Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

31 air force sides ‘on a fine and warm day’ on 16 March 1943 ‘in front of spectators lounging in deck chairs’. 14 While each stage of his services induction cannot be confirmed, the next one was transfer to RAF Operational Training Unit [OTU] 4 of Coastal Command at Invergordon in north-east Scotland, for introduction to Sunderland flying-boats. Only after that preparation was he assigned, as Bullen noted, to 461 Squadron of the RAAF. If Keith was already earmarked for the cricket that was soon to distinguish his near future in Britain, it’s far from clear that Bullen’s suggestion of a protective posting is correct. 15 Squadron 461’s Sunderland flying-boats, he wrote, ‘had an enormous range’: searching the Bay of Biscay: as they hunted submarines ‘the danger of being shot down so far away from German waters was extremely rare’. Immediately before Keith joined the squadron on 2 June 1943, it had been involved in fierce fighting. On 14 May one plane was damaged by fighter fire and its nose gunner wounded; on 17 May another returned with 200 bullet holes and shell damage to a wing and upper and tail turrets from a thirty-minute attack by six German Junkers. On 26 May one pilot was killed, his co-pilot seriously injured and the rest of the crew survived in a dinghy for nearly 14 hours. 16 And at much the same time, flying a Sunderland for another squadron, the man expected to captain the RAAF team in the first match at Lord’s, Ken Ridings of South Australia, was shot down and killed in the Bay of Biscay. Just as Bullen’s speculation rested on a false assumption that 461 squadron was an airborne sheltered workshop, historian Mark Rowe’s recent revelation that Keith Miller remained in training until almost the end of the war suggests he was a poor pilot, rather than a man singled out for protection from the start. Even though Miller eventually achieved far greater stature in the game, at this stage there was no obvious reason to regard him as a more significant asset than the man soon to be chosen captain of the RAAF team. It’s certainly true that by the time Keith was flying for 461 Squadron in July – newly promoted from Pilot Officer to Flying 14 The Australian side won by 76 runs according to Leo Bennett’s The Week-end Cricketer , published by Hutchinson in 1951. The match was on the Bournemouth Cricket Club ground. 15 Paul Gibb, who had played 98 pre-War first-class matches, including five for England, flew Sunderlands in 1942 and 1943 from Pembroke Dock and Oban. It is clear that his posting was far from ‘protective’. 16 All the records of Carmody’s flying career and also Keith Miller’s have been accessed through the internet from the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the various squadrons found by number under AIR/27. In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF