Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

45 Making no attempt to claim primary credit for himself or Roper, Sismey added: ‘It should be acknowledged that Keith Carmody was a very “thinking” cricketer always aiming to take the initiative.’ * * * * * * * It may well be that his captaincy of junior teams in 1930s Sydney had already equipped Carmody with the leadership qualities that impressed cricketers and airmen alike in 1943 and 1944. On the available evidence, it’s impossible to say whether the unique wartime circumstances changed him in other ways or merely accelerated his maturity. In the absence of surviving correspondence, the social life he squeezed between combat in the air and on the cricket field can be glimpsed only through fragmentary evidence. Added to the inscriptions on the backs of many of his photographs, his address book from the period is compelling evidence of a gregarious man forming valued friendships with many English people. The RAAF’s game against New Zealand Services at Maidstone in August 1943 was probably the start of important links with people in Kent. Photographs from the winter of 1943/44 suggest that Keith used periods of leave to consolidate friendships ‘on the Farm at Lenham, Kent’ with families named Malden and Bucknell; with ‘Hookey’ of the Women’s Land Army and a milkmaid who refused to be snapped ‘holding the milkcans’; and with Flight Sergeant Joe Hall, ‘our pianist at the New Inn, Maidstone, who previously played in a couple of leading dance bands in London and is super’. The address book listed a Mrs Robinson residing at the New Inn and two members of the Bucknell family, as well as Miss Mary Hook, at the Old Shelve Manor, Lenham, Kent. No doubt such connections were among the factors that led him to consider playing for Kent as an amateur after the war. Kent was by no means the only place where he forged English friendships. In Bolton, Lancashire, he met the father and sister of Morton Bruckshaw, his RAF friend from training days in Canada. With Australians fascinating to British people, probably for the only time ever, it’s likely he impressed through his personality, his glamorous uniform and his ‘colonial’ identity, as much as his celebrity as a cricketer. As Mark Rowe suggests, ‘wherever in Britain the Australian airmen went, they made a stir. Their exotic accents were exciting. That they had come halfway around the world, to fight for the Mother Country, was flattering.’ Out of 31 names on Keith’s address list 21 were of people in England, five in Canada and five at home in Sydney. 13 of those 21 English names In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF