My Favourite Cricketer: Victor Trumper by S.A. Rennie

My Favourite Cricketer sees the teams at Balanced Sports and World Cricket Watch invite the best cricket writers and bloggers to tell us who their favourite cricketers are - and, more importantly, tell us why they stand out.  Today's submission is by S.A. Rennie of Legside Filth.  You can find Legside Filth on the web at www.legsidefilth.com, or on Twitter at @legsidefilth

I never saw my favourite cricketer play; he died 56 years before I was born. But like a cricketing Alexander the Great he left behind him a legacy of achievement, literature, and myth, and changed the face of batting forever.

It could have been my first reading of Arthur Mailey’s recollection of bowling to him in club cricket, with its famous last line (“I felt like a boy who had killed a dove”). It could have been my first viewing, in the Lord’s museum, of that iconic photo by George Beldam of Trumper jumping out to drive, taken at the Oval when Australia played Surrey in July 1902. Whatever triggered it, my obsession became total and all-absorbing. I read everything I could about the man, spent a fortune on books and ephemera and bitterly rued the impossibility of time travel, because unlike Harold Pinter with Len Hutton, I never saw Trumper in his prime, and it was another time - a time when a batsman could successfully break the shackles of orthodoxy, could have stories told about his greatness as a human being and as a cricketer. That fascinated me just as much as the man.

Courtesy: arcadia.com

If Trumper were a superhero, he’d have been rocketed to Earth as a baby from the planet Krypton to crash-land behind Charles Trumper’s boot factory. It is believed he was born in Sydney in 1877, but no record of his birth exists. There is a theory that he was the illegitimate son of an Auckland chambermaid, adopted into the Trumper family through a cousin of his mother’s. Like Phar Lap, he could be another hero New Zealand might claim for its own.

His accomplishments glow like an illuminated manuscript amongst fusty tomes. 300 not out against Sussex at Hove on his first tour to the “mother country” in 1899; first man to score a century before lunch on the first day of a Test match, at Old Trafford in that damp but glorious annus mirabilus of 1902; 335 in 180 minutes for Paddington against Redfern in 1903; that last, poignant hurrah at Lancaster Park where he contributed 293 to a record 8th wicket partnership of 433 with Arthur Sims for a touring eleven against Canterbury. That was in 1914; fifteen months later he was dead from kidney disease. News of his passing knocked the Great War off the front pages, and thousands of Sydneysiders lined the streets to watch his funeral cortege on its way to Waverley Cemetery.