The Picador Book of Cricket
Page 11
What was it about this man without warmth, this detached artist with the heavy-lidded eyes, this ruthless and efficient destroyer, to endear him so closely to his public? Jack Hobbs had the common touch and the common humours; Hammond, in public at least, walked like an emperor and walked alone. Yet England and English crowds thrilled to him as to few others; the welcoming roars broke more violently round his indifferent head than they did round any of his contemporaries. They tried to effect familiar relationships by calling him Wally. This may have been all right for his private character, but as far as his public face is concerned it was, for me, like calling Dr Johnson Sammy. For me he is always Walter Hammond; stern and majestic names for a stern and majestic man. Yet on his very last appearance, in 1951, when he played for Gloucestershire against Somerset in the August Bank Holiday game, he confessed that he had been hardly able to see the first few balls bowled to him, so moved had he been by the tremendous reception given him by the crowd. Abiding admiration, yes; immense respect, yes. But popularity, affection, a welcome to stir the heart? It is strange, and it is very good. It shows beyond doubt that the British public recognized and warmed to the character and artistry of an unusual man, not caring whether he troubled to pay court to them with his personality or not.
For Walter Hammond brought to the highest reaches of the game a stability and an assurance administered with stunning power. Nothing that he did was without grace; nothing that he did was without authority. He was orthodox, but he expressed his orthodoxy in rich chorded tones. His on drive was right out of the book; his off drive was right out of this world. To magnify the good and the right to Titanic dimensions; this is to behave after the high Roman fashion. Jack Hobbs was a fifth-century Greek; Walter Hammond an imperial Roman, of the days of the great Augustan empire. The Latin language has come down to us with its four great qualities plain: clarity, strength, weight, precision. Those, in his lesser field, are Walter Hammond’s qualities too.
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Donald George Bradman was the most phenomenal of cricketers. He was unquestionably the greatest batsman of all time, and one of the best captains. In his youth he also fielded brilliantly at cover point. But it was not so much the records he broke as how he broke them that attracted notice. No other cricketer, before or since, has been so successful in the pursuit of success. No other cricketer has had a revolutionary new strategy worked out by his opponents against him. In its own terms this strategy, ‘bodyline’, worked well – it brought Bradman’s average, normally in excess of 100, to a mere 56. However, ‘bodyline’ also very nearly led to Australia’s premature exit from the Empire.
From the huge and ever proliferating literature on Bradman I have chosen two essays – one on the promising youngster, the other on the veteran at the end of his career. Each is written by a man who played much cricket with the Don, who vastly respected his cricketing genius but who, nonetheless, had reservations about the damage done to the game by his single-minded pursuit of personal success.
W. J. O’REILLY
Young Don Bradman (1985)
I have often wondered about the strange fact that I still have the clearest possible recollection of the very first time I heard Don Bradman’s name.
The strangeness of it comes from the present knowledge that the name must have meant absolutely nothing whatever then to a young Sydney Teachers’ College student, as I was, just reaching the final stages of his two years’ scholarship course and preparing to take up a job as a primary school teacher with the New South Wales Department of Public Instruction, as the Education Department was then known.
A small group of us were making our way past the ‘Greasers’ School’, as we called Sydney University’s School of Engineers, on our way down to the Forest Lodge exit from the University grounds, en route to the Jubilee Oval at Glebe Point, where we were due to take part in some sporting programme. To make some sort of appropriate conversation I mentioned that I would be returning to my Wingello home, where I hoped to take part in some of the cricket fixtures in the Southern Tablelands Cricket Competition during the coming two months’ summer vacation. Len Kelsey, who hailed from Bowral and who had spent his two years’ training at the College in close association with me, informed me that it would probably pay some dividends if I were to keep a wary eye open for a young man named Don Bradman, whom he had known as a fellow pupil at Bowral High School, and who was presently scoring lots of runs in the local competition. I passed the matter over in the same way a good chairman in a humdrum public meeting skims over the general business, setting it aside for later consideration.
But my meeting with Bradman came much sooner than I had anticipated. Boarding a passenger train leaving Sydney’s Central Station for Goulburn one Saturday morning in December 1925, I travelled peacefully for eighty miles, blithely unaware of what was to happen to me before I arrived at my little home town, situated 104 miles south. As the train came to a halt at Bowral, an attractive township popular as a health resort and holiday mountain town, I was startled out of my peaceful reverie by the weird sensation of imagining that I heard my name being called. I jumped up, leaned my long frame from the carriage window and called out ‘Here I am.’
It was the stationmaster from Wingello doing the bellowing. His instructions were terse and forceful. ‘Grab your bag and get out.’
My reluctance to obey him must have been plain for him to see, for he added in explanation, ‘We are all down here to play Bowral this afternoon and you are going to get the new ball.’ I jumped out smartly. And that was a dreadful mistake, I must admit.
The stationmaster, with the same organizing ability which had induced the Railway Commissioners to promote him to his dizzy height of responsibility, put my fears to rest by informing me that he himself had been in close contact during the week with my dear mother, who had packed my cricket gear and given it to him to set me up for the afternoon. Misguidedly I silently gave three hearty cheers for the good luck which had given me such a welcome start to the Christmas holidays.
On the way to the Bowral Oval in an old 1918 Model T Ford truck I was well and truly briefed on the growing reputation of a kid named Don Bradman – there it was again – who had been showing such unusual skill that they had decided to enlist my services at short notice.
We were a motley-looking crew I suppose as we began to peel off under cover of a clump of gum trees beside the ground. Young and old, all shapes and sizes. Moustaches were popular with the more mature members, but no youngster dared then to run the risk of wholesale criticism by encouraging the reluctant growth of a few goose-down hairs on the top lip to give the false impression that he had entered the state of manhood. It wasn’t done then. There were no beards. It was long since the days when cricketers found it necessary to add to their ferocity, glamour, sex appeal – call it what you will – by hiding behind a thatch of fearsome whiskers.
Bowral won the toss and batted. I got the new ball.
You might well ask, ‘Why did O’Reilly get the new ball? He wasn’t a fast bowler who thrashed them down at headlong speed. There has never been any suggestion that he could move the new ball in the air sufficiently to claim recognition as a worthwhile new-ball operator.’
Quite true.
O’Reilly got the new ball regardless. The reasons were basic. O’Reilly could bowl consistently at the stumps. He had earned himself a noticeable reputation as a wicket-taker in the Sydney Moore Park Saturday-morning competition. Furthermore the Wingello captain and the entire team – including O’Reilly himself – thought that O’Reilly was a good bowler.
Play began.
In my first over I hit the stumps of one of Bowral’s openers. That warmed me up for the entrance of a diminutive figure, approaching with what appeared to be the diffident gait of a stopgap performer sent in to hold the fort long enough for the real No. 3 in the batting order to get his pads on. What struck me most about him was the difficulty he seemed to be having in taking normal steps as he approached. His pads
seemed to reach right up to his navel. His bat was small and had reached the sere and yellow stage, where the yellow was turning to dark tobacco.
Still, he shaped up as though he knew what the game was all about, and the expression on his face publicized the fact that he felt quite at home and was ready to cope with anything that I had in store for him.
The battle was joined. As the game proceeded I was quick to realize that I had come into contact with my very first ‘problem child’. My training as a prospective primary school teacher was supposed to have prepared me for dealing with the occasional hard case who would turn up from time to time, but nothing could have prepared me for the confrontation with this particular youth.
As the precocious lad began to handle my quickish leg breaks, bouncing high off the coir mat which always favoured spin, I was made aware that here at last I had a real job of work on my hands, and I wondered what I should have to say to Len Kelsey the next time I saw him.
I had a bit of bad luck early in that memorable afternoon. Twice before he had reached 30 the youngster was dropped in the slips off my bowling. To elucidate, it is necessary that I give an honest pen-picture of the captain who led Wingello in that great struggle.
Selby Jeffery was a railway fettler. He had worn the Australian uniform which proudly displayed the big brass ‘A’ denoting the fact that he was present on the Sunday morning of 25 April 1915, when the Australian and New Zealand forces went into action at Gallipoli in their attempt to open up the Dardanelles. Selby was an Anzac, and as such held the unbounded respect of every man on the field. He sported a fairly robust black moustache. His face was rosy with blatant good health and his persistent good humour was heralded by the most pleasant smile one could wish to see.
His snow-white shirt and duck trousers were immaculate, as were his rubber boots. He wore a black waistcoat, unbuttoned, over the shirt. The idea of the waistcoat was quite original – it held his pipe, his tobacco and his matches. It was not unusual in those far-off days for a country cricketer to light up and take a few draws on a pipe or cigarette. Nobody took umbrage at it. I saw it happen outback many times. Indeed I once saw it in first-class cricket on the Sydney Cricket Ground, when Freddie Mair, the gifted all-rounder and Balmain captain for many years, playing for New South Wales against Victoria, let his craving for a few draws get the better of him at the fall of a Victorian wicket. And I seem to recall that he had to get a match from the man fielding at short leg, but I can’t remember who that was.
Selby used to slip his big-bowled bent-stemmed Captain Peterson pipe into the top pocket of his unbuttoned waistcoat. His tobacco pouch fitted snugly into the other top pocket, with the tin box holding his Wax Vestas matches in the bottom pocket along with a penknife for cutting the plug of dark ‘Conqueror’ tobacco.
It would have been senseless for him to field in any position where it might have been necessary to raise an occasional canter. Had he run there would have been a scattering of smoking paraphernalia in all directions. Wisely therefore he placed himself invariably at first slip, where he was spendidly covered by a magnificent keeper named Tommy Lynam and always supported by an active and mobile second slip.
Very early in the day I got one to lift and bite. Young Bradman edged it and the ball travelled speedily and straight in the direction of Selby’s midriff. It would have been an extraordinary effort had the catch been taken. It struck him in the solar plexus just at the moment when he was, with both hands well and truly occupied, lighting his pipe.
Bradman soon gave our skipper a chance to redeem himself by snicking my quicker ball straight to him again. This second time Selby made a manful attempt with both hands to make the catch, but he had blown such a dense cloud of bluish smoke from his startled lungs that he must have lost sight of the ball well before it reached him.
‘Sorry Bill,’ he called, as if nothing untoward had happened. Selby’s inconsistencies in the slips were part and parcel of the Wingello team’s programme. I was probably the only one among us who felt that he might have been wise to deny himself just a little longer.
Who in the name of all that is holy could ever possibly hope to get away unscathed when Don Bradman had been given two lives? If I said earlier that I experienced some early worries as the boyish Bradman started his innings by methodical employment of the middle of his bat, I could certainly go much further in describing my own mental reactions as this young man tore the Wingello attack apart. Even though his size suggested that he would have been better fitted physically to have been riding winners at Randwick racecourse, he summoned up the energy required to land the ball right over the fence on half a dozen occasions. One wondered where he was hiding the battery that generated the power.
To draw a convenient veil over the desolate scene, Selby Jeffery’s team finished the day a crestfallen crowd who listened more to the rattles of the old Model T Ford than to any animated flow of conversation on the thirty-mile return trip by road to Wingello. Their chief bowling hope had nothing whatever to say. The boy Bradman was 234 not out.
Back at home I questioned my mother’s wisdom in aiding and abetting my downfall by so carefully collecting my gear, but she seemed to think I had come to little harm, really, and that I should have considered myself lucky to have spent such a lovely day out in the fresh air playing cricket.
As the game was to be continued on our Wingello wicket the following Saturday afternoon, I could not help feeling that I was due to face up to another hammering from this pint-sized powerhouse a week later. I saw no hope ahead for me. All was gloom. I began to count my blessings in that I had other sports to choose from. As an athlete I had spent two happy years with Botany Harriers, where I had done reasonably well without ever having really tried to train assiduously for the three events – high jump, triple jump and shot put – in which I competed. I had done well enough in tennis to promise myself some sort of a future there if I cared to concentrate. All these thoughts went through my troubled boyish mind, but it was difficult to find one alleviating premise upon which to base my deep-dyed love for cricket. Having been belted unmercifully by a schoolboy was a pill too bitter for me to swallow. My pride had been badly injured.
The next Saturday afternoon arrived. I lined myself up manfully for another serve of what the game I had loved so much might have to offer.
The first ball again was mine to bowl, and the not out Bradman was there to deal with it. I let go my accustomed leg break, aimed at the leg stump. It spun sharply past the Bradman bat and crashed into the top of the off stump. Suddenly, I thought, the grass round our Wingello ground began to look greener than ever it had done before. The birds began to sing. The sun shone becomingly. One ball changed my whole sporting outlook. Gone were the dismaying plans to give the game away for ever. I was prepared to go on and take whatever it had in store for me, and I made the personal pledge that as I was taking it on the chin in future I would be unsparing in my efforts to deal out as much as I could of what I was getting.
There were lots of encounters for the two of us in the years that were to follow. There were times when I felt the full weight of Don Bradman’s bat – many of them indeed – but there were many occasions too when I had ample reason to rejoice in the lesson I learned on those afternoons at Bowral and Wingello in 1925.
Fifty years later I had the privilege of bowling a ball to Sir Donald Bradman when we both appeared at the ceremony to open the Sir Donald Bradman Memorial Oval built on the very site of the little park in which we met for the first time ever – long before our first-class cricket careers began.
To cap this long story off I must tell you that on 26 August 1983, the day before Don’s seventy-fifth birthday, Benson & Hedges invited me to attend a function at the New South Wales Cricketers’ Club in Barrack Street, Sydney, where the company presented the bat used by Bradman in the game I have described to the NSW Cricket Association. It was the first bat he ever owned. His mammoth scores were shown thereon. That score of 234 led all the rest.