Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

8 ultimately tragic, life inside and outside cricket. He began his playing career at the age of 14, batting three times alongside Don Bradman. He briefly tasted first-class cricket immediately before the Second World War. As an admired captain of the Royal Australian Air Force [RAAF] in matches throughout England in 1943 and 1944 and as a returned prisoner of war [PoW], playing in the ‘Victory Tests’ of 1945, he made a significant contribution to the survival of cricket and its post-war revival in England. In 1947/48 he led Western Australia to triumph in its first Sheffield Shield season. His batting achievements failed to match the promise of a style that saw him compared to Archie Jackson, Alan Kippax, Stan McCabe and even Wally Hammond. But Keith Miller nominated Carmody – who never played a Test – as captain of his ‘dream team’ picked from Miller’s international contemporaries. Miller’s close friendship with Carmody developed during the war years in the RAAF. Carmody is more entitled to the praise still heaped uncritically on Miller as a warrior of the air at the time of his death in 2004, even by Australia’s distinguished cricket writer, Gideon Haigh: ‘the whiff of danger and insouciance that accompanied him through the rest of his career was derived to a great extent from the fact that he’d had danger on his tail for the previous six years’. Research by historian Mark Rowe has revealed that Mosquito pilot Miller had only three operational flights, in the last days of the war, probably never feeling the ‘real pressure of a Messerschmitt up his arse’, to quote the often repeated hero- worshipping words of Sir Michael Parkinson. 4 Carmody, an active pilot in 1943 and 1944, lived much more dangerously in the weeks before he was shot down in June 1944, attacking German shipping in the English Channel from his two-man Bristol Beaufighter. Although this writer interviewed a number of Carmody’s contemporaries for the official history of the Western Australian Cricket Association in the 1990s, Miller is just one of many 4 It may have been hard for Australians to consult UK records in pre-internet eras. But it’s less excusable that Miller’s service record in the Australian War Memorial led nobody to explore further a myth that he didn’t actively promote but did nothing to qualify. After revealing a discipline-scarred year in the Army, the record refers in general terms to his RAAF training and ‘the award of his pilot’s flying badge on the 12 Nov 1942’ and to ‘further advanced training before being posted to No.169 Squadron (RAF) flying Mosquitos in bomber support raids over Germany’. Without mentioning that this posting took place in 1945 the record concludes: ‘the number of sorties over Germany is not recorded in his personal documents.’ An on-line search of the records in the United Kingdom’s National Archives confirms the accuracy of Rowe’s research. Introduction