Stewie Dempster, born November 15, 1903, played 10 Tests for New Zealand and ended with a batting average of 65.72 — next to only Don Bradman’s 99.94 with a 10-innings cut-off. Arunabha Sengupta remembers the life and career of one of the greatest Kiwi batsmen of all time.
One of the best in an elite group
Orton Sutherland Hintz: an imposing name for a cricket scribe from the distant New Zealand.
The lad was just 24 when he travelled to England to cover the Kiwi cricket tour of 1931. It was quite a fruitful trip for him as well. He wrote a book on the visit, with the utilitarian name New Zealand Cricketers in England 1931, and it remains a valuable record in the cricketing archives. While in England he also met a girl called Flora Margaret McIver, or just Madge, and by November of that year they were married at Paddington, London.
But this is not the story of Hintz. We therefore leave his matters of the heart aside and delve into his book to find that at that time Charles Stewart ‘Stewie’ Dempster was acknowledged as one of the finest batsmen of the world.
His game was likened to a smooth piece of machinery, but the mechanical metaphor did not deter enjoyment from his acts on the field. He loved every bit of it, and so did the crowd.
At the wicket Dempster was a pugnacious character, stocky, compact, workmanlike, whose steady eye held the bowler with the cocky challenge, “Let’s see you get me out.” He also had the most accurate assessment of his own ability as a batsman, and never fell victim of overestimation of his prowess. All the while, he gave his best in his own unobtrusive way, adapting his game to the requirements of his side.
As the tour progressed, Hintz assessed Dempster to be one of the top five batsmen in the world. He went further. “If he were to play cricket regularly in England, he would probably be in the top three.”
That was a rather brave call. The previous summer, the English grounds had been blazed by the incredible run-making genius of a young man called Don Bradman. His 974 runs in the 5 Tests of 1930 had displaced Wally Hammond from the throne of world batsmanship. Jack Hobbs had departed the scene, but his faithful colleague at the top of the order, Herbert Sutcliffe was still going strong. There was the ageing but still active Herbie Taylor of South Africa. George Headley was making heads turn in the West Indies. And there were a plethora of superb performers just below this top bracket, including Bill Ponsford, Bill Woodfull, Patsy Hendren, Alan Kippax, Bruce Mitchell. Besides, KS Duleepsinhji had made runs in grand style and with great success starting the previous summer, and Frank Woolley was as stylish as ever.
Yet, Hintz was not really swayed into blasphemy by patriotic admiration. Dempster dazzled everyone on that tour. And by the end of it his figures were right up there with the best of the best.
The incredible trip
It was not his first trip to the country. Dempster had been an unexpected inclusion to the side when New Zealand had toured in 1927. That visit had seen no Test matches, but the 24-year-old had topped the batting averages with 1,430 runs at 44.68, with big hundreds against Warwickshire and Glamorgan, followed by 101 against a strong Surrey side.
The Surrey innings involves an anecdote, as mentioned by Geoff Boycott in The Best XI: “Stewie had never been coached and claimed that he learned all that he needed to know while standing at first slip as Jack Hobbs made 146 for Surrey against the tourists at The Oval. He must have learned pretty quickly because he got a hundred in the second innings of the same match.”
Stewie Dempster (left) and ‘Dad’ Weir on the 1931 tour of England ©Getty Images
When Harold Gilligan’s England team had visited the southern islands in 1930, in that unique tour when another national side was engaged in Test cricket in the Caribbean, Dempster had hit 136 and 80 not out at Wellington, and followed it up with an unbeaten 62 at Auckland. The English cricketers were aware of the potential of this opening batsman. Yet, the feats he performed in 1931 were unexpected.
Just six days after completing one of the longest ocean voyages, the Kiwis faced Essex at Leyton. Dempster faced the very first ball of the day, and was unbeaten till the last was bowled. By then the score against his name read 201, full of flashing cover drives punctuating the compact workmanlike approach. He fell the following day for 212, but it was enough for New Zealand to start with an innings victory.
This was followed by 92 against Leicestershire in a match of spine-chilling climax. The New Zealanders next played Hampshire, and Dempster batted his way to an unbeaten 106 in the second innings.
Against MCC at Lord’s, he was out to a spectacular caught and bowled effort by Jack White, but by then he had scored an important 45, setting the platform for a winning score. At Swansea, he hit 109 against Glamorgan. And after a well-deserved rest for two matches, he struck 36 and 101 not out against Cambridge University.
It was time for the First Test at Lord’s. On a glorious summer day, captain Tom Lowry won the toss and batted. Even a canny Douglas Jardine, recently appointed skipper of England, could not see a way of stopping the spate of scores by Dempster.
In the first innings he was dismissed by Ian Peebles, leg before to a ball that turned in, when his score was 53. A New Zealand collapse and a world record partnership between Les Ames and Gubby Allen saw the hosts take a 230-run first innings lead. And then it was perhaps Dempster at his best.
First with GL ‘Dad’ Weir and then with ML ‘Curly’ Page, he launched a fightback. There was scintillating footwork and strokes all around the wicket. It took a peach of a ball from Hammond to dismiss him for 120. By then the match was all but safe.
Following the Test, the New Zealanders travelled north. At Stoke-on-Trent, they played Staffordshire, and turning out for them was the 58-year-old Sydney Barnes. Perhaps the greatest bowler of all time, he was still a masterful operator with incredible length and spin. The match saw one of the scintillating duels, between Dempster and Barnes. The Kiwi opener scored 41 before he reached out, was beaten in flight and stumped off the master.
Dempster continued to score useful runs — 65 against Bill Voce at Trent Bridge when the Kiwis played Nottinghamshire, 46 against George Macaulay and Hedley Verity of Yorkshire at Harrogate, and 51 against Lancashire at Liverpool. But from the match against Yorkshire he felt a niggle in his leg. A specialist was consulted, but even his best efforts could not help him recover in time for the second Test at The Oval. With Dempster sitting out, Sutcliffe, Duleep and Hammond all scored hundreds and New Zealand lost the Test by an innings.
It was in August that our man managed to play again. He returned with 54 against Gloucestershire at Bristol. After sitting through a rain washed third Test at Old Trafford, he scored 93 against Norfolk and 88 against Essex.
Julien Cahn’s cricketing skills were ridiculously limited; and yet, his side played 621 matches and lost 19 over an 18-year period. He was also responsible for Dempster’s Leicestershire stint (Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)
After a quiet 34 against Kent, he hooked, cut and drove magnificently to score 167 against Sussex at Brighton. And finally, he brought the tour to an end with a masterly 122 against Harold Larwood, Allen, Freddie Brown and Verity when New Zealand played HD Leveson-Gower’s XI.
He ended the tour with 1,776 runs at 59.26, 16 runs per innings ahead of the next New Zealand batsman.
The Cahn collaboration
Apart from his spectacular performances, there was one more important outing which brought the tour to a close. On September 14 and 15, at Trent Bridge, the New Zealanders played 12 men led by the eccentric millionaire Sir Julian Cahn. Dempster did not score too many in that game. However, he got introduced to Cahn. This kick-started his relationship with this peculiar philanthropist and cricket-lover.
Cahn was a hypochondriac who had perhaps less cricketing skills than any one remotely associated with the game. He often moved about on his electric wheelchair, because he preferred that to walking. He had his special inflatable pads pumped up by his chauffeur before he went out to bat. His hired umpire, the old Notts cricketer John Gunn, allowed the ball to strike the huge pads without ever dreaming of giving his employer out. Neither did other umpires, because money talked in those days as it does today. Jim Swanton wrote, “The pads were very large, and the ball bounced readily off them for leg-byes, which the umpires conveniently forgot to signal”. Once, when his bloated pads had lost air with a hissing sound, and became limp due to a puncture, Cahn had stalked off the pitch, sacked his chauffeur on the spot and had declared the innings.
Yet, Cahn recruited the best cricketers to play for his touring side. And this side lost just 19 of the whopping 621 matches that they played between 1923 and 1941, all around the world.
And Cahn was a most benevolent patron of the financially struggling Leicestershire side of the 1930s. So, a few years after this first meeting with Dempster, Cahn coaxed the New Zealander returning to England. He arranged for the great New Zealand batsman to work as his store manager in Leicester. In 1936, Dempster was appointed as captain of the county side.
According to PE Snow, Leicestershire historian and the brother of novelist CP Snow, “At that time, Dempster was regarded as the best player of slow bowling in the world. He was incredibly quick on his feet. He was outstandingly successful at Leicester but Cahn, who often took him off to play for his own team, limited his appearances.”
Nevertheless, Dempster scored 4,659 runs for Leicestershire, at an average of nearly 50, with 18 hundreds to show for his efforts. That was the second coming of this wonderful batsman. Twice he hit three centuries in consecutive innings. In 1937 he played for the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s. Since his parents were Scottish, he also represented Scotland in a few matches.
The rest of his career
There are two parts of his story that are still untold in our narrative.
Before the tour of England in 1927, Dempster had had a long cricketing apprenticeship, most of it assiduously self-taught.
Growing up near the Basin Reserve, he first thought of playing cricket at the age of 10. He was soon in the school representative eleven for Wellington, and competing in the junior boys matches. At 16, he was already into club cricket for Wellington. Then, before he was seventeen, came club cricket for Wellington. By 1921-22, he was playing State Cricket.
When A.C. MacLaren’s team was in visited New Zealand in 1922-23, Dempster did duties as the 12th man for the Kiwis.
The success in the home and away series against England had placed him at the top of the batting charts of the world. The performances of the 1931 summer ensured that Dempster was one of the Five Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1932. Alongside him were Bill Bowes, the Nawab of Pataudi, James Langridge and Hedley Verity. Not a bad company to find oneself in.
In 6 Tests till then, he had scored 514 runs at 85.66 with 2 centuries. It was, hence, not really stretching it far to say he was indeed one of the best in the world. Hintz had been quite correct.
Dempster did not manage to achieve the same amount of success in the rest of his very short Test career, but neither did he do badly.
He struck a quick 64 against South Africa at Wellington when the country visited in 1931-32.
The following year saw England, riding their Bodyline success, playing a couple of Tests in the land. Both the matches were drawn and Dempster played his final Test at Eden Park. In that match he played what he considered his most rewarding innings.
He was late in arriving at the ground, the overnight express from Wellington having been held up on the way. He went in at 0 for 2, with Bill Bowes having bowled Jackie Mills and Weir off successive balls. The travel-weary Dempster was out there to face a hat trick.
Did anyone say, “No matter when you come in man, the score is still 0?” We don’t know. At least, Dempster did not go around saying so. But, his 83 not out that day was one of the most brilliant efforts, more so considering New Zealand’s total of 158. The English attack consisted of Bowes, Allen, Voce, Brown and Hammond.
After the Test
The night that test finished in a draw, Dempster sailed for England on the Taimui to work for Cahn as store manager for Jays and Campbells. His career Test figures stood at 723 runs from 10 Tests at an incredible average of 65.72. He was indeed one of the great batsmen of New Zealand. His average remains the highest among batsmen, barring the obvious Bradman, who have played at least 10 Test innings.
At Leicester, Dempster worked in Cahn’s store. By 1936 he had qualified to play for Leicestershire and captain their side. It was the second innings for this brilliant cricketer. He led the side for three seasons, 1936 to 1938. He was not just successful at the game. In October 1938, he married Margaret Elizabeth Jowers at the Leicester Holy Trinity Church.
In 1939, Dempster visited New Zealand again. This time, strangely, it was with Julian Cahn’s private cricket team.
After his return to England, Dempster joined the Second World War effort and held commissions in the Royal Armoured Corps and Pioneer Corps. He was later invalided out of the army.
In 1946, he moved back to New Zealand, with his second wife Elsie Lowick and their daughter. He worked as a cricket coach and also dabbled seriously in the textile business.
The CS Dempster Gate outside Basin Reserve, Wellington
(Picture courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)
When England visited in 1946-47, Dempster was expected to play for the New Zealand team. At 43, he was still a force to reckon with. However, he was unfortunate to be involved in a golfing accident in which a sliver of gorse pierced his left eye. Hence, his Test career remained limited to 10 matches.
Dempster played his final First-Class match in Eden Park for Wellington against Auckland in early 1948. He was 45, and had a decent outing with scores of 7 and 41. His final figures stood at 12,145 runs at 44.98 with 35 hundreds.
Stewie Dempster passed away in Wellington on Valentine’s Day, 1974. The C. S. Dempster gates at the Basin Reserve eloquently commemorate his contribution to New Zealand cricket.