Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

104 Achievement and Rejection in Western Australia On 20 January 1949 Keith married Ruth Frank (née Mattison) at Christ Church in the Perth suburb of Claremont. 47 If the newspapers are to be believed, it followed a romance begun just two months after Ruth had come from her native Canada to visit the parents of her late husband, RAAF Flying Officer Murray Frank, at their home in Daylesford, Victoria: she had visited Keith, it was suggested, because he had been a friend of Murray Frank. But the newspapers are not to be believed in their unanimous report that Ruth had been widowed only two weeks after she married Murray on 17 March 1944: he died ‘on an operational flight’ near Leipzig on 10 April 1945. One possible reason for the error – that the couple may have spent only just over two weeks together before he was transferred to Britain on 3 April 1944 – doesn’t mean that the sincerity of her visit to her Victorian in-laws should be doubted. But events in 1948 combine with the fragmentary evidence of the war years to raise questions about her interest in Keith and whether indeed he and Murray had been friends. Keith and Murray could have met at RAAF Bradfield Park in Sydney in March 1942 or in Canada between August and late October that year. But there are no extant records connecting the two, while Bill Bullen’s failure to name Murray among Keith’s friends is remarkable, given that both the Bullens and Franks were from the same small Victorian country town. On the other hand, Ruth’s name and contact details in Keith’s wartime address book and the near certainty she was the ‘Ruth’ who wrote to him in Stalag Luft III suggest she, rather than Murray, had been a friend of sorts in Canada. Her willingness to cross the continent from Daylesford reinforces the impression she was eager to see Keith. A prolonged controversy about Murray Frank’s fate makes the timing of that journey and the speed with which she and Keith married especially intriguing. When the aircraft of bomb-aimer Murray Frank was shot down, there was just one survivor from the eight-man crew, rear gunner M.J.Hibberd, who was captured by the Germans. Interviewed four times after the war – in Britain, on the ship returning home and in Australia in late 1945 – Hibberd claimed he’d seen on a table the undamaged identity card of Murray Frank, as well as items belonging to three other members of the crew , when the Germans interrogated him as a PoW. These claims didn’t prevent the RAAF issuing a Certificate of Death on War Service and copies to 47 In an odd coincidence the newspapers reported the marriage on the same day of Alex Barras, Keith’s RAAF contemporary and occasional teammate in wartime England and sometime cricket correspondent for The Western Mail