The match that stood still: Tangiwai and the spirit of 1953

Neil Adcock was running in determinedly; his loose-limbed arms and legs pumping like pistons. Ordinarily, watching scribes would have described the South African speedster as a runaway express train, but on this day of all days, it would have been in markedly poor taste.

Adcock’s commanding 6’3” height and a lively green-hued wicket that placed the term ‘sporting’ at its absolute limits was causing a combination of panic and carnage in the New Zealand ranks.

Extracting wicked pace and bounce off the old Ellis Park deck, he had already cleaned up startled opener Murray Chapple for eight, and with fellow opener and skipper Geoff Rabone already back in the pavilion, New Zealand’s innings was in danger of capsizing at 9 for 2.

But at least they had the reassuring presence of Bert Sutcliffe to enter the fray at four.

The Kiwi’s one genuinely world-class batter, who adequately lived up to the lofty heights of his English pre-war near-namesake, the imperious Herbert Sutcliffe, was by now used to keeping a lone vigil at the crease.

Most of his innings were akin to attempting to plug holes in the stricken bow of the Titanic. By this point of his career, New Zealand had embarked on 32 Test excursions since their debut in the 1929/30 season and were still yet to record a solitary victory.

Sutcliffe was immediately troubled by the spitting bounce from Adcock and determined that his best chance of success was to take the attack to the bowler.

He set himself to hook his third ball; defeated by its searing pace, it smacked sickeningly into the side of his head and laid him out prostrate on the Johannesburg turf. Blood trickled disconcertingly from the wound as a packed crowd and the South African players looked nervously on.

In time, the Otago man was able to partially regain his senses. Stumbling unsteadily to his feet, he magnanimously shook hands with the gathered South African fielders before being led back to the pavilion and a waiting hospital bed.

Soon after, New Zealand’s Lawrie Miller blocked an Adcock delivery with his chest, coughing up blood; he was immediately sent to join Sutcliffe in the casualty ward. The scoreboard may have read 24 for 3, but it was effectively 24 for 6, what with two players completely sidelined in hospital and another of their XI sat distraught back at the team hotel.

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It was Boxing Day 1953, but the mood in the New Zealand dressing room was anything but seasonal. The familiar silver and gold vibrancy of tinsel and fairy lights was singularly overwhelmed by an unmovable shade of black.

Its shadows had crept in with the gathering dusk of Christmas Eve and engulfed the camp with its tales of national and later personal misery.

Two days earlier, an Express locomotive carrying 285 passengers and crew had departed from Wellington bound for Auckland at 3pm local time. At 10:21 pm it plunged into the freezing Whangaehu River, near the tiny rural village of Tangiwai, after a vast mudflow had earlier destroyed one of its bridge piers.

Despite the driver’s best efforts to halt the train, its front six carriages were derailed and lost into the deep. It was later calculated that 151 people lost their lives on that night of unmitigated horror.

At around the same time, back in Johannesburg, a young Bob Blair had not long taken the new ball on the first morning of the second Test. Running in at full tilt, he had snaffled the early wicket of Anton Murray as the outgunned New Zealanders set about responding to a not unfamiliar innings defeat in the series opener.

As he willed himself to find extra pace on the helpful track, and to ignite a career that was still in its infancy at international level, Blair wasn’t to know that over eight thousand miles away his beloved fiancée Nerissa Love was doomed to lose her life on the 3pm Express from Auckland.

Although the New Zealand players were at once shook by the tragic news, coming in by wireless, neither they nor Blair had any idea that his fiancée had any plans to even be on the train.

The telegram informing Blair of the despairing news finally found its way to him on the following afternoon as the New Zealand players celebrated Christmas at their hotel.

To this day, the Tangiwai tragedy remains the worst rail accident ever to occur in New Zealand. Love was just 19, and the man she left behind a mere 21.

Yet on that Christmas Eve a noisy Ellis Park still existed in its own innocent vacuum, far away from the unforgiving vagaries of the outside world. South Africa reached the close on 259 for 8, leaving the game delicately poised ahead of the break for Christmas.

Blair had added another wicket in the final session and returned the respectable figures of 2 for 50 from his 17 overs.

For now, at least, it was still all about the cricket. By the time the players returned some 40 hours later, it served as little more than a distraction. And for Blair, sat with team manager Jack Kerr back at the hotel, his ear pressed numbly to the wireless, nothing would ever be the same again.

As the team coach arrived for the second day’s play, they were met with flags around the ground hanging disconsolately at half-mast.

It is perhaps a wonder that they showed up at all. Today’s commercial pressures were then largely absent, but instead replaced by an all-pervasive credo: to do your duty and carry on.

A mantra that would be more than adhered to as the day’s play progressed.

With Sutcliffe absent undergoing X-rays on his injured head, the New Zealand innings continued to implode to 57 for 5 in response to South Africa’s 271 all out. An ignominious failure to beat the follow-on looked certain.

However, against medical orders, Miller elected to discharge himself from the hospital and rejoined the fray. Despite defying both grave personal danger and a rampant home attack, he steadfastly dug in for a critical 30 minutes whilst accruing a modest total of 14 runs.

With the score 81 for 6, still more than 40 required to beat the follow-on, and just two tailenders to come in, that easily could have been the end of the story. But rather than fast bowler Tony MacGibbon, out strode a returning Bert Sutcliffe instead.

Entering the field with his head swathed in a large white bandage, he looked like a cross between an underfed rugby prop and a wounded soldier. Although hospital X-rays had successfully ruled out a fractured skull, the doctors had still recommended that he remain there for additional observation.

Sutcliffe had earlier blacked out when the presiding doctor had prodded the large fist-size swelling close to his right ear.

That the New Zealand opener was in less than an optimum physical condition to be facing a rampant fast bowler on a lively track is beyond doubt. As he sat in the dressing room waiting to bat, the only drug fortifying his return was not one administered by the hospital, but instead self-medicated from a bottle of Scotch whisky.

A packed house applauded him all the way to the middle, and all but the most partisan of home supporters would have begrudged him his success as he set about hitting the home bowling to all parts. Partnered by wicketkeeper Frank Mooney, who toughed out a tenacious 35 before being bowled, the New Zealanders fought their way past the follow-on, and Sutcliffe to the cusp of a remarkable half-century.

With MacGibbon and last man Overton both falling for ducks, an undefeated Sutcliffe tucked his bat under his arm and began to make his way to the pavilion along with the South African fielders. As the crowd rose to applaud him, they suddenly noticed a figure slowly moving inward from the boundary edge. It walked uneasily as though it were cursed to carry the labours of the world on its young shoulders.

At once, the players on the field stopped walking. The applause from the stands gradually petering out as more and more of their number noticed the appearance of New Zealand’s No.11 batter.

Absolute silence permeated Ellis Park. Not a seat in the full-to-capacity stadium was filled as every person stood in stunned silence. It wasn’t just about respect for the bravery of a cricketer who appeared to be little more than a boy, but also a struggle to compute Bob Blair’s appearance on a day when the Tangiwai disaster hung so morosely over the outside world.

Ellis Park had endured it too, but the unfolding drama between bat and ball on the field had gradually offered an escape from the horror being reported from the newspaper and wireless.

But all at once, the presence of Blair upended these twin comforts of sunshine and cricket, as the impenetrable realities of real life were once again brought sharply into view.

As Blair made his way past the South African fielders, he couldn’t hide the tears streaming steadily down his cheeks.

The 21-year-old from Petone, near Wellington, was there because he didn’t want to let his mates down. Sutcliffe and Miller had risked further injury or even death to return, so why couldn’t he?

Every action from each of these men was set in accordance with their duty to the people back home. They wore their black caps heavily; today’s responsibility had never been greater, as they set to exemplify the stoicism of those at home within the parameters of the cricket field.

For each of them, this was courage of a Boys’ Own vintage, although in Blair’s case ratcheted to another level. Perhaps, more than anything, he was tired of sitting in his hotel room staring into the abyss of his own thoughts.

Cricket, at least, allowed him to focus for a few barely uninterrupted seconds on something else, and to be in the protective cocoon of his teammates.

Whatever the truth, it is difficult to imagine such an eventuality occurring today. Instead, Blair would have been whisked back home on the first waiting aeroplane, a team of counsellors and other experts waiting to comfort him.

But such an action was not possible in this immediate post-war world of: “Keep calm and carry on” and tours negotiated by long boat journeys.

As he reached the edge of the square, Sutcliffe came to meet him, putting his arm gently on his young teammate’s shoulder. He famously said: “Come on, son, this is no place for you. Let’s swing the bat and get out of here.” They made the final passage to the wicket arm-in-arm. The team bond unbreakable.

How they must have looked to the watching audience? Those sat in the main stands or occupying the grassy banks, and those whose skin meant that they had to crowd into a tiny corner of the ground, segregated and alone. Collectively they cast their eyes into the distant middle upon the two men whose actions had and would unconsciously determine that this moment would be immortal.

One physically battered and the other carrying unimaginable mental anguish. The bandage covering Sutcliffe’s head was by now flecked with blood, and his shirt collar stained crimson. His partner utterly broken, the mental debris of his stolen future swirling about him, but still standing there defiantly.

A cricket field on Boxing Day should have encouraged a carnival atmosphere, but the scene in the middle was more reminiscent of the hell and torment the world had endured just a few short years earlier.

Blair, his eyes blinded by tears, swung and missed at his first ball, and the umpire called “over”.

At the other end, facing Hugh Tayfield, Sutcliffe was true to his word. The first ball disappeared straight down the ground for a mighty six, and the next one followed its trajectory. Later in that same eight-ball over, Sutcliffe clouted another maximum before surrendering the strike to Blair. Not famed for his batting, even on better days Blair would have been propping up the order; he took his guard and waited as Tayfield ambled in.

How Tayfield, a famously miserly off-spinner, must have wished he wasn’t in possession of the ball. There was nothing in it for him here. Everyone’s sympathies were with Blair, including most probably his own. As he released it from his grasp, the lad, playfully nicknamed ‘Rabbit’ by his teammates, unwound into a mighty heave that sent the ball careering over the midwicket fence.

Of any tailender slog played anywhere in the history of the game, perhaps this was the most cathartic; hit as it was with every ounce of malice and hate that he could summon for the world.

The ball merely serving as a spherical approximation of his anguish; the shot owing less to the steady coordination of hand and eye but instead drilled from the very depths of his soul.

That over from Tayfield went for a gluttonous 25 runs and was at the time the most expensive over ever recorded in a Test. Shortly afterwards, Blair attempted to take aim again at the spinner, missed, and was stumped without adding to his score.

The 1953–54 New Zealand cricket team in South Africa. Bob Blair is the last player on the right in the second row. Bert Sutcliffe is third from right of those seated. Photo: NZ History

The doughty Sutcliffe remained unbending on 80 not out at the other end. Together they had added an impressive 33 runs in just ten breathless minutes of hitting.

Blair and Sutcliffe were instructed to sit out the early overs of South Africa’s second innings, as the home side stumbled to 35 for 3 at the close. Legend has it that they sat together silently in an empty changing room, draining the last dregs of the whisky bottle that had fuelled Sutcliffe so successfully earlier that afternoon.

Blair did eventually get to bowl five overs but finished wicketless, as the South Africans were bundled out for 148 at the hands of Reid and MacGibbon. But with Adcock bagging a five-for, New Zealand could only muster an even 100 on the final day and slipped to defeat by 132 runs.

But the bare arithmetic does not do it justice, and in any case, hardly seems to matter now. Indeed, what was cricket after all compared to the unrestrained horror experienced in Tangiwai?

Only within those brief moments when it was played by Blair or Sutcliffe was it imbued with some proper meaning. Only then did the game imprint on all those watching the very essence of the human spirit.

South Africa went on to take the five-Test series 4-0, but not even the games historians remember. All the facts and figures contained in more than 20 days of cricket over four months boiling down to a single Boxing Day afternoon of otherworldly courage. When life and death were played out vicariously through bat and ball.