by Arunabha Sengupta
As a youngster Alan Kippax had bowled to Victor Trumper at the nets.
When he developed into a top level cricketer, he looked eerily like the great man’s natural successor. The delicate late-cut, the ease of the hook, the overall elegance of style … and then there were the shirt-sleeves rolled to the halfway fold.
All these crystallised into a first-class average of 57.
When Don Bradman made his first-class debut for New South Wales, hitting 118 against South Australia, Kippax was his skipper, and he himself got 143. In the third match Bradman played, he was out for a first ball duck. Kippax hit an unbeaten 315.
By then Kippax had played one Test in the 1924-25 Ashes and had contemplated throwing himself off the cliffs to the east of Sydney on being left out of the 1926 tour to England.
He was selected for the 1928-29 Ashes. At Melbourne Bradman, in his second Test, scored 79 and 112. Kippax got 100 and 41.
In Bradman’s triumphant 1930 tour of England, he shared stands of 192 at Lord’s and 229 at Leeds with the young genius. Towards the end of the tour he hit 158 and 102 not out at Hove.
When the West Indians visited in 1930-31, Kippax hit 146 at Adelaide, the first ever Australian century against West Indies. At Brisbane he shared a stand of 193 with the boy champion to whom he had very recently been a father figure.
However, in the 1931-32 season, a ball jumped from an iron peg securing the matting in a minor match at Grenfell. Kippax broke his nose. And soon after that he was hospitalised by a blow to the temple from Pud Thurlow in a Shield match at Brisbane.
By the time Bodyline came about, he was shaken. At Adelaide, he was hit glancingly on the head by Voce and then struck on the knuckles. Out leg before to Larwood for 8, when taking off his pads he supposedly lamented, “He’s too bloody fast for me.”
In the second innings, he was walking out to bat at 10 for 2, when captain Bill Woodfull, walking back for a duck, told him to wait and asked Stan McCabe to join Jack Fingleton. Eventually Kippax emerged to deny Wally Hammond a hat-trick and resisted for a while but then played across the line to Larwood.
That was virtually the end of his Test career. It made Arthur Mailey write that leg theory “interferes seriously with the brilliant batting artist and has a tendency to produce batting plodders.
Kippax himself wrote strongly on Bodyline.
He played one more Test during the 1934 tour of England, a trip when illness dogged him and the string of disappointment was broken only by a sublime 250 at his favourite Hove.
On tours, he was inseparable from Vic Richardson, somehow conjuring up images of Douglas Fairbanks and Spencer Tracy as a duo. Later he ran a sports store in Martin Place, Sydney, thriving against the stiff competition from nearby shops run by Bert Oldfield and Stan McCabe.
He lived with his wife in a house of fine old furniture and art-deco ornaments, wearing red satin smoking-jackets and pulling at his cigarette from an ivory holder. David Frith said it was akin to being in Noel Coward’s presence without being confronted by Coward’s eloquence and vanity. Indeed, Kippax remained reticent about his great deeds as a batsman.
Alan Kippax was born on 25 May 1897.