Young Bradman

12 Bowral admired. When Bradman was making his way in Sydney grade cricket in 1927, the city’s newspapers routinely called him a ‘countryman’. Often, in cricket and general society, city people looked down on those from the country as laughably or sadly uncivilised. An unnamed visitor in December 1918 reckoned that stepping off a train into Bowral was ‘like coming into some dark hovel of a night time, so different to the brightly illuminated Katoomba’ in the Blue Mountains, a resort town like Bowral. Words gave away how city cricketers looked down on others. The Australia wicket-keeper Wally Grout in his autobiography recalled how as a ‘Sydney or the bush’ batsman he was not good enough for the Queensland team. Again, it’s telling that he did not feel he had to explain; presumably, he meant he was an unsophisticated swiper. The London-based journal The Cricketer , describing Bradman in its spring 1929 issue, said that although he ‘played in the country until 1926 there is no suspicion of a rural touch about his batting’. Bradman understood that ‘rural’ was a coded insult. In his serialised December 1930 life story, he admitted that to critics his cross-batted style ‘smacked of the bush’: ‘I make no pretensions as to style.’ As with everything, men disagreed over the difference in class of cricket in town and country – in English terms, between county and club cricket. Some wrote off cricket, and life generally, outside the cities as backward. ‘Not Out’, the cricket reporter of the Sydney weekly sports newspaper The Referee , in his office in 1922, took a caller to be a visitor from the country. The journalist pictured a village ‘with its matting wicket surrounded by eucalypti and the local stars of bat and ball playing in tweed trousers and braces’. Left unspoken was the thought; they can’t even dress properly . Bradman, indeed, began his 1938 autobiography - still in his twenties - by admitting he was ‘a rather old-fashioned sort of person in some ways’. Various words of Bradman from across his life support that; in that same book he recalled the FA Cup final at Wembley in April 1930; ‘the people all standing to attention and singing the National Anthem when the King [George V] arrived left an impression upon me that I shall never forget’; although it did not impress him enough to stay until the end of the match. In 1953, while reporting on the England-Australia matches for the Daily Mail , he noted several spectators in the warm sun stripped to the waist, ‘a strange sight at Lord’s’; and in an interview for Australian television in 1996, he joked that he was such a slow driver that his daughter once said to him: ‘What’s the matter Dad, are we driving into a head wind?!’ The man who so upset cricket’s routines because he batted so well – and who would have made the game unplayable, if many more had done the same – was a conservative who ended that TV interview with an uplifting quotation from a long-dead English aristocrat that even the English had forgotten. Harking to England was not odd for someone of Bradman’s time and place. While Bowral was all Bradman knew, by European standards the town was not far short of the ‘wild west’; when a fire destroyed a wood and iron store in Station Street in 1919, the Southern Mail called it ‘one of the old landmarks of Bowral, having been built over 30 years ago’. After his 1930 tour of England, Bradman looked back on the news of his selection: ‘It seemed too good to be true, and it took me some time to realise that I