Two hundred and nineteen, in the fourth innings

Bill Edrich batted at six in England’s first innings at Durban and made 1, caught by Eric Rowan off Chud Langton with the score on 171. It was the fifth wicket of an innings that finished on 316, and nothing about it suggested what the same man would do a week later.

England were set 696 to win. No side had ever made that many in a fourth innings. Edrich was moved up to three.

Seventy-eight for one

Len Hutton was bowled by Bruce Mitchell for 55 with the score on 78, and Edrich walked in on the seventh day of a match that had no scheduled end. Paul Gibb was at the other end. By the close that evening England were 253 for one, Gibb on 78 and Edrich on 107.

Then nothing happened for two days. The eighth day was washed out and the next was the rest day. Two men who had spent an afternoon building a chase sat through a Saturday of rain and a Sunday of nothing, and came back on the Monday to carry on.

Two hundred and eighty

They carried on to 358, at which point Gibb was bowled by Eric Dalton for 120. The stand was worth 280 for the second wicket. Gibb had hit two fours in 451 minutes, and the boundaries in the stand were almost all at the other end.

Edrich went on to 219 before Langton had him caught by Norman Gordon with the score on 447. He had batted 460 minutes and hit 25 fours. It was the highest score of a match that produced 1,981 runs, and it came from a man whose Test record gave no warning of it.

Full scorecard: South Africa v England, 5th Test, Durban, 3–14 March 1939 →

What it was for

Wally Hammond made 140 and Eddie Paynter 75 after him, and England reached 654 for five before the rain came on the tenth day and the team’s ship would not wait. The match was left drawn, 42 short. Edrich’s 219 was a third of the runs England made in the chase.

South Africa used five bowlers in that innings and four of them conceded a hundred or more. Gordon bowled 55.2 overs for 174. Langton bowled 56 for 132 and took the wicket that mattered, which nobody remembers because the innings it ended did not win anything.

What came before it

Edrich’s Test career to that point had produced almost nothing. The 1 in the first innings at Durban was of a piece with everything before it. Then he was promoted to three in a chase of 696 and made 219.

There is no account on the card of why he was moved up. It records a man at six in one innings and at three in the next, and a difference of 218 runs between them.

What came after it

He was twenty-two. He turned twenty-three twelve days after the match ended. The war began in September and he joined the Royal Air Force, flew with Bomber Command, took part in a low-level daylight raid by Blenheims on power stations near Cologne in August 1941, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He finished the war a squadron leader.

None of which is on the scorecard, and all of which is why the 219 reads differently now than it did at the time. It was the innings of a young man who had failed repeatedly and might not be picked again. It turned out to be the innings of a young man who was about to spend six years doing something else.

What the card holds

A 1 and a 219 against the same name, in the same match, a week apart. A second-wicket stand of 280 with a rest day and a washout in the middle of it. Twenty-five fours. And a total of 654 for five that was 42 short of a target nobody had ever reached, in a match that was played to a finish and did not finish.

••••••

No. 9 in The Other Guy, a series of 24.

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