Young Bradman

42 School and district years Jessop’. After a visit the same month, he wrote of how his hosts’ sons, ‘strong athletic youths’, included one who was ‘his parents’ only trouble as he does not fix upon some trade or pursuit and is now going 16 years’. In an era before 1918 when children could leave school at 12, parents wanted such children to earn their keep. Any sport, or art, or politics, and anything else that then belonged to the elite, did not count as a ‘trade or pursuit’. English cricket added its own handicaps; as Gilbert Jessop put it in The Cricketer annual for winter 1922/23, ‘a player in a second class county has as much chance as Mr Venizelos [a Greek politician] has of becoming the Sultan of Turkey’; that is, zero. If the county you were born in or lived in played in the minor counties championship, it could take you two years to qualify to play for a first-class one; or if, like CP Mead, you could not find a place at Surrey, your first-class county, again you had to wait two years to qualify for another. ‘Tich’ Freeman, after ‘the Essex committee appeared reluctant to persevere with me’, had to become an under -groundsman at Tooting, south London. He took eight for 20 against Charlton Park, whose skipper was ‘Captain McCanlis, the well-known Kent coach, and now came my great opportunity. During the lunch interval he asked me to take a walk around the ground with him and … invited me to consider going to the Kent nursery at Tonbridge’. In these haphazard ways the fourth-highest scorer and second-highest wicket-taker in English first-class cricket history began their careers. Few counties gave as much care, and money, to ‘nursing’ young talent as Kent. In its 1923 yearbook, Gloucestershire admitted that a nursery was ‘imperative’, but the club was ‘somewhat hampered by shrinking finances’. In August 1921 in the Manchester Guardian , Neville Cardus complained: There is no adequate machinery at Old Trafford for the job of discovering young cricketers or of training them whenever they are discovered. Indeed there is no adequate machinery at Old Trafford for the job of making the best of what ability is at hand. The Lancashire club needed a nursery; ‘also some organisation whereby the county can periodically be covered from top to bottom by representatives with eyes for ability in youngsters’. The arch-snob Cardus ignored league clubs. The premier club and ground, MCC and Lord’s, employed ‘ground boys’, such as JW Hearne, who pulled the roller and did ‘every job possible except play cricket’. Again and again, these stories of leading or long-lasting English cricketers showed most of cricket’s employers were indifferent to anyone who wanted pay for playing. Those with power favoured amateurs like themselves, who played for the love of the game (and expenses). Instead of searching for talent according to some rational system, those in authority went by recommendations from people they knew. Jack Durston for instance recalled an MCC member played for his village occasionally, ‘and he gave me an introduction to the officials at Lord’s’. English cricket was as Manning Clark understood, after he studied at Oxford in the 1930s; ‘a world of chaps’. The Langridge brothers in Sussex were another case, from around Bradman’s time, that showed how unreal Harris’ ‘great republic’ was.