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Short Leg – Who was Bert Folkard? – Part 1
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In this episode, Tom is joined by co-authors Pat Rodgers and Peter Lloyd who have just published a gem of a biography on Bert Folkard (1878–1937), a Sydney cricketer during the Golden Age who, owing to personal and professional circumstances, never reached his full potential on the sporting field. His one chance at playing for Australia was dashed with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
ABOUT PAT RODGERS: Pat has taught History and coached cricket at schools in Sydney for over 35 years. In 2021, The Perplexing and Tragic Life of Jack Cuffe was published and earned critical acclaim. Books on Sydney-born working-class cricketers Alex Kermode and Arthur McBeath followed.
ABOUT PETER LLOYD: Peter has written extensively on cricket, winning various awards for his research and prose. Most recently, in-depth biographies of three 'Golden Age' cricketers – Warren Bardsley, Monty Noble and Charlie Macartney – have stamped him as a social historian of the highest order.
DONATE: You can buy Tom Ford a coffee! Every donation helps with production and inspires Tom to keep the podcast going. You can donate from a little as $5. Visit: buymeacoffee.com/GoldenAgeOfCricket
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 Bert Falkhardt's Biography
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to this short-leg episode of the podcast. My name is Tom Ford. In today's episode, I speak to Pat Rogers and Peter Lloyd, two Australian historians who have co-authored a new biography on Bert Falkhardt, a pre-World War I cricketer who never played for his country, but who they claim was a giant of the game.
00:00:28
Speaker
It's on this statement that i began my line of questioning. Peter Lloyd begins...
Bert Falkhardt's Cricket Legacy
00:00:34
Speaker
Bert was a natural cricketer and he was true to his nature. He was a competitive man.
00:00:40
Speaker
He was ah an honest and fair cricketer. He played the games to the best of the laws as he as he could. He was loyal to his teams and his comrades. and He was highly admired right through his career, both as a younger player at Callum Park and then later on as he went through the grades and even into the straight side. um He was a very durable cricketer, um despite the fact that there were suggestions later in his life that he was less nimble about the field as he put on weight and his girth and increased. He was quite a um an athlete in his younger days. And um he gave his all, whether he was bowling or batting or fielding, um and he was a good fielder. Even when he was a little less nimble, he could catch quite well and anticipated where a stroke might go.
00:01:31
Speaker
He was somebody that a lot of folks said the younger players should aspire to. Following his lead, he had that knack and the technique which... took him above the average and for emerging players, those who aspire to greater things, he was shown as a ah role model that they could follow to good effect. um think he was a very confident person in his own skills as a cricketer and he had a pride about um and had a poem about the way that he went about cricket. He was um a a man of mental stability and great depth. I think all those things sort of emerged throughout his career.
00:02:13
Speaker
Towards the end of his cricketing ah life, he still maintained very close connections with a lot of high-flying cricketers who saw him as an elder statesman, so to speak.
Challenges in Bert's Cricket Career
00:02:25
Speaker
And for all those reasons, I think Pat and I agree, he was a giant of cricket in Australia, well, certainly in New South Wales. And had he had a different lifestyle, different work work circumstance,
00:02:39
Speaker
And had he been able to commit to playing regularly in front of representative selectors, I think his career may have unfolded in different ways. But for all those reasons and more, Pat might want to allude to other things, but they all made him, in my opinion, a giant ah of Australian cricket.
00:02:56
Speaker
If I could add to that, Tom, I think the giant part of it, certainly ah a giant of a man, he was a big, big fellow, wasn't he, Peter? And, um you know, just in the photos, team photos, you can see that very clearly. He's towers over most of the players he's in the photo with. But the giant part of it, I suppose, was in Sydney grade cricket and in Sydney cricket like for...
00:03:18
Speaker
The best part of three decades, he dominated first grade cricket and lower level cricket um just with enormous numbers of runs and enormous numbers of wickets. He was ah a true all rounder. He would have made any team purely as a batsman and or purely as a bowler. And his feats there were phenomenal.
00:03:38
Speaker
but um Unfortunately, he didn't. quite for reasons we'll get to, know, translate that into first class arena as much as you would have thought he would have. and um And he never got the chance to play for Australia, which we'll get to too, but certainly a giant character.
00:03:55
Speaker
Now you've both written on cricket history independently. How and why did this collaboration come about?
Collaboration on the Biography
00:04:03
Speaker
Well, Peter can correct me if I'm wrong here but um with the details here, but my recollection is we were helping each other with proofreading each other's books, at cricket books. So I think I started, Peter asked for some help with the m MA Noble book that he wrote and then the Charlie McCartney book. And at the same time then when I was writing the book about Sid Emery,
00:04:26
Speaker
the erratic Sid Emery from the 1912 Australian tour to England. Peter was very generous in his help that he gave to me there. So we'd read each other's work. We'd liked each other's processes and so on. And um we certainly had a common interest in the golden age cricketers, especially the Sydney based ones.
00:04:47
Speaker
ah And so I'm pretty sure it was Peter's suggestion that we draw up a list. And if there was someone on that list that we both, thought was worthy of further investigation that we'd collaborate on ah on a book. And there are a number of people on that list and and they weren't big characters like your McCartneys and Bardsleys and nobles, but more sort of forgotten golden age cricketers, the sort of characters that I'd been looking at in my own work individually. And Bert's name happened to be on there with people like Austin Diamond, I think was there, was there Peter and who I'd done some work on, but we decided on Bert being a good subject and we agreed on that and we're glad we did.
00:05:27
Speaker
We certainly are.
Exploring Bert Falkhardt's Life
00:05:28
Speaker
i um I think I wanted to challenge myself a little bit too, because having written on three of the of the greats of Australian golden age era, the golden age era, my thought, well, Charlie McCartney, of course, went beyond the golden age.
00:05:43
Speaker
And I think that came out in the podcast with you when I spoke about Charlie and we saw that his career had been divided it into two parts. But I was wanting to see how I might help with uncovering a man who's who was far less well-known and who obviously had something about him which intrigued people, ah but didn't have that sort of glamour and the publicity surrounding his being. So for me, it was ah an opportunity to ah go down that avenue. And i Pat and I, think, have done a good job of bringing out the real Burt Falkard to the attention of many people who
00:06:27
Speaker
Thought they may have known a little bit about him, but really knew very little, apart from basic statistics. And the fact that he almost played test cricket for Australia except for the Great War.
00:06:39
Speaker
How much did each of you already know about him? Was he a name that kept popping up in your other research and you just sort of parked his name for a while? um did you Did you know much about his life leading into this project?
00:06:58
Speaker
I suppose I'd come across him in a book that I'd co-authored about Balmain Cricket Club. It's now the Sydney Cricket Club that based in Dremoyne in Sydney. And myself and my fellow co-author there had done an updated version of the cricket club. There'd been two very good histories done of it, but not for quite a few years. And this was the 125th anniversary of Balmain, which we...
00:07:24
Speaker
did this updated version while we're doing the update of it. We went back in time to try to summarize the early days of of the club and where it had come from. And Bert's name certainly popped up there a lot.
00:07:37
Speaker
Um, He was regularly you know having 500 run seasons, 50 wicket seasons for Balmain, season after season, and he's certainly their finest all-rounder in their whole 125-year history. Ended up with 500 first-grade wickets and five thousand over 5,000 runs. So that's where I came across him, as well as other research. He's in New South Wales teams of, say, Emery, and I'm sure with McCartney and Noble and and so on. And,
00:08:05
Speaker
um And the thing that attracted me to him, Tom, was that I knew something about his link to Callan Park, which I'm sure we'll get to, the Callan Park Mental Asylum in Lillifield in Sydney.
00:08:18
Speaker
And I knew something about him playing there um and working there. And that really sparked my interest in him. He was a a fairly unforgotten character, but also a different character, someone whose story might have been a bit out of the ordinary, someone who was a mental health a hospital attendant for many years, as we found out, and all the burdens that that must have had on him and mixing that with cricket just made him a an original character, I suppose, out of all those we could have chosen.
00:08:52
Speaker
So I concur totally with all of that, Tom. um But also in my case, while I was writing the Charlie McCartney biography, as Charlie was often want to want to say, he never played anything other than grade cricket. So he didn't play junior cricket. He he joined the North Sydney club as soon as he was ah able to. And um at the time with the electorate system already in place,
00:09:21
Speaker
Their technique at the club with their senior um executive staff, the the coaches and the senior first grade players, would often cobble together a composite side ah and encourage junior players of promise, which included Charlie, to travel to ah play against...
00:09:44
Speaker
ah non-grade sides such as Callum Park. So Charlie was invited by Norm Dean, the um the senior coach selector for North Sydney, the shawman, as they were called, to travel one Saturday just prior to the beginning of the of the Sydney grade season to be part of it of ah of a collective and to experience what it meant to be playing against men.
00:10:10
Speaker
And he was eight years younger than Bert, When he worked out how to get to Callum Park, his mother had to help him yeah and what he what that meant in terms of transportation. He was so excited, but his big worry was that he thought that perhaps the selectors were just including him in the in the group so that he experience the atmosphere of of being amongst the the other players. He thought that he may not actually get a game. And he was, I think he was sort of the last person chosen. He was only 16. And um he hadn't yet played any great cricket whatsoever.
00:10:45
Speaker
He thought that perhaps he would just be left by the outside the pickets, but he was chosen. And then when um Callum Park won the toss...
00:10:57
Speaker
and batted, he was delighted because he thought that he would probably bat number 11. And in that case, he might not even get a hit. So he was pleased he was able to go onto the field. So in our in the prologue to the Falkard book, we talk about what that particular experience meant for Charlie and and he just saw something in Bert that he wanted to emulate. So totally different physique, yes, as Pat says, Bert was a ah big man. Charlie was always short, five foot four, um and yet he had enormous strength and he had big shoulders, big hands, even as a young youngster. So I think he saw something in Bert that he might...
00:11:37
Speaker
he might be able to
Callum Park's Cricketing History
00:11:39
Speaker
replicate. And um at the end of that match, ah he and and Bert spoke together and Bert was very encouraging of his nimbleness around the field. So for Charlie, that was a great um ah beginning of his appreciation of what it meant to be to be a keen and good cricketer.
00:11:58
Speaker
So Charlie McCartney is probably not the only one that needs directions to Callum Park. There's probably a few of my listeners who, certainly the international ones or even inter interstate listeners who aren't familiar with Sydney, possibly don't know where it is and what it's about. So what can you tell us about Callum Park in Sydney and particularly what was its stature as a cricket venue in the late 19th century?
00:12:25
Speaker
Well, as Pat mentioned earlier, it's it's in inner west ah Sydney between Lillifield and Balmain. It's a ah fabulous ah site these days.
00:12:35
Speaker
It was a and ah private residence which the government under Henry Parks as premier... brought to turn into a ah mental health asylum in a time when ah there was very little systematic management of people with ah mental disabilities.
00:12:56
Speaker
um It was appropriate site because it had a lot of open space, it had vistas towards the harbour, Today, if you see the the background of the Sydney skyline, you can just tell with the Iron Cove bridge between it and the and and the CBD, it's a fabulous fabulous sub area.
00:13:18
Speaker
Unfortunately, these days, it's um its still used and in a positive fashion by um educational institutions, institutes, but a lot of it is run down and in need of...
00:13:30
Speaker
ah pulling down. But the heritage area of it is quite is quite significant. There's a ah group that we, Pat in particular, were involved with in finding out about more about Cullum Park called the Friends of Cullum Park. they're They're seeming to be in constant um ah discussions with the government on how best to use the the facility as a ah positive community establishment, try to avoid and it being just taken over by commercial developers. so
00:14:03
Speaker
To get back to your question, though, about its premise, Henry Parks and um Frederick Norton Manning, who was a British naval medical officer, came together and both of them had similar views on how best to improve the disparate and very out very fragmented ah mental health services in the colonial state.
00:14:30
Speaker
And Manning was a man ahead of his time. He had a very strong view of um the idea of the idea of um care in ah in an institution which allowed for something similar to life in a caring home environment. And he had spent time overseas looking at current therapeutic techniques, and he had the capacity to convince Parks that what he wanted to do was worth spending money on. So there was a lot of resistance in this area. It was quite a genteel type of
00:15:09
Speaker
ah middle class area and local folk weren't very keen on having a um what they thought was ah an asylum for mad people on their doorstep but Parks was able to ah rebut that nimbyism and ah the the building was constructed over a period of time into a what would be thought of today as rather a an archaic way of managing, but in those times, in the at the turn of the century, it was state of the art.
00:15:41
Speaker
So cricket ah was ah essential element of the therapy that um the services provided in the sense that it was an outdoor exercise. It gave people, inmates, which I shouldn't use that term because they were desperately trying to avoid the connections of ah with um prisons and penal issues. But of those who were residents there were offered opportunities to get social connections with others, including people from outside the facility, so that they had had more of a normal
00:16:21
Speaker
so more more a normal ah way of being. Cricket was seen as a ah model sport because it had basic rules and there was a competitive edge to it, but it was anyone who was able to battle bowl or field was welcome to join in the team sport not all were able to but so many were the history of calvin park's cricket involvement at more than just picnic or miscellaneous match level is quite incredible the decades they were seen as being the the go-to team to provide opportunities for the serious grade sides to get practice either before seasons or to play during a bye round and provide rigorous opposition on a very good field. There were a couple of medical superintendents in the early days at Callum Park who had a particular penchant for cricket.
00:17:18
Speaker
and who were able to work with authorities, using sometimes the labour of the folk who were residents at the at the park, to help with ah building wickets and preparing ovals.
00:17:34
Speaker
By the early decades of the 20th century, it was one of the picturesque most picturesque and well-received wickets in Sydney.
00:17:45
Speaker
And I think I'll just add there one thing that um Peter mentioned, some of the early medical superintendents. So Herbert Blaxland, who was there in the early days, he was a very keen cricketer.
00:17:55
Speaker
He played a lot of cricket at Callum Park. And his son, Marcus, ended up playing interstate cricket for um New South Wales in Queensland. And he had a big role in developing an oval that Bert, when he arrived there, was able to take advantage.
00:18:10
Speaker
advantage of and we find out that Bert ended up being the curator basically of the of the pitch there as well as the captain of the team and so on.
Bert's Early Life and Cricket Skills
00:18:31
Speaker
Let's talk about his childhood. So Bert Folkart was born Ryde in Sydney in 1878. And just for reference, that is six months after Victor Trumper, who was born not too far away in Sydney. What can you tell me about Bert's early years and how much did cricket feature in those early years?
00:18:54
Speaker
So that's right. Ride is another 10 kilometres or so further south out of the CBD from Callan Park. And Bert grew up there in a large family. His father was a stonemason.
00:19:08
Speaker
Originally, Bert became a stonemason after he'd left school, um but only for a short time. And then he followed his brothers, ah three of them, and his uncle, into the mental health industry. They were all working at different asylums around Sydney, eventually around country, New South Wales. And so cricket was a ah big part of Bert's life. From what we can gather, he played in the local um Gladesville and Hunters Hill um clubs to start with. And he was nicknamed Bowler at school.
00:19:42
Speaker
ah And in 1899, when he um started working at Callan Park, he started playing for them and that's where he made his mark. He was an outstanding all-rounder, as I've already mentioned. They were, particularly at Callan Park, where the standard of cricket probably wasn't as, certainly wasn't as high as first grade in Sydney, but he um he was playing for them and scored mountains of runs, um you know, regularly taking sort of nine or 10 wickets in an innings and, you know,
00:20:15
Speaker
After a couple of years there, and the press had got hold of his story and how good a young cricketer he was, he's in his early 20s by this stage. The Leichhardt Balmain Club, which evolved into the Balmain Club, um made motions to or made moves for Burt to join them and straight into the first grade team he went. We mentioned Austin Diamond before. He was the captain of the Leichhardt Balmain team at the end. It was probably him who recognised that Burt could add a lot to the um their local first grade team and that's what he did.
00:20:48
Speaker
And so that's where he started his great career. So your audience may not know a lot about Austin Diamond, and he's another fascinating character. ah As Pap was saying, he was one of those we listed on our mutual list to see perhaps there's ah an interesting story there. But he he features in so many biographies of the era because he was an amazing person in his own right.
00:21:14
Speaker
I think he and Bert hit it off very well because they both had... They were both driven to to develop cricket ah of of all sorts, both and at the local level and in and in Austin's case, internationally, when he was um often involved with overseas tours that were missionary style things. So Bert, I think, and admired Austin and Austin admired Bert. So there was a strong link there. Yes, indeed.
00:21:45
Speaker
Now, this certainly ah surprised me when I was reading your book, and it's possibly because, Peter, I'm used to certainly your subjects having these meteoric rises into international fame, but with Bird it was slightly different. He jumped around grade cricket, Sydney grade cricket, for a long time, and he often demoted himself. um And he didn't make a first-class debut, which was for New South Wales, until he was in his mid-30s.
00:22:13
Speaker
Why was that?
Impact of Work on Bert's Cricket Career
00:22:14
Speaker
Well, it was the fact that Bert was a very strong family man. He was linked to ah to a work that was highly demanding. The the the the attendance at Callum Park and other asylums ah in New South Wales and elsewhere in Australia and internationally as well would work very long hours. The the therapy was linked you know in some ways to the fact that Particular attendants were expected to be available on a continuing basis, day after day, with the same set of clients.
00:22:48
Speaker
And if there were breaks in that process, there were suggestions that the clients would suffer. So that meant for Bert that he was very unlikely to get, say, for example, two successive weekend Saturdays off to go and play ah afternoon grade cricket in Sydney.
00:23:07
Speaker
um he could He could get one Saturday every now and then off, but not more than one in succession. So that obviously meant that he wasn't able to play for the grade sides who...
00:23:21
Speaker
ah in Sydney in any way were matches that went over two weekends, successive weekends. Playing cricket for Callum Park ah meant mostly either a Wednesday afternoon match or a Saturday ah match and they were on site in the majority of cases. Occasionally Callum Park would travel elsewhere but because of Callum Park's fabulous ground, other sides would prefer to come and play Callum Park. So Burke was in a jam in a sense. He enjoyed the step up in in quality by playing grade cricket.
00:23:56
Speaker
But he he he found that first year at Leichhardt Balmain, as Pat mentioned, was nine know two three and So he had two good seasons there. The first season, he was only in the side for three matches.
00:24:12
Speaker
think he played a couple of lower grade matches to begin with before first grade entry. But as soon as he was available, he was wanted of the first grade side.
00:24:22
Speaker
In the second season, he played six matches, and then he had a break of four years um because of this inability to get leave of absence from from work. It wasn't quite the same as when representative picketers were having to obtain leave to go interstate or even overseas. This was more of a...
00:24:45
Speaker
personal commitment to the clients that he was looking after. And he wasn't alone in this. the We have a photo in the book showing at the beginning of Bert's era, 1899 onwards, when he was just a ah young person, young man, there were 40 or 50 attendants, well kitted out in in a particular uniform and structured in a way that some were more senior than others.
00:25:11
Speaker
It was a team effort and everybody had to oblige. The rules for folk working in the asylum were very rigorous. and Nurses and attendants and medical staff too were ah compelled to spend long periods of time on site.
00:25:31
Speaker
If if ah an attendant or a nurse were to marry, they were initially weren't allowed to go home to a marital bed. They were forced to, they were still obliged to live on site.
00:25:45
Speaker
And when they were allowed to, when they didn't find that they could move away, they had to be within a short five, ten-minute walk of the facility. So there were a lot of restraints on mobility, and ah Bert found that, I think, satisfying. He and all of his family were highly credible officials at their own asylums. um He must have been torn, though, because even though he was...
00:26:16
Speaker
Ruring the roost quite comfortably at Callum Park with his superior skills, and he did enjoy the the competition that he was said that he had had at grade level and the fact that he was easily able to hold his own against first-grade picketers.
00:26:33
Speaker
However, for those years, those first four or five years after He had the initial taste of great cricket. He just didn't feel that he could um break the bonds of his work.
00:26:45
Speaker
He was a devoted servant to the industry. I think one other thing that attracted him um to stay was ah he had a very close relationship and a partnership with one of the patients at the asylum who happened to be an ex-first-class cricketer.
00:27:01
Speaker
He was Reggie Duff's brother, Wally Duff, and Wally had been admitted to Callan Park during this period where Bert had stopped playing great cricket for those four years that Peter mentioned. And during that time, Wally and Bert... reign supreme with the bat and many, many high partnerships. And that must have given him some solace that he was able to be helping Wally, who was very troubled,
00:27:30
Speaker
um and but was also still a very good cricketer that Bert could you know match and form these very good partnerships with. But eventually he was brought back to Balmain, as we'll see.