Young Bradman

86 Australia Bradman batted for less than seven hours. At the time, there seemed only pleasure in Bradman’s achievement; even the Queensland players gave him three cheers, and shook him by the hand. Queensland had fielded for the previous record score, 437 by Ponsford, two years before. After a spectator jumped the fence and tried to carry Bradman off the field, and failed, four of the Queenslanders did instead; as was famously photographed. Less well known is what happened next: the carriers let Bradman down at the gate, ‘and Bradman bounded into the dressing room to escape further congratulations’. In his life serial in 1930, he confirmed: ‘Physically I was so comfortable that I felt I could have gone on indefinitely.’ A lifetime later, Norman May asked Bradman about the declaration; had Kippax asked if Bradman wanted to carry on? ‘I think Alan decided I had had enough,’ Bradman replied playfully. If Kippax were thinking only of winning, he could have declared any time between lunch and tea, once the runs were beyond Queensland. As Kippax was already letting Bradman set records, why didn’t Kippax give Bradman another hour, to go for 500? The journalist Cliff Cary recalled years later that ‘hundreds’ of letters to Kippax from ‘rabid Bradman fans’ complained about the declaration. Bradman was starting to meet the same obstacles that he had at school. He was making more runs than others could stand. What mattered more; one man’s statistics, a team win, or the feelings of the other team? It would soon end – inevitably, some would say - in bodyline. Gossips recalled, and newspapers printed, how after his 452, as others in the pavilion were celebrating, there ‘sat Australia’s wonder batsman placidly licking an ice cream like any other big kid’. Ice cream was, so they said, ‘his chief vice’; he was ‘still a boy at heart’. ‘How that boy tried,’ Macartney said of Bradman after his run out in the Fourth Test. Days earlier after Jackson’s 164, Macartney began: ‘I consider that in Jackson A 1922 caricature of Jack Ryder.