Young Bradman

26 Beginnings back. I didn’t hit the ball on the off-side, because my parents’ bedroom and several windows were on that part of the verandah, so I either played the ball straight back or down in front of me, on to the grass. I’d keep the cycle going for as long as I could, willing myself to beat yesterday’s record. Graeme Hick, looking back in his mid-20s in his 1991 autobiography My Early Life on growing up on a farm in Zimbabwe, understood, like Bradman: ‘I was learning to bat properly without realising it.’ In 1929, at about the same age as Hick, Wally Hammond said: ‘… my cricket has developed practically without any coaching at all. Maybe I was born with the instinct for cricket in my blood. I did not know how I should be a cricketer when I batted against the wall of a barracks away in Malta but I liked cricket.’ Around 1890, Jack Hobbs used to play with other boys in front of the servants’ quarters of Jesus College, Cambridge, where his father was the groundsman. ‘Our weapons would be a tennis ball with a tennis post as wicket and a stump as bat. The ‘pitch’ was a gravel one. This scratch kind of cricket got me in the way of playing cricket strokes and the stump bat was certainly capable for training the eye.’ And in November 1958, Rodney Marsh’s parents gave him a pair of wicket-keeping gloves for his 11 th birthday: …. when I had nobody else to throw the ball [his brother Graham and their father ‘almost threw their arms off’] I would spend hours hurling the ball against a wall at all different angles and catch, catch catch. I would count how many I would take without dropping one, sometimes reaching a thousand without a miss. I found a golf ball would go off the brick wall at As late as this October 1930 advert in a Sydney newspaper, Johnny Taylor and Frank Woolley bats (‘oiled free’) were popular at Alan Kippax’s sports goods store, in Martin Place in downtown Sydney.