Over and still not out
In these days of quickfire cricket it is hard to imagine a match lasting 12 days without a winner. Yet that is what happened between March 3 and March 14 1939, in what has become known as the Timeless Test
Few sports offer the languid drama of Test cricket. Three Saturdays ago, the denouement of four days’ play unfolded across an entire afternoon at Kingsmead in Durban. Eighty years ago, at the same venue, the match lasted 12 days — and still ended in a draw. Much of the blame for that fell on two mules and Adolf Hitler.
And the match turned on a tickey.
The tickey, a threepenny coin, was in the pocket of Alan Melville, the South African captain, who made his way to the middle of the pitch with the England skipper Wally Hammond on a blustery Friday morning in the late summer of 1939. They would toss to decide who batted first. As home team captain, Melville provided the coin.
In the four previous Tests, Melville had lost the toss. South African fast bowler Norman Gordon offered him the tickey that he had won off England’s Len Hutton at cards. Gordon believed it would bring Melville luck.
The toss was vital. If SA batted first while the pitch held firm they would not only score many runs, but avoid batting second against the guile of England’s Hedley Verity, one of the best spin bowlers in the world, who was known to exploit the vicissitudes of a crumbling pitch.
From the balcony on the grandstand, the South African players looked on anxiously. Dudley Nourse — the AB de Villiers of his day — couldn’t bear to watch. He sat in the changing room, fingers crossed, “hoping to be of assistance to Melville”.
“Melville,” Nourse recalled many years later, “bent down anxiously to see which way the coin had fallen, and rose with a smile.”
SA would bat first.
If SA were relieved, England were worried. Two of their three concerns were about the fitness and form of two batsmen.
Eddie Paynter, their leading run-scorer, was doubtful because of an injury (he would be passed fit).
Bill Edrich had not lived up to promise, scoring just 24 runs in the series and making ducks in his last two Test innings. But Edrich had scored 150 the week before against Natal in Pietermaritzburg. Hammond backed his friend; it would prove an inspired decision.
Their third fear was existential. During the four months on tour, the political situation in Europe had deteriorated. The year before the danger of another world war had been averted, or postponed, only by Britain and France appeasing Hitler. In the infamous Munich Agreement of September 1938, Germany was given the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs called it the Munich betrayal. Not that it satisfied Hitler, who was soon rattling his sabre, making more territorial demands. The English players were eager to get home before war broke out and German U-boats began preying on British shipping.
At least their passages were booked. The Athlone Castle would sail from Cape Town on March 17, giving them more than enough time for the match.
The fifth Test of the series, beginning on March 3, would be played to the finish, unlike three of the four preceding matches which had ended in draws. England led the series 1-0 and SA would be given the chance of squaring it.
After the toss in Durban, the cognoscenti agreed that the pitch would begin to break up by day three. By which time, so Melville hoped, SA would have put up an impregnable total.
No-one, however, reckoned with the two mules. In those days, pitches were not covered to protect them from rain. When a pitch began to dry, play was resumed but it made for a “sticky” wicket that was difficult to bat on. Spin bowlers thrived on them.
To avoid a “sticky”, it was agreed that in the event of overnight rain, the groundsman could use a heavy roller pulled by mules to squeeze out the moisture from the pitch before play began. This happened three times in Durban and groundsman Vic Robbins harnessed his two mules to drag the heavy roller up and down, up and down the Kingsmead pitch.
Whatever moisture the mules and their roller did not squeeze from the soil, the sun soon dried out. The compacting by the roller and the baking sun turned the pitch into a hard clay cake, ensuring its durability. There would be no crumbling.
In the first session, the run rate, by today’s standard, was glacial. Six runs came in the first 25 minutes and just 49 between the start and lunch. It took Pieter van der Bijl, as tall as his 1.88m opening partner Melville, 45 minutes to score his first run. England’s fast bowlers, especially Ken Farnes, who was the quickest and most dangerous, helped restrict the scoring.
Van der Bijl and Farnes were friends from university days, the South African at Oxford and the Englishman at Cambridge. Van der Bijl’s cricket career at Oxford had been modest, but his boxing one illustrious: he won the Oxford-Cambridge heavyweight title. On the cricket field, he was more Lennox Lewis than Muhammad Ali, his footwork not the quickest.
With Van der Bijl stoic and Melville sedate, Edrich later claimed that the pair “started so passively it was as if they had eternity before them”. It fell on Farnes “to fire the opening salvo of the Timeless Test”, according to author John Lazenby.
“Pounding the ball in at just short of a length on leg stump, and using his height and brute strength to detonate lift and life from the wicket … he repeatedly peppered Van der Bijl about the body,” wrote Lazenby.
“Cut it out, Ken,” Van der Bijl is reported to have said, according to a reporter who claimed to be able to lipread from the press box.
According to cricket writer Louis Duffus, however, Van der Bijl took the blows uncomplainingly, “risking personal injury rather than his wicket”. It was a display of the same courage that would earn him a Military Cross and bar a few years later in World War 2.
Despite the pain, Van der Bijl considered the Timeless Test to have been the highlight of his cricket career, according to his son Vintcent, who, 28 years later, became a fast bowler as feared as Farnes. By the close of play on the first day, he was 105 not out and SA were 229 for two. By the second, the score was 423 for nine. It was a solid, if slow start.
By the third day’s play — Sunday having been a rest day — SA were all out for 530, Van der Bijl making 125 and Nourse 103. England were 35 for one, trailing by 495 runs. After four days, England were in trouble at 268 for seven, and all out for 316 by day five. Melville could have enforced a follow-on because England were more than 200 runs behind, but he demurred.
Hammond said years later that the SA captain had blundered. Whatever Melville’s reasons for not putting England in again, the game was about to change dramatically.
Before the close of play on day five, Van der Bijl fell three runs short of becoming the first South African to make centuries in both innings of a Test match. By stumps, SA had scored 193 for three, a lead of 407. The Test, everyone agreed, was slipping away from England.
Melville dropped himself down the order because of an injury and made 103, the first of four successive Test centuries.
SA’s second innings ended on day six at 481, requiring England to make a near-impossible 696 to win. But the pitch, thanks to the mules and their heavy roller, held firm.
A week after Hammond had lost the toss, the England captain had a surprise in store. When Hutton was out with the score on 78, he sent in not the regular No 3, Paynter, but Edrich. Not only was it a risk for a man out of Test form, the night before Edrich had overindulged at a party. By the close of play on day seven, however, he had batted away his hangover with an unbeaten century.
By day nine — the eighth having been rained out — Edrich added a second century and England needed only 200 runs to win, with seven wickets standing. Fortune had swung England’s way.
Day 10, officials decided, would have to be the last day. The train to Cape Town would leave that evening and the England players would have to be on it if they wanted to sail home on the Athlone Castle.
Heavy clouds loomed, the humidity was high, and the locals said rain was on its way. England would need to get a move on to win, and they did. By lunchtime their score reached 600. Only rain, it seemed, could save SA.
A phone call came through from an England supporter in Isipingo, 19km south of Durban. “It’s raining hard here,” said the caller. “Please tell Mr Hammond [batting with Paynter] to hurry up.”
By 3.15pm, Paynter was out and the first drops fell. There were three more rain delays and after each one the England batsmen stepped up the run rate,
Hammond losing his wicket in the chase.
By 3.55pm, the storm broke with England a tantalising 42 runs from victory and only five wickets down.
After nine days’ play, there would be no cigar. Or champagne, of which 36 bottles had been put on ice for the winners. They remained corked.
The England players were rushed to the station to catch the 8.15pm train to Cape Town. Flying to Cape Town was not even considered. The players’ contracts forbade it.
“They were far too precious to be allowed in the air,” wrote The Daily Telegraph’s EW Swanton.
The day after the Test, Hitler sent troops into the rest of Czechoslovakia. War became inevitable. Six months later it broke out. For the next six years — eight in the case of SA — Test cricket would go into hibernation.
When SA resumed Test cricket in 1947, it would find that a much-changed world no longer had the patience for timeless Tests. Or with SA.
The first apartheid prime minister, Daniel Malan, could joke about whether “our English or their English” were winning when an England cricket team toured again in 1948/49, but within 25 years there was no-one to play against. SA’s participation in world cricket ended in 1970 because of segregation; specifically over the infamous treatment of one of our own cricketers, Basil D’Oliveira.
By the time of SA’s readmission in 1992, the game was undergoing momentous changes. Today, Twenty20 is all the rage and the Timeless Test a forgotten relic in a world that has forgotten the meaning of patience.