Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

32 Officer – his RAAF cricket career was well on track and more than likely his active service had been delayed deliberately to that end. But the events in May, followed by sorties in June involving injuries, one death and the awards to 461 aircrew of one DSO and one DFC, show it was entirely a matter of good fortune that his first two anti-submarine patrols, each lasting over 12 hours, were ‘uneventful’. * * * * * * * Photographs taken in March 1943, on the way to, or on leave from, training in Scotland, reveal Keith exploring Yorkshire with an RAAF colleague, Max Canavan, and a couple from Bradford, Ronnie and Dorothy Wootton. They hiked on Ilkley Moor; snapped ‘the oldest chemist shop in England’ at Knaresborough several times; hid among trees with ‘nature calling’; and explored the attractions of York – the Shambles, St William’s School and the Minster, ‘very beautiful and huge with lots of small chapels inside.’ It’s uncertain whether the location of another faded photograph, ‘RAAF v. RNZAF’ dated 18 March, was in Yorkshire or Scotland. But clearly this wasn’t the genesis of the Services matches in which Keith rapidly established a greater reputation than he’d yet achieved in Australia. As might be expected in an impromptu cricket match in winter, in either Yorkshire or Scotland, none of the players was dressed in white, though two were wearing pads. If the hugely popular RAAF matches had informal origins, they had taken shape earlier in London. As early as 1941 Australians working at RAAF administrative headquarters at Kodak House in Kingsway had formed a team to play social matches around London. According to cricketer Stan Sismey’s unpublished manuscript lodged in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Flight Lieutenant Perce Cochrane, welfare officer at Kodak House, arranged with Plum Warner the first two matches for the RAAF team at Lord’s in the early summer of 1943. Any thought that the Kodak House team might provide personnel for the projected matches was quickly dispelled by a trial in May, in which it was all out for six. Eight of its batsmen failed to score, the other three each made two. Pilot Officer K.Carmody took five for three and then scored 86 in an hour for the more experienced RAAF team recruited from several locations around Britain. Sismey didn’t mention a match between RAAF and RNZAF teams at the Dulwich Cricket Club ground on 23 August 1942. Although this can’t be seen as the origins of the RAAF team promoted by Warner and Cochrane, three players in the Australian team – which In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF