Young Bradman

160 Thanks and sources own. If another book has something worth reading, that’s the place to read it. Newspapers have been a main source, thanks to the ‘Trove’ part of the National Library of Australia website, trove.nla.gov.au. Its search engine allows quicker research – which is not the same as better, necessarily. For instance, if you input the right search terms, for the right period, you can call up the local Cootamundra newspapers that mentioned George Bradman, to pick up pieces of the Bradman family before 1908. Before the internet, you may well have had to visit the place, and plough through 20 years of newspapers – at four sheets for each week, about 4000 broadsheet pages – with no guarantee you would find anything. Many books about cricket from 1930 to the 2000s had something to say about Bradman. I picked up many second-hand, for example at the county ground, Derby. The Graham Gooch quote in chapter one comes from the first edition of the Pelham Year Book (1979), page C33; that I did not buy. The BBC Radio Collection tapes, The Don Declares (1988) I bought at a charity bookshop at a favourite place of mine, Palmers Green, north London. A transcript of the Ray Martin TV interview of 1996 I found online, like the advert with Michael Clarke. While Kangaroo is frankly a poor novel, it’s worth looking at for a flavour of the early 1920s, still horse-drawn, life south of Sydney. DH Lawrence for example described a game on a ‘football field’, presumably rugby that he saw at Thirroul. If only he had stayed in the Southern Highlands, in summer, he might have witnessed young Bradman! For Lawrence’s impressions, see volume four of The Letters of DH Lawrence (1987), edited by Warren Roberts, James T Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield. A crucial piece of good fortune, that let in Bradman to make his debut for New South Wales, was the boil on Archie Jackson’s knee. It may be hard to believe – when did you last hear of a sportsman, or anyone, suffer from boils? However, WM Rolland, born in 1915, in his memoir Growing up in early Canberra (1988) included the ‘agony’ of a boil on the kneecap (page 58), treated by a nurse with a poultice. One field I did not cover – you have to draw the line somewhere – was child psychology and play. Nor did I compare growing up in other sports, or countries; for Russia in the 1920s, try Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero , by Catriona Kelly (2007). The Vanishing England quoted in chapter eight I found in a café in Aberystwyth, the weekend I was there for a rest before I began planning then writing the book. The Daily Mail supplement of 1950 I read at the Magic Attic local history centre in Swadlincote, Derbyshire. Tony Shillinglaw’s theories about Bradman were in brief in issue 12 of The Nightwatchman journal (winter 2015). ‘These our actors’, the title of the final chapter, comes from that speech by Prospero, quoted on the Shakespeare statue in Sydney. For sources in detail, see my Wordpress website, markrowe.wordpress.com .