The Don: my friendship with Australia's greatest sportsman

Donald Bradman (“The Don”) at the end of his career, aged 40, still relaxed, confident and scoring Test match centuries

I wonder if anyone else reembers the BBC television program many years ago, a historical drama about the rise and fall of King Edward VIII? I have forgotten the title. But I do remember the theme song. It was a 1920s hit ‘I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales!’ I am reminded of this line when I reflect on my association with the cricketing legend Don Bradman, Australia’s greatest sportsman. Bradman, as we oldies remember, was often referred to as “The Don”, the soubriquet of a certain American President at the moment, and I must say I frown upon this usage as it seemingly detracts from that special memory of “our Don Bradman”  - a man who was embraced by every man, woman and child in Australia at one time.

                                                                                                                                                                     Yes, I knew Don Bradman … although to say that we were friends might be stretching it a bit. It was more like a friendship at second and third-hand, like that girl who danced with the man who danced with the Prince of Wales.

One of those at second-hand is my friend Gil Field, a colleague back in departmental days. Gil told me once that when he had been a boy growing up in South Australia in the early 1950s, his father had taken him to Adelaide Oval one day and contrived to introduce him to The Don. Gil was only about six years old at the time but still remembers the great man gravely shaking his hand, and the awe which surrounded the occasion. It became a highlight in Field family history. To his father’s chagrin, the experience did not lead to Gil becoming a champion international cricketer, although I do not share that disappointment. It would have robbed us of Gil becoming one of Australia’s most gifted national park rangers and an expert in environmental interpretation.

I also have a second-hand contact with Bradman through Peter Hill, another old friend, now long gone. Peter also met The Don when he was a boy. This was before the War, when the Don had not long returned from the famous 1930 Test series in England and was at the very height of his fame. Peter’s father had taken him to Myers Store in Melbourne where Bradman was signing cricket bats under some sponsorship arrangement with Myers. Peter’s signed cricket bat has survived the years, bequeathed by him to me, and it is beside me as I write, complete with the great man’s faded signature. Occasionally I pick it up, reminding myself that this is a bat once held by Bradman, and in my imagination I flourish a fluent drive through the covers, smack a solid pull through midwicket or cut one away to the third man fence. As with Gil, the Bradman meeting failed to ignite an international cricketing career for Peter Hill. He became a scholar, musician and diplomat. He did spend most of his career in exotic places around the globe but as a member of the Australian Diplomatic Corps, not of the Australian Cricket Team.

Another second-hand contact with Bradman is through my friend John Snell (the friendship came about when John married the sister of my lifelong friend Phil Ledger). John had been a brilliant schoolboy and district cricketer in Perth before, in 1980, he was transferred in his employment to Adelaide. I once asked John had he met Bradman when he was living in Adelaide, and he recalled:

I did. Shortly after arriving in Adelaide, I joined Rotary and there I first met The Don, who was a member of the same Rotary Club. Over the next 5 years I spoke with him many times and always found him very friendly and interested in other people. 

I also joined Kooyonga Golf Club, where Don was a member, and once I played in a foursome with him. It was one of the most enjoyable games I ever had. Don played extremely well off his then 6 handicap (he had played off scratch when younger) and was very charming both on the course and in the Clubhouse afterwards, where we shared a couple of lemonades and a chat about the state of Australian cricket.

Finally, and here we are at three degrees of separation, there is my former forestry colleague and good friend Donald George Begbie. He was named Donald George by his father, who worshipped Donald George Bradman.  

I don’t recall that Don Begbie ever met Don Bradman, but he has a connection, nevertheless. Don (Begbie, that is) once lived next door to Lindsay Hassett, a member of Bradman’s all-conquering 1948 Ashes team, and Bradman’s successor as Australian cricket captain. More than this, Don Begbie actually once bowled to Hassett in a game of cricket. True, it was beach-cricket which Hassett (long retired at that point) had been persuaded briefly to join by the neighbourhood kids. Hassett faced one ball from Don and cut his innocuous off-spinner away into the surf. Remarking “I’ll take four for that”, Hassett then retired and adjourned to his garden shed. As was well-known in the neighbourhood, Mr Hassett’s garden shed doubled as a wine-cellar. The shed was also known to be well-stocked.

Lindsay Hassett batting at the WACA ground in a Sheffield Shield match: “I’ll take four for that” he seems to be thinking.

My father, like Don Begbie’s, lived through the peak of the Bradman era and on one occasion watched him bat in that famous series in England in 1930. But unlike Mr Begbie Sr., Dad did not unreservedly admire him. Perhaps he was influenced by Jack Fingleton’s book Brightly Fades The Don, a copy of which knocked around our house when I was a boy. Fingleton, like many of The Don’s team-mates always put Bradman-the-batsman on a pedestal but had little time for Bradman-the-man, regarding him as aloof and self-centred.

Perhaps my father also saw Bradman as calculating and ruthless (characteristics he deplored) and compared him unfavourably to the free-flowing devil-may-care type of cricketer exemplified by Keith Miller. I can’t imagine my father taking me to shake Bradman’s hand. Nor can I imagine my father having any time for the religious conflicts that caused a rift in the 1948 team (about half the team, including Bradman, were Freemasons and the other half, including Fingleton, were Roman Catholics, and this was at a time when the conflicting beliefs were taken very seriously).

I am not sure, all these years later, that my father’s attitude was fair and reasonable, but it rubbed off on me. I am not a Bradman worshipper, although I acknowledge his batting prowess, achievements as Australian captain and, especially, his absolute cricketing supremacy. I have also taken on-board comments by people like John Snell who knew and liked him. And like so many Australians, I have made the pilgrimage to the Bradman Museum in Bowral. I have read his books and the books by many of his contemporaries and fans, including those of my own favourite cricketer Richie Benaud. And I am always irritated by the naive journalists who these days brand some newcomer to the Test scene, as they did with David Warner and Steve Smith, as “the next Bradman”.

Don Bradman and me, at Bowral in 2015

The trouble is, few people these days, even those familiar with the statistics of his batting career (in First Class matches he scored a century or better every third time at the crease), really appreciate the degree to which Bradman dominated the game or the way in which he could reduce a world-class bowling attack to impotence. I once read a good story in an old cricket book that exemplified this, and it still makes me smile. The ‘Little Fella’ in the story is, of course, Bradman.

Leg spinner Bill Tallon, whose brother Don was a famous Australian wicketkeeper, loved to tell a story about a time he and his brother were both playing for Queensland in a Sheffield Shield match against South Australia.

“South Australia had been sent in to bat. My brother Don caught Tom Klose. One for none. The Little Fella came in and turned a single to leg. One for one. We got Ron Hammence out for a couple. Two for three.

Bill paused at this point and had a pull on his beer.

“Bradman went for a big hit and skied it over mid-wicket. Circling under it I thought to myself ‘Don’t miss this one’.  I caught it and looked at the scoreboard. Three for 480.”

This was the thing about The Don; he tore bowling attacks to shreds without seeming to do so, almost without you noticing. The thing that characterised a Bradman innings was the relentless accumulation of singles, twos and threes, the glides past gully, the gentle sweep than ran to the fine leg fence, and the effortlessly knocking of the ball into gaps in the field. When Bradman was batting, the scoreboard just kept ticking over.

The Don during the 1948 tour to England. He was a wonderful accumulator of runs but was also a master of the ruthless pull through mid-wicket and a fearless hooker

There was another factor. England fast bowler Harold Larwood once commented on what he called the “cruelty” of Bradman. “He flogged us when we were down” said Larwood. He also observed how Bradman would pick on an individual fielder (for example the rotund England spinner Tydesley) and tease him over and over again with strokes just to his left or to his right, always making him give up the single, always making him run.

I have recently read The Incomparable Game by the great England cricketer Colin Cowdrey, and in it he tells an amusing story about Bradman, commencing with observations made (when Cowdrey was aged 15) when watching Bradman's last innings (in 1948) at Lord's:

As fast as any Englishman in that period of no fast bowlers was, I suppose, Bill Edrich. Sitting at Lord’s watching him on the occasion of Bradman’s last innings on the ground, I was filled with that sense of awe that comes to every schoolboy when he sees a bowler he considers fast enough to be fearsome. Edrich, aggressive, fit, terribly busy in his run up, made me think then that it would be impossible for me to play in his class of cricket. He would have been too fast for me and I would never have seen the ball. He frightened me to death just to watch him run up.

This respect was transferred fairly quickly once Bradman got to the wicket and began to compile what everyone said was a typical hundred. The sight of him that sticks in my memory is of his counter to an Edrich bouncer. I don’t know whether he picked up a message from the bowler’s run up, but he took two little skipping steps away from the stumps and with a horizontal bat lathered the ball down the wicket so that it pitched almost at Edrich’s feet on his follow through and caused him to shuffle out of the way like a dan­cer. Then the ball took off past the umpire like a Bobby Locke low wedge shot and bounced back off the sightscreen at the Nursery End.

That stroke has remained in my memory like a photograph. It tells me everything I want to know about Bradman.

I have only once seen a batsman in First Class cricket playing the "straight pull"  - flat batting a bouncer back at the bowler and endangering his and the umpire's health. That was the great South African Barry Richards, then playing for South Australia at the WACA ground in Perth. Against bowlers of the calibre and pace of Graham McKenzie and Dennis Lillee, he had four options with the short ball aimed at his head, and he used them all: he could step away and cut it, flat bat it back past the bowler, pull it through mid-wicket or square leg, or hook it over fine leg. I had never seen such cool mastery.

But back to Bradman. Earlier I made the comment that he was more an accumulator of runs than a master blaster.  He would effortlessly keep the scoreboard ticking over with ones, twos and threes. One of his favourite strokes was the late cut, which he hit crisply and with supreme control. No matter where the fielding captain put third man, a Bradman late cut would speed past him to the boundary

Bradman cuts past slip to the boundary

Until I read Colin Cowdrey's book I had not realised that he was also a magnificent hooker when the occasion arose. Cowdrey tells a story:

I know that when they say he murdered even the best fast bowlers with his hook that it was true. I know also that it must be true when they claim that he was the greatest hooker the game has known.

There is a story of Bradman’s hooking which is now listed in the history of Kent as another example of man’s inhumanity to man. The victim was Fred Ridgway, the county’s fast bowler who had never seen the Don bat.

So at Canterbury in 1948, as Bradman [then aged 40] walked out to take guard, Godfrey Evans and Les Ames, two men whose combined knowledge of Bradman went back nearly twenty years, decided to give Fred some tactical advice.

“He’s got a reputation as a hooker,” said Evans, “but when you get to forty it’s a different business.” Turning to Ames he said: “You used to hook a bit, Les, didn’t you, but you had to give it away.” Ames nodded agreement.

“Give him a couple of good length ones around the off-stump,” advised Evans, “and then give him the bouncer third ball. You’ll get him caught at short-leg.”

Ridgway gave the third ball everything. So did Bradman. It pitched among the hydrangeas in front of the Mayor’s enclosure scattering the official party, skimmed past two waiters and bounced off the back wall of the tent.

In judging Bradman-the-man, rather than Bradman-the-batsman, we need to take into account the unprecedented media attention directed at him, his international hero status and the extent of the public adoration for him, especially during the dark days of the Depression when many people were crying out for something uplifting. The Don needed to find a way to survive this, and perhaps when he chose not to be ‘one of the boys’ this was one of the ways he coped. Furthermore, first class cricket at Test and Sheffield Shield level is played hard. No prisoners are taken ... especially none were taken by Donald Bradman.  It is also worth remembering that Bradman was a teetotaller and mostly did not socialise with his team-mates. This was at a time when teams would always share a few drinks at the close of play.

One of the best comments I have seen on Bradman by one of his team-mates was by the master leg spinner Arthur Mailey, whose Test career just overlapped that of Bradman, and who later became a cricket commentator and journalist. Mailey wrote:

… Bradman is an enigma, a paradox; an idol to millions of people, yet, with a few, the most unpopular cricketer I have ever met. People close to Bradman either like or dislike him; there is no half-way. To those who dislike him there is no compromise, forgiveness, little tolerance. There are at least two major reasons: jealousy and this great cricketer’s independence.

I have watched Bradman’s career since he left Bowra … , have seen every innings he has played in Tests against any country, have seen him during periods of rich success and in his moments of embarrassment and frustration; have seen him pleased and annoyed; have seen him grin and sob almost in one moment, but never have I seen him deviate very far from that line which was intended to lead him to power and success … [But] as a team-mate, I have always found Bradman dependable, a good sportsman.

Bradman was brought up the hard way, the lonely way. That’s why he practiced as a boy by hitting a ball up against a brick wall, and when he felt the cold draught of antagonism within the ranks, he kept his counsel, remained unperturbed, and knew his greatest weapon was centuries and more centuries.

I also appreciated the comments by Bradman’s great Adelaide friend Dr Donald Beard. In answer to a question from a journalist, Beard replied:

“I enjoyed his company. A lot of people found him difficult because shall we say he didn’t have the common touch. He found it difficult to mix and people found him standoffish but I think this was largely due to nervousness and embarrassment. I found him kind, generous and a quick wit …..”

As to Bradman-the-cricketer rather than Bradman-the-man being judged by his peers, Richie Benaud once recalled saying to Keith Miller how much he regretted never having bowled to Bradman. Miller glanced up from the racing guide he was reading, looked at Richie for a few moments and then said quietly “You would not have enjoyed it”.

Bradman against spin – on his toes, square cutting behind point

However, there was one latter-day champion bowler who did bowl to Bradman, and who later told the story. This was the ferocious fast bowler Jeff Thompson, who with his great partner Dennis Lillee, terrorised English batsmen in the 1980s.  The confrontation between the world’s greatest batsman and one of the world’s great bowlers came about this way:

Each year during the Adelaide Test Bradman’s friend Don Beard would host a dinner party in which guests from the Australian and visiting teams would have a chance to relax with Sir Donald and Lady Jessie.

Thommo was injured that year and was not playing in the match, but he and his new wife were staying in Adelaide, and Dr Beard invited them for dinner.

It was a balmy evening and before dinner the guests went for a walk around the garden. Don Beard’s two sons were keen cricketers and began goading Bradman, nagging him to see if he would have a hit with them. Beard, who had once been a First Grade cricketer, had his own turf wicket on the grounds.

In a jocular moment the then 69-year-old Bradman agreed, picked up a bat and entered the net. Thommo saw what was going on and exclaimed “If Bradman’s batting then Thompson’s bowling!”

“Think of it,” recollected Dr. Beard later. “The last man to ever bowl to Don Bradman was Jeff Thomson. After it they had a laugh and came in through the doors arm in arm talking cricket.”

“How did he go?” Beard was asked. “Let’s just say the little feet were still dancing” he replied.

Thommo had his own memory of that evening: “I thought this won’t take long — this little old guy with glasses. I thought I had just better bowl my leg spinners as it wouldn’t look too good in the newspaper if I killed Don Bradman in a game of backyard cricket. Bradman had nothing but a bat ... no protector, no pads, or anything, on a green turf wicket. I thought ‘good luck old man you will be dead shortly’.

But the ‘old man’, who had played his last Test match 30 years earlier in 1948, started to unleash his famous shots.” He just belted my first ball and I thought, hmm that wasn’t a bad shot, it must have been luck”.

“I then watched this guy bat for 20 minutes flogging me and the other bowlers. He just backed himself to hit everything and I was gobsmacked. If anyone doubts how good a batsman he was, they should come and see me.’’

Richie Benaud admired Bradman as a player, a person, and an administrator, and for his insights into the game. He related how he once asked Bradman what he thought of the new 50-over One-Day game that was just coming into vogue. “I’m in favour of it” said Bradman, “it will lead to faster rates of scoring and an improved standard of fielding in Test and Shield cricket.” He was right and had he been alive today would be making a similar observation about the advent of 20-20 cricket (to which I am only slowly warming). Bradman was also the first cricket administrator to push the idea of using television replays to help with umpiring decisions, but only (in Bradman’s opinion) for run-outs, stumping and catches. He regarded the use of the television replay in LBW decisions as too speculative and preferred to see the umpire’s decision stand unchallenged.

I think it unlikely that posterity will have much interest in those aspects of Bradman’s personality that did not endear him to some of his team-mates. The future will not concern itself with old jealousies or religious conflicts. Instead, I think they will appreciate the comment of an English test player who remarked on the occasion of Bradman’s retirement: “he is the only batsman I would have given a century to in every innings … not to come out to bat”.

Donald George Bradman is widely acknowledged as Australia’s greatest sportsman. I am pleased to be able to record my personal relationship with him thanks to my friends Gil Field, John Snell, Peter Hill and Donald George Begbie ... all of whom, I am confident, given the chance, would have danced charmingly with a girl who had danced with the Prince of Wales.