THE DUKE OF HAZARD

GH on the celebrity manager of a celebrity team

A reader, Patrick Negus, has been kind enough to send me this photograph of England’s team of 1962-63 arriving in Kalgoorlie for their first game of the tour. Their host is his mine manager grandfather, Len Bugg, born in Tullah, a winner of the Burnie Gift in Tasmania, then president of the Eastern Goldfields Cricket Association and a life member of the Goldfields Football Association. In the background are Barry Knight, John Murray, Geoff Pullar and Ray Illingworth; in the offing is a match against WA Country which will be attended by nearly a third of the town’s population of 25,000, and a lot of country hospitality, including a tour of a mine and a night at the exclusive Hannah Club.

The most striking presence, however, is the portly, florid figure in the centre - the manager of Ted Dexter’s touring party, the Duke of Norfolk. Managers, generally, are anonymous factotums. The fifty-four-year-old Duke was the Queen’s beloved ‘Uncle Bernard’. He had succeeded to his title aged twenty-one, was also president of Sussex and a former president of Marylebone, and as hereditary Earl Marshal of England had organised the last two coronations.

What was all this about? The standard take is that Marylebone were worried about their appointed captain, Ted Dexter - at twenty-seven the youngest skipper the club had sent to Australia, and of mercurial temperament. EW Swanton’s version is that the Duke was on the Marylebone committee to determine the manager, which adjourned inconclusively, divided about whether club secretary Billy Griffith could be spared for the many months of a southern tour.

Over drinks after the meeting one of the younger members said, ‘You know, Ted’s not the easiest chap to handle.’

Duke: ‘I could handle him.’

YM: ‘Yes, but you’re not going to be manager.’

Duke: ‘No-one’s ever asked me.’

So they did, and, after running it past the Duchess, the Duke accepted. ‘One thing was absolutely certain,’ Swanton averred. ‘Much lustre would be added to the MCC’s tour before it had even started.’ It certainly engaged the interest of the Women’s Weekly, whose Diana Gibson had accessed those always talkative royal ‘friends’:

His friends as well as his family are convinced that the Duke will make a “right royal" success of his cricket leadership. As one said: ‘You see; this will be the best tour ever. Everyone will be directed, charmed, and coaxed into the utmost efficiency at all levels. After all, anyone who managed to organise a couple of coronations could hardly make a mess of cricket.’

Who knows?  Perhaps the mission was broader still. Anglo-Australian relations had been tested by Malaya and Suez, by British nuclear tests at Maralinga and the Montebello Islands, and by the UK’s first tilt, that year, at membership of the European Common Market.  Prime minister Robert Menzies had just sacked his trade minister Les Bury for having the temerity to speak on favour of such accession - that ‘European integration, of which the Common Market is an essential expression, is a keystone of the grand design for Western survival.’ At the time, nothing worked so reliably to assuage incipient republicanism as the royal family: the Duke would add to the sense of quasi-vice-regal status on his visit by staying with the governors in each state, and with Viscount d’Lisle in Canberra.  In a way, he was acting the warm-up act for his niece, who arrived in the cricketers’ wake.

The players flew to Aden on a BOAC Comet via Rome and Cairo, there boarded the Canberra, and went the rest of the way by sea.  The Duke, a busy man, joined them in Colombo, by which time Dexter had committed his first gaffe by saying, in response to a Dorothy Dixer about over rates, that the team would aim to bowl twenty overs an hour - he had overlooked that Australian overs were eight balls.  On arriving in Perth, the duke settled things down.  He was a guest of the WA Turf Association who were running a Duke of Norfolk Cup in his honour at Belmont: to the winning jockey, he presented the prize, a canteen of cutlery, and a whip.  It was reported with delight that he drank West Australian beer ‘as though he had done it all his life’.  Then, on the morning of 14 October 1962, he joined the team on a bumpy two-hour DC-3 flight to the goldfields.  During his stay he patiently queued for his turn in the communal bathrooms in Kalgoorlie’s Palace Hotel, and accepted a long list of handshakes wherever he went: at a golf club dance, according to John Clarke in Challenge Renewed, ‘every matron in the town seemed to be led up to the Duke’.  Swanton was soon reporting: ‘The manager has identified himself in the friendliest way with many sides of Australian life.’ 

Those initially surprised by the Duke’s appointment now started to see the value of a titled name in a demotic context.  Initially thinking the appointment as ‘surprising…as if Mr Macmillan had suddenly volunteered for the job to escape Opposition battering over the Common Market and to avoid an English winter’, The Observer’s Alan Ross sensed an opportunism ‘calculated to create publicity, to remove the main social burden from Dexter, and to demonstrate aristocratic adaptability to a notoriously egalitarian country.’ One is reminded of the exchange in Python’s ‘The Bruces’ sketch.

Bruce 1: ‘It’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s mum, your majesty,’ he said, and she smiled quietly to herself.

Bruce 2: She’s a good sheila, Bruce, and not at all stuck up.

The Duke made lots of boosting comments about cricket, indulged his passion for racing and shopping, and even had time to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

He flew home for Christmas, was detained an additional fortnight reportedly on doctor’s orders, then on returning by plane on 19 January became a bit pissy about being ‘misquoted’, but gave his daughters a nice holiday; twelve years later, Colin Cowdrey left his wife for the oldest of them.

Later, the Duke pronounced it all ‘a great success’ and, ever quotable, claimed that Richie Benaud’s men were ‘terrified of Dexter’ - a view Benaud politely demurred: ‘I do not really wish to disagree with the Duke and I am prepared to agree that Dexter is one of the finest batsmen in the world….Anyone who believes Australians are terrified of Dexter is perhaps indulging in a little bit of exaggeration.’  I wonder, in fact, whether it mightn’t have been the other way around.  The anxiety around Dexter was surely accentuated by the fact that Benaud, twice a successful Ashes captain, was rival.  Benaud was perhaps cricket captaincy’s original flim-flam man.  As Ray Robinson said: 'In public relations to benefit the game Benaud was so far ahead of predecessors that race-glasses would have been needed to see who was at the head of the others.'  In the 1962-63 Ashes, he outcampaigned again.  John Woodcock told Dexter’s biographer Alan Lee: ‘Benaud was the first captain in my knowledge to conduct press conferences at the end of a day’s play. Ted was thus expected to do the same but he really didn’t cope very well and Benaud was always seen in the better light for it.’  The Duke may not, then, have been so much a minder as a decoy, comfortable in the limelight, ever ready with a quip:

Of course we shall bring back the Ashes," the Duke

said at London airport. ‘There is no point in our

going if we don't feel that way.’

Asked where the main strength of the M.C.C. attack was, he quipped, ‘In

me.’

Not everyone saw the appointment as such a boon for Dexter.  Benaud, who had had to deal with an overmighty manager, Syd Webb, during the previous Ashes tour, told Lee: ‘I think he [Dexter] was hampered a good deal by the high profile of the manager. The Duke was very pleasant but the captain should be in charge of the team team and be seen to be in charge. the media were inclined to push ted into the background in my own opinion, and I thought it did him a disservice.’  The tour derived further celebrity quotient from the presence of Dexter’s model wife, Sue, and his clergyman opening batter, the Rev David Sheppard.  It certainly antagonised the team’s senior pro Fred Trueman: ‘All that the newspapers and television programmes were full of was where the Duke’s horses were running, where David Sheppard was preaching and what Mrs Dexter was wearing.’

Trueman had been on Marylebone’s previous Ashes tour, and clashed repeatedly with the manager, Freddie Brown, a boor and a drunk.  Four years on, he was still less inclined to tug the forelock, even to a member of the royal family.  Trueman was a popular figure in Australia.  Learning that his birthday was to coincide with the Prime Minister’s XI match, Menzies presented him with a pewter goblet.  The Duke, Menzies reports in his memoirs, was unimpressed: ‘I suppose you know you’ve destroyed the disciplinary labours of several months.’ He continued those labours anyway, having the Yorkshireman docked £50 from his £150 good behaviour bonus, and Trueman’s biographer Chris Waters quotes an unflattering tour report: ‘A fine bowler when it suited him. The least easy person in the team to control. Slack in his ways and not prepared to willingly lend any help in off-the-field duties. His general manner off the field, although improved from earlier days, left a good deal to be desired.’  Trueman was so outraged he announced his retirement, only to quietly rescind the decision a few months down the track when he realised he was cutting off his nose to spite his face.  The Yorkshire communique was suitably opaque: ’F. S. Trueman has decided to accept the decision of MCC with regard to the bonus for the recent MCC tour of Australia and, so far as he and MCC are concerned, the matter is closed.’

Dexter, too, may also have been more popular in Australia than England by tour’s end.  Although the drawn series was a let down, his batting had been as handsome as his profile; ‘Lord Ted’ had a carriage almost as aristocratic as his manager.  The dean of the Australian press corps, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Tom Goodman, gave him a rousing send-off: ‘I have never known an England captain to make himself so available or give so freely on his time the press.’ Dexter reciprocated with another vintage top-of-the-head Dexterism, blaming the one-all scoreline of the series on the inhibiting influence of the trophy: he dismissed the Ashes as ‘a bane and a nuisance’, and claimed that the players would have played more red-bloodedly for money.  This was too much even for urbane Alan Ross: ‘I trust he did not fully understand the implications of what he said; if he did, then he has forfeited the right to be England’s captain.’ It was not, of course, Dexter’s last eccentric presser. But it was by then too late for the Duke to intervene….

A Footnote: a veil was drawn over the Duke’s mid-tour furlough - Wisden described him as involved in 'private duties' - but he was quietly overseeing a rehearsal of Operation Hope Not - the funeral of Winston Churchill, which by then had been almost ten years in the planning. Another two years would elapse before the preparation paid off, when the funeral was seen by more than 350 million people worldwide. Len Bugg, I’m fairly confident, was one of them - I wonder if he reflected on his brush with history.  

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