Wally Hammond
In early April 1945, even while Hitler remained alive, directing phantom armies from his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin, the English cricket authorities decided that it might be possible to stage a number of Test-level matches with Australia during the course of the summer. The ensuing ‘Victory’ series presented its organisers with a huge feat of logistics. Many of England’s cricket grounds bore the scars of Luftwaffe bombing, while there was also the small matter of securing the services of eleven fit men to put into the field. Two of the nation’s leading prewar bowlers, Yorkshire’s Hedley Verity and Essex’s Ken Farnes, had perished in action, while others had returned from years of captivity in German or Japanese POW camps in far from ideal condition to play representative sport. In the measured words of the 71-year-old MCC deputy secretary Pelham ‘Plum’ Warner, the man primarily responsible for selecting the England team: ‘The project [had] seemed sound when initially advanced to me, but it proved harder to effect than ideal’ – particularly at a time when such men had none of the benefits of our modern communications technology at their disposal. If Warner wanted to correspond with someone about a matter such as their availability to play cricket for England, he did so by writing them a letter, putting it in an envelope, affixing a stamp, taking it to the nearest pillar box and then awaiting developments. ‘It was not a task I [had] undertaken in the full knowledge of the actual burden it might present,’ he was later to ruefully admit.
Not the least of the matters demanding Warner’s attention that April was the question of who might captain England in the hastily arranged series with Australia. The peerless Walter Hammond had been the man in charge for his side’s last Test fixture before the war, a drawn match against the West Indies at the Oval. Hammond himself was clearly the best batsman England had produced since the Jack Hobbs era of 20 years earlier. Yet doubts about his fitness to ‘continue to assume the high honour of the England Test Match captaincy’, as The Times put it, remained. Hammond was then nearly 42, somewhere between muscular and heavyset, a chain smoker and a martyr to lumbago, with a love life that attracted a certain amount of what passed for tabloid scrutiny in those more reticent times. He had joined the RAF on the outbreak of hostilities, but in the event found himself playing a good deal of sport, occasionally training new recruits, and coming to resolve a complicated home life that led to the terse Press Association report: ‘A decree was granted to Mrs. Dorothy Hammond, wife of the England star. Misconduct was alleged with a woman named Harvey.’
Hammond was perhaps fortunate, even so, to enjoy Pelham Warner’s unstinting respect and friendship, which had something of a father-son quality to it. In that elaborately formal age, when even routine business letters tended to open with phrases such as ‘Sir, I have the honour to state that consideration has been given to the matter of your application for overdraft facilities at this institution …’, and were topped-and-tailed either by the use of precise titles, or merely by surnames, the Warner-Hammond correspondence found in the archive at Lord’s is invariably of the ‘Dear Wally’ and ‘Yours ever, Plum’ variety.
Like Warner himself, Hammond had spent his early years overseas. His father, a corporal with the Royal Artillery who seems to have been of the opinion that children should be brought up in mild fear of their parents, was posted successively to Hong Kong and Malta. The family returned to England just before the First World War, and Walter, an only child, was sent to boarding school. His father was killed fighting in France in 1918, and his mother seems to have been more concerned with her social status than in the daily welfare of her young son. She handed him over to tutors during the school holidays, starved him of love, and on the occasions they did meet beat him regularly. It’s surely not stretching psychology too far to conclude that this upbringing turned Hammond into something of a loner and a bully, ‘a dreadful little shit’ as he admitted years later to a younger colleague, none of which should in the least detract from a proper acknowledgement of his obvious skills as a magnificent all-round cricketer.
After seventeen years as a professional player, Hammond had turned amateur in 1938, largely because this was then thought to be the proper status befitting England’s national cricket captain. The move gave him the curious distinction of leading out the Gentlemen in their annual match against the Players at Lord’s, having done the honours for the Players in an earlier fixture. But even someone as well versed in the nuances of the British class system as Hammond could perhaps mistake widespread respect for his sporting skills for broader social acceptance. Cricket has a way of finding the truth about people, and the evidence suggests that although the incumbent England skipper might look, behave and sound not unlike a proper gentleman, that did not necessarily mean that he would be universally treated as one. Hammond was and remained, in the blunt terminology of the day, ‘in trade’. Walter Robins, a Lord’s grandee whose own personal charm came with a sensitive on-off switch, once referred to him as ‘a jumped-up car salesman’, while the Cambridge-educated Basil Allen, Hammond’s predecessor as captain of Gloucestershire, was on ground well beyond this when he spoke of his dislike of a ‘moody bugger’ who took ‘no interest in other people’s lives unless they happened to be pretty girls.’
The author David Foot quotes an exchange of views between Allen and Pelham Warner during the last pre-war Gentlemen v Players match at Lord’s.
‘Basil, that Wally Hammond of yours really is a wonderful chap, isn’t he?’
‘If you want my honest opinion, Plum, I think he’s an absolute shit.’
Nonetheless, Hammond would duly return to lead England in the five Victory matches against Australia in the summer of 1945. The series was eventually tied two-all, with one draw, and huge crowds flocked to each of the fifteen days’ cricket. Hammond finished them with a total of 369 runs, scored at an average of 46. It says something for his technical prowess that certain critics would interpret even those figures as evidence of his waning powers. A lesser batsman would consider them highly creditable, and of the century the England captain scored in the series’ second match, at Sheffield, the Wisden correspondent wrote: ‘The finest game of the season was memorable for a wonderful hundred by Hammond on the opening day, when the pitch was at its worst. He never neglected a scoring opportunity.’
The 18-year-old John Dewes was one of a trio of hitherto unknown schoolboy cricketers, alongside Donald Carr and the Hon. Luke White, who to some surprise – including their own – found themselves asked to represent England in the summer’s third international fixture, played at Lord’s. Forty years later, he remembered what had happened after he and his fellow debutants were summoned by the captain to join him at the White City dog-racing track late on the Saturday evening of the match.
‘When we got there,’ Dewes recalled, ‘we all sat down to a meal in the stadium, which was packed like Wembley on Cup Final day, the skipper at one end of the table, one or two others in the middle, and the three youngsters down at the end. Then the racing itself began. From then on for the rest of the night we were basically Hammond’s runners. “Dewes!” he’d call out. “Put a quid on dog number 5 for me.” I’d walk up, collect the pound from the skipper, go to the window, pass it over, then go back and hand Hammond the slip. His dog didn’t win. Next race it was the same thing, only this time the skipper shouted, “Carr! Put this down on number 4,” or whatever it was. And Carr did so. Hammond kept that up for about six races, alternating between the two of us, I might add with never a winner among them, and then on the final heat he shouted out “Mr. White!” as if just now remembering his name. And Luke White said “Yes, sir?”, went up, took the skipper’s money, passed it through the window for him, and trotted back with the slip. Still no joy for old Wally.
‘I suppose we could have objected,’ Dewes continued. ‘After all, putting money down on the greyhounds had nothing to do with our duties as Test cricketers. But that’s how it was in those days. I should say that like everyone else I admired Hammond the cricketer to the ends of the earth. He was one of the true giants of the game. But he could also be pretty snooty to those he deemed to be small fry, including some of his own teammates.’
Set against this, there was the moment in the summer’s fourth match, also played at Lord’s, when the Australians’ wicketkeeper Stan Sismey was hit on the thumb and unable to continue his duties behind the stumps, forcing his teammate Jim Workman to take over. Workman did his best, but it was said that the chief characteristic of his keeping lay in his emulating the Ancient Mariner’s tendency to stoppeth one in three. A total of 39 byes and leg byes, among 57 extras as a whole, ensued. The Australians’ Ross Stanford remembered that there had been some spirited back and forth about this in the visitors’ dressing room, where just before the start on the final morning, ‘Old Wally Hammond put his head round the door, and said to [Australia’s captain] Lindsay Hassett, “Do you know, Lindsay, if you asked me, I could let Keith Carmody keep wicket.” Well, Keith was actually our 12th man that day, but he was a fair middle-order bat and more to the point not a bad keeper, either, back home in Sydney. “Oh?” said Lindsay. “Thanks, Wally. I didn’t know that. But since you ask, will you let Keith Carmody keep wicket?” And Wally said, “Yes, he can go out there with my blessing.” Well, Keith went out there and did bloody well, too. I always remember that about Wally. Funny bloke. You could never tell which side of his face you might get.’
Hammond retired from cricket after a generally unhappy final tour of Australia over the winter of 1946-47, and in time emigrated with his second wife to South Africa. The popular consensus on him was that of a dazzling youthful talent – deemed by one critic to be the ‘Nijinsky of cricket’, almost spoilt by fortune – who later bloated in his Durban exile like Elvis Presley at Graceland. It’s a caricature, if one with a grain of truth. In February 1965, the England cricket team was playing a Test down the coast at Port Elizabeth, and happily agreed to pass round the hat in order to take their old skipper out to dinner. In recent years, Hammond had both lost his job and been involved in a serious car crash, events that possibly served to further darken a personality already prone to the choleric.
The England wicketkeeper John Murray remembered: ‘We got to the hotel and there was Wally waiting for us. Everyone said a cheery hello and we told him we just had to nip in to another room to shake some hands, but that we’d be right out again and on our way to a slap-up dinner. When we got back 15 minutes later, Wally was gone. He left a note behind. It said he’d never been so insulted in all his life by our behaviour in making him wait for us. “I am a former captain of England, and you buggers have dishonoured the office” was the gist of it. He died just a few months later. All very sad’.
Walter Hammond was just 62 at the time he suffered a fatal heart attack in July 1965. It may be unfair to judge him from a modern perspective in which it’s no longer fashionable to admire reticence, not to mention a certain hauteur, in our sporting heroes. But there were periods in the 1930s when Hammond was the complete cricketer, a batting genius who on his day was also a useful seam bowler and an electrifying slip fielder who once held 78 catches in a season, ten of them in a single match. I continue to think of him as one of England’s greatest ever players, if also as a man who sometimes struggled to make taking an interest in lesser mortals seem anything but a necessary chore.
Christopher Sandford’s book The Cricketers of 1945: Rising From the Ashes of World War Two is available now.
