Young Bradman

13 Bowral was really going Home, to begin an adventure on which every Australian, whatever his station, sets his heart.’ As he added, Bradman did not know a soul ‘in the old country’; although his father’s father had come from Withersfield on the borders of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Bradmans from that district made contact in 1930. Bradman’s grandfather Charles had often spoken of Withersfield, Bradman said; although he had died the year before Don Bradman was born. By visiting Withersfield in 1930, Bradman was no different from the thousands of Australians in Britain in two world wars who looked up living relatives or places with family meaning. Other people in Bradman’s youth had closer British connections. A fellow Bowral batsman was Sid Cupitt, whose mother came from England ‘when about eight’, according to her 1918 obituary. Alf Stephens, captain of Bowral for 25 years, married a woman from Grantham when in England in 1913. A photograph in Bradman’s albums shows Stephens taking strike – intriguingly, with the bat away from his feet and with the bat’s face pointing at the feet, much as Bradman did – on a concrete pitch in the back garden of his home, ‘where Don Bradman had much of his early practice’. Stephens called his home ‘Grantham’. In June 1948, Stephens was at Nottingham, to watch the first Test match. To the Nottingham Southern Mail, Bowral newspaper advert of May 1928 for Alf Stephens, ‘building contractors and timber merchants’.