“Sydney is the essence of Australia,” Bob Barber says. “You’d got the Hill and there was a sense of battle. And I enjoyed that. Maybe for Australians coming to England, Lord’s is the place. But for me, there were certain things I wanted to do as a cricketer and Sydney, Australia, was the place to do them. The feeling went right back to when I was a boy, lying in bed with a little radio, listening to Johnnie Moyes’ commentaries.”
His chance came in January 1966. The boy with the radio was now 30, walking out at 10.30 on a bright morning with Geoffrey Boycott. With the first two Tests drawn and the pitch expected to break up later, a large partnership would be a big step towards regaining the Ashes.
Boycott and Barber. The Yorkshire professional setting out on a long career of run-scoring and the free-spirited Cambridge graduate about to turn to a life in business. They shared a steely determination to succeed, but they differed in the approach.
That morning, while Boycott sat in a cocoon of concentration, Barber splashed about in the hotel pool with his two-year-old daughter before driving to the airport to collect his father. “To me, cricket is played above the neck and I liked to be relaxed,” he says.
In a light breeze, Garth McKenzie and Neil Hawke swung the new ball effectively and Boycott was badly dropped at square leg. Then the runs started to come and by noon, according to John Woodcock in The Times, “the famous Hill was a blaze of confetti and England were safely on their way”. At lunch, the scoreboard read 93 for no wicket, Barber 57.
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Under the captaincy of Mike Smith, England had promised a tour of positive cricket. “It was a time when a bit too much selfishness had come into the game,” Barber says.
“To my mind we were public entertainers, there to bring in the crowds, not to drive them out. I got runs in the early matches at Perth and I remember going up in the hotel lift with a group of journalists. ‘What I really want to do,’ I said, ‘is to play one innings as I think the game should be played. And I want to play it at Sydney.’ I could have got a first-baller, but within myself I knew this was the one occasion in my life above all others.
“There’s a battle of wills between batsman and bowler and I always set out to impose myself right away. Once I’d done that and the innings was going well, I didn’t mind getting out. But not that day. I was determined to go on.”
An hour after lunch, he was on 95 out of 168. In Johannesburg the previous winter he had been bowled for 97, trying to reach his maiden Test century with a six. Now he drove a four, pushed a single, quietly raised his cap and set about the bowling with fresh purpose. In the words of Boycott, it was “one of the truly great displays of batting in Test cricket”.
Woodcock wrote of “judgment tempered by aggression. In every line of Barber’s remarkable innings there showed an independence of character.” At the start of the tour Boycott had been laid low and, when Barber had visited his sickbed, he had received a typically combative greeting: “Don’t you worry. I’ll be fit, and I’ll have your place.”
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Now they were working together. “You have to have a balance,” Barber says. “The way I played allowed Geoffrey to play his own game.”
They took the score to 234 before Boycott chipped the penultimate ball before tea into the hands of Peter Philpott, the bowler. For another hour, Barber piled on the runs, reaching 185 before he edged a wide ball from Hawke on to his stumps. His innings stood as the highest played against Australia on the first day of a Test until overtaken in 2003 by Virender Sehwag, of India. “Often in bleak moments,” E. W. Swanton wrote years later, “do I cast back to that innings. It made blissful watching to English eyes.”
Barber walked off to a standing ovation from the 40,000 crowd. A newspaper cartoon called him “the only fellow in Australia who can empty the bars” and his delighted father reported the words of a man on the Hill: “Why can’t we have a batsman like this Barber?”
John Edrich added a century, then, as the pitch became worn and Fred Titmus and David Allen, the off spinners, set to work, the Australians fell to an innings defeat.
In the next Test, in Adelaide, Barber was bowled third ball for a duck and Australia levelled the series. “It was a hell of a bump,” he says, still disappointed that England did not bring back the Ashes.
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A successful businessman who follows the game from his home in Switzerland, what advice does he have for the England cricketers this winter? “You’ve got to believe in yourself,” he says.
“You’re privileged to be given the chance to represent your country and playing in Australia is the one time in your life above all others when you should grasp the pleasure. You should let your spirit come out. It’s a game. It should be fun. I felt it then. I still do.”