Young Bradman

43 School and district years Again, the Langridges were major figures in English cricket, each scoring more than 30,000 first-class runs. In 1924 James (18 that summer) and 14-year-old John headed the batting averages of Thomas Baden-Powell’s eleven, revived on a meadow in the village of Newick after the 1914-18 war. The Langridges were lucky in many ways. In Baden-Powell they had a patron, who wanted Sussex to develop ‘native talent’ on the lines of Kent, rather than import ‘material’ from other counties, or even Australia. The Sussex secretary WL Knowles, in a surviving exchange of letters with Baden-Powell in 1927, agreed: ‘The nursery is the cornerstone of the county cricket club; in fact the county team cannot do without it as a reserve.’ Baden-Powell sincerely wanted to bring on local boys: he gave teas, and prizes in 1914 for the best essays on the duties of a cricket captain. He wrote to Knowles, ‘as to John Langridge, I should be only too pleased to ‘push his claims’’. Why was Baden-Powell having to ‘push’ the younger Langridge upon Sussex, years after the older brother began playing for the county? Newick was hardly in the back of beyond, as it’s a dozen miles as the crow flies from the county ground at Hove. Even if a young man found a place in a first-class county eleven, the six days a week routine demanded an apprenticeship – two years, according to Alfred Dipper in 1926: … for it usually takes quite that time for the ordinary player to accustom himself to his new sphere; to learn a thousand and one things still to be learned, to control his nerves in the bigger issues at stake, to disregard the great crowds of spectators, the critical press. It is only then that a new man can be expected to do himself and his side full justice. Sir Home Gordon in The Cricketer annual for the winter of 1928/29 said three years, except for a ‘few brilliant exceptions’ such as Wally Hammond, Harold Larwood and Les Ames. Nor were the talented taken on as soon as they might be; England’s original Test captain James Lillywhite in old age recalled, ‘I was only 20 when given a trial’ for his county of Sussex, in 1862. By comparison, the bringing on of young talent in Sydney was much more meritocratic, systematic and swift. The New South Wales state selector Johnny Moyes saw Bill O’Reilly bowling for Northern Sydney’s second grade eleven, and put him into the state practice squad; that is, skipping first grade. A letter of Tuesday 5 October 1926 from the NSW Cricket Association – via Bowral club captain Alf Stephens, as Sydney only knew Bradman’s scores, not his address – invited Bradman to practice at the Sydney Cricket Ground the following Monday afternoon (‘an opportunity which should not be missed’). The authorities offered return train fare, and an overnight stay if wanted. As Bradman put it in his 1930s autobiography, ‘the receipt of this ‘command’ created quite a lot of excitement in my home’. While the letter’s tone was formal rather than unfriendly, the authorities were assuming that Bradman would come to them, not them to him. Life was not like in the Arthur Conan Doyle story Spedegue’s Dropper ,