1946 – a remarkable All-India team, Cowdrey’s debut and Attlee at the Oval
Well, yes, of course, Eoin Morgan’s smiting of seventeen sixes against the unfortunate Afghans was a remarkable achievement, but less of one perhaps than the six sixes in an over struck by Gary Sobers at the expense of the equally unfortunate Malcolm Nash, less remarkable because Gary wasn’t wielding one of today’s Big Bertha bats. Lord knows how far he would have hit the ball with one of those in his hands – or Colin Milburn whom I once saw hook that good Australian quickie Alan Connolly almost out of the Oval. He was opening the innings for England and it was either the second or third ball he faced.
Big-hitting can become boring, and when the England innings ended just short of 400, the match was effectively over. This is what happens when you adjust the laws to take the third possible result – a draw – out of the game. If England had been required to take all ten Afghan wickets to win the match, the last hour would have been much more interesting than it was. The draw is a result, and playing for a draw, defying the fielding side, has often produced tense nail-biting cricket. There were three such draws in the great 2005 Ashes series. 50-over cricket would be a damn sight more gripping if the side bowling second had to take all 10 wickets to win the match.
This World Cup is a tad lethargic on account of the format with a patience-demanding wait till we reach the knock- out stage. Happily, in re-arranging my books, I have come upon the 1947 Wisden, my first copy of the Almanack, a present for my ninth birthday. Much-read, well-worn and a bit tattered, it takes me back into a different world.
Very different indeed, deplorably so, some might say. More than 70 of the 714 pages are devoted to Public School Cricket, and this isn’t counting the notices of schoolboy matches in the “Other Matches at Lord’s” section where not only the Eton v Harrow game is featured. There is also, for instance, Clifton v Tonbridge, notable for the first appearance at Lord’s of a 13 year-old boy identified as Michael Cowdrey, later to be better-known as Colin. He made 75 in the first innings, out of a total of 156, and 44 in the second, after which he took 5 for 59, “mainly with leg-breaks” to help Tonbridge win by 2 runs. He must have gone to bed a very happy boy.
The amateur/professional distinction would last another fifteen or so years, and was religiously observed by Wisden. Amateurs got their initials in front of their surname, professionals theirs (in brackets) behind it. So you find that Test centuries were scored by Hammond (W.R.) until W.R. Hammond scored a great 240 against Australia at Lord’s in 1938, having turned amateur that winter in order to be available to captain England. As I recall, he came to the wicket with England 31 for 3, after, it is said, downing a couple of large pink gins as wickets fell. These days he might have been breathalysed as he descended the pavilion steps.
Sometime in the early Fifties this observance of the distinction between amateurs and professionals provoked one of the most gloriously pompous announcements ever made over the Public Address system at Lord’s – even at Lord’s, some might say. Spectators were informed that there was a mistake on their scorecard; for F.J Titmus read Titmus (F.J.).
County staffs were small in 1946, and amateurs, some of doubtful ability, were regularly required to make up an Eleven. The note on Somerset’s season tells us that “fewer amateurs than usual played for the county”. Nevertheless, there were fourteen of them in the averages – as against only eight professionals. Yorkshire, retaining the title won in the last pre-war series, offered an exception. Only three amateurs turned out for the county: Brian Sellers and Norman Yardley (captain and vice-captain), and Paul Gibb, a Cambridge Blue, briefly England’s wicket-keeper till supplanted by Godfrey Evans. Years later Gibb would play for a few seasons as a professional for Essex before retiring and becoming a bus-driver.
1946 was a miserably wet summer, even worse than this one, but cricket was popular and crowds were good. Doubtless this was partly because there was little rival entertainment. Football went to sleep after the Cup Final and didn’t re-awake till September. Of course, immediately after the war, any sport offered relief from austerity. It’s interesting to read that the Roses match at Old Trafford in August aroused such interest that “vast crowds were left outside when the gates were locked.” The first Roses game of the season, at Sheffield’s Bramall Lane over the Whitsun weekend had been ruined by rain. Even so, “on the Saturday 14,761 people paid £1,370 gate money”.
India were the tourists. Theirs was the last All-India team before Partition and Independence. The captain was the Nawab of Pataudi, a Muslim who had previously played for England, scoring a Test hundred at Sydney on the “Bodyline” tour.
The team included a young left-handed all-rounder, Abdul Hafeez, who, a few years later, now known as A H Kardar, would captain Pakistan. The Indians were very popular. They had at least three great players: V M Merchant, who scored 2385 runs in the season, including a century in the Test at The Oval, V S Hazare, a future captain of India, and the all-rounder Vinoo Mankad who achieved the Double of a thousand runs and a hundred wickets in the season. There were some remarkable performances. Against Sussex, they ran up a score of 533 for 3 declared, the first four batsmen – Merchant, Mankad, Pataudi and Lala Amarnath all making centuries, Merchant a double. Then their numbers 10 and 11, C T Sarwate and S N Banarjee, each made a hundred against Surrey: “Never before in history had Nos. 10 and 11 in the batting order each scored a century in the same innings”.
The Test matches, each allocated only three days, were all disrupted by the miserable weather. “Utterly ruined”, Wisden said of the last one at The Oval. Nevertheless, two final notes on that game are of some interest.
“The official return of attendance on Monday was 26,285, of whom 20,253 paid 3 shillings 6 pence at the turnstiles, and 4,080 were holders of tickets bought before the match. Apparently at this summer’s World Cup it has sometimes been impossible to pay at the gate even when not all match tickets have been sold.
“The Prime Minister and Mrs Attlee were present on Saturday and Monday”, a happy reminder that the only use Mr Attlee found for the ticker-tape installed in Downing Street was the opportunity it offered to check the cricket scores.