JACK MARSH HISTORY LECTURE 2015

Written and delivered by Wednesday 21 January 2015

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE “When he came he (2 opened the windows of the mind to a new vision of what could be”

How 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 team to their home in . In The Changing Face of Cricket, Moyes recalled that he was at first less taken by Trumper than by his teammate : “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 a 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 Sonny Liston (3) and No more so than 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 ’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 ’s by the and Summons at the SCG in 1963 (6); Nicky Winmar at super slo-mo, Trumper’s legend 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 , 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 , and reflecting view finder, remained rather mysterious. On one knocked 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 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. The year in which Beldam turned his attention to cricket was Trumper’s annus mirabilis: he peeled off eleven hundreds in compiling a record 2570 runs while (19) Collaborators: George Beldam with cricketer and editor CB Fry touring , and his portrait glowed from the middle of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year. And when Beldam (19) As they outlined in their introduction to Great first peered through his emulsion at the ima ge of Trumper Batsmen, the collaborators had two purposes, subtly in jumping out to drive, he would have imagined all his tension. First was to break down and decode technique, purposes fulfilled. to slow time down so that the action might be better Beldam eventually assembled two sequences of understood. photographs of Trumper, three years apart, at and It has often been said that more may be learnt by at Lord’s. His final selection occupies 30 glossy pages in watching a good batsman actually playing than by Great Batsmen, including these (20) (21) (22) (23). reading all the books that have been written about cricket. But it impossible to see the details of a stroke as the batsman plays it in real life: the eye cannot follow the rapid and complicated movements of arms, hands and bat. Here Action-Photography is of value since it shows in full detail the various stages in a stroke, and thus betrays secrets which the human eye cannot detect… We hazard the prophecy that no one who studies the pictures in this book carefully will fail to acknowledge that they show him a great many points which he never suspected.

(20) (21) To this first purpose of scientific exploration was attached a second purpose, auxiliary, but also of immense to Fry and Beldam, both classicists and coinosseurs: they wanted to create art, or at least to reveal cricket’s artistic beauties.

It has been said that the results of instantaneous photography, however true to nature, are generally inartistic in effect: ‘very true but very ugly.’ Possibly such an opinion may be revised in the light of a study of these pictures of live cricket. Some of the attitudes may seem strange and unfamiliar to those who have (22) (23) never studied great batsmen in action with very close attention. But some of them go to prove how beautiful 20 to 23. Capturing Trumper: Beldam’s ‘action’ photos from the Oval and Lord’s

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE But Plate XXVII is clearly the stand out. As a technical dub the book Great Batsmen document, it represents both the first and last word in “the most precious gem that batting, insofar as batting consists of making instinctive cricket literature has ever what begin as a set of quite unnatural motions. In possessed”). this image, Trumper seems to achieve the complete reconciliation of the orthodox and the spontaneous, the Plate XXVII very quickly took rehearsed and the original. Everything is in equipoise. One on a life above and beyond the foot is grounded, the other airborne; one hand is gloved, book it formed part of, blurring the other bare; the shirt seems both loose and taut; the into art, just as its sponsors had (26) Big sales: Beldam’s arms appear both gloriously free and tensed for action; photos proved popular envisioned. (26) the stroke is both instantly recognisable and uniquely his. Though the bat is slim, like a rapier, held lightly, its Even as MacMillan published Great Batsmen in August imminent impact is palpable. Batspeed often confounded 1905, Beldam released an edition of 500 India proofs of Beldam’s shutter, fast as it was for its time. (24) In any Trumper – a kind of fine, very smooth paper, designed number of his shots, like this of Archie MacLaren, you see to show off fine detail. These were reproduced by Swan the bat blurred and bowed; (25) in one amazing image of Electric Engraving, a company whose eponymous founder Frank Ford, it’s invisible altogether. But not here, where had developed photographic dry plates and bromide it seems to have been captured at the point of perfect paper in the UK, and whose speciality was illustration, stillness before commencing its downswing. such as the tonal images for Aubrey Beardesley’s The Yellow Book.

It is hard for us to conceive of cricket in an age where image was so scarce, the cricketer so remote. Recall the passage in CLR James’ Beyond a where the author is mistaken by men outside a barber’s shop for the famous Trinidadian batsman Wilton St Hill:

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘but are you Mr. St Hill?’... All were watching intently. I had to say no, and he was sadly disappointed, as I was... None of them had ever (24) (25) seen St. Hill, but they worshipped him. 24 & 25. Technical limitations: the distorted and disappearing bats illustrate the difficulty of capturing action with early cameras Amid such scarcity, single images could achieve immense As art it is also a triumph. The composition is power. Now, thanks to the miracle of action photography unimproveable: in the equidistance of the feet from and the related miracle of mechanical reproduction, all the left and right edges; in the background horizontals cricket could partake of this art of the common man. that accentuate the forward motion; in the background verticals that express the pent-up power; in the transition The picture, observed Johnny Moyes in A of from the line emerging diagonally from the bottom Cricketers, came to hang “on the wall of most cricket left to the empty space in the top right which seems buildings in ”. It hung in the pavilion at the SCG. to afford the ball an exit point; in the allusive motif of Heavily framed it looked down on the delegates of the ‘Sporting Life’, blurred but still legible in the distance New South Wales Cricket Association at Cricket House, (Sporting Life, Britain’s bestselling sports periodical, would and adorned the cover of their annual report.

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE (27) Attached by pins to a hessian wall, it was the only picture in Arthur Mailey’s cottage. “When the wind blew, Vic appeared to go through his whole repertoire of strokes,” he recalled. In The Radetsky March,

Joseph Roth writes (29) (30) of how the Austro- 29 & 30. Background evidence: proof that the Trumper images were not “faked” Hungarian Empire was (27) (30) But it’s a testament to the power of the image that even bound together together Fingleton, who regarding Trumper as “the greatest batsman by reproductions of “the indifferent, habitual and unheeded who ever lived”, thought the shot too perfect, too idealized. countenance” of the Emperor Franz Josef; Beldam’s Trumper came to pervade Australian cricket in much the And, of course, the image’s popularity endures. You find same way. In time it even incited a certain disbelief. In it on the cover of Wisden Australia (31) and this Wisden the manuscript for The Immortal Victor Trumper, Jack compilation Endless Summer (32; adorning the programme Fingleton quoted the view of that it was of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Graham simply too good to be true. (28) Greene’s The Return of A.J. Raffles (33); booming out You Am I’s album Victor Trumper’s Everlovin’ Pop and Soul Revue. (34) It has been entered in the Archibald by Dave Thomas (35); it has been rendered lifesize in bronze by Louis Laumen (36); it has been reproduced in miniature bronze and silver by Brian Elton. (37) Most recently, the image was twinned by illustrator Max Tiedemann in his

(28) tribute to the late Phillip Hughes in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

The photographer had certainly taken the picture of Trumper batting but it was on a practice ground and superimposed on the background of a crowd on an English ground. It looks like a crowd at , Sheffield, with a scoreboard. There is no other person in the picture, no fieldsman, no square leg , no one. I accept Benaud’s opinion that it is a fake, though it greatly disappointed me because I had once written (31) (32) (33) (34) that the picture is so inspiring it should be hung in all the cricket dressing rooms of the world but no matter.

Actually Fingleton was right the first time. It’s clear when you examine other photographs in the sequence that the photograph was taken in 1902 at the Oval. You can see (35) (36) (37) the eternal Gasometer. (29) You can see the Muirhead- 33 to 42. Enduring image: a century later, the iconic Trumper image designed pavilion newly-built. continues to appear (above and next page)

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE (38)

(38) Nor has the image remained confined to where Trumper played the game. Strange fact: the first book about Trumper was published in India, a slim anthology (40) (41) collected by a former first-class cricketer from , , fifty years ago.

(39) (42)

(39) Victor Trumper: The Beau Ideal of a Cricketer (1964) cannot feel really at home in any environment until they contains both Plate XXVII and Plate XXVIII. The image’s have transformed the natural shapes around them by appeal to Indian sensibilities is attested by renderings in infusing them with myth”. books from Ramachandra Guha’s classic collection Spin It was a common complaint of Australians in colonial times and Other Turns (40) to S. Giridhar’s recent Mid-Wicket that their jubilantly philistine materialism rendered them Tales (41); just a few months ago I encountered a version indifferent to aesthetic niceties and civilizing indulgences. hanging on the wall at . (42) But let’s Thus Richard Twopeny in Town Life in Australia (1883): stay with Trumper’s time and place, for it is a seminal “It cannot be understood too thoroughly that Australia historical period – in and around Federation, defining an is before everything a money-making place”. Thus J. A. inchoate nation, commencing a local pantheon. As Vance Froude in Oceana (1886): “They [Australians] aim at little Palmer put it in The Legend of the Nineties (1954): “Men except what money will buy; and to make money and

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE buy enjoyment with it is the be-all and end-all of their seemingly removed from temporal concerns and financial existence”. Thus Francis Adams in The Australians: A exigencies, a mot juste to the world’s Willougbys, a rebuke Social Sketch (1893): “To speak of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ even to the world’s Carduses: nothing realistic or cunning in Australia, in the sense that one does of the greater about Plate XXVII; the very opposite of dour. So naturally European capitals, would be like speaking of the snakes stylish was his batting was that the initial response of of Iceland. Disinterested study is unknown in a country some English observers was to decline to recognize him where every one is still in haste to gamble, grab land, or as Australian at all, tending as they did to see English create a business”. Grumbled Arthur Streeton in 1897: amateurism as the cradle of batting brilliance, Australian “The country is full of wealth, but somehow can’t afford commercialism as the forge of grim cricket efficiency. It artists yet”. But Australians were most sensitive to these was Fry, in The Strand magazine in August 1902, who lamentations when they were made by visitors. In Such is first made this explicit, by audaciously claiming Trumper Life (1903), Joseph Furphy put the view in the mouth of for England: “Trumper appears to unite in his person the the Englishman Willoughby: utilitarian virtues of Australia with the artistic virtues of the old country; or, perhaps, it is fair to say he is more like a Even in your cities I observe a feverish excitement and very good English batsman than a very good Australian”. a damnable race for what the Scriptures aptly call ‘filthy lucre’. Your colonies are too young. In time to come, no Australians weren’t oblivious to Trumper’s exceptionalism, doubt, the amenities of life will appear – for you have but they preferred to regard him as an aspirational symbol. some magnificent private fortunes; but in the meantime Pace Arthur Streeton, Australia could afford artists after all, one hears of nothing but work – business – and so and appreciate them too – providing they were in flannel, forth. Cultivated leisure is a thing practically unknown. at any rate. And the diffusion of Trumper’s image gave urgency to the task of describing him and cricket more If anything, leisure was cultivated for filthy lucre. Australian generally. Finding adequate terms became challenging cricketers were renowned for their commercial instincts. as not before. Reading contemporary accounts of ’s 1878 Australian team created the template Trumper, you sometimes sense writers at the limits of their by stumping up 50 pounds each as a provision against expression. Fry: “Victor Trumper is, perhaps, the most costs and taking a lucrative share of the profits afterwards. difficult batsman in the world to reduce to words.” Albert Successors insisted, often militantly, that their cricket Knight: “Such a one is not to be written about…with a efforts be properly recompensed – by, for example, recipe book in hand, or a bundle of statistics at one’s withholding their labor in the 1884-85 series against elbow.” Frank Iredale: “I cannot speak of him as a cricketer England. And they played, of course, to win. It was, as because I realise that nothing I could say would do him Sir put it, Australians who “brought to our justice.” Sir Home Gordon: “Virgil and Dante invoked the Victorian pastime a terrible realism and cunning…They muse to help their pens, and some such assistance is were not hampered by old custom”. And that, he thought, needed to do justice to the magnificent batting of Victor defined them ever after: “There has always been a certain Trumper.” In a 1902 match report, a Sydney Morning dourness about Australian cricket, an unabashed will-to- Herald copped out altogether: “His batting was brilliant in power, with no ‘may the best side win’ nonsense”. the extreme and it is impossible to say more.” In a 1912 column, ‘Arawa’ of the Daily Telegraph described being To this, Trumper became the great exception. All of a told off at the SCG for using merely the word ‘fine’ while sudden, Australian cricket had in its midst not just a describing Trumper’s batting against South Africa. match-winning champion but a cricketer who extended the game’s aesthetic esteem of itself. We are familiar with One of those uniquely Trumperian efforts had dazed the idea that Australia by its pre-Federation triumphs me - it was all wriggle and wrist, and the ball shot away against England forged a path to nationhood. We as if it had been belched forth by a 9.2. I just murmured underestimate, I think, the revolution Trumper presages in a kind of spellbound reverie, ‘What a fine batsman by batting beautifully, in an expansive and carefree way, Trumper is.’

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE ‘Fine?’ shrieked an aged historian near me. ‘Where did Frank Iredale, Sydney Mail: “[Trumper was] Australia’s you ever see the like?’ greatest genius with the bat”.

I hadn’t. I said so, and made up my mind that I would ‘Long Leg’, Sporting Life: “In brief, he was a genius!”. consult Crabb for the right word next time. J. C. Davis, The Referee: “The word genius may often be [Crabb was short for Crabb’s English Synonyms misapplied to men who achieve wonders in sport and art, Explained in Alphabetical Order – a popular thesaurus of but Trumper was an absolute genius in cricket”. the time] HDG Leveson-Gower, Evening News: “Trumper…I would In The Game’s The Thing, which probably contains the style a genius”. finest technical analysis of Trumper anywhere, explains his subject’s uniqueness by reference to EA Bland, Winner: “I think there can be no doubt that here the inadequacy of words: “In many ways he reminded me he will always rank as more of a batting genius than any of a great orator. You follow the discourse, even anticipate other Australian player we have seen”. correctly the words he is going to use – it all seems so natural and so easy – yet, if you try to do it yourself you fail M. A. Noble: “In real genius for the game no one has ever miserably”. In his canonical text, The , HS compared with Victor”. Altham argued that those wishing to understand Trumper : “Trumper was a big personality as well as a should simply “study the glorious series of photographs cricketing genius”. of Trumper in action contained in Beldam and Fry’s Great Batsmen”, because “to try to reduce to words the art of Sydney Morning Herald (Jan 1911): “The batting genius of this consummate batsman is almost an impertinence”. Trumper is best to be focused perhaps by consideration of a simple matter of fact. There is no record in the history of cricket But when they did try to sum Trumper up, they reached of any batsman of his versatility, or his complete command of often for a word that we would, I think, feel awkward using the bowling attack, and though he has played representative in the context of cricket today, and that was ‘genius’. The cricket for many years now there is no batsmen who is within earliest usage was applied to him even before he played range of rivalry of him in those respects”. for Australia, by ‘’ in The Referee: “Trumper does not belong to the ordinary class of batsmen; he is above Sydney Morning Herald (Feb 1913): “There is not likely to them, for he is a genius”. Perhaps the lushest usage was be such another batting genius for many years to come”. by a former opponent, Albert Knight, in The Complete Cricketer (1906): “With luxuriant masterfulness, yet with Genius? It seems an extravagant use of the word for what the unlaboured easy naturalness of a falling tear, or rather we take as more conservative, less hyperbolic times. In of showers from the sunny lips of summer, he diverted the fact, the subject of genius was of intense interest during ball in every conceivable direction which his genius willed”. Trumper’s lifetime, Francis Galton having popularised the But there are many others, which I’ll list here (Genius) idea in his book Hereditary Genius (1869). Italian Cesare Lombroso had argued for artistic genius to be a form Sydney Pardon, Wisden: “His skill in pulling good-length of insanity in Men of Genius (1889); American James balls amounted to genius”. Cattell had completed his Statistical Study of Eminent Men (1903); Briton Havelock Ellis had outlined in his , The Australasian: “It is beyond question Study of British Genius (1904) what he thought were its that we have never seen a more brilliant exponent of the preconditions: he concluded that geniuses tended to art of batting than Victor Trumper. I saw him once send come from large families with elderly parents, to be feeble two to square-leg in one over. It is only a batting in youth but live long lives, be well educated and well genius could do it”. travelled but to contract late or sexless marriages.

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE Why did cricket’s savants apply the term to Trumper, cautious tyro leaves alone, Trumper tackled vigorously, to which none of the foregoing applied? Well, why not? and cut and drove hot-footed to the railing. Trumper and the other great players of this belle époque, I suspect, made them feel entitled to parity with the other To quote Atkinson: “Writing like this brought the game fields in which genius was identified: art, literature, music, home. You could imagine yourself there. You shared the science. Go through studies published between 1900 excitement but also the cleverness of the skilled observer”. and 1915 in which the subject was assessed as a genius, Consider, too, this Fry and the tag is indeed applied sparingly: Shakespeare, appreciation – not by Dickens, Hugo, Pasteur, Milton, Braille, Hogarth, CB himself, but by his and one Australian, the author of For the Term of his formidable wife Beatrice Natural Life, whose biographer, A. W. Brazier, entitled (43) in a February 1904 his 1900 book Marcus Clarke: His Work and Genius. edition of an English The confident, almost brazen proclamation of Trumper’s magazine, the VO. genius, then, was a statement of cricket’s growing pride, in its confidence of its role in national and imperial culture. There is something As Cardus wrote: “Whoever would not be spendthrift of peculiarly satisfactory language about Trumper, let him not write on him at all”. in his having such a suitable name. Victor What we’re seeing in this time, in Australia especially, is a Trumper, with a real people falling in love with cricket all over again. First of all healthy, fresh, pink there had been joy in winning; now they were wakening (43) Avid fan: CB Fry’s wife, Beatrice skin, a long muscular to cricket’s additional pleasures - intimate insights, neck, and small, keen, revelatory beauties, the spirit behind the Trumperian bright eyes. Nothing sad about those eyes, not for one leap. Read enough of it and you can’t help being struck moment. A pair of very fine arms, splendid forearms, at how ebullient, joyous and ambitious is the writing wrists, and hands; the whole together makes up a very Trumper stimulated, as though writers were trying to perfect telephonic communication between his eye and bat. Rather sturdy legs, which never are between the match his strokes with their own. Alan Atkinson notes or on the edge of a very wide boundary, but try in his third volume of The Europeans in Australia (2014) all day. that following sport was an underpinning of our newborn nation’s education: “Is it surprising that some boys kept When Trumper, chasing the ball, comes towards you, to their reading lessons so they could read about sport the air seems to divide; he wakes a buzz of power, or to their mathematics so they could do the necessary something like you associate with a very first-rate motor- calculation?”. Imagine the schoolboy poring over this car. When he bats, if you are fond of cricket in the right intricate commingling of method and measure in the sort of way, to you then will Trumper’s batting be like Sydney Morning Herald on Trumper’s highest Test score. reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s description of some great granite rocks. [There they stand, for all the world To the mathematician it may be of interest to know that like their neighbors ashore; only the salt water sobbing Trumper scored 208 not out, that he batted for nearly between them instead of the quiet earth, and clots of four hours, that 25 boundaries punctuated his figures, sea-pink blooming on their sides instead of heather; and and that not one chance marred the symmetry of the the great sea-conger to wreathe about the base of them exhibition; but the cricket enthusiast likes to know that instead of the poisonous viper of the land.] It is good it was a graceful and brilliant exposition of the national and pleasant to watch cricket, with the same mind’s eye game. Trumper took length balls on the off peg and that glories in a beautifully written description. His timing hooked them to the leg boundary. He forgot that the best has the exactness, rhythm, and fit of the oceangoing wicketkeeper in the world was crouching behind him, and ship’s piston-rod—true. Quite naturally his bat hits the drove fasts and slows indiscriminately. Off theory that the ball. Owing to the fibre of the hit a beautiful stroke is the

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE outcome, and this to almost every ball which is . He shifts his feet, steps across, over and back with infinite variety and ease; he can play any bowling on any wicket, not from any particular luck, but just sheer natural ability. He is a poet of cricket; he has a poet’s sense, touch, and feeling.

Trumper can play, with his bat, a cricket ball as Paganini played his violin; to him it is alive; he plays his strokes by nature, in the easiest possible way, to do it well, and get all there is to be got out of that particular stroke, a note. Trumper is an artist. Some day someone will paint his portrait; it will be hung in a National Portrait Gallery; he will be dressed in white, with his splendid neck bared to the wind, standing on short green grass, against a blue sky; he will be waiting for the ball, the orchestra to strike up. Not even a bowler need go away regretfully from this healthy, strong picture — so easily imagined, a white flannelled knight.

(1) This traverses an extraordinary expanse of aesthetic territory – physical, literary, poetic, artistic, musical, mechanical even, in the invocation of the telephone, motor car and the steamer’s propeller. But it might interest you to know that it was republished, as a lot of writing from English journals was, not only by Sydney’s The World’s News but the Singleton Argus, the Richmond River Express and Tweed Advertiser, the Albury Banner and Wodonga Express. There is something enchanting about imagining a farmer at his rocking chair reading such an appraisal by lamplight, or a farmer’s son coming across it when his father (44) Poetic tribute: poet EV Lucas’s shares his appreciation of Trumper had finished. The Australian sporting reader might never with Sydney literary circles hear Paganini or never visit the National Portrait Gallery, but here, he was being told, one of his countrymen, a sportsman, had scaled equal heights of beauty. The pride My sir, The Australian who in his brief time gave me most pleasure and excitement was Victor Trumper. In was enhanced by the sense of a sportsman as a creative literature I should name Henry Lawson whom I knew export, winning cultural fame abroad. in London. I have met none of your blacks – Yours sincerely, E. V. Lucas (44) There exists in the collection of the Cricket Club, for example, this delightful short letter from the In winning the acclamation of the English literary English essayist and poet EV Lucas to The Triad, the cognoscenti, then, Richard Flanagan was following in pioneering Sydney literary journal, responding to an inquiry the footsteps not just of our first great writer but our first about his appreciation of things antipodean. Lucas wrote: master batsman.

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE I have not the time here to go into Trumper’s individual feats, or those of his teams; neither shall I explore here how his legend was enriched by his loveable personality and premature death, nor how his various biographers have tended it. What I want to do is open your minds to how Trumper opened their minds – the minds of his contemporary admirers. He made them see batting, sport, Australia and even genius in a new light. And for that, they remained ever grateful. I have mentioned Bradman only fleetingly here: this is a forum Trumper should have to himself.

(45) But I might recite in closing one anecdote of this place, from November 1928, when the English playwright (45) Ben Travers: recalls the “blasphemy” of comparing Bradman to Trumper Ben Travers, travelling with the , saw something he never forget, and recalled into his nineties, when he wrote it in a memoir. Travers was watching the young Bradman for the first time, The Jack Marsh History Lecture is representing NSW, and making 87 and 132 not out. an annual event that explores the Recalled Travers: history of our grounds. It is part of the

I witnessed one rather striking incident during that Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground of his. When Bradman made one particularly Trust’s enduring efforts to know, brilliant cover drive, an enthusiast sitting near me in the celebrate and preserve our heritage, members’ stand was so carried away that he rose to and chronicle our physical, cultural his feet and shouted ‘Trumper!’ He was pulled violently back into his seat and for the moment appeared in and sporting history. The series is danger of being lynched. However exultant his fellow named in honour of the indigenous members were about the Bowral boy, they remained NSW fast bowler Jack Marsh whose devout in their worship of their old heroes. This was near first-class career was cut short by blasphemy. accusations of ‘throwing’ that many Once opened, though, the windows of the mind can believe were inspired by racism. never be completely closed: Bradman was to throw them wide open again. But let us honour tonight the man the The Jack Marsh History Lecture series is cricketer who opened those windows the first time. an initiative of the SCG Museum is made possible through the generous donation of a private benefactor.

Tax deductible donations that support the activities of the SCG Museum may be made to the Australia Sports Foundation at http://asf.org.au/project/scg/

JackHISTORY Marsh LECTURE