Young Bradman

102 Bradman or machine? more malicious. Other cricketers were at least as touchy. Percy Chapman told the Reuter’s news agency in February 1929 how everyone in his team resented criticism in the English press: ‘These men are thousands of miles away and without knowing the circumstances of the case they give us fulsome praise when the team is doing well and yet if we make a moderate score they say the team has a pronounced tail.’ This man had just won four Tests!? How did the team know what newspapers on the other side of the world were saying, anyway? Because the Australian newspapers repeated the comments. Even a man without vices such as Bradman may have feared that headline-seeking journalists might pick up gossip and a fickle public might believe it. Irving Rosenwater in his 1998 booklet wrote that after 1930 the Bradman ‘doubters and detractors … had silently folded their tents and crept away’. The opposite was true. Even at Bradman’s triumphant return to Bowral, on Tuesday evening, 4 November 1930, Percy Westbrook had to defend him from what the Southern Mail called ‘certain criticism’. ‘Bradman the Great’ books (to quote one title) thrived, like works celebrating Winston Churchill, because of the profitable market in them. The authors ignored (or did they never hear?) grumbles about Bradman. Journalists had a grudge; Bradman was unhelpful to them. One journalist, Cliff Cary, in 1948 quoted ‘inner cricket circles’ (‘it is astonishing the number of former teammates who have not a good word to say for the game’s most consistent run-getter’). Few Australians dared put their name to criticism of Bradman - or, in fairness, anyone; reasonably, they wanted a quiet life. Englishmen could be franker about a man they wanted to get out. As for 1930, it’s striking how grudging much of the English praise was for Bradman. After Bradman made 1000 runs in May, The Cricketer ’s editorial said that ‘never yet has a cricketer hit the mark quite so quickly’; and hoped that no English club or county would try to sign him (‘we have enough players of our own’). After Bradman’s record 334 in the Third Test at Leeds in July 1930, the Surrey captain Percy Fender, while crediting him as a ‘genius’ and ‘all-destroying’, also wrote that ‘there was nothing particularly attractive in style about this young man’s batting’. Afterwards, in his book The Tests of 1930 , Fender credited Bradman as ‘enormously improved’ since the 1928/29 Tests; still did not find him ‘an attractive bat’; and called him great, within limits (‘he has not impressed me as being comparable with such players as Charlie Macartney or Victor Trumper’). Bradman knew this. When introducing a 1981 book, Bradman’s First Tour , Bradman was quite impersonal: I was aware that there had been adverse comment about the boy from Bowral … who according to Percy Fender lacked certain qualities which would be needed under the more searching conditions of that country [England]. These things did not prey upon my mind though I confess in retrospect that my subsequent success against these bowlers [Fender, and Maurice Tate] in England carried with it some satisfaction. Again, he offered restrained ‘satisfaction’ for his pleasure in showing who was right. In the 1988 ABC interview Bradman gave more detail against