Alec Bedser, one of England’s greatest bowlers, died on April 4, 2010. His friend John Woodcock wrote this tribute in the 2011 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
John Woodcock was cricket correspondent of The Times from 1954 to 1987 and editor of Wisden from 1981 to 1986.
Alec Bedser was one of the great bowlers, and someone to whom commitment was the first commandment. That he remained wedded to cricket until his dying day, and got out and about until into his nineties, made him a national treasure, chunter though he would at an open-chested bowling action, the absence of a third man or for want of a pint of bitter.
Through having served six years in the Second World War, by the time his career started in earnest he already had something of the veteran about him. His bowling was essentially a product of the English game as it was played for the first two-thirds of the last century. Still being uncovered, the pitches encouraged lateral movement at medium-pace to an extent seldom found elsewhere, and that was Bedser’s stock-in-trade.
Not even Sir Pelham Warner and Lord Hawke between them can have helped to pick more Test sides than Bedser, and he had a remarkable memory for all the whys and wherefores of the different eras. More than anything, selectors need genuine all-rounders to help them out, and for his last few years Bedser was fortunate in having Ian Botham round whom to build a side. The successful decisions to bring back Mike Brearley as captain in 1981 in place of Botham, and to plump for Ray Illingworth ahead of Colin Cowdrey to lead the side in Australia in 1970-71, were not quite as straightforward as they may seem now.
Bedser was not, I think, given to agonising over things, but he always wanted to see justice done. The irony was certainly not lost on him when, 36 years after the selectors, under Bedser’s chairmanship, had felt obliged to suspend Tom Graveney for three Test matches for “a serious breach of discipline”, the villain became president of MCC!
From the days when, as a member of the groundstaff at The Oval, he had to do what he was told by Mr Holmes and Mr Garland-Wells, until he was assured of a right royal reception at Lord’s and knighted by the Queen, Bedser’s career has nothing in cricket quite to match it. It would make a good film if twins of the right shape could be found to play Alec and his identical and inseparable brother, Eric, who predeceased him by four years. They would be seen getting away together from Dunkirk, and their mother would be heard to say “But that’s what he’s paid for, isn’t it?” when asked what she thought of Alec taking 11 wickets in his first Test match.
Alec must have taken after his mother. I wasn’t there to see him bowl Bradman at Adelaide in 1947, the most famous of his 236 Test wickets, but I saw most of the others and each one brought no more than a nod of satisfaction. The hugging and mauling which go on today, and that he would have so detested, had yet to come in. There was a native dignity about Alec, besides a becoming unselfconsciousness and gentle homespun humour, a candour, an incumbent melancholy and a liking for the old ways, which all went towards making him the institution he was – along with his indomitable bowling.
