Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

71 Woodward (1994), Jaggard (1996), and Rowe (2010), as well as biographies of Keith Miller by Whitington (1981) and Perry (2005). From those secondary sources, British and Australian newspapers and the unpublished manuscript of Stan Sismey, Keith Carmody emerges as a minor figure in that series, but a man still greatly respected for his contribution to cricket in 1943 and 1944 and hence to the morale of the wartime British public interested in cricket. As the war was drawing to a close, former Australian wicketkeeper Major Bert Oldfield was employed to find ‘top-line cricketers’, serving in the Middle East and New Guinea, to form an Australian Army team ready for the start of the English cricket season. Captain A.G.Cheetham, Captain R.S.Whitington, Warrant Officer/ II A.L.Hassett, Sergeant C.F.Price and Sergeant C.G.Pepper were transferred to an Eastbourne reception centre 29 to provide the nucleus of this team. ‘Able organisation by Captain John Mallyon of Adelaide,’ wrote Sismey, initially drew up a modest programme of one-day fixtures against club and social teams. Sismey had assumed the captaincy of the RAAF team in 1944, after Carmody’s plunge into the North Sea. Now, following a recent transfer from flying duties to RAAF headquarters in London, he combined with Plum Warner and welfare officer Perce Cochrane to draw up a programme for the RAAF that was wider than the Army’s but still initially consisting of one-day fixtures. Although the short fixture lists for both services teams appealed to war-weary players anxious to return home, a shortage of shipping played into the hands of Warner, who suggested to Sismey and Cochrane that the RAAF and Army teams combine, initially for three three-day matches in London against an English side, but soon extended to the northern war-damaged grounds at Bramall Lane and Old Trafford. As he abruptly departed Luckenwalde, Carmody had no chance to record in his ‘Log’ anything beyond the first-day scores of the first of those Victory ‘Tests’. But in England he doubtless quickly heard about a contest memorable for more than its result. Long before the Australian team’s unexpected victory against an apparently stronger English side, the crowd stood to give a moving reception to South Australia’s Graham Williams, clearly emaciated from four years as a PoW, ‘after gulping glucose to give himself energy’, wrote historian Ed Jaggard. Keith must also have learned that 29 The reception centre had been established to handle 6,000 former PoWs. The Victory ‘Tests’ and the Long Road Home