It would be hard to find a more endearingly old-fashioned, uncomplicated man - or, many would say, a finer bowler - than Sir Alec Bedser, who has died aged 91. He took 236 Test wickets at 24.89 runs each, and 1,924 in total at 20.41 - with Sir Don Bradman among his most unswerving admirers - while fronting the attack for Surrey, championship-winners for most of the 1950s, alongside his twin brother, Eric. Bedser bowled at something above medium pace, drawing inevitable comparisons with Maurice Tate. The arm was high, the action constantly good. He planted down his big boots determinedly in a run-up of modest length though undeniable aggression. His late in-swing troubled the best of batsmen, and so did the leg-cutters or fast leg-breaks that were his trademark. There were times when England over-bowled him of necessity. On the first ill-conceived tour of Australia after the second world war, he and the enigmatic Doug Wright alone offered a valid threat to the opposition.
Bedser would bowl all day if asked. He was the “Big Fella” or simply “Big Al”, big in stature and heart. He sweated willingly, as he did when he and Eric helped their father, a bricklayer by trade, to build the family’s house at Knaphill, Woking, in Surrey. At Adelaide in 1947, however, he was overcome by the heat, so, as unobtrusively as possible, he withdrew to the boundary to be sick. Then he returned to the attack and got on with the job of bowling at Bradman and his illustrious teammates.
He played in 51 Tests. For his first, in 1946 - not long out of the RAF - he took 11-145 against India at Lord’s and followed up with another 11 wickets in the second Test at Old Trafford - a record. What everyone noticed was his insistence that the batsman should be made to play every ball. There was nothing much loose or wayward. Half-volleys were not allowed.
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Such was the Surrey newcomer’s impact on those first postwar Tests that England won the Lord’s match by 10 wickets by lunch on the third day. The gates had been closed on the first two days, with crowds of 30,000 inside. They all seemed to sense that they were witnessing a bowler with a long future. Though the Old Trafford match was drawn, Bedser’s impressive haul included four wickets in one six-over spell. And in the seasons ahead, his uncluttered endeavour and sheer stamina repeatedly gave England hope of swaying the balance of the match.
Bedser’s entry into Test cricket was exceptional, with no signs of his being a nervous novice. It was also a timely fillip to a nation starved of top-class cricket during the war years. Not that his formidable 1946 statistics, for instance, and the headlines that followed, were going to affect him. He was refreshingly unmoved by praise. What the spectators - and adversaries - were aware of was his physical presence. It carried a psychological potency. Here was an old-style seamer with some additional tricks, and one who rapidly earned respect overseas: he toured Australia in 1946-47, 1950-51 and 1954-55, as well as South Africa in 1948-49.
A conservative and single-minded, some would say unworldly, bachelor, Bedser did what he was asked and avoided social excesses. He was also widely popular, not least because he was usually the best bowler at those times when a win for his country looked difficult. During the 1950-51 tour, he took 30 wickets at an average of 16.06, though England lost 4-1. When England regained the Ashes at home in 1953, his marvellous tally was 39 wickets at 17.48, including 14-99 at Trent Bridge.
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When Bradman said Bedser could be the most difficult bowler that he had faced, he meant it. The perceptive Trevor Bailey, who used to share the new ball with him, maintained that the Big Fella wasn’t just a fine bowler, but a great one.
Bedser acquired by instinct the arcane subtleties of an intelligent fast bowler’s armoury. He could disguise his leg-cutters or the occasionally slower ball. He did not bother much with the outswingers. The Aussie lefthanders still had enough trouble coping with his functional repertoire, often faster than it looked from the boundary.
Arthur Morris was one who suffered excessively - he was dismissed 18 times by Bedser. Neil Harvey was another left-handed victim. Bradman was out to Bedser five times in a row - and there could not have been a greater compliment to the bowler than that.
He liked his wicketkeeper to stand up to him. This was what Godfrey Evans did so proficiently for England, and Arthur McIntyre for Surrey. Bedser’s influence for the county, as they monopolised the championship with a shared title in 1950 and then seven in a row, 1952-58, was considerable. When Peter May was absent, he captained them in his pragmatic, no-nonsense style.
Nor should one forget Alec’s single first-class century. Batting No. 9 against Somerset at Taunton in 1947, he had been 99 overnight but continued to 126. In that same match, Eric scored 73.
Alec and Eric, the off-spinner, were inseparable. They talked and thought as one. The cricket writer and commentator John Arlott described them as “two dark, massive men, identical in every detail of bone structure”. There was never a semblance of envy from Eric that his twin gathered most of the public acclaim. Nothing could have been more endearing than his sibling selflessness. “I owe much to my other half,” Alec once remarked, “and if it is deemed that I served the game, then cricket also is in his debt.” Off the field, they dressed in the same way. They were sparing with their words. Alec, quoted most frequently as an England bowler and as a Test selector, never went in for fancy phrases. There was no question of his ever betraying his roots.
The twins, born in Reading, Berkshire, to Arthur and Florence Bedser, were brought up at Horsell Common and then at nearby Knaphill. They left Monument Hill central school, Woking, at 14, and travelled from their home every day to work in a lawyer’s office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, central London. But in 1938 they joined the Surrey county club staff, already encouraged and tutored by the ex-county allrounder and coach Alan Peach, and, in 1939, Alec played two first-class matches. War service saw the twins return from France via Dunkirk, and then in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Austria.
Perhaps not a man of exceptional imagination, Alec relied instead on experience and common sense, not diverted by any newfangled ideas. All his life, he remained suspicious of cricketing innovation - often, he felt, introduced for the wrong reason - and the surfeit of fixtures and competitions.
He retained a steadfast affection for the championship, up to and beyond his retirement as a player in 1960. Some of the more recent experiments and restructuring were anathema to him. One had only to goad him mischievously by mentioning the high staffing levels at the ECB, the England and Wales Cricket Board, in more recent years, and his eyes would take on a kind of exasperation and drift eloquently towards the ceiling. There were also, he argued, too many committees.
His more intractable attitudes surfaced occasionally during the tours of Australia that he managed in 1974-75 and 1979-80, although mostly offset by basic wisdom, a modest manner and a hard-headed approach to the game. He was one of the England selectors from 1961 to 1985, and their chairman for 13 years from 1968.
Open and honest with his players, he maybe had a few minor reservations about the way Len Hutton had skippered on tour. He had left Bedser out of the team for the second Test, at Sydney, without mentioning it, when the bowler was unwell with shingles on the 1954-55 tour. Hutton, in the next room, failed to look in and see him. “Funny bloke, Len,” he later reflected. He played just one more Test after that, against South Africa at Old Trafford in July 1955.
Young players, on the later tours when Bedser was in charge, may have gently joked about him and called him a bit of an old fogey, out of earshot, but they all had a respect for him and his principles. One occasionally sensed signs of the generation gap. There was the often repeated story of the day he went into the England dressing room where one of the players was using a hairdryer. “Whatever is that?” Bedser asked. When he was told, he snorted and growled: “In my day we used a bloody towel.” He could be a reactionary and a bit of a moaner, often unable to hide his displeasure at a faulty bowling technique, though praise was also willingly given.
Alec and Eric lived for the rest of their lives in the house that the family had built at Knaphill in 1953, and the following year started their office equipment firm in Woking. They expanded the business when they formed the firm Straker-Bedser with Ronald Straker in 1962, and it was sold to Ryman in 1977. They played golf and did hospital charity work, and Alec grew brussels sprouts with the same enthusiasm as he once imparted to his leg-cutters. He was appointed OBE in 1964 and CBE in 1982 for services to cricket, and was president of the Surrey club in 1987-88. His knighthood came in 1997. Eric died in 2006.
Richard Evans writes: I was standing in the lobby of the Pegasus hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, during England’s tour there in 1990. Alec was telling me how he was suspicious of modern training methods. “I just bowled,” he said. “Often walked to the ground, changed and bowled all day. Did that in Australia in 90 degrees. Didn’t need to go to a gym. And I wasn’t hurt much.” If those comments did not mark him as a man from another age, his reaction to an England supporter entering the lobby wearing an England cap most certainly did. “You earn that?” he barked. The man stopped dead in his tracks, looking embarrassed. “You have to earn that cap,” the great bowler went on. “It’s supposed to be a privilege.” The age of replica sports gear was just dawning, and Alec didn’t like what he saw. He was old school, tie or not, and all the better for it.
Alec Victor Bedser, cricketer, born 4 July 1918, died 4 April, 2010.
Copyright: Guardian News & Media 2010