Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

106 Achievement and Rejection in Western Australia a honeymoon. But Ruth was clearly able to adapt to varied new circumstances. Remembered by Aileen Edwards – Allan’s wife – as a cultivated woman with wide interests, she was also destined to turn heads in the more subdued areas of the WACA ground with raucous baseball-style barracking. If it was Ruth who encouraged Keith to play his first competitive baseball match in Perth in May 1949, perhaps she was finding it hard to appreciate the finer points of a much more complex game at a time when Western Australia failed to live up to the promise of its inaugural Shield season. More certainly, her exuberant personality had little time for the house rules of the ‘stuffy’ hierarchy of the WACA, commented Aileen, in an era when women weren’t allowed to drink inside the ground. * * * * * * * In their second season, 1948/49, Western Australia’s Shield team lost all four matches. And where Keith had averaged 45.07 in 1947/48, he now managed only 166 runs, with a highest score of 55, to average 20.75. Yet before this dismal record was complete, he still had eminent supporters. In January Arthur Mailey told a Sydney newspaper that although Hassett was Bradman’s likely successor as Australian captain, ‘the claims of Sid Barnes and Keith Carmody should not be overlooked’. Giving the captaincy to Barnes might be the best way ‘to handle this volatile and rebellious Keith and Ruth Carmody on their wedding day in January 1949. Ruth later turned heads in the WACA ground with some ‘raucous’ barracking.