Spirit On The Water (14 page)

The teams returned to Melbourne for the final Test. Benaud made the first positive move by winning the toss and putting the West Indies in to bat. The atmosphere was heavy and he probably expected the ball to move around more than it did. At the end of the day, Australia had the slight edge with the West Indies closing on 252 for 8. The next day was a Saturday and a world record crowd of 90,800 watched the game. A true testament to Worrell and his team.

Solomon and Hall had a 9
^th
wicket partnership of 55 and the West Indies finished on 292. By the end of the second day, Australia had reached 236 for 3 and were very much in the driving seat. The West Indies fought back on the Monday with wickets for Sobers and Gibbs and Australia’s first innings lead was restricted to 64. By the close of play, the Windies had reached 126 for 2, effectively 62 for 2 and everything still to play for.

All the top batsmen made starts but none could put together a big score. Worrell was cheered all the way to the wicket for what he knew would be his last Test innings in Australia. Sadly for him, and the West Indies, he only made 7. Gerry Alexander once again batted well and top scored with 73. He finished top of the batting averages for both sides and you would have got long odds on that
at the start of the series. The West Indies were all out for 321 and so Australia needed 258 to win the game with a day and a bit to go. McDonald was out just before the end and Benaud went in as nightwatchman.

As discussed in Chapter 2, the concept of nightwatchman in cricket is a curious one. Does it really make sense to send in someone who isn’t particularly good at batting when it’s very important not to lose another wicket? It is interesting that Benaud took it upon himself, as captain, to undertake the duty. At least it is more logical for him to do the job, as he was a useful bat. Another example of his positive approach to the game.

As it happened he did not last long the next day but Simpson and O’Neill took the score on to 154 before Simpson was out 8 short of his century. With only another 104 runs needed, Australia were definitely favourites but wickets began to fall. As though to make up for his failure with the bat, Worrell proceeded to bowl 31 overs, concede only 43 runs and take 3 wickets. It was still anyone’s game.

Australia edged closer and when Burge was the seventh wicket to fall, Australia needed just 8 runs to win. There was a moment of controversy when, with 4 runs needed, Grout late cut Valentine for two runs but the off bail had fallen to the ground. The umpires consulted and ruled that the batsman was not out and the runs should stand. Valentine then had Grout caught for no addition to the score. Another tied match was still a possibility, both sides could still win. Australia required 2 runs to win when Martin gave a chance which wasn’t taken and they ran a single to bring the scores level. ‘Slasher’ Mackay had faced 51 balls for his 3 not out. He and Martin ran a bye and the Australians had won by 2 wickets.

The West Indies had lost the series but it didn’t really matter. In truth, a drawn series, or even a West Indies win, would have been
a fairer result. Both sides won one Test relatively comfortably. One Test, the West Indies should really have won and the other two Tests were very, very close.

Although it undoubtedly would have mattered to the West Indies players that they had lost the series, in the wider scheme of things they were still winners. They had played entertaining cricket throughout the tour. They had held their own with Australia. And last but not least, Frank Worrell had debunked the myth that a black man could not successfully captain the West Indies.

So captivated were the Australians with Worrell’s leadership and charisma that they named the winners’ trophy after the touring captain. Former Test player Ernie McCormick, a jeweller by profession, was commissioned to create a trophy incorporating the ball used in the Tied Test. Australia and the West Indies still play for the Frank Worrell Trophy today.
18

Such was the appreciation of the West Indies touring party that the side was given a motorcade and tickertape farewell through the streets of Melbourne. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to see them off. Melbourne came to a standstill. There has never been such a farewell for a visiting cricket team before or since. Frank Worrell and his team returned home from the tour as heroes.

In 1963, the Thames froze over, the Great Train Robbery took place, Kim Philby was named as the ‘third man’
19
, President Kennedy was assassinated, the Beatles had their first No.1 hit with
Please Please Me
and Frank Worrell brought his West Indian team to England.

Life was a lot simpler in 1963. For a start, there were only two TV channels, something that is more or less inconceivable to anyone brought up in today’s multi-channel age. In the evening, the whole family would settle down and watch the
Dick Emery Show
. Later, if you were lucky, you might get a bit of Charlie Drake or Harry Worth. Ah, the good old days. Little wonder then that all cricket lovers looked forward to the West Indies tour of England with eager anticipation.

Apart from the West Indian cricket tour, the other major excitement in 1963 was the Profumo affair. It was a sensation that gripped the country for months and had repercussions well beyond the initial scandal. It had everything! Cabinet ministers, call girls, sex parties, Soviet spies, a socialite osteopath and a mysterious suicide.

John Profumo, educated at Harrow and Oxford, was the Secretary of State for War. He met Christine Keeler at Lord Astor’s country mansion and they had a brief affair. Keeler, and
her friend, Mandy Rice-Davies, were ‘associates’ of Stephen Ward, a fashionable West End osteopath. His profession was probably quite useful bearing in mind the sort of parties he laid on for his friends and clients.

Profumo wasn’t the first MP to have a fling with a ‘call girl’ and he surely won’t be the last. Before the sixties, his affair would more than likely have remained simply as gossip for those in the know. However, by 1963, the world was changing and the media were not so deferential. Satirical magazines like
Private Eye
and TV programmes like
That Was The Week That Was
had a wonderful time.

With the rumours and speculation growing, Profumo made a big mistake. He lied to the House of Commons. In March 1963, he made a statement to the House saying that “no impropriety whatever” was involved in his relationship with Christine Keeler. Call me old-fashioned but it’s hard to imagine a forty-eight-year-old government minister and a twenty-one-year-old ‘call girl’ having a relationship where there was no impropriety involved.

He might have got away with it but for the revelation that Keeler had also slept with Eugene Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Soviet embassy. The world was in the grip of the Cold War during the early sixties. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 had brought the world as close to a nuclear war as it has ever been.

The idea that the British Secretary of State for War was sleeping with the same woman as a Soviet naval attaché was too much for the FBI. They launched Operation Bowtie – possibly named after the only thing, apart from a mask that, allegedly, a naked Cabinet Minister was wearing when he served drinks at one of Stephen Ward’s ‘parties’. And he wasn’t wearing it round his neck.

Harold Macmillan and John F. Kennedy were in the middle of delicate negotiations about the sale of Polaris missiles to the UK. The FBI feared that defence secrets had been compromised. To add a little spice to an already extremely hot story, the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jnr knew many of the people involved, including Ward and Keeler. He provided the FBI with regular reports of the various activities. It seems likely that he had a front row seat at some of Ward’s parties and therefore was in a good position to let the FBI know what was going down, so to speak.

The game was up for Profumo. He had to apologise for lying to the House of Commons and resign from both the Government and his Parliamentary seat. The Establishment needed a scapegoat so they went for the easiest targets – Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies (proving that having a
double-barrelled
name was not enough to protect you from the English Establishment.)

In June 1963, Ward was charged with living off immoral earnings and procuring prostitutes. The case came to court the following month. The prosecuting counsel was Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who had been the prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover court case. He made a particularly harsh attack on Ward’s character in his closing speech describing him as “a thoroughly filthy fellow” and “a wicked, wicked creature”. Ward apparently took an overdose of sleeping tablets the following night and was discovered in a coma the next morning. The jury, with strong guidance from the judge, found Ward guilty of living off immoral earnings and he died three days later without regaining consciousness.

Ward had claimed that he was providing information to MI5 about Eugene Ivanov but they denied it at the time of his trial – well they would wouldn’t they? Many years later, Ward’s claim was corroborated by retired MI5 officers. Beyond doubt was the fact
that Sir Roger Hollis, head of MI5, was a friend/client of his as was Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. The latter was later exposed as the ‘fourth man’ in the Philby affair.

It was later established that Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies and others were pressured by the police to lie in court about their associations with Ward. It seems likely that Ward lent Keeler more money than she actually gave to him.

You may be thinking that this is all very interesting but what has it got to do with cricket. Well, as it happens, the Profumo affair made a major contribution in helping Britain get the only Prime Minister ever to have played first-class cricket.

The Tories had been in power since 1951 and Harold Macmillan had been Prime Minister since 1957. The Profumo Affair brought a huge amount of pressure on to the Tory party in general and Macmillan in particular. In October 1963, he resigned on the grounds of ill health. There were no elections for leaders in those days and the obvious successor was ‘Rab’ Butler, the ‘unofficial’ Deputy Prime Minister.

However, poor ‘Rab’ had not gone to Eton and was also considered a bit of a ‘lefty’ (these things are all relative). The ‘magic circle’ of Tory elders looked at all the likely candidates and decided that the job should go to the 14
^th
Earl of Home. True, he was a member of the House of Lords at the time, not the House of Commons, but he had been educated at Eton and was damn good at cricket.

Using recent legislation that had enabled the 2
^nd
Viscount Stansgate to become Anthony Wedgwood-Benn (or Tony Benn as we now know him), the 14
^th
Earl of Home was transformed into plain old Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Macmillan advised the Queen to invite the Old Etonian to form a Government, presumably on the grounds that he was a jolly decent chap.

For a few weeks, Sir Alec Douglas-Home was Prime Minister without being a member of either the House of Lords or the House of Commons, a rather unusual state of affairs to say the least. He eventually got into the Commons through a by-election in the safe Tory seat of Kinross and West Perthshire. Willie Rushton, of
Private Eye
fame, stood against him but polled only 45 votes.

Sir Alec, or Lord Dunglass as he appeared in the scorebook, played ten first-class matches for six different teams including Middlesex, Oxford University, H.D.G. Leveson Gower’s XI and the MCC (with whom he toured South America under Sir Pelham – aka Plum – Warner). Sadly, politics curtailed a promising cricketing career in 1927.

When Frank Worrell and his West Indies team arrived in April 1963, Macmillan was still PM and Gerry and the Pacemakers were top of the Hit Parade (that’s what it was called then!) with ‘
How Do You Do It
?
’. That was probably what the Gloucestershire team was asking Charlie Griffith as he took 8 for 23 when they were bowled out for just 60. The West Indies had also bowled out Worcestershire for 119 in the tour’s opening first-class game. Worcestershire had Tom Graveney to thank for getting that many. He scored 75 of the runs himself. The tourists were looking very strong and the First Test was still a month away.

The match against Gloucestershire was noteworthy for Sir Learie Constantine’s intervention in an ongoing dispute at a Bristol bus company which had refused to employ coloured workers.

Bristol in the early 1960s had around 3,000 residents of West Indian origin, some whom had served in the armed forces during the Second World War and others who had emigrated to Britain more recently. They suffered discrimination in housing and employment. One of their main grievances was with the Bristol Omnibus Company, which had been nationalised since 1950.

The company enforced a strict colour bar by refusing to employ blacks or Asians as bus crew. This was effectively endorsed by the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TG WU). The company claimed white women would refuse to ride on buses driven by black men or would feel unsafe if they employed black bus conductors. It was an act of blatant racism and provoked Paul Stephenson, a twenty-six-year-old teacher and community officer working in St Pauls, an area of Bristol, to lead a boycott of the city’s buses. His protest was backed by thousands of local people.

Tony Benn, a Bristol MP, lent his support and Sir Learie Constantine, who at the time was the High Commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago, wrote letters to the bus company condemning their actions. Sir Learie attended the tourist’s game against Gloucestershire in early May and leaflets were handed out to West Indian players as they arrived at Bristol. Frank Worrell was unwilling to get embroiled in the situation. “We do not want to get involved in political matters,” he said. Constantine’s respect for Worrell was not diminished by his lack of involvement. They remained good friends to the end.

The protests and negotiations went on all summer. Sir Learie Constantine continued to be involved. On 28
^th
August the company finally capitulated and agreed to lift the bar. It was the same day that Martin Luther King delivered his
I have a dream speech
.

It would take another five years before the Race Relations Act of 1968 made racial discrimination at the workplace illegal. The Bristol bus protest had played its part in bringing this about.

After Bristol, the West Indies moved on to Fenners and comfortably beat a Cambridge University side captained by Mike Brearley. The tourists scored 512, which included a ferocious maiden first-class century from Wes Hall in just sixty-five minutes.

In all, the Windies played ten first-class matches before the start of the First Test. This is in stark contrast with touring sides these days that seem to get off the plane, have a quick net, one knockabout match against a county side consisting of under-19s and Kolpak players and then go straight into a Test match. Back in 1963, the West Indies won 6 and drew 3 of their opening ten first-class matches.

The only game they lost was against Yorkshire. As was usually the way then, Yorkshire fielded a full strength side. Geoffrey Boycott, ‘Best Young Cricketer of the Year’ in 1963, couldn’t even get in the team. Yorkshire made 226 in their first innings with Fred Trueman scoring 55. The West Indies were then bowled out for 109, Trueman taking 5 wickets. Opening for Yorkshire in the second innings, D.E.V. Padgett was hit in the face by a ball from Charlie Griffith and had to retire hurt. Brian Close declared at 145 for 6 and Yorkshire bowled the visitors out for 151 with Trueman again taking 5 wickets.

Clearly there was no thought of saving Trueman for the Test matches but perhaps there should have been. In the First Test at Old Trafford, the West Indies racked up 501 for 6 declared with Conrad Hunte scoring 182, Trueman taking 2 for 95 off forty overs. England made 205 and 296 and got hammered by 10 wickets.

Fiery Fred probably wasn’t in the best of moods. He was due a
£
150 good conduct bonus from the recent winter tour of Australia. With the immaculate timing for which it was renowned in those days, the MCC had informed Trueman just before the Old Trafford Test that they were cutting £50 from it. The reduction was because of his alleged “behaviour off the field”. Talking after lights out, walking with his hands in his pockets, not showing the Duke of Norfolk sufficient respect; that sort of thing. He threatened not to play for England again but eventually backed down.

The West Indies team that toured England in 1963 was well balanced and strong in all departments. Many of the players had experience of English conditions either from the last tour in 1957 or from playing in the Lancashire leagues. In the Test series, apart from Worrell with forty-five overs, all the bowling was done by four bowlers only – Hall, Griffith, Sobers and Gibbs. Ten players played in all five Tests and the only problem they had was with Conrad

Hunte’s opening partner. Carew, McMorris and Rodriguez were all tried with moderate success. Hunte – the disciplined ‘sheet anchor’, restraining his natural aggression – and Kanhai – flamboyant, improvising and entertaining – were the batting stars in the Tests with Butcher and Sobers not far behind. Worrell scored an immaculate 74 not out at Old Trafford but after that did not get a big score in the Test matches. At the age of thirty-eight he was past his best but more than made up for it with his leadership and captaincy.

The West Indies emphatic win in the First Test put them in a confident mood. The previous year, the West Indies had beaten India 5 – 0 in the Caribbean so this was their sixth Test win in succession. After two one-day matches in Belfast and Dublin, they played Sussex at Hove. Ted Dexter – a ‘scratch’ golfer – was captain of Sussex as well as England and he must have wished he had opted for the golf course, as his county side collapsed for 59 in their first innings. The tourists declared at 287 for 9 with Sobers out one short of his 100. When Sussex batted again, Dexter made a century in two and a half hours but the West Indies went on to win the match with ease.

Dexter was an attractive and aggressive batsman and his hook rivalled that of Henry Cooper for effectiveness. On 18
^th
June that year, at Wembley Stadium, a Cooper left hook knocked down Cassius Clay, as he was then known. Only the bell saved the future
Muhammad Ali from defeat. A mysterious split glove that needed fixing gave him the time to recover and he stopped Cooper with a cut eye in the next round.