The Don’s Early Life

Donald George Bradman was born on 27th August 1908 in the western New South Wales town of Cootamundra. He was the fifth child of George and Emily Bradman who lived in Yeo Yeo, about 25 km from Cootamundra. When Don was two years of age, the family moved to a weatherboard house in Shepherd St, Bowral.

Don attended the Bowral School and from an early age displayed excellent sporting and coordination skills.

Because of a lack of any organized sport and a shortage of children in his neighbourhood, young Donald devised a game in his own backyard. It consisted of throwing a golf ball against the brick base of a water tank and hitting the ball with a cricket stump for a bat.

It was probably this simple game that honed his reflexes and developed the eye movement and coordination and that was to become the trademark of his fabulous cricket career.

Apart from school and backyard cricket, young Don had a particularly busy and active childhood. In addition to being a golf caddie, he learnt piano, attended choir practice and helped his father who was a carpenter and fencer. Don was an accomplished pianist who was taught by his sister, Lilian. It was the beginning of a life-long love of fine music.

As a teenager, he continued to be busy playing rugby, tennis, cricket and athletics. In 1923, he actually quit cricket for almost two seasons to play tennis.

The Don’s Early Career

At the age of 12, Don Bradman was asked to play for the Bowral High School senior eleven. In his second game, he scored his first century (115) on the oval that now bears his name. In this particular match, Don also took eight wickets.
On weekends, Don was scorer for the Bowral Senior X1 which included his father, brother and two uncles. On one occasion, the team was a player short and the young Bradman was invited to bat at the fall of the eighth wicket and scored 37 not out. In the return innings the next week, he scored 29 not out on the Glebe wicket. For his remarkable achievement, Don was given a bat by one of the senior team members. Don’s father had to saw three inches off the bat so that the young Don could use it.

That season, Don begged his father to take him to the Sydney Cricket Ground to see the final Test between England and Australia. Bradman watched in awe as Charles McCarthy make 170. From that moment the young Bradman vowed that he would never be satisfied until he played cricket on the S.C.G.

Bradman left school in 1922 at the age of fourteen. He began work for Percy Westbrook as a clerk in a Bowral real estate agency. By the time he was seventeen, he was beginning to attract considerable attention in Sydney with his prodigious scoring. In 1926, Bradman scored 234 for Bowral against Wingello. One of the opposition bowlers was Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly who Bradman later described as, “The best bowler I ever faced.”

In the final match of that season, Bradman scored his first triple century and the legend began to blossom.

On October 5th 1926, at the age of 18, Bradman was invited to attend NSW state training. He also agreed to play Sydney grade cricket for St. George providing the club paid his return train fare from Bowral. During this period, Don had to get up before 5 a.m. to catch the train to Sydney, often not getting home until midnight.
In 1927, Bradman was selected to play Sheffield Shield for NSW. In his first game of First Class cricket, the young Bradman scored 118 against South Australia on the Adelaide Oval. He became the 20th Australian to score a century on First Class debut. Now fondly referred to as “The Boy from Bowral,” he left home in 1928 to live in Sydney.

In November 1928, he scored 87 and 132 not out against the touring MCC side. A short time later, at the tender age of 20, Donald George Bradman was selected in the Australian Test team to play in the First Test against England in Brisbane.

Bradman’s first Test efforts were far from auspicious and Australia lost the match by a record 675 runs. Bradman scored 18 in the first innings and 1 in the second. For the first and only time during his career, Bradman was dropped to twelfth man for the second Test in Sydney. Recalled for the Third Test in Melbourne, Bradman clearly signalled his emerging greatness. With scores of 79 and 112, the MCG crowd recorded a tumultuous reception for the boy wonder from the bush. From this point, Bradman was to stamp his authority on World cricket for the next twenty years.

The year 1930 signalled more incredible feats and elevated Bradman to a level not previously considered possible. In January, he made a World record score of 452 not out for NSW against Queensland at the SCG. The innings lasted 415 minutes and included 49 fours. Later in the year, he was chosen to make his first tour of England. Up until this point in time, the English players had been unimpressed with his deeds and they believed his unorthodox style would not be successful on the slower English wickets.
Were they in for a surprise!

In his first First Class match on tour, Bradman scored 236 in a match against Worcester. This unleashed a furious onslaught against English bowlers that was to shake the English establishment to its very foundations. In the Test matches of 1930, Bradman scored 8, 131, 254, 1, 334, 14 and 232 – a total of 974 runs at an amazing average of 139.14.
Photo at right: Bradman and Archie Jackson at the Oval, 1930. The two young Australians put together a partnership of 243 on a rain affected wicket. Unfortunately Archie was to die soon after in January 1933.

During the entire 1930 English tour, Bradman scored almost 3000 runs at an average of 98.66. The innings of 334 at Headingley included 309 runs in a single day. This score is still the highest Test score by an Australian – a record shared with Mark Taylor who also scored 334 not out against Pakistan at Peshawar in the 2nd Test of the 1998/99 season.

Following his very successful English tour, Bradman played a Test series at home against the West Indies in 1930-31 and South Africa in 1931-32, and was even more devastating. His scores in all matches against South Africa were 30, 135, 226, 219, 112, 2, 167, and 299 not out. 1190 runs at an average of 170! In Tests, his average was over 200. This dispelled any thoughts that 1930 was just a flash in the pan.

Bradman’s incredible feats in the early 1930s were of such a magnitude that the English team began to think of ways to curb Bradman’s brilliance for the up-coming tour to Australia in 1932-33. The result -Bodyline !

The Bodyline Series: 1932-33

Bodyline was arguably the darkest chapter in the history of Anglo-Australian cricket. The man behind the tactic was newly appointed England captain, Douglas Jardine. Educated at Winchester and Oxford, Jardine was all that was noble and proud in English cricket. Born in India of Scottish parents, Jardine was, however, a ruthless and aloof man who was single-minded in his will to win and curb the brilliance of Bradman.
During the 1930 Australian tour to England, Jardine believed that Bradman displayed a weakness against fast short pitched deliveries.

With this in mind, Jardine set packed leg-side fields and ordered his fastest bowlers, headed by Harold Larwood, to pitch the ball short and deliberately aim at the rib-cage of Bradman and other Australian batsmen. Larwood was a humble man who had come from the a working class background in the Lancashire mines. However, he was a professional cricketer and had no alternative but to follow his captain’s instructions.
With the series tied at one all after the first two Tests, the controversy of Bodyline began to reach a crescendo during the third Test in Adelaide.

Australian batsmen, Bill Woodfull (shown left) and Bert Oldfield were both injured as a direct result of the Bodyline tactics. When England’s manager, Pelham Warner visited the Australian dressing room to offer his sympathy, Woodfull uttered the now famous words, “There are two teams out there on the Oval. One is playing cricket, the other is not!”
The Australian Board of Control sent an urgent telegram of complaint to the M.C.C. which threatened diplomatic relationships between the two countries and almost cancelled the remainder of the tour. A transcript of each telegram reads as follow:

Telegram
From: Australian Cricket Board:
January 1933
To: Marylebone Cricket Club Reply
From: Marylebone Cracker Club:
January 1933
To: Australian Cricket Board

Bodyline-line bowling has assumed such proportions as to menace the best interests of the game, making protection of the body by the batsmen the main consideration.
This is causing intensely bitter feelings between the players as well as injury. In our opinion it is unsportsmanlike.
Unless stopped at once it is likely to upset the friendly relations existing between Australia and England.

Reply
From: Marylebone Cracker Club:
January 1933
To: Australian Cricket Board

Bodyline-line bowling has assumed such proportions as to menace the best interests of the game, making protection of the body by the batsmen the main consideration.
This is causing intensely bitter feelings between the players as well as injury. In our opinion it is unsportsmanlike.
Unless stopped at once it is likely to upset the friendly relations existing between Australia and England.

We, Marylebone Cricket Club, deplore your cable. We deprecate your opinion that there has been unsportsmanlike play. We have fullest confidence in captain, team and managers and are convinced that they would do nothing to infringe either the Laws of Cricket or the spirit of the game. We have no evidence that our confidence has been misplaced. We hope the situation is not now as serious as your cable would seem to indicate, but if it is such as to jeopardize the good relations between English and Australian cricketers and you consider it desirable to cancel remainder of programme we would consent, but with great reluctance.