Young Bradman

55 First grade Test cricketers who had just lost the Fourth Test and the Ashes. His pall- bearers from the house were Bill Woodfull, Vic Richardson, Bradman, Bert Oldfield, Bill Ponsford and Stan McCabe; at the graveside, Kippax took McCabe’s place. Were they picked as men together on the 1930 tour? Was the switch made at the grave because those six were Freemasons? Jackson was a member of the local Haberfield lodge, and had a Methodist then a Masonic service at the graveside. While Freemasonry was no secret – among the notices in the Sydney Morning Herald on the morning of the funeral was one from the lodge – the cricket world has been oddly silent about something that has linked so many famous players. Jackson’s biographer David Frith said nothing, for example. Bradman dodged a question from Ray Martin in 1996 about being a Mason. It means we have no way of knowing how much Freemasonry mattered to those players; or who recruited them and when. Cricket and Freemasonry had much in common. WR Weir, editor of the English annual Ayres’ Cricket Companion , in 1916 wrote of ‘the subtle Masonic influence engendered by the genuine chivalry of sport’. Oldfield invited Douglas Jardine to his Sydney lodge during bodyline, despite his notorious knocking out by Larwood in the Adelaide Test the month before. As that tantalising story suggests, Freemasonry was one more tie between England and Australia, as was the 1914-18 war for veterans like Oldfield. Of English Freemasons of Bradman’s time, Gubby Allen (born 1902) was initiated in Old Etonian Lodge in 1923; Jardine (born 1900) in an Oxford University lodge in 1920. That suggests amateur, upper-class Englishmen joined at a younger age than professionals, in cricket and other sports, who tended to become Freemasons once they had made their name: such as Wally Hammond (born 1903) and Maurice Tate (born 1895) each in 1928. When did Bradman become a Freemason? Whether it matters depends partly on whether being a Freemason mattered to him. We can dismiss the caricature of Freemasons secretly helping one another. Did Bradman need such help, on a cricket field at least? Bradman, like ordinary Freemasons, may well have joined because he was the sort to join clubs, such as Rotary, and to follow clubbable pastimes such as golf. However, just as two English strangers may stick together in a room of Australians, so Freemasons like any group will feel towards each other differently from those who are not. If Bradman had joined in Bowral, Freemasonry might have been a metaphorical hand to hold as he made his way into the world. As Bradman joined a Sydney lodge, in 1929, it offers more evidence that Bradman made the ‘plunge’ into Sydney, despite the kindness of others, alone.