Young Bradman

9 Bowral another 16 to Adelaide – as ‘a severe test of physical endurance’. The heat left ‘one limp and almost good for nothing’ and in need of a day’s rest, he said. Likewise an Australian correspondent told The Times in 1920 that playing five hours of Test cricket in a day including lunch and tea, when it could be 80 to 110 ºF in the shade, was about as much as anyone – English or Australian – could stand (‘a soft white drill hat with a broad brim is an absolute necessity’). Sydney grade cricket matches ran over two Saturday afternoons at a time, a more bearable four hours each day. Englishmen who had gone through the 1914-18 war had admired the Australian soldiers they saw. The war correspondent Philip Gibbs in his 1920 book Realities of War hailed the Australians and Canadians for having all the British qualities of courage, ‘and the benefit of a harder physique gained by outdoor life and unweakened ancestry’. Tellingly, Gibbs felt he did not have to explain what he meant; the idea was common that city slums and factories ‘weakened’ British working men. The historian of the Australian Army of the First World War, Charles Bean, thought likewise. In 1942, as he was finishing The Australian Imperial Force in France 1918 , the last volume of his great history of the Anzacs, Bean made a sweeping judgement: It is true that the war [1914-18] furnished ample proof that in general country life produces a much better soldier than city life. In most European Armies the troops from crowded industrial areas were visibly poorer in physique, mentally more helpless and morally less virile and capable of endurance than those from country parts. The Nazis even had a word for this celebration of country folk: voelkisch , of the Volk . In war, according to Bean, countrymen came to the front; officers and sergeants showed ‘capacity’ and their men ‘intelligent initiative’. Not that it did the diggers much good at Gallipoli, when, at their most disciplined, ‘one attacking line after another’ was ‘mown down’. They became better soldiers by 1918, ‘through longer experience and training’; they ‘had a habit of reasoning why and not merely of doing and dying’. By hinting here at two lines of Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade , Bean was neatly suggesting that the English, used to doing as they were told, did less well. Bean told his Australian readers their homeland made them special: ‘Social equality in civil life had produced men with the habit of thinking for themselves and acting on their decision ... and were not backward in giving advice to their leaders if they thought it necessary.’ Bean made the Australian veterans’ wartime sufferings valid. Something that Australia had, and England did not, shaped men, and for good – the ‘bush’, the thousands of miles of near-emptiness, if you forgot the original blacks. As with all generalisations, you could soon unravel Bean’s. If the bush was so wonderful, why did he write those words in Victoria Barracks in the middle of Sydney? Could a holiday in the country make city Australians quicker-witted, more ‘virile’? Visibly? Measurably? What of an Anzac like Bert Oldfield, Australia’s wicket-keeper of the 1920s, who lived in Sydney and whose father came from Manchester; was he less of a man?