Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

131 Ric Charlesworth had given a copy of his own ‘Life’ to his two childhood friends. I owe a major debt to John Hiscox, a lifelong member and eventually president and historian of the Mosman Cricket Club. Before spending many hours showing me the two ovals where Keith learned the game, John had dug out relevant sections of the club’s annual Reports and listed the details of every Carmody innings in his formative years. He has continued to provide invaluable comments by email about the last stages of Keith’s life in Sydney. Thanks to John, I was able to have a long telephone conversation with former England allrounder, Barry Knight, who began his many years in Australia playing with distinction for the Mosman club as well as establishing a coaching school that has turned out over twenty future Test players. I received David Lord’s uniquely hostile recollections of Keith as the result of another recommendation from John. I’m greatly indebted to John Rutherford, the first locally born member of the Western Australian team to play for Australia. His explanation of a Carmody coaching methodology he himself adopted – and only slightly adapted – clarifies the impact of Keith’s presence in laying the foundations of the state’s rise from poor relation to dominant force in Sheffield Shield cricket in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m pleased once again to acknowledge the ever helpful co- operation of Steve Hall, curator of the WACA museum, especially in enabling me to copy a photograph of Rutherford and one of Keith that appear in this book. In addition, Roger Mann has contributed several photographs from his collection. In thanking Jamie (Elspeth) Hibberd I refer not only to all the work she has devoted to her informative website but also for the suggestions and help she offered directly in the attempt to untangle the relationships between Keith, Ruth and Murray Frank. For months I intermittently explored the possibility (and maybe the hope) that Josie – vaguely remembered by Jill as Keith’s sometime companion in his years in Sydney in the 1970s – might be the ‘Josie’ who corresponded with him so prolifically while he was in Stalag Luft III. Not even the discovery that Josephine Chicherio had married Patrick Joseph McEvoy in 1947 deterred me from a fruitless quest to find her among immigrants to Australia. The definitive proof that I was wasting my time came from English researcher Jane Painter – contacted via the Ancestry Acknowledgements