Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

105 Murray’s father William Frank and to Ruth in February 1946. But uncertainty about the fate of the seven crew members lingered until October 1947, when an RAF Missing Research and Enquiry Unit reported on the location, exhumation and reburial of Murray and other crew members in a British War cemetery in Berlin. In March 1948 Ruth was informed that Murray had been re-buried in a named and numbered plot in the same cemetery. Only in August 1948 did she learn the full details of his fate. Interrogation of local residents and investigations at the Zaasch cemetery had revealed the bomber was hit by anti-aircraft fire north of Leipzig, exploded in the air and crashed near Zaasch. The Germans had recovered the seven bodies and buried them in a communal grave at the cemetery. After they were exhumed by the RAF ‘it was possible to establish the individual identification of the seven men’. The absence of explanation in newspapers and Ruth’s failure ever to mention to her daughters that she’d been married previously mean that conjecture about Ruth’s visit to Keith in late 1948 and the speed with which they married can be pushed no further. The brief newspaper accounts contain another puzzle. The likelihood that the two had met during Keith’s training in Canada makes plausible the assertion that Ruth was a former member of the Canadian Air Force. And her own antecedents in Nova Scotia, and eventual retirement there, make it likely she’d served in that province. It is, however, again remarkable that her children remained unaware of that period of her life and especially that, as the press claimed, she had been awarded the MBE during her wartime service. 48 Very clear amid all these uncertainties is that Ruth embraced both her new husband and new life with enthusiasm. The welcome she received in The Mirror two days after the wedding was a dubious accolade, given that Perth paper’s reputation for manufactured scandal. But in the years ahead its prediction that ‘Ruth’s engaging personality’ would attract ‘the admiration and friendship of many’ proved correct. In the short term, however, her focus was entirely on Keith. Immediately after the wedding she travelled with him to Shield matches against South Australia and Victoria. After the rest of the twice-defeated team retreated to Perth the couple stayed on for a week’s holiday. Ten years before it was allegedly described as ‘a perfect place to make a film about the end of the world’, Melbourne may not have seemed the most romantic location for 48 All of the information about Murray Frank in this paragraph is drawn from an extensive website established by M.J.Hibberd’s daughter, Jamie (aka Elspeth) Hibberd: http://462squadron.com/pages/crew/frank.html Achievement and Rejection in Western Australia