Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

35 London, individuals had to make and pay for their own travel and accommodation.’ Before the first match at Lord’s on 5 June 1943 it seemed unlikely the RAAF could mount a serious challenge against a much larger number of available highly qualified English players. Watched by about 10,000 who contributed £127 to the Red Cross, Warner’s side – ‘an agreeable mingling of youth and experience’, said The Times – won convincingly. Chasing a total of 201, Carmody was out for three in the first over, caught low down at cover-point by Eric Bedser from a full toss from the 19-year-old Trevor Bailey. But by the time the RAAF were all out for 100 there were promising signs: ‘the Australians were showing themselves a keen and intelligent fielding side’ and there had been two periods when ‘the result was far from assured’. The first came when Warner’s XI lost seven wickets for 133, the second when the ‘decisive, stroke- playing’ Miller marked his first appearance at Lord’s with 45 out of 48 made with Jeffreys for the second wicket. Unremarked by the newspaper was that Miller was also emerging as a bowler, claiming the wickets of R.E.S.Wyatt and G.O.B.Allen. A single reference in cricketarchive.com to ‘O.D.K.Carmody’, playing in a drawn one-day match for a British Empire XI at Tunbridge Wells on 19 June, is probably a typing error. But in any case the strange initials do nothing to alter the fact that ‘D.K.’ had limited cricket after the Lord’s match: the phantom entry ‘did not bat’ in a crushing victory over a local club side, Linden Park. By then Keith had already joined 461 Squadron: he made his two ‘uneventful’ sorties from its base at Pembroke Dock in Wales on 8 and 12 July before playing again, displaying form that seemed a recommendation for avoiding match practice. When he led the RAAF to a ten-wicket victory over the South of England at Hove on 17 and 18 July, his batting was ‘phenomenal’, wrote Sir Home Gordon in The Cricketer . Taught by Stan McCabe, ‘he has modelled himself on that master, and puts tremendous punch into his strokes’, scoring 137 out of 191 in 90 minutes with 19 fours: ‘Not since Hammond at his best have I watched a finer display, and if he lifted a ball it was invariably far from any fieldsman’. 21 21 One comprehensive statistical review of top-level wartime cricket in England, the Datasport Book of Wartime Cricket: 1940-45 , lists Carmody’s first-wicket partnership with Jim Workman in this match, when they scored 186 runs in 90 minutes, as among the fastest six partnerships of the war period. Both Workman and Carmody were out stumped. The opening bowlers for the South were Trevor Bailey, then 19, and Arthur Gilligan, then 48. In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF