Young Bradman

113 as machines, were entering cricket: such as large and detailed scoreboards and what Harold Gibbons (one of Worcestershire’s unsuccessful bowlers against Bradman in 1930) in a May 1930 article called ‘a mechanical device which allows you to throw the ball against it, and it comes back at all kinds of different angles’. Such a ‘cricket fielding machine’ was in use by the 1910s at some English county clubs, the main fee-paying schools, and at the MCG and SCG. Likewise, in everyday life, pianolas, car horns and brakes, and traffic lights, did predictable things once set up (or programmed, the 21 st century might say) and saved humans the job of playing the piano, making a noise to warn other traffic, and so on. In a significant letter to the Times in December 1928, Sir Herbert Maxwell took up the question of whether to make the chess board 100 squares, not 64, to make the game harder. ‘Professional proficiency has reached a marvellous pitch in certain games’, such as billiards, and batting in cricket, he claimed. A few men had reduced the problems of those games to a ‘mechanical solution’. Maxwell was pointing to the balance needed in all sports and human pastimes, whether solving crossword puzzles or climbing mountains. ‘Proficients’, to use Maxwell’s word, might find a game ‘insipid’ once they mastered it; but the great majority still found golf, for example, complex enough. You altered the rules to suit one or the other sort of player at your peril. Likewise, you were unwise to tinker with the size of the cricket ball or the stumps, or the way counties won points in the Championship, to please what AE Crawley in the Observer in 1921 termed ‘unrestful spectacle mongers’. If you gave in to the impatient and vulgar, who wanted the thrill of results, Crawley suggested, ‘a game becomes not only a business, but so mechanical a business that competition, adventure, enterprise, and everything that makes business itself worthwhile, is excluded, and the Bradman or machine? A 1937 advert in The Cricketer magazine for a bowling machine, ‘invented with the object of giving batsmen more perfect practice at the nets than is generally obtainable’. Price: ten guineas, or roughly £1000 in 21 st century money.