by Arunabha Sengupta
By the time Ted Dexter finally got to the wicket and hammered 52 with six fours and two sixes at Old Trafford, the team to Australia had already been announced. In any case, the Cambridge man was in the side only because Laker, Cowdrey and Bailey were injured. When the New Zealanders played the final Test at The Oval, Laker, Cowdrey and Bailey were all back. The 23-year-old was left out. The newspapers had a field day talking of the ‘grave blunder’ of omitting such a prodigious talent from the Ashes side. However, selectors do not reverse their decisions too often under public or media pressure, no matter how charismatic the personality involved. Dexter himself would not buckle when the man at the wrong end of the decision was David Gower in the 1990s.
So, while Peter May’s much-vaunted England side was struggling Down Under, Dexter was spending the winter working for his father’s insurance business in Paris and having a whirlwind romance with the gorgeous Susan Longfield.
Meanwhile, Willie Watson, Arthur Milton and Trevor Bailey all suffered injuries as England were trounced in the first Test. And then Raman Subba Row was diagnosed with a broken hand. When the summons for reinforcement reached Dexter, he was skiing in the Austrian alps, blissful in the aftermath of his recently announced engagement.
‘The whole business of a newly engaged Cambridge man socialising in Paris and being flown to “save” his country in Australia captivated the journalists’, Dexter remembered. It was like an Edwardian romance.
Only, from that point onwards, the romance was soiled by grim reality.
MCC were organising for his kit and finances, but Dexter’s flight from Le Bourget to London could not take off due to fog. When he boarded a plane from Orly, the flight had to return to the departure airport because London was in the grip of a real ‘pea-souper’ and the pilot was unable to land. By the time, after several hours, Dexter managed to meet MCC secretary Billy Griffith at Heathrow, he was coming down with a virus.
The London to Sydney flight was supposed to be a two-day affair in those days. It took five days, including a 17-hour hold up in Bahrain due to technical problems. When he finally reached Australia, Dexter was in no state to play cricket. He had to be nursed back to health by former Middlesex cricketer John Human, now settled in Sydney. It was not a very pleasant sojourn, with Dexter coming across as moody and ungrateful.
After a handful of tour matches, he was given twelfth man duties for the second Test at Melbourne. Only, he had no idea what twelfth men duties were, other than loafing about and waiting to run in as a substitute when someone came off the field. He was busy drinking at oyster parties during the lunch intervals, instead of handing out towels and drinks and drying clothes for his teammates. When he was selected for the third Test at Sydney, it was perhaps because ‘They couldn’t face the idea of having me as twelfth man again.’
Dexter walked in at 97 for 4 and approaching the wicket asked, in a distinctly upper-class voice, for ‘two laigs please.’ Wally Grout from behind the wicket added, “blue-blooded ones, of course.” The Australians could not develop on the theme because Dexter was leg before for one. In the second innings, he managed 11, and in between he dropped a catch. Of course he was left out of the following Test.
With England humiliated for the third time in four Tests at Adelaide, the team was shuffled and Dexter was back for the final Test at Melbourne. In the first innings he was out first ball, in the second he scratched around for over half an hour for six. 18 runs in his four innings at 4.50. In the tour he had 154 runs at 14.00 Johnny Moyes wrote, “On the form he showed, he was one of the poorest batsmen to appear in a Test in Australia in the past forty years. As a bowler Dexter was not even a good third change when it came to Test cricket. His throwing lacked speed and accuracy. One can only wonder why there was such an agitation in some quarters to have him sent out as a replacement.”
Things did improve after that. Across the Tasman Sea he hit 141 at Christchurch. The next time he faced the Aussies he amassed 180 at Edgbaston. The next time he toured Australia, he was the captain and scored 481 runs in the series. He made waves off the field as well, with photographers never missing an opportunity to capture him and his stunning wife on camera. He also played a foursome with Norman Von Nida, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, while Colin Cowdrey acted as his caddy. The professionals were impressed enough to offer him a trip to America to become a tournament golfer.
When he visited Australia for The Ashes again, it was as a journalist in 1970-71. But there was a difference with the rest of the pressmen. Dexter flew his wife and two children himself, on an aircraft called Pommie’s Progress.
Between tours he contested future Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s Cardiff South East seat in the 1964 General Election. His campaign ended in a dismal defeat.
Motor bikes, jaguars, greyhounds and race horses—his passions were plenty, and expensive in various ways. He used to carry a portable television, a rare commodity in those days, to watch races in dressing rooms. Once he declared a Sussex innings from the Brighton Racecourse.
He was also crushed out of serious cricket by his other pet passion — his Jaguar. Having run out of petrol in West London, he was pushing it along when he got pinned by it to a warehouse door. His leg was broken and that virtually ended his career.
In 1976 Dexter popped up during the West Indies Test at Lord’s dressed in a cowboy hat and brandishing pistols, in order to promote the awfully bad mystery novel Testkill, co-written with Clifford Makins.
Subsequently, he became chairman of selectors, summing up the reason of an Ashes routing as “lines of Venus were in the wrong juxtaposition”. He maintained a low golf handicap, experimented with new golf rules, became President of MCC and still describes himself as ‘an international cricketer and a jolly good egg’.
Ted Dexter, never an ordinary man, was born on 15 May 1935.