He returned to cricket at the start of the 1946–47 season and in the first match scored a new personal highest score with an innings of 153, putting on 299 for the seventh wicket with Bruce Mitchell which was a partnership record for that wicket in South African cricket. With his wife recovered and his own fitness not in doubt, he was picked as captain for the 1947 South African tour of England. The 1947 English cricket season was dominated by the run-getting exploits of Denis Compton and Bill Edrich, and the South African side led by Melville suffered at the hands of both batsmen in a hot summer made for batting. In the first half of the season, however, Melville's own batting form was almost as good, despite breaking a bone in his little finger early on and also straining his thigh during the first Test. He made centuries in the second match of the tour against Leicestershire and in the fourth match against Surrey. His form took a bit of a dip when he moved up to open the innings because Dennis Dyer, the expected opening partner for Bruce Mitchell, was badly out of form (and subsequently proved to have been ill for most of the season). The change proved successful in the first Test match, however: Melville scored a career-best 189 in the first innings and then, when the South Africans went in wanting 227 to win the match in 140 minutes, he hit an unbeaten 104 in the second innings, though the match remained drawn. Melville's performance set several records: this was the first time a South African batsman had scored two separate hundreds in a Test match; his first innings of 189 was at the time the highest by a South African against England, though Mitchell equalled it and was not out later in the same series; Melville's third-wicket partnership of 319 with vice-captain Dudley Nourse was a record in all Test cricket for that wicket, though beaten by Compton and Edrich for England later in the series, and South Africa's highest for any wicket; the South African total of 533 was the highest against England; and Melville's two centuries meant he had scored three Test centuries in succession, as his final innings in 1938–39 had been 103. Melville was not finished with record-setting, however. In the next Test at Lord's, with the South Africans facing a huge England total, he scored yet another century, 117, to equal the record of four consecutive Test centuries set by Jack Fingleton in the 1930s.