Young Bradman

15 Bowral it away from old craftsmen. Yet more profound changes came from the First World War. The dead and injured in body and mind, the survivors’ experiences, and the break with conventions for those at home, added up to arguably the biggest single change of modern times. In December 1919 a Southern Highlands newspaper, The Scrutineer , printed an ‘honor roll’ of 35 dead and 106 that had returned; not as many as in an equivalent British town, but enough for everyone to know someone who had volunteered. Bradman’s father George, born in 1875, was too old to serve (although some his age did) and his sons were too young. Apart from the occasional lecturer, or event raising money for wartime causes, it’s striking how little the world war touched Bowral. It still celebrated the end of war as wildly as everywhere else. Once word came on Monday night, 11 November 1918 (about the same time as the 11.00 am armistice in France), the fire brigade and St Jude’s Church rang its bells so that everyone knew. Bong Bong Street ‘became thronged with people until it is doubtful if there was a tenanted house in the town’. Was the ten-year-old Donald Bradman allowed out? Even if not, could he have slept through the cheering, the band, the singing ( Rule Britannia and the English and French national anthems), the fireworks, bonfires and kerosene tin cans banged together? Even if he did, the next day schoolchildren were part of a procession, and the Wednesday afternoon saw ‘a monster picnic for the children in the Glebe Park’ and games. The end to the biggest event of their lives (until the next one) deserved something big, for everyone to join in; yet Bradman said nothing of it in his 1930, 1938 or 1950 autobiographies. Other, older cricketers such as Jack Hobbs and Frank Woolley said little about their war, presumably because they did so little. In fairness, Bradman had no need to remind readers of the 1914-18 war, as they had lived through it; and if they were too young to remember it, other people had more to say about it. But why did Bradman equally have nothing in his published life story about the other great event in his time in Bowral, the turning on of electricity, on Saturday night, 31 January 1925? Power lines came from Port Kembla, on the coast 40 miles away. ‘The sudden transition from the deepening darkness to the full brilliancy of the light cast by hundreds of lamps held the people spellbound for a moment. Then a great cheer broke out.’ Bradman was probably in the estimated crowd of 3000. Was it best left unsaid because it showed he came from a small town? Was the night not that important to him? Did it not fit in with his narrative? Everyone edits their life story; you do, if I ask how you are and you say, ‘all right’. We tell the world what we think it wants to know; and what we would like the world to know about us, and no more. Even without telling lies, you can mislead – on purpose or not. For example, Steve Waugh from a conversation with Bradman in old age imagined that Bradman’s reflexes were ‘almost supernatural’. Waugh wrote that an answer of Bradman’s ‘all but confirmed it’ when he remembered being hit in the bicep once, on a rain-affected pitch. In truth a ball from the Queensland Aboriginal fast bowler, Eddie Gilbert, famously left Bradman on his backside at Brisbane in November 1931; and Bradman himself admitted in My Cricketing Life how in the last Test match in England in 1930, Harold Larwood’s ‘very fast high risers’ gave him and Archie Jackson a ‘rather hot time’ (‘both of