Young Bradman

107 Bradman or machine? them? One shilling to enter. The winter before, the British Movietone News Company had asked Worcestershire for permission to make a ‘talking picture’, including ‘a conversation between the rival captains, spectator comments in the pavilion and a running commentary by an expert on the game’. The county club answered coldly; the Australian manager would have to consent; and the terms were not good enough. The terms must have become good enough because Movietone, among other cameras, were there when Woodfull led his men onto the field at Worcester. Looking back on the 1930 tour, Bradman implied that after his big scores commerce came to him - unsolicited offers and outright cash gifts. He began with pure motives: ‘As an enthusiastic youth who simply adored playing cricket for the love of the game and not for any thought of material or financial reward I went forth to England with the anticipation of a boy in love marrying his young bride.’ Such vivid words suggested that here lay the turning point of his life, on and off the field. Earning £600 for the tour of England was ‘pretty good’, Bradman agreed with Ray Martin in his TV interview. As a comparison, a solicitor earned about as much in a year; a teacher much less. It felt less good when a man was away for near eight months, and had to pick up his life again. Charles Kelleway, after his 1926 tour, called his £400 ‘nothing’. ‘One player told me during this last trip that he wouldn’t do the same thing again for £1000. By the time the next team is selected he will have forgotten …’ These confused feelings of Bradman’s teammates explained much of their estrangement from him. Money mattered to them, the same as anyone else; they felt they had a raw deal; which they kept taking, because the love Bradman spoke of was real. The authorities knew that, and played on it. Whatever Bradman did, he offended somebody. The press kept his name in the papers every day? ‘Bradmanitis’. His book of his life so far? The Australian cricket authorities fined him for a breach of contract. The car- maker General Motors wanted to fly him home solo across Australia and give him a new car? Bradman went against the team’s ‘sense of values’, by letting himself be singled out. Was he supposed to say no? On Bradman’s return to Bowral, the Southern Mail saw ‘the same carefree, modest and clear-eyed boy’. Others did not. A colleague of Cliff Cary’s who reported on the return of the rest of the team contrasted Archie Jackson, the by now ‘sick boy’, with ‘Don’s smile and easy assurance’ that reminded the journalist of a brand of soap Bradman had put his name to after taking a gift of £1000, and the lacquer on his gift Chevrolet. First impressions evidently stuck. In his 1948 book, Cliff Cary said ‘Jackson gave so much to cricket … Bradman took so much from it’. If someone admired like Jackson dies young, the men around him will always disappoint some, simply for living on. Jackson was, as Warner put it in his book of the 1930 tour, ‘disappointing’. As Bradman recalled in later life, ‘when the [1930 touring] team was chosen the majority of Australians (in my opinion) believed that the batting story of the team was likely to be Archie Jackson’. Why did all the critics get it