Young Bradman

101 Bradman or machine? been looking for. That would have suited Bradman, ‘an attractive, simple hearted lad’, quiet rather than aloof, wrote Jack Hobbs in his 1931 memoir Playing for England: My Test Cricket Story . Hobbs, another man who found publicity hard to live with, was not Bradman’s teammate. The Sydney sports reporter Cliff Cary, in an unpicking of Bradman in his book of England’s 1946/47 tour, said that Bradman on tour was aloof; ‘was in the team, but not of it’. Jim Mathers in 1949 bluntly wrote that Bradman was ‘not popular’ with his team before the 1939-45 war. Bradman in his 1930s memoir half-admitted a problem; ‘in my efforts to dodge the limelight at that time I fear I was often very much misunderstood’. Like any sensible team, the 1930 tourists showed their best face to the world, and only shared their true feelings with those they could trust. The playwright Ben Travers in his 1981 memoir 94 Declared revealed that he played golf with Vic Richardson and Alan Kippax on 29 June, the Sunday of the Lord’s Test: ‘Kippax confided to me his utter bottled up resentment of Bradman … Bradman’s record undoubtedly raised jealousy in Australia’s camp.’ Bradman needed a strong will to ignore teammates (who unconsciously wanted to pull him back to their level?). Travers had written that so late in life, he died before publication. It became public as early as December 1930, when Geoffrey Tebbutt brought out With The 1930 Australians. Behind the Scenes in the Fight for the Ashes Tebbutt, an Australian Press Association journalist about Bradman’s age, had spoken and dined with him on tour. As Tebbutt put it carefully, ‘Bradman’s immense popularity with the public was not echoed by his team-mates’. As a good agency journalist, who had to stay friends with everyone, Tebbutt was even-handed, pointing out Bradman knew how good he was, and was aloof but modest, and there was ‘no open breach’ with the rest of the team. Tebbutt ended his chapter on Bradman by hoping that ‘he will become, on and off the field, a little more human’. Significantly, Bradman raised that very point, about his humanity, in his own journalism during the 1953 Ashes series: When a man becomes an international figure these days he still remains a human being and as such is entitled to live a normal life – not be regarded as an inebriate if he enjoys a glass of beer. I was accused of being drunk throughout a match when in fact the strongest drink I ever tasted was lemonade. Before we were married a year my wife overheard a conversation at a Test match about our alleged impending divorce. Time softens these blows. Ironically, a sign that Bradman was human – that is, as weak as the rest of us - was that he was so sensitive to such comments, by people who meant nothing to him (unless some ‘blows’ came from people he knew?). Such nastiness had started early; in his December 1930 serialised life he told how a friend passed on the story that success in his first Melbourne Test match had supposedly turned his head, and he was ‘scarcely sober all the time he was in Adelaide’ for New South Wales, in January 1929. Bradman called this ‘rather an amusing little incident’. Either it hurt more than he let on, he became more thin-skinned, or the comments became