(courtesy Andrew Wyatt, editor Wairarapa Times - Age, Masterton)

The rainy day trip that robbed the crowd - (Part 1)

Australian cricket great Sir Donald Bradman, who died this week aged 92, never played in New Zealand. He nearly did but as ANDREW WYATT found, it seems he went sightseeing in Wairarapa instead.

IT WOULDN’T happen today but the only visit to Wairarapa by the greatest of cricketers, which caused much muttering in Wellington, went unreported in the Wairarapa newspapers of the time.

Tuesday, September 20, 1932, was just another spring day to the Wairarapa Age, which reported 48 minutes of sunshine, a maximum temperature in the shade of 50 degrees fahrenheit – or 10C – and 1 point of rain, according to figures collected by Miss R.Robinson, of Masterton.

This was the Depression and the news of the day was depressingly predictable. Like a Press Association report from Auckland: “An allegation that forty relief workers on a job at Manurewa were deliberately loafing was made by a farmer to the Manukau County Council today.”

Closer to home, under the headline South Wairarapa Items, and the subheading Pirinoa, readers learned that “Mr Hamlin Minncher, Wellington, is spending a few days with his mother”. Clearly Mr Minncher was no lover of cricket. Otherwise he might have stayed in the capital and been among the thousands who crammed the Basin Reserve for what would have been Don Bradman’s only innings in New Zealand – if Bradman hadn’t decided to that day cross the Rimutakas to Wairarapa.

It would have been a landmark day for Wairarapa cricket even without the presence of The Don. An event that didn’t elude the Wairarapa newspapers was the founding of the Lansdowne Cricket Club that same night, though that was doubtless just a happy coincidence rather than either event inspiring the other. Bradman’s visit to New Zealand was a two-day stopover for an Australian team at the end of a four-month tour of North America that doubled as a honeymoon for Bradman and his wife Jessie.

The trip was organised by Bradman’s friend Arthur Mailey, a plumber by trade and retired Australian test leg spinner, to help English expatriates promote cricket in Canada and the United States. It was sanctioned but not paid for by the Australian Cricket Board of Control.

Mailey arranged sponsorship from Canadian Pacific Railway, but with one proviso. Such was Bradman’s fame around the world after Australia’s 1930 Ashes tour of England – when he scored 974 runs in the tests at an average of 139, with two double centuries and a world record innings of 334 – that the sponsorship depended on Bradman being in the team. Bradman, then 23, agreed – if he could take his new wife. He had fallen for Jessie Menzies when they were both 12, the day she became a boarder in the Bradman family home in Bowral, south of Sydney. They were married at St Paul’s Church in Burwood, Sydney, on April 30, 1932. The team for North America left on May 26 and Jessie Bradman was the only player’s wife on the trip.

There were only 12 players. A few had test experience, including batsman Stan McCabe and the captain, Victor Richardson, who would have a later claim to fame as grandfather of the underarm Chappell brothers. Among the others was Chuck Fleetwood-Smith, 24, a left-arm “chinaman” bowler later to play 10 test matches.

They sailed on the Royal Mail Steamer Niagara – fated to be sunk by a German mine near Auckland in 1940 – and Bradman spent the first three days in his bunk with the flu. They stopped briefly in Auckland, Fiji and Hawaii. Then followed an itinerary that was nothing if not arduous – 10,000km across and around North America, mostly by train, with 51 cricket matches in 75 days.

Bradman, honeymoon or not, played in every game and was always the centre of attention. American newspapers dubbed him “Dynamite Don” and “the Babe Ruth of cricket”. And he delivered. The bowling was rarely high-class, but nor were the pitches and opposing teams fielded up to 18 players. Bradman scored 3779 runs, averaging 102, with a top score of 260, made on matting laid over grass in the grounds of a Toronto prison. He also took 189 wickets with his leg spinners – 188 more than he took in test matches – including six in one eight-ball over, remarkably without a hat trick.

Part 2