Ashes Heroes No 40: Alec Bedser

I'm in Spain at the moment for the start of the Volvo Ocean Race (that's sailing, not cricket), so blogging has been a little light but don't go thinking I've forgotten our Ashes project. Less than ten months to go and this week's entry at No 40 in the list, following Matty Hayden last week, is Sir Alec Bedser.

It is hard to attend a cricket dinner these days without seeing Alec Bedser. In 2008 alone, I have seen him at the Cricket Society dinner, the Wisden dinner, the Cricket Writers Club dinner and the Lord's Taverners nosh for Mark Ramprakash and those who have scored 100 hundreds. With all these dinners he is going to, how does Sir Alec not have the same problem I do shifting weight? It's not as if he is running around any more. Perhaps he skips pudding.

Each time, Bedser has been attended by Mickey Stewart, a spry 76 to Bedser's 90, who selflessly ferries his old Surrey friend around and scoffs all the free food and drink with barely a thought for himself. Jokes aside, though, it is great to see Bedser so full of life and he always has a good quip or story to retell when the obligatory microphone is passed his way. Telling Ryan Sidebottom to get his hair cut at this year's Wisden dinner was one of the best bits of coaching advice I've heard.

Bedser also has some straight advice for aspiring bowlers: "Remember," he said, "the stumps are only 28 inches high and if you don't pitch it up enough you won't hit the wicket and you won't get anyone out lbw." He added that you will never hit the stumps if you don't aim at them.

Bedser was one of those cricketers whose best years were lost to war, but that didn't stop him from emerging six years later as one of England's most accurate and deadly fast bowlers. Saved from a life in a solicitors' firm when he was spotted bowling in his club's nets by the Surrey coach in 1938, Bedser made his first-class debut the next season but Hitler's escapades meant that Bedser did not play his first full season for Surrey until he was 28.

He was accompanied, as ever, by his twin brother Eric, who was just as keen on cricket. The story went that when they were first selected for Surrey they realised that they couldn't both be fast bowlers so they tossed a coin to decide whose life would take that path. Alec won and Eric became a batting off spinner instead. The only times they were ever separated until Eric's death in 2006 was when Alec won selection for England, an honour his brother never received.

Alec, who had taken six for 27 against the West Indies when playing for the RAF during the war, was selected by England in 1946 against the touring Indians and made an astounding debut. After two Tests, he had taken 22 wickets. His average for Surrey and England that summer was 128 wickets at 20.13. It was a no-brainer that he would be selected for the winter's Ashes tour.

That series, won 3-0 by Australia, was not as satisfactory as Bedser or England would have hoped. He did his bit, though, with 16 wickets in the five Tests. At Adelaide in the fourth Test he bowled Don Bradman for a duck, having dismissed Merv Harvey, brother of Neil, in his previous over. That put Australia 18-2 in reply to England's 460 but the rest of their phenomenal batting line-up saved the draw.

Bedser also dismissed Bradman, for 63, in Australia's fifth-Test run-chase at Sydney and he would get the Don's wicket four more times the next summer when Australia toured England, including for another duck, at Trent Bridge, meaning that for five consecutive innings Bedser was the only man who got Bradman out. Given that Bradman only made six ducks in his Test career, Bedser can be said to have had his number more than anyone else did.

In the 1948 Ashes, another painful story for England, Bedser took 18 wickets but greater glory awaited him on the next tour Down Under, when he took 30 Test wickets at an average of 16, ten of them in the final Test in Melbourne. It was the only Test England won on that tour but it signalled Bedser as the team's go-to man, the bowler to whom they looked to take wickets. He regularly bowled more than 1,000 overs in a season for club and country, conserving his energy (and the spectators' time) by taking a run up of only ten steps. If only he had some support. But Bedser went through 17 new-ball partners in his 51 Tests, which suggests an astounding failure of consistency on the part of the selectors.

He was a one-man band again in 1953 but at least this time his efforts were rewarded. England regained the Ashes for the first time since the Bodyline series 20 years earlier, thanks in no small part to Bedser's 39 wickets at 17.5, which began with 14 in the first Test at Trent Bridge. It remains the best haul in an Ashes series by an England fast bowler (Jim Laker leads the way with his 46 spin victims in 1956), which was no mean feat for a 35-year-old.

If war had not got in the way, Bedser could have been the first man to take 400 wickets. As it was, he got to 236, at an average under 25, before his body finally gave in. He suffered from shingles on the 1954-55 Ashes tour and played only one Test and with Fred Trueman, Frank Tyson and Brian Statham emerging to become England's leading fast bowlers Bedser was sent off to pasture, with gratitude. Against Australia alone he had taken 104 wickets in 21 matches. Only five bowlers (Underwood, Rhodes, Barnes, Willis and Botham) have done better.

There were still some golden years ahead with Surrey: 144 wickets at 19 in 1955, 131 more at less than 17 in 1957. After retiring in 1960 with five for 25 against Glamorgan at the Oval, he went on to be an England selector for 23 years, as well as managing them on two overseas tours. He was knighted in 1996.

Bedser remains a very popular character on the cricket circuit, although he now walks very stiffly and getting around is tough. John Woodcock, the venerable correspondent of The Times until the late 1980s, still meets his old friend every year at Lord's during the Test match, although given that there is a foot's difference in their heights and both are hard of hearing it must be tough to have a conversation, but what great stories they have to reminisce about!

Woodcock is probably the right man to give the last word on his old friend. "If his labours as a bowler could be collected and piled up around him in some visible shape," Wooders wrote, "he would be seen to be standing beside a mountain."

Comments

[Pablo]

Welcome to Spain, Patrick. I heard the weather in Valencia is going to be nasty this weekend. You'll feel like home.