Young Bradman

105 Bradman or machine? examples show, Bradman was not the first to be likened to a machine. It did stick; Cardus in his English Cricket in 1945 famously contrasted the ‘eagle’ Trumper with the ‘aeroplane’ Bradman. This was all absurd; Bradman, or any man, was not a machine. What was going on? The editorial in The Cricketer of 26 July 1930 was telling. It complained that counties were playing more matches than they could afford, and only for the sake of the County Championship table. That created interest, ‘but in the wrong places – the clubs, the inns, and other resorts where the folk are gathered together’. Did tables improve the game? The magazine answered its own question: no, ‘for they undoubtedly have a tendency to reduce the players to mere automata, run-getting machines to whom the first innings points and their place in the averages is of the first importance’. The conservative, backward-looking magazine made a connection between what it called the ‘amateur spirit’ (cricketers ideally playing for the love of it, not for pay or coming first); the quality of play; and what class of people followed the game (common people in pubs were the ‘wrong’ sort). Men of a lower social class, who sought a wage to play sport, agreed with much of that argument. Jack Mew, the Manchester United and England goalkeeper, said in 1921: … the fact that money so largely enters into the big game must inevitably have had the effect of knocking a lot of the sentiment out of it … it seems to be forgotten by a lot of people that to the professional footballer, football is a profession, in which he cannot always, or even frequently, allow himself to be swayed by sentiment. As Mew said, he could not go easy against the team bottom of the table; he still had to win. Mew might have added that nor could he play too hard, too often, in case he wore himself out, and played badly. To keep his place, and earn his ‘bread and butter’, the player-for-money had to avoid extremes – of failure, or of effort. A witness of Bradman’s 452 not out, Cliff Cary, remarked on the ‘machine-like steadiness’. Any regular sportsman, then, professional or amateur, who routinely did well ran the risk of becoming, or looking, mechanical, that conservative connoisseurs would pounce on. Bradman timed his rise badly for another reason; ‘the first-class championship has changed in character even in my time,’ said the veteran Surrey professional Andy Ducat in 1925, ‘and there is not quite the same scope for the carefree amateur who is willing to ‘have a go’ at everything’. Ducat blamed careful, leg-side, bowling. Whether because of social change generally or from the 1914-18 war, amateurs were not coming through in England. One of them, DJ Knight of Surrey, wrote in The Cricketer annual for 1926/27: ‘I long for the days when the universities shall once more bring forth the material out of which may be formed the nucleus and cream of English cricket.’ This implied that amateurs were competing with ‘pros’ for the same few places in counties and the national team. Another tension was the cost of wages, compared with the expenses given to a wealthier amateur. It