Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

26 Chapter Two In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF After passing his medical Keith Carmody was placed on the Air Force Reserve for preliminary aptitude testing. His results have proved impossible to find, but those of his older brother, Harry, in the National Archives of Australia, reveal both the range of abilities tested and how much better Keith had risen above their difficult family circumstances. In September 1943 Harry’s application for transfer to air-crew was rejected with test results well below average in every category: ‘fair only’ in ‘general intelligence (non- mathematical)’ and ‘weak’ in all others –‘numerical calculation’; ‘speed and accuracy at routine’; ‘capacity for plans and designs’; and even in ‘mechanical aptitude’, despite peacetime and service employment as a driver. Success for Keith in such tests was essential, but selection for flight training and eventually a commission in the RAAF required favourable assessment of personal qualities largely hidden in newspaper reports of his cricket through the 1930s. If a public profile helped his cause, it’s likely interviewers also detected personality traits soon to impress those he met in the RAAF and later in the world of post-war cricket. Even before he was a fully- fledged pilot, postcards home and his own jottings on the backs of numerous photographs reveal an enterprising young man seizing opportunities for experiences he would never have had in peacetime. Very soon he was a leader, both in the air and on cricket grounds around Britain: ‘a very dynamic person,’ said his navigator Gil Docking. * * * * * * * During initial training, at Bradfield Park in Sydney, Keith struck up a close friendship with Norman Craig that persisted until November 1943 – when Craig was killed in Italy flying a Spitfire – and for long after the war with Bill Bullen of Daylesford, Victoria, who believed ‘Keith’s meritorious conduct during the conflict of World War 2 has not been properly recorded by Allied officialdom.’ Bullen’s correspondence with Keith’s daughter, Jill – incorporating the reminiscences of several other RAAF colleagues – provides many of the insights into the earliest stages of his wartime career.