Published: Sep 12, 2013, 12:16 PM (IST)
Edited: Sep 09, 2016, 02:29 PM (IST)
Bert Oldfield, arguably Australia’s greatest wicketkeeper, was born on September 9, 1894. Abhishek Mukherjee looks at the genial artist behind the stumps.
William Albert Stanley Oldfield was that rare specimen: a polite, mild-mannered Australian wicketkeeper. He was, in fact, so soft that it was difficult to believe that he was performing the most physically demanding act in cricket; he might as well have been a surgeon performing a complicated operation on a dying patient and meeting the eager family with the smile of success, possibly with a polite ‘thank you’.
“Bert Oldfield was such a gentleman he might have kept wickets in the gloves in which he was married,” wrote The Age in his obituary. Harold Larwood, with whom Oldfield shared perhaps the worst memory of his playing days, was all in praise, calling Oldfield “a real gentleman on and off the field.”
Oldfield was, perhaps by a distance, the greatest stumper the sport has produced. It was not about athleticism or robust energy. The comparison with a surgeon once again comes to mind: he might well have been using a scalpel instead of a pair of gloves; the stumping was executed so neatly that often only one bail moved.
His job done, Oldfield almost never appealed: like most artists he was too shy to. To quote Neville Cardus, Oldfield “used to catch or stump in a flash and yet appear the embodiment of politeness and almost obsequious deportment, as though saying to his victim: ‘Awfully sorry, but it is my painful duty — Law 42, you know’.”
“I played with Oldfield through a considerable portion of his career, and many times have marvelled at his skill. There was about his work a polish far transcending that of the others. Never any suggestion of an early movement — feet always right — hands in perfect position, and remarkable speed while stumping – especially on the leg-side, off a medium-pace bowler,” wrote an impressed Don Bradman.
“He was a chirpy, amusing, little fellow and there was no better keeper even though we have had many such in [Sammy] Carter, whom Oldfield succeeded in the Test side, [Don] Tallon, [Gil] Langley, [Wally] Grout, and so on down to [Rod] Marsh of the present day,” wrote Jack Fingleton in Oldfield’s obituary. It was one of those aspects on which he agreed with The Don.
“He was a textbook ‘keeper, dapper and trim in feature, spotlessly attired, and with superb reflex response,” wrote The Age. The newspaper mentioned in his obituary that Oldfield “could flick a bail from its groove as a dandy might whisk a speck of snuff from his jacket.”
But how good a stumper was he against pace? Let us recall the Melbourne Test of 1924-25. Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe had already added 126 and were looking good for many more. Herbie Collins threw the ball to Jack Ryder, who was at least fast-medium. Oldfield decided to come up to the stumps.
Collins had asked Ryder to “give it everything”. Ryder bounced, Hobbs took evasive action, and his right foot slid slightly outside the crease, but he had plenty of time. Oldfield, after all, had to gather the ball from above his head. By the time Hobbs had started sliding his foot back, the bails had been whipped off, and a familiar, polite voice asked Bob Crockett: “How was that, Bob?”
It must have broken the ardent Hobbs fan Crockett’s heart to utter the words “I’m afraid you’re out, Jack.” Over half a century later Ryder still maintained that “it was one of the finest pieces of wicket-keeping I have seen.”
A diminutive man (5’4″), he prepared himself meticulously before every innings. Richard Cashman wrote of him in Australian Dictionary of Biography: “Before ‘keeping he taped his finger joints which were then covered with stalls and two pairs of chamois inner gloves. Oldfield also studied bowlers at the nets carefully, noted weaknesses of opposition batsmen and observed carefully the ground and weather conditions.”
Let us do some number-crunching: Oldfield had 52 stumpings from 101 innings in 54 Tests. The next on the list, Godfrey Evans, had 46, which took him 175 innings and 94 Tests. Nobody else has gone past the 40-stumping mark. The chasm is so glaring that the rest do not even feature.
His 78 catches took his victims tally to 130. He was the first wicketkeeper to effect a hundred Test dismissals. He also became the first wicketkeeper to score a thousand Test runs. He finished the series with 1,427 runs at 22.65 with 4 fifties.
Despite his efficiency against the champion fast bowlers of his time, Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald, and the great Bill O’Reilly, it was with Clarrie Grimmett that Oldfield forged the greatest pair of all time. Oldfield had 28 stumpings off Grimmett; nobody has ever stumped more than 15 times off the same bowler. He also had 7 stumpings off Arthur Mailey.
In 245 First-Class matches Oldfield had 6,135 runs at 23.77 with 6 hundreds; he also had 399 catches and 263 stumpings to his name. The 16 men above him on the list of stumpings are all Englishmen, and all of them had played 320 or more matches. The next non-Englishman on the list, Jack Blackham, had 181 stumpings from 275 matches.
War and early days
The seventh child of John William Oldfield and Mary Gregory, Bert began his career at Cleveland Street School, Redfern as an all-rounder: he bowled seam-up and could bat a bit. It was during his tenure at the Glebe and Gordon Clubs that he took up his role behind the stumps seriously after the regular wicketkeeper had failed to turn up. However, as World War I broke out he had no option but to enlist himself for the forces.
It was by chance that Oldfield had managed to survive the war. He was first posted to Egypt but later moved to France. While in Polygon Wood, France, in 1917 with the 15th Field Ambulance, he was hit by a German shell; then, as he was carried away in a stretcher, a Bosche shell exploded and killed his colleagues. Oldfield was buried and remained unconscious and was dug out from bloodied mud just in the nick of time.
Oldfield stayed back in England to recover from the blows. However, when the Australian Imperial Forces were touring England their main wicketkeeper Ted Long was hit on the face by a Gregory snorter. Oldfield had to be drafted in. He did not even have his flannels, which had to be tailor-made at an SOS basis.
He scored a duck on his First-Class debut against Oxford University but came up with 4 catches. He kept wickets so well that Long told Collins after the match: “I suppose I can go home now, you won’t need me anymore.” Fingleton mentioned that “his keeping was the feature of the game.”
He kept on with the excellent work both in the domestic season in Australia and in a tour with the Imperial Services to South Africa. After an excellent match against South Australia at Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) (he took a catch and 3 stumpings — all off Mailey — in the same innings) he was drafted into the side for the first Test at the same ground.
Test debut
Oldfield played 3 Tests in the series where Australia whitewashed England 5-0. Oldfield scored 7 and 16 at SCG, 24 at Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), and 50 and 10 at Adelaide. More importantly, he had kept wickets brilliantly and his tally read 3 catches and 5 stumpings, 4 of which had come off Mailey.
Oldfield went to England next season as an understudy to Sammy Carter. Batting at ten against Warwickshire at Edgbaston Oldfield added 116 with Warwick Armstrong in 61 minutes and was then involved in a whirlwind 44-minute partnership of 124 with Mailey. In the process he scored a 105-minute 123 — his first First-Class hundred.
With Australia going into the last Test at The Oval with a 3-0 lead Oldfield replaced Carter. He kept wickets so well as England (he conceded a single bye as England scored 647 in the Test). He did not look back from there and became Australia’s No. 1 wicketkeeper.
The number one in business
It was during the Ashes series in 1924-25 that Oldfield emerged as the best wicketkeeper in the world. He had scored 47 and three 39s in his first 5 outings with the bat and had 7 catches from the 3 Tests. However, it was in the fourth Test at MCG he really came to his elements.
England scored 548 and won by an innings; Oldfield, however, had a catch and 4 stumpings. Two of these were off Mailey; additionally, he stumped Hobbs of Ryder (mentioned above) and ‘Dodger’ Whysall off Charles Kelleway, also a fast-medium bowler.
If the stumping of Hobbs at MCG had put Oldfield at the top, the catch of the Master placed him firmly over there. Gregory had erred by bowling on the leg-stump; Hobbs’s deft wristwork turned the ball towards fine-leg; as the crowd tried to track the locus of the ball they sensed a blurry movement behind Hobbs: Oldfield had stretched himself impossibly wide of the leg-stump and had pulled off a sensational catch.
in the final Test, he finished with 2 catches and 4 stumpings; he also scored a career-best 65 not out, adding 116 with Kelleway for the eighth wicket. Australia claimed the Ashes 4-1, and Oldfield finished the series with 291 runs at 41.57, 10 catches, and 8 stumpings.
Once he had established himself as the world’s best wicketkeeper, Oldfield’s career progressed without much fuss. True, he could not equal the record of most stumpings in a Test series (9, held by Percy Sherwell and Dick Lilley), but other than his 8 stumpings in the 1924-25 Ashes he had two series with 7 (Ashes 1930 and in South Africa, 1935-36) and two more with 6 (at home against South Africa, 1931-32, and the 1934 Ashes).
He had also toured New Zealand, and it was on the 1927-28 tour that he scored 137 against Canterbury at Christchurch. It remained his highest First-Class score. He conceded only 3 byes from the first 3 Tests of the 1928-29 Ashes: England had scored 1,912 runs.
Felled by Larwood
Things were going fine for Oldfield in the 1932-33 Ashes at home. England had won the first Test at SCG in Bradman’s absence, but the great man had struck back at MCG, scoring 103 and, along with O’Reilly, helped level the series. When he reached 12 in his first innings Oldfield became the first wicketkeeper to score a thousand Test runs.
Horror struck at Adelaide — the kind of which the world of cricket had seldom seen. After Larwood famously hit Bill Woodfull on his chest it was Oldfield’s turn. Larwood bounced, Oldfield ducked, and the ball took the top-edge of his bat and hit his skull with a sickening blow. There was a fracture and he had to be rushed to the hospital.
Oldfield was the first to come out in defence of Larwood. He had always maintained that it was his own fault that the ball had hit him. As was expected, he became an excellent friend of Larwood after the latter had settled down in Australia.
It would, however, have taken more than that to keep Oldfield out of action for long: he missed the fourth Test at The Gabba (Hammy Love got his only Test) but came back for the final Test at SCG. In typical Oldfield fashion, he defied Larwood, Bill Voce, and Hedley Verity before scoring 52 on comeback.
Playing with an injury was not alien to Oldfield: he had played a Test with a broken finger, and on another occasion he kept on keeping wickets with his astronomical level of efficiency even after a bouncer from McDonald had cracked two of his ribs.
Reclaiming the Ashes and final days
Oldfield took particular pride and pleasure at being a part of the Australian side that reclaimed the Ashes in 1934. He contributed as much as anyone else with 8 catches and 6 stumpings. It was during the second Test of the series at Lord’s that Oldfield stumped Verity off Grimmett to bring up his hundredth Test dismissal.
He played in only two series after this, in South Africa in 1935-36 and the 1936-37 Ashes at home. Between them the two series amounted to 12 catches and 11 stumpings for Oldfield. He played on for another season, scoring 212 runs and finishing with 23 catches and 5 stumpings from 9 matches.
Post-retirement
Oldfield took up commentary as a profession and added more trips to his favourite country, England. He settled down in the Kilara suburb of Sydney. He ran his sports shop (WA Oldfield Pty Ltd) on Pitt Street. The shop had played its own little role in the history of world cricket.
“When he was brought to Sydney he had no cricket gear or shoes. I received an SOS to lend him clothes from my Sports Stores. The only clothes that fitted him were mine!” Oldfield had been talking of Bradman to Kersi Meher-Homji of Roar.
He had married Ruth Maud Hunter on March 23, 1929, and had two daughters. He was also summoned for World War II where he was appointed as the Lieutenant in the 17th Battalion. He served on the staff of the Eastern Command Headquarters, was promoted to Captain and then to Major, and served till 1946.
A benefit match organised in 1947 raised £6,000 for him and Alan Kippax. He was awarded an MBE in 1970 Queen’s Birthday Honours for Services to Cricket. The Killara Oval has been named after Oldfield, as has been Oldfield Road and the Bert Oldfield Public School on it.
In 1946, he famously gave away three pairs of his wicketkeeping gloves. The first, a used pair of his, went with the renowned actor Shirley Ann Richards to Hollywood as a gift to Sir Aubrey Smith; the other two, new ones from his store, flew to Sussex for Billy Griffith in the financially tough times. Griffith went on to play 3 Tests.
Even as late as on his 80th birthday Oldfield told in an interview to The Age that cricket was “a God” to him. “The game is full of charm — Jack Hobbs, Bert Strudwick, Wilfred Rhodes — the memories are so dear. I often walk from home at Killara to the nearby cricket oval. I stroll along the pitch and my mind is filled with green thoughts.”
Even at 80, cricket was all he could think of. He flew to Hong Kong (along with Larwood) for the inauguration of the first cricket stadium there as late as in 1976, and helped promote cricket in Ethiopia.
He passed away on August 10, 1976, and was buried in the Rookwood cemetery.
(Abhishek Mukherjee is a cricket historian and Senior Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He generally looks upon life as a journey involving two components – cricket and literature – though not as disjoint elements. A passionate follower of the history of the sport with an insatiable appetite for trivia and anecdotes, he has also a steady love affair with the incredible assortment of numbers that cricket has to offer. He also thinks he can bowl decent leg-breaks in street cricket, and blogs at http://ovshake.blogspot.in. He can be followed on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ovshake42)
