Miller's tales
FRANK KEATING
Farewell and all hail. It would be amiss tor The Spectator not to add its amens to the panegyrics for Keith Miller. In England, the archetypal Australian hero's two papers of choice were Sporting Life and (for its classical music crits and, 1 fancy, Taki) The Spectator. Cricket knew him as 'Nugget' — 24-carat, precious. Adonis? The Donis. Wretchedly, by the time the imp's finger sent him on his way for the final time at 84, Miller's resplendently strapping physique had become a crumbled, ravaged thing. When Victor Trumper died in 1915 more than 20,000 citizens of Sydney lined the funeral route to Waverley cemetery. As then, the wide world of cricket was there in spirit this week as well, drums muffled and hats doffed, as Miller's cortege passed.
The paradigm Aussie in excelsis loved returning to England, to coincide with Epsom or Ascot so much the better. Miller was here long before he was show-stopper for Don Bradman's `Invincibles' of 1948, arriving first in the dark midwinter of 1943, hastily trained up as a dreadnought RAAF pilot to fly Beauforts and Mosquitoes for the RAF's 169 squadron. He had many a hairy 'scramble' and I was glad some obits quoted Keith's gloriously disparaging line about today's ninny sportsmen citing 'pressure' to excuse their failings. Said Miller, 'Pressure is flying at 2,000 feet with a Messerschmitt up your arse.' A half century ago, this weekly sporting corner of the Spec was inhabited by the north country Labour MP J.P.W. 'Curly' Maltalieu. None of us since have filled it better. In August 1953 at the Oval when England famously won back the Ashes, the force of Miller's personality still demanded a memorable paragraph from Mallalieu: 'Miller made one (off a no-hall) and nought. He took just two wickets. He let a ball go for four to give England a first innings lead ... But we knew he was there. Did the crowd object to his bumpers? He waved a hand at us and bowled another. Did we jeer when he failed to run the ball off his foot into his hand? He tried again next time, succeeded, and again waved his hand. Was all this playing to the gallery? Not at all. It was playing with it . . . a boy standing at the front gate, bawling for us to come out for a game in the street.'
Rotten luck for me, I only saw him play on celluloid. Once in the press bar at Adelaide some three decades ago the still tigerish, ancient, 1930s star Bill O'Reilly was sarkily deriding me, a first-time Porn, when Miller stepped in and told him to grow up. And at once O'Reilly, 15 years the senior, sheepishly and grumpily muttered apologies. O'Reilly knew the patricians' pecking order and that, for instance, the only three portraits in oil of Australians commissioned by MCC to hang in the Lord's Long Room were of the aforesaid Trumper and Bradman and .. . Keith Ross Miller (who had been born in the week in 1919 that the aviator brothers Keith and Ross Smith completed their intrepid 27-day flight from England to Oz).
If cricket loved him with a passion, so did a stream of beauteous ladies. In the mid-1970s Miller flew in to speak at a dinner for old buddies Edrich and Compton. His grown-up son was with him. At the Heathrow arrivals' gate a — as he would have put it — schmoozy shoal of shapely Sheilas was waiting to greet him. Keith took his son aside: 'Have a great trip, aboy, hut this is where we split: you go your way, I go mine.'
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