Young Bradman

41 School and district years cricket had trailed Australia’s for a generation without an end in sight, Alec Stewart, one of many English players who appreciated Australia as their ‘finishing school’, praised the ‘production line of top cricketers’. By the way, he contrasted Australian players - open and enthusiastic when they made runs - with English players who would shyly say ‘I got a few’. By that reckoning, Sir Donald Bradman was un-Australian in his recollections. Though Australia had a sunnier climate and more open spaces, as Stewart and so many others pointed out, the British could take at least as much trouble to find sportsmen. By the 1920s, August was the month for ‘holiday tournaments’ in seaside resorts, the British tennis equivalent of the ‘country weeks’. In a 1921 newspaper article, the Scottish footballer James Blair claimed that the ‘hunt’ for players of promise was ‘almost a science … the country is honey-combed with agents of football clubs who wander around the grounds where the juniors play’. As Bill O’Reilly hinted in his recollection in old age, some cricket watchers would alert officials to talent, for the love of it; they, and those agents doing it for money, and the youths wanting to get on, were all ‘wondering how they were going to try and open the oyster’, to quote Sir Robert Kindersley, at speech day at Repton School in England in 1923. By then, the English saw that Australia did it better. RH Bettington, from the Sydney fee-paying King’s School, Parramatta (his brother BJ played in Sydney’s 1926 country week, besides Bradman), played cricket for Oxford University. The Times in July 1920, before the Oxford-Cambridge match, wrote of Bettington: ‘Perhaps the very fact of being an Australian adds to a great extent to his reputation … colonials always develop more quickly than our men at home.’ Was English damp to blame? Or were ‘colonials’ brought on better for man-made reasons? Then, as before and since, some men of success gladly shared the reasons, as they liked to imagine them, for their success in ‘the game of life’. The reasons did not necessarily add up. You had to be exact about what you wanted, and have vague abilities such as ‘staying power’; you needed confidence, but not over-confidence; and you had to do your best, which implied that if you failed, that was your fault. This all ignored the reality, in English cricket and workplaces generally, of privilege; enjoyed by some and not others according to class or geography. Some chose to fool themselves, or others. At a September 1924 dinner in London, Lord Harris claimed: ‘The cricketers of the world form a great republic in which eminence can be secured only by excellence. There is no favouritism, no jobbery, neither birth nor wealth can obtain precedence.’ The same day, however, at a lunch for the tourists about to leave for Australia, Harris denied MCC selected southerners instead of northerners. Harris was half- right – no-one else could make the runs or take wickets for you. However, those born to titled or wealthy families, who went to fee-paying schools and the old universities, had more chances to prove themselves, if only because they could afford to keep on playing cricket while poorer lads had to find any paid work. The Gloucestershire retired schoolmaster and diarist William Swift gave no time to sport, although in a pub in August 1902 the talk was of the Australians playing the county, ‘and on the prowess of Mr