Young Bradman

104 Bradman or machine? hid the peacetime changes that people before 1914 were fretting about. In a 1910 book, Vanishing England , for example, PH Ditchfield saw motor cars damaging old bridges, and common people giving up their ‘simple joys’ for railway excursions. Such conservatives saw progress, thanks to machines, as a threat to the country’s heritage, whether its buildings or customs. However, conservatives welcomed some machines, the same as everyone else, even if they did not understand them. Ditchfield for example hailed a ‘grouting machine’ as a ‘wonderful invention’ as a way of preserving old buildings without spoiling them, significantly adding that it was ‘unnecessary to describe its mechanism’. That sounded like hypocrisy. Sir Francis Younghusband, the mountaineer, early on in his 1926 book The Epic of Mount Everest , set out man’s genuine dilemma. Aeroplanes could, thanks to the 1914-18 war, fly higher than Everest. Why then bother to climb it; why not have a ‘plane set you down on top?! As Younghusband added, in that case, why should the Oxford and Cambridge University boat crews row from Putney to Mortlake, when they could go quicker in a motor-boat? Why run, when you could take a taxi?! ‘Life would be a poor affair if we relied always on the machine.’ Men in 1930 could hardly deny what Bradman did – ‘phenomenal run getter’ said Bob Wyatt, who took over as England captain from Chapman, for instance. So many chose the same metaphor that it must have been more than chance or convention. To quote only two of the most eminent: Wyatt called Bradman ‘a genius of which as a run getting machine the like had never been seen before’; ‘more of a run getting machine, first kinsman to Phil Mead of some years ago’, said Jack Hobbs. As that and other A January (that is, midsummer) 1920 advert in the Bowral weekly newspaper the Southern Mail for a Buick car, sold by Percy Flight, of Bong Bong Street in Bowral.