Young Bradman

115 few admirers of James want to admit how extremely left-wing he was. A democracy decided its politics by number of votes; only a few nutters such as James wanted revolution by a few, forced on all. In sport, number of goals, or runs decided. Those were the rules. No-one in 1930 denied that Arsenal beat Huddersfield 2-0 in the FA Cup final, or that Bradman made 334 at Leeds (instead of 333 or 335). Within those rules, men were free to have beliefs – foolish, biased, or even offensive to others, based on nationalism for example. At the dinner to welcome the 1926 Australian tourists, Sir James Barrie spoke of ‘our proudest sporting boast, that it was we who invented both cricket and the Australians’. Australian winners stung English pride. The commander of the Royal Air Force Pathfinders in the 1939-45 war, Donald Bennett, born in Australia in 1910, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the only crime an Englishman cannot forgive is to be right’. We can contrast Bradman – a foreigner who showed England how to play their own game – with another genius, KS Ranjitsinhji. ‘Ranji’ settled in, and played for, England; in 1930 he gave £1000 to the Sussex county club he had played for. Everyone had only nice things to say about him. Might Fender have found more to like in an English, amateur, Bradman?! In fairness, by the later 1920s, it was becoming a habit to call any heavy- scoring batsman, like Ponsford, ‘a run-getting machine’, as the Sydney Morning Herald did in January 1928. The Herald admitted it ‘scarcely does the young Victorian justice, for his batting is as far removed from the mechanical as that of any of the masters’. Dr Eric Barbour in 1932 claimed that Jack Hobbs ‘found it convenient and profitable to develop into more or less of a run-getting machine’. Writing about the Fourth Test in February 1929, Cardus wished Hammond had made his seven-hour 177 faster; Cardus blamed the ‘deadening routine’ of Test cricket since Bradman or machine? An early, May 1925, advert in The Cricketer for Aubrey Faulkner’s school in west London.