Unheard Melody

GH on a new life of Karl Schneider

Sometimes the faces in ancient team photographs merge and blur. The figures are unfamiliar, the personalities undiscernable, the reputations forgotten. Not so with Karl Schneider [above, bottom right, in the South Australian Sheffield Shield team of November 1927]. In any group image, even at school, he is always the youngest and shortest, barely a boy, neat and trim - a left-hander, along the quick-footed lines of Neil Harvey. He might well have been a Harvey too, except that having raced to 1500 runs at nearly 50 in his first score of first-class matches, he died, aged 23.

What’s that? You’ve never heard of Karl Schneider? That’s understandable. The title of Michael Lefebvre’s Cricket’s Lost Prodigy is fitting in two senses. Schneider was indeed a prodigy lost to cricket; but he has been lost to cricket history too. The 1920s falls between two of cricket’s most storied eras: the so-called Golden Age, of Edwardian grace and chivalry cut off by World War I, and what Gerald Howat christened Cricket’s Second Golden Age (1989), the time of Bradman and Hammond. Schneider made 68 in Australia’s inaugural unofficial ‘Test’ against New Zealand in Auckland in March 1928, captained by state teammate Victor Richardson, but was slain by leukaemia within six months, missing an Ashes series in which he would probably have been capped, leaving the scene at the dawn of the Don’s twenty-year hegemony.