Midsummer Murder

GH on Australian cricket's deadliest match

Even now, more than seventy years later, the image has the power to shock. The background is a suburban cricket ground. Across it walk everyday onlookers, who could be taking a tea time promenade. To the left, though, stand police handling a rifle; on the far side of the pitch is parked an ambulance next to a prone figure receiving medical attention; nearest the camera, as if almost forgotten, lies a lifeless whiteclad body, sprawled on its back.

It is hard to conceive of such a front page photograph today. Police cordons would have prevented its taking; editors would have blanched. But in the simpler times of 1952, what bled led. ‘Murder On Cricket Field’ has relegated even the King’s funeral on the Adelaide News’s front page.

The panorama of what was then Railways Oval, today Karen Rolton Oval, is complemented by a second photograph: hatted police holding a hatless ‘man’, a little like a trophy, before pushing him into their squad car. He is identified only in the body of the text, and sketchily. Otherwise, the facts jamming up against each other reinforce the initial shock, of something still unique in our annals: while fielding at cover point on a perfect summer’s morning on a picturesque sporting field, Captain Arthur Henderson has been killed instantly by a single bullet, leaving a widow and three sons.

Phil Henderson, now seventy-seven and retired to Goolwa, is the last of those three sons. Not until he was in his late twenties was he acquainted with even the basics of his father’s death. Not until the last few years has he felt genuinely curious. All he remembers from the time is that his father’s murder occurred between older brother Mick’s fourth birthday party and his own forthcoming third. ‘Then all of a sudden, I wasn’t having a third birthday party,’ he recalls. ‘It seemed to go very dark. Like everything dropped in a hole.’

Phil Henderson with relics of his father Arthur