Ashes & B raddles

Ashes & Braddles

"What's the score? How many did Bradman make?"

These were the first words addressed to an Australian farmer last week by two travelers whom he encountered in the fastnesses of the MacPherson Range, 60 mi. south of Brisbane. The travelers, named Binstead and Proud, were the only survivors of one of the most shocking crashes in Australia's air history. Near them was the charred wreckage of the plane containing the bodies of its two pilots and two other passengers. Farther away lay the corpse of another passenger who had plunged to his death off a cliff while trying to find help in the dark. Travelers Binstead and Proud, after eight days without food, had given up hope of being found alive. They were writing last messages to their relatives when found. What they wanted to know was the score of the fifth and final cricket match between Australia and England for "The Ashes," and what had happened to Australia's famed George Donald ('"Braddies") Bradman, ablest cricket player in the world.

To their delight Travelers Binstead and Proud learned that the fifth match of the series was not yet over, that Batsman Bradman had just finished rolling up the impressive score of 169 runs. This helped swell Australia's first innings score to 604. England, which had won the first two matches at Brisbane and Sydney and lost the next two at Melbourne and Adelaide, had made only 239 runs in its first innings. It was now faced with the task of getting at least 365 runs in the second to make it necessary for Australia to bat again. England's best batter, W. H. Hammond, could make no more than 56 runs before he was caught out by Bradman. Next morning with two wickets left to fall, Australia's able slow bowler, L. O. B. Fleetwood-Smith, took them both before England could add to its overnight score of 165. Australia had then won the match, by an innings and a tidy 200 runs, retained The Ashes by a great recovery, three matches to two.

When news of the rescue of Binstead and Proud appeared last week in Australian newspapers, no one criticized their curiosity as frivolous. Had anyone done so, Travelers Binstead and Proud could have answered with some justice that almost any other loyal British subject would have asked the same questions. To consider cricket the "national game" of a world-wide empire is to do it a grave injustice. Extremely dull either to play or to watch, it thrives because in addition to being a game, it is an art, a religion and a huge tea party. The biennial matches between England and Australia, cricket's No. 1 event, combine for Britishers the attractions of a World Series, a Madrid corrida and a Nazi jamboree.

The story that The Ashes, famed prize of Australia v. England cricket, do not really exist is a canard. After Australia's first victory over England on British soil in 1882, a sportswriter in the London Sporting Times wrote a facetious epitaph for English cricket, announced that the body would be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. Any chance that Britishers would ever stop relishing this grisly little quip was effectively destroyed when England's dashing Ivo Bligh, who captained a team that beat Australia the following year, brought back an urn full of real ashes. He explained that when, after the final match at Melbourne, English ladies had celebrated the victory by running out onto the field and setting fire to the stumps, he had carefully collected the remains. Currently, the ashes imported by dashing Ivo Bligh are in the Trophy Chest at Lord's, capital of British cricket, as a monument to an immortal British joke.

Even more preposterous than the idea that cricket is nothing more than a national game is the idea that Batsman Bradman is merely the Babe Ruth of Australia. A discussion about how close to the batsman's body it is sporting for a fast bowler to pitch his ball strained British political relations with Australia in 1933. When King Edward abdicated last winter the consternation in Australia was no greater than that which would have prevailed last week had Braddles been "bowled for a duck egg" (put out with no runs). For Braddles to abdicate would simply be unthinkable. A cricket prodigy, Braddles, now 28, was born in Cootamundra, New South Wales, left school at 16 to devote all his time to cricket, has been the world's most famed cricketer since 1930. Cricket's greatest names before Braddles were England's W. G. Grace, who retired in 1911 after scoring some 55,000 runs in 44 years of play, and Jack Hobbs, British professional, who had scored 197 centuries (100 runs or more in a single innings) when he retired in 1931. Braddles already holds the world's record for individual batting in first-class cricket (452 runs, not out) and the record for runs in a Test Match series (974). In the first matches of the current series, Braddies made three centuries (270, 212, 169), a grand total of 810 runs, an average of 90 runs an innings.

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