Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

72 expansion of the ‘Test’ series had brought requests for extra minor matches. Using as a guide the schedule of the extremely successful first Australian Imperial Forces [AIF] team at the end of the Great War, Sismey had collaborated with Warner and Cochrane to draw up a programme focusing on the leading county clubs. Commenting some 45 years later, Sismey – the highest ranking serviceman, though not the on-field captain – emphasised that the new composite team was formed independently from the Australian cricket authorities, who would eventually prove they really were a Board of Control over anybody contemplating a post-war future in the game. While disputes lay well in the future in 1945, Carmody’s absence at the time the combined team was formed apparently averted arguments about who should be its captain. According to the Army’s Whitington – whose despatches to newspapers provided an insider’s view of events throughout the team’s matches in England, India and Australia – the RAAF men wanted Carmody. Lindsay Hassett, however, the only player with pre-war Test experience, was the logical choice for the First ‘Test’. There’s no evidence of resentment by Carmody, who joined Hassett, Whitington and his RAAF teammates, Sismey and Roper, on the selection committee and resumed captaincy of the RAAF team he’d led so well in 1943 and 1944. While it now played many fixtures on its own, some of its personnel joined the Army men for the ‘Tests’ and occasional fixtures against county and regional representative teams. A Daily Mirror ‘World Cable’ was enthusiastic about Carmody’s return to the RAAF captaincy for a two-day match against Lancashire at Old Trafford on 5 June, but seriously astray with its account of his recent experiences. Already the myth that he’d ‘witnessed the shooting of 50 PoWs at Stalag Luft III’ was in circulation, as well as a triply flawed reference to ‘a new bowling prospect … F/O Peter Mossman whose wicket-taking did much to win “tests” for Australia in a camp series.’ When the match began after a rain delay, Carmody, said the press, ‘showed that his year’s captivity had not affected his ability’. After a crushing innings defeat of Learie Constantine’s XI at Edgbaston, The Times greeted his reappearance at Lord’s as RAAF captain as ‘particularly welcome’. Scores of 27 at Edgbaston and 25 in a draw against the RAF at Lord’s convinced critics that ‘ Keith Carmody, after only 14 days release from PoW camp, showed form enough to indicate big and lively tallies in the future.’ The Victory ‘Tests’ and the Long Road Home