Sidney Downer's cricket history, from memory in Japanese prison, before Adelaide Oval centenary tribute, 1971
Sidney Downer's book 100 Not Out: A Century of Cricket on Adelaide Oval (1970-71) and (right) a page from his Goodbye to Bradman, a cricket history compiled while in the Japanese prison during World War II and signed by fellow prisoners.
Images courtesy South Australian Cricket Association
Sidney Downer wrote two significant cricket books under very different circumstances. One was 100 Not Out: A Century of Cricket on Adelaide Oval, called “a compelling source of cricket lore in South Australia”, and the other a small one-copy volume that ended in the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) Museum at Lord’s in London.
Sidney Downer fell in love with cricket as a boy in Adelaide. At 16 in 1925, he scored a patient 130 for St Peter’s College in the intercollegiate against Prince Alfred College. His ambitions to play higher grades of cricket weren’t fulfilled but a career in journalism at The Advertiser in Adelaide allowed him to stay close to the sport.
When World War II broke out, Downer moved to London with Australian Associated Press and in 1940 enlisted with the Royal Air Force. The next year he was posted to Singapore. When the island fell to the Japanese, he briefly escaped before being taken prisoner in Java. Flight lieutenant Downer was interned at Karenko prison camp in Formosa (later Taiwan) and, when that closed in 1943, he was transferred to Shirakawa #4, with up to 500 prisoners used as forced labour on farms.
Keeping up morale in horrific conditions was important and cricket played a small role. At Changi in Singapore, Australian and British servicemen. played test matches. Among the prisoners was English cricket writer E.W. Jim Swanton, an entertainment officer at Changi and later on the Burma railway. Swanton had a 1939 Wisden, classified by the Japanese as non-subversive, and so well-thumbed that it had to be repaired several times. In the evening, Swanton would simulate commentary of famous Test matches and occasionally gave lectures including one on “The life of Don Bradman”.
Swanton later wrote that “we were never so thankful for having been cricketers as we were when we were guests of the Japanese. It was a subject that filled countless hours in pitch-dark huts.”
So too for Sidney Downer at Shirakawa #4, especially when prisoners were given afternoons recreation time. For several months in 1944, they had access to typewriters and a crude printing press. The men produced drawings and wrote poems, plays and stories for the camp magazine Raggle Taggle. Besides contributing to the publication, Sidney Downer began writing a cricket history. “I could palliate the present by submerging it beneath a past crowded with memories of Hendrens, Bradmans and Tates,’ he later wrote.
Working on scraps of paper, entirely from memory, Downer detailed 49 Test matches. After the war, when checked against official records, there were only two errors. Each piece was read aloud and shared with other prisoners. The pages grew until it became a book. Fellow prisoners found materials to crudely bind it and Downer hand drew a cover page and contents table.
The Japanese guards were aware of the manuscript and they cleared it by stamping a neat permission seal under the title Goodbye Bradman. The back of the book featured a page entitled “My Public” with signatures and service details of three dozen keen readers. Downer dedicated the book to his young son John: “It was my aim to supply John with a sort of cricket bedside book to dip into in an idle moment, to consult when in doubt, to be amused by when in the spiritual doldrums”.
Downer’s book was passed on to E.W. Swanton after the war and, when Swanton died in 2000, his library went to the MCC.
After the war, Downer returned to Adelaide and The Advertiser sports department. He began writing a history of the South Australian Cricket Association for its centenary in 1970-71. After completing much of the manuscript, Downer was hospitalised with pneumonia and died soon after his 60th birthday. Donald Bradman finished the book and oversaw its publication.