Young Bradman

159 I wrote a 28,000-word outline of Young Bradman after The Victory Tests , that went nowhere. In 2016, after I wrote Brian Sellers: Yorkshire Tyrant , I returned to Bradman, thinking that I had half-written it. Instead I found most of the chapters – about coaching, selection and recruitment, and the myth of a ‘golden age’ before 1914 – were forerunners of my history of English cricket, The Summer Field . Hardly any of the outline found its way into this work. I had done background reading at Lord’s library; and studied the newspapers about Bradman at Worcester and then Leicester in 1930 at the then local studies library in Worcester, and Leicestershire county archives at Wigston. As a refresher I went to the library at Trent Bridge, Nottingham, by permission of Peter Wynne-Thomas, who saw Bradman bat in 1948; on the wall overlooking the table was a signed bat used by Bradman in 1938. I must acknowledge kind letters from John Woodcock; and David Moore for lending me The Bradman Albums (1987). Let’s hope he does not notice the pencil marks I made. I felt Bradman’s life before 1930 was little studied, and yet might hold clues to how he became extraordinary. The sources would be fairly manageable (or to put it another way, would not mean as much work as a full biography). Remembering Bradman , by Margaret Geddes (2002) for instance, a fine collection of ‘those whose lives he touched’, had next to nothing about Bradman’s Bowral days, only because near everyone from those days had gone. The Bradman Albums , and Michael Page’s illustrated biography, ‘using the private possessions of Sir Donald Bradman’ (1983) did cover his early years. Indeed, they offer plenty that I cannot. I avoided quoting them – and Rosenwater, and any other biography – because I cannot abide authors who digest 20 or 200 books to make one of their Thanks and sources The author in 1998 outside Bradman’s childhood home, across the road from the town’s cricket ground.