Tufty
Gordon Phillips remembers his tragic hero
My mother, however, and his sparkling and attractive wife, Daphne, often shared the stage together for the PE Musical and Dramatic Society (to this day I can sing all the female solos from Gypsy Love and The Quaker Girl), and it was from my mother that I learnt that he both literally and metaphorically suffered nightmares about bowling to Denis Compton and Bill Edrich in the light of morning. This being so, they were immediately anathema and excommunicate for me, and it is only now, 36 years later, that I salute them for the geniuses they were with the bat, and for standing four-square for South Africa's re-admission to international cricket.
By 1952, uprooted to remotest Rhodesia, to probably the world's worst co-educational school, the world caved in on me when a small, black-edged sheet of paper fluttered to the floor out of a friend's copy of the maiden issue of The South African Cricket Annual. It was the hastily-printed obituary tribute to N. B. F. Mann, and the pain of his passing in his 32nd year abides with me still. It was with enormous delight, therefore, that I chanced upon some lines in the South African-born poet David Wright's contribution to Michael Meyer's anthology Summer Days. He vividly remembered'the dozen or so most perfect overs I have ever seen in my life, maiden overs in which not a wicket fell nor a run was scored... A slow, mortally accurate bowler, he pitched the ball, an all but unplayable ball, again and again on the identical spot.' He was, of course, writing about `Tufty' Mann, who opened his Test career on a typically docile Trent Bridge wicket in 1947 with eight successive maidens to Edrich and Compton; his final analysis read 20-13-10-0.
In the next Test, at Lord's, in that glorious `austerity-binge' summer of 1947, with Compton and Edrich running amok with a partnership of 370, his first day's figures indicate a measure of restraint on the `binge' with 33 overs for 50 runs, and when the slaughter was over he finished with the wicket of Edrich for 99 runs in 53 overs, 16 of which had been maidens. As Wisden points out, on the seven occasions in Test cricket when he bowled 50 or more overs, only once did he give away more than 100 runs, and that was at Kingsmead, Durban, against an Australian batting line-up which included Morris, Moroney, Hassett, Harvey, Miller, Johnson and Loxton.He was South Africa's greatest-ever left-arm spin bowler, and he formed with Athol Rowan South Africa's greatest spin duo ( Hugh Tayfield later shouldered the burden alone). With bowlers of their calibre and kind as rare as gold-dust today, and histrionics a menace both on and off the field, it seems a good moment to recall one of nature's gentlemen, whose principles and way of living proved as immaculate as the length of his deliveries. In a letter to me, Athol Rowan says it all: `Not only was he a gentlemen but as a left-arm spinner he must rank with the highest of the high. His guile, command of length and flight were superb and if the wicket reacted to spin he was quite capable of exercising wrist and finger spin to more than suit the occasion.
`He normally did not turn the ball prodigiously... but with broad shoulders for his height and build, he would casually run no more than ? paces and with a flat trajectory he would dig the ball into and onto a spot the size of a tickey like a mean, automated machine. He was terrific, a deal faster than the conventional left-arm spinner and one of the few who could bother Compton or Edrich during their run-spree brilliance of 1947. It was a wonderful experience for me to know that Tufty was on at the other end when I was bowling and a great spirit of comradeship and competitive enthusiasm engendered itself between the two of us. I feel sure that had he played in the last Test at the Oval South Africa would have won handsomely. ( England won by four wickets on a wicket taking spin from the start.) He was just the finest on and off the field and I heartily agree here was a person who should and must never be forgotten.'
War prisoner
Born on December 28, 1920 in Brakpan, Transvaal, the second son of highly successful and much-loved general practitioner, and a former cricket captain of Durban High School, Norman Bertram Fleetwood Mann inherited from his father a natural charm and gift for friendship, and from his mother a tough, steely grit. It was the latter which allowed him to survive a particularly unpleasant war, which must have taken a toll on his health. Taken prisoner at Tobruk, he was transferred to a camp in northern Italy. From there he eventually escaped when the Allies landed far to the south in 1943, and for 20 months was hidden in a tiny hut in the woods built as a false back to a pigsty by an elderly Italian couple and their 14-year-old niece. Under constant fear of Nazi detection, he communicated daily with his protectors by hiding a note under a stone every morning, retrieving it after nightfall. The strain it imposed left him with an indelible loathing for most things German, and on coach trips during the 1947 tour, whenever he saw German PoWs by the roadside, would call out `Tedeschi, you -!' To his peasant benefactors, whom he never forgot, he left a generous legacy.
Essentially a placid man, a flash of the same inner steel emerged during the Nottingham Test of 1947, when a celebrated actor (still alive) kept him awake with a spot of alcoholic roistering in the next room until Norman `intervened'.
At his primary school he was known as a batsman rather than a bowler, and David Wright recalls him scoring a 50 and the English master snorting ` Mann thinks he's playing golf.' His mother, a very determined lady, spotted that he had an eye for a golf ball, and by the age of 14 his handicap was down to six, he was playing with the young `Bobby' Locke, and at 16 had won the Natal amateur golf championship.
At Michaelhouse School ( South Africa's Eton) he collected not only his nickname, on-passed to him from his elder brother, Noel, whom it was decided resembled a schoolmaster there, by name ` Tufty' Moore, but also played for Natal Schools in 1937, taking a hat-trick against a strong Natal provincial side. Strangely enough, he did not impress as a potential Cambridge cricket Blue, despite a season with the Sussex Martlets, for whom his bowling bordered on the phenomenal. Having appeared only in a rather nondescript Freshman's game without much distinction, he turned to golf, winning a Blue in the same team as Willie Whitelaw.
Back in South Africa to pursue his legal studies, he played for Natal in a series of friendlies in 1939-40. A hint of the consummate artistry to come was evident, even if his first real experience of big cricket was a sobering one. Eric Rowan hit 306 not out in a Transvaal total of 608 for 6, still the highest individual score in first-class cricket in South Africa; but Mann bowled a lot better than many of his peers, returning 45-14-104-2, one being the invaluable wicket of Bruce Mitchell.
Returned from the war, after a couple of games for Natal, Mann moved to Port Elizabeth to a partnership in a wool-broking firm, and it was here that I became lost in wonderment at the machine-tool precision of his bowling at club and Currie Cup level. He was a priceless asset to a rather dainty EP attack which, until Anton Murray came along, gloried in four spin bowlers; including Syd Hird, the former NSW and Lancashire League professional. By that absurd administrative convenience whereby no Curie Cup competition took place during the presence of touring teams, Mann participated in but a dozen Cup games, still managing to take 75 wickets at 15.89; but his figures never showed the total of wickets he took for other bowlers with his unwavering accuracy. Against WP at Newlands in 1947-48 he took 8 for 59; there was a match return of 12 for 102 against Rhodesia in 1950-51; but his most memorable figures in domestic cricket were against the might of Transvaal at Johannesburg back in December 1946: 67.6-38-69-6, five of them Springboks.
Although from an early age his sight was impaired, so that he played in spectacles, his appearance at the crease as a tailender always caused a frisson among the Coloured spectators and with more simplistic schoolboys. His batting was a triumph of unorthodoxy, exhilarating and free. When the ball was pitched up, he would choose the appropriate club from his locker, and with that most soul-satisfying shot of all, the deliberate hoick over long-on, the ball would be clumped with tremendous power. He top-scored with 41 in a lamentable South African display in the final Test against the 1949-50 Australians, but in the Second Test at Newlands he shared in a marvellous century partnership with Hugh Tayfield. Lindwall, Miller, Johnston and McCool had enjoyed total control, but Tufty climbed into the Australian attack and thumped it all around the ground, enabling South Africa to lose honourably rather than humiliatingly. His most joyous moment, however, was against Glamorgan at Cardiff in 1947, when he reached his 50 in 30 minutes, and just missed winning the Lawrence Trophy for the fastest century of the season. He scored 97 in a partnership with Athol Rowan of 122 in some 55 minutes before being caught on the boundary.
In the field he was a natural third man, casual, calm and ambulatory. Geoff Dakin, a former schoolfriend of mine and with Joe Pamensky a SACU delegate to the 1981 ICC meeting, reminded me that when Tufty threw, unusually, it was always with his right arm. Jimmy Hattle, whom I used to read avidly in the local Evening Post, recalls that Mann was never your actual greyhound in the field, and how during a county match on the 1947 tour, Lindsay Tuckett was struck towards an untenanted boundary. After a brief hesitation, Tufty set out after it. The ball had almost stopped. Tufty flicked it back, fell over the boundary picket, regained his composure, then hurled the ball in. Returning to the vicinity of the bowler he remarked gaily, `Well, I saved the four.'`What do you mean, saved the four, man?' came the rather clipped Free State reply. `They ran five.'
Applauded batsman
The South African touring side to the UK in 1947 was top-heavy with high-scoring but venerable batsmen, had a smattering of middle-order players and allrounders who never made it, and no fewer than three wicketkeepers, none of whom came off. The Test attack was in reality Tuckett, a world-class off-spinner in Athol Rowan, and Mann, and it was their misfortune to come up against Compton and Edrich in their most sun-dappled season of all. Together they plundered over 2000 runs off the South Africans, so it was to them that I turned instinctively for their memories of Tufty. Denis Compton rated him a slow bowler of the highest standards, slightly slower in pace than Underwood, but who spun the ball significantly more. `A wonderful chap and a great credit to the game.' Denis remembers him as one of the very few bowlers who applauded the batsman when he had played a fine shot. When do you see that today? Bill Edrich also wished that more of our modern players emulated him in skill and character, and could see clearly still his immaculate length and line, the neat and economical action, with a high arm, through the air more like Hedley Verity.
To right-hand batsmen he bowled round the wicket, coming between the non-striker's wicket and umpire, and off a gentle six-pace run-up, his beautiful, rolling, effortless action kept the best English batsmen on a tight rein. Only 5ft 9 ins tall, Louis Duffus described him as `frail', but in 39 matches he nonetheless returned figures for the tour of 954 overs, 350 maidens, 74 wickets for 1869 runs, an average of 25.25. A glance at the `bible' reveals a sequence of extraordinary analyses in the Tests, masterpieces of defensive guile and cunning in the midst of a run avalanche. Len Hutton saw him as'a fine bowler, his left arm was not quite so high as Hedley Verity's, but was of similar pace. He spun the ball and on delivery was just a little open-chested, but even so he was a remarkably accurate bowler. I rate him as one of the best slow left-arm bowlers whom I played against... He bowled me out in a Test at the Oval. This was a shock to me because I did not think he could make a ball turn on that particular pitch, but he did, and I departed.'
F. G. Mann took a much less crease-bound and more cavalier MCC side to South Africa in 1948-49, and with Hutton, Washbrook and Compton scoring almost at will and Roly Jenkins rolling over the home batsmen, Tufty had a rather more difficult time of it. South African cricket was deep in the throes of its pre-Jack Cheetham inferiority complex, and Mann was used much less than he might have been. Even so, using every resource of the spin bowler's technique, he almost bowled England out at Kingsmead in the First Test, taking 6 for 59 in what was to become probably the second most thrilling Test of all time, England winning off the very last ball of the game, a scuttled leg-bye. It was on this tour, moreover, that John Arlott was inspired to make his classic remark about ` Mann's inhumanity to Mann' when seeing one Mann dismiss t'other. Certainly no friend and admirer of white South Africans in general, Arlott seems to have made an exception of N. B. F. Mann, staying with him in Port Elizabeth, and in his book Gone with the Cricketers ( 1950), he writes with warmth and affection of `one of those rare men who possess both an equable temperament and an almost perfect sense of relative values. He is one of the few outstanding cricketers I have known who see cricket in complete perspective...'
Perspective and an equable temperament were prime requisites to face the next touring side, Hassett's Australians of 1949-50, who turned South Africa inside out, 4-0. No-one could cope with Lindwall, Miller and Johnston, and their batsmen, by hitting fiercely across the line, caused Tufty ruefully to remark, `You Australians play it a little differently.' After the Second Test at Newlands, with figures of 28-3-105-4, he turned to South African cricket correspondent A. C. Parker and said, `I bowled badly, AC. It's just not there any more,' But the best was yet to come. Shot out by Tayfield and Mann for 75 in the next Test at Kingsmead, the Australians were set 335 to win. Three decades later, writing of his matchwinning 151 not out, Neil Harvey reflected: `I'll always remember the battle I had with Tufty and Hugh Tayfield during the Test match in Durban... and in this particular match at Durban he was a real handful.'
How much he did turn the ball seems to be a matter for contention. Likewise the arc of his flight. Most of the unquoted cricket immortals I contacted concur that he bowled at about Bishan Bedi's pace, perhaps a little faster, like Phil Edmonds, and agree that he was not a great turner of the ball. Neil Harvey took the line that he was slightly slower in pace than Ray Bright, with a similar trajectory, but decidedly more accurate. I would have liked to have seen Tufty on film, but David Frith had snaffled every scrap of action on camera for his video Golden Greats: Batsmen, so that I am left with the hope that model of supreme accuracy is granted enough time on a second video to find himself properly placed in cricket's Valhalla, and also accorded more than a passing reference in The Slow Men to come.
Appalling suffering
By his standards Mann had a quiet tour of the UK in 1951. The illness which was to kill him after quite appalling suffering towards the end, first displayed its symptoms while he was on tour, and generally debilitated and in pain, he was only fourth in the tour averages with 647.3-246-1161-44, average 26.38. That he was still a menace on a wet pitch was evident in the First Test, when he and Athol Rowan routed England, the first and only time that Tufty (and the rest of the team, apart from the veterans Dudley Nourse and Eric Rowan, who could remember a victory way back in 1935) found himself on a winning side. Although he did not come on until 1.15 on the last day, only three runs were scored off his first 15 or so overs, and when he bowled Ikin the game was turned round. Unfit for the final Test at the Oval, where in conditions especially helpful to spin bowling he would have been ideal, he was compelled to break a sequence of 19 consecutive Test matches.
Thereafter he bowed gently out of the first-class game, dying of cancer in a nursing home in Johannesburg on July 31, 1952. Keith Miller then wrote to Mrs Mann, `c/o Cricket, Port Elizabeth', to say: `He was Nature's gentleman, a man respected by all, from the highbrow to the lowbrow... He is the one chap who will always live in my mind as a great man.' Cricketers Arthur Coy and Geoff Chubb were made guardians of his minor children, with another cricketer in D. V. Dyer, Springbok opening bat, as first reserve. In addition to the legacy mentioned earlier in the article, there was also a £200 bequest for African child welfare.
A memorial at Michaelhouse, unveiled by Alan Melville, stands in his memory, and his Springbok blazer, cap and Union CC blazer are on display in his old clubhouse. More meaningfully, perhaps, I understand he was mentioned by name by a speaker from the floor during the recent crucial debate by MCC members on the nature of future relationships with South African cricket, spoken of as a man of principle, a man of liberal and decent conscience. The miserable loneliness of being sent to boarding school at the age of six, added to the months of hardship endured during the war, made him also a very firm man, and during the 1947 the tour he was very strong that one of the team members who had consistently misbehaved should be sent home.
Universally students of my generation who, in their small way, stood up to the South African police on their own killing-ground rather than waving placards and mouthing platitudes from afar are left to wonder what impetus Norman Mann might have given toward universal acceptance of South African cricket, had he but lived.