Edging Towards Darkness: The story of the last timeless Test Page 12
Slowly Hammond reclaimed his touch and, when Edrich swung a full toss from Dalton to the leg-side boundary, the England score passed 400. Edrich moved to 199 with further boundaries off Mitchell, before sprinting through for a quick single to reach a chanceless and nerveless double-century in six and a half hours. Three runs later, England exceeded the previous highest score in the fourth innings of a Test – their own 411 against Australia in 1924. Melville took the eleventh new ball shortly after, and at tea the scoreboard stood at 442 for two with Edrich on 215 and Hammond 34.
The England manager Jack Holmes was waiting for Edrich with a glass of champagne when he returned to the dressing-room. ‘I hear you train on the stuff,’ he said, unable to suppress a broad smile. Edrich removed his sodden boots and swiftly downed two glasses during the interval, admitting he was ‘thoroughly fagged’. The crowd had grown substantially by this time. ‘The news of England’s amazing resistance had spread through the town like wildfire and office workers donned their coats and hurried out to the ground,’ the Daily Tribune reported. Many were still arriving when Edrich, having added a further four runs since tea and offered a sharp chance to gulley, played a weary-looking shot at Langton and was caught by a diving Gordon at short-leg, who gleefully snatched the ball inches from the turf.
‘The fourth flying boat to bring mail from England since the match started flew round the ground just too late to look down on Edrich’s exit,’ Pollock observed. He had taken his country to the brink of an astonishing victory, become the first Englishman to hit a double-hundred in the fourth innings of a Test, batted for seven hours and 20 minutes and scored exactly 100 runs in boundaries. ‘He had won himself striking rehabilitation,’ Duffus wrote. ‘In years to come men who were boys in 1939 will pause before the trees planted by Edrich and Gibb among the honours grove and recall with wonder how they batted for nearly two days with an insatiable appetite for runs – gluttons at this unparalleled feast.’
When bad light ended play at 5.30 – an hour after Edrich’s dismissal – Hammond had passed his fifth half-century of the series, chipping another 49 runs off South Africa’s great edifice, in the company of Paynter. England were 496 for three at stumps, with Hammond 58 and Paynter 24, only 200 runs away from victory. At the start of the day, requiring 443 to beat South Africa, their chances had moved, in Duffus’s view, from the ‘impossible to the improbable’; now they were ‘odds-on favourites’. ‘They had scored a great psychological as well as physical triumph,’ he added. The prevailing view was that England would have to suffer a collapse of fatal proportions if they were to lose it from this position.
The end was finally in sight: a fact confirmed by the South African Cricket Board, who announced that the England players would be released from the game on Tuesday evening to enable them to catch the boat train from Durban. This would allow them not only enough time to arrive in Cape Town on Friday morning and board the Athlone Castle before it sailed, but to complete the match. If, by some quirk of fate, it remained still unfinished by the close of play on Tuesday it would not be extended into an eleventh day, as had earlier been proposed. ‘The England players’ contracts expire on Friday, when they go aboard for England at Cape Town,’ Pollock reported. ‘Should the players be prevented from sailing, the South African Cricket Board would have to be responsible for some form of new contract.’
Jack Holmes explained later that, with the situation in Europe growing more grave by the day, it had become impossible to obtain a berth on a ship returning to England. They were all full. Had they cancelled their booking on the Athlone Castle and stayed to conclude the Test, they ran the risk, he pointed out, of being stranded in South Africa for several weeks at the least. Their departure could not be delayed a moment longer.
England: 316 & 496-3 (Edrich 219, Gibb 120, Hammond 58no, Hutton 55) require 200 runs to beat South Africa: 530 & 481.
Day ten: Tuesday, 14 March
The weather had reverted to heavy cloud and humidity for the last day of the match; there was a blustering wind, too – a sure sign, according to local weather experts, that rain was coming. One even predicted ‘a race for a finish’. It would turn out to be one of the few prophesies about the timeless Test that anyone got right. However, the turnstiles clicked merrily all morning and a crowd in excess of 2,000 watched Hammond and Paynter add 82 more runs before lunch, trimming England’s target to 118. Melville’s defensive fields had permitted the batsmen to push the ball into the gaps and sprint their singles almost at will – a tactic at which Hammond, ‘playing strokes in croquet fashion and tapping it insolently on either side of the wicket’, was particularly adept. South Africa’s efforts to stem the flow of runs, the Daily Tribune wrote, were ‘like a small boy trying frantically to stop water gushing out of a tap after mischievously unscrewing the washer’.
For one brief dazzling moment during the morning the sun appeared, illuminating the ground with the sudden glare of a spotlight, before the dark clouds bustled in again. Hammond was batting responsibly and coolly, and 15 minutes after lunch he completed the sixth century of the match, his third of the series, and his 21st in Test cricket to equal Bradman’s record. He did not as a rule pay great attention to statistics, but this was one that he would have been acutely aware of. He had struck only three boundaries, but his harvesting of singles and clever placement gave the impression that his innings was in perpetual motion. Paynter, though not at his impish best, had already reached his half-century – the 16th of the game – and the England score swept on towards 600. Only the rain it seemed could save South Africa from certain defeat.
It was about this time that Swanton, having just finished a stint on air, was rung up by an enthusiastic England supporter who lived at Isipingo, a beach resort some 12 miles south of Durban. The message was short and to the point: ‘It’s raining hard here. Please tell Mr Hammond to hurry up.’ Swanton relayed the message to the England dressing-room and, using the pretext of a spare batting glove, the twelfth man, Yardley, was sent to the middle to inform the captain.
‘When Hammond examined the sky and strolled over to Paynter, we knew there was going to be an attack launched,’ Nourse recalled. ‘Ferociously he set about the bowling.’ England were now engaged in a desperate race against time. Casting thunderous glances at the sky, Hammond batted with fierce precision, as if accelerating through the gears of his favourite Jaguar. The ball purred across the turf to the boundary, one cover-drive travelled with such rapid power that no fielder moved before it struck the fence. Paynter worked the ball efficiently off his pads, pulled and cut anything short and scampered his singles. However, another factor had entered the equation: the wicket was starting to break up. For the first time in the game puffs of dust rose from a couple of powdery patches, and the occasional ball reared disconcertingly. ‘The pitch was finally relinquishing its stubborn hold on life,’ Duffus concluded.
Hammond and Paynter had moved the score to 611 in an atmosphere of mounting tension and excitement when Gordon, his flannels daubed in red, his shirt clinging to his back in the steamy heat after 50 second-innings overs without a wicket, belatedly reaped his reward. He bowled a ball that appeared to kick off the surface, clip the shoulder of Paynter’s bat as he swung at it and fly through to Grieveson, who completed the catch at head height. Paynter, having batted 213 minutes for his 75, looked surprised to be given out.
Black clouds were massing and the light was deteriorating rapidly as Ames walked out to replace Paynter. Considered by many to be the most technically accomplished strokemaker in the side after Hammond – in the opinion of C. B. Fry he was a ‘delightfully effective player, a sort of troubadour of a batsman’ – the wicketkeeper was the ideal man for such a situation. It would have held no fears for him and he was briskly off the mark with a square-cut for two. At 619 for four Gordon, armed with the twelfth new ball of the game, drew a rare false stroke from Hammond, who edged uppishly between wicketkeeper and slip to the boundary to gasps from the spectators. Gordon, con
centrating his attack primarily on leg stump where the wicket was showing marked signs of wear, maintained an admirable control, and his duel with Hammond, in particular, enthralled the crowd. ‘Hammond gave the impression that as long as he was at the wickets he was quite capable of scoring any runs that England might require,’ Jack Gage reported in the Daily Tribune. When the waiters emerged at 3.15 with trays of cold drinks, the England captain impatiently waved them away.
The first spots of rain arrived soon after, and the sound of rustling raincoats and unfurling umbrellas from the spectators in the open seats was transmitted to the middle; within seconds the players were dashing from the field. The short shower caused a stoppage of six minutes and England resumed on 631 for four; but only three more runs were added before the rain blew in again, harder this time, delaying play for a further 15 minutes. The fifth-wicket pair advanced the score to 650 after the players re-emerged for the third time, matching each other with the resonance of their strokeplay until Hammond, in his hurry to beat the rain, took one risk too many. Unable to resist a dart down the wicket at Dalton he missed a big leg-break and was exuberantly stumped by Grieveson, succumbing to the same combination for the second time in the match. He batted for five hours and 49 minutes for his 140, hitting seven boundaries to leave England just 46 runs from victory. It was an innings of ‘power and majesty’, Paynter declared, and only the magnificence of the South African fielding curbed the number of boundaries he struck.
The baton passed to the carefree Valentine, who nearly suffered the same fate as Hammond to his first ball. Grieveson’s work with the gloves had been nothing short of a revelation, but this time he fumbled the stumping chance and Valentine breathed again. Undeterred, he jumped out to the next ball and drove it fearlessly down the ground for four. ‘We’ll get them before close of play tonight,’ he assured Ames at the end of the over. Just two balls into the next – Gordon’s 56th of the innings – the rain came back to send the players scurrying to the pavilion. This time they would not return. The intensity of the downpour engulfed the ground in semi-darkness. Within minutes the square was awash and the pavilion lights glowed fiercely through a curtain of gloom. There was no hope for it. The rain, having rejuvenated the wicket on three separate occasions to keep the game alive well beyond its natural lifespan, had saved its cruellest trick for last.
A meeting between the two captains and the South African Board of Control was hastily convened during the tea interval to discuss the next course of action, while the exhausted teams sat in the pavilion, where 36 bottles of champagne waited to be uncorked by the winners of the rubber. The board, in fact, did not arrive at a decision for almost an hour, and some of the 5,000 or so spectators drifted out of the ground without staying to hear the verdict. During that time, Duffus reported, ‘a few farsighted players, sensing the end, surreptitiously looted the stumps’. One of them was Hutton, who admitted later that a stump from the timeless Test and another from the victorious third Test, also at Kingsmead, were among the keepsakes he brought back to England.
Eventually the board came to a decision and delivered it, appropriately enough with maximum dramatic effect, to lightning pyrotechnics and a drum roll of thunder: the timeless Test was abandoned as a draw. England’s attempted heist of the spoils – they were 42 runs short of an earth-shaking victory when rain chased the players off the field for the last time at 3.55 – had come to nothing. The official announcement stated:
It has been agreed by the South African Board of Control, after consultation with the two captains, that the match be abandoned. In coming to this decision, we took into consideration the fact that the England cricketers had to be in Cape Town for a reasonable number of hours to make necessary arrangements before their departure on the Athlone Castle on Friday, which is essential. The requisite number of hours in Cape Town would only be possible if they leave Durban at 8.05 tonight.
Melville had argued at the meeting that England should lose by default if the game was not played out the following day. His protest was laughed off by the England players. ‘South Africa wanted to claim a win by default because we could not stay another month and finish the match,’ Yardley quipped. According to Pollock many of the bookmakers at the ground, and those who had wagered heavily on a positive result, voiced the same objection: ‘I heard bookmakers contending that England were technical losers because they did not stay to finish the match. The argument is that England “gave up”. But Hammond did not abandon the match. The South African Board of Control decided on the abandonment, and took full responsibility for it.’ Having already agreed that England’s players would be released from the game on Tuesday evening, the board had been left with no other choice but to honour its commitment.
Perhaps the biggest losers amidst all the disputes and confusion were the Kingsmead regulars. For those who sat through all nine playing days, even braving the thunder and rain at the bitter end to hear the final verdict, it was a dismal anti-climax and many felt cheated. The journalist Jack Gage encapsulated their frustration: ‘It seemed such a pity that this remarkable game should have been brought to an unsatisfactory and unnecessary conclusion when an hour, at the most an hour and a half’s play, would have sufficed to bring about a definite result.’
There was a proposal that the six remaining batsmen – Ames, Valentine, Verity, Wright, Farnes and Perks – should stay behind and fly to Cape Town instead, therefore enabling the match to be completed the following day. But even that was stymied. A clause had been inserted in the England players’ contracts that prohibited them from flying during the tour. ‘They were far too precious to be allowed in the air,’ Swanton divulged. Nonetheless the ruling was openly flouted by Hammond, who took it upon himself to fly to Cape Town while the others travelled the 1,000 miles by train, enduring in the process another timeless test of their patience4.
There is one more burning question to consider: who would have won the match had it been played to a conclusion? As the game stood at that stage it was undoubtedly England’s to lose (654 for five), though more likely than not the Kent cavaliers, Ames and Valentine, would have speedily acquired the 42 runs needed for victory. Verity, the next man in, had been good enough on one occasion to open the batting for England against Australia, and was more than capable of holding his own had he been called on; Wright, too, was no slouch. As a testimony of Verity’s batsmanship there is none finer than Robertson-Glasgow’s: ‘He looks like Sutcliffe gone stale. That is, pretty good . . .’ Yet in South Africa’s favour the wicket was breaking up, albeit slowly, and their bowlers – drained to the core for the most part of Tuesday’s play – had been re-energised by the late wickets of Paynter and Hammond. Who was to say that the game did not have one final twist to perform? After all, collapses had occurred from more advantageous positions before. As Duffus put it: ‘It remains one of the eternal riddles of Test match cricket.’
Standing on the Kingsmead square 25 years later, the Daily Telegraph cricket writer Michael Melford remembered listening with fascination as Hammond and Melville, batting their theories back and forth, reflected on what might have happened had the timeless Test been allowed to run its true course. ‘Each was absolutely convinced that he would have won,’ he wrote. Even the arch-sceptic Pollock – who watched every ball and calculated that he had cabled some 10,000 words on ‘the longest cricket serial ever thought of’ – appeared to have been won over by the closing act:
This timeless Test will go down in cricket history as the match there wasn’t time to finish . . . And, by the cussedness of things, the game was just then in an intensely interesting state, threatening, at any moment, to keep developing sensationally, with the players suddenly keyed up, the spectators agog over the drama that might unfold before the final curtain . . . Then, just as the drama was nearly at its height, dark rain came teeming down, and the thrilled crowd saw no more. What a pity. What a match.
There was nothing left for the players to do after that but toast each other’s health
with copious champagne, and to conclude the series in the spirit and sportsmanship with which it had been conducted. Hammond would later refer to the friendliness and good humour that existed between the two sides as ‘unprecedented’. When the England team boarded the train for Cape Town that night they were sporting the green and gold ties of South Africa, while their opponents who had come to wave them off wore the dark blue, red and yellow of MCC. Among a roll-call of the English injured, Hutton and Gibb were both lame, and Edrich was nursing a sore shoulder. Nearly every player complained of a niggle or ailment of some kind or other, though it was nothing compared to the extreme fatigue felt by both teams; like the stragglers at a marathon, each man was utterly spent. Hammond, who had come to see his players off, was feeling his back; Melville was also lame, and Gordon and Langton – his lower back heavily strapped – had bowled themselves to a virtual standstill. No wonder that one newspaper carried the headline the next day, ‘War of exhaustion’.
More champagne, no doubt, would help to dull the pain, and there were suggestions that several bottles had been smuggled on board by the England players. It would be a long night.
England: 316 & 654-5 (Edrich 219, Hammond 140, Gibb 120, Paynter 75, Hutton 55); South Africa: 530 & 481. Match drawn.
The following morning, Nourse decided to wander out to the middle and make a brief examination of the Kingsmead wicket. It was more out of curiosity than anything, though, as he said, ‘There was no one to lay a wreath on the wicket after it was all over.’ The crowds and the players had long gone, of course, but the sky was cloudless and the square, dappled in warm sunshine, looked in pristine condition. Once more the groundstaff had performed their conjuring tricks and, to his amazement, he discovered a wicket that would have ‘rolled out better than ever had the necessity for its use arisen’. It was still rock-hard, he noted, ‘dull and glazed, like a boxer who has received a knockout blow’.