The Bedsers

Alec Bedser’s accurate and lively bowling meant more than any other single factor. He was the man who kept giving England a chance.

RAY ROBINSON

The Union Jack fluttered defiantly on the grandstand in the Melbourne twilight on the eve of England’s first victory over Australia for 13 years, in February 1951. It had taken 15 post-war Tests to bring the coming great day, one more than the number required after the First World War. On the ground where his team beat the Australians in 1925, Arthur Gilligan kept a watching brief from the broadcasting box. ‘What do you think, Arthur?’ was a familiar sally. Gilligan, the commentator, would not have been stumped for words to express his joy at the long-awaited success.

Alec Bedser was in the vanguard of this notable conquest. The novice of four years earlier was now a feared opponent. Facing him was Arthur Morris, the left-handed marauder who had headed the Australian batting averages in England in his finest season in 1948. Encounters between the two men assumed a special significance in 1950–51. As Ray Robinson wrote, ‘Morris’s eyes would have vanished amid their puckering laugh-wrinkles had a teacup reader told him he would meet a tall dark man and go on a long journey back to the pavilion time and again.’

Sickness had at first threatened to remove Alec Bedser from the fray. He contracted influenza while bowling into the wintry breezes at Perth. Jim Swanton reported that Bedser appeared listless on his return against New South Wales at Sydney: ‘His reputation among the Australians is such that it seemed especially important for him to strike form.’

When the big man was restored to fitness his action, in the words of Lindsay Hassett, the Australian captain, combined a ‘weighty and explosive harmony’. This was a series of cruelly deflating close calls. Alec demonstrated his renewed strength in bowling 195 overs (1,558 balls) and taking 30 wickets at 16.06 runs each. He was the first to achieve this distinction in an Anglo-Australian rubber since Harold Larwood 18 years earlier.

Neville Cardus voiced his appreciation of Bedser’s efforts in the second Test at Melbourne when Australia were dismissed for 194 in a day: ‘For the connoisseur, there was nothing better in the cricket than Bedser’s bowling. After an hour of unrelieved effort, after the new ball had lost its shine, Bedser was still on the spot, dangerous and straining the batsman’s nerve and eyesight.’ Throughout the series, wrote another observer, no Australian batsman wholly mastered the late swerve, the accuracy of direction, and the stinging pace from the pitch: ‘His [Bedser’s] was a double task, to quell runs and to take wickets.’

It was largely due to Bedser that only once in Australia’s nine innings did the first wicket survive the twenties, and only one century innings was played by their opening batsmen. ‘Sometimes he cut the ball off the pitch like a quick leg-break. Then he was totally unplayable,’ enthused Ray Robinson. Alec, forewarned after his first trip to Australia, had wisely assessed the need to conserve his energy. He reduced his speed and settled into a rhythmical run-up, which was so steadily repetitive that it appeared mechanical. ‘His air of round-faced simplicity concealed the working of a brain of a bowling genius,’ observed Robinson.

Gloomy overtures preceded the first Test at Brisbane. Charles Bray, in the Daily Herald, was among the pessimists: ‘The odds against our winning one Test, let alone the series, are insultingly high.’ Australia were installed as 5–1 favourites. Before Brisbane the criticism had soared into a crescendo of despair. England were described as ‘apathetic in spirit’ and monstrously culpable in wayward fielding. It was estimated that as many as 27 catches, some of them difficult but the majority ridiculously easy, had been dropped.

Jack Fingleton wrote: ‘Those who missed their chances with bat and ball, and spilling innumerable catches in the field, were mostly youngsters upon whom England was relying for its cricket revival.’ Jim Swanton dwelt on the ‘science of field-placings’: ‘There was not sufficient appreciation of the importance of finding specialists for key places in the field. Too often the field switches round so that the man occupies the nearest position.’

The clouds of uncertainty parted in an astonishing transformation at Brisbane. England’s four-man attack of Bedser, Bailey, Brown and Wright bowled out Australia for 228. Godfrey Evans was at his inspirational best. Fingleton had thought Evans had been ‘playing to the gallery’ against Australia in England in 1948 and his form had suffered as a result; but ‘here,’ he said, ‘his mind was hard on the game. Darting here and there behind the stumps, he was like a leaping and live electricity wire that had been broken. He threatened danger in all directions.’

Freddie Brown believed that his ill-luck with the toss was one explanation for England’s reverses in 1950–51. None were more important than his lost call at Brisbane, where the rains once again disadvantaged England. Bill Bowes described the ensuing conditions on a ‘crazy, unreal Test day’: ‘Great batsmen were reduced to wild slogging. The ball, when it pitched, performed antics which the batsmen could not anticipate, or for which the bowlers were not responsible.’ He added, ‘England were beaten by a treacherous pitch, not by Australian supremacy.’ For John Dewes, one of the affronted English batsmen, it was not a fair test because ‘it was just like batting on plasticine’.

The Australian view, as expressed by Jack Fingleton, was less severe: ‘It was a nasty wicket. The ball took any amount of turn and sometimes it kicked high. But I do not think it was as cantankerous as the one for the Test four years ago when England made 141 and 172.’

A selectorial misjudgement was a factor in England’s plight. Len Hutton was, in an attempt to preserve his skills, relegated to third wicket down in the batting order. The demotion left him undefeated in the match. He scored 8 in the first innings and 62 in the second innings. Fingleton railed against the perpetrators: ‘Hutton must never again go in other than first because England cannot afford to lose a minute of him. The “brains trust” that suggested sending him in lower down should be sacked immediately, and without a reference.’

Hutton himself remembered the burden he and Washbrook shared as England’s opening batsmen in this lean period. ‘Do you realise,’ he wryly said many years later, ‘when Cyril and me go out to bat, we are like a couple of window cleaners set to work on the top floor of a skyscraper? Only some silly so-and-so has whipped the ladder away.’

Twenty wickets fell for 130 runs in a curtailed day when the rains relented at Brisbane. England struggled to 68 for 7 in their first innings. Australia, at one stage 0 for 3, finally declared at 32 for 7. England were set a target of 193 and were betrayed by madcap batting. They tottered to 30 for 6, and 3 of the wickets went down for 7 runs in 10 minutes before the close of play. ‘All the nightwatchmen had failed Brown, commented Fingleton. ‘It was rather like a real nightwatchman putting his keys in the warehouse door and then going for a stroll around the block.’

Arthur McIntyre, Evans’s deputy, was selected as a batsman at Brisbane. He was one of the anxious victims in the collapse, thrown out by Don Tallon, the Australian wicket-keeper, while attempting a fourth run:

I was batting with Godfrey. We were tearing up and down the wicket like a couple of whippets. Bill Johnston was way out on the boundary; he’d just managed to hold the ball up. I called Godfrey for the fourth run. Bill’s throw was fairly wide and Tallon had to stretch some distance and gather the return before putting down the wicket. He had only one stump to aim at, and he hit it.

It was a gloomy night and we’d already appealed against the light. I did feel terrible, but there were no excuses.

‘Mac’ dejectedly made his way back to the pavilion, well aware of the reception awaiting him: ‘I would have chosen another gate for my return had it been possible.’

Len Hutton was given the near-impossible task of nursing England towards salvation on the final day. The squandering of wickets on the previous evening seemed wanton now on a pitch rendered placid by the heavy roller. ‘It was like a man the day after an alcoholic fling, full of remorse and respectability,’ commented one writer.

Neville Cardus, while applauding Hutton’s mastery in a lost cause, lamented the lack of a supporting cast. The imperturbable Yorkshireman was the bulwark of England’s batting, shouldering the burden almost unaided in some of the tour’s darkest hours. Cardus observed: ‘Hutton, in this team, travels a long furrow of responsibility. I cannot recall an instance in Test cricket when any batsman has had Hutton’s reason to believe that he and nobody else was the spinal column of an innings.’

Hutton revelled in his lone command at Brisbane. His purpose did not falter even after the first-ball dismissal of Denis Compton. Compton was the fallen cavalier caught in a web of indecision throughout the series. In other happier times, there would have been the comradely pursuit of winning runs. As it was, the last-wicket partnership of 45 runs between Hutton and Wright only served to delay Australia’s victory by 70 runs.

Compton’s decline should perhaps have been expected. He had had a cartilage removed in the spring of 1950 and missed most of the English season. The state of his knee aroused much speculation and came under intense scrutiny before the tour. Medical experts who knew its full history were more inclined to praise Compton for his bravery rather than to disown him as a liability in Australia.

In fact, he finished second in the tour averages to Hutton. He was deeply upset by his form in the Tests in which he scored only 53 runs at an average of 7.57. It must be regarded as one of the worst series ever for a batsman of his stature. A writer in the Sporting Globe interviewed Compton following his century against Western Australia at Perth in October. The troublesome knee, he learned, was the legacy of a pre-war soccer injury. In 1947, Compton had suffered another knock without any visible reaction during his wonderful summer against the South African tourists. Three years later the condition had worsened to the extent that the bones in his right knee joint had begun to scale and chip.

The restorative qualities of warm sunshine in Australia did at first give rise to optimism. The century at Perth was an exercise in the familiar freedom as one observer commented:

Compton bats with the same pristine delight . . . He still rips the textbook to shreds. He spins and sweeps the ball late off his heels to the fence. He moves yards down the pitch to anticipate the bowler’s length before the ball is actually delivered. Yesterday he cut, drove, hooked or glanced to his heart’s delight.

The bowling of Doug Wright – at 36, the second oldest of the MCC party in Australia – reached its nadir in the low-scoring second Test at Melbourne. Wright was a finely tuned artist whose leg-breaks veered between the unplayable and the wildly erratic. The wayward side of his bowling unhappily surfaced at Melbourne. He conceded 105 runs, including 63 off 8 overs in Australia’s first innings. It was, as the margin of defeat showed, a concession too luxurious for the batsmen to overcome.

Fluctuations in fortune tended to diminish Wright’s renown. Some considered him a magnificent but unlucky bowler. That his majestic days far exceeded his mediocre ones are shown by his career figures of over 2,000 wickets, including 108 in 34 Tests against Australia and South Africa. His figures included seven hat-tricks.

Trevor Bailey refers to one cameo illustrating the bewildering spin of his England colleague in 1950–51. The match was against Western Australia at Perth. Wright’s extravagant spin was this time allied to unwavering length. Bailey recalls: ‘Doug’s bowling there, before he was stricken by fibrositis, was the best leg-break bowling I’ve ever seen. No one apart from Godfrey [Wright’s Kent wicket-keeper] knew where the ball was going.’ Wright’s rhythm was well under control at Perth. He took seven wickets, including six with his mesmeric googlies.

‘Look here,’ said big Jake Iverson, in conversation with an Australian writer. ‘You must have seen a fellow throw away a smoked cigarette. He gives it a flick from the back of his finger and away it flies. In a different way that is exactly what I do. My longer finger just flicks the ball out, spinning as it does so.’

Iverson, then aged 35, was described as the rawest of Test débutants against England. Yet this bowler with the freak grip enjoyed remarkable success against the tourists. Sid Barnes, excluded from the Australian ranks in the series, related the view of one Englishman that Iverson’s deliveries had more curves than in a six-day bike race. This was the Victorian’s finest hour. But he would soon be stunned into submission by more adventurous batsmanship and depart from first-class cricket.

His curious grip was the result of wartime experiments, flicking table tennis balls down the table at fellow servicemen in New Guinea. ‘I take the ball between my thumb and second finger,’ said Iverson. ‘My index and third fingers do not touch the ball. So the grip is solely between the ball of the thumb and the side of the long finger. When I deliver the ball I never twist or turn my wrist; the knuckles are facing the batsman when the ball leaves my fingers.’ By changing the position of the thumb he could deliver a leg-break, an off-break, or a googly, with little discernable change of action.

Iverson headed the Australian bowling averages against England. His 21 wickets cost him only 15.23 runs each. Twice he confounded Hutton in the series, once in the third Test at Sydney where his sharp spin and bounce earned him a second-innings analysis of 6 for 27. In his first 7 overs he took 3 wickets and, after a rest, 3 more in 10 balls. England were dismissed for 123 and Australia won by an innings to retain the Ashes.

Magnificent bowling by Alec Bedser and Trevor Bailey deserved a better reward in the second Test at Melbourne. The pitch was fast and the atmosphere heavy, and the stage was set for an unnerving bowling performance. ‘Alec,’ wrote Keith Miller, ‘seems to have that extra devil in his bowling that extracts increased venom from a slightly inferior batting wicket.’

‘Uplifted by the swift capture of Morris’s wicket, Bedser opened with a spell of sustained hostility lasting two and a half hours,’ commented Wisden. ‘Twice more he returned to hurl himself into the attack with life, lift and swing. No batsman played him with anything approaching relish. For once, the adjective “great” carried no exaggeration.’ Bedser and Bailey shared 8 wickets, including 4 in the last 10 minutes, as Australia tumbled to 194 all out at the end of a dramatic day.

An umpiring decision to rank with the Bradman incident at Brisbane in 1946 turned the tide against England. At Melbourne, it was Len Hutton who was controversially given out to a catch by Tallon off Iverson. Keith Miller related how Hutton appeared set for a big score: ‘Len had been tied down by Iverson in the previous over. So in the next over he moved down the wicket to drive one away. The ball dropped just shorter than he expected. Hutton realised the situation and pulled his bat away.’

There was some confusion as the ball rebounded from Hutton’s pad and flew into the air. Tallon did not evince any enthusiasm as he casually stepped from behind the wicket to take a simple catch. He did not appeal, but Iverson and Hassett did, winning the umpire’s approval. Hutton walked sadly away. Players, including Miller, who was fielding at short mid-on, shook their heads at the decision. ‘I do not think Hutton went within inches of the ball,’ wrote Miller. ‘There was only a dull thud of the ball striking the pad.’

Hutton, said Miller, looked at him with a startled look usually seen at a horror movie. ‘He blanched a little and made some remark in his Yorkshire dialect that I didn’t quite catch. He walked out in bewilderment rather than in annoyance.’

England, in the end, required 178 to win and the result was exasperatingly close. Australia, with Lindwall and Johnston as their spearheads, won by 28 runs. Excessive caution by the England batsmen played into their hands. ‘The impression could not be avoided,’ observed Wisden, ‘that if England had been left with three or four hours to make the runs instead of three whole days they would have adopted different, and probably, more successful methods.’

The gracious city of Adelaide was shrouded in a haze of smoke swept in from surrounding bush fires when the MCC party arrived there for the fourth Test in February. They found some respite from the torrid heat in quarters at Glenelg, the neighbouring bay resort. Before the days of air-conditioning, successive England teams had suffered in the extreme night-time temperatures. In other days there had been constant queues for showers in the early hours of the morning. ‘One just grumbled and stewed while those monsters of the night, the mosquitoes, indulged themselves in interminable dive-bombing,’ remembered Jack Fingleton. ‘On such nights, the Adelaide folk took an undersheet and slept on the beaches, or on their home lawns.’

Keith Miller was moved to extol the mastery of Len Hutton in Australia. For such a dauntless rival, his endorsement reflected not only his appreciation but also his sportsmanship. ‘He is one player you can watch without monotony, even if it is your own bowling he is hitting around the oval.’ The ‘high-class technician’, as is the way of greatness, always controlled and commanded without fuss.

At Adelaide Hutton once again bestrode his kingdom. In the previous English season, he had resisted the wiles of the West Indian spinners Ramadhin and Valentine in scoring 202 not out at Kennington Oval. He repeated this single-handed exercise in carrying his bat for 156 (out of a total of 272) at Adelaide. The only other Englishman to survive the fall of all ten wickets in a Test between the two countries was Bobby Abel at Sydney in the 1891–92 series. Hutton batted for six hours and ten minutes. His only supporter was, as at Brisbane, Doug Wright, who resisted for over an hour in a last-wicket stand of 53 runs.

The reception which greeted England’s victory by eight wickets at Melbourne could not have been bettered at Kennington Oval. There was a sense – even among the Australian partisans – that England, narrowly denied on other occasions during the series, deserved to carry the day. There were another ten wickets for Alec Bedser to place alongside Hutton’s winning runs. These gave the Yorkshireman a series aggregate of 533 runs at an average of 88.83.

The batting challenge at Melbourne did not this time rest with Hutton alone. Reg Simpson, on his 31st birthday, was undefeated on 156 in England’s first innings. ‘Late, but not too late, he found his own high artistry of stroke-play,’ was the compliment of one writer. ‘He put away the pedestrian accuracy of a mere workman and turned a position of doubt into one of lively hope.’

The acclamation at the end of the series demonstrated the appeal of Freddie Brown. His valour in adversity established him as one of the heroes of the season. Keith Miller considered the England captain to be the ‘surprise packet’ of the team. At Melbourne, in the second Test, Brown took 5 wickets and scored 62 runs. ‘He did not let the occasion upset his main batting asset – an ability to hit hard and often,’ wrote Miller. ‘This day at Melbourne he lofted shots over the cover fieldsmen and slammed an occasional glorious drive with a power and timing worthy of Hutton. He took the game by the scruff of the neck, chanced his luck, and succeeded.’

Brown had first toured Australia as a 22-year-old leg-spinner under the leadership of Douglas Jardine in 1932–33. At The Leys School, he had regularly opened the attack, bowling at brisk medium-pace. Then, at the instigation of Aubrey Faulkner, he had reverted to leg-spin before going on to win his blue at Cambridge. His leg-breaks were seldom used in the 1950–51 series; injuries to Bailey and Wright forced him to enter the quick bowling lists more often than he had intended. The transition was surprisingly effective and was reflected in the yield of wickets.

Alec Bedser was once asked to describe the bowling of his captain in Australia. ‘He just holds the ball seam-up and bowls with a good action,’ was the reply. Determination was the keynote of an ebullient leader. Twice he took five or more wickets in a Test, on both occasions at Melbourne, and his 18 wickets in the series showed him to be an indispensable member of the team.

Captains come in many shades of character. Freddie Brown was cast in the traditional mould of the amateur. The iron fist was rarely concealed, especially where the professionals were concerned. Prejudices often distorted his judgement although Roy Tattersall, a late replacement in Australia, strongly defends Brown and remembers his guidance and help in adjusting to alien conditions.

Brown could, though, be bossy and brusque – then as a captain and later as an MCC manager. John Dewes refers to the gulf between the ‘officers’ (amateurs) and the ‘men’ (professionals) which was only beginning to narrow in the post-war years. Relationships forged between the two ranks in the war marked a change towards a new awareness. As Dewes observes: ‘We had both fought and we had both won.’ Freddie Brown, however, still kept his foot firmly jammed on the barrier in Australia. ‘To those of us who were young and amateurs, he was friendly and fatherly,’ recalls Dewes. ‘For others, I suspect, he adopted a different manner.’

There was a rousing reception to greet Alec Bedser, Woking’s sporting ambassador, on his return home from Australia. The news of his feats – and the descriptions praising him as ‘the best bowler in the world’ – prompted the Surrey townspeople to establish a testimonial fund as a gesture of appreciation. In April 1951, Alec was the guest of honour at a public reception in Christ Church Hall followed by a dinner at the Albion Hotel. Waiting to pay tribute to their distinguished pupil were his former headmaster, Frank Marsh, and form master, Fred Dixon. Mr H.C. Barrett, chairman of Woking Council, presented Alec with a television set, an oil painting of him in his England colours, and a cheque for £200.

The assembly of guests at the homecoming included three Surrey stalwarts, Andrew Kempton, Andrew Sandham and the Bedsers’ first cricket coach, Alan Peach. Sandham echoed the regret of many who had followed the progress of the series from afar. He thought that if the batsmen had responded as well as the bowlers had performed, England would have won the rubber. Sandham was reminded of the tutelage of Peach, his predecessor as the county coach. ‘When I watch Alec bowling I can see Alan Peach when he played for Surrey.’

‘Alec has brought honour to our town,’ enthused the Woking council chairman. Charm, personality and a love of true sportsmanship characterised his manner as a cricketer and a man: ‘We offer our thanks to Alec and Eric for the interest shown and the encouragement they so willingly give to the sporting activities of the young people in our district.’

On the other side of the world, one Australian was also ruefully remembering the dominance of Alec Bedser. Arthur Morris had been given an accolade to treasure after he had scored 696 runs in England in 1948. Don Bradman, his captain, then described him as the best left-hander he had seen. Bedser dented this image when he dismissed Morris five times – twice in one match – in the 1950–51 series.

There was gleeful talk of a hoodoo imposed on him by his England rival. Morris did salvage his reputation and pride and end his servitude with a painstaking double-century at Adelaide. The yardstick for supremacy, with bat and ball, can only be determined by figures over a long period. Morris’s mastery was checked but not dimmed in his years of combat with Bedser.

Ray Robinson wittily portrayed the ardour of the contests between two close friends. The fame of Alec Bedser was ultimately sealed when he took his place among the waxen rows of the illustrious at Madame Tussaud’s. ‘Morris, as a spokesman for the batsmen,’ said Robinson, ‘could have been forgiven if he had suggested that the figure’s proper place was down in the basement – the Chamber of Horrors.’