Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

85 even more enjoyable in retrospect after the team flew across India to Calcutta. Welcomed at a civic reception, the players had no inkling of the difficulties awaiting them. Carmody was rested from the first game against East Zone in which the immediate threat was the appearance of Denis Compton, in Calcutta with a touring football team after spending some of the war in India with the Army. If his first-innings ‘duck’ suggested the Arsenal left-winger had spent too much time earning 12 England wartime football international caps, his second-innings century confirmed he’d been a major absentee from the Victory ‘Tests’. Of greater significance at the time was the way thousands of marching demonstrators twice stopped the match by invading the field: waving banners, they ordered the players off the ground, threatening to dig up the wicket and set the grandstands on fire if play continued. While most writers link the agitation to the Indian nationalism that would lead to independence within two years, Sismey provided a more precise explanation of its immediate causes and the Australians’ reactions. Although a minor operation to remove shrapnel from his back meant that he missed both Calcutta matches, as commanding officer he was well informed about official explanations and involved in crucial negotiations about the viability of the tour. The immediate cause of unrest was the coincidental start of trials in New Delhi of alleged collaborators with the Japanese, causing ‘bitterness and unrest throughout the nation’. Alarmed by these ‘terrifying disturbances’, the Australians were told by cricket and civil authorities to stay in their hotel. Sismey and manager Johnson tried to abandon the Calcutta matches but were confronted by an equally determined Australian, the Governor of Bengal, R.G.Casey. Although they couldn’t foresee his future as a Knight of the Garter, life peer in the House of Lords and Governor-General of Australia, they deferred to his present status and perhaps his recent one as a member of the British war cabinet. Certainly, a Government House dinner, hosted by the Governor and his wife, was ‘a very formal occasion’, recalled Sismey, before Casey persuaded the players to continue by deploying army units to restore order and ensure their safety. Even so, being escorted to and from the cricket ground under armed guard and ‘playing cricket under the protective eye of the army was not exactly conducive to a pleasant and enjoyable experience’. Almost certainly these events seemed far more important to the tourists than their two-wicket defeat by East Zone. The Victory ‘Tests’ and the Long Road Home