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ALFRED ERNEST DIPPER (1885-1945) Alf Dipper is the most famous cricketer to have played for Apperley and the only one to have played Test Cricket tho Chris Street, our young Australian from the 90's, did manage to get into the Victorian State Squad. We have had a variety of Test Cricketers to play at the ground but not one of our own like Alf Dipper. Paul Willams, ex of Gloucester rugby club and the best dentist since Laurence Olivier, lives in Alf Dipper's house in Apperley and is researching a book on Alf's life. We don't mention that he played for Tewkesbury as well!! We are looking for information on Alf and his life so please contact Paul if you can help (click here for e-mail) Below is an extract from David Foot researched article on Alf Dipper (it is followed by his career details)
Gloucestershire’s
farmer’s son and batting stalwart It was sometimes said, usually and wisely out of his hearing, that Alf Dipper had the most inelegant stance and style in county cricket. The off drive, for instance, so fashionable and aesthetically pleasing, was anathema to him. Whenever he could, which might be every ball in an over, he would twist his sturdy, stained old bat and pull to leg. No one in the Gloucestershire club attempted too hard to change him. Why should they? He was utterly reliable as he was. For some years he carried the county's threadbare batting on his artisan shoulders. He scored 53 hundreds, five times passed 2000 runs in a season, and played once to England. What conceivable case could be made out for revising his practical, if unsightly, methods of batsmanship'? The
family lived at Green Farm, opposite the village pond where the moorhens
continue so decorously to congregate. For
Alf, the cricket field was just half a mile down the lane. At the turn of the century and in the next few years when he
played for Apperley, the ground was devoid of any manicured grandeur.
There were undulations, molehills, thistles and nettles.
Sheep, impervious to the casual human cares of the Saturday ritual,
grazed on the outfield and the nominal square for much of the week.
The club was still ninety or so years away from the elevated status that
took it to the village final at Lord's. Dip
noticed the wanton manner in which many of the local lads in the team slogged
and perished on the difficult natural pitches of the day. He was not a boy to be influenced by such reckless bravado;
he'd waited for a week for a match and saw no sense then in hastening his
departure from the wicket by trying, every ball, to dislodge one of those lofty
rooks' nests beyond the boundary. Very
consciously, he was already intent on doing things at his own phlegmatic pace. Nor,
it should be added, did the pair of them smile too much.
They had a permanent saturnine expression. But that serious countenance should not necessarily imply any
lack of friendliness. Look at a
hundred sepia prints of early team groups.
The poses are stylised, the players appearing self-conscious and
inhibited. It was not the fashion
to reveal the merest suggestion of relaxation or high spirits.
Alf, more the stone-waller than the stroke-maker, a lad who spurned
excitement and high drama, was still a popular team-mate.
So he should have been. In
his own one-paced mode, uncoached though with an eye as sharp as a Severn Vale
poacher, he won games for Apperley. Oppositions
despaired of getting him out He may have been a slow scorer - but often he was
victorious one. The hoary stories
about his supposed facility for pulling balls into the beds of stinging nettles
may have had an element of truth, embroidered in the retelling. What was beyond dispute, even if few of the old scorebooks
have survived, was his sheer consistency in compiling runs.
Because his timing was so true and he knew the contours of the outfield,
he was even then the best batsman in the village side. Before
too long he was playing for Tewkesbury, where the standard was higher and the
pitch better prepared. Not that he
was privately any happier than he'd been at Apperley. He liked familiar things: the lads of the parish, the sound
of the sankeys being rehearsed at the little Methodist building just round the
corner from the ground, those bulging rooks' nests, timeless as neighbouring
Deerhurst with its Saxon minster and chapel where the Dipper tombstones linger
in crumbling and leaning stonework. But
the invitation to play for Tewkesbury could hardly be ignored.
Encouragement was soon forthcoming, not least from one renowned member of
the team, Charlie Parker. Not a bad recommendation, especially for a depleted team. He stuffed his modest, assorted kit into a brown paper bag. and caught the train, to meet up with the rest of the county side. He'd never stayed away from home before. Gilbert Jessop, the captain, gave him at friendly welcome but didn't think he looked much like a cricketer, more like, well, a farmer's boy. Jack Board, the wicket keeper, chummily said he used to be a gardener and knew all about growing- crops. Dipper, the introvert, nodded: but he didn't feel at home. It
might be thought that Dipper was hardly Jessop's sort of cricketer.
While the flamboyant skipper stretched and drove forcefully in a dozen
different arcs, the newcomer rejected any semblance of a liberty.
He played a dead bat with pride. He
turned the ball, with somnolent composure, just wide of mid-wicket for a single
when Jessop flashed attractively for four.
But Jessop was acutely aware of the dearth of undeviating backbone to the
order. Here was a batsman prepared
to stay all day. Sometimes he did:
without a single stroke to recall or an emotion to manifest.
In the following years, however, he would repeatedly sustain hope for
Gloucestershire amid wholesale frailties and adventurous follies from transitory
players of token pedigree. In
all he carried his bat eleven times for the county.
He exasperated opposing bowlers and crowds. Nothing would fluster or agitate him. He was called boring - but never by his own team-mates.
Like all the proficient slow coaches, he would occasionally make mischief
by unfurling a succession of prodigious blows.
He didn't flinch from seemingly histrionic indifference to reputation
that few of the more illustrious batsmen of his day dared to demonstrate. He'd
just scored 70 not out for Gloucestershire against the Australians.
For the second Test, against the Australians at Lord's, England made six
changes. Dipper walked out with D J
Knight (two Tests), the schoolmaster amateur, to open the innings against the
ferocity of Gregory and McDonald. Twice
he was bowled by McDonald but not before he had scored a defiant and unruffled
40 in the second innings. There was
favourable comment on his batting, little alas about his fielding.
He was not alone. "The
England fielding was well below par, the side being one of the worst fielding
combinations ever to represent England in at Test match." Considered
judgement could not be more withering than that.
There was a large crowd at the country's most famous ground and many
spectators squirmed as the runs were given away. Dip was no more at fault than
two or three others amid the general embarrassment.
It was still apparently too much to forgive; he was not given another
Test. Hammond,
at times as sparing in conversation as the older man, liked him and appreciated
the anchor role that Dipper played. Newly
arrived in Bristol, not yet influenced by the social aspirations that were to
alienate him from some of his colleagues, Hammond was also a listener.
He enjoyed the earthy jokes and the gossip, while leaving it to more
gregarious pros to do the telling. But
he was encouraged more than once, as the tired players gulped their pints of ale
at the close, to remind them of the day he scored his first hundred for the
county. It was a good and true
story. Fielders
and team-mates back in the pavilion sensed what was happening.
Hammond, slim, boyish and a trifle embarrassed to be seen wiping the
sweat from his forehead, eventually caught on.
He grinned back. Dipper was
out first for 99; his young partner progressed to his century.
On the return to the pavilion, Dip was stretched out wearily on the
dressing room bench. 'What's the
trouble, then - has the sun got to you, Alf'?' Alfred
Ernest Dipper wasn't exactly a character. He
had the slightly careworn face of a poker player who tells us nothing about
himself or his hand. He had no time
for superfluous conversation and had few intellectual pretensions.
He liked cricket more than farming.
And he liked scoring on the leg side most of all. I went back to Apperley, where for 250 years there had been Dippers tilling the land. Sadly they have now all gone. All one finds is the treasured old picture in the pavilion and Dipper's Cottage, down the twisting road toward the Coalhouse pub and the banks of the Severn. He was only 60 when he died in 1945, in London. They continue to talk in the village of him with some pride. But the memories, the stories and the deeds are now only recounted at second or third hand. People aren't sure where he is buried. Apperley's Test cricketer, and most famous resident, is no more than a distant name - only vaguely identified by some of the newer parishioners - receding unsentimentally into the past. History can have a remorseless edge. Full Name: Alfred Ernest Dipper Born: 9 November 1885, Apperley, Gloucestershire Died: 7 November 1945, Lambeth, London Major Teams: Gloucestershire, England (Apperley!) Batting Style: Right Hand Bat Bowling Style: Right Arm Medium Other: Umpire On England v Australia at Lord's, 2nd Test, 1921 Career Statistics: TESTS
M I NO Runs
HS Ave 100
50 Ct St Batting & Fielding
1 2 0 51
40 25.50
0
0 0
0 Bowling (DNB)
FIRST-CLASS (career: 1908 - 1932)
M I NO Runs
HS Ave 100
50 Ct
St B & F 481
865 69 28075
252* 35.27
53 147 210
0
Balls
M R
W Ave
BBI 5
10 SR Econ Bowling
8882 295
4903 161
30.45 7-46
5 1 55.1 3.31 - Explanations of First-Class and List A status
courtesy of the ACS. Profile: Alfred Ernest Dipper, died at St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, on November 7, within two days of his 58th birthday. He played for Gloucestershire from 1908 to 1932, and on retiring became a first-class umpire. Seldom can chance have entered more into a professional’s county baptism than was the case with Dipper. A man short for the match at Tonbridge against Kent in June, Gloucestershire requested a local club to fill the vacancy and, in reply, came Dipper of Tewkesbury. Making 30 not out, highest score for the side when going in last but two, Dipper got eight in a more disastrous second-innings collapse. Then a steady 19 checked a breakdown against Somerset and helped in a victory by six wickets. When promoted in the batting order he fared disastrously several times and could not keep his place in the side, then captained by G. L. Jessop, but from 1911 he regularly registered a four-figure aggregate and became a very dependable opening batsman of the stolid type. Five times he exceeded 2,000 and passed the thousand in ten other seasons; in 1928 in his 41st year he excelled with 2,365 runs at an average of 55. His full record in first-class cricket was 28,075 runs with an average of 35.22, and highest innings 252 not out against Glamorgan in a total of 481 for nine wickets declared at Cheltenham in 1923. On eleven occasions he carried his bat through an innings and, of 53 scores of three figurers each, two 117 and 103—were made against Sussex at Horsham in 1922. In each innings against Somerset at Bristol in 1913 his opening stand with C. S. Barnett exceeded a hundred, but his most noteworthy partnership occurred against Lancashire in 1925 when he and W. R. Hammond put on 330 for the third wicket, a record for the Old Trafford ground. These figures scarcely show the value of Dipper to his side. For several years he could anticipate little support from his colleagues and on this account often resorted too rigidly to defence; but he could exploit most of the good scoring strokes and, though seldom becoming aggressive, many times made more than half the runs put on during his stay. Beyond question Hammond set an example which Dipper strove to emulate with more freedom and versatility in stroke-play. His talent improved in better company but the inevitable decline came with increasing age. Yet in 1932, when approaching 45, he averaged 30.37—second only to Hammond; and so ended the active cricket career of one of the most loyal and successful professionals who ever served the county, as H. E. Roslyn wrote in Wisden. Unfortunately Dipper never fielded really well, and this weakness limited his selection for big occasions to one Test—against Australia at Lord’s in 1921, when England were in sad straits. As a medium to slow bowler Dipper occasionally proved useful, taking 161 wickets for the county at a cost of 30.32 each, and he held 197 catches. He was a noted bowls player and very good at billiards. Dipper was buried at Manor Park Cemetery, London, Mr. F. O. Wills, chairman of Committee, and Lieut.-Col. H. A. Henson, Secretary, representing Gloucestershire County Club. Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
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