Meeting: 1 October 2011
Guest Speaker: Murray Hedgcock
Grace:
The Reverend David Brown said, Grace.
Apologies for Absence:
Clive Barnett, Kevin & Helen Beaumont, Mike Woof, Bernard Frowd, Alan Edwards, Brian Ford, Ray Cook, Nick & Gillie Twine, Richard Pettifer, Wilfred Weld, Roger Treherne, Andrew Renshaw (in hospital having a hip operation) and Tony Atkinson (convalescing after a stroke).
Next meeting:
The President announced MJK Smith will speak at our Spring luncheon, on 24 March 2012, and Robin Brodhurst will speak at our Autumn luncheon, on 6 October 2012.
Administration:
Future booking – Because of restricted seating at the Bat & Ball, and due to growing popularity in recent years, it has been agreed that availability for lunch will first be offered to all members up until two months before the luncheon date. At this date, available seats will then be offered to these members’ guests (one per member). Members missing this deadline will then be offered available seats along with their guests. Consequently, longstanding guests were urged to become club members to avoid future disappointment.
Ties – These are available for £15 each from the Treasurer.
Payment for lunch – The President reminded members to pay the Restaurant Manager for their lunch before leaving.
Prize Draw in support of Youth Cricket at Hambledon Cricket Club:
The customary draw raised £280. After deduction of the prize drawer and speaker’s expenses, £215.50 was raised in aid of the Club. A cheque for £500 was sent to the Hambledon Cricket Club to assist in supporting and encouraging their youth programmes.
The Loyal Toasts:
The President asked members to be upstanding for the traditional toasts: The Queen’s Mother; The King; The Hambledon Club; Cricket; The immortal memory of Madge. Stephen Saunders asked members to toast The President.
Introduction to the Speaker:
Our President introduced Murray Hedgcock, an Australian journalist who first came to Britain in 1953. Since then Murray has had a long and distinguished involvement with cricket. An MCC member for forty years, despite long residence in London and holding a UK, as well as an Australian nationality, he remains a loyal Australian, and barracks for his native land in every Ashes series. He represents the Australian Cricket Society on the Council of Cricket Societies, has contributed to Wisden and many other cricket publications, and he is patron of the P.G. Wodehouse Society for whose team ‘The Gold Bats’ he umpires. He compiled a book ‘Wodehouse at the Wicket’, reproduced this summer. He is teetotal despite which he has written a history of Watney’s Mortlake Brewery.
The Speaker:
Murray began by announcing that Geelong had just won the Australian Football League (which became clearer later!), and went on to thank us for the presentation of our tie in 1972 when he became a member of Hambledon Cricket Club. “Luxuriating in all the English cricketing activities at that time,” he said Hambledon seemed the “most logical” club to be part of, and remarked, “I am not a guest speaker, I am just a prodigal who has returned.”
Somewhat self-deprecatingly he suggested that over the years his role has been to “stand-in for people at cricket dinners”. He once replaced John Major who had been unable to turn up for a Sussex dinner society, and on another occasion, he had to speak as if he were Henry Blofeld. “I did my best but I wasn’t actually quite up to the standard of either of those gentlemen, because my accent is unmistakable; and that of Henry’s of course!”
Murray has worked for Rupert Murdoch for over 50 years, and humorously inferred he had been busy in that world of scandal, so we were lucky to have him in attendance! He suggested Murdoch “is very much misunderstood … he is part of the cultured world of Australia in which we both grew up, and there is sometimes a belief that Australia is not a cultured country, but we are indeed! For instance, we are very proud of our national library in Canberra. Sadly, however, the recent bushfires caused havoc there and burnt out the entire collection of 12 books, 4 of which had not been coloured in yet! But, of course, that isn’t the same as your background and your origin.”
Murray spoke of his cricketing background being very different from our past and future speakers Bob Barber and Mike Smith respectively, and also that of Henry Blofeld or John Major. He said that in learning cricket as a boy in Australia, “the essential was to have a kero (kerosene) tin and a compo ball … you couldn’t use a leather ball because you couldn’t afford them and they would be torn to shreds on the ground. And so the wicket was the kero tin, and it had the great advantage that if the ball hit the wicket, there was no doubt about it. There was an echoing boom which you would hear and there was no argument of ‘yes it did’, or ‘no it didn’t’ – that was the way it went.”
Murray began playing cricket in a Victorian country town called Penshurst, and then in the 1940s, the family moved on to a mountain district area just outside Melbourne which was a very pleasant place to grow up. At the local High School, his new headmaster was the Australian batsman W.M. Woodfull, much to the excitement of Murray and his classmates. Sadly, for them, Woodfull was a dedicated mathematician teacher and for him “study was all that mattered and cricket was very well and truly down the line”. One great disappointment for Murray was to find out that Woodfull had actually played one game of cricket for the staff against the school a couple of months after he had left. However, Murray said, “the world of bodyline has been of interest to me ever since, and I do tend to have contradictory views with my English friends on the rights and wrongs of bodyline.”
Another form teacher to cross Murray’s High School path was one E.A. ‘Bill’ Baker. He recounts at the 1946 school assembly that Bill Woodfull announced the progress of Victoria against Wally Hammond’s touring MCC team with ‘Victoria at lunch … and Mr Baker 13 not out.’ Baker had been the Victorian wicket-keeper that day, and the announcement came about because ‘E’ stood for Everard, “and you couldn’t be called that in Australia, so obviously he had to be called Bill!”
Murray learnt to watch cricket with Sheffield Shield matches at the Melbourne cricket ground and also watched Aussie Rules Football there. He contrasted Lord’s MCC waiting list of 20,000 and that of Melbourne‘s MCC of some 180,000, the latter club of which, “you not only get access to Test matches, and the rest of cricket, but also for the ‘Footy’ finals, and that is something very special.”
Moving from Belgrade to Macra with a population of between 7-800, Murray recounted his first competitive club cricket there, making “two not out” playing for Macra against Stratford-Upon-Avon—unlike that of England’s in every respect—which was, “the beginning of my long but totally undistinguished cricketing career.” While playing both cricket and football for his High School, he hastened to say, “you would have had to be pretty feeble not to get in the first 11 or the first 18 because there were four boys in the 6th form!”
From Macra, Murray moved on to Victoria’s western district and played cricket there for the local Methodist church team. He said, “A number of churches in Australia always run, and still do, their own teams, and they are particularly part of the community that you grew up in. It was a world where you lived either in sporting terms with your club which belonged perhaps to a church or a friendly society, or else it was a geographical team, and this was the basis for which you played for the community in which you lived.”
He then moved to Geelong (hence the opening announcement) and had the chance to see a better class of cricket. In 1951, the MCC team led by Freddie Brown played a Victorian country eleven. “The temperature was 114F, and this was pretty heavy going. At lunchtime, D.B. Close was about to sit next to me in the lunch room, and I was looking forward to this hugely … (but) … the captain Cyril Washbrook who was skippering the team that day, called him over to sit with the team, which was right and proper, but I have hated Cyril Washbrook ever since! He robbed me of my first chance to sit down and talk to a real cricketer.”
Moving from Geelong to England, he had the sad understanding that, “Lindsay Hassett’s 1953 team was not the same as Bradman’s team, and English cricket was on the rise – good luck to English cricket!” While enjoying his time in England, he went back to Australia after a couple of years and joined a country newspaper in northern Victoria at Mildura, where his cricketing activities were finally laid to rest by a busy newspaper career.
Murray reflected on the impact of the war on Ashes cricket and speculated on the teams that might have contested the 1940-41 series. “I think that would have been a terrific series. You would have had Hutton, fresh from 1938 glory at the Oval; you would have had Denis Compton just coming into the game; you would have had Hammond, much fitter, primer and focused, more than when he went out in 1947; Australia would have had Bradman still only 32.”
Murray has a UK passport and has lived in the UK for 47 years but retains fierce loyalty to Australia. In 1986, Rob Stein published a book on Australia and England cricket, called the New Ball, in which Murray was asked to state his loyalties and he wrote, “it is with much pride that I failed the Tebbit test, despite having lived precisely half my life in London, and loving this country deeply for all its oddities and faults, I barrack against England in any sporting contest for the simplest reasons: I am by birth, background and upbringing, an Australian from the era when the greatest of all sporting contests was the Ashes, and no genuine Australian could ever see England as anything other than the enemy.” He added, “now provided you keep this in a fun context, and it doesn’t get sour, I get enormous pleasure out of this.” He added that as a consequence – and with particular reference to ‘soccer’ – “I always barrack in any sport for the team playing England, particularly in German v English football competitions because my wife is German and she doesn’t barrack for Germany so I take the opportunity to cheer them on.” Staying with English soccer, he added, “I really don’t see how anybody can have so much enthusiasm for sports teams which exist to such a degree of mercenaries, and that’s all they are.”
This inevitably led to a consideration of the origins and birthplaces of members of the English Test side. He did not “object to Andrew Strauss” but noted that he had “the excellent taste to marry an Australian girl” but asked, “How can you approve of having in an England team like the Pietersens and others who have played senior cricket or represented at junior cricket in South Africa?” Murray confessed that he had been an “absolute purist” but believed now, “that you should play for the country that you learned your cricket, so if you come here at 14 and go to Millfield, that’s fair enough … If you are the product of another country then I don’t think that’s really the way the game should be played. The Australian pattern is very much that you play for your own district, state, (and) country.” He had been “horrified when Australia picked that ultimate cricket mercenary, Kepler Wessels.”
He noted that various teams over the years in Australia have imported players. “Queensland had a very small population and for years tried to find players who would give them the Sheffield Shield which they finally won 1994-5. Over the years they had recruited a number of domestic players including Jeff Thomson, Alan Border from New South Wales, and Greg Chappell from South Australia, while overseas players included Wes Hall, Alvin Kallicharran, Tom Graveney, Majid Khan, Viv Richards, Rusi Surti, Kepler Wessels, Ian Botham and Graeme Hick. Some Queensland team, I don’t think.”
Murray acknowledged that this was an area of “endless debate” and recognised that in a “multi-national” world, “one of the weaknesses of Australian cricket is that we have not integrated enough of the migrants who have come to settle in our country. Australia had 7 million people when I started school and now has 22 million. A great number of them have come from Asia and it has been a great worry that not many Asians have become integrated into Australian cricket … Sadly, of course too, there are not many Aboriginal cricketers in the game. There was an Aboriginal youth team that came over here last season, which played a few matches, and you probably know, the very first team that came to England in 1868 consisted of Aborigines”. He stated that Aborigines have been much more inclined to go into Aussie Rules which they find more to their taste than cricket.
Murray returned to his basic theme: “The fun of cricket and the other sports in Australia is very much that they come from local enthusiasm and local involvement.” He recalled Macdonell’s fictional cricket match in England Their England, which he finds “marvellous and, frankly, looking at Broad Halfpenny Down is exactly where I’m sure his cricket match could have been played.”
Despite expressing concerns about “the flexible loyalties of sporting England”, he is, “delighted to feel a part of this country not least with my dual nationality and family links on my father’s side from the Isle of Oxley, in Kent, and from Cornwall on my mother’s side”. He recalled the “eccentric cricket writer Major Rowland Bowen, who … cut off his own leg in some strange experiment or expression of opinion which nobody has ever understood and was then rather miffed when asked to leave the intelligence department of the war office.” Bowen was once “scathing about provincials who join the MCC and flaunt their visits to the Long Room ‘like sergeants abounding in the Officers’ Mess!’” Murray knew Bowen and asked him “What about colonials?” Bowen generously suggested that ‘no that’s alright, colonials have a special place and you are allowed in.’”
Murray concluded on this theme by noting that when he was elected to MCC 40 years ago “when it was a lot easier to get in than it is now, I found myself in the Gentlemen’s retiring room standing between, the Duke of Norfolk and E.W. Swanton and I thought, I have just about arrived in England!”
He concluded, “Today, I feel coming to Hambledon for the first time, I have definitely arrived in England and thank you for the opportunity to do so.”
Through appreciative applause, the President thanked Murray for entertaining us.
Thanks:
The President thanked the new managers and their staff for looking after our members.
Any Other Business:
None
Date of next meeting:
24 March 2012