by Mayukh Ghosh

February 1974.
David Frith, the editor of 'The Cricketer' magazine, rings Ian Peebles and requests him to write an obituary.
Peebles declines, saying he disliked the man.

Peebles was not the only one.
This man wasn't the easiest to deal with. He had his own ways and he was rarely flexible enough to accommodate others' views.

It all started really early, during a rather forgettable childhood.
He was very young when his father was in court for stealing. His parents were in the court at the same time fighting for divorce because his mother was having a relationship with the plumber.

Thankfully for him, there was cricket.
He liked playing it and did well whenever he got a chance to bat.
He was so good that Julien Cahn, the eccentric entrepreneur, appointed him as the store manager in Leicester so that he could captain the near-bankrupt county.

He was the finest against slow bowling in the 1930s.
And, according to Denzil Batchelor, no one could hit the ball harder through the offside.

But it was Stewie Dempster's private life which created more headlines.
He married thrice and had innumerable affairs.
Most of them made it to the newspapers, either in England or in New Zealand.
So much so that his biographer contemplated changing the working title of the book from Second Only to Bradman to A Ladies Man.

Even Getty Images captioned this picture wrongly.
Dempster can be seen sitting on the customer's chair of his own little shop in Leicester.
The caption says that Dempster was the barber.

But he was New Zealand's first great batsman.
Once when he approached a century at Lord's, a spectator shouted, " Why wasn't I told about this before? Here is one of the most beautiful stroke-players I've ever seen and you critics have been hiding him all these years. You've wasted your adjectives on the hacks and here is a master."

Stewie Dempster was born on November 15, 1903.