The Black Caps’ June 2021 victory in the Test Championship crowned a wonderful few years for New Zealand Cricket, which only success over Australia could have bettered. Such is the humility of Kane Williamson and his team that I suspect they would be the first to acknowledge that in achieving such heights they stand on the shoulders of giants.
It is fair to say that the first giants of New Zealand cricket, at least judging by results, were Walter Hadlee and his team who toured England (and Scotland, Wales and Germany) in 1949. The Forty-Niners, as the team is known, left the shores of New Zealand aboard the Dominion Monarch in February and returned on the Rangitata in October. They played 37 matches, losing only one and drawing all four tests. To say that they put New Zealand on the cricketing map would be an understatement. As with the 2021 team, their 1949 forebears were a popular team who won friends and influenced people to believe that Kiwis could play the great game well and in the right way.
Walter Hadlee kept a detailed diary on the 1949 tour which provides a fascinating insight into both the tour itself and also the times in which it took place. These were the days of healthy over rates (up to 120 a day), hardly any back room (a manager and a bag man) and expectations that the players would connect with the local community both before (visits to local businesses etc) and after (dinners etc) play, mixing with royalty, politicians, military leaders and stars of stage and screen. It is astonishing that the team acquitted themselves so well on the field against legends like Len Hutton, Denis Compton, Trevor Bailey and Alec Bedser; and it was not surprising that the pace found several of the players out, with the skipper needing R&R in London whilst the team travelled to Scotland under the able vice-captain Merv Wallace (who came close to the holy grail of scoring 1,000 runs before the end of May).
Sir Richard Hadlee has compiled his father’s 1949 diaries beautifully. The book titled “The Skipper’s Diary” is an essential part of any cricket collection. It takes us back to a bygone era before air travel, where amateurs played for the love of the game and appeared to enjoy what surely must have been the ultimate of tours, which that doyen of cricket writers, Neville Cardus, thought contributed to English cricket a “rejuvenation of the spirit”. More than that, Cardus said: “The tourists (New Zealand) came here to learn, but they also had something to teach us, or at any rate, help us with – that is, the renewal of what is known as the ‘amateur’ attitude. I am talking about a manner of approach, rather than class division: of an eagerness to embrace uninhibited, unselfish action.” More than shades of their 2021 successors!
Sir Richard Hadlee is to be heartily congratulated on this project, which he told me he rates as the best thing he has ever done!
— David Kidd is a past chairman of London New Zealand CC and member of both MCC and The Willows