Extract from

CHAPTER SIX

THE THIRD TEST

MELBOURNE

DECEMBER 1954–JANUARY 1955

 “I can see Len now. He was sitting up in his bed with a woollen vest on, staring at the wall.”

“I don’t think I can play today,” Hutton said. “I’m not feeling too well.”

It was Friday the 31st of December, the third Test was scheduled to start in less than two hours, and the England captain had lost his will for the battle.

‘He was feeling unwell,’ his official biographer Gerald Howat records, ‘with fibrositis and a cold, white as a sheet and shivering.’

 But that is not how anybody else in the room remembers it.

 “He seemed to be in a very disturbed state,” Denis Compton wrote, “as if suddenly things had got too much for him, and he couldn’t or wouldn’t go on.”

“Come on, mate,” Godfrey Evans cajoled.

“Come down to the ground at any rate,” Bill Edrich suggested.

 “Let’s put it this way,” Geoffrey Howard says. “If somebody had said, ‘The hotel’s on fire’, he’d have been out of bed and down the stairs as quick as any of us.”

*

The day after Christmas, with the team still recovering from their ‘hilarious’ party, they had caught the train to Newcastle for a three-day country match. But their captain had not gone with them. “He went ahead to Melbourne on his own. He wanted to think things out for himself.”

Peter May scored a century for the fourth successive match, Wardle and Appleyard took wickets, and Wisden records that ‘M.C.C. gave a joyous display.’

Yet all the while their captain sat in his room in the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne, trying to focus his mind on the challenge of the forthcoming Test. It was Thursday afternoon before his team arrived to join him.

“Basically,” the manager believes, “it all amounted to one thing. ‘How am I going to tell Alec that he’s not playing?’ That was the thing that was preying on his mind.”

The idea before the second Test had been, in the words of Ian Peebles, ‘to reserve Bedser for Melbourne, a favourite ground of his, and let him restart at full blast.’ But, after the superb bowling of Tyson and Statham at Sydney, Bedser could only regain his place at the expense of Wardle – and that meant disturbing the shape of a winning team.

*

Len Hutton grew up in Fulneck, west of Leeds, in a family steeped in Moravian Presbyterianism. He was not an active worshipper – “I don’t remember Leonard showing any signs of ever wanting to go to church” – but he had internalised their belief in discipline, hard work and self-sufficiency and he practised the ‘stillness’ that for centuries had been a hallmark of the sect.

‘What Moravians have said about stillness,’ an early Yorkshire believer wrote, in the days when their settlements were attacked by angry mobs, ‘has either been strangely misunderstood or strangely misrepresented. They mean by stillness that we should endeavour to keep our minds calm, composed and collected, free from hurry and dissipation.”

*

On the eve of the Melbourne Test, the England captain sat drinking coffee with Bob Appleyard, and he watched as Compton, Edrich and Evans came down the steps, dressed up for a night on the town. “Look at those three,” he said to his fellow Yorkshireman. “They’ll say they need to relax. But this is the time to be thinking about the match.”

From Sunday, when they went their separate ways at Sydney, to that Friday morning when he would not get out of bed, he had done little else but think. But what was he thinking?

“I can remember on the voyage out,” Geoffrey says, “there were times when I would retire to my cabin with a tin of toffees and a book. But I can’t imagine Len doing that. He’d just have sat in his room with the radio on, staring at the wall.”

*

A stillness of mind and deep powers of concentration were at the heart of Len Hutton’s batting. In 1938 he had stayed at the crease for 13¼ hours to set a new world Test record score of 364. Then after the War he had carried the fragile England batting for years, adjusting his technique to compensate for a left arm made two inches shorter by a gymnasium accident.

Denis Compton scored sparkling runs with a carefree abandon but Hutton carried the responsibility, never more than in the Caribbean the previous winter. The first professional cricketer to lead M.C.C. overseas, he endured a stream of attacks for his diplomatic faux pas and his inability to keep his more wayward team members under control. Yet, after losing the first two matches, he hit 169 at Georgetown, 205 at Kingston, and the series was levelled.

At the start of the summer of 1954 Len Hutton had scored 6,665 Test runs at an average of 61.71. “His powers of concentration at the wicket were enormous,” Geoffrey says, “and the statistics are wonderful. But not as wonderful as seeing him bat. He was such a beautiful stroke-maker.”

But the Caribbean tour had taken its toll, and in the summer of 1954 he was bowled for nought in the first Test and took a month out of cricket. His replacement as England captain, David Sheppard, was an amateur, and there were many in cricket’s ruling circles – not least the selector Walter Robins and the Surrey trio of Errol Holmes, ‘Shrimp’ Leveson Gower and secretary Brian Castor – who advocated that Sheppard should take charge in Australia rather than the professional Hutton.

Apart from any other consideration, Hutton, whose official title on the tour was Captain of the M.C.C. side, was not even a member of Marylebone Cricket Club, an anomaly about which he was very sensitive. “We were going out to a function one night,” the manager recalls, “and I was wearing my M.C.C. tie. ‘I’d rather you didn’t wear that,’ Len said to me.”

In the press, Jim Swanton was quick to express his reservations about professional captains, as he had done in 1952 before Hutton’s first appointment:

When professionals have been called upon to lead representative sides, they have not usually taken particularly easily to the job. There is no strong reason why they should since, whereas they have risen to the heights by concentrating all their energy and effort on succeeding in their own particular departments, the secret of captaincy lies in seeing the game as a whole, in appreciating the feelings of the other ten players, and in always taking the unselfish part.

  For the England manager, however, the issue was more complex. On the one hand, he regarded much of the attitudes of Swanton and his old Surrey bosses, Brian Castor and Leveson Gower, as outmoded snobbery. “I think Jim would have been upset if anybody had said he wasn’t a snob. He was proud of it.” By the mid-1950s the certainties of social class were fading. “I remember Jim telling me how he’d been travelling by rail one day in Kent, and some chaps had got in, drinking and making a great noise. ‘I suppose you realise this is a first-class carriage,’ he said. ‘Yes, we do, mate,’ they replied. ‘Do you want to see our tickets, or would you like to show us yours first?’”

But, on the other hand, the England manager knew that Len Hutton had had no background of training or experience for the responsibilities he carried. “The captaincy of the English cricket team was the most important office in all sport. It meant a lot to Len, but he’d never been captain of Yorkshire. He was very confident of his own ability as a player but, till the later stages of his career, I don’t think he ever saw himself as a leader. They say that in 1953, when Freddie Brown played at Lord’s under his captaincy, he called Freddie ‘Skipper’. He’d been captain for over a year, but he still hadn’t got used to it. Deep down, I think he had an inferiority complex.

“He relied a great deal on Dorothy and, by Melbourne, he was missing her terribly. There were times on the tour when I had to pack his bags for him because he wasn’t ready. I remember asking him at one point if he’d had any letters of congratulation. ‘I’ve been unindated,’ he said. He wasn’t a great user of words. ‘Unindated.’ And he opened up his case and there were hundreds of them. ‘Give them to me,’ I said. ‘I’ll write a stereotyped letter of thanks, and you can just top and tail them all.’”

Len Hutton could speak entertainingly at the various functions, and he was always immaculately dressed. But he needed time away from the limelight, time when he did not have to be Len Hutton, captain of the M.C.C.

“I was sitting in the Windsor Hotel with him and Johnny Wardle, having a drink, and this Australian sat down at our table. He was full of grog, and he asked Len who he was. ‘My name’s Joe Soap,’ Len said, and this chap spent the rest of the evening calling him Mister Soap.”

By the morning of the first day it had all got too much for him.

*

The manager summoned a doctor.

“He was recommended back in London. ‘This is the chap you should see if you need medical help in Melbourne.’ And I got him to examine Len.”

“There’s nothing really wrong with you, Mr Hutton,” he said. “You’d better get up, have a shower and some breakfast and get down to the ground to play.”

Today there would be a sports psychologist on hand to help him through the crisis. “He was depressed, but in those days people didn’t talk about depression like they do now. You were expected to get on with your life.”

The small gathering in the room waited for the captain’s reaction.

“Len didn’t look overjoyed at the doctor’s opinion. I think he’d made up his mind that he wasn’t going to play, but he did as he was told.”

With Compton, Evans and Edrich returning to their rooms, the manager quietly offered the captain his assistance.

“If you like, I will tell Alec Bedser he’s not playing.”

“No,” Len insisted. “It’s my job.”

Nearly half a century later Geoffrey Howard wonders if perhaps he should have insisted. ‘The secret of captaincy lies in appreciating the feelings of the other players,’ Jim Swanton had written, but it was not lack of appreciation of Alec’s feelings that was the difficulty here. “Len knew he was going to hurt Alec, and Len didn’t like hurting people.”

The world was moving forward. Only eight years earlier, M.C.C. had toured Australia under the management of Major Rupert Howard and the captaincy of Wally Hammond. “They travelled around together by car while the team struggled with the trains. They drove from Brisbane to Sydney with Len and Cyril Washbrook in the back, and the only word they spoke all journey to them was when Wally passed back his cigarette. ‘Light that for me, will you?’”

Then in 1950/51 they were under the captaincy of Freddie Brown, with six amateurs in the party. “If Freddie had still been England captain, he’d have taken Alec to one side on the eve of the match. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you out,’ he’d have said, and Alec would have accepted it. ‘Right, thank you for telling me.’ Alec was used to the master-and-servant relationship. It was much harder to take from Len.”

*

At the ground the England captain asked Denis Compton to take Alec Bedser out to the pitch and to see how he felt about bowling on it.

They pressed their thumbs into the ground, and the bowler gave the only reply he was ever going to give. “Yes, I reckon I can bowl well on that. I’d like to play.” And he added, “If I do, I’ll be trying.”

As Compton later wrote, ‘It was always a certainty that Alec would be trying.’

Hutton had no stomach for the decision, but his senior players were all of the same mind. Evans, Edrich, Compton: they all told him that he should leave out Alec. But they left it to the captain to find the best way of telling him.

“I can see it clearly to this day,” Geoffrey Howard says. “It’s a vivid picture in my mind. I’d been delayed at the hotel, and I’d only just arrived. The team list was pinned to the back of the dressing room door. Alec was standing in front of it on one side, Johnny Wardle on the other. They were both changed and ready, both with their blazers on, looking at the list to see who was playing.”

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