Frank Exchanges

GH on a lost name from the past

The cover of Ron Cardwell’s In Search of Frank Ward is at first perplexing. It shows the 1938 Australian cricket team trench coated on a ship’s foredeck, evidently being felicitated by a local mayor and/or town clerk. Newsreel cameras are focused on their captain, Bradman. Some figures – McCabe, O’Reilly, Fleetwood-Smith, Brown – are readily recognisable. Others are less familiar. Which one is Ted White? Is that Ben Barnett? I’m bound to say that my knowledge of the book’s subject was so blurry I did not at once single him out – in fact, he is on the right, a woman in a fur hat and coat behind him.

This, of course, is the effect Cardwell is seeking: Frank Ward belongs to that category of cricketer readily lost in the mass of others. The sum of my prior knowledge may be much the same as yours.

Ward, I knew, was a leg-spinner who started in Sydney, wound up in Adelaide, played a handful of Tests, was controversially chosen ahead of Clarrie Grimmett for those 1938 Ashes, then after spending the war in uniform did….well, what exactly? This, Cardwell explains, is how he encountered Ward, as an unrecognised name on an honour board at St George sixty years ago - he renewed the acquaintance in 2009 when entrusted with publishing the club’s history. So little was known of Ward that Cardwell, a researcher of unflagging industry, turned him into a project at which he has chipped away these last eleven years, and which has yielded this slim, attractive, well-illustrated and decidedly unlikely book.

Unlikely because Frank Ward, you soon get the sense, had little wish to be known, or at least that anonymity rather suited him. Cardwell has moved heaven and earth to establish a plausible chronology of his life: Ward, it turns out, also tried his luck in Queensland and Victoria before landing in South Australia, where he was reunited with his erstwhile St George clubmate Bradman, who would be among the selectors to advance him past Grimmett. After a nondescript war service in the 4th Division 2/8 Field Ambulance, Ward drifted from place to place like a twentieth century swaggie, generally unrecognised, and seldom divulging anything about his sporting prowess. For the time poor, Cardwell offers this timeline both as a two-page biographical entry and a three-page calendar of dates. The balance of the book is, per the title, principally composed of his search for these hard-won facts.