Young Bradman

20 Beginnings On 1 December 1930, the Sydney Morning Herald began Bradman’s serialised life story. As each day’s piece ran in one long column, the sub- editor broke up the text with sub-headings. The first one was ‘BATS LOPPED FROM GUM TREES’. You can understand the sub’s thinking. Here was a lad, so rooted in his country – unlike the English batsmen he had bettered, with their names printed on their expensive bats; though Bradman would do that too. It also gave the impression that Bradman’s family could not afford to buy him a proper bat. On purpose or not, Bradman was showing himself as a typical son or grandson of immigrants; better off than if they had stayed in their English city slum or village hovel, but not so well off that they had lost the common touch. When Bradman was two, which would be 1910 or 1911, his family had moved to Bowral, ‘where my father set up as a carpenter’. What about before, in Cootamundra? In November 1912, a Cootamundra estate agent, Samuel Dickson, took a property owner by then living in Sydney, John Heaver, to court. Dickson was claiming £20 for commission on the sale of six cottages in Cootamundra in June 1911, for £820, to George Bradman. Giving evidence to a jury, Bradman called himself a ‘retired farmer’ and a friend of Dickson. Bradman said that Dickson paid the £1 deposit on the houses, ‘as I did not have my cheque book with me’. To have a cheque book in those days was far from usual. The jury sided with Dickson. As a comparison, £1 was roughly a week’s pay for a cook or barmaid in Sydney, and an estate agent evidently felt £20 was worth a day in court. Where did all that money come from? In July 1906, at auction Bradman sold his 542-acre farm at Jindalee, at £4 8s an As early as the Australian summer of 1930/31, aged 22, Don Bradman was telling – and moulding – his life story.