It's Victor Trumper Day

GH on the 147th anniversary

Man cannot live by Craig Serjeant alone. Today is the anniversary of the birth of another hallowed figure, Victor Trumper, born 2 November 1877, and the subject of my 2016 book Stroke of Genius. Because too much Trumper is never enough, here’s something I wrote at the time, starting, in the spirit of last week’s post, with a title from my childhood library.

One of the very first cricket books I was ever given, on the occasion of my tenth birthday, was a slim black paperback called Great Australian Cricket Pictures (1975). When I retrieve it from the shelf now, it falls open at page 89, corroborative of my boyhood fascination with the image it contains.

"Trumpered" read the bad-pun heading for the short caption, which described Victor Trumper as "one of our truly great cricketers", told me that he was "the first to score a century before lunch in a Test match", which proved to be true, and "once hit the first ball of a match for six", which did not. Such was my simultaneous introduction to the first cricketer from history who ever registered with me and to what remains perhaps its oldest truly treasured image, in the context of assertion, fact and myth.