c Tindill b Cowie
Martin Chandler |Published: 2013
Pages: 94
Author: Palenski, Ron
Publisher: New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame
Rating: 3 stars
There have been many books written about the life and times of Don Bradman, who in purely bibliographical terms is without doubt the most famous cricketer there has been. Inevitably with many of these books there is much that overlaps, particular as many of them simply purport to be biographies.
I did read a Bradman biography once, that written by Irving Rosenwater, but that is the only one of the numerous books that I have about him that I have read from start to finish. The others have all been consulted from time to time, but I have never felt the urge to read another biography of Bradman.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t a good deal of other books, booklets or pamphlets on the subject of The Don that I have thoroughly enjoyed and, idly going through my shelves the other day this one came to my notice and joined that list. All I could recall was the reason I had never looked properly at the book before, that being that it had arrived in a parcel with a number of others from Australia, and that consequently as a rather modest looking paperback it was overlooked.
The part of Bradman’s life that c Tindill b Cowie deals with is his involvement with New Zealand or, perhaps more accurately, his lack of any real connection with the Shaky Isles, a nation he was to visit just twice, once en route to North America for the tour Arthur Mailey organised in 1932 and which doubled as Bradman’s honeymoon, and then to give a speech at a dinner almost forty years later. Bradman never did play cricket in New Zealand.
There were of course occasions when opposition sides in England and Australia included New Zealanders in their sides, but only once did Bradman come up against a New Zealand team, and it is that single game which is the main feature of this absorbing account. The occasion was a match between New Zealand, on their way home from their 1937 tour of England, and Bradman’s South Australia.
The New Zealanders were not a strong side, and they lost to South Australia by ten wickets. If that were not bad enough they missed out financially as well. The cause was double All Black wicketkeeper Eric ‘Snowy’ Tindill and their one top class bowler, Jack Cowie, combining shortly before the close of the first day to dismiss Bradman for just 11. It was an achievement to take pride in, but guaranteed to slash the numbers attending the next day.
The match itself gets a full description, a scorecard and a brief pen portrait of all who played, but there is a good deal more to the book than that. Bradman’s not inconsiderable number of opportunities to travel to the country, and the varying reasons for his not ultimately being able to are also discussed, as is the cricketing relationship between Australia and their neighbours over a period when the Australians viewed New Zealand as very much a second class cricketing nation.
All in all Ron Palenski’s book is a fascinating glimpse at just a single rarely considered aspect of the life of cricket’s greatest runscoring machine, and on that basis alone it is worthy of notice. For me it also introduced something that I had not previously taken on board, the less than glorious end to the life and career of stockbroker Harry Hodgett, the man who had brought Bradman to Adelaide and whose business failure seems to have paved the way for the success of Bradman’s own stockbroking business, an episode I shall certainly be trawling back through my Bradman library to learn more about
Leave a comment