Cricket On The Beach (Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia) Page 3

  The Duke of Norfolk was a man who had spent his life in the service of his country and in pursuance of his competing loves for the turf and the willow wand. The eldest son of Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th Duke of Norfolk, who had died in 1917, his mother was Gwendolen Mary Herries, 12th Lady Herries of Terregles, whose peerage he had inherited upon her death in 1947.

  Educated at the Oratory School he had taken up a commission in the Horse Guards, and upon resigning that joined the 4th Territorial Battalion of the Sussex Regiment. Promoted major in 1939 he had seen active service in World War II and been wounded in action.

  Although the Duke had taken his own ‘Duke of Norfolk’s XI’ touring party to the West Indies in the winter of 1956-57 (to celebrate his year as President of MCC in 1957), the idea of his managing the Australian party had surfaced rather late in the day. MCC had originally intended to place the enterprise in the safe hands of ‘Billy’ Griffith[17], the former Cambridge University, Surrey and England wicket-keeper. However, as MCC was wont – it being a collection of committees rather than a homogenous ‘body’, it periodically had a great deal of trouble making up its mind, and then speaking it coherently – it had appointed Griffith its Secretary, without first considering whether it was practicable or desirable to entrust its Australian touring party to the man who was at one and the same time; cricket’s most powerful global administrator, and the man that MCC was depending on to get things done at Lord’s half-a-world away from Australasia.

  Nobody had seriously considered offering the ‘Australia touring chalice’ to the ‘Grand Old Duke’ until, almost in passing he had chirped up, over post-committee meeting drinks at Lord’s – words to the effect of – ‘since I have to go to Australia this winter anyway I’d be delighted to help out’.[18]

  The Duke apparently added: ‘if you want somebody to manage [Ted] Dexter I’m your man!’

  This had sealed the deal.

  To the newspaper men sailing on the Canberra the Duke was to be an endless source of fond ‘good copy’. Several of the harder cases in the press pack had hardly credited their ears when the appointment was announced, and it was not until the portly Earl Marshal boarded the liner that they had finally got used to the idea that the most senior aristocrat in the country had nothing better to do with his time than to manage a ‘cricket tour’.

  That to the Duke the tour was not just about ‘cricket’ was apparent from the outset. Not least because he brought three of his four daughters on the tour; not to mention the small matter of the arrangements for the Queen’s visit to Australia – which was going to necessitate Billy Griffith flying out to ‘cover’ his absence in November almost before the tour had properly got under way. However, in one respect at least, his was a wise appointment, if any man in England could manage ‘Lord Ted’, it was probably Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan-Howard, 16th Duke of Norfolk.

  It soon became clear that the Grand Old Duke was in part a figurehead; for the majority of the practical organisation and management of the tour was, as was customary, in the hands of a tried and trusted ‘old pro’. In this case that man was forty-four year old Alec Victor Bedser[19], still seven years after his last Test Match in 1955 the all-time leading wicket-taker[20] in international cricket (although both Statham and Trueman were now inexorably closing in on his tally).

  The hackneyed expression ‘salt of the earth’ might have been invented to describe Alec Bedser. The younger – by ten minutes – of identical twins who but for the Second World War would have led the Surrey bowling attack for two decades, he was a veritable rock of English cricket.

  Bedser was a stern, taciturn man whom like many twins was – many suspected – rather more comfortable in his skin when his sibling was close at hand. In England he and Eric – the brothers were so alike they were sometimes mistaken one for the other, a thing often prompted because they dressed alike and shared many mannerisms – had served in the RAF together, lived together in a house their father, a bricklayer, had built in Horsell in Surrey, and were well, inseparable. They had attended Maybury Junior School, and then Monument Hill Central School in Woking, played football and cricket together at school, then for Surrey and many felt that Eric, if not the quite his younger brother’s equal with the ball in hand, then a very fine all-rounder, ought to have played at least once with Alec for England. When the brothers left school they had both become clerks at Lincoln’s Inn. If Eric had won the toss of a coin when the brothers were fourteen (as to who would be a seam bowler and who would be a spin bowler) it might have been him who became England’s premier fast-medium bowler of the post-1945 era.

  The periods of separation when Alec went abroad with England after the war must have been sorely trying for both brothers, who had never married and in their middle years still shared a bank account. Cricket was the only thing which had ever parted the twins. In 1939 both had joined the RAF, travelled to France with the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force and both very nearly not been evacuated from Dunkirk. Later they saw service together in North Africa, Italy and Austria, and both might have been promoted to Warrant Officer had it not been for Alec’s refusal of the rank because it would have resulted in being posted away from Eric.

  Alec Bedser’s unbreakable bond with his brother was perhaps, the thing that best characterised the man. He prized personal loyalty and respect above all else, and representing his country was never less than an honour. He was a man who had set himself impossibly high standards in his own career and he demanded exactly the same dedication from everybody else. Already, he was an English cricketing institution and the ideal sergeant major to the Grand Old Duke’s flamboyant regimental commander.

  Bedser had briefly joined the press corps for the last tour of Australia in the winter of 1958-59; but that had not been a comfortable experience. Now he was back inside ‘the family’ of English cricket and that was where he planned to stay. Acquitting himself well on this expedition would go a very long way towards cementing his position in the ranks of the slowly changing Lord’s hierarchy, so he did not plan to disappoint...anybody.

  What with one thing and another Alec Bedser had reasonable grounds for believing that behind the scenes he would be the man charting the cricketing course steered by the tourists in the coming months; and that might actually have been the way of things if Colin Cowdrey, not Dexter, had got the nod for the captaincy. Cowdrey, that most elegant of batsman, languid of stroke, speech and gesture, a gentleman in the finest tradition of the amateur game of yore; was actually a cautious, play safe captain, a man of consensus, a seeker of the middle ground, not a man who cared to put another fellow’s nose out of joint...

  Twenty-seven year old Edward Ralph ‘Ted’ Dexter was a man and a cricketer hewn out of a radically different mettle. At this remove nobody can doubt that he was the last great amateur gentleman cricketer, and that in temperament and presence he was Archie MacLaren to Cowdrey’s Percy Chapman; few England captains since Douglas Jardine (of ‘Bodyline’ infamy) had raised such hackles as ‘Lord Ted’.

  Born in Milan, educated at Norfolk House, Beaconsfield and Radley College, where he had first earned the sobriquet ‘Lord Ted’ in his year as captain in 1953 for his apparent aloofness and over-weaning self-assurance, Dexter had done his National service as a junior subaltern in the 11th Hussars at the height of the Malayan crisis. Thereafter he had gone on to Jesus College, Cambridge where he had played golf, rugby and won his blue for cricket, captaining the University in the Varsity Match at Lord’s in 1958. Ironically, it was as a bowler taking match figures of 8 for 55 for the Gentlemen against the Players that he first came to real public notice. At Radley he had kept wicket, he had always batted with Olympian majesty; he was that rare thing, a genuine all round sportsman. A lot of people thought he ought to have been in the original MCC Australian touring party back in 1958-59, not as a belated injury replacement urgently summoned to the Antipodes where, out of season, without time to familiarise himself with conditions ‘down under’ he had failed i
n the big matches. At the time that call had come he was with his wife in Paris[21] and it was not until the 1958-59 tour moved on to New Zealand that he registered his first Test Match century, 141 including 24 boundaries at the Lancaster Park ground, Christchurch.

  The next winter he had averaged 65.75 in the tests against Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith, the two fearsome West Indian fast bowlers who were starting to terrorise world cricket. His stand and deliver, never a backward step driving, smashing, slashing and often flaying the quick men to all parts had made him one of Wisden’s – then as now every cricket-lover’s Bible – five Cricketers of the Year in 1961.

  In the First Test Match of the 1961 home Ashes series Dexter’s cavalier 180 – the highest score by an England batsman against the old enemy since the end of hostilities in 1945 - in a desperate rearguard action at Edgbaston had established him as the nation’s premier wielder of the willow wand. He was one of those sportsmen who, in some indefinable way, catch the mood and the spirit of a nation. Britain at the turn of the decade had been a country beginning to embrace, in fact to demand, change. The old values were in question, increasingly threatened and the public was looking for new heroes; cometh the moment cometh the man.

  That man was Ted Dexter.

  No man hit the ball so hard or so far; the Dexter’s were like sporting royalty, like movie stars who were somehow ‘right’ for the coming age of television. Whereas, politicians in grey, drab suits, and the aristocracy in its castles and stately homes were distant, untouchable, ‘Lord Ted’ and his fabulous model wife were ‘of the country’, in tune with where it wanted to go and each time the ball fizzed off Dexter’s scything bat into or high above the boundary rope it was easy to believe that it was one more little step towards a better future.

  A typical buccaneering innings of 76 at Old Trafford in the Fourth Test had almost wrested the Ashes back in 1961 but when he was out the other batsmen had defensively propped and copped to defeat as if they were playing on an entirely different wicket against supermen, not mere human beings.

  Dexter in full flow was unstoppable.

  He would hit the ball with such force that often it made no difference if there was a fielder standing directly in its path as it whistled to the fence. In mid-innings he would look up from the batting crease and discover there was nobody within thirty or forty yards of him except the umpire at the bowler’s end and a bowler wearing a hangdog resigned look.

  In Pakistan and India the previous winter, where Dexter had taken the reins because neither Peter May nor Colin Cowdrey had deigned to tour, he had led a much weakened side – without Trueman or Statham – with mixed results; personally scoring fluently all the while. Back in England in 1962 after captaining the side to victory in the first two return Tests against the Pakistanis, he had found himself peremptorily demoted to the ranks, with the captaincy passing to Cowdrey in an apparent signal of the way the selectors were – mid-season - looking towards the forthcoming Australasian tour.

  MCC having got into the habit of proselytising about ‘brighter’ and more ‘positive’ cricket had caught a cold when Ted Dexter had threatened to give it to them. MCC’s dithering schizophrenia spoke to the wider crisis in English cricket: amateur or professional?

  Do we want to win or lose?

  This in an environment when most of the first-class counties were facing financial troubles as crowds continued to dwindle; and yet county committees were loath to embrace a more commercial outlook.

  Questions, questions; so much talk and very little action; such had been the malaise which was starting to tighten its strangle-hold around the throat of English cricket at the outset of the 1960s. That a successful, entertaining England team which filled grounds wherever it played was the bedrock of any long-term solution ought to have been self-evident to all concerned; instead, even after the MCC had ‘backed’ their leading man it fretted about Ted Dexter in the fashion of men who had seized a Tiger by the tail without having first considered the consequences of letting go.

  Not that Dexter was necessarily his own best friend in all of this. Captain of Sussex in 1961 and 1962 it was obvious that beneath the public persona of confident, almost arrogant self-assurance there was a much more complicated inner man. He could be moody, he agonised over this or that theory long after his players had shrugged their shoulders and mentally turned away, and increasingly he needed adversity or the stimulus of a big match atmosphere to bring the best out of him.

  Famously, he got ‘a bit bored’ when a match was dawdling along or no result was in prospect. Batting, bowling, captaincy was fun but long days in the field chasing leather were well, dull.

  It was no surprise that the advent of occasional competitive one-day matches had caught Dexter’s imagination; suddenly the three to five-day cut and thrust, three-dimensional chess of first-class and Test Match cricket was to be condensed into a single day-long duel in which dynamism, bowling guile and pure hitting power might be expressed in a short-lived, explosive duel.

  There was something of the gambler’s soul in Dexter, he was often a loner uneasily navigating the troubled waters of a team sport and everybody who knew him could not help but wonder, how he would fare in the coming months on a tour which had defined so many great, and unfulfilled careers in the past.

  On the Canberra he told reporters – and wrote in his own article – that he wanted England to score runs faster than it ever had before and to reverse the recent trend of bowling less and less balls in a day’s play. Cricket, Test Match cricket in particular, had been ‘slowing down’ of late and that was no use to man or beast. The Australian public deserved something better and he was jolly well going to give it to them if he had anything to do with it!

  That was Lord Ted all over; one asks oneself at this remove if he had been at Balaclava on that fateful day in the middle of the Crimean War and somebody had given him the order to charge down the wrong valley, if he would not just have shrugged his shoulders and replied, ‘that sounds like a good wheeze’ and put £20 on winning the race to the Russian guns. Odds of 10 to 1 would have appealed to him...

  Michael Colin Cowdrey, Dexter’s senior by two-and-a-half-years, was a different kind of man. Like Dexter, he too had been born abroad in that age in which nobody really batted an eye at such things. The Empire was the Empire and it often happened that its sons were born abroad in a globe one-quarter painted pink.

  Cowdrey had been born in Ootacamund[22] in the Madras Presidency on his father’s tea plantation. His father had applied for him to be a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club soon afterwards and although he was to be sent back to England to be educated a bat was placed in his hands as soon as he could walk. It was no accident that his batting technique was of the classical, effortless purity of that long-lost, somewhat mythical Golden Age of Cricket which allegedly preceded the First World War.

  In 1945 he had been enrolled at Alf Gover’s Cricket School for several weeks, and then at Tonbridge School so that he might qualify to play for Kent. In 1946, aged thirteen, he became the youngest boy to play for Tonbridge at Lord’s against Clifton, scoring 75 and 34 and taking eight wickets in a match in which most of the other boys were three or four years his senior.

  While still at Brasenose College, Oxford, aged only twenty-one Cowdrey had been selected for the Australian touring party of 1954-55. He had never really looked back. By the end of the 1962 season he had played 57 Tests, scoring over three thousand runs at an average of better than forty-two; he was a fixture in the side. Back in 1957 at Edgbaston he and Peter May had batted for eight-and-a-half hours compiling the then third highest stand in Test cricket, 411 runs, to frustrate the West Indian spin magicians Ramadhin and Valentine.

  Cowdrey was a prodigy whose career seemed to be a progression of effortless steps from school, to club, to colts, to County and then Test cricket; each step taken as if to the manner born. He was among the most naturally gifted batsmen ever to play for England and his lightning quick reflexes and god-giv
en hand and eye co-ordination made him one of the three or four best slip fielders in the world.

  The most courteous and charming of men Cowdrey had probably expected to be handed the captaincy in Australia that winter. Not that he was the sort of man to begrudge another his good fortune. He was one of those men who lived his life with the grace with which he batted.

  ‘His cover-drive was still his chief glory, but other shots were scarcely inferior: the glory of the moon and stars as opposed to the rich glory of the sun. There seemed to be no effort about his work. With a short back-swing he persuaded the ball through the gaps, guiding it with an iron hand inside the velvet glove which disguised his power and purpose.’[23]

  By the autumn of 1962 nobody remembered the minor blot on his cricketing escutcheon back in 1954 when he had come down from Oxford without troubling to win his degree. He had planned to concentrate on his cricket but in surrendering his University exemption from National Service he had been snaffled up by the RAF; only to be discharged a fortnight later on account of a hereditary ‘disability of rigid toes’, for which he had previously been operated upon. In the mid-fifties National Service was viewed as a blight on many young lives, so to see a young, privileged ‘amateur’ cricketer so easily escape its clutches raised a lot of eyebrows. It was a situation compounded by the fact that within weeks Cowdrey had strung together a sequence of scores that belied any suggestion of a ‘disability’: 44, 101, 5, 139, 48, 44, and 115 not out and 103 not out. Accusations of ‘strings being pulled’ were mooted. Questions were asked in Parliament, and Cowdrey received hate mail.

  Cowdrey had what was still a typical frame for a cricketer – specially a batsman - in those days. Dexter might be lean and athletic, lithe in motion, whether swinging the bat or a golf club and would swoop on the ball in the covers and propel it into the wicket-keeper’s gloves like a bullet. Cowdrey was a complete contrast; he was well fleshed, bulkier around the midriff, and people muttered that he had the ‘look of a baby elephant’ about him. His troublesome ‘foot’ hardly facilitated speed or mobility in the outfield, and even in an England team not generally renowned for its prowess in the ‘outer’ he stuck out like a sore thumb as a weak link if placed anywhere but in a static close-catching position.