In Search of Frank Ward
Martin Chandler |Published: 2026
Pages: 133
Author: Cardwell, Ronald
Publisher: The Cricket Publishing Company
Rating: 4.5 stars
Down the years I have read a very large number of biographies of cricketers. In days gone by such books tended to almost always be written about the most successful players, the record holders and men with prodigious on field feats to show for their efforts.
Some of these biographies are, of course, excellent reads, but not all. Increasingly in recent years the biographies I enjoy most tend to be of the less well known cricketers, and those with the more eventful lives outside the game. A disproportionate number of the subjects seem to be Australian. Is this a measure of the quality of writing and research of the authors, or is it just because the Australian way of cricketing life and more importantly the fact that in the past so few could earn a living from the game dictates that their lives are more interesting? It is probably a combination of both.
Which brings me to Frank Ward. A slow right arm wrist spinner Ward did not make his First Class debut until November 1935 when, at 29, he was selected to play for South Australia against the MCC*. Just thirteen months later he made his Test debut in Australia’s defeat in the first Test of the 1936/37 Ashes, although with 2-138 and 6-102 he did pretty well. Three more Tests however, two in that series and the first of the 1938 Ashes, brought him just three more wickets and, barely five years after his debut, his First Class career was over.
The main controversy of Ward’s playing career is the fact that he was preferred in 1936/37 to Clarrie Grimmett, and that it was Ward rather than Grimmett who was taken to England in 1938. Cardwell inevitably dwells on this intriguing issue. For some feelings ran high at the time and, Cardwell presents his reader with all the conflicting views.
Which is an interesting enough basis for a cricketing monograph, but no one who has read any of Cardwell’s other work would expect that to be all, and so it isn’t. Cricket might have brought Frank Ward to Cardwell’s attention, but his interest piqued he was determined to uncover details of the course Ward’s life had taken prior to November 1935, and where it took him after December 1940.
It has taken Cardwell more than eleven years to discover sufficient material about Ward’s life for him to feel comfortable going into print, and he has done a remarkable job in tracing documents and those who met Ward, or knew of him. The result is that the complex family history has been unravelled, and Ward’s journey around various Australia cities traced. Cardwell also manages to discover a good deal about Ward’s personal life, no easy task given that Ward always lived in a country where homosexuality was not decriminalised until after his death in 1974.
For those of us with our own inclination towards researching lives Cardwell’s approach to his writing is certainly instructive. In a way I have never seen any historian seek to do before he gives his reader what amounts to a commentary, setting out and explaining the many steps he has taken over the last eleven years in search of Frank Ward.
As to the manner in which the book is presented, although it almost goes without saying with this publisher I will say it anyway, this is a fine production, stylishly designed, and well illustrated. Cardwell is scrupulous in his referencing of sources in as many as 211 numbered end notes and he also produces a helpful chronology, comprehensive statistics and a decent index.
And finally, Cardwell adds one short segment to In Search of Frank Ward that will doubtless ruffle a few feathers. The man whose work is featured is statistician Ric Finlay who has devised an ‘Era Index’ which is designed to meet the oft made assertion that no realistic comparison can be made of players from different eras. Finlay compares 25 Australian spinners from 1919 to date and Ward achieves a creditable joint ninth place – it is the identity of the man he shares that slot with that will cause the arguments – Shane Warne.
In Search of Frank Ward is available from Roger Page.
*This was a touring party led by Surrey’s Erroll Holmes. It was a decent side containing a number of players who had or would be capped by England albeit only one, Joe Hardstaff, who enjoyed any significant success.
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