EW Swanton: The Don still a huge hit after all the passing years (22 Aug 1998)

22 August 1998

The Don still a huge hit after all the passing years

By E W Swanton

IN HIS standard work, A History of Cricket, H S Altham's chapter entitled 'The Coming of WG' salutes the emer gence of the game from its ancient pastoral roots. The massive achievements of 'The Champion' heralded the foundation of the county clubs and Test cricket against Australia.

While WG's impact was, of course, unrepeatable, there can be little argument as to the arrival of a new era with the coming of Don Bradman. In April 1930, he arrived in England with Billy Woodfull as one of several promising young cricketers in a side chosen with an eye to the future following England's retention of the Ashes by Percy Chapman's MCC side in Australia. Before the end of that summer it was evident that another phenomenon, a champion of a new order, was among us.

Of a little less than average height and build, he had the nimblest of feet and the swiftest of reflexes. There was an apparently effortless rhythm about his play, a tireless concentration. He was in every way the complete batsman.

For the benefit of the generations who have been born to the game since Bradman's retirement in 1948, here for digestion are a few facts. His Test aggregate of runs, 6,996, is exceeded among Australians by only three men, the most successful of whom had almost twice as many innings. His Test average is 99.94. Only three other batsmen in history have achieved as much as 60. His total of 29 Test hundreds (19 of them against England) has been exceeded only by Sunil Gavaskar, who played nearly three times as many innings. He is the only man who has scored over 300 Test runs in a day. His 974 in 1930 is far and away the most scored in a Test series.

It was in that first of his four English summers that I first saw him. He preferred batting in England, as successive opponents rued to their cost, because the light was softer and the turf more yielding than at home, as the figures below show.

The most detailed analysis of his batting, from his arrival aged 19 to his retirement at 40, is to be found in His Honour B J Wakley's Bradman the Great, published in 1959. There one may learn not only that he made hundreds (117 of them) in more than a third of his innings, but that of his 338 innings 16 were ducks while 37 were upwards of 200. He was run out only four times, only once after he reached the age of 21. He scored almost half as fast again as his partners. He made all his runs at 42 per hour, and his average stay at the wicket was 2hr 14min. Hedley Verity and Clarrie Grimmett dismissed him 10 times each, Sir Alec Bedser eight. And so on. And so on.

It is possible to imagine that in other circumstances a robust, extrovert young man might have endured, indeed greatly enjoyed, the sudden onset of his fame. Don, of course, was appreciative of the acclaim of the crowds and shrewd enough to realise that the success might enhance his financial prospects. Yet neither his background nor his personality prepared him for his sudden ascent to undreamt heights of sporting stardom.

Australia was at a low ebb, unsure of herself and with high unemployment reflecting the worldwide depression. If ever a country needed a national hero, Australia did and she found it in this unsophisticated country boy. Don had come to England as an employee of a sports goods firm, which on the return of the 1930 team to Fremantle exploited their man for all they were worth. While the ship bore Woodfull's team slowly to the eastern states, he was taken ahead by train, being hailed to his embarrassment by vast crowds and mayoral receptions normally given to returning teams in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. Don, then a non-smoking tee-totaller, had not mixed much with his touring colleagues. Imagine what they thought of him now!

Happily for this all-too-public, all-too-private young man, also awaiting him was his childhood sweetheart, Jessie Menzies. They married in Sydney in April 1932, and she remained his inspiration and companion in all their long life together.

Notice that the marriage shortly preceded the MCC tour to Australia of 1932-33, wherein amid bitter controversy England's bodyline tactics were devised to counter the prolific Bradman of 1930 - devised and succeeded to the extent of lowering an average of 139 to a human 56. The spotlight, needless to say, never left the Don, through the eight Australian summers and three more tours of England that lay ahead.

He was the dominant figure in every series and Australia won them all, except for the one shared in England in 1938. The only brief challenge to his supremacy came with his appointment to the captaincy in 1936. At the end of the 1934 tour of England, he was struck down with a poisoned appendix and for days, threatened by peritonitis, his life was in danger.

In consequence, he could play no cricket in 1934-35 and, Woodfull having retired, the popular Vic Richardson led a successful tour of South Africa in 1935-36. The players, and in particular Bill O'Reilly and Jack Fingleton, were disgruntled when the Australian Cricket Board chose Bradman for the series against the MCC team led by G O Allen. After losing the first two Tests, the little man won the remaining three, making 677 runs in four successive innings.

At the Oval in 1938, in the Test wherein England squared the series with their biggest victory, having seen Len Hutton beat his Test record of 334, and with England's score 887 for seven, Don gave himself a bowl with leg-breaks and in the pit formed by O'Reilly's deep footmarks, fractured a bone in his ankle. It was an irony in two senses.

The war years were for Don a sad, frustrating experience. Commissioned as a supervisor in the army school of physical training, the man who had been apparently tireless through all his hours at the wicket broke down completely in the face of the rigorous demands of PT. After several spells in hospital, he was discharged from the army in June 1941. In days when muscular and psychosomatic illness was a less expert branch of medicine, the verdict was fibrositis. There was nothing for it but a resumption of his stockbroking business in Australia.

After so dramatic a mixture of triumph and trauma, Bradman's post-war life has followed a more mellow and fulfilling course. Seeing him in the Adelaide nets, plainly short of fitness after further back troubles, on a cool spring evening in October 1946, I wondered whether, at 38, he could fight his way back to anything like his form of the Thirties. Gradually, much of the old mastery returned, and with it a maturity in leadership which blended and bound a Test side too formidable for England's post-war resources. Now, as not before, he was fortified by the affection as well as the admiration of his side.

So it remained when, after the 10-year gap, Australia toured England once more in 1948. Before a ball was bowled, Don made a broadcast speech so eloquent, so full of feeling for the sufferings of war, yet touched with humour, that the BBC delayed the nine o'clock news so that it could run its course. The immediate result was sackfuls of mail which it could truly be said has been flowing ever since. All that fate denied him was the four runs in his last Test which would have left him with an average of 100. In every way the tour was a personal celebration, on the field and off, culminating in one last hundred at Lord's on the eve of his 40th birthday.

Since his retirement, which was immediately followed by knighthood, Sir Donald Bradman has combined continual service to cricket with a full family and business life. A selector almost uninterruptedly until 1971, and an Australian board member likewise with two periods in the chair, his has been the advice most eagerly sought on the game's major issues. There is no better or more readable instruction manual than his The Art of Cricket. Jealous as ever of his privacy, he has contributed forewords in plenty, answered (at least until recently) every letter by return, written signatures by the thousand every week.

Today, when the integrity of the game is so much under threat from market forces, the services of old players in the ways open to them is specially important. In this, as in other respects, the Don has fulfilled all demands. He has even seriously considered, and only reluctantly declined, more than one nomination for the presidency of MCC.

When the care of Jessie, his wife, through a long illness from cancer ended in her death a year ago, one wondered how he would face up to life without her. In fact, his resilience yet again answered the call. He resumed playing golf and has beaten his age round the Kooyonga links, and enjoys daily visits from his son John.

On his 90th birthday next Thursday, when a company of 1,300 will sit down to a dinner in Adelaide in aid of Bradman charities, he will be dining quietly a mile or two away, at home with his family.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)