Young Bradman

106 Bradman or machine? cost £6042 to run the Gloucestershire county club, the Gloucester Citizen reported after the club’s annual meeting in 1924, twice as much as in 1913; ‘this remarkable increase is mainly due to the higher rate of pay now given to the professionals’. This comment was revealingly unkind; inflation in general had doubled, thanks to wartime. Was workers’ pay not supposed to keep up?! A famous former Gloucestershire amateur, Gilbert Jessop, deplored the 1920s shortage of amateurs, because ‘with all due respect’ to veterans such as Hobbs and Woolley, ‘a preponderance of the professional element conduces to slow cricket. When a man is dependent for his livelihood on the game it is but natural that he would eschew those risks which the amateur can afford to take with impunity.’ English spectators and players had their own ideas of what ‘playing the game’ meant, as the Warwickshire professional Harry Howell set out in 1925. Each man had to do his best, and what was most useful for the side; he might have to show ‘sacrifice, restraint, patience’ for the sake of team success, rather than follow self-interest or ‘provide a cheap thrill for a section of the crowd’. Australian cricketers, meanwhile, were ‘all amateurs’, Bradman told Ray Martin in his 1996 TV interview; ‘… we played cricket because we loved it, we loved the game’. In truth, Australian cricketers in Bradman’s youth were not professionals; but not amateurs either, as the English understood the word, so an anonymous Australian correspondent told The Times in 1920. Leading players were professionals ‘in all but name’, and might well take money from a benefit match on retirement. Some Australians saw cricket in English terms, ‘either a game or a business … with the moral standards and box-office criteria of Hollywood of the Chicago White Sox’, wrote Dr Eric Barbour, in a profile of Bradman in the Sydney Mail in 1932. Barbour credited Bradman with a ‘pleasing personality’, unspoilt by success and publicity, yet criticised him ‘for his tendency to materialism’. Bradman’s published life story at the age of 22 was ‘hardly in keeping with cricket tradition’. For a cricketer to ‘play the game’ – that is, keep to convention, besides take part - he could not take more from the game than others, because above all ‘no player is greater than the game itself’, Barbour wrote. Barbour also admitted, however, that the rules of cricket amateurism were ‘elastic’. The hypocrisy started with Barbour; was he writing his articles for nothing?! Speaking at the dinner for the Australians at Worcester in 1930, Pelham Warner ‘urged the Australians to bat till six o’clock on Thursday to attract another good gate’. The diners laughed because, as with so many jokes, the jest was in a truth seldom aired; that English and Australian cricket welcomed the other’s team every couple of years to make all the money they could, to tide them over the other, unprofitable, years. English amateurs said they wanted to keep cricket free from money, and indeed anything else; DJ Knight for instance deplored as ‘sensationalism’ the press picturing famous cricketers at home, and telling what make of car they drove. ‘Cricket is not a stunt,’ Knight wrote, ‘it is a great national institution.’ In truth English cricket was for sale in 1930 just as much as it was in the supposedly more commercial 21 st century. Did you want to see the Australians at their first nets at Lord’s, and maybe be invited to bowl at