Young Bradman

70 New South Wales the responsibilities of fame was that other people wanted to know your business (‘Don himself is also in splendid trim’). As Bradman became the business of anyone who wanted New South Wales and Australia to do well at cricket, he was at the watershed of a change that AG Moyes traced in an important passage in his 1950 book A Century of Cricketers : The Bradman who first descended on Sydney was a happy, smiling country youngster entirely ignorant of the ways of the world, coming from a pleasant home and a friendly community. In the big world of cricket he found success, but he also discovered that not every one was sufficiently selfless as to rejoice in the good fortune and success of others. For the first time he was touched by bitterness, which changed his outlook and introduced an element of wariness that had not been there before. Hence as Bradman became ever more important, comments about him or solicited from him became plentiful, and only more pounced on, if Bradman rationed them; and yet they gave less insight into the man. Just as a sneer out of jealousy or one selfish autograph-seeker blind to Bradman’s right to some privacy did not alter him at once, the ‘armour of reserve’ – the silence defined by Moyes and others, that made Bradman seem indifferent to friends and enemies alike – would take years to grow. Ironically, Bradman may have changed in that way to preserve something of himself. It hurt when people said unkind things – what hurt more, that they were untrue, or true? - yet he needed to keep his sensitiveness so that he could study cricket relentlessly. As his own critic, he had to ignore the ignorant comments, even the compliments that can rot the rich and the powerful. Even if Bradman had not succeeded in cricket, a business life in the city may have given him much the same ‘armour’. The hypocrisy of the city and purity of the countryside was a staple of Anglo-Australian culture, and indeed dated back to classical civilisation. The outback journalist Douglas Lockwood in a 1960 memoir recalled how he ‘could never get used to man’s inhospitality to man’ during his two years of work in London and living in a Surrey village; he returned to the Northern Territory. As elsewhere, it’s significant if an event does not figure in Bradman’s own telling of his story. That celebrity match in Bowral did not because it was only glamorous for the small town, not him. Bradman proceeded straight to the 1928/29 season, as the most important one since the last MCC visit four years before. Looking back in his 1930s autobiography, he said he still had to make sure of his New South Wales place; and wanted to do well enough to be ‘in the running’ for the Tests against England. ‘You may say this sounds like presumption,’ he admitted. It was in fact realistic. ‘Several players, perhaps, are assured of places,’ said a mid-September article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the ‘Australian eleven’: ‘The rest is guesswork.’ Bradman was where he had been two years before, one of the ‘Possibles’ against ‘Probables’, only now one rank higher. Thanks to his own good sense and the kindness of others, Bradman had arranged his life to give him the best chance of succeeding. In his 1930 serial, he wrote of ‘a new sphere’. He was ‘secretary’ of Mr Westbrook’s