Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

91 Even innings of eight and four in the next match didn’t prevent Clarrie Grimmett from enthusing: ‘One batsman who impressed me in the Services match in Adelaide was Keith Carmody, of New South Wales. He really looks a cricketer, and moves into position beautifully to hit the ball’. Such praise couldn’t last for a man who finished the Australian tour with a batting average of 17.60 (while Miller was confirming his own standing with 57.90). But whether or not Keith’s ‘mental concentration’ had improved in the way Fingleton predicted – and even if it was a legacy of the PoW experience – there’s no evidence of the diminished vitality suspected by his friend Bullen long after the event. The same couldn’t be said for the team as a whole. Against Victoria, reported The Sydney Morning Herald , ‘there was no evidence of a strong desire to overtake Victoria’s huge total. Their general bearing yesterday suggested that they had had too much cricket and were sick of the game’. By the time they reached Sydney they were reduced to 13 men by the withdrawal of Roper, weary from three years’ Air Force service, and Pettiford with appendicitis. Yet Carmody’s enthusiasm was undiminished. On 30 January 1946, beneath the headline ‘KEITH CARMODY TO RETURN TO MOSMAN FIRST XI’, the Herald reported that he’d cabled the club secretary announcing his availability for a match against Manly, ‘the first of the touring Services players to reappear in grade cricket’. Soon Keith was included in a combined Sydney grade team to play in a post-season game against Far Western Districts at Nyngan, 583 kilometres north-west of Sydney. By now, however, there seemed a real prospect his peacetime career would resume much further away, with reports in both English and Australian newspapers that he was likely to play as an amateur for Kent. The Kent secretary’s comment that ‘he is a fine player, and we can do with him’ was testimony to the reputation he’d won in wartime Britain. The valued friendships he’d established in Kent on leave from the RAAF may well have made the prospect attractive to him. The record of his performances in the Victory ‘Tests’ provides no details of his personal life to reveal whether he resumed his obviously important relationship with his prolific correspondent, Josie, after his year as a PoW. But it’s entirely possible she may also have been a factor in Keith’s interest in the Kent proposition. If so, news that she was no longer available may be a major reason he didn’t return to England. In the late English summer of 1947 Josephine Chicherio married Patrick Joseph McEvoy at The Victory ‘Tests’ and the Long Road Home