by Arunabha Sengupta
Nottingham 1947.
The last time Alan Melville had appeared in a Test match had been in Durban, 1939. The last timeless Test. He had scored 78 and 103.
Here at Trent Bridge, the South African captain batted through the day, almost as if he had taken over the mantle of timelessness from Test cricket. He did not quite hit the ball—he coaxed it to go where he willed..
With Dudley Nourse, he added 319 in just four hours. Melville flicked a full toss from poor debutant Cecil ‘Sam’ Cook into the crowd beyond square leg. Nourse drove Bedser straight back and it ricocheted off the pavilion rails. Only towards the end of the day, Nourse lost his stump trying to hit Eric Hollies into the Trent.
The scoreboard read 376 for 3. Nourse 149. Melville 183 not out.
South Africa totalled 533 and with Lindsay Tuckett capturing 5 for 68, England followed on. In their second knock, Denis Compton kept his boyish pranks in check. The result was a blemish-free 163. The match headed for a draw.
In South Africa’s second innings, Melville limped while he batted, but still stroked his way to his second hundred of the match. “To give flavour to an epilogue whose light notes were like chamber music coming after Beethoven’s Ninth,” wrote John Arlott.
Three centuries in three successive innings in Tests, the first and second eight years apart.
In the following Test at Lord’s he hit 117 even as Doug Wright and Eric Hollies spun the rest of them out to enforce follow-on.
Timeless class.
Before arriving at Oxford from the Cape Province, South Africa, Melville had been involved in a car crash that had left him with three fractured vertebrae. His back never quite recovered, and since that fateful accident he seldom got by a full day without periods of excruciating pain. While at Oxford, he developed severe problems with his knee. And then, as captain of the University side in 1932, he broke his collar bone in a game against Free Foresters by colliding with his batting partner Pieter van der Bijl.
During The War, his affair with misadventures continued. While training with the South African forces, he suffered a severe fall, and that restarted all the pain and problems associated with his old back injury. For almost a year he creaked along, wearing a prescribed steel jacket, every movement carried out gingerly, with caution and metallic clangs.
There was nothing metallic, clangy or accidental about his batting. Melville was a sublime timer of the ball and, as a batsman, one of the most graceful to watch. His technique was almost flawless, executed with clinical perfection. He drove with élan, cut with elegance and his hooks were lissom and lithe. Off the legs, his strokes came off with delectable poise.
At the end of the 1947 tour, he retired and then was coaxed out of retirement to lead South Africa against George Mann’s Englishmen in late 1948. However, after scoring 92 for Transvaal against the MCC, he characteristically injured his wrist and managed to play only the third Test.
Melville’s 11 Tests brought him 894 runs at 52.58 with those 4 hundreds in consecutive innings. One of South Africa’s unknown greats.
Alan Melville was born on 19 May 1910.