Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

34 any opinion about Carmody on the two occasions they’d played against each other in 1939 and 1940. But, given the admiration he expressed publicly later, it seems certain he had no objection to Carmody’s selection as captain. With meagre resources available for an RAAF team in 1943, a circular to RAF stations, asking for Australian players to send their records, brought many replies and led to hurried trials at the Dulwich Cricket Club. Hindsight suggests Carmody might have done well to select Wally Langdon, who’d scored 46 not out as an 18-year-old for the Western Australian Goldfields against Bradman’s South Australia in 1940. The two were to have an uneasy relationship when Langdon became Western Australia’s leading batsman under Carmody after the war. But Langdon was certainly wrong in asserting in an interview in 1996 that he was excluded from the wartime RAAF teams because ‘Carmody wasn’t interested in anybody from W.A.’ Opening the batting with Carmody in the first match was J.A. (Alan) Jeffreys, who’d played five times with modest success for Western Australia between 1937 and 1940. Also included was Alex Barras, a recent winner of the Military Medal, 20 who’d represented the same state in 1938/39 and would do so again in 1946/47, finishing with the excellent first-class batting average of 44.00. And in 1944 Carmody picked another West Australian, Bill Roach, whose three state matches had been as long ago as 1933. Making it even clearer that Carmody’s leadership qualities were already respected, a week before the first RAAF match at Lord’s he captained a Dominions XI that included New Zealand Test players Ken James and Stewie Dempster. At the Clifton College ground, in Bristol, Keith made five runs in a one-day match in which Dempster’s 37 was the only score above 11 in a reply of 95 to a Gloucestershire Services XI declaration at 202 for nine. While Keith’s main cricket focus had to be on the RAAF team, its formation, both then and later, faced formidable obstacles. Although Warner and Cochrane felt that the four pilots with Shield experience could be the nucleus of ‘a reasonably strong’ RAAF side, its composition could never be assured. As Sismey later recalled, ‘the RAAF cricketers were stationed at RAF bases throughout England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. If they obtained weekend leave for the occasional one-day matches in 20 This unusual medal for an airman was awarded ‘when, after a bomber had crashed near Tobruk he led the crew in a 21-day trek. They travelled more than 450 miles through the desert before reaching the British lines, and twice they encountered the enemy.’ The Argus , Melbourne, 5 June 1943. In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF