More than a cricketer: Farewell to Ken Archer

Note: Ken Archer, was a BGC Member from 1948 to at least 1978. He played cricket for Queensland and Australia with distinction in the post-WWII era. He passed away last Friday aged 95. The story below was written by Adam Burnett and was first published on the Cricket Australia website.

It was only late last month that, from his retirement village home on the NSW Central Coast, Ken Archer was showcasing his sharp wit as he recalled life as a cricketer in post-World War II Australia.

“Well to pinch a phrase off Arthur Morris,” Archer said, “it meant poverty.”

The five-time Australia opener (1950-51), who also captained Queensland as a 24-year-old, held the mantle as Australia’s oldest living male Test cricketer until his death last Friday aged 95 years and 87 days.

Yet to pin Archer, who is survived by his children, Murray and Gwyneth, exclusively as a cricketer would be to tell only a fraction of his story.

“I was stuck with a restless curiosity, but I’m quite happy about that,” he told cricket.com.au. “I wouldn’t want my life to have been restricted to cricket.”

Archer was born in Brisbane in January 1928, the year before the onset of the Great Depression, which curtailed his father Percy’s cricketing ambitions when he was forced to work on Saturdays to feed his growing family. A second Archer child, Ron, arrived in October 1933, and he would go on to outdo even his big brother as a gifted allrounder, wearing the Baggy Green 19 times and being tipped as a future captain before a back injury ended his career at 23.

“I tried to teach him how to play,” grinned Ken, “but he of course was an extremely talented player, possibly up around the Cameron Green kind of level.”

While he eventually explored beyond its boundary, Archer’s early life was intertwined with cricket.

“I went to the Yeronga State School, which was a fairly big state school then and, as I understand it, a really big one now,” he said. “I played cricket for my school, like most kids did, and we had a pretty good team in those days – eight or nine of them later played first grade cricket.

“Cricket was just a part of life for most physically active kids. We really just played it automatically, although I must also point out my father had been a promising colt in club cricket for Souths in Brisbane.

“When I was 12 or 13, he made a comeback to captain a local team that played in the junior competition, which had a couple of old heads like him, but they also developed a lot of kids who went on to play the top club level and more in Brisbane.

“I was mingled in amongst that environment, and every now and then when someone failed to turn up, I’d have a game with the men. It was all just part of the scene.”

Archer excelled as a batter at Anglican Church Grammar School, making the prestigious Greater Public Schools XI three times before debuting for Queensland at 18 in the summer of 1946-47.

In recalling life as a cricketer through that era, he elaborated on the ‘poverty’ line he borrowed from Morris.

“It was an amateur game, essentially,” he said. “When I began playing for Queensland in 1946, we received an allowance on playing days only of seven shilling and sixpence, which is 75 cents in today’s jargon, which meant three dollars a match, and that covered your tram fares to the ground and back.

“That was pretty much it. There was no money in the game for the players, and they had outlays, because nobody except the occasional superstar ever got gear given to them, so you had to buy or borrow your own bats, pads, and clothing, because they didn’t have uniforms either.

“They had team sweaters, and then after things settled down after the (Second World) War, and we got rid of clothing rations, we finally got some blazers.

“But it wasn’t the way it is now; it’s a very different form of the game in all sorts of ways.”

Around the same time, Archer also played baseball for his state – including against his future Test teammate, Neil Harvey – and his performances as a short-stop in the Claxton Shield caught the eye of American scouts, one of whom famously offered him a contract with the St Louis Browns.

But his path lay elsewhere. In the summer of 1949-50, during which he turned 22, he toured South Africa with the Test squad despite not yet having registered a first-class hundred.

“I can probably thank Neil (Harvey) partly for that, because they’d picked him (as a 19-year-old for the 1948 Ashes tour) and he’d been so highly successful, it encouraged them to go to the well one more time,” he said. “Of course, he’d had an extremely successful introduction to Test cricket, but then he was an extremely great player.

“I enjoyed that tour of South Africa but it also helped me to understand where I was in the pecking order, because I got to bat a lot with Arthur Morris and Neil. I knew early in the piece that I didn’t have the kind of talents they had, although you didn’t have to be Einstein to work that out.”

Archer averaged 43.61 in 15 matches on that tour, posting his maiden hundred after opening alongside New South Welshman Morris. The pair would team up again in the 12 months from December 1950, when Archer played all five of his Tests (234 runs at 26, highest score 48) and it was in that window too that he produced the first of his two centuries for Queensland. Both came at the Gabba against star-studded NSW attacks.

“New South Wales were the top side of that era, and Ray Lindwall was the world’s best fast bowler by a significant margin,” he recalled. “Richie (Benaud) was only learning his craft then, but he was on his way up, and ‘Davo’ (Alan Davidson) was there, and then (Keith) Miller came. Alan Walker was in the mix in the earlier days as well, and he was pretty quick, so yes, I was very happy to make a couple of hundreds against New South Wales.

“The (innings) I also remember playing against Ray (Lindwall) was down in Sydney on a greentop, when we were 5-30 and we got to 200. I played very well that day with a bit of help from Colin McCool (and Don Tallon) down the bottom.”

For the 1952-53 Shield season, a 24-year-old Archer was handed the Queensland captaincy. By then he had been joined in the side by Ron, and the brothers helped Queensland to a third-placed finish in 1953-54 and 1955-56 – lofty heights for a Queensland side that were still considered very much the easybeats of the competition.

One match into the following season, however, having helped a young Peter Burge through his early years at first-class level and after a decade of service to his state, Archer decided his time in the game was done.

“I’d been lucky,” he said. “I probably should’ve stopped a year or two earlier, but you get into habits. And I was enjoying it. I made an awful lot of really good friends out of cricket, all round the world as well as all around Australia.

“But it was a bit pointless at the finish; I felt I wasn’t going anywhere, and I was only keeping some young hopeful out of the game.”

Life after cricket for Archer was varied and fulfilling. After working as a science teacher, he moved into radio, where he climbed the ranks to become a highly regarded executive, and in 1980 was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for Services to Media.

In the early 1970s, he and his wife Marion relocated the family from Brisbane to Sydney, which paved the way for their eventual move to the Central Coast.

“When we first came down, the children were teenagers, and I thought it might have been a difficult time in their lives to change environments, and that having a beach cottage might introduce them to another group of kids,” Archer said.

“So we bought the beach cottage up on the Central Coast, and that worked OK for a few years, and then of course they disappeared.

“So my wife and I retreated from the beach, and we bought a new house up on the hill with a nice view of the ocean and the headlands, and we spent a lot of time there. We did it up and we finally finished up living between that big house and a unit in Sydney for 10 years or so, which was a two-bob-each-way lifestyle that worked. It’s a nice part of the world.”

For eight years until 2015, he and his former opening partner Morris lived within close proximity of one another, and the two shared a close friendship until Morris’s death.

By the early 2020s, Archer had quietly emerged as the country’s oldest living male Test cricketer – pipping another old mate, Harvey, by nine months.

“It’s unexpected, but it’s been that way for a while now,” he grinned when quizzed about the title. “I don’t know what’s happened to all my challengers, except for Harvey – I know where he is (laughs).

“I ring him on his birthday every year to remind him he’s as old as me again, and his standard reply is, ‘Yeah, but only for a couple of months’.”