The war had taken everything. Ration books. Young men. The simple joy of a summer afternoon at the cricket. By 1946, England was tired. The country was broke, still picking through rubble, still waking from nightmares. But people needed something to watch. Something to feel normal again.
That May, an Indian cricket team landed on these shores. They had not played a Test match in ten years. Their last one was at this very ground, The Oval, back in 1936. Now they were back and the ground itself was barely ready.
The pavilion had bomb damage. The square had been left alone for six years, used first for searchlights, then as a place to hold prisoners who never actually arrived. The grass had grown wild. The stands were patched up.
Nobody thought cricket would happen here in 1946. The groundsmen worked like men possessed. A trial match was played in late April. It held up. So the Indians were booked in to play Surrey on May 11. It would be the first proper game at The Oval since August 1939. Before everything went wrong.
Old men of Surrey
Surrey had no new players to speak of. The war had seen to that. No county did. Their side was full of men in their mid-thirties, some nearly forty, trying to remember how it felt to play without looking over their shoulder.
The average age was 36. Alf Gover, their fast bowler, was 39. He had been good once. Now his body was starting to give out.
The Indians were missing their captain, the Nawab of Pataudi, and their best all-rounder, Lala Amarnath. Both were unwell. Vijay Merchant, the great Bombay batsman, led instead. The Times called the pitch “beautiful.” It looked that way until Alec Bedser started bowling.
Bedser was 28. He had played one first-class match in 1939, then spent six years in the army. He had been demobbed just eight weeks before this game. He looked like he had never left. He took two quick wickets. The Indians were wobbling at 17 for 2.
Then Merchant and Gul Mohammad steadied things. They put on 111 for the third wicket. But Squires broke through and Bedser came back and cleaned up the middle order. The innings fell apart. By ten past four, India were nine down for 205. The end was near.
The Captain’s mistake
Chandu Sarwate walked out at number ten. He was not really a tailender. He had opened the batting for Holkar in the Ranji Trophy that winter and made a hundred in the semi-final. He was a proper batsman who happened to bowl leg-spin.
Shute Banerjee joined him at 4.03pm. He was even less of a tailender. He had two first-class hundreds. He had opened for Bihar and for East Zone. He was, by some distance, the fastest bowler in the Indian side. He just never got picked for Tests. Not in 1936. Not now.
The Surrey captain thought they would last hardly a few minutes. He called the groundsman and started telling him about the roller he would need later.
It was a small thing. A reasonable assumption. Number ten and number eleven against Bedser and Gover on a good pitch. Why would they last? The captain wanted to get the roller ready for his own innings. He was planning ahead.
But that evening, they could not do anything wrong.
The partnership
They attacked from the first ball. This was not tailender batting. This was openers seeing off the new ball, except the ball was 80 overs old and the openers were batting at the wrong end of the order. Alf Gover limped off with a strained tendon in his heel. That helped. But even with him there, something had shifted.
Sarwate nearly went early. He danced down the pitch to Jack Parker, the left-arm spinner, was beaten in the air, and Gerald Mobey fumbled the stumping. He got back. That was the only chance. After that, they were unstoppable.
John Arlott watched them. He wrote that Sarwate played one streaky shot through slips, but nothing went to hand. Otherwise, they batted “capably and correctly.” They defended Bedser, who kept coming back, kept running in, kept getting milked for ones and twos. They scored in front of the wicket.
By the close, Sarwate had 107. Banerjee had 87. They had added 193 runs in two hours. The Surrey captain had stopped talking about rollers.
The record
They came back on Monday after a rest day. The press had done the maths. The world record for the last wicket was 307, set by two Australians in 1913. The England record was 235, by Kent’s Frank Woolley and Albert Fielder in 1909. People wondered if they could get there.
They batted more carefully now. The fireworks of Saturday evening gave way to something more deliberate. Just after midday, Banerjee, who had reached his hundred, pushed a single into the leg side. They had beaten the England record. The crowd cheered like the war was finally over.
At 12.27 pm, Jack Parker finally got one to turn past Banerjee’s defensive push. The bail came off. The stand was worth 249 runs. It had lasted three hours and ten minutes. Sarwate was 124 not out. Banerjee had made 121.
Nobody has done it for next 78 years. No number ten and number eleven have both made hundreds in the same first-class innings until 2024.
What happened next
Surrey batted. They made 135. Banerjee, who should have opened the bowling, was given a rest. His teammates did not need him. CS Nayudu, the captain’s brother, took a hat-trick. It was the first by an Indian in England.
Surrey followed on. They reached 172 for no loss at the end of the second day. But on the third, Sarwate took five for 54 with his leg-spin. Surrey made 338 second time around. India needed 20 to win.
Merchant sent Sarwate to open. A joke, perhaps. A nod to his weekend’s work. He made one and was out. India won by nine wickets.Banerjee played just one Test match at age of 38 and picked up 5 wickets. He went home, continued to play for Bihar, took wickets, made runs, and was forgotten by the selectors.
Sarwate also played just 9 Tests. That was it. But he had that 124 not out. He had that partnership.
The meaning of It
Cricket is full of numbers. Records. Statistics. Averages. But some numbers tell a story that numbers cannot really capture. 249. The last wicket. Two men who were not supposed to be there, batting like they owned the place, while a captain planned for the next innings and a war-torn ground held its breath.
It was 1946. The world was trying to start again. India was still a year away from independence. The British Empire was ending, though nobody quite knew it yet.
And at The Oval, on a patchy ground with a damaged pavilion, two Indian cricketers gave people something to remember. Something that had nothing to do with war, or debt, or rationing. Just bat hitting ball, and two men refusing to get out.
The Surrey captain thought they would last a few minutes. They lasted three hours and ten minutes. They made him wait for his roller. They made history instead.