Spirit On The Water (16 page)

The more experienced players all failed until a dashing 50 from Don Wilson, Yorkshire’s left arm spinner, helped the county to a total of 260. When the visitors batted, Rodriguez scored an impressive 93 which secured him a place in the final Test. Nurse hit 77 and then Sobers stroked a brilliant 100 in under three hours.

Hunte declared with a lead of 98 and would have expected to get another chance for some more batting practice. He wasn’t needed. Yorkshire were all out for 96 with Griffith taking 5 for 12 off ten overs. Sweet revenge for the West Indies against the only county side to beat them all tour.

Northamptonshire had the better of the next match, with Colin Milburn scoring a magnificent 100 in the first innings and an exhilarating 88 in the second. ‘Ollie’ Milburn was a huge talent in every sense, his size making Samit Patel seem positively anorexic. He was talked about as a possible England player in 1963 but didn’t get picked until 1966, when the West Indians were visiting again. Apart from his weight, his ‘larger than life’ character and gregarious nature probably didn’t do him any favours in the eyes of the selectors. Considering he only played nine Test matches, he is remembered with great affection by a great many people. His contentious exclusion from the England party to visit South Africa in 1968 was completely overshadowed by the Basil D’Oliveira affair.

In 1963, after the first two days play, Northants were strong favourites to win the game against the West Indies but rain washed out the last day of the match and it ended in a draw. The final outing before the Fifth Test was another draw, this time against Nottinghamshire and then it was off to the Oval for the game that would decide the outcome of the series.

Only four players for England – Dexter, Close, Barrington and Trueman – played in all five Tests. This compares to ten players who played in all the Tests for the West Indies. Assuming a team is playing well, to have a settled side is a definite advantage. The players get used to one another and camaraderie is built up. The captain knows what he can get from each member of the team. Most importantly for the 1963 tourists, Worrell knew how to get the best out of Hall and Griffith.

Fast bowlers are notoriously difficult to handle at any level of cricket. As a general rule, the faster the bowler the more temperamental the player. Trueman certainly fitted this stereotype but his partner Brian Statham was the exception that proved the rule. Nicknamed ‘Gentleman George’ (in stark contrast to his fellow pacemen, ‘Fiery Fred’ and ‘Typhoon Tyson’); he had to be persuaded to bowl a bouncer. Frank Tyson told the story of a West Indian bowler who hit Jim Laker over the eye in a Test match during the 1950s. When the offender came out to bat, Statham was encouraged to reciprocate with a bouncer. He replied: “No, I think I’ll just bowl him out.”

Statham was recalled for the final Test at the Oval, joining Trueman and Shackleton in a three-man pace attack. Statham was a class act and still stands fifth in the all time England wicket taking list with 252 wickets. Despite the plethora of Test matches in the last twenty years, no bowler has yet overtaken Botham, Willis, Trueman, Underwood and Statham in the England list. Brian Statham was quicker than Shackleton and invariably just as accurate. The West Indies were going to have to fight hard for their runs.

Dexter won the toss and chose to bat so Hall and Griffith had the first chance to make their mark, literally in the case of Wes Hall. He hit John Edrich early on and then, in the sixth over, sent
down two successive bouncers at Brian Bolus. The umpire, Syd Buller warned Worrell about excessive short pitched bowling. Towards the end of the day, he warned Griffith directly, under the ‘Fair and Unfair play’ law. Unlike his umpiring colleagues in 1984, Buller at least had the courage to try to implement the spirit and the law of cricket but by then the damage to England’s batting line up had been done. They collapsed from 216 for 4 to 275 all out. Phil Sharpe top scored with 63 and Griffith took six wickets.

The West Indies began their innings the next day and having reached the safety of 184 for 3, they too collapsed to 246 all out. Conrad Hunte contributed a disciplined 80. Frank Worrell, given a standing ovation as he went out for his last ever Test innings, was bowled by Statham for just 9.

So the home side had the slight advantage at the halfway stage. In the second innings, their fragile top order succumbed again. Sharpe batted for over three hours making 83 but the next best score was Barrington with 28. Sobers bowled superbly taking 3 for 77 from thirty-three overs. Griffith also got 3 wickets, Hall cleaned up the tail and England were all out for 223.

The series had been hard fought. Only in the third Test had the West Indies been outplayed. Now they needed to score 253 in the last innings to clinch the series. The tourists had collapsed at Edgbaston chasing 309. Would they do so again? They negotiated the last few overs of the third day safely and finished on 5 for 0 at the close of play.

The gates were closed early on Monday, 26
^th
August. Over 25,000 spectators were in the ground, nearly two thirds were West Indian supporters. These days, tickets are purchased in advance, on line, with credit cards and cost around £100, so the scene at the Oval in 1963 would no longer be possible. The exuberance of their
supporters must have helped to inspire the West Indies team and certainly added to the sense of occasion.

The visitors had a stroke of good fortune in their quest for victory. Trueman had injured his ankle on Saturday and, despite treatment over the weekend, he was unable to bowl on the last day. This gave the West Indies a huge boost. With 34 wickets, Trueman was far and away England’s leading wicket taker in the series. Shackleton came next with 15.

Hunte and Rodriguez gave the tourists a solid start with an opening partnership of 78. Then Kanhai came in and scored a sparkling 77 at more than a run a minute. Finally, with a jubilant crowd getting ever closer to the boundary ropes, Butcher and Hunte saw their side home. The West Indies had won the match by 8 wickets and Hunte finished on 108 not out. Hundreds of spectators invaded the pitch to celebrate the victory.

The West Indies had deservedly taken the newly established Wisden Trophy, three games to one. Griffith almost matched Trueman by taking 32 wickets and he had great support from Sobers, Gibbs and Hall. There was, however, a significant difference in the batting with no England player scoring a century in the series whereas there were four centuries for the West Indies – two for Hunte, one for Sobers and one for Butcher. Kanhai didn’t get a century but had a wonderful series finishing as the leading run scorer with 497 runs.

It was a fitting end to Frank Worrell’s Test career. His aim had been to establish the West Indies as a serious international force. The epic series in Australia followed by the 5 – 0 home triumph against India and the series win in England had unequivocally done that.

By the time the tourists went home to the Caribbean in the middle of September, they had played thirty-eight games in all,
including thirty first-class matches. Apart from the defeat to England at Edgbaston and Yorkshire’s victory in May, the only other match the West Indies lost was a one-day Challenge match against Sussex, the Knockout Cup winners.

Lord Ted had got some compensation for losing the Test series, by leading Sussex to victory in the first Knockout Competition Final at Lords. Although Gillette were involved as low key sponsors it wasn’t until the following year that it became known as the Gillette Cup. It seems strange now, some counties were lukewarm about sponsorship and one day cricket. Nowadays you have only got to say ‘Charles Colville’ and a county will put on a one-day match at the drop of a hat.

One-day cricket continued to grow in popularity throughout the sixties but it was the 1971 Gillette Cup semi-final between Lancashire and Gloucestershire that really established the game in the public’s cricket consciousness. The 60-over-a-side match was watched by a full house at Old Trafford. Rain delayed the finish until nearly 9 o’clock in the evening when, in the gathering gloom, David Hughes became a Lancashire folk hero by hitting 24 runs from a John Mortimer over.

These days, umpires seem to take players off for bad light at the slightest opportunity. Back in 1971 the attitude was a little more relaxed. Jack Bond, the ultimately victorious Lancashire captain, had earlier asked Arthur Jepson, one of the umpires, about the bad light. “What’s that up there?” asked Jepson, pointing to the sky. “The moon,” replied Bond. “Well how far do you want to see?” said Arthur.

The West Indies were to become the kings of one day cricket in the 1970s, but in 1963 they were still getting to grips with the new form of the game. Put in by Dexter at Hove, they soon found themselves four wickets down for just nine runs. A brilliant
partnership of 104 in only an hour between Sobers and Butcher rescued the tourists but they were all out for 177, with eight of their allocated 55 overs unused. Sussex got home with three overs to spare and, showing how expectations have changed over the years,
Wisden
describes their reply as “managing to score at a brisk rate”.

The tour ended with a light-hearted charity match against Sir Learie Constantine’s XI at the Oval. His team included Len Hutton, Godfrey Evans and Alec Bedser. Over 600 runs were scored on the day and Frank Worrell, playing his last innings in England, top scored for the West Indies with 68.

The tour had been an undoubted success. Increased immigration from the West Indies during the 50s and early 60s meant that the tourists received plenty of support in the major conurbations. Such was the popularity of the tourists that their next visit to England was brought forward to 1966. Until that time there had typically been six years between tours. Four of
Wisden’s
1963 ‘Cricketers of the Year’ were West Indians – Sobers, Hunte, Kanhai and Griffith. There was recognition for Frank Worrell too when he was knighted in the 1964 New Year’s Honours.

Garry Sobers had an outstanding tour. He played in twenty-four of the first-class matches, scoring more runs and bowling more overs than any other player. He also took 29 catches for good measure. Sobers was Worrell’s natural successor and he was to lead the West Indies to victory when they returned in 1966.

The Holy Grail for Test batsmen is to end their career with a batting average of over 60. Only four players have achieved this: Don Bradman, Graeme Pollock, George Headley and Herbert Sutcliffe.

The rest of the top ten is made up of the following who didn’t quite reach 60. Eddie Paynter, Ken Barrington, Everton Weekes, Walter Hammond, Garry Sobers and Jack Hobbs. No modern players feature in the top ten of Test averages. Garry Sobers is the most recent and he played his last Test in 1973.

The best current batsmen – Ponting, Tendulkar, Sangakkara and Kallis – are all in the mid 50s and unlikely to make the 60 benchmark. Relatively recent players who you might think would have qualified – Lara, Richards, Gavaskar and Miandad – all have Test averages in the early 50s.

It goes without saying that averages are not everything. Ian Botham averaged just over thirty-three in Test matches but his batting stopped the traffic and won games for England. Jonathan Trott will probably finish his Test career with a higher batting average than Ian Bell but who would you rather watch bat?

Four players who are in the top ten were involved in England’s tour to Australia in 1928/29. This tour doesn’t seem to get mentioned much, which is a shame because England stuffed the Australians 4 – 1. Maybe it’s because the ‘Bodyline’ tour that
followed it in 1932/33 is referred to interminably. England stuffed the Australians 4 – 1 in that one too!

The four players involved in the games on the 1928/29 tour were Jack Hobbs, who was still opening for England along with Herbert Sutcliffe, the consummate professional from Yorkshire. A young Don Bradman was playing for Australia but he was dropped after the first Test. Walter Hammond, making his first tour of Australia, made up the quartet of top ten players.

Wally Hammond was a complex, enigmatic man. He does not always get the recognition that his talents and achievements deserve. For a while in the 1930s, only Bradman challenged him for the title of ‘greatest batsman on the planet.’ Some claimed he was better than Bradman. Certainly Len Hutton, who did not give praise lightly, said: “I preferred to see an hour of Walter Hammond to eight or ten hours of Don Bradman.”

Hammond had poise and style in abundance. Whereas Bradman is often referred to, perhaps a touch unfairly, as a ‘run machine’, Hammond’s power, class and elegance at the crease are invariably the features that writers highlight. Neville Cardus was a fan from the first moment he saw him. He witnessed his 250 against Lancashire in 1925 and wrote: “To be present at the rise of a star in the sky and to know it is going to be glorious – here is a moment thrilling indeed to men who live their lives imaginatively.” Classic Cardus hyperbole but you get the point.

Hammond dominated English cricket during the ten years leading up to the Second World War. He was top of the national batting averages for every year from 1933 until the outbreak of war, and then again in 1946. He played in eighty-five Tests, captaining England before the war and immediately after it. He was reluctant to turn his arm over but when he did bowl he could be devastating. He generally bowled medium quick but could be
genuinely fast if he put his mind to it. In his early days, he was an outstanding cover point fielder. Later he moved to slip where he was considered to be the best in the game. Had he bowled more, he would have undoubtedly rivalled Sobers as the best all-rounder ever seen in the game.

County and Test colleagues often described him as moody, introverted and distant, and those were some of the nice things they said about him. He was reluctant to give praise and rarely encouraged the younger players. Despite his great talent he often seemed unsure of himself. At the root of his insecurity was an uncertainty of his social status; never really at ease with his fellow professionals nor completely comfortable with the amateurs he later joined.

He was certainly a very private man and he probably had quite a lot to be private about. Eddie Paynter was asked for his enduring memory of the Test colleague that he had played and toured with. Maybe his exquisite cover drive or an outstanding slip catch or beating the Australians? The Lancastrian replied, “Wally, well, yes – he liked a shag!” Hammond, although shy, was a ladies man. He was very attractive to women and he in turn was rather partial to them.

His womanising, both before and during his first marriage, does not explain why so many of his fellow players did not get on with him. There would be a lot of unpopular players if that was the case. To most of his teammates he was a remote, seemingly lonely figure. They admired his cricketing prowess without question but few got close to him.

Hammond was an only child. He was born in Dover but spent most of his childhood in Hong Kong and Malta where his father was stationed in the army. Commissioned during the First World War, his father was killed in action in 1918. By this time, Walter
was boarding at Cirencester Grammar School in Gloucestershire. Success playing local cricket for Cirencester got him a county trial and, securing his mother’s approval, he signed as a professional for Gloucestershire straight from school in August 1920.

Grace, Hobbs and Hammond were the three truly great English batsmen. It is coincidental that two of them – Grace and Hammond – played for Gloucestershire but this nearly didn’t happen. After a few modest appearances at the end of the 1920 season and even less success in 1921, Hammond began to find his feet early in the 1922 season, only to fall foul of Lord Harris, Hon. Treasurer and omnipresent influence at the MCC.

Lord Harris, who once sacked an umpire for mistakenly giving a young Gubby Allen out LBW in a Gentlemen versus Players match at Lords, had been a dominant presence at the MCC for fifty years. He found out that although Hammond had been educated and brought up in Gloucestershire, he did not actually have a home there as his mother was living in Hampshire. Lord Harris, who incidentally was affiliated to Kent, decreed that Hammond did not qualify for Gloucestershire under the residency rules.
20
Harris saw himself as a bastion against anarchy and Bolshevism infiltrating cricket. Hammond could of course play for Kent if he wished, since he had been born in Dover.

Gloucestershire hung on to Hammond but he had to miss the rest of the 1922 season in order to qualify for them. Lord Harris was an autocratic ass, full of his own self-importance. Like so many people in power, a stickler for the rules when it suited him.

The writer Benny Green describes him thus: “a bigot who always protested his own rectitude with absolute sincerity.” In 1896 Harris, then President of the MCC, had barred Ranjitsinhji from playing for England against Australia at Lords on the grounds that he had been born in India. Lord Harris himself had been born in Trinidad but that had not stopped him turning out for England four times, captaining on each occasion. He had been school captain of the Eton XI so he was well qualified.

Benny Green’s memorable description of Lord Harris continues: “He appears to have been a sort of moral imbecile who took up a succession of bogus ethical positions without ever perceiving the faintest trace of self-delusion.”

Following the Hammond incident, Harris had a famous exchange in the Long Room at Lords with Lord Dearhurst, the president of Worcestershire. There was no love lost between the two of them, as illustrated by Lord Dearhurst’s greeting. “Good morning my Lord. How many more young cricketers’ careers have you buggered up this year?”

Walter Hammond showed great promise in his first three seasons for Gloucestershire but without the consistency that came as he matured. Jack Hobbs put him at the top of his list of future England players. He wrote in 1925 that Hammond was “potentially a very great all-rounder.” This was before his 250 against Lancashire when Hammond took apart the Australian Ted McDonald, at the time the fastest bowler playing in England.

His obvious potential, coupled with the occasional devastating performance like the one at Old Trafford, got him selected for the MCC tour of the West Indies. The tour started well for Hammond when he scored 238 not out in a representative game against the West Indies who were not yet a full Test side. It ended disastrously.

Hammond became ill in British Guiana. He scored a century there and even bowled twenty-five overs in the next game at Jamaica but the infection he had picked up grew worse. He was in tremendous pain and discomfort on the journey home. The nature of the illness was never fully explained. A mosquito bite in the groin area was identified as a possible cause. He had to be carried off the ship on its return to England and taken straight to hospital.

It is no exaggeration to say that he very nearly died. In the days before antibiotics, blood infections were very hard to treat. At one point, the surgeons contemplated amputation of his leg but thankfully his mother refused to allow it. Only his physical strength and robust constitution saw him through. He was in a nursing home for months. The doctors did not really know how to deal with the illness. Often the treatment made things worse. He literally did not have the strength to get up and take another shot.

Hammond survived but missed the whole of the 1926 cricket season. Pelham ‘Plum’ Warner, chairman of the England selectors and the man who took over from Lord Harris as the main influence in the MCC, came to visit him. He had been an admirer of Hammond from the early days and his reassurance and support meant a lot to the twenty-three old. Hammond later wrote that Warner’s visit “gave me the strength to turn the dark corner from hopelessness back to life.”

Hammond and Warner were to become good friends despite their age difference and gap in social class. Warner was influential in persuading Hammond later to become an amateur and subsequently captain of England.

Gloucestershire arranged for him to spend the winter of 1926/27 in South Africa to continue his convalescence. He played
some club cricket, swam every day, enjoyed the sunshine and gradually got his strength back. It paid off handsomely. Hammond had an outstanding season in 1927 scoring nearly 3,000 runs at an average of 69.

Once again he delivered the goods for Gloucestershire at Old Trafford. He was out for 99 in the first innings “being careless” as he wrote later. Then in the second innings he hooked and drove McDonald to distraction. Cardus described his knock of 187 in the
Manchester Guardian
:

Already a fan, Cardus was now a lifelong convert. Hammond had still not played a Test match nor did he get the chance that season. New Zealand were visiting but they had not yet attained Test status. During the 1927 season, Hammond scored 1,000 runs before the end of May, only the third player to achieve this feat at the time. W.G. Grace in 1895 and Tom Hayward in 1900 being the others.

Wally Hammond made his Test début in South Africa the following winter. He had only modest success in the three Test series. Back in England for the 1928 season, Hammond once again had a very productive summer. At the Cheltenham Festival, he scored a century in each innings against Surrey and took ten catches in the match, still a first-class record for a fielder other than a wicket-keeper. His total of 78 catches that season is also still a world record and, with the onset of one day cricket, likely to remain so for evermore.

Hammond followed the Surrey match with 9 for 23 against Worcestershire, scored 80 when Gloucestershire batted and then got another 6 wickets in the second innings to help his side to victory without needing to bat again. He finished the season with 2,825 runs at an average of nearly 66 and 84 wickets at an average of 23. As well as helping his county to fifth place in the championship, he also played in three Test matches against the West Indies that summer. There were no centuries for Hammond but he had done enough to be on the boat when it left for Australia in September.

Only seven players have scored more than 50,000 runs in
first-class
cricket and five of them were in England’s team for the First Test which started at Brisbane on 30
^th
November, 1928. Hobbs and Sutcliffe opened. Phil Mead of Hampshire came in at number 3, followed by Hammond. Patsy Hendren of Middlesex, batting at six, was the fifth member of that exclusive club.

So there were plenty of contenders to be the batting star of the English team. Jack Hobbs, the Master, was making his last tour of Australia. Herbert Sutcliffe, brought up in Pudsey, the same Yorkshire town as Len Hutton, was vastly experienced. As he happily admitted himself, he was not as stylish a player as Hobbs but he fought off strong opposition to become his England opening partner for many years. His fellow Yorkshire opener Percy Holmes was one of the unlucky ones, only playing for his country seven times. Holmes had an outstanding county career which included the famous opening partnership with Sutcliffe of 555 against Essex.

Phil Mead started playing for Hampshire in 1905. Despite being one of the most consistent batsmen in the country for twenty years, he had few opportunities to play for England because of the remarkable strength of batting during that time. As well as the
competition from Hobbs, Sutcliffe and Hendren, Mead’s career more or less paralleled that of Frank Woolley. The stylish Kent all-rounder – another member of the 50,000 runs club, along with W.G. Grace – played sixty-four Tests compared with Mead’s seventeen.

When C.P. (Phil) Mead arrived in Australia in 1928 at the age of forty-one, he was greeted by a local official who claimed to have watched Mead’s ‘father’ play for England in 1911. The amused

Mead had to inform him that in fact it was he himself who had, seventeen years earlier, made his first trip to Australia. Mead was not the most graceful player but quick on his feet and very difficult to get out. The writer, R.C. Robertson-Glasgow, who often played against him, wrote that Mead “pervaded a cricket pitch .... occupied it and encamped on it! His bat always appeared wider than others.”