A rainy festival

 posted by John Winn

When I was  a small boy in the 1950s family holidays were taken at Scarborough to coincide with the cricket festival at the beginning of September and at that time the three first class matches had a familiar pattern. Yorkshire would play MCC, Gentlemen take on Players and Essex stalwart TN Pearce would select an XI to take on the touring team, so I was lucky enough to see Australia in '53 and '56, South Africa in '55 and West Indies in '57. I suspect at the time I thought that this structure had been in place for ever and would go on for ever. Of course this was not so, TN Pearce had only taken over from HDG 'Shrimp' Leveson Gower, pronounced Lewson Gore of course, in 1951 and before 'Shrimp', Charles Thornton had had this responsibility. 

There had also been years when there were no visiting sides so for example in 1925 Thornton's XI took on team selected by MCC from those due to tour Australia that winter. Hobbs and Sutcliffe opened for the MCC side, not a bad attraction. Even further back in the nineteenth century I Zingari were regular visitors and North v South added spice to the occasion a number of times. 

The year referred to in the title of the posting is 1948 when on the first of September, a Wednesday, the festival opened with Yorkshire v MCC followed by Gower's XI v MCC, chosen from those due to tour South Africa and the climax came the following week when another of HDG's sides took on Bradman's 'Invincibles' who had gone undefeated in a tour beginning at New Road on April 28th. In his excellent book Bradman's War Malcolm Knox stresses how important it was to 'The Don' to go through the tour undefeated, his failure to do so in 1938 'still rankled' and thus he was very wary as to what might happen at Scarborough in what was close to a sixth test match. Staying at The Royal Hotel there were no festival festivities. Wisden has no doubt that there was an agreement that Gower would not include more than six test players although this is disputed in Knox's book. Whatever the truth of the matter only six test players were included while the Australian side had ten who had thrashed England at the Oval a few weeks earlier.

The weather for the festival seriously interfered with play and at times when play was possible watching was a miserable, cold experience. Yorkshire v MCC enjoyed a fine first day but only three and a half hours were possible on days two and three. Match drawn, as was the second match played for much of the time in 'wind and gloom'. For the Australian game much time was lost on the opening day the start was delayed on the second. Hutton was bowled in the first over by Lindwall, something to be repeated at Headingley five years later, and Bradman batted on until all possibility of defeat was eliminated thus preserving his side's undefeated record. Knox records that some of the Australians were not enamoured by this show of ruthlessness. In his last innings in England Bradman hit 153.

The tourists played two more matches before sailing for home, both against Scotland, in Edinburgh and Aberdeen where a crowd of 10000 saw  DGB sign off with 123 batting at number six.