Young Bradman

88 Chapter seven: England This is a great change; we are to be exposed to peculiar influences. Henry James, The Europeans Just as it is hard to make the mental effort to think of Bradman as merely a young man of promise, before he made his most famous runs, so you find it hard, in Sydney harbour, to imagine it before the bridge. On the evening of Thursday 13 February 1930, the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald , Charles Brunsdon Fletcher, was taking the Manly ferry across the harbour, presumably to go home from work. ‘The curve of the gigantic arch is plainly indicated now,’ he wrote in that Saturday’s Herald , under the initials CBF, ‘and one can see that a magnificent construction in perfect proportion will soon be the main feature of the harbour.’ Fletcher recalled standing on the southern pylon, as the engineers began to lift the pieces of steel into place by crane, ‘and the suspending cables were vibrating about us like harp strings’. The scene reminded him of the afternoon before, when he had been a guest at ‘Gladesville Hospital for the Insane’. For three years the hospital had played the Herald once a year at cricket. The year before, Bradman had made 149 for Gladesville and Archie Jackson 88 for the Herald . In 1930, Bradman had promised to play again, only for the New South Wales parliament to invite him, and the state’s other cricketers newly picked to tour England, to lunch. Jackson, Kippax and Oldfield duly went, and had their picture taken with a dozen parliamentarians and spread across half the next day’s Herald ; as no doubt the politicians had hoped all along. Bradman was not there, but he was on the page; he was part of another picture, sitting on a wooden bench at the lunatic asylum, beside Fletcher. A view of Sydney Harbour looking south. Above the bridge, note the ferries pulling out of Circular Quay. The SCG is just beyond the picture to the top left; Central station is beyond top centre; and Balmain beyond, top right.