Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

79 ‘within a week of returning to England’; he added that ‘he might have done better as a batsman if he had rested longer.’ Carmody played no part in the other 1945 three-day matches given first- class status; he was absent from the Dominions side against England at Lord’s two days after the Old Trafford match and from the Australian Services’ innings defeat of Leveson Gower’s XI, in the revival of the famous Scarborough Festival in early September. But later that month the reputation he’d won with the RAAF side in 1943 and 1944, and renewed in 1945 as a returned PoW, gave him a unique place in Britain’s celebrations of the end of the Pacific War. On 18 September thousands thronged Trafalgar Square for a ‘Victory over Japan’ service conducted by the three Chaplains- General of the Forces. ‘The roar of the capital’s traffic sweeping round the square,’ reported The Times , ‘was stifled by the voices of the multitude raised in praise and powerful thanksgiving for the victory of allied arms in the East.’ After senior military figures gave first-hand accounts of fighting in the Far East and confirmed that ‘Japanese atrocities reported in the Press were in no way exaggerated’, just three other speakers were introduced to the lunch-hour assembly: ‘an American and a British sailor’ – both unnamed – and ‘Flight Lieutenant D.K.Carmody, R.A.A.F., the Australian “Test” cricketer, who was a prisoner of war in Germany after having been shot down off the Hook of Holland.’ The prominence he was given in the Trafalgar Square ceremonies was a remarkable illustration of the distance he’d travelled, in both miles and achievement, from the impoverished family background that had produced both him and the ever-troubled Harry. The older brother – whose appearances before the children’s court in the early 1930s preceded Keith’s emergence as one of ‘Bradman’s boys’ – was charged by the RAAF in 1942 for using a forged requisition for transport from his camp in Toowoomba, Queensland, ‘well knowing that it was not genuine’. The woeful test results, when he applied for air-crew in September 1943, are in striking contrast to Keith’s mathematical studies in Stalag Luft III a year later. In early 1945, soon after Keith was responding to the boredom of captivity by ‘designing a house for Peter’ and calculating the costs of a pavilion at Rawson Oval in Mosman, Harry was applying for compassionate discharge from the RAAF. His wife of ten years had left him, closed his home, sold the furniture and abandoned three young children to his care. While divorce proceedings were under way, ‘I have no relations to help The Victory ‘Tests’ and the Long Road Home