Bill Alley was an Australian cricketer with a formidable record in the Lancashire League when in 1957, already thirty-eight, he signed a contract to play for Somerset. The county must have hoped to get perhaps five years’ service from him. In the event, Alley would be the mainstay of the Somerset side for twelve seasons, performing extraordinary feats with both bat and ball, and pulling in the crowds with his rumbustious, aggressive style.
A left-handed batsman, Alley believed that the ball was there to be hit, and set about the task with a wonderful eye and an extravagant lack of classical technique. Straight deliveries might be chopped down to third man, while good length balls outside the off stump would frequently be dispatched to leg. No matter how many fielders were placed between square leg and long on, he possessed the power to slog the ball either between them or over them. Then, having driven the connoisseurs of style into despair, he would suddenly unfurl a perfect cover drive, as if to show that he could play that way, too, when the mood took him. As a right-arm medium-fast bowler, Alley presented a far more niggardly persona, resenting every run conceded, and combining great accuracy with an ability to move the ball both in the air and off the seam.
His best seasons were 1961 and 1962. In 1961 he scored 3,019 runs (he remains the last person to score more than three thousand runs in an English summer) and took sixty-two wickets. In one golden patch he hit 523 runs in eight days for once out. Against Surrey he scored 183, 134, 150 and nine without being dismissed. Altogether he made eleven centuries in 1961, and was particularly pleased that two of them, and another innings of 95, came against the Australians. ‘Their flabby bowling almost made me want to weep,’ he declared with ill-concealed delight. ‘The Don wouldn’t have stood for such mediocrity.’ In 1962 Alley did the double, with 1,915 runs and 112 wickets. The combination of his hard-hitting batting and thrifty bowling also made him a particularly useful player in the new one-day game. In 1967 he helped guide Somerset to the final of the Gillette Cup, though they lost to Kent at Lord’s.
It was hinted to Alley, then playing for New South Wales, that he would be chosen for the tour of England in 1948. Around this time, however, he suffered a terrible accident when Jock Livingston (later of Northamptonshire), playing in a net alongside, hit a full-blooded hook shot which came through the netting and hit him flush on the left side of the jaw. Alley was unconscious for sixteen hours, and his jaw had to be re-constructed and sewn up with sixty stitches. The accident put paid to his boxing career (he had twenty-eight professional fights at welterweight, and won every one of them), and for a while even his future as a cricketer seemed in doubt.
On and off the pitch Alley was a tough, highly talkative competitor, very much in the Australian mould. It would not be altogether fair to pillory him for sledging, for he was fundamentally too good-humoured to be really vicious. In Fred Trueman, however, he found a worthy sparring mate. Alley set the tone on the first occasion he faced the great fast bowler, in 1957. ‘For two overs we exchanged scowl for scowl. Then, loudly enough for Fred to hear, I said to Paddy Corrall, one of the umpires, “I thought this cock was quick. When’s he going to let one go?”’ Alley remembered another time when he drove Trueman’s first ball and hooked the next to the boundary – ‘a gesture tantamount to tickling a bush snake. Fred reacted with two bumpers, the crowd booed, and at the end of the over I set them off again by striding down the pitch with bat raised. Fred played along by striding out to meet me halfway. Suddenly the fans grew very quiet as they saw Fred push his face into mine. And out of the corner of his mouth came the promise, “First pint’s on me tonight, Bill”.’
Alley loved such theatrical displays. His pranks, though, were not always innocent. Once at Bournemouth he borrowed the umpire’s penknife, and began without any attempt at concealment to cut round the new ball, lifting the seam in the process. The umpire, outraged, spoke of reporting him to Lord’s. ‘You’d look nice,’ Alley returned, ‘after giving me the knife and standing by my side while I picked the seam.’ Nothing more was heard of the matter.
William Edward Alley: b Hornsby, Sydney, New South Wales, 3 February 1919; d 26 November 2004