Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

Acknowledgements I’m grateful for the total co-operation I’ve received from Ric throughout this project. He gave his time generously on the eve of a major international hockey tour earlier this year. On his return he made helpful comments about various details of my completed draft, without trying to censor anything I’d written, including recollections of conversations we’d shared up to seven years previously. I also very much appreciate the willingness of Ric and Carmen to tolerate my several intrusions into their domestic routine in the latter hectic stages of the project. I thank also Allan and Aileen Edwards, not for the first time in their lives, for welcoming my wife and myself into their home for a crucial interview. After playing in the very first Sheffield Shield match in Perth and many others from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s. Allan must have watched nearly every first-class game played there since. As a friend of Lester Charlesworth, he has known Ric all his life and is in a unique position to comment on his cricket career. Most other interviewees mentioned in the bibliography wouldn’t have known they were contributing to this profile when I interviewed them at various times in the last fourteen years or so. I’m grateful to them anyway and especially to one of their number, Bob Paulsen, who was surprised to be interviewed again, this time about the Charlesworth story when he telephoned me from New South Wales about a quite different matter. No thanks are adequate acknowledgement of the contribution made by David Jeater. As he showed with another of my projects earlier this year, the way he attends meticulously to the detail of a manuscript, while searching out additional material to enhance it, makes him easily the best editor I’ve had in a long writing career. My thanks too, to Pete Griffiths for his management of the production of this book and for his attention to the detail of typesetting, to Zahra Ridge for her cover design, to Roger Mann and Pat Jeater for assistance with photographs, and to Ric Finlay and Gerald Hudd for taking on the graft of proofreading. I thank Ric and Carmen also for enabling me to use many of the photographs in the preceding pages. I’m equally grateful to three people at the University of Western Australia for providing photographs: University archivist Maria Carvalho; Nathan Johnston, Club Development Officer from the UWA Sport and Recreation Association; and Dr Jean Chetkovich, editor of the forthcoming centenary history of the university. At the WACA museum curator Steve Hall has gone out of his way to help me, both in providing copies of photographs and in allowing me to take my own of the batting helmet that Dr Ric Charlesworth invented years before such things 98