Meet England’s oldest surviving player – now living Down Under
Don Smith, 94, reveals why Test cricket was not for him and how Australia became home
England’s oldest living Test player is intrigued to hear that he is only the second most elderly in world cricket. South Africa’s John Watkins, also 94, beats him by 65 days. Don Smith considers this fact, then says of Watkins: “Poor old bugger.”
At his bowling club near his home in Adelaide, Smith is only a mile or two from England’s current Test team, but a universe away in terms of history and memories. He scored nearly 17,000 runs and took 340 wickets for Sussex from 1946 to 1962 but was restricted to playing just three Tests, all against West Indies in 1957, in a golden age. Among the protagonists that summer were Sobers, Walcott, Worrell, Ramadhin, Weekes, Graveney, May, Cowdrey, Close, Trueman, Statham and Laker.
For Smith the immersion was brief but reinforced his view of sportsmanship. Troubled by osteoporosis, but still pin sharp, he takes up the story.
“I got a hundred against Windies for Sussex in the match prior, and it was the end of a very good run I was having, because I’d been to Jamaica with the Duke of Norfolk’s side, and had a good time there against Roy Gilchrist, who chucked it like fury.
“So I suppose they thought, ‘Well, this fellow’s in good nick, we might as well let him have a go.’ Lo and behold I turned up at Lord’s and nothing much was said. I was presented with my colours in the basement by a minion, who gave me my cap and sweaters. Well, I thought it was great.”
At Lord’s, Smith batted once, for eight. “Then, in the second one, at Nottingham, I walked,” he says, “And when I got in the dressing room, Peter May said, ‘You don’t walk in Test matches.’
“I said, ‘Sorry Peter, but this is a cricket match. It’s what I do. You know you’re out – bugger off. My conscience wouldn’t have let me stay. But then May tells me at lunch, ‘The umpires would have given you not out, so you should have stayed.’ I said, ‘But I tell you, I nicked it’. I thought, ‘This really isn’t me’.”
From that short taste of life at the top, Smith slipped out of the England side with 25 runs in four innings and one wicket from 270 balls.
Now an Australian citizen, he still has the clearest recollections: “I was privileged to see [Everton] Weekes bat the greatest innings [90] I’ve seen, at Lord’s. He was battered and bashed; his gloves were full of blood; his knuckles were split. My thigh pad in the Test at Lord’s was two pieces of carpet, with tapes to tie it round my waist and tapes to tie it round my thigh.”
To leave behind, for an afternoon, the frenetic build-up to the second Test in Adelaide to speak to Smith is to step through a door in time. Born 10 years before Hitler came to power, he moved to Adelaide in 1986 after teaching at Lancing College and coaching Sri Lanka in their early days, to be with his wife Lyn, whom he met at Lord’s.
He tells a nice love story too: “I was a player and she was a spectator. You know, I was doing nothing much in the outfield and thought, ‘She looks all right’. When I walked out of the back of the pavilion I thought, ‘I’ve got to speak to her’. But that blew up and she eventually married an Australian policeman.
“Then I came here with the Lancing boys side. I thought, ‘I wonder …’. In the Adelaide directory there were only three with her name. I thought, ‘Give it a try’. Her voice answered the first number I called. She was divorced. ‘Can we meet?’ ‘Yes, we can.’
“I was staying with a fellow just down the road here. I said, ‘By the way, while I’m here, I’d like to see this friend of mine. She lives in Linden Park. How do I get there?’ He said, ‘You don’t have to go very far. You’re in Linden Park. Walk up the road 50 metres and turn left.’ It was as simple as that.
‘In the second Test, I walked. Afterwards, Peter May said: “You don’t walk in Tests”’
“I wrote on the way out to Singapore, ‘What would you say if I said I was coming back?’ The response I got a week later was, ‘I can’t think why you left’.”
A left-hand opening bat and left-arm medium pacer, Smith is unapologetic about preferring cricket’s past. “I think I played towards the end of the great days of cricket,” he says.
“Yes, you were out there; there was needle, you were trying to win matches. But I had a very good friend called Maurice Hallam, of Leicestershire. When he played in Sussex he stayed with me, and I did the same when we played in Leicester. That wouldn’t happen these days, would it?
“I can still hear him now in my home cabbage patch at Worthing. Playing Leicester, I got out for nought in the first innings – caught Hallam, bowled somebody. Second innings, all I heard from behind me was ‘Oh, Don.’ Maurice had caught the second one as well. I thought that summed it up.”
Smith laughs at today’s controversies. “As for this drinking nonsense,” he says, “I can remember Alan Oakman [the Sussex all-rounder] being given a curfew. Robin Marlar decided, ‘Alan, he’s just not getting enough sleep’. Because he was very much a ladies’ man.
“I went out and came back about 11.30, and there’s Robin sitting in the vestibule of the hotel, saying, ‘He’s not back yet, you know’.
“The next morning, Robin came in for breakfast and said, ‘Do you know, I went to bed at three o’clock and he still wasn’t in.’ At that moment, Alan turned up, and said, ‘What are you talking about? I went to bed at 10 o’clock.’ End of curfew.”
Happy with his vantage point at home, with the sound turned down, Smith is not angling to attend the pink ball, day-night Test downtown.
“I stopped going to matches years ago because I can’t stand the noise,” he says. “Most spectators want to be part of the action. I don’t want that.
“I just want to see my beautiful game of cricket.”