Jack Marsh History Lecture 2015
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JACK MARSH HISTORY LECTURE 2015 Written and delivered by Gideon Haigh Sydney Cricket Ground Wednesday 21 January 2015 JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE “When he came he (2 opened the windows of the mind to a new vision of what batting could be” How Victor Trumper Changed Cricket Forever (1) My title, which seems to combine Aldous Huxley’s doors (1) Feline tribute: Gideon with his cat ‘Trumper’ of perception with Dusty Springfield’s windmills of your mind, is actually from a rather less exotic source, Johnnie Moyes. The journalist and broadcaster Moyes may be unique in tightness of affiliation with both Victor Trumper and Donald Bradman: he was an opponent of the former, a biographer of the latter, a friend and idolator of both. He also links the man in whose name tonight’s inaugural lecture has been endowed. Six-year-old Moyes first met Trumper one summer evening in December 1900 when his father, a schoolteacher, invited the visiting New South Wales team to their home in Adelaide. In The Changing Face of Cricket, Moyes recalled that he was at first less taken by Trumper than by his teammate Jack Marsh: “I do not remember now whether I had seen a coloured man, but certainly I hadn’t seen one who was playing first-class (2) Iconic image: the photo that began the Trumper legend cricket, and Marsh fascinated me. What a grand bowler he must have been!” It was only a few weeks later that Trumper and Marsh participated in the Federation Sports Carnival, finishing first and second in the competition for throwing a cricket ball here. So when Rodney Cavalier first mooted this lecture, it seemed at once fitting to reunite these former teammates at the place their paths crossed. That and, of course, my own lifetime’s fascination with Trumper, which extended to naming my cat for him. (1) I want tonight to consider Moyes’ assertion: “Did Trumper alter cricket’s face? I don’t think this could be doubted.” I want to do so principally by working outwards from this one hundred and thirteen-year-old photograph (2) – perhaps cricket’s first truly great photograph, and still, I think, on par with the likes of Neil Leifer’s image (3) Similar impact: Muhammad Ali & Sonny Liston JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston (3) and No more so than Clem Hill or Reg Duff, of whom the Norman Potter’s snapshot of Roger Bannister breasting existing images are rather less dramatic. As it is, wherever the tape at Iffley Road Track (4). we look for Trumper, we find this image: it is a certification of his authenticity, a statement of cricket’s continuity. In discussing the importance to Ireland of its National Theatre, WB Yeats used the expression “a community bound together by imaginative possessions,”. The image of Trumper is one of our most compelling imaginative possessions and binds us still. The medium by which we know him also positions Trumper historically: just as Bradman is identified with radio and Richie (4) World changing: Roger Bannister captured breaking the 4-minute mile Benaud with television, just as Dennis Lillee’s threat was Certainly there would be few rivals to it in Australian enhanced by the slow-motion sport: the climax of the Tied Test perhaps (5); Provan replay and Shane Warne’s by the and Summons at the SCG in 1963 (6); Nicky Winmar at super slo-mo, Trumper’s legend Victoria Park thirty years later. can, I think, be at least partly elucidated by reference to the (7) George Beldam: sports impact on perception of action photography pioneer photography. (7) The photograph was taken, as some of you would know, by George Beldam, who played more than a 100 first-class matches for Middlesex, Marylebone and London County between 1900 and 1907. Beldam’s playing career may be the least interesting thing about him. He was the scion of wealthy Hugenot refugees who built a fortune in maritime and auto engineering – the company made the engine seals for the Titanic among other (5) Magic moment: tied Test climax vessels, and marketed Britain’s first anti-skid tyre. (8) Beldam had three large homes, at one time owned three The word ‘icon’ is so freely used handsome Rolls-Royces, and had three tumultuous today as to have been drained marriages. He liked, above all, to quote the line of Robert of all meaning, but I suspect the Louis Stevenson’s Trumper photograph is one in about “the reason the truest sense of the word. It o’ the cause, an’ condenses a cricketer, an era the wherefore o’ the and a style in a single conception: why…”. The answer to it directs our thinking; it limits it this, whether he was too; it is, today, all many know of studying cricket, golf, (6) Gladiator glory: Trumper. Imagine if it did not exist. sailing or jiu-jitsu, was famous SCG photo of (8) Beldam wealth: company made Provan and Summons Would Trumper even be a name? photography. engine seals for the Titanic JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE (10) (11) (9) 9 to 13. Bygone era: typical cricket photos before Beldam’s Trumper image (12) (13) (9) At the time, the standard cricket image was the posed question of whether a racehorse ever had all four feet in shot – the batsman in his stance, the bowler holding a ball the air – something that had cheated the naked eye since in an outstretched arm, usually reproduced in postcard time immemorial – and cricket actually became one of his form, such as by the rival Brighton firms of E. Hawkins numerous subjects. (14) & Co and Foster & Co in the thirty years before the First World War. Among the images collected between 1884 and 1887 for his landmark study Animal Locomotion (1887) you will find (10) (11) (12) (13) Beldam belonged in an emerging genre a series of collotype studies of “the best all-round cricketer of photography dedicated to unlocking the secrets of in the University of Pennsylvania” purveying overarm and motion. Its pioneer was the protean Anglo-American roundarm bowling, playing the back cut and the straight Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge’s experiments began drive. In the last, in fact, Muybridge’s cricketer uncannily in the 1870s when he was asked to resolve the perennial anticipates another of Beldam’s Trumper images. (15) JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE (14) 14 & 15. Early influence: Muybridge’s 1887 Animal Locomotion (16) State of the art: Beldam’s Videx camera study inspired Beldam’s ‘action photography’ (below) Beldam found a name plate negatives, hoping for the best. (17) His collaborator in his for what he did: “action explorations, which finally formed two books, Great Batsmen photography”, in order to (1905) and Great Bowlers and Fieldsmen (1908), was the “make it clear that the players ubiquitous CB Fry, cricketer, footballer, athlete, aesthete, were actually playing and not polymath, pundit, novelist, naval officer. At the time, Fry posing”. This, he modestly was editor of an eponymous magazine for George Newnes observed, depended to a Publishing, and Beldam’s visits to its Southampton Street great degree on the skills of offices incited frenzies of analysis and exposition. (18) Fry’s the image maker, because young deputy editor Wallis Myers recalled Beldam’s arrival “to catch the player at any one day bearing a sheaf of new action photographs, and his certain point of his movement launching into a dissertation on the relationship between Fry’s cricket drives and J. H. Taylor’s golf drives: (15) requires as much timing with the camera as is required for any shot in cricket”. And pretty soon he was the talk of Suddenly Beldam whipped off his overcoat and seized the poker. I dropped my pipe in momentary alarm. But he cricket, even if the functioning of his state-of-the-art Adams was only giving us a practical illustration of Taylor. Then Videx (16) with its superfast shutter speed and full-sized Mr Fry took the poker, stood at an imaginary wicket, and reflecting view finder, remained rather mysterious. On one knocked George Hirst with terrific force past mid-on. A occasion when Beldam went to photograph a team, the discourse followed on the subtleties of wristwork, stance county secretary inquired how long each exposure took. Told and follow through. It lasted quite a long time, and I do 1/1000th of a second, he remarked: “Oh well, then, you’ll not think we did any more planning that day. soon be through with our eleven – about 1/100th of a second for the whole team”. Cricket photography had still to conquer its other besetting difficulty: distance. There would not be the first rudimentary telephoto lenses for another 20 years. So action from games remained ever elusive. But individuals could now be studied in motion. Beldam’s technique was to bowl with one hand, click the shutter with controller connected to the Videx by an (17) (18) 17 & 18. Sports media: CB Fry’s 8m cord, and at the end of a session carry off armfuls of glass magazines were a showcase for Beldam’s photography JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE a game is cricket, and to suggest that the sculptor of modern times might possibly achieve statues of athletic perfection in nowise inferior to those of ancient Greece in the days of the athletic prizemen. Apart from the purely technical aspect of the art of batsmanship in these pages, we hope that the pictures have caught something at any rate of the glow and glory of ‘the game with the beautiful name’. Thus Trumper: there could have been no subject more fitting.