Young Bradman

95 England Everyone, including Bradman, was about to find out. ‘There were only four players in that team who had been to England before, Woodfull, Ponsford, Oldfield and Grimmett,’ Bradman recalled in old age. ‘All the rest were very young. In fact the critics virtually wrote us off and gave us no chance because they said we were too young and inexperienced.’ The tourists had two related facts about England to overcome. First, as soon as they arrived, the weather. Percy Fender wrote in the Australian Sporting and Dramatic in March 1929 that April was ‘a rather cold, raw, month usually’. Arthur Mailey likewise in February 1930 warned of the grey and damp: ‘Then it will be a fairly general thing for players to be huddled round a fire or radiator complete with bat and batting gloves waiting for their turn to bat.’ The softer English pitches were slower than Australia’s, Mailey went on; and unlike Australia the ball swerved, ‘and the ball invariably does something off the pitch’: ‘A batsman cannot with safety play at the pitch of the ball in England. He is often compelled to get back on his wicket and see what happens. Bradman’s footwork leaves little to be desired …’ Bradman, in old age, recalled finding English pitches different from Australia; he had a fraction more time to play a shot, as he ‘was always predominantly a back foot player’: ‘It just so happened that they suited me, the conditions were right and I had no problem with them, right from the very first innings.’ As Bradman also identified, English pitches varied, ‘almost from day to day, and you have got to be very adaptable to change your style to suit the day … and this is one of the features of an English tour, that you have got so much experience in one season.’ Bradman had yet more to learn, and fewer distractions than in his previous Australian summers, of weekday work and family. A recollection from the cricket correspondent of The Times , RB Vincent, on Bradman’s retirement, linked the two; the cold and the work to come. Bradman was sitting in his hotel the night before the first game at Worcester, with his feet on the fender, or the mantelpiece, thinking. Ever since, that memory has clung, for if ever a cricketer subdued every ounce of mental and physical activity to the job in hand it was Bradman. His power of concentration was the essence of his technical skill. Bradman, looking back in December 1930, agreed: ‘One of my axioms in cricket is to have a reason for everything I do, rightly or wrongly.’ Others saw Bradman at the fireside at the Star Hotel in Worcester, two nights later. One Australian journalist reported home that his fellow tourists left him alone: ‘He remained over an hour, then took writing-paper and, returning to the fireside, wrote at length.’ The reporter wisely saw that Bradman only looked friendless and miserable; he was simply weary after his batting. As Bradman went upstairs for the night he was smiling, and JG Bridges of the Adelaide Register heard him speak of ‘more hard work at Leicester’. ‘They do make it look easy, don’t they,’ an old England player said to the Daily Mail reporter HJ Henley on Thursday 1 May 1930, as Bradman went from his overnight 75 not out to 236. Bradman ‘never looked like getting