Bat out of heaven
Roy Jenkins
BRADMAN
by Charles Williams Little, Brown, £20, pp. 336 Ihave only once previously reviewed a book about games-playing, and that was also in The Spectator. It was about croquet, and rather portentous, as a result of which, although croquet is the only game that I can now play, I found the book rather diffi- cult to take seriously. Cricket I have never been able to play properly. About my peak achievement was in a Westminster Under- school fathers' 11 when I partnered Aidan Crawley, who with one broken arm in a sling made 48 while I made two.
On the other hand, 25 years before that, in the 1930s, my life was dominated by cricketers, their scores, and their enshrine- ment in the temporary pantheon of Play- er's cigarette cards. Only 50, including Australians, were admitted to this holy of holies, but the chosen few were imprinted on the minds of a generation of schoolboys. The initials of the amateurs (why did they nearly all have three; only the 1960s Labour Cabinet with R. H. S. Crossman and C. A. R. Crosland has rivalled them in this respect?) were unforgettable. The Australians, who were then all more or less amateurs, which rather destroyed the point of the initials distinction, did not often in any event go in for such many- splendoured names. But with their flat caps and double-century-scoring habits not only Bradman himself, but also the somewhat more plodding but almost indestructible Ponsford, Woodfull (the captain) and the relatively dashing McCabe, were engraved upon my adolescent memory. A book about first-class cricket between 1928 and 1948 is therefore a tailor-made piece of nostalgia for me.
Charles Williams, the closer one looks, is also a tailor-made author for a life of Bradman. First he is an accomplished biographer with a wide range. His 1994 biography of General de Gaulle is by a wide margin the best English study of this enigmatic but indisputably towering Frenchman. So he has the technical bio- graphical equipment. He has also been a considerable practitioner of Bradman's art, 'the only first-class cricketer in your Lord- ships' house' (for he is also a Labour life peer), as he once, accurately, I think, but not wholly tactfully, informed the second chamber, He succeeded Colin Cowdrey as Captain of Oxford in 1955 and then had six seasons for Essex. In addition, he was the son of a professional Canon of Christ Church and has himself been an elegant classicist (not much Bradman analogy there). And to round it off, he, like Brad- man, moved from cricket to finance around his 30th birthday, although, with Baring Brothers and Henry Ansbacher and Co., it was at a grander level than Bradman's H. W. Hodgetts and Co. of the Adelaide exchange. Nevertheless, the number of tangential points is impressive.
Almost the only weapon lacking in his armoury appears to be experience of Australia beyond that which he has diligently acquired for this task. For this prior ignorance he almost over- compensates. His object is not merely to paint an individual portrait of the paradox- es of a lightly educated, poor country boy who had a strong taste for quiet middle- class suburban conventional values, and who, in spite of being a neurotic hypochondriac, also happened to be the most formidable batsman the world has ever seen. In addition, Lord Williams is keen to fit Bradman into a socio-economic historical framework: What the book attempts to do [he writes in the preface] is to put Britain's cricketing achievements in the context of an Australia feeling her way, gradually, towards something that the world would recognise as 'nation- hood'.
He uses the early 1930s' slump, which hit Australia peculiarly hard, as a refrain of doom, or at least of gloom, between the double and the triple centuries. He begins his account of the Jardine/Larwood 'body- line' tour of 1932-33 by writing: 'Into this maelstrom of class antagonisms sailed the liner Orantes with the visitors from England.' And he makes the Australian XI of those days sound almbst like Northern Ireland with its sectarian hostilities and O'Reilly and Fingleton consistently head- ing the Irish and Catholic anti-Bradman wing.
Some of this makes Lord Williams sound like a Marxist historian, which I am fairly sure he is not. And some of the appendices show a positively Wisden-like attention to detail. In general, the story, more than interesting enough for a middle-length book, which this is wisely kept to, is pene- tratingly and attractively told. The subject is not quite up to de Gaulle but, as a result, will, I guess, sell a good deal more. And Charles Williams, with his biographer's reputation wholly unimpaired, prepares for a return to the limited field of towering statesmen from that of towering scores and (maybe) towering sales figures.
Is it another cookery book?'
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