Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

11 Pickering, but Keith’s father listed his religion as Anglican and his mother was Baptist. By the outbreak of war they had two daughters, Beryl and Dorothy, aged six and seven, and an infant son, John Henry James (Harry), born in June 1914. A third daughter, Irene Joyce (also always known by her second given name), was born in 1917. The birth of a sixth child, Noel, in 1923, meant that, even without the impact of the 1930s Depression, the Carmodys were likely to remain the working-class battlers they’d been since the mid-nineteenth century. In 1859 Keith’s grandfather, James, a 19-year-old bootmaker, married Mary Anne Austin, the 18-year-old daughter of a blacksmith. They were still living in Camperdown, in Sydney’s inner west in 1890, when Keith’s father, Henry David Carmody, was born. He continued the bootmaking trade and married Annie Ada Walsh, daughter of a labourer, when both were also in their late teens. By the 1920s both generations of the family had moved north of Sydney Harbour to various addresses on and near Military Road, the thoroughfare that linked Cremorne Junction, where Keith lived and attended primary school, to Mosman, the centre of his cricket world, and Neutral Bay where he went to secondary school. That ribbon of commercial and residential development lies to the north of the more scenic parts of those three suburbs. But in the 1920s and 1930s not even their wooded slopes and cliffs nor the sheltered harbourside Balmoral beach were the prime real-estate locations of modern times. One oral history transcript, collected by the local public library, remembers that ‘Mosman was far from being the overall affluent place that it is today.’ Many lived in ‘small workers’ cottages’, while Milson Road, Cremorne ‘was one of the cheaper parts of Sydney to live and rent in those days.’ A handful of men, others suggested, found even cheaper accommodation in caves near Balmoral. A humble boot and shoe shop was unlikely to prosper in the Depression. ‘It was a great time to be in Mosman, to be at school,’ recalled one interviewee, ‘I remember continually battling with my mother who would force me to wear old tan sandshoes to school when I knew a lot of kids there were privileged enough to go to school in bare feet, but I was never allowed to.’ The Carmody shop doesn’t appear among the library’s collected memories of the era. One reference to it in the local press suggests it was well known for reasons other than dynamic sales. Free-range canaries were shown in photographs, soaring around the interior, occasionally settling on or near a large recumbent dog, but apparently making Escape From Poverty