There used to be two shops in Birmingham called Tyseley Pet Stores. While in one advert they boasted of their stocks of “puppies, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters and mice” these were not your average pet shops – by the end of the paragraph they had moved on to “our large selection of monkeys, tame chimps and latest arrival, the baby gorilla”. They imported around 2,000 marmosets a year and shipped tortoises from Morocco at the rate of 6,000 a time. As might be expected, not all of these creatures were particularly keen on life in a Birmingham pet shop: in 1961 a giant anteater caused chaos when it escaped and was pursued through town by RSPCA officers; three years later Annie, a giant armadillo, crashed through the shop window and went missing for two days; in 1967 three dingos broke loose and had killed five sheep by the time they were found.
All of these creatures and many more were available to the general public; at one stage in the 1960s Angela McWilliams, a part-time secretary from Kensington, earned a measure of fame for her habit of taking her leopard cub, Michael, for walks around London (she decided to give it back after a year). “She always struck me as being well-to-do,” Brian Williams, the shop’s owner, said of his client. “After all, not everyone can afford £200 for a leopard.” But it wasn’t just ordinary members of the public who shopped in Tyseley’s and in May 1970 Chessington Zoo bought a young elephant called Bella, a creature that was to go on to play a small but memorable role in the history of Test cricket.
The final day of the third Test between England and India in 1971 coincided with Ganesh Chaturthi, the Hindu festival that honours the elephant-headed god Ganesha. In a bold move, a group of India fans celebrated the occasion by borrowing Bella from Chessington and bringing her to the Oval, where she was welcomed and paraded around the outfield. In the India dressing room Hemu Adhikari, the manager, and his captain, Ajit Wadekar, were discussing their team’s chances of knocking off the 97 runs they still required when Adhikari spotted an elephant strolling around the ground. “He said it was a good omen, considering it was Ganesh Chaturthi,” Wadekar recalled. “I went out to bat on my overnight score of 45 with my hopes doubled, and was run out first ball. As I came back to the pavilion I prayed to Lord Ganesha, imploring him to make the victory possible, having raised our hopes with his appearance that morning. The rest is history.”
It was not history that Wadekar himself took a very active part in creating, however. The captain took off his pads, looked at the scoreboard and assessed the match situation. He was tired, his team were well placed, and the following day they were due to start another match, against Sussex. “Since we were winning, I thought to take some rest before the trip,” he explained. Wadekar lay down on the floor of the dressing room and closed his eyes. A couple of hours later it was over.
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“Every Indian tourist, businessman, waiter and schoolboy in London seemed to be at the Oval,” wrote Campbell Page in the Observer of the moment when Abid Ali struck the winning four. “What follows is like one of Eisenstein’s crowd scenes. While the ball is still 50 yards from the boundary, massed Indians leap the barrier and charge. The England team sprint for the pavilion. The umpires gather up the stumps before they are lost to the marauders. Hot on the heels of the shock troops, a little Indian girl of not more than five years old lifts her even smaller brother over the fence, takes his hand and drags him to where the action is. In no time the Indian batsmen are being swept towards the pavilion on the shoulders of the crowd.”
Wadekar slept through it all. The first he knew of his team’s success came when he was shaken from his slumber by Ken Barrington. “Mate, they want you on that balcony pronto,” the England manager said, “else we could have a ruddy riot on our hands.”
It was India’s first ever Test victory in England and – the first two matches having ended in rain-affected draws – their first series victory too, a success still celebrated as one of the country’s greatest. “The team, admirably captained and sustained by Wadekar, have succeeded where the great names of Indian cricket had failed,” wrote John Arlott in the Guardian. “The Test and the rubber were effectively won by the Indian spinners, arguably the strongest attacking force in international cricket at the moment, supported by the most sophisticated, enthusiastic and effectively deployed fielding ever produced by an Indian side in this country.”
When the team returned to India their flight was diverted to Delhi so the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, could congratulate them in person. Then they flew on to Mumbai, where an estimated 1.5 million people lined the streets and flung flowers in their path as they were carried in open-topped cars to a reception at the Cricket Club of India. “Glorious to be living at this hour and to be an Indian,” wrote the Times of India. “Days, months, years will pass, but our cricket team’s magnificent triumph over England in England will remain unforgettable.”
Last Wednesday Wadekar died after a long illness. This Friday it will be 47 years precisely since he and Adhikari spied Bella from their dressing room. These two coincidences added emotional heft to India’s performance in this year’s third Test, and a display that conjured memories of a distant success that Indians, like a particular proverbial pachyderm, will never forget.
• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.