Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

15 Don’ fuelled the fantasies of cricket-mad schoolboys, not least one with increasingly realistic hopes of playing the game at elite level. In January 1933, at the exact time the most acrimonious of the Bodyline Tests was under way in Adelaide, Keith was playing in the Sydney Public Schools Amateur Athletic Association’s [PSAAA] cricket carnival. Without making a significant score, he did enough to win selection, a month before his 14th birthday, for the New South Wales schools’ team to play against Queensland and Victorian schools in Brisbane. Again, his achievements were modest, both in a preliminary game against Ipswich, when he was out for nine, hit wicket, and in the ‘Test’ against Queensland, when only an impressive catch in the deep compensated for a personal score of three in his team’s victory. 8 Although this record would seem unlikely to impress Bradman, Keith now benefited indirectly from the difficulties the great man had been facing for some time from cricket administrators as authoritarian as he would himself become in the post- Second World War era. In 1932 Bradman’s interest in signing for Accrington in the Lancashire League threatened to end his Test career until a group of businessmen devised a contract to avoid his loss to Australian cricket and to overcome some of the objections of the Australian Board of Control to this overt professionalism. Its terms included writing for a newspaper – which remained contentious until the newspaper released him from the contract – broadcasting for a local radio station and promoting the Sydney retailer, F.J.Palmer and Son, a commitment involving coaching sessions with promising young cricketers. In 1932 Bradman had combined the North American tour organised by Arthur Mailey with a honeymoon, removing himself and his bride, Jessie Menzies, from the kind of frenzy that had seen public and media crowds breach police cordons to gatecrash their April wedding. Coaching gave him an opportunity to prevent his well-known desire for privacy from becoming a public-relations disaster, especially when it soon involved him in the ‘Goodwill Tour’ staged six months after the Bodyline series. The Young Australia League – which in pre-Depression times had sponsored parties of Australian boys to travel around the world – arranged with the New South Wales Railway Department to take 198 boys from metropolitan Sydney into rural areas on the north coast. A dozen adults accompanying the party that left the city – to the 8 Unless otherwise stated, all details about Carmody’s cricket career in the 1930s are taken from The Sydney Morning Herald. Escape From Poverty