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'Tibby' Cotter – Part 2 – with Max Bonnell
328 Plays1 year ago
In Part 2, Max discusses Tibby's prowess as a batsman, his involvement in the infamous 'Big Six' dispute of 1912, his career as a stretcher bearer in the First World War, and the mystery surrounding his death at the Battle of Beersheba in October 1917.
ABOUT MAX BONNELL:
Max is a lawyer and writer from Sydney. He has published around 20 books on sports history and legal topics. He played grade cricket for about 20 years for Western Suburbs and Sydney University, plus a season in the Birmingham League. Max is a life member of the Sydney University Cricket Club and the Sydney Cricket Association. In 2012, Max co-authored (with Andrew Sproul) a biography on today’s subject, titled: Tibby Cotter: Fast Bowler, Larrikin, Anzac.
CREDITS:
Presenter & Producer: Tom Ford
All music used in podcast comes from the University of California Santa Barbara's remarkable collection of wax cylinder's from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which are free to download and use. You can donate to the upkeep of these recordings via their website.
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Transcript
Introduction to Albert Tibby Cotter
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Tom Ford and welcome to part two of this episode of the Golden Age of Cricket podcast focusing on the life and career of Albert Tibby Cotter with my special guest Max Bunnell. If you haven't already be sure to listen to part one available on the podcast now.
Tibby Cotter's Bold Personality
00:00:31
Speaker
I have this theory, Max, having read your book, that in many ways Tibby was the antithesis of the Golden Age player. He was brash and unapologetic when it came to his extremely fast bowling. And he was a character or a larrikin
00:00:56
Speaker
who celebrated hard off the field. Was Tibby unique amongst his peers? That's hard to say. I mean, he was not alone in being boisterous. He was not alone in enjoying a drink. But there were not so many who had such an open disregard for etiquette.
Legal Troubles and Personal Life
00:01:26
Speaker
You know, one of the stories we uncovered doing the book, and I'm amazed that this isn't better known, is that he was actually locked up in jail the week before the first test of the 1907-08 Ashes series. And what happened was that there was a custom in those days that the touring MCC team would play something called an Australian 11 in Brisbane.
00:01:57
Speaker
And that typically was a chance for a few Queenslanders to play a representative game and for the test selectors to try out one or two fringe candidates. But they must have thought Cotta needed some practice or needed to prove he could still bowl fast or something and they picked him in the team. There was almost no cricket played because it rained so much.
00:02:23
Speaker
So on the Saturday night, Cotta went out drinking with a bunch of friends. And after you've been doing that for several hours, there's nothing more natural than walking back towards your hotel, loudly singing at the top of your voice. Cotta at that point was approached by a policeman who asked him to be quiet. Not realizing that the man was a policeman, Cotta thumped him. And so he spent Sunday
00:02:52
Speaker
in jail in Brisbane for assaulting a policeman. The magistrate saw him on the Monday morning and said, well, I assume you're wanting to play in the test match next week, so I'm going to fine you two pounds. And off he went. So he was kind of pretty disciplined in his private life.
00:03:21
Speaker
leads us inevitably to Lucy Hepworth, the barmaid from Bradford, who insisted that she and Cotter became engaged during the 1909 tour. We don't know an awful lot about that relationship, except that it seems to have interested Cotter greatly while he was in England on the 1909 tour.
00:03:51
Speaker
and then dropped out of his mind altogether when he left. An interesting coder to that story is that after Cotta Departs, Lucy Hepworth is sent to France for a period by her family. And this gives rise to all kinds of stories or speculation that she was sent there to have the child.
00:04:18
Speaker
which was then placed in a French orphanage, at which point she came back to England. She finished up marrying very happily and having a family, although she always kept the Australian team hatband that Cotter gave her as a present on the 1909 tour. So it's a possibility that there are a bunch of
00:04:42
Speaker
Frenchman wandering around today who don't realize that they're descended from an Australian fast bowler Yeah, and and it's fair to say had social media existed In Tibi's day his his career might not have even got off the
Celebrity Lifestyle and Playing Style
00:05:01
Speaker
ground. Well, I'm resisting the the obvious comparisons with Shane Warne Kotter was
00:05:11
Speaker
notoriously a ladies man. He was good looking, single, from a well-to-do family, famous, very athletic. After his death, there was a ceremony at the Sydney Cricket Ground to unveil a plaque in his memory, and a wreath of flowers was placed on it.
00:05:33
Speaker
It was anonymous, but was said to come from his many women friends. Quite who these people are, we have no idea. You could argue the Shane Warne of his day, but it's a facile comparison, but there's something in it.
00:05:50
Speaker
Max let's uh we've spoken about his bowling obviously uh but let's also touch on his batting um because it to me having read your book it seems like his batting was much like his bowling he was brash and highly entertaining to crowds um perhaps he was the first modern tail ender he had this philosophy of just coming out and swinging and
00:06:17
Speaker
often to great effect and he would routinely add 20 or 30 late valuable runs to the team's total. Is this a fair assessment? Yeah, I think one thing we need to remember is that if you look at coaching books from this period, most of them discourage bowlers from batting.
00:06:41
Speaker
They will all say things like, it's important for you to be fresh and supple when you bowl, so don't waste time at the crease. Just have a swing, get a couple of runs, get out, get on with your job. And it was almost this philosophy that bowlers shouldn't tire themselves out batting. He certainly could bat, but he preferred to slog. And sometimes it came off spectacularly.
00:07:09
Speaker
In the 1911-12 first class season, he got about 350 runs at an average of 25, which is almost edging up into the all-rounder category. He had a quick 82 against South Australia. In the next game for New South Wales against Victoria,
00:07:32
Speaker
He hit 79 in very quick time. He got to 50 in 18 minutes, which, if you go by the clock, is still the fastest half-century in first-class cricket in Australia. But you have to bear in mind that they bowled a lot more balls per hour then than they did now. So in those 18 minutes, he faced 31 balls.
00:07:59
Speaker
So by balls faced, it's not a dramatically fast half century, but certainly in terms of the clock, it hasn't been beaten. He had some phenomenal success in first grade cricket. He played an innings for Gleib against Waverly, where he scored 152 in 85 minutes with 16 sixes.
00:08:27
Speaker
And then the following the following year, he scored 100 against the same opponents in an hour. So when he came off, he was spectacular. But consistent batting requires concentration, application and good decision making. And those weren't his strengths.
00:08:48
Speaker
Yeah and it's a nice segue actually into my next question about his most famous batting episode, certainly as a test batsman at least. It came with a famous partnership he had with Jerry Haslett in December
00:09:08
Speaker
the 1907-08 Asher series which was the first test in Sydney where the two put on 56 runs as the number nine batting pair to win the match by two wickets very famous victory now in your book you sum up in describing this episode you sum up
00:09:32
Speaker
Cotter's overall approach to cricket, and I'd just like to quote you here, you write, just as he bowled fast with little regard for line and length, so he hit hard and high without troubling about the niceties of building and innings.
00:09:49
Speaker
His match-winning effort in Sydney only emphasise what a wonderful cricketer might have existed if Cotter's superlative physical gifts had been bestowed on a man of a different temperament. It just simply sounds, listening to you there, that he didn't quite, as a cricketer, maximise his potential. Yeah, and I feel like I'm going to sound like George Barber here, his school coach.
00:10:19
Speaker
who no doubt was frustrated by precisely that, that here was someone with just phenomenal natural talent who relied on their natural talent and not much else. And what that innings in 1907 showed
00:10:40
Speaker
was that if he needed to, he could get his head down and play a really important, sensible, match-winning innings. But he preferred to slog. And similarly with his bowling, you know, you wonder if he'd ever taken the trouble to build on what he was born with, what kind of bowler he might have been.
00:11:08
Speaker
So for example, there's no evidence that he ever intentionally made the ball change direction. He didn't swing it or cut it. He just flung it. He didn't have a slower ball. Wasn't interested in the slower ball. He wasn't interested in expanding the range of his skills because I guess
00:11:38
Speaker
then it would have been work and he wanted it to be fun. So, you know, you've got a guy just, and this is a period of cricket's history where you can do this because there's not the same level of consistent professionalism that you see today. You know, if you had that kind of talent, then that probably was enough.
00:12:07
Speaker
But he was inconsistent, he was unreliable, he was phenomenal. But you wonder what would have happened if you'd taken all that talent and tried to build on it.
Career Conflict and Advocacy
00:12:27
Speaker
Whenever they stop any Bolshevik stuff, I make a motion that we straighten rough. All those in favor, say aye.
00:12:41
Speaker
I mentioned earlier, Max, that if modern cricket fans know anything about Tibby Cotter, it would be that he was the only Australian test cricketer to have perished in the First World War. Well, if they know a second thing, it's most likely that he was a member of the infamous Big Six, the six test cricketers, Australian cricketers in 1912, who refused to tour England because of the dispute
00:13:10
Speaker
with the Australian cricket board over allowing them to select their own manager, a process which had been done repeatedly in the tours beforehand. The big six being Clem Hill, Victor Trump, Warwick Armstrong, Sammy Carter, Vernon Ransford and Tibi Cotta.
00:13:31
Speaker
This dispute effectively ended Tibby's test career along with Clem Hill and Victor Trumper. Warwick Armstrong of course came back after the war. Max, was Tibby, was he a passionate advocate for the players having their own manager on tour? Or was he just following his captain and being one of the boys?
00:13:59
Speaker
He made very few statements about it. I think one of the few statements he made was along the lines that, you know, the board was treating the players so badly that if it was a wet summer in England, they'd have to swim home because there wouldn't be enough money for the tour to buy a return passage.
00:14:24
Speaker
So he wasn't engaging in it in a very advanced level. I think what went on there was that his most endearing and relatable quality, and this is another, I have to say another parallel with Shane Warne, was loyalty. You know, if you were on Cotter's side, he stuck with you. And I think he was simply
00:14:53
Speaker
in that episode demonstrating his loyalty to Trump in particular, but also Carter Armstrong, the people he'd been hill, the people he'd been playing with. And if there was ever a choice between an institution and organization or his friends, he was going to side with his friends. And so I think this was really an expression of that aspect
00:15:22
Speaker
of his character and as you say it put an end to his international career although as it happens his international career would have ended anyway because after that 1912 tour Australia didn't play another test until 1920. Yeah
00:15:42
Speaker
That's a fair assessment. Well, let's have a look at his statistics. He's playing career as a whole. As we've already mentioned, he made his test debut against England at the SCG in February 1903-04. He plays his final match against England at the MCG in February 1912.
00:16:07
Speaker
His entire first class career spans from 1901-02 to 1913-14 season. For the actual numbers, and I'll start with his bowling of course,
00:16:23
Speaker
test career first, so he played 21 test matches, he bowled in 38 innings, he threw down 4,633 deliveries, took 89 wickets for a total of 2,549 runs,
00:16:40
Speaker
His best bowling in an innings was 7 wickets for 148 runs, so expensive. Best bowling for a test match was 9 for 221.
00:16:55
Speaker
His bowling average was 28.64, so quite high. Certainly we think of modern bowlers today. Glenn McGraw I think was about 21. Seven occasions he took five wickets in an innings. His first class record, 113 first class matches he bowled
00:17:19
Speaker
19,565 deliveries, took 442 wickets for a total of 10,730 runs. Best bowling, as I mentioned before, that seven for 15 spell against Worcestershire. His bowling average in first class was a bit better, 24.27, and he took five wicket innings on 31 occasions and a 10 wicket match on four occasions.
00:17:47
Speaker
I'll just look briefly at his batting. So in those 21 test matches he scored 457 runs as a tail ender, higher score of 45, so he never made a 50, batting average of 13.05. In his first class, 113 matches as I mentioned, 2484 runs as a batsman, higher score of 82, an average of 16,
00:18:17
Speaker
0.89 and on four occasions he scored 50. Max, what do you make of Tibby's statistics? Unlike many of his contemporaries who we still see at the top of many records and charts, Tibby's all but sort of disappeared. So what do you make of it all? The one thing that you would say
00:18:48
Speaker
survives as an impact is that I think he's still certainly in the top 10 Australian test bowlers who've played a comparable amount of cricket for strike rate. I think he took, and I'm going purely from memory here, but a wicket
00:19:13
Speaker
roughly every 50 balls or so. And that puts him squarely in the top 10 for strike rate. And that is probably a fair indication of the kind of cricketer he was. He was someone who made a sharp impact rather
00:19:37
Speaker
you know, built a solid substantial body of achievement, but he made impacts that change games.
00:19:58
Speaker
Well, let's move on to, I suppose, the third and final act of Tibi's life.
Military Service and Heroism
00:20:07
Speaker
And as we've alluded to, his first class career was petering to a close during the 1913-14 season.
00:20:20
Speaker
and then of course the first world war occurs and as was expected of cricketers and sportsmen of the day to be signed up for the war effort strangely what is discovered when he signs up he goes in for a medical
00:20:39
Speaker
And it's discovered that he's actually quite blind, which is remarkable. And initially he's discharged or not allowed to sign up. And then another, he does another medical and the doctor lets him slide through, but perhaps owing to his celebrity. What can you tell us about that, Max? Yeah, well, he went to join up and there was a standard medical test.
00:21:10
Speaker
And it found that he was, I think, very short-sighted in one eye, which in retrospect makes his cricket all the more remarkable because that you think would have affected his depth perception, which would have made batting quite a challenge.
00:21:32
Speaker
That creates a real dilemma for the recruiting staff, because according to the criteria that they're obliged to apply, cotter is unfit. But here's a guy who only a couple of years before has been opening the bowling for Australia in test matches, who's a renowned athlete
00:22:01
Speaker
who's a first grade rugby union player for Glebe. If he's unfit, who is fit? And of course, there's a stigma attached to not signing up, which Cotto's anxious to avoid. And Cotto is also being used for publicity in attracting new recruits. Bear in mind,
00:22:31
Speaker
There's no conscription. And so, you know, Kotter's photograph is being used. Tripper, Kotter's signed up. You've got to sign up. There's a lot of incentive to get Kotter in. And it seems to me that what happened was that they struck a compromise where he was allowed to join, but in a non-combatant role.
00:22:58
Speaker
So you can sign up, but we're not giving you a gun, because who knows who you're going to shoot with. And that seems to have been the compromise they struck. We've got to let this guy in, because if Australia's opening bowler isn't fit, what signal does that sound? But we don't want him shooting anyway. So that seems to be in the compromise. So he joins as a stretcher bearer.
00:23:25
Speaker
rather than an armed combatant. But he then signs up to the light horse brigade, does he not? Which seems like a bit of an odd choice. I mean, did he have a background with horses? Or is it simply that they were after a stretcher bearer?
00:23:47
Speaker
Well, did you have a background in horses? He knew what a horse was because the cotter home at Glebe had stables. Now, I don't know whether he used those as riding horses. My suspicion is this was before motor cars. So the horses were probably pulling a carriage, but we just don't know. I suspect he joined the light horse purely because it was glamorous. And, um,
00:24:18
Speaker
If you had a level of celebrity, you were given some leeway in saying where you wanted to serve. And it's quite likely that he opted for the light horse either because he knew someone who was there or because it was the glamour unit.
00:24:39
Speaker
So he goes off to war and he arrives in Gallipoli in 1915 in August I think which is about four months after the initial slaughter in April and the weather is just terrible. Your book details how there's just constant storms of sleet and snow and the troops are just
00:25:06
Speaker
of course, miserable, including, including Tibby. And he actually incurs an early misdemeanor, an official misdemeanor. What can you tell us about that? I think he'd been on Gallipoli for two days when he was found guilty of being too drunk to function. And he was sentenced to a thing called field punishment, number one.
00:25:36
Speaker
Now, there's a couple of things to say about that. First, we don't know anything about the circumstances. It's possible that he just met up with a bunch of people who were keen to have a drink with the famous test cricketer and it got out of hand. It's also possible that his first exposure to conflict had
00:26:02
Speaker
a shocking effect on him and he was drinking to nullify that. So there's that range of possibility and we just don't know where he fell on that. He was sentenced to field punishment number one. This is a notorious subject in studies of the First World War. What field punishment number one was is
00:26:30
Speaker
And that's because it was the discretion of the local commanding officer. So there are horrendous stories that, in some places, field punishment, number one, involved being tied to some object within range of enemy guns for a period of an hour to convince you to act better next time.
00:26:56
Speaker
you know, in other places it was just performing mundane but unpleasant duties. We just don't know. But I guess the other point to make about it was that cotter in this respect is not untypical. And I talk about the layers of mythology that smother this and this is an area where whenever I talk about it I get extraordinary heated
00:27:26
Speaker
adverse comments from a particular group of people who are determined to believe that the Anzacs were the epitome of fine, upright, noble soldiers. The fact is there are academic studies of the First World War that show conclusively that the Australian forces had the worst disciplinary record of any of the Allied soldiers.
00:27:55
Speaker
And that ranged from relatively trivial things like the refusal of the lower ranked soldiers to salute their superiors whenever they walked past, to the more serious end of things like desertion. And the paradox of the Australian soldiers in the First World War is that on the whole, they were phenomenally good
00:28:24
Speaker
at the fighting bit and incredibly messy and undisciplined at all the non-fighting stuff. And Cotta fits quite neatly into that pattern. It's not his only offense. He goes on leave to Cairo after Gallipoli and just goes missing for three days. He just goes on a bender in Cairo for three days and gets punished for that.
00:28:54
Speaker
So he's a very messy soldier, but he would argue, and I think with some justice, good at the bits that mattered.
00:29:04
Speaker
I think your assessment is entirely accurate. I mean, when you think about it, you know, here they are sending off large groups of young men overseas for the first time, which must have been extremely exciting for many of them. In fact, Tibby would have been one of the most experienced. I think at this point of his life, he'd been overseas
00:29:30
Speaker
on two other large trips, cricketing tours obviously, and so he would have been one of the more experienced, but for a majority of them, and I'm certainly not saying it was fun, but in between, away from the conflict, they would have
00:29:47
Speaker
certainly had time for lots of merriment and this is what Tibi finds. So I think the following year he's relocated to Egypt where the weather is a bit better than when he first arrived and
00:30:03
Speaker
It leads him to partake in many cricket matches, which not only boys everyone's spirits, certainly does tibbies and naturally he's seen as a celebrity in that field. And through all this and through his efforts as a stretcher bearer, his reputation is really restored, is it not? Yeah.
00:30:32
Speaker
Yes, certainly. So we need to touch a bit on what a stretcher bearer does. So typically in an assault on an enemy position, the first wave of attacking soldiers leads off. Typically there are very high casualties in that first wave. And the second wave is actually the stretcher bearers. They come and pick up what they can.
00:31:02
Speaker
And we tend to think of, because stretcher bearers are non-combatants, we tend to think of that as somehow being safer than actually going into action with a gun. It's actually more dangerous because you're upright, you're carrying a heavy load, you're slow, and you're in range of the enemy guns, and you are an easy target. So being a stretcher bearer is incredibly hazardous.
00:31:31
Speaker
because if you're a soldier approaching an enemy position with a gun, you can crouch down, you can lie down, you can crawl, you can make yourself a difficult target. Stretcher bearers can do none of that. In some parts of the war, at some times, there's anecdotal evidence that both sides
00:32:00
Speaker
had a tacit agreement not to shoot each other's stretcher bearers, but you couldn't count on that. And it didn't happen all the time. So really your job as a stretcher bearer is to go in when the guns are still firing to identify wounded men and bring them back. Kotter first comes to attention at the Second Battle of Gaza, where there are numerous reports, including in the
00:32:29
Speaker
Australian official war history of what a phenomenal job he does under heavy fire going in to identify and return casualties. And the bravery that he showed on that occasion is remarked upon in many different places. Curiously,
00:32:52
Speaker
not in any official reports from his unit. He's never mentioned in dispatches or recommend for a decoration or anything like that. And possibly that's because the officers resented his attitude to life away from the front. But we can't really know. But he certainly established a reputation as being
00:33:21
Speaker
immensely brave under fire in a job that was inherently very hazardous. So Max, let's talk about Tibi's death.
Mysterious Death and Legacy
00:33:34
Speaker
So it happens at the famous Battle of Bathsheba on the 17th of October 1917. And what's interesting about this
00:33:48
Speaker
to us is that it is clouded in mystery how it actually occurred. We know that he was shot dead but perhaps to maintain morale amongst troops and Australians back home his
00:34:07
Speaker
death or the manner in which it occurred was little reported, which has led to conflicting reports of what actually led to the fatal shot. What can you tell us about it? Well it's a very, it's a puzzle.
00:34:29
Speaker
The Battle of Bathsheba happens in October and Bathsheba is statistically very important because it has wells. The Australians are travelling with horses and camels, quite apart from the men, and they need access to the wells. There are no wells for hundreds of miles past Bathsheba, so it's critical they get there.
00:34:58
Speaker
It's also critical they get there on that day because the Turks might abandon Bathsheba and poison the wells on the way out, which renders them useless. So it has to happen on the day. Now, the way the light horse operate is they're not cavalry. They're not trained to fight on horseback.
00:35:25
Speaker
Instead, they're trained to ride to a position, dismount and fight so that they're light mobile in infantry rather than horseback fighters. But the commanding officers decide
00:35:44
Speaker
General Chevelle decides that the only way to get to Bathsheba and take Bathsheba before nightfall is just to charge. So a cavalry charge is launched at Bathsheba. It's the last thing the Turks expect. They're overwhelmed. The fighting takes a couple of hours. It's all very quick. All we know is that at the end of it, Qatar's dead.
00:36:15
Speaker
Now, the reason that background's important is that there's no role for a stretcher bearer in a cavalry charge. There's nothing for him to do. So we don't know whether he, which is possible, joined in the charge and was shot in the course of that, or whether something else happened. And
00:36:41
Speaker
There's really no way of unraveling that mystery. What we do know is that all the stories about his death that have traditionally been told are wrong. So the one that got most circulation was a story that Bert Oldfield used to tell, that Cotter had been in a trench, couldn't, wanted to check what he'd seen through the periscope, so put his head up over the trench and got shot.
00:37:11
Speaker
Now, there are no trenches and periscopes at Besheba. The story's probably told to reflect the fact that Cotter isn't the smartest and doesn't know how to use a periscope. But it's plainly nonsense. And in any event, Bert Oldfield was serving on the Western Front, so he would have heard this fourth hand at best.
00:37:39
Speaker
So we just don't have a reliable first hand account and there's no official account of what happened. Now, what we do know is that Besheba was an incredibly unpleasant conflict because amongst other things, a large number of Turkish soldiers surrendered. And after surrendering,
00:38:07
Speaker
one of them produced a gun and shot a couple of Australians. And that led to a massive reprisal in which a large number of Turkish prisoners were killed. It's well documented. It's not well publicised because again, it doesn't sit nicely with the way we want to think about Anzacs. But these things happen in war.
00:38:37
Speaker
And one of the accounts of this episode says that one of the men who was killed by the Turkish prisoner who kept his gun was a stretcher bearer. And Koda is the only person I've been able to identify who died at Busheba who was a stretcher bearer. So it's not impossible. The theory we propound in the book, and we never say that it's more than a theory,
00:39:05
Speaker
is that Cotta was the stretcher bearer who was killed by a Turkish prisoner who had pretended to surrender. And that at least is consistent with the reason why there's no official report. There's plenty of ornate, obviously wrong stories in the press about how Cotta died, but no official account anywhere of his death.
00:39:36
Speaker
And that could be because if he was killed in that way, it was an episode that the authorities would not be anxious to say much about because then they'd have to deal with the reprisals as well. And that was something that no one wanted to be publicised. But it's a theory only.
00:40:01
Speaker
absent the emergence of some document that lies in a dusty archive somewhere, we're unlikely ever to know more.
00:40:09
Speaker
There is a photo, and I didn't know this until I read your book, which purports to be Tibi Koda, his body, lying on the ground with the other casualties of the Battle of Bathsheba. And if you see the photo, there's an X next to what is generally regarded to be Tibi's body.
00:40:31
Speaker
The body is partly covered by a blanket it seems but you can see just the side of his left face, you can see his ear and a bit of the hair. Are you as his biographer satisfied that the photo is in fact showing Cotter's body? It's been accepted as
00:40:56
Speaker
a photograph of Cotter for a very long time. And there's no, whilst I don't know the precise provenance of that, there's no reason to disbelieve it. It's interesting in assessing the stories about Cotter's death because his trousers have been removed.
00:41:19
Speaker
which suggests that he suffered a wound to the lower half of the body, which, if that's right, enables you to discount the stories about Cotta being shot in the head. So that, if it is Cotta, then that probably discounts
00:41:45
Speaker
75% of the accounts of his death. But look, all we know for sure is that it's a photograph of Australian war dead at Bathsheba and that one of the war dead was Cotter and that it's been accepted for many years that the man marked with the X was him.
00:42:18
Speaker
God be with you till we meet again.
00:42:33
Speaker
Well, let's conclude Max in discussing Tibby's legacy. What do you make of his legacy today? And what public monuments or plaques exist to remind people of his feats, either sporting or otherwise? Well, I think the fact that he was killed in the war,
00:42:59
Speaker
It's has kept his reputation alive for longer than it might otherwise have survived. He's better remembered, for example, than Ernie Jones. It was probably roughly comparable as a cricketer. And, you know, the fact that he was killed at one of Australia's most famous
00:43:24
Speaker
battles of the First World War. It's often said to be the last cavalry charge that took place in modern warfare, although people who know more about this than I do dispute that. But certainly the fact that he was killed at a very famous battle has helped preserve his reputation in the public consciousness.
00:43:54
Speaker
reminded of the people who said that for Elvis Presley, death was a good career move. Well, I wouldn't quite go that far, but certainly the manner of Cotter's death has preserved his memory for longer than perhaps might otherwise have occurred. I think he was someone who definitely brought about changes in the way the game was played and
00:44:23
Speaker
Those aren't well remembered, but I think they're genuine. So I think there's, he's a little bit of a legendary figure, although he was, you wouldn't call him a great cricketer. You'd say he was a very good cricketer, but also a very colorful one. And so we, there was, shortly after his death, there was a plaque,
00:44:51
Speaker
installed in his memory at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Almost no one now knows where that is. It's vanished. But a couple of years ago, a bridge was named after him. There's a Tibby Cotter bridge, footbridge, that goes over, I think, South Darling Street.
00:45:16
Speaker
connecting two parts of Moorpark. I've not yet met anyone who's used it. I've definitely used it. I'm not quite sure what it's meant to do, but it's there and it has his name on it. And I think that was probably
00:45:38
Speaker
the naming of that was probably due to Rodney Cavalier who was the chairman of the SCG Trust who has a strong interest in the cricket of this period. There is also still in the suburb of Glebe a cotter lane and that's not named after him, that's named after his father because as those of you who have lived in
00:46:06
Speaker
inner-city Sydney know back in the days when there was no indoor plumbing and the dunny man came to collect the refuse on a couple of times a week. There were laneways at the back of
00:46:31
Speaker
major streets to enable access to the house for that service. And the laneway at the back of the Cotter's old house, which still stands, is called Cotter Lane. So if you want to find out where he lived as a boy, you just look up Cotter Lane Glebe and that's where he is.
00:46:52
Speaker
I'm sure, Max, there are a few of my listeners who have crossed or used the Tibi Cotta Bridge. For those of you who don't know, it is an unusual bridge in that the two ends, the bookends, seem to curl around before you even get anywhere. So if you're running partially late to a football or cricket match at the Sydney Cricket Ground,
00:47:20
Speaker
If you crossed the Tibi Cotta bridge you would definitely be late. It seems like you've walked a mile and you're still not halfway there. But I suppose we should be grateful that such a large monument exists in Tibi's name after all these years.
Impact on Modern Cricket?
00:47:44
Speaker
Max, here's the final question which I put to all of my guests and that is what do you think Tibby would have made of modern cricket? And by that I mean T20 cricket, day and night cricket. Do you think he would have thrived? Well, look, potentially
00:48:10
Speaker
tremendously well. But a modern cricket is nothing if not professional. And so he would not survive in high level modern cricket with the approach that he had in the era when he played. Would have had real difficulty with the discipline required to be a modern professional cricketer.
00:48:39
Speaker
That said, if he were able to come to terms with that, you could imagine him being quite an extraordinary T20 cricketer, perhaps in the mold of an Andre Russell, someone who can bowl fast and come out and hit three sixes in and over. That kind of cricket was made for him. Now, you know,
00:49:07
Speaker
that there are all sorts of caveats that come with that. You can equally imagine him bowling seven lakeside wides in an over. But if he could have disciplined himself to the
00:49:27
Speaker
regimentation required to prepare and perform consistently, then you can imagine him having an absolutely explosive impact in short form cricket. So I think he could have had a terrific impact in the modern game, but
00:49:53
Speaker
You know, his kind of player is rare now because the need for consistency, the need for reliability has to a large extent removed his kind of unpredictable explosive play from the modern game.
00:50:16
Speaker
and not to mention the 24-7 news cycle which may have caught him out a few times. Well, thank you Max for joining me on the podcast today. It's been excellent actually, very enlightening hearing you recall the life and times of T.B. Cotter. Just wonderful. I would encourage all my listeners to read your
00:50:41
Speaker
book T.B. Cotter, Fast Bowler, Larrick and Anzac if they can get a hands on a copy but thanks for joining me here today Max. Thank you very much. That's all from me. Be sure to follow the podcast on social media and you can write to me at golden age of cricket at gmail.com. My name is Tom Ford and until next time it's bye for now.
00:51:13
Speaker
Bye!