Book reviews

Charlie Macartney, Mayhem and Artistry (Peter Lloyd, published privately, October 2024)

Peter Lloyd’s biography of Charlie Macartney is beautifully presented with lavish and varied illustrations occupying almost every page of his 744-page work. The book is based on a prodigious amount of research, both in terms of the text and illustrations. The page length of Charlie Macartney exceeds Lloyd’s two previous biographies of Warren Bardsley (486 pages) and Monty Noble and (587 pages).

Lloyd is passionate in researching the context in which Macartney operated, uncovering the threads of ‘land, stock and blood’ to understand his subject. He delved deeply into the society in which Macartney lived and the social and political forces that impinged on his cricket.

Lloyd is critical of Peter Sharpham’s 2004 biography of Macartney suggesting that he ‘failed to nail the inner man in his sketchy and incomplete portrayal of Macartney’. He added that Sharpham ‘baulked at unmasking the subject’s public persona; and, worse still, he explicitly denied the existence of any hidden demons’.

Lloyd contended that it was essential to understand Macartney’s complex and ‘multi-faceted character’ because it impacted on his cricket. He also suggested ‘Charlie’s showmanship, his “little man” swagger, his ambidextrous skills with both bat and ball, his muscularity at the crease, and his need to dominate his opponents from the outset, mut be appreciated within a milieu of emotional fragility and periodic mental distress’.

Outside events also impinged on Macartney’s cricket. Lloyd makes a good case that Macartney suffered profound war-time trauma, this being a factor in his extended absence from the cricket field for two months in the 1920–21 season and the entirety of the 1924–25 Ashes series. Macartney was exposed to unabated shellfire for a week which was followed then mustard gas in a ferocious battle, the Australian assault on Messines in Belgium in 1917. His predisposition towards anxiety and emotional withdrawal made him a definite candidate for post-traumatic stress disorder. M.A. Noblesensed such an outcome when he wrote that Macartney suffered a ‘mental breakdown’ during the 1924-25 season.

Fellow scribe Greg de Moore, in a Preface to the book, focusses on the possibility of Macartney’s war-time trauma. He agreed with Lloyd that Charlie ‘may have been seriously psychologically affected’ at the time of his war-time involvement. De Moore added that since Charlie wrote little or talked about his war-time experience, it is difficult to pinpoint the precise impact of the war on him. He notes that there is the small but suggestive scribble in his scrapbook collection where he blacks out a newspaper caption which equates his golfing exploits with his fighting in the war. It seems that Charlie may have been offended by this ignorant sporting hyperbole ‘but we are left groping if we want something more tangible’ notes Greg de Moore.

Lloyd is well-equipped to explore such issues as he completed a PhD at the University of New South Wales in 1993 on the subject of ‘A Social History of Medicine: Medical Professionalism in New South Wales, 1788–1950’. Lloyd has also delved deeply into the recent literature on shell shock which affected soldiers involved in war.

A central argument of the biography is that Macartney was a ‘daring and innovative cricketer’ who attempted to attack from the very first ball he faced when his mood to dominate was at fever pitch’. He batted the same was whether he was playing grade of first-class cricket. With the risks he took from the outset his innings his stay at the crease was ‘sometimes more spectacular than sustained’.

This is a warts and all biography which explores Macartney’s failures as well as his successes. Lloyd investigates the strange episode of Macartney’s move to Dunedin to coach and play cricket for four months in 1910–11. Lloyd speculates that Charlie needed to challenge himself and gain a measure of financial independence. Whatever, the motivation for his time in Dunedin the move was largely unsuccessful. Lloyd is critical of Sharpham’s brief (200 words) treatment of this episode which is littered with falsehoods, inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims. Lloyd also takes issue with Ronald Cardwell, author of short monograph on Macartney’s stint in Otago, who concluded that his ‘promise was perhaps grounded in Otago setting him on a wonderful path in cricket’.

Pater Lloyd has produced an exceptional and praiseworthy biography of a fascinating figure in Australia cricket history. Unfortunately, it will be read by a very limited audience because of the cost of the book. In his talk to the scribes on his biography of Monty Noble, Peter outlined his funding strategy for this and other biographies: a limited edition of 100 copies at $350 for each copy that would provide a budget to cover costs. While collectors will be delighted with the finished product, Peter was aware that his readership will be limited. While some scribes have purchased Charlie Macartney, and his other two biographies, others have not.

There has been much talk about the desirability of a trade copy of the book to reach a wider audience. Some senior librarians around the country have urged Peter to produce a more accessible work. However, it appears unlikely that there will be a trade edition because of the work involved in reducing the text to about 250 pages as well as the risks involved in promoting such a work.

While Peter Lloyd has set out to realise the inner character of his subject, he admits at the outset, with great modesty, his capacity to fully comprehend a man such as Macartney who divulged little of his inner self.

Cobbled together, however, these details fall far short of providing a comprehensive sense of Charlie’s

character and personality. They are fragmentary and illusive at best, lacking any piquancy in explaining his genius at the crease, or his ambition and hunger to succeed, or his more deep-seated frailties and fears. Rather, they are tantalising, indeed frustratingly, incomplete in promoting a flash-and-blood characterisation of his real self (p. x).

However, Lloyd has enabled us to have a deeper understanding of both the genius of Macartney and his struggles on and off the field. Peter should be congratulated for his enthusiasm, energy which plumbed the depths of a fascinating figure of Australian cricket history. It was not an easy task because Macartney was not inclined to make public statements on controversial or contentious matters. He rarely expressed his inner feelings. However, his book raises the question about the audience for substantial works such as this one. Is it possible to satisfy both cricket collectors, who may flick through the book, and serious students of the game, who closely read the text?

Richard Cashman

May 2025

The First Ball After Lunch (John Benaud, The Cricket Press)

John Benaud made a single tour as an Australian cricketer, to the West Indies in 1973. It’s the subject of this fascinating, delightful, messy and disjointed book.

Benaud learned his trade as a journalist on Sydney’s tabloid Sun, of which he became the editor, and it shows in his writing. Short paragraphs. Direct language. He doesn’t bury the lede: after a perfunctory introduction, he takes the reader straight into the Third Test, skipping past the first two, less interesting, drawn games. It was a dramatic, against-the-odds win, and the book takes its title from the timing of Max Walker’s crucial dismissal of Alvin Kallicharran on the final day.

The tour of 1973 was only Australia’s third visit to the Caribbean, after the tall-scoring series of 1954-55 and the acrimonious 1964-65 series, dominated by the pace of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith. Ian Chappell’s Australian side was below full strength, missing Ashley Mallett’s bowling and Paul Sheahan’s batting, while the pace attack was handicapped by the loss of Dennis Lillee (with stress fractures in his back) after the First Test, and Bob Massie’s illness and loss of form. The West Indies were also hobbled by injury: Garry Sobers missed all five Tests with a bad knee, while batting prodigy Lawrence Rowe limped out of the Third Test with a severely injured ankle. Australia coped better than the West Indians with these obstacles, winning the only two decided contests in the series. Jeff Hammond and Max Walker formed a surprisingly effective new ball combination, leg-spinners O’Keeffe and Jenner enjoyed moments of success, and Greg Chappell and Doug Walters produced vital supporting spells. It was a series without much by way of fast bowling, once Keith Stackpole thrashed Jamaica’s Uton Dowe out of the Tests. The Australians caught a glimpse of the future, in the form of a very young Michael Holding, but no one in 1973 could have foreseen the emergence of the four-pronged pace attack that the West Indies would field just a few years later. The lynchpin of the West Indian bowling in 1973 was the very skilful but utterly unintimidating off-spinner, Lance Gibbs.

Much of the account of the tour consists of short, punchy anecdotes, which are consistently interesting, but it’s when Benaud allows himself to dwell on a topic in detail that the reader gets the full benefit of his shrewd understanding of the game. He explores, for example, Ian Redpath’s mistreatment at the hands of Australia’s Test selectors, which he attributes to Neil Harvey’s inability to grasp the fact that not everyone was capable of batting like him. And there’s a thoughtful consideration of the prevalent but misguided view, in the 1970s, that the bowlers most likely to succeed in the West Indies were leg spinners.

There are interesting insights into several of the players. There are, unsurprisingly, the usual stories of Doug Walters’ dry humour, smoking and drinking – but also an explanation of a less familiar aspect of his character, his intense competitive drive. Benaud’s good on the predicament of Johnny Watkins, an able and likeable cricketer temperamentally unequipped to handle his sudden promotion to big cricket. The late Ian Redpath contributed some typically thoughtful reflections. And Benaud’s observations of Keith Miller, following the tour as a journalist, are hilariously astute.

There are times when Benaud is frustratingly reticent. Towards the end of the book, he mentions that the tour manager, Bill Jacobs, reported to the Australian Cricket Board that there had been ‘a few instances of one player disagreeing with another’, which Jacobs had needed to address with ‘some pretty harsh words’. Reading Benaud’s account of the tour leaves you none the wiser as to what happened here. It’s also possible to forget that Benaud was actually on the tour himself: of his own role on the trip, he says virtually nothing, except that he was in poor form before the First Test. He says almost nothing about the Fifth Test, the only one in which he appeared. It would have been interesting to know more about his personal perspective – including how he was pressed into service as a bowler late in that game, and picked up a pair of unlikely Test wickets. More significantly, Benaud reproduces a telegram from his mother informing him that his wife had given birth while he was away on tour, but he has nothing to say about the strain that surely caused. The way Benaud was trained, the reporter was never the story.

The book is thoroughly illustrated with photographs of the tour, many of them unfamiliar: the most memorable is the shot of John Benaud returning home to be greeted by his brother Richie, whose eyes are bulging out of his head in astonishment as he takes in his sibling’s lurid shirt (containing, it’s safe to guess, not a single natural fibre). Anyone who recalls the way Richie dressed in the 70s will appreciate that it took quite a shirt to provoke that kind of reaction.

John Benaud gets home to Sydney on page 89, but the book still has about fifty pages, and two distinct sections, to run. The first addendum deals with the development of World Series Cricket, which is linked, tenuously but plausibly, to the 1973 tour by reason of the fact that nine of the (grievously underpaid) tourists became WSC players. Even less obviously connected to the story of the tour is the final section, in which a speech given by Sir Donald Bradman in 1979 is used as a springboard for Benaud’s views on the contemporary state of the game.

The most striking thing about these last two sections of the book is how hard it is to reconcile them. Benaud writes of Kerry Packer’s intervention in the game as a benefit, dragging the game into the twentieth century, bringing the transformative introduction of night cricket, and allowing the leading players to earn a decent financial reward. That’s all fair enough, but then he frets about today’s administrators arranging pointless white-ball matches ‘to satisfy the television and marketing people and their lust for content.’ That, of course, was exactly what World Series Cricket was about – Packer was a businessman, not a philanthropist. The difference between WSC and the IPL is only one of degree.

Benaud pokes gentle fun at Bradman for his dogmatic adherence to tradition, but seems not to have noticed that he’s turned into a bit of a traditionalist himself. He worries for the future of Test cricket, and frets that Grade cricket no longer performs the function of toughening up young players. Still, his views are trenchant, hard-earned and well worth heeding, even if they have little to do with Max Walker’s bowling at Sabina Park. A more coherent book might not have included these last two sections but, since everything Benaud has to say is interesting, we should be grateful for them.

Signed copies of The First Ball After Lunch are available from Ken Piesse here. And Gideon Haigh’s thoughts on the book are here.

Max Bonnell

April 2025

The Final Test (Huw Turbervill, Bloomsbury)

Two thirds of the way through this highly idiosyncratic book, the penny finally drops.

The Final Test is subtitled ‘The Uncertain Future of Cricket’s First-Class Game’. An introductory blurb announces that it is part ‘looking at how Test cricket is being consumed by T20’ and part ‘an attempt to appreciate or at least understand the allure of franchise cricket’. But the analysis of the first (hardly controversial) point seems to be confined to a graph in the introduction, while Turbervill’s attempts to come to grips with the second question rarely rise above expressions of bafflement. On The Hundred, he writes, ‘the bewildering thing is why it is so popular with some people’, who can’t ‘tell me why they like it. They just do.’ Of the Surrey club’s enthusiasm for The Hundred, he writes that ‘for the life of me I cannot understand why – as I said, Surrey do not need it, and have never needed it.’ The ‘attempt to appreciate or at least understand’ never gets very far off the ground. So what’s going on?

It soon becomes apparent that Turbervill doesn't really want to explore or analyse the rise of short-form cricket, or spend much time proposing plausible alternatives - what he really wants to do is lament it. His chosen weapons are anecdotes and interviews. He has gathered a number of very interesting observations from a wide range of people – including Graham Gooch, Farokh Engineer, Mudassar Nazar, Jack Russell and Merv Hughes. But there’s no coherent argument at the core of it all, so all of these impressions never add up to much. There’s no systematic consideration of the economic forces shaping the game, or of the role of the ICC. Indeed, Turbervill seems not quite to understand how these things work. At one point, he observes that ‘In October 2023, Cricket Australia announced that it had recorded a $16.9m loss in 2022/23, despite hosting the 2022 T20 World Cup.’ That sentence should, of course, read that Australia recorded a loss (partly) because it hosted the T20 World Cup – as that was an ICC event, its revenues went to the ICC, not to Cricket Australia.

Structurally, the book rambles. Plainly, Turbervill has a deep knowledge of cricket, but it spills out in random bursts rather than organised arguments. The book intersperses interviews with various cricketing personalities with brief decade-by-decade summaries of Turbervill’s personal memories of Test cricket. He seems to have been at his happiest in the 1980s, when he could watch Ian Botham, David Gower, Graham Gooch, Mike Gatting and (slightly surprisingly) Derek Pringle – and England beat Australia as often as not. He seems sceptical of Bazball. Strangely, Daddles the Duck (the annoying Channel Nine cartoon that accompanied unsuccessful batsmen from the field) receives repeated mentions. And Turbervill’s memory betrays him from time to time – it was the New Zealand team, not the Australians, who turned up for the first T20 International in retro outfits and facial hair.

Eventually, the book turns into what it really was all along – a cricketing memoir. Turbervill recounts his time as a club cricketer in Suffolk (revealing that he played twice for Suffolk’s Second Eleven), traces his life in cricket journalism, and devotes a chapter to “cricket and my family”. None of this has any obvious connection with the demise of Test cricket or the rise of T20. It leaves the reader with the impression (fairly or not) that what Turbervill really wanted to write was an account of his life in the game, including an apologia for his preference for traditional forms of cricket over more recent developments. Perhaps it was then suggested to him that even his standing as editor of The Cricketer might not persuade quite enough people to buy his life story, so the book was repackaged as something else. It’s disappointing, because the book only superficially attempts the task that it purports to set for itself. And the deeply personal nature of Turbervill's responses to the changes in cricket sometimes leaves him open to the suggestion that he thinks the game shouldn't change just because he liked it the way it was.

Once you get accustomed to the fact that the book just won’t do what its cover promises it will, it’s entertaining enough, although not all of Turbervill’s dogmatic opinions withstand scrutiny. ‘T20’, he insists without explanation, ‘does not lend itself to great cricket writing.’ Well, why not? You can make a presentable argument that there have been more great baseball writers than great cricket writers, and their game (as Turbervill observes more than once) lasts about as long as a T20 match.

Turbervill concludes by insisting that supporters of red-ball cricket should ‘try to resist’ its extinction. That’s a worthy cause, although it may require a better-reasoned foundation than anything offered in The Final Test. Something like the World Cricket Association's report, Protecting History, Embracing Change, would be a better place to start.

Blood on the Tracks (David Tossell, Fairfield Books)

The cricket tour book is an institution older than Test cricket itself: Fred Lillywhite created the genre in 1860 when he wrote a book covering “The English Cricketers’ Trip to Canada and the United States”. Once it served a very clear purpose: most readers hadn’t seen the games the books described, and a tour book provided an authoritative account of something that had occurred on the other side of the world, far out of sight. Today, we scarcely have tours to write books about, and when they do occur, anyone with the right subscription and the capacity to cope with a few late nights can watch the games as they unfold.

So is there still a place for the tour book? It’s a question that David Tossell skirts around in Blood on the Tracks, his account of the 1974-75 Ashes tour. This, of course, was the season in which Australia unleashed Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee on Mike Denness’ hapless England, winning the series emphatically, by four Tests to the one which Thomson missed, and from which Lillee was removed by injury early on.

The first thing to say about Blood on the Tracks is that it is an extraordinarily thorough and detailed account of that tour. Tossell has read every account ever written of these matches (including the two previous books devoted to the tour), trawled through countless interviews and videotapes, and made contact with almost every survivor of the series – all of which has been distilled into as complete a chronological account of the tour as you could hope for. He’s a diligent and accurate researcher, although he seems to believe, wrongly, that Dennis Lillee didn’t have a moustache in 1972, and he thinks that the scorer John Sandes was nicknamed “J.E.” (he was universally, and ironically, known as “Silent”). Still, if those are the only errors you make in a book like this, you’ve done well. If anyone wants to know where Dennis Amiss hit his boundaries in the third Test, or who dropped Keith Fletcher in the slips in Brisbane, or what Bob Taylor got up to when he wasn’t playing, this is the book they should consult.

But that strength – which is considerable, and shouldn’t be dismissed lightly – is also a drawback. For the most part, this is a book that Fred Lillywhite would have recognised: its primary purpose is to tell you what happened. And that’s a limitation.

The 1974-75 Ashes was the first series I ever watched from start to finish. Because of that, it’s imprinted on my memory. I can tell you, without consulting any external reference, that Australia made 309 in the first innings of the first Test, while England made 166 in the last. I remember that Ross Edwards hit each of the first five balls of the third day in Perth for two runs, and that Peter Lever’s figures in the last Test were 6-38. I even remember that Max Walker’s lowest score with the bat in the series was 17, his average of 44.20 surpassing every English player in the Tests.

All of which means that I’m not the ideal person to review Blood on the Tracks, because the overwhelming impression I had reading through it was that there’s nothing new here. It’s an immensely comprehensive trawl through the six Tests, but never quite conveys a sense of what the purpose of that journey is. At one point, Tossell interrupts the narrative to place the tour in the context of the changing relationship between Australia and the UK that followed the UK’s entry into the Common Market and the election of the Whitlam government. It’s the germ of a great idea, but immediately it recedes into the background. What could have been a key theme of the book ends up reading like a diversion. Similarly, there are fleeting discussions of the fraught relationship between the game’s administrators and its underpaid players, but again these aren’t worked into the fabric of the narrative. Nor is a suggestion that the 1974-75 series changed Test cricket by shifting the emphasis to attacks based on pace (a questionable premise anyway, given what had occurred in 1921, or 1932-33, or 1948, or 1954-55, or even 1970-71). Interesting connections are identified, but not explored. The title of the book is taken from the Bob Dylan album released in the middle of the tour, but Tossell just refers to this briefly, and moves on. Like the other non-cricketing references in the book, it feels tacked on, rather than worked in. (As an aside, despite the book’s lurid cover art, while the English batsmen suffered the odd cracked finger and John Edrich’s broken rib, the blood on the cricket pitch remained, during the series, strictly metaphorical.)

In an era when anyone who is interested in the 1974-75 Test series can watch great swathes of it on You Tube, lengthy descriptions of its matches serve little purpose. A tour book today needs to do something more – to illuminate aspects of the country where it happened, perhaps, or reveal something new about the players involved. Tossell takes tentative steps in each direction, but never goes very far before he returns to describing Colin Cowdrey batting for two hours while scoring 22, or where Derek Underwood placed his close catchers in Adelaide.

To the extent that there’s a consistent narrative theme, it’s that the English team was terrorised by pace. That’s true enough, as far as it goes, because Thomson bowled as fast as anyone before or since, to batsmen who didn’t have the protection of helmets, and some of the pitches assisted him (especially Brisbane with uneven bounce, and Perth with its uncommon pace and bounce). Yet it’s also simplistic. Certainly Dennis Lillee was hostile (not least verbally), but by his own admission he didn’t try to bowl flat out until the fourth Test in Sydney. And Max Walker, who scared no one with pace, and the off-spinner Ashley Mallett, both took as many wickets in the series as any English bowler. A case can be made that Walker and Mallett owed at least some of their success to the pressure created by Lillee and Thomson, but that doesn’t really happen here: too often, Tossell just reaches for the most inflammatory quotes about the intimidatory nature of the Australian bowling, and simply repeats them at face value. David Lloyd is quoted as saying that Lillee and Thomson bowled “four or five bouncers” each eight-ball over – an exaggeration that should have been challenged rather than endorsed uncritically, especially since Thomson seldom bowled a conventional bouncer at all. Similarly, when Mike Denness is quoted as saying that Thomson didn’t bowl at the stumps, one obvious response is that he hit them four times in England’s second innings in Brisbane. Denness, again, is unchallenged when he says that “we encountered a new degree of pace out here and had no rest from it.” No rest? But during the series England faced more deliveries from Walker and Mallett than they did from Lillee and Thomson.

And yet, despite these reservations, there’s an audience for whom Blood on the Tracks will be excellent – anyone interested in the game, not old enough to remember the series but curious about it, will never find a fuller account of how the matches unfolded, or a more complete collection of the thoughts of the players involved in the series.

Max Bonnell

15 March 2025

Blood on the Tracks has been shortlisted for the MCC/Cricket Society Book of the Year Award. You can read Cricketweb's take here.

Young Vic (Max Bonnell, Red Rose Books)

In the Summer 2024-25 issue of 1876, the annual magazine for members of the Sydney Cricket Ground, Gideon Haigh wrote, yet again, about his reasons for not undertaking a “conventional biography” of Victor Trumper (1): "I…experienced misgivings. Three previous biographers [Jack Fingleton in 1978, and Peter Sharpham and Ashley Mallett both in 1985] had struggled to make much of [Vic]. The primary material was thin, his period remote, his contemporaries long gone, and the mythology thick indeed."

Haigh contended that “legend is an uneasy companion of biography, if not an outright enemy”. His compromise (a “bargain struck with the past”) was to focus largely on Trumper lore. To this end, he argued persuasively that an iconic, increasingly pervasive, image of the beau ideal has helped to consolidate and extend Victor’s stature as a combination of peerless cricketer and modest man. While Trumper’s timeless reputation was thereby enhanced, others, many of whom had superior records to the Australian’s first-class career statistics, and who possessed both sublime sporting talent and indomitable spirit, suffered from a naturally progressive diminution of their glory day brilliance. What they were lacking was the lustre of “an aesthetic signature”. Such an appealing perspective.

This recent “nostalgia” 1876 essay concluded with the explicit suggestion that George Beldam’s 1905 action photograph of Trumper ‘Stepping Out’ prevented his subject from becoming “no more than a distant name with a fading echo, a statistical remnant buried deep beneath a century’s further achievement”. Haigh doubts wherever an older version of himself would have appreciated the long since departed cricketer’s credentials, had he not been exposed as a youngster to such a photograph resonant of the gaiety and gallantry of unorthodox batsmanship. (2) Bold as this statement is, it rings hollow. However, that's not the focus of this review, rather more of a preface to the main story. Perhaps for the efforts of a future biographer but still, nevertheless, pertinent to what follows.

Well credentialed Australian cricket historian and prolific author, Max Bonnell, has taken the bit between the teeth and tested the depth of Victor Trumper’s immortality. In an engaging new publication, Young Vic: The Early Life of Victor Trumper, to be published in March 2025, Bonnell looks beyond what has gone before and asks whether there's any genuine opportunity to advance our appreciation of the roots of Trumper's artistry and talent - his "genius". In so doing, he suggests an avenue of historic enquiry that has lain dormant for well over a century.

Bonnell concurs with Haigh regarding previous efforts to explore, at least the early decades, of Trumper’s life, describing them as “imperfect” investigations. He strives, in his forensically clinical way, to examine how “an illegitimate child, born into hardship, with no cricket in his family and no material advantages, became the most memorable cricketer of his generation”. With the rationale for the book explicit upfront, Bonnell’s focus remains true to purpose throughout. In hindsight, however, he may have considered modifying his depiction of intent to include just Australian-based players. While Trumper’s unique credentials were heralded widely throughout the cricketing globe, his batting talents were far from universally acclaimed in the ‘Motherland’ after two lacklustre Ashes tours, with several English heroes of the first decade of the 20th Century held in higher esteem. A minor issue but one warranting consideration.

The author is at his best when discussing Trumper’s ancestry. He begins by dispensing with the historically thorny issue of illegitimacy, a matter which had proved, under advisement, an unnecessary confounder, a bridge too far, for biographers Fingleton and Mallett. In the 1870s and beyond in colonial Australia, as in the Motherland, bastardry was still a blight on the character of all concerned - parents and children alike. So it remained for some, or so it seemed, a century later.

Distancing himself from such concerns, Bonnell argues persuasively, and for a range of reasons, as to why Charles Trumper and his wife Louisa (née Coghlan) are unlikely both to be Victor’s biological parents. He speculates then that there is some possibility that Louisa may be his mother. Exploring all ancestral research avenues, Bonnell admits to coming up with blanks. No birth certificate for Victor has been found. Nor is it ever likely to materialise. Adoption records are non existent, such documentation not being required until well into the second decade of the 20th Century when the process was legally formalised in New South Wales. The unfortunate loss by fire of the 1881 New South Wales household census forms was a likely calamitous blow for any would-be future biographer as it may have provided evidence of Victor’s place of residence when he was a mere toddler.

Bonnell asks all the pertinent questions, circles around the “tiny handful of inconclusive facts” (including the tantalising prospect that Trumper was born a year later than commonly believed) and concludes that there’s only “the most minuscule chance of the question [of who Victor’s biological parents were ] being answered a century and a half later”. As a lawyer, Bonnell is well positioned to advise that circumstantial evidence and guesswork are often uncomfortable bedfellows.

Ultimately, he concludes that, regardless of the “true nature” of the biological connection between Charles and Victor, the former carried out his fatherly duties in a caring and diligent fashion. Presumably, while not being explicit about Louisa’s maternal instincts, he assigns her much the same loving parental qualities.

Beyond the matter of the subject’s birth, Bonnell handles all the regular family parameters with aplomb. United Kingdom ancestry, migration to and from Australia and New Zealand, marriages, births and deaths of siblings and others, and the sites of various family abodes in the inner Sydney suburbs during the period under review (broadly 1870-1900) are noted in a fashion far clearer than in the past. Added to which, specific sources of information are provided as endnotes. A small quibble with the extensive referencing from newspapers and the like. Page numbers of cited issues of broadsheets, tabloids, magazines and gazettes are not provided. For devotees driven to agonise over all materials this is more than a minor issue, one that could have been remedied by a mere click of the mouse.

A matter of far greater consequence and perhaps the weakest (we are keen to suggest ‘least informative’ because, truly, the book is a superior product overall) element of Young Vic is the paucity of attention which Bonnell gives to poverty as an endemic feature of the Trumper domestic, community and commercial world. This lacuna is far from an unknown circumstance as the author himself acknowledges from the outset. Bonnell’s most explicit commentary about the pervasiveness of poverty in inner Sydney during the mid to late 19th Century is contained within two brief, albeit graphic, paragraphs:

"For at least three generations, the Trumper family was stalked by premature death. Like most working-class people, they lived in cramped houses in inner-city suburbs, served by only the most primitive sanitation. Contagious bacteria thrived in these environments, where it could be hazardous simply to breathe the air or drink the water."

And:

"Surry Hills was not a comfortable neighbourhood. There’s a whole sub-genre of Australian fiction about the hardship of growing up poor in Surry Hills. Its small, dingy terrace houses were jammed up against factories and workshops in narrow, pungent streets. Drainage was inadequate, poverty endemic and crime was common…"

Bonnell is onto something important here but baulks at consolidating his argument. Any number of selected passages from the fine body of Australian fiction that flags the desperate straits within which Australian middle- and lower-class urban dwellers toiled throughout the second half of the 19th Century and beyond, would have enlivened and coloured his account. Writers of the calibre of Ruth Park, Kylie Tennant, Lewis Rodd, Henry Lawson, Louis Stone, Christina Stead and, more recently, Helen Garner, among others, are all sensitive observers of the squalor of life in the Sydney slums, and, importantly, of the human capacity to ‘make do’ by various organisational, familial and personal means even without access to state welfare or religious and benevolent charity systems. In his short account, Bonnell has, perhaps through necessity, foregone an opportunity to provide an additional layer of insight by blending the heightened allure of fiction, with its capacity to allow the poor to speak for themselves, with his more prosaic narrative.

The essence of Bonnell’s treatise is that, somehow, Victor Trumper, despite growing up in an environment of extreme vulnerability (notwithstanding that his father/elder male in the household was gainfully employed throughout the entirety of his youth), was able to survive, and indeed, thrive in his chosen field without any significant cricketing heritage.

The explanation of this phenomenon is disappointingly thin. Fundamentally, Bonnell’s account fails to address the structural causes of poverty in New South Wales for the entirety of the period under review. As Anne O’Brien, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, wrote in the foreword to her seminal 1988 graphic portrayal of the extent of destitution in the “working man’s paradise”, Poverty’s Prison: The Poor in New South Wales 1880-1918 (5):

"As the central economic unit, the family was very vulnerable: to fluctuations in the macroeconomy, to environmental pressures such as poor housing and serious illness, and to a patriarchal ordering of social relationships. It was also vulnerable to having too many dependent members at any one time, as well as to sheer bad luck. In analysing structural causes of poverty [my] book uncovers destitution in a land of plenty."

Several disciplinary branches of Australian historical scholarship provide an impressively detailed and compelling theoretical body of work which describes and explains the grim realities of the final quarter of 19th Century urban life for the working classes. (6) Researchers include those with a focus on urban studies, social geography, social collectives, economic history, labour politics and the working classes, poverty, feminist history, transport and the family. Some names that spring readily to mind include Jenny Lee, Shirley Fitzgerald, Max Solling, Christopher Keating, Brett Lennon, Garry Wotherspoon, Max Kelly, Eric Fry, Michael Gilding, Jill Roe and Robin Walker. And the list goes on.

It would have been useful for Bonnell to allude to the work of at least some of these diligent researchers and capable authors in contextualising the circumstances of Victor Trumper’s prodigious early cricketing stature in an otherwise unremarkable (for the times) upbringing. Two examples, below, suffice to suggest how such inclusions may have enhanced his account.

First, given that the author focuses on Charles Trumper’s long career as a Sydney boot maker, “boot-clicker” or “clicker”, it seems appropriate to explore the extent to which pedestrianism remained the major form of transportation even in the last quarter of the 19th Century. A two or three mile walk to and from work at the factory or docks or building block was considered unexceptionable for the time. Horses were expensive to buy and fares for horse-drawn carriages were steep. A system of tramways (first steam and later electric) was established in Sydney between 1880 and 1884 as the city expanded to the west and, to a lesser extent, the south. However, the price of a trip from an inner suburb to the heart of the city was an initially prohibitive 3d. (7)

As a corollary, knowledge about the number of tradesmen (skilled and unskilled) working in the shoe industry during this period and where they were located would be valuable. How competitive a trade was it and how cut-throat did manufacturing and retailing become as a consequence of changes in technology? What impact did mechanisation have on full time employment and on part-time and casual labour? And what was the typical wage of a factory employee? This is but one example of how contextualising a major commercial activity might enhance our appreciation of individual circumstances. So important if a family’s well-being was dependent on the breadwinner (overwhelming the father) mastering a trade and thereby ensuring his viability as a provider. (8)

Shirley Fitzgerald (née Fisher), for many years the City of Sydney’s Historian, with overall responsibility for the collecting, cataloguing and displaying of the City Council’s historic archive, undertook a review of the urban workforce by occupational groups in the 1980s. Boot and shoemakers figure prominently in her oft quoted classic study Rising Damp. (9) She describes how mechanisation of the boot industry saw a proliferation of factories in Sydney with a concomitant deskilling at the individual level but increased output per worker:(10):

"The total output of boots and shoes for Sydney in 1870 was estimated to be about 15,000 a week. The industry was strongly located in the city, and the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo immediately south of the city. Factories employed more hands, rather than proliferating. For the colony as a whole, the number of boot factories had been reduced over the twenty-year period, while employment doubled. In eight New South Wales factories over 100 hands were employed in 1891, with one factory employing 290."

The wages paid varied according to skill, age (school-age boys and girls were often employed for a pittance) and gender, with male clickers, considered to be among the more expert and paid accordingly, earning perhaps as much as £2/10s a week in return for working 10-hour days “all year round”, as Bonnell notes from a column in the Sydney Morning Herald. (11)

From another column in the same issue of the Herald, we learn that the overall Sydney labour market was tight with “general labourers of all classes walking about in large numbers” unable to procure work. However, the boot and shoe trade was less affected by the depression than other branches of industry, notwithstanding the fact that there was a “slackness of work” and [boot and shoe men were also] walking about”. In a quintessential Australian way, coopers were considered to be the “only tradesmen enjoying anything like brisk times”! (12)

Charles’s bold decision, as described by Bonnell, to leave steady employment, which provided a reasonable wage, to establish his own shoemaking business (in partnership with Arthur Brown who likely provided the requisite financial capital) was full of risk. He likely realised that a fixed salary would always be insufficient to extricate his growing brood from strapped circumstances. He knew too that, in the mid to late 19th Century, people (more often than not women) tended to shop locally with Sydney already splintering into distinct socio-economic groups based on class divisions. (13)

To this end it seems probable that Trumper and Brown marketed the wares of JW Ward Bootmaker in ways that promoted their standing within the local community. As Max Solling noted in his social history of the nearby suburb of Glebe, and which has relevance throughout the inner city, retailers and their wholesale suppliers, needed to rely on “the continuous patronage of a relatively small but fairly concentrated clientele”. (14)

The pair’s prospects of commercial success would have been heavily dependent on their capacity to restrain manufacturing and labour expenses while maximising profits. Charles’s lengthy union affiliations (Bonnell points out that he was elected President of the Sydney branch of the Boot Trade Union in 1892) would seemingly have meant that he and Brown paid their employees wages at least the equivalent of their competitors. The business was successful enough over the course of the next several years for Charles to be able to relocate his family from a small Surry Hills rented tenement to a larger house in the more salubrious adjacent suburb of Paddington in 1896, and a short while later to an even airier terrace house in the same suburb. While still a tenant, he would by then have been optimistic of future prospects, perhaps even contemplating land and house ownership. (15)

Extrapolating from known details, Bonnell fills in as much of this period of the Charles Trumper family saga as he can through assiduous research and careful assessment of motivation. His scholarship here is impressive. What he may usefully have added was that Charles possessed an exceptional degree of spirit and grit that helped him confront significant adversity and challenges. Qualities that could be witnessed by members of his close family circle and, perhaps, emulated and channelled into their own areas of endeavour. As an adult, Victor was an astute observer of life and behaviour, far more so than has been traditionally alleged and retold ad infinitum. In his formative years, the young man would have been fully aware of Charles’s determination to improve his, and his family’s, circumstances. And he would have admired his father’s doggedness to succeed.

A key component of Bonnell’s treatise is attempting to explain the improbable. How did Victor Trumper’s ascendancy to cricketing grandeur occur given his socially humble beginnings? The overview of the early stages of Victor’s career from eagerness to participate as a youngster in regular morning practice on the green, open spaces around Moore Park, through his Fort Street Superior High School match performances and his emergence as a club and then representative cricketer of rare talent is well depicted. As is the sense of growing pride shown by his father as the teenager matures towards manhood. Yet there is a missing contextual feature of the late colonial New South Wales era which, with due consideration, has the potential to shine some light on the question as to how the young boy’s nascent talent at cricket expanded exponentially in an apparent familial sporting vacuum. This missing factor is the increasingly significant concept of contested sport, and recreational physical exercise more broadly, as an important element of popular culture.

In the last quarter of the 19th Century the colonial working and wage earning classes in the inner, factory-dense, suburbs of Australian cities, and in some of the larger country towns, were defined by

their “patterns of housing, work and consumption”. (16) However, as Richard Waterhouse, among others, contends, they would also come to be distinguished, at a period when the luxury of leisure time was becoming more widespread, by recreational activities which were closely tied to their community identity and status. (17) As part of this process, particular aspirational values and competitive attitudes were attached to participating in contested games or watching others play. Qualities such as setting goals, undertaking hard work, and testing oneself through personal risk and sacrifice, were becoming important features within the social and cultural milieu among the working classes of colonial society.

Concurrently, there were also emerging ideas about club allegiances and neighbourhood affiliations, group co-operation, inclusiveness, and ethics of care between participants. Much of the essence of cricket, and of the game’s hallowed laws appear, at least superficially, to be wholly amenable to such ideals and beliefs. The momentum of this dynamic cultural force was burgeoning in New South Wales just as Victor Trumper, with a free-spirited mindset and with firm personal motivations, was just getting into his stride. His determination to succeed at his chosen sport was deeply rooted while he was still living at home with his parents and siblings.

In this review two possible avenues for further development of Bonnell’s Young Vic, have been presented. There are other features of Trumper’s early days that could be expanded profitably. For example, more could be made of his school boy experiences. Charles Rudd’s personal account of his schooling at Fort Street in the first decade of the 20th Century in his A Gentle Shipwreck, an engrossing social history of the era, before and during the First World War (18), is a goldmine of intimate details which might add substance to what are generally known, bare-boned, generic facts of Trumper's years at the same school.

Notwithstanding these suggestions, this reviewer has nothing but praise for Bonnell’s excellent crystallisation of the known circumstances of the formative years of Victor Trumper and for the additional details that he’s uncovered which add immeasurably to the information base about the cricketer’s early life. Although the author suggests that all that happened after Vic’s selection for the 1899 Ashes Tour of England is already known, and that as a consequence a biography is unnecessary, it seems there remains an opening for a diligent biographer to test that assertion.

Peter Lloyd

Notes:

(1) G Haigh, "A Thousand Words", 1876, Summer 2024-25, pp28-31

(2) Haigh, G. (2009) “Top Shot That”, Portrait 34, National Portrait Gallery. See: https://www.portrait.gov.au/magazines/34/top-shot-that

(3) The population of Surry Hills in 1871 was around 15,000, doubling over the next twenty years. While housing stock (of poor quality) was increasing apace, overcrowding was becoming a significant problem, with “five or six people occupying a two- or three-room house”. See: M. Kelly (ed) (1978) Nineteenth Century Sydney, University of Sydney Press, Sydney, p. 71

(4) O’Brien, A. (1988), Poverty's Prison: The Poor in New South Wales 1880-1918, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, p. 2

(5) Jenny Lee and Charles Fahey provide an excellent summation of the reasons why the working classes in Australian cities did not share in the fruits of the periods of national economic boom between the early 1860s and about 1891. See: Lee, J and Fahey, C. (1986) “A Boom for Whom? Some Developments in the Australian Market, 1870-1891”, Labour History, Number 50, pp. 1-27

(6) Wilson, R.et al (1970) The Red Lines: The Tramway System of the Western Suburbs of Sydney, Australian Electric Traction Association, Sydney, p. 7

(7) Fisher, S. (1985) “The family and the Sydney economy in the late nineteenth century” in P Grimshaw et al (eds) Families in Colonial Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, pp. 153-6

(8) Fitzgerald, S. (1987) Rising Damp: Sydney 1870-90, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. 147-50

(9) ibid, p 149

(10) Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 1880, p. 7. Fitzgerald reports 48 shillings a week for a male clicker and 23 shillings for a female doing the same work.

(11) ibid

(12) Fitzgerald, S. (1987), op cit, p. 227

(13) Solling, M. (2007) Grandeur and Grit: A History of Glebe, Halstead Press, Sydney, p. 10

(14) See RV Jackson (1970), “Owner-Occupation of Houses in Sydney, 1871-1891, Australian Economic History Review: Urbanization in Australia, Volume X, No 2, pp. 138-54 for an account of the percentage of tenanted and owner-occupied private dwellings by Sydney suburb. The percentage of tenanted dwellings in Surry Hills in 1891 was 86 of 4,513 houses; and 77 percent in Paddington of 3,141 houses.

(15) Solling, M. (2007), op cit, p. 181

(16) Waterhouse, R. (1995) Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788, Longman, Sydney, pp. 112-14. See also Waterhouse, R. (1908) “Culture and Customs”, Dictionary of Sydney at https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/culture_and_customs

(17) Rudd, LC (1975) A Gentle Shipwreck, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne

And Cricketweb's review is here.

Fearless (Mohinder Amarnath with Rajinder Amarnath, published by Harper Collins)

Not that I’ve checked, or anything, but my guess is that probably 75%, or more, of cricket books published by mainstream publishers are ghosted player autobiographies. The reason, of course, is that they generally sell well, despite the fact that, as David Foster Wallace put it, “the sports-star-“with”-somebody-autobiography” is too often “breathtakingly insipid”. Wallace described sports memoirs, which he loved, as “almost uniformly poor as books.” Fearless, a memoir by Mohinder Amarnath “with” his brother Rajinder, isn’t much good as a book. But it’s certainly not insipid, and it’s worth a couple of hours of your time.

Mohinder played in the years before Indian cricket emerged as the dominant force in the game, and perhaps he’s not as well-remembered as he should be. In 69 Tests between 1969 and 1988, he averaged 42.50 with the bat – the kind of performance which, at that time, was achieved only by very fine players. Probably the peak of his career came in 1983, when he enjoyed a phenomenally successful series in the West Indies, bravely defying Holding, Roberts, Garner and Marshall to hit 598 runs at 66. A few months later, he played a key role in India’s unexpected triumph in the World Cup. You may remember that he was Player of the Match in the final – but he was Player of the Match in the semi-final, too, as much for his miserly spell of medium-pace as for his batting. Upon his return home, he suffered a catastrophic loss of form: scores of 4 and 7 against Pakistan were followed by three Tests against the West Indies in which his six innings produced only a single run. But Mohinder was resilient: recalled to play against Pakistan the following season, he responded by hitting an unbeaten, match-saving century. So he was a very fine player, whose career spanned an interesting period of Indian cricket, and that alone makes Fearless worth reading.

Harper Collins is not a publisher with slender resources: would it have killed them to engage a fact-checker? Fearless is riddled with distracting and avoidable errors. Some are minor: the Australian touring team arrived in India in 1969, not 1968, and the match in which Mohinder scored 49 not out and took four wickets for Northern Punjab was his third first-class match, not his first. England’s off-spinner was named Pocock, not Paddock. Others are plain weird: the Second World War did not last for twelve years, although Mohinder twice asserts that it did. Mohinder says that Australia selected eight debutants for the first Test in 1977-78, but he gets to that number by including Tom Brooks and Max O’Connell, who were the umpires in that match.

But you’re not reading Fearless for the facts. What you want are the glimpses behind the curtain, and that’s what it delivers. Mohinder writes compellingly about the experience of being the son of a celebrated cricketer – Lala Amarnath, the first batsman to score a Test century for India. Lala (“Papaji”) emerges as a stern but devoted parent, whose firm guidance – tempered by warm encouragement – steered his three sons into first-class cricket, and Mohinder and Surinder into the Indian team. Mohinder, it seems, reciprocated with a mixture of love, respect and awe. Yet Lala was strong-willed, controversial and not universally popular in Indian cricket: every time Mohinder is dropped from the Indian team, he attributes the decision to a faction within the game opposed to his father. No doubt there’s some truth in this, although it has to be said that, in the six-year gap between his first Test and his second, Mohinder’s performances in domestic cricket hardly made a compelling case for his selection. Omitted from a one-day tournament in 1986, he asks: “Was I dropped because of my performance, injury or machination? Most likely machination” – which is the same answer he gives every time he’s excluded. Dropped for the twelfth time, he gave a newspaper interview in which he denounced the selectors as “a pack of jokers”. His father disagreed, insisting that he should have included the rest of the BCCI in the pack. Unfortunately, in Fearless, Mohinder never descends to specifics on this issue, so it’s hard to understand who he thinks was out to get him, or why.

He's good on his first Test match, against Australia in 1969-70. When he was given the ball to open the bowling, his instructions were, “Just one over” and “do not shine the ball” – at which point, it dawned on him that he was only there to roughen up the ball for the spinners. As his Indian team blazer had not arrived, he wore his Indian Schoolboys blazer instead. He has little to say about his disastrous season in 1983-84, attributing his initial failure to illness and the rest to loss of form, although there’s a touching scene at the end of the series, when Michael Holding offers his sympathies. And there are plenty of illuminating stories from inside the Indian dressing room, including the player who (Amarnath implies) invented an injury to avoid facing Jeff Thomson in Perth, and the surprising information that Srinivas Venkataraghavan (more recently known as an expressionless umpire) possessed a volatile temper in his playing days.

The dominant figures in the Indian team early in Amarnath’s career were Bishan Bedi and Sunil Gavaskar. He writes warmly about Bedi, who offered him plenty of support and encouragement. While he has nothing negative to say about Gavaskar, their relationship seems to have been based on deep mutual respect rather than any great warmth – although they did laugh together over practical jokes.

Fearless is conventional in its structure, beginning with Amarnath’s childhood, and tracing his progress through the game in a strictly chronological fashion. It’s formulaic, and edited clumsily (if at all). But for all its flaws, it gives the impression that you’re hearing Mohinder’s authentic voice – a blend of determination, respect, self-belief and defiance. There’s little by way of introspection or self-reflection, but then it's likely that it was his refusal to doubt himself that made him the player he was. Perhaps, as a book, Fearless isn’t especially good: but as an individual perspective on a fine career and an important period of Indian cricket, it’s consistently interesting.

You can read Cricketweb's opinion on it here.

Max Bonnell, 30 January 2025

Cricket’s Lost Prodigy: The Story of Karl Schneider (Michael Lefebvre: published by Cricketbooks.com.au, $60, limited edition of 200)

Since 2011, the books in Ken Piesse’s Nostalgia Series have told the stories of a number of lesser-known, yet very interesting, Australian cricketers. The latest is this immaculately researched biography of Karl Schneider by Melbourne writer Michael Lefebvre.

In the first third of the twentieth century, Australian cricket produced a number of immensely gifted batsmen whose promise was never realised before their untimely deaths. Norman Callaway was killed in action in France; Frank O’Keefe succumbed to peritonitis; Archie Jackson contracted tuberculosis; and Karl Schneider was only 23 when he died from leukemia. By then Schneider, a left-handed batsman who never grew any taller than five feet two inches, had emerged as a greatly accomplished cricketer who held legitimate expectations of an international career. His biographer suggests, and with good reason, that had Schneider not fallen ill, he was on a trajectory that may have earned him selection in the Test team in 1928-29.

Karl Schneider was (like Michael Lefebvre) educated at Melbourne’s Xavier College before proceeding (although only briefly) to Melbourne University. This gives Lefebvre the tremendous advantage that Schneider’s brief life is extensively documented, partly because he attended the kinds of institutions that preserve records, and partly because his family saved a vast cache of letters, clippings and photographs. There’s a diary, there are letters to his family, even photographs Schneider took in New Zealand while touring with an Australian team in 1927-28. Besides these, Lefebvre has mined with great thoroughness all the usual sources – especially contemporary newspapers – to create a remarkably comprehensive picture of his subject’s life.

Schneider first attracted attention while he was studying at Xavier. A well-organised batsman who bowled right-arm leg breaks, he was also (despite his lack of size) an outstanding Australian Rules footballer. Xavier emerges from this account both well and badly: it generously provided Schneider with opportunity and encouragement, yet it also extracted a price, urging Schneider to remain at school after he had matriculated so that the college could win more sporting premierships. Schneider spent one year longer at school than was necessary, a decision that resulted in him dominating schoolboy contests when he might have been better occupied testing himself at a more challenging level. Schneider made his first-class debut while still at school; in his first match for Victoria, against Tasmania, his praiseworthy innings of 55 was rather overshadowed by Bill Ponsford’s world record score of 429.

Schneider’s progress after school was not entirely smooth. He filled his first year at Melbourne University with so much cricket, football, rowing and general enjoyment of life that he managed to fail all but one of his subjects in first year Arts (an academic performance that does not sit easily with Lefebvre’s description of him as a “scholar”). The Victorian selectors overlooked him for the Sheffield Shield team, preferring to stick with veterans like Vernon Ransford. Expecting to be sent down from University, Schneider jumped at the opportunity to move to Adelaide, where he had an offer of employment and the near-certainty of a place in the State team.

In Adelaide, Schneider flourished. The job intended for him never materialized, but he ended up employed by the stockbroker and cricket administrator, Harry Hodgetts, who later employed Donald Bradman after his move to South Australia. He played football for Norwood, cricket for East Torrens, and enjoyed two highly productive seasons for South Australia, averaging over fifty in each of them. When Bradman scored a century against South Australia on his first-class debut, Schneider responded with a hundred of his own. He won a place in the Australian team that toured New Zealand at the end of 1927-28, from which it’s fair to conclude that the selectors thought he had prospects of playing against England the following season. But already he had developed leukemia, for which no cure then existed, and before the new season opened, he was gone.

Lefebvre is a lawyer, and he writes as a lawyer should: he’s clear, direct, precise and factual. On the whole, this is a good thing: if you want to know where Schneider was at any moment in his life, or what he did there, this is the book you should consult. This is Lefebvre’s first cricket book, and his accuracy is very impressive (although Percy Hornibrook bowled left-arm spin rather than "medium pace"). Against that, the book’s structure is rigidly chronological, so there are times when the relentless accumulation of detail becomes slightly numbing. Each significant match Schneider played, and every important innings, is summarised, as well as many less important ones, which on the one hand is admirably comprehensive, but on the other results in a few too many sentences like this: “In reply, New South Wales could muster only 198 despite all their top order starting well – Charlie Macartney and Alan Kippax each making 43 – save for Jackson who made his first duck in big cricket.” It’s all correct and informative: there’s just a lot of it. Lefebvre tends to present the facts, leaving it up to the reader to draw conclusions from them, and while that’s certainly a reasonable method, I could have done with a little more of Lefebvre’s own analysis, since the judgments he does present are well-reasoned and interesting.

Like all the books in the Nostalgia Series, it’s beautifully presented and profusely illustrated. It's recommended to anyone with an interest in the period, and available from Ken Piesse’s cricketbooks.com.au, here: https://cricketbooks.com.au/product/lefebvre-michael-crickets-lost-prodigy-due-in-the-new-year/

And you can read Gideon Haigh's review here. Cricketweb's opinion is here.

Posted: 4 January 2025

Bill Edrich: The Many Lives of England’s Cricket Great (Leo McKinstry, Bloomsbury, $38.69)

Leo McKinstry has written so extensively on both cricket and the RAF during the Second Word War that the only real surprise about Bill Edrich: The Many Lives of England’s Cricket Great is that it’s taken him so long to write it. Edrich, of course, played cricket for England on either side of the war, and during it he served with great distinction in the RAF.

Edrich was one of the most famous English cricketers of his day, his name inevitably bracketed with Denis Compton’s since the summer of 1947, when both Middlesex batsmen broke the record for the most runs in a first-class season. Compton ended the season with 3816 runs, Edrich with 3539, and they scored a ridiculous 30 centuries between them. It’s a safe bet that these are feats that will never be repeated. But there was more to Edrich than one golden summer. Because he was born in Norfolk, the rules required him to spend two years qualifying for Middlesex, but in his first year playing for the county, he passed 2000 runs and in his second, 1938, he began in such spectacular fashion that he passed 1000 runs before the end of May. That earned him a place in the England side, but he struggled so badly against Australia and South Africa that his first eleven Test innings produced only 88 runs before he broke through with 219 in the second innings of the notorious Timeless Test. The War then cost him what should have been six of his peak cricketing seasons. Afterwards, he played bravely and pugnaciously in a losing cause in Australia in 1946-47, and might have been a regular member of the Test side for several seasons but for the fact that the selectors (and Bob Wyatt in particular) refused to pick him between 1950 and 1953, not because of his batting, but because of his drinking.

McKinstry covers all this fluently, crisply and accurately. He’s right, I think, to conclude that “Edrich never quite lived up to” his early promise, because “rich periods of success were matched by troughs of failure”. The real challenge for a biographer of Edrich isn’t the cricket, however, but the life, which was every bit as messy as you’d expect from a man who married five times. Edrich was a compulsive philanderer and a very heavy drinker. His exile from the Test team occurred after he drank so heavily on the Sunday night of the Old Trafford Test against the West Indies, that he needed help from the night porter to return to his room.

McKinstry suggests that Edrich’s drinking and womanising were consequences of his time in the RAF, a response to post-traumatic stress disorder. This is a serious argument, and undoubtedly contains some truth. Edrich was a bomber pilot, and that was as hazardous a role as the armed services could offer – from the low-level raid that earned Edrich his DFC, 12 of the 54 British planes did not return. It seems likely that Edrich suffered from some form of breakdown during the war; his service file has been redacted, and he was removed from active service before the war ended. And it’s certainly true that many former pilots responded to the profound strain of their time in the air by self-medicating with alcohol and never knowingly missing a party. Yet the connection between Edrich’s time in the RAF and his drinking and philandering isn’t explored in any detail, nor does McKinstry address the complication that Edrich was already an enthusiastic drinker and chaser of women long before the war. There’s a more complex picture here, one feels, which McKinstry has not quite managed to fill out.

Which leads, inevitably, to the women, and here, in my view, McKinstry misses the real issue. Why Edrich was so perpetually thirsty for sex is a question that surely contains its own answer: the more interesting problem is why he kept on getting married. He must have known, two or three marriages in, how it was likely to end up, yet he persisted in marrying again and again, when it was obvious that he was not emotionally equipped for much more than a quick fling. Was he trying to satisfy some deep emotional need? Was it that he needed someone to provide for him domestically – the cleaning, washing and cooking? Was he just foolish? McKinstry doesn’t really go there. He quotes a friend of Edrich’s as authority for the proposition that he “loved women”, but that’s too glib a conclusion, and in any case doesn’t explain why he treated so many women so poorly.

McKinstry seems to have spoken with just about everyone alive who had meaningful contact with Edrich, including several family members, and this allows him to present a rounded portrait of his subject. He doesn’t shy away from his subject’s flaws although, not unnaturally, he tries to present Edrich in a favourable light wherever he can, and he quotes a couple of people who insist on how nice a man Edrich was, comparing him to Compton, who had a “nasty streak”. Perhaps, though, that edge of steel was one reason for the difference between Compton’s Test batting average of 50, and Edrich’s 40? It’s not a question that McKinstry asks – instead, he points out that Edrich’s Test performances between 1946 and 1950 were outstanding, and implies that only the selectors’ unreasonable decision to drop him in 1950 prevented him from finishing with a better record. He might be right: but he’s also too harsh on the selectors here. There are plenty of good reasons not to select a player who becomes insensibly drunk in the middle of a Test match, not the least of which is the risk of destabilising the rest of the team. It’s true that Edrich scored 71 in the Old Trafford Test of 1950, but most of those runs were scored before his late-night drinking escapades, and in the next Test he was dismissed for 8 and 8. How many opportunities do you give to a drunk?

McKinstry is at his best when dealing with Edrich’s undoubted qualities, particularly his bravery both during the war and when batting against Lindwall and Miller after it. His reward came when he was part of the England team that regained the Ashes at the Oval in 1953 – he was at the crease, unbeaten on 55, when the winning runs were scored – although, in an apt metaphor for his career, those runs were scored by Denis Compton, who stole the show yet again.

Still, Edrich was more than a sidekick. He was a talented, combative batsman and a courageous pilot, whose colourful life receives a balanced consideration in this book. It’s available here.

Max Bonnell, 4 January 2025

A Striking Summer (Stephen Brenkley, Fairfield Books)

In A Striking Summer, Stephen Brenkley, formerly the cricket correspondent for the Independent, takes on the Ashes series of 1926, a contest that coincided with a period of industrial unrest in England, including a long-running miners’ strike, and a nine-day General Strike in May. It’s a wonderful idea: there should be more cricket histories that locate the game in its wider social context. Unfortunately, having assembled a great deal of interesting material, Brenkley has never really decided what use to make of it.

The book’s basic thesis is that, in a turbulent period in England, cricket somehow cut through to reach everybody and provide a feeling of social cohesion. By winning the Ashes, he writes, the England team “united a troubled country.” Similarly, the “nation… despite its woes, was enthralled.” Or this: “The country was essentially broke, unemployment was still rising steeply in many areas, society was divided, but the Ashes … well, the Ashes were a panacea.”

Of course, you could take another view of things. You could argue that cricket didn’t actually heal the divisions in English society, but exactly reflected them. You could say that “Society was still divided… and cricket … perfectly embodied this.” You could say that interest in cricket was no more than a “bandage”, that covered up the country’s problems but did nothing to solve them. Those quotes, of course, are also from A Striking Summer. Now, you can make a case that cricket was a vital unifying force, and you can make a case that it perfectly embodied deep social divisions. Trying to do both at the same time only creates a terribly muddled narrative.

Not only is it unclear what Brenkley’s trying to say, but the structure of the book is also cluttered and difficult to follow. Brenkley opens his account of the season by considering the selection of England’s team for the crucial fifth Test, which is an excellent, dramatic starting point. But the next chapter retraces the progress of contests between England and Australia since the AIF tour of 1919, including summaries of each Test. At the point where some narrative momentum should be building, instead we read “Australia 267 (Collins 70, Hearne 3-77) and 581 (Armstrong 158, Collins 104, Kelleway 78, Bardsley 57, Taylor 51, Parkin 3-102)…” It’s informative, if you don’t know much about cricket in this period, but it’s not effective storytelling. Similarly, every time the story starts to move, it’s interrupted by brief profiles of personalities, starting with the England selectors. Just when you should be thinking about the lead-up to the Test at Leeds, you get a 200-word profile of Tommy Andrews.

Brenkley follows the progress of the miners’ strike in parallel with the progress of the Test series. But he seldom really demonstrates how the two things interacted. Here, there’s an obvious device that could have been used to tie the two strands of the book together – Harold Larwood, who made his England debut during the series, had been a miner. He certainly had friends and family – his father was a miner – affected by the strike. Yet this is all that the book has to say on the subject: He “was a pit pony boy at 14 and working the night shift hewing coal in an underground tunnel about three feet high when he was 17.” How, in a book about the miners' strike, can you not do more with that material?

The book is also marred by some strange judgments. Somehow Brenkley believes that Australians thought that Percy Chapman had been “plucked from virtual obscurity” to become England’s captain. But Chapman had already toured Australia twice, playing four Tests there, and had played in three of the first four Tests in 1926, so there was nothing “obscure” about him at all. Brenkley also asserts that the 1926 Ashes was an “epic” series, and England’s success was a “magnificent achievement”. Really? The Australian team was dreadfully weak: two of its leading batsmen failed completely, and its attack, selected for a dry summer of firm pitches, was useless on the damp, soggy surfaces it encountered. At any one time, four or five players were hobbled by injury, including the spearhead of the attack, Jack Gregory. Nonetheless, because the first four Tests were limited to three days each, the Australians were able to play above themselves to hold England to 0-0 until the final Test, played to a finish at The Oval, left them with nowhere to hide. There were two exceptional performances in the series: Macartney’s hundred at Leeds, and the opening stand between Sutcliffe and Hobbs at The Oval. Otherwise, apart from England’s well-deserved success, it was a dull and forgettable series. Only 104 balls were bowled at Nottingham: at Old Trafford, rain prevented either side from earning a first innings lead. This was not “epic”.

The enduring controversy that arose from the final Test was the handling of the Australian bowling during that crucial opening stand in England’s second innings. Stork Hendry later accused Bert Collins of fixing the match by deliberately keeping Hobbs and Sutcliffe at the crease. More sober judges thought that the Australian captain had been suckered into keeping the harmless Arthur Richardson in the attack longer than was sensible. Brenkley deals with all this in a couple of lines: “Collins resisted what must have been an overwhelming temptation to give Gregory a bash and was being criticised for not doing so even as Richardson laboured away on his leg-stump line. But this was to forget Gregory’s woebegone state for so much of the season.” The book gives three pages to scores and summaries of Tests played in 1920-21: surely the single most important tactical decision of the 1926 series deserves more detailed consideration than this.

It's no pleasure to criticise a book like this, which attempts something different, ambitious and worthwhile. Fairfield Books has made several important contributions to cricket literature, and should be commended for encouraging this project. But this one’s a misfire.

It’s available here. And a more enthusiastic review is here.