For cricket tragics and history buffs

The Ashes are exciting our interest again. Can Australia take the series?

Let's take a look back 70 years at the 1953 Ashes series. My long-passed father, Peter Duffield, was a journalist and war correspondent (Europe in WWII and Middle East thereafter) but was back in Australia by the time the 1953 Ashes rolled around.?My brother, Andrew, found this piece by our dad in the attic, all about how Australians followed that UK-based Ashes series -- transfixed to their radios.??

Says a lot about how Australia was back then and the central role cricket played in our sense of identity.?The days before television, the internet, and electric typewriters, let alone computers.??

It's a classic -- not for everyone, but some of you, cricket tragics and those who want to understand or remember our past, might really like it.??(BTW, England won the 1953 Ashes, 1-0.)

How Australia Hears the Tests

A report from Radio Bedlam…Down Under

By Peter Duffield

Sydney, Australia

July 1953

“And now Bedser to Morris,” says the short-waved B.bB.C.-voice with growing urgency, “he’s running up to the wicket…he BOWLS…”

“Bedser A82 B6 D10 E5 I7 M4 y13” dot-dashes the international code-cable from the Test ground.

“Poor little Morris,” bellows a Melbourne studio-audience to the tune “walking to Missouri”, “walk-in’ walkin’ walkin’ to the pavilion…with a tear-drop in his eye-eese…”

Australia, normally and on the whole, is a nice, quiet Continent. The pubs close early.? Bed-time is early.? People are given to gardening and home-building and raising the kids.? Night-clubs are as rare as 300 run opening partnerships.

But play a Test Match in England. And what happens?

The Continent becomes radio bedlam.? To feed a cricket-starved nation with the approximate population of Greater London, no less than 81 broadcasting stations stay open with ball-by-ball descriptions from opening over to close-of-play. 74 more stations constantly interrupt normal programmes with progress results.

And because of the exasperating solar system whereby your lunchtime is our bedtime, your tea-break is our wee small hours and close of play at 3.30am, an estimated one million Australian listeners stagger to work next morning bug-eyed with sleeplessness, dazed and reeling under a welter of scores, static, weather forecasts, states of wickets, expert commentaries and, in some instances, variety-cricket programmes, community singing, Test Jests, Contests, Prizes, Stunts and high jinks - presented by the makers of this or that, and liable to send the consecrated member of Lord’s jump screaming into the Thames….

What happens in Australia when the fate of the Ashes is under determination in the Old Country?? What happens in a cricket-mad community whose team is playing on the other side of the globe?

We have just survived one fraction of the 1953 Test Series. How shall we survive the remainder?

The mass insomnia currently being generated over the Test matches is the responsibility of a unique radio system operating in unique fashion.

Australian radio, to begin with, is a non-monopoly, dog-eat-dog business, competitive between National and Commercial broadcast systems. (There is a National wavelength dedicated, by law, to broadcasting every word spoken in Australia’s Parliament.? Every major city has an all-night commercial station.)

Of the 155 stations mentioned above (81+74), 50 belong to the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and include city and country stations plus the powerful Radio Australia.? These feed all parts of the Commonwealth, reaching out to Malaya, New Zealand, Korea and India.??

The remaining 105 stations are Commercial or B-class? transmitters which rely for their income on advertising.??

Commercial and National stations have this year pooled their resources for a common radio and cable service from each Test ground.? Some stations serve up their cricket straight.? Others dilute it….

Spend an evening listening with me to an exciting English day’s Test cricket as heard in any large Australian town.

We have a matter of six or seven local stations to choose from.? Dozens and dozens more if our set is high-powered.

1. Twist the dial to the local ABC transmitter.? Here, backing their belief that most Australians want the utmost detail with the utmost speed, the ABC lay on and keep on direct transmissions from each Test ground in broadcasts featuring the regular BBC team plus their own Bernard Kerr.

These transmissions start at 8.25pm Australian time- five minutes befor your morning play begins.? Lunch(for us) is from 10.30 to 11.30pm and comes with commentaries from folk like Bert Oldfield and Jack Fingleton in England, from Johnny Moyes and selector-and-ex-test opener Bill Brown in the Sydney studios.? Your tea-break ends at five minutes past one in the morning(are you sleepy yet?)…and close-of-play is at 3.30am. No bed even then…there is further comment- usually from Bill Stanton.

The ABC closes around twenty-five minutes to four!

2.Suppose the short-wave radio breaks down, or ionospheric conditions ruin reception.? The ABC, and the commercial stations in the pool, are immediately prepared to put out what is called the “synthetic” cricket service, a ball-by-ball description based on cable from the ground, and made faithful by the use of special crowd-noises, bat-striking-ball (usually simulated by pencil and matchbox) and experts to interpret the game.? At these times (so far short-wave reception, boosted by 100 kw transmitter in Singapore, has been excellent) we hear a game of cricket so superbly faked that it is virtually played in the studio about 30 seconds after it is in fact played in England.

Full-rate especially encoded cables are the secret of this service.??

The cable “Lindwall A418 B7 Y95 T10 M2 I3,” for instance, reaches every studio of the pool about 20 seconds after despatch from the ground.? Men whose nearest equivalent in non-cricketing life would probably be MI5 cipher officers, instantly decode it, rush it to the commentator.

It means that Lindwall is to bowl, that his field consists of three slips, Miller, Hole and Benaud, two leg-slips, Davidson and Hill, that Morris is in the gully, Harvey at cover and Hassett at mid-on.??

The entire field-placement is instantly available to listeners in this way.??

A cable then reading “Lindwall Hutton maiden driving” indicates to the expert that the over was a maiden with Hutton hitting the ball hard but not getting it through the field.??

Similar shortenings and codes arrranged by the cricket pool include such phrases as “10,000 dull slow morris not 20 Hassett not 15” meaning that there an attendance of 10,000 that the weather was dull and wicket inclined to be slow, that Australia had won the toss and had opened with the? two not-out batsman named.(The word “bosie” is always used in this strange cablese for “wrong-un” thus avoiding a possible double cable charge for two words — and the word “drinks” always and simply means that the interval in play has arrived when drinks are brought out.)

3.Twist the dial again, this time to a Sydney commercial station.? At one of them, 2UE, with map of the Test ground, full professionally-kept scorebook and the latest decoded cables before him, one-time cricketer and veteran broadcaster Alan McGilvray keeps up a lively description of the game.??

Turn the dial again, to Sydney commercial 2GB, and the famed English speed-demon, Harold Larwood, now an Australian migrant, sits nightly at the microphone heading a team of Australian experts.??

In both cases the broadcasts are paid for by such sponsors as insurance companies, retail stores, tobacco firms, producers of clothing, patent medicines and car batteries.

4. It is in Captain Lindsay Hassett’s home-state, Victoria, that the technique of combining cricket with variety has been most developed.? Here two stations, believing that listeners want their cricket mixed with fun and games, have gone all out to prove it.?

At one Melbourne commercial station, 3AW, Ian Johnson, the Test bowler that Australia this time left behind, is in charge of the expert commentary, but back of him is a team of five technicians and some twenty? variety artists, bandsmen, vocalists, comedians.

Pioneer of this type of Test cricket broadcast is another Melbourne commercial transmitter, 3DB, owned by the Melbourne Herald newspaper group.? They started the fun, tentatively and a little fearfully, back in the 1930 Test series, when both broadcasting and commercial radio were in their infancies.??

“Cricket-cum-variety” was an instant and howling success.? Asked over the air in 1930 one midnight whether they liked it that way, thousands of listeners from all parts of Australia telephoned, wrote and wired the studio to keep going.? Presents of food and bottles of beer poured into the station.? Sponsors reported thriving business.

“We figure,” says then-as-now station manager, David Wirral, “that we helped sell the million pounds worth of radios sold that year, that our listener rating was around 55%, and that it was really the year that put Australian commercial radio on its feet.”

Today the station goes berserk every night of Test cricket in England.? Centred around comments by ex-Australian Test captain Bill Woodfull and studio-commentator Eric Welch, normally one of the world’s fastest race-commentators, the programme is played to a nightly studio audience and features a rag-doll which lights up each time a Test wicket, English or Australian, falls.??

“We don’t worry, we don’t care,” sings the studio audience as doll Rickety-Kate lights up, “we’re not afraid of the big bad bear.”

“Hassett’s got a hundred runs, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah.? With plenty of singles and plenty of fours: he must have been listening to our applause: and the score goes marching on and on and on….”

“Swee-eet vii-olettts,” they shout as Bedser takes a wicket, “send them all to BEDSER.”

Between catch-songs, community singing, progress scores , jokes (samples:?

“How do you get milk from a Persian cat?? Take the saucer away when it’s not looking.” “A Sarong: a dishcloth that’s made good;” “Waiter, a piece of plaster’s just fallen into my soup.” “That’s alright, sir, you’re paying ceiling prices.”), the station runs a series of competitions paying about 25 pounds a night in prizes.??

During the Trent Bridge game, for instance, 5 pounds was suddenly offered to the first milkman to arrive in the studio, and another night, 5 pounds for the first person to bring in a motor-horn in the key of “F.”? The following night 5 pounds was given to the first taxi-driver to get to the station, and on a night of the Lord’s Test, 5 pounds to the person who first brought a barking dog to the he microphone.? The studio was soon full of dogs; none of them would bark.??

“Well, Mr Sponsor,” said the unabashed announcer, “that’s 5 pounds I’ve saved you.”

Believed to have a present listener rating of between 40 and 50 percent, station 3DB answers its critics by its ease in getting sponsors.? A number of firms, including a furniture house and a wine company, have this year paid the station 9,000 pounds for a series of half-hour advertising blocks of this cricket-variety material.? So high is the Australian feminine listening interest that one of the sponsors of the programme is a firm manufacturing nylon stockings.??

Excitement in Australia over the 1953 Test series has now reached top pitch.? Sixty to seventy percent of houselights are on if you walk around a suburb at midnight.? Electricity companies report a definite “load-shed” after 3.30am.? Listeners are found all the way from Governor-General Sir William Slim in Canberra to uranium prospectors in the Northern Territory to soldiers stationed in lonely outposts n the Dutch New Guinea frontier.

No matter whether you fail in the competition to “stump the umpire,” or fail in the nightly competition to guess the lunch-time score — or whether a Hutton century is followed instantly by a singing commercial…if England is setting up cricket attendance records it’s fair to say we’re setting up records, too…

For sitting up — around our radios…