Norman Gordon had bowled two balls of his 56th over of the innings and his 93rd of the match when rain began to fall on the Kingsmead ground in Durban. The fifth Test match between South Africa and England in March 1939 was then abandoned as a draw — it had been going on for ten days.
England needed just 42 more runs for victory, but they were booked to board the Athlone Castle home from Cape Town and had to catch a train leaving Durban that night to make their ship.
Gordon did not complete his over and, with war six months away, he did not play for South Africa again. But his place in cricket’s record books was secured by his appearance in the “timeless Test”, one of the most celebrated matches in the game’s history. He was the last survivor of that extraordinary match. And in August 2011 he left a further imperishable mark by becoming the first Test cricketer to reach his 100th birthday.
Gordon, a right-arm fast bowler of strapping physique, made all five of his appearances for South Africa in that series, finishing as the leading bowler on either side with 20 wickets and a best performance of five for 103 in the first innings of the first Test at Johannesburg.
By making his debut in that match Gordon became the first openly Jewish cricketer to appear in a Test. As he came in to bowl his first ball, he recalled hearing a voice in the crowd shouting, “Here comes the Rabbi”. Gordon recalled in 2011: “Fortunately I took five wickets in that innings, and that shut him up for the rest of the tour.”
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Bowling was as much a test of endurance as anything else. In South Africa at that time, overs were still of eight deliveries and Gordon bowled 1,966 balls during the series. “Although I did not do gymnastics, I was fantastically physically fit,” Gordon recalled. “I could bowl ten to 15 overs at a stretch.”
Norman Gordon was born in Boksburg, Transvaal, in 1911. He became besotted with cricket from the age of ten, making his debut for Transvaal in the 1933-34 season. He was the leading wicket-taker in the Currie Cup — South Africa’s domestic competition — in 1937-38 and was a natural selection to face England the following season. He got off to a wonderful start in the first Test at the Old Wanderers ground in Johannesburg by claiming the great Walter Hammond, the England captain, as his first victim and finishing the England innings with five wickets.
He took seven wickets in total in the first Test, five in the second and a further five in the fourth. With England leading the series 1-0, a decision was made that the final match would be “timeless” in order to secure a definite result. But the plan backfired spectacularly as, on a pitch offering no help to the bowlers and the batsmen on both sides batting with painstaking care, the match dragged on and on, including a day lost to rain and two rest days. Ken Viljoen, one of the South Africa players, joked that it was the only time he needed two haircuts during a match.
Gordon, known as “Mobil” for the amount of Vaseline oil that he used to slick down his hair, encountered Hammond again during the war, when the England batsman was stationed there with the RAF. Hammond was known to be a prickly character but he and Gordon became friends. He still might have been a contender for South Africa’s first postwar tour in 1947, despite the fact that he was 36 by then, but Gordon felt that malign forces were at work: he related a story he had been told that the selectors were concerned about him encountering antisemitic feeling in England.
He ended his playing career in 1949 with 126 wickets from 29 games and ran a sports shop for a number of years; he also worked part-time as an accountant until the age of 94. On his 100th birthday he was honoured with a reception attended by a number of former South Africa players.
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His wife, Mercy, died in 2001 and he lived in Johannesburg with his son Brian, who was retired and devoted himself to looking after his father and took him to Houghton golf club every day until he was too frail to leave their home. One day in late 2010, Brian Lara, the great West Indies batsman, was visiting the club and was introduced to Gordon. Lara said meeting him was a “humbling experience”.
Norman Gordon, cricketer, was born on August 6, 1911. He died on September 2, 2014, aged 103