Cocktails, Golf, Tourism- the Grass Was Greener in 1965

Forty years ago, when England last won a Test series in South Africa, they still toured under the banner of the MCC, and the Basil D'Oliveira affair, which finally forced cricket to face up to the horrors of apartheid, was still four years away.

They drank cocktails at the privileged all-white clubs, exchanged a word or two with black caddies at exclusive golf courses and, including a brief stopover in what was then Rhodesia, ambled around southern Africa for the best part of five months.

MJK Smith's tour party managed to find time for five Tests, each with obligatory rest day, in an endless programme of up-country matches. They lolled on the beach, took jeeps around the Kruger game park and watched Zulu stick fighting. One-day cricket, which had just begun experimentally in England, was not about to detain them.

The current England Test squad have crammed five South Africa Tests into 40 days. Add 11 one-day internationals in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and a week's warm-up in Namibia, and the entire winter stretches to two months. When they return home these days, the kids look the same age.

They did get Christmas Day and New Year's Eve off, with the understanding that they drank in moderation, and there was an obligatory High Commission welcome in Johannesburg. Their first real drinks party was last night's victory celebration - and even then they had an 8am flight back to Heathrow.

England won 1-0 in 1964-65. They won the first Test in Durban in early Dec ember, Kenny Barrington making 148 not out in their 485 for five and the spinners, David Allen and Fred Titmus, sharing 13 wickets on a turning pitch.

It was a series dominated by the bat and England's supremacy was challenged only once, in the fourth Test at the Wanderers, at which point an intense, bespectacled young fellow named Geoffrey Boycott, on his first senior tour, batted out time. In South Africa this winter as a TV commentator he has been happily reliving it all, even allowing himself a few on-air taunts of "you'll never get 'em out" during England's innings.

Those who watched unsympathetically as James Anderson floundered through his fourth Test at the Wanderers might also like to consider this. It was his only match of the tour - and it showed. Mike Brearley did not play a Test in 1964-65, but he still found time for 12 first-class matches.