 at Nottingham, and 117 at Lord’s. As he had also scored 103 during the timeless Test in his last innings for South Africa before the war, he became the first man to record four consecutive hundreds against England, albeit ones that extended over two series and were eight years apart. He hit 569 runs in the five Tests at 63.22 and 1,547 in all games, including six centuries.

  It was his pinnacle as a Test batsman, though he had not been without his health problems on tour, and South Africa lost three Tests. Melville was never robust physically and the toll of captaincy exhausted him to the extent that he was reported to have lost nearly two stone by the time he returned home. It came as no surprise when he announced his retirement shortly afterwards. Yet two years later he was persuaded to play in the third Test against George Mann’s England side at Newlands. It was a brief comeback: he scored 15 and 24, and the former South African batsman Jackie McGlew admitted that, ‘Melville’s unexpected return to the fold, in his only Test in which he was not captain, was disappointing by his own high standards.’ Nonetheless, he added, ‘The seasons in which he played fell in a magic era – rich and glamorous and, in their own way, a golden portion of South African cricket history.’

  The side Melville led to England in 1947 lost nothing in the popularity stakes with their 1935 predecessors, and rarely failed to create a favourable impression on or off the field. In addition, they brought over a supply of canned food ‘as a gesture of sympathy’ when rationing was at its most swingeing, and contributed half their share of the gate against Surrey and Lancashire to help with the rebuilding of their bomb-damaged grounds. Melville scored 894 runs at 52.58 in 11 Tests – all against England – and 10,958 in 190 first-class matches. He died in 1983, aged 72.

  Arthur Dudley Nourse (1910–81)

  Natal

  Record in the timeless Test: scored 128 runs, including 103 in first innings.

  Nourse succeeded Melville as captain of South Africa in 1948. His record was not a glorious one: in two series against England and one against Australia, he lost nine and won one. Yet his batting never failed him; his special glory, Wisden wrote, was the square-cut. There were 536 runs in ten innings against the 1948–49 England tourists in his first series as captain, and a further 405 against Lindsay Hassett’s Australians during which he topped the South African batting averages for the fifth successive season. He was 40 when he bowed out as captain against England in 1951 and achieved his solitary victory under the most unlikely of circumstances.

  He had suffered a broken thumb while fielding in the game at Bristol three weeks before the first Test, an injury that threatened to put him out of the series. He was told by a surgeon that if his thumb was plastered he would miss at least two months of the tour. The only other option was to pin the bone, which would at least enable him to play in the first Test at Nottingham, but would prove agonisingly painful. Naturally, Nourse chose the second option and proceeded to play a match-winning innings of ‘unprecedented courage’. He scored 208, occupying the crease for more than nine hours, mostly in severe pain, especially when he tried to impart any power into his shots – a pronounced drawback for such a muscular striker of the ball. According to Wisden, he refused to have an injection to relieve the pain because he feared it would numb his hand and affect his grip. He was unable to bat in South Africa’s second innings, but the tourists bowled out England for 114 and won an amazing Test by 71 runs.

  Nourse’s Test record is up there with the very best: 2,960 runs at 53.81, with nine centuries, from 34 matches; there were 12,472 runs in all and 41 hundreds. Only Graeme Pollock and Jacques Kallis among South African Test batsmen have a superior average. He enlisted in the army during the war and served in the Western Desert. He died in Durban at the age of 70.

  Bruce Mitchell (1909–95)

  Transvaal

  Record in the timeless Test: scored 100 runs, including 89 in second innings. Bowled 44 overs for one wicket.

  Mitchell was a tireless cornerstone of South African batting for nearly all of his 42 Tests, at a time when his country’s resources were often alarmingly thin. The role carried such great responsibility that it contributed in no small part to his reputation – a somewhat unfair one – of being a dour, strokeless batsman. In fact, he possessed all the strokes; he just didn’t always get the chance to put them on display. On one occasion in England he was barracked by an irate spectator, who accused him of doing a passable impression of a monument. He was often immovable. His third trip to England in 1947 was a particularly fruitful one and he scored 597 runs at 61.03 in five Tests. At The Oval he batted for more than 13 hours to score 120 and 189, becoming the second South African after Melville to hit a century in each innings of a Test. He collected his seventh century against England in the 1948–49 series, and missed out on an eighth when he was dismissed for 99 in the fifth Test.

  No one would have predicted, however, that he had just played his final game for South Africa. It was the arrival of Miller and Lindwall a year later that triggered his sensational omission from the side, after being ruthlessly targeted by the pair while playing for Transvaal. It brought this sequence of 42 consecutive Tests to an abrupt end and, in Wisden’s view, amounted to ‘the shabbiest treatment handed out to a Springbok by selectors’. Mitchell played no more first-class cricket after that, finishing with 3,471 Test runs at an average of 48.88, with 27 wickets, a record that puts him among the forefront of South African cricketers. He served with the Transvaal Scottish Regiment in the war and fought at El Alamein. He died in Johannesburg, aged 86. The last word belongs to Wisden: ‘Few quieter or more modest men have played Test cricket, and Mitchell’s perfect sportsmanship on and off the field at all times was living proof that success can be achieved without any compromise of behaviour.’

  Eric Alfred Burchell Rowan (1909–93)

  Eastern Province and Transvaal

  Record in the timeless Test: scored 33 runs, and took one catch.

  Rowan was the complete antithesis of Mitchell: tempestuous, brash and with a complete disregard for authority. He was, naturally enough, a highly combative cricketer who, when he was not falling in and out of scrap
es with the selectors – or his fellow players – continued to flourish in Test cricket until he was 42. It was said that personality clashes kept him out of the tour to England in 1947, but he was recalled in 1948–49 and, after failing in the first Test, struck an undefeated 156 at Johannesburg in the second. Unfortunately the selectors, acting in haste, had already named the side for the third Test against England before Rowan completed his second-innings century, replacing him with Melville, who was making his comeback. As Rowan returned to the pavilion at the conclusion of his innings, he is reputed to have made a V-sign in the general direction of the selectors. He explained later that it was actually a V for Victory sign (the match was drawn); when informed that it was the wrong way round, he replied, ‘That depends on what part of the ground you’re sitting.’ The matter was resolved and Rowan returned to the side for the fourth and fifth Tests.

  He was vice-captain to Nourse in England in 1951 when he scored 236 in the fourth Test at Leeds to become the oldest South African to record a double-century in Test cricket (he was 42). He played his final Test in that series at The Oval, scoring 55 and 45. He enlisted in the army in 1939 and rose to the rank of Lieutenant. He was the elder brother of the off-spinner Athol Rowan, who represented South Africa in 15 Tests. Eric Rowan scored 1,965 runs at 43.66 in 26 Tests, and probably should have toured Australia in 1952–53. His appetite for runs remained undiminished, though perhaps the selectors felt that enough was enough. He died in Johannesburg, aged 83, a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad.

  Kenneth George Viljoen (1910–74)