Summer Times is the Journal of the Old Scarborians Association

Summer Times by Mick Herman, which lim‐
ited the number of county players allowed in
a team to two.
In 1948, and on a much bigger stage, Peter
Robson recalls, Ted suffered from another
dirty trick. He was nicely set on 37 at Bramall
Lane against Bradman’s all‐conquering tour‐
ists, and was run out by wicket‐keeper Ron
Saggers when he went down the pitch to do
some ‘gardening’. At a time when the Eng‐
land selectors were desperate to find someone
to fight back against the Aussies, Peter reck‐
ons this might have cost Ted dear.
In 1947 Ted had became a regular member of
the Yorkshire side, and in that glorious sum‐
mer when Denis Compton and Bill Edrich
tore up all the batting record books, Ted was
not eclipsed. In only seven matches and
eleven innings (twice not out) he scored 657
runs (including centuries in both innings at
Northampton) to come third in the national
averages at 73.00. He must then have been
very much in the test selectors’ minds.
Unfortunately, he was not able to sustain such
an astonishing level of scoring, although he
did score two centuries (125 not out and 132)
in a Roses match in 1948. Then, in his best
season, 1952, he scored 1786 runs, including
six centuries, for an average of 49.61. What is
more, he was regarded by those in the know
as the finest player of medium pace bowling
in the country. That might sound like damn‐
ing with faint praise, but overlooks the pres‐
ence in those days of great medium pacers
such as Alec Bedser, Cliff Gladwin, and Reg
Perks.
I suspect that one of the reasons Ted did not
accumulate more runs was that he never for‐
got that cricket should be played for pleasure,
and he just loved giving it a whack – not al‐
ways wisely. For instance, in a match against
Worcestershire at North Marine Road I saw
him twice caught off a shot of a kind only he
ever played. It was a sort of shovel shot to a
shortish ball outside the off stump, which
34
most times landed safely over the midwicket
boundary. In both innings of this game it
came down into the hands of Don Kenyon,
just short of the boundary.
This shot of Ted’s was one some of us got to
know well. Eric Dixon, Peter Jackson, Brian
Stockdale and I used to practice on Sunday
mornings through the winter on coco matting
on one of the tennis courts above the Open
Air Theatre, and Ted sometimes joined us.
When he played his shovel shot it cleared
several of the high fenced courts, and one of
us had to make a long trek round to retrieve
the ball.
When Ted retired from County Cricket, The
Cricketer magazine printed what might have
seemed, to anyone who did not know him, an
outrageously extravagant tribute for the en‐
joyment and sportsmanship he had brought
to the game. Two personal recollections show
why.
With my friend Eric Dixon (about whom
more later), I used to work in the dressing
rooms at North Marine Road during first class
matches, cleaning boots and pads, and run‐
ning errands for the players – anything to get
close to our heroes! That gave us the opportu‐
nity to listen to their conversations. In one
Yorkshire v MCC Festival match, after Ted
had got a duck in the first innings, I heard
Alec Bedser, a generous and gentle cockney
giant, describe how he had bowled him an
easy one down the leg side in the second in‐
nings to give him a single to avoid a pair. ‘Do
you know what that facking Ted Lester did?’
he demanded in outraged but humorous
tones. ‘He only hit me into North Marine
Road!’
Ted could never resist hitting a loose ball. In
one game for Scarborough, late in his career,
he opened the batting and was out to the third
ball of the second over ‐‐ with his score at 26,
including two sixes into the same road.
After quitting the first class scene, he cap‐
tained Yorkshire’s 2 nd XI for a number of