Young Bradman

141 The Himalayan Men While Bradman had power as a cricket administrator, it took some bravery by an Australian to say boo to him. It remained easier for Englishmen to belittle Bradman by standing up for their own. Lionel Tennyson, who as Hampshire captain stayed on the field in the rain to let Bradman make 1000 runs by the end of May 1930, by 1950 in his memoir Sticky Wickets was, for whatever reason, complaining that Bradman played ‘with a ruthless efficiency which, at the risk of being old-fashioned, I would say is not strictly in accordance with the traditional and best outlook on our greatest game’. Ian Peebles in his memoir Spinner’s Yarn stuck up for Hobbs as ‘the complete master batsman’. Someone else who had to field to Bradman, Bob Wyatt, likewise thought Hobbs ‘a still better batsman’ than Bradman. As for Hobbs, he stuck up for WG Grace. Or, as in in Playing for England! for several Englishmen: ‘I would not compare Bradman to George Gunn, Archie MacLaren, Reggie Spooner, Frank Woolley or any of our classic batsmen,’ he wrote, and thus either through clumsy English or deviously did exactly that, lumped them all together, or implied those men had something ‘classic’ that Bradman did not. Another tactic was to ignore Bradman altogether, as Wally Hammond’s benefit souvenir did in 1934. Inside, JG Coates, the sports editor of the Bristol Evening World , hailed Hammond as a ‘record maker’, genius and ‘the Greatest Cricketer of his Generation’. In such a publication you would hardly expect unwelcome truths; that Bradman had upstaged Hammond. However, another word of Coates’ about Hammond – ‘incomparable’ - was how the former Australian prime minister Robert Menzies described Bradman in his memoir Afternoon Light . It was a good lawyer’s word; it gave praise, yet was enigmatic and empty. If you cannot compare one man to another, how can you say one is good and another bad? That did at least raise the question of whether you could compare someone from one generation with others, before or after. Other sports wondered too. Writing about football in 1931, the former striker Steve Bloomer reckoned you could not compare goal scoring in different generations, just as you could not compare Hannibal with Napoleon or Foch. As for an obvious comparison, number of goals, Bloomer held a record that he was proud of; but said he did not want to be a ‘swank’. Then he seemed to say you could compare past with present (‘goals are unquestionably cheaper than they used to be’), and in the end played for a draw (‘let each generation have and hold its treasures as long as it may’). As for boxing, Clyde Foster in the London Evening Standard in 1930 judged that the rules of the ‘Ring’ were so different from the past that ‘comparisons become practically untenable’. Comparing generations may be a sign of how juvenile sport is; do historians of ancient Rome debate which emperor was the ‘greatest’?! At least sportsmen were asking; they had a sense of history. The Australian journalist Ray Robinson in his 1951 book From the Boundary recalled how on Sunday morning, 30 May 1948, the Australian tourists boarded a motor coach outside the Victoria Station Hotel in Nottingham, to lunch as guests of the duke and duchess of Portland at Welbeck Abbey. Australian vice-captain Lindsay Hassett said to Robinson: ‘I suppose you realise how wrong you are?’ In an argument about past and present players, Robinson