Jack Fingleton (1908–1981)

Jack Fingleton was a fine cricketer who is perhaps best known for his role in Bodyline and his dislike of Bradman. He was also a political journalist and media adviser to former Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes, which makes Batting from memory unlike your average cricketer’s memoirs. Fingleton gives us his life from growing up in the country, his father, James Fingleton, becoming a Labor politician before succumbing to TB at a young age, his cricket and journalistic career.

Well written and with some great insights; Fingleton sounds like a glutton for punishment working for Hughes as long as he did and one wonders if the book on Australian politics he wrote (about which he notes that an editor suggested he would have to publish it under an assumed name to separate it from Fingleton’s cricketing life) was ever published?… (més)