Brick by Brick: The Australian Cricketers in England 1964

Martin Chandler | 9:17am BST 11 May 2025

Published: 2025
Pages: 209
Author: Bonnell, Max
Publisher: ACS
Rating: 4.5 stars

There have been some excellent books about past tours published in recent years, and Max Bonnell was, last year, responsible for one of the very best of them. He chose a good subject then, the first ever visit of a West Indian team to Australia back in 1930/31. A ground breaking series it had the benefit of not having been written about at great length before and the absence of any contemporary account. Social, political and economic conditions were also very different in the 1930s from those anyone alive now is familiar with.

But the 1964 Ashes? In some ways I suppose it was the same, but to call it ground breaking would be a stretch, although Bob Simpson’s Aussie’s were the first to fly into England. That said it sounds like their 16 hour flight from India wasn’t much fun. Sixty years ago the world was again a very different place, but this time there are plenty of us with some memory of the time, and for this tour there were four accounts of the series published in the months after it concluded although, perhaps understandably in light of the way it unfolded very little has been written about it since.

The 1930/31 series was, predictably, largely one sided. Bill Woodfull’s Australian were far too good for their visitors and recorded thumping victories in each of the first four Tests before, as dominant Australian teams have been wont to do on occasion subsequently, they allowed West Indies to regroup and secure an unexpected consolation win in the final Test.

In 1964 though the first, second and fifth Tests were all rain affected draws, and the fourth Test at Old Trafford one of the most boring Tests that has ever been played. This was the one where Australia spent 255.5 overs piling up a score of 656, led by their skipper’s maiden Test century, 311, before England took 38 overs more to score 45 runs less, their reply built around an innings of 256 from Kenny Barrington that occupied more than 11 hours.

Which just left the third Test at Headingley where, an Australian side described by several English commentators as the worst ever to have left Australia, managed to come back from a situation on the second afternoon where they were still 90 runs adrift of England’s first innings with just three wickets to fall to run out victors by seven wickets.

The Headingley Test was, of course, the great talking point of the series, and learning more about that match was the one reason why, some years ago, I went out and acquired all four of the books published on the tour, by Denis Compton, Denzil Batchelor, John Clarke and Lyn Wellings. The most striking feature there is that all four writers were English, and all concentrated on the same issue – was Ted Dexter at fault in taking the second new ball and asking Fred Trueman to blast out the Aussie tail at Headingley, or should he have allowed his spinners to keep their stranglehold over the Australian batsman?

Which in one obvious way rather missed the point. However badly Dexter might have shuffled his pack, and Trueman undoubtedly bowled poorly, the 160 that Peter Burge scored with the assistance of Neil Hawke and Wally Grout is an innings that really should be remembered much more than it is. But overall the books are not good. Compton’s is concerned solely with the Tests, and the others do not deal with a great deal more. Wellings’ book, thanks to his trenchant style, is the best of them, but I can’t imagine anyone in the twenty first century wanting to sit and read any of them from start to finish.

Which is certainly not an observation that I can make about Brick by Brick. Having sat down to open it with my morning coffee on Bank Holiday Monday by the time I closed it at around 3pm I had finished the book. Being a great admire of Bonnell’s work I certainly expected to enjoy the read, but was still surprised by just how engrossing it proved to be.

It helps, after all these years, simply to have the book written by an Australian, if only because the English writers of the time seem not to have spent too much time researching the attributes of the (to them) relatively unknown Australians who arrived on our shores that summer. And research is the key to any book in this genre and the contributions of those who played in the series, Australians Ian Redpath, Graham McKenzie, Tom Veivers and Rex Sellers, and Englishmen Fred Rumsey, Bob Barber and Sir Geoffrey Boycott, are key to the book’s success.

As a result Brick by Brick is what can only be described as a complete account of the tour, from the moment the party gathered and then on through the trip, off and on the field. The accounts of the play are excellent and, in expressing his views on what Dexter should or should not have done at Headingley, Boycott shows just why he was such an interesting broadcaster, and left this reader thinking that perhaps he would have made a decent England captain after all.

Naturally there is also, given this is a retrospective account, a great deal of context in Bonnell’s writing as well. The reader is reminded of the dying days of the Conservative Government of the day, and Dexter’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to unseat future Prime Minister Jim Callaghan at the General Election that was eventually called for October. The Beatles and their workload loom large, and the Kray twins and their activities, on both sides of the law, crop up as well. It is a shame that the notorious divorce between the Duke and Duchess of Argyll had concluded a year earlier as Bonnell’s take on that would have been interesting.

All in all Brick by Brick is an excellent slice of cricketing history from one of the game’s foremost historians and to anyone, and there are many, who find the sporting soap opera that is the Ashes a fascinating source of entertainment it should be required reading. It isn’t quite perfect, as the selection of images is not up to the same standard as the quality of the narrative. In some ways though that is an unfair comparison, and it isn’t that there is a shortage of photographs, but a number are familiar and, a little disappointingly, it seems that none of Messrs McKenzie, Redpath, Veivers or Sellers had any snaps from the tour that they were able to share with us.