Young Bradman

68 New South Wales before lunch and stay there in defiance of a Victorian attack.’ Ponsford wrote much the same: ‘Although not yet stroke-perfect, Bradman has all the attributes of a potential Test match player.’ As Kippax, his captain, told the Sydney journalist Arthur Gregory about this time: ‘Oh, this boy is an Australian eleven man.’ Bradman, and the other state cricketers that he now belonged to, had done their most serious business of the season. For St George he made middling scores; at Hurstville on March 3 he took four wickets against Manly. On Thursday 5 April Bradman left Sydney for nine days as one of Arthur Mailey’s Bohemians. From Good Friday 6 April to Saturday 14 April the team covered 650 miles, plenty even on 21 st century roads, across south-west New South Wales, from Parkes to Canberra, and played seven matches. Some were light-hearted; in a ‘carnival’ game at Dudauman outside Cootamundra, against 13 men, the Bohemians’ opening bowlers were the cartoonist Jimmy Bancks, who invented Ginger Meggs, and the wicket-keeper Jack Ellis. They wore bright blazers and flew the Bohemian flag from their three cars. They were indeed there to fly the flag; to entertain, and enjoy hospitality; to raise money at the gate for local cricket associations, towards turf pitches; to bind country towns such as Cowra to Sydney; and to spot young talent. They presented a signed bat to 17-year- old Stan McCabe, who two years later was on the boat to England with Bradman. It did not matter much whether Bradman made runs or not, and he did not; except that it mattered enough for him to remember in 1930 that he only made 77 in those seven innings, ‘try as I would to get runs’. As those weeks showed, Bradman was becoming a celebrity. Before Bradman and Mailey set off, Dick Jones had arranged for a ‘St George’ team to play on a new turf pitch at Bowral, on Saturday 20 April ‘Our own Don,’ the local press gushed: ‘who in the Berrima district has not followed his career with breathless interest?’ Mailey and Bradman were back in Sydney by Tuesday night, 17 April, for a ‘smoke concert’ to mark the wedding that Friday night of Alan Kippax, who had just returned from New Zealand. That night Bradman was in Bowral, receiving a gold watch and chain from Alf Stephens as town mayor, at a reception and dance where townspeople sang ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ to him. By Bowral standards, Bradman had succeeded already; he could draw famous men such as Vic Richardson and Jack Gregory to town (they would drive there by motor from Sydney on the day of the match, as they were groomsmen at Kippax’s wedding), and Mailey (Bradman’s century at Adelaide was ‘one of the best innings he had ever seen’, he told the gathering). ‘Don might have been pardoned had he shown some little sign of a swelled head,’ the Southern Mail said after the big-city men had gone. He did not. He was ‘evidently overcome’ and said the plain yet only right things that people can say on such occasions. He thanked people: Alf Stephens, for the chance ‘to have a knock in Sydney’; Jones and Cush, ‘for if he hadn’t got into St George he could not have gone further’; and, for giving time off, Mr Westbrook (‘whether it was keeping books, playing tennis, driving a car or wielding a bat, the smartest man of his age was