The Times - UK (2021-11-10)

the times | Wednesday November 10 2021 49

Register

with members, administrators, players

and the media, and brought the per-

spective of an outsider to an institution

which, rightly or wrongly, was often

perceived as stuffy. Above all, Bradshaw

sought to make Lord’s a more welcom-

ing arena. This he succeeded in doing.

Keith Bradshaw was born in Hobart,

the son of Ralph, an itinerant television

technician and Hazel, a nurse and part-

time cricket scorer who had emigrated

from England with her parents when

she was 18. He was educated at New

Town High School and was sufficiently

talented at sport to represent Tasma-

nia’s under-16 and under-19 cricket X1s

and to be offered professional terms as

a middle order batsman and useful me-

dium pace bowler. His life, though, was

affected episodically by misfortune,

particularly ill health, and he found

himself having to compete with emerg-

ing batsmen such as David Boon, Mark

Taylor and Mark and Steve Waugh.

He soon realised that they were more

naturally gifted and embarked on an

external degree course in commerce at

the University of Tasmania. He was

given a sports scholarship to play club

cricket in England and represented

Sidley in Sussex and the county’s

second XI as well as Greenmount in

Lancashire, where he was befriended

by a leading figure in the club, Neville

Neville. Bradshaw would happily play

backyard cricket with his two sons, Phil

and Gary, both of whom would be

drawn away from the game to the glam-

our and riches of Manchester United.

“I reckon both boys could have

played Test cricket had football not

been the preferred option,” he said.

“Phil represented England at junior

level at cricket one day and at football

the next day. The difference was that at

one match he had 200 people watching

and at the other there were 20,000.

What with that and potential greater

earning capacity if they made the grade

with United, which they did, the choice

of career was an obvious one.”

Bradshaw was to make 25 first-class

appearances for Tasmania, scoring

1,083 runs at 25.78 and taking nine

wickets. In 1988 he decided that a career

in accountancy would be more profita-

ble. By the age of 40 he was a partner

with Deloitte and appeared to be

settled for a long career with the firm.

Yet his attributes, enthusiasm and

pleasant, open nature attracted him to

a firm of headhunters who were seek-

ing a successor to Roger Knight as

secretary and chief executive at Lord’s.

When approached, he thought he

was being asked to run Melbourne

Cricket Club, a short flight away, not

Marylebone Cricket Club on the other

side of the world.

Bradshaw particularly impressed

Robin Marlar and Tony Lewis, both of

whom were former MCC presidents

and influential voices within the club.

Lewis, a former England captain who

was to sit on the development commit-

tee, was, however, no property expert:

on his watch the disused railway

tunnels under the Nursery Ground fell

into the hands of a property developer,

leading to endless complications over

the redevelopment of Lord’s.

Bradshaw believed that this redevel-

opment, which would have been

brought about by a £100 million contri-

bution from the developer, Charles Rif-

kind, who wanted to build flats over the

tunnels, would have safeguarded the

future of MCC for generations and

would have meant a reduction in the

subscriptions of the 18,500 members.

He had a trying relationship with Stock-

en, who on one occasion challenged

him about reports of young women

coming in and out of his grace-and-fa-

vour house on the edge of the Lord’s

curtilage. Bradshaw responded, angrily,

that these were his daughter’s friends.

In his period in office Bradshaw was

to succeed in obtaining a more favoura-

ble staging agreement with the En-

gland and Wales Cricket Board for Test

matches at Lord’s, even though he had

his differences with the governing

body’s chief executive, David Collier.

He floated the idea of merging MCC

and Middlesex, who also were based at

Lord’s, with the intention of creating

“the Manchester United of cricket”, but

this came to nothing.

He managed to improve the club’s

finances, to initiate permanent flood-

lights on the ground and to undertake

considerable research into the use of a

pink ball. He even allowed spectators to

walk on the outfield during intervals,

which had been unheard of in the past.

He would telephone two members

every day to ask their opinion of the

club and would be up early on big match

days to speak to spectators queuing

outside the ground.

When Bradshaw returned home, in

December 2011, it was to take up a posi-

tion running the South Australian

Cricket Association. Ironically, a rede-

velopment of the ground at Adelaide

was underway, costing a near identical

sum. The difference was that, unlike at

Lord’s, this was completed. In addition,

he staged day-night Test matches in

which the pink ball was used.

Bradshaw married, firstly, Louise

King, with whom he had two daughters

and a son. Juliet works in the jewellery

business in Brisbane and Eliza is com-

pleting her paramedical course in Tas-

mania, where Don also lives and at

present is unemployed. The marriage

was dissolved and he subsequently

married Sara Palstra, who believed their

grace-and-favour house, previously oc-

cupied by Gubby Allen, one of the fore-

most figures in the game, was haunted.

Bradshaw himself believed he saw a

ghost there on a separate occasion and

claimed that his housekeeper did as well.

Palstra-Bradshaw subsequently re-

turned to Australia, where she works as

a business development manager. This

marriage was also dissolved. Their son,

Jack, is at school in Adelaide.

One of Bradshaw’s strengths was his

ability to defuse a potentially trying

topic. Although a certain number of

female members had joined MCC by

the time he arrived from Australia, he

discovered their presence was still an

issue. “A large number of members did

not want women in their club. I think

they thought it would turn into a glori-

fied cocktail party or something along

those lines. Unfortunately that con-

tinued to be the mindset of some and

manifested itself in the form of subtle

but continual complaints about a num-

ber of matters such as the state of

women’s dress in the pavilion.

“One constant complaint which par-

ticularly annoyed me was that women

repeatedly were challenged over whe-

ther they were bona fide members

whilst they were in the pavilion. The

frequency of this was such that I had to

introduce a procedure whereby any

member challenging another member’s

validity would have his own name

taken and recorded,” he said. “Fortu-

nately this worked a treat.”

Keith Bradshaw, cricketer and

administrator, was born on October 2,

1963. He died of multiple myeloma on
      November 8, 2021, aged 58

Keith Bradshaw was once described by
Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The
Times as “the enemy within”. Although
this was a tongue-in-cheek remark, the
employment of a colonial to run Mar-
ylebone Cricket Club would have been
unthinkable at the time of the “Body-
line” series between England and Aus-
tralia that engulfed it in 1932-3 and for
some decades thereafter.
His appointment in 2006 as the first
Australian to take charge of the club was
indicative that, although the great rival-
ry between his country and England
was still to the fore on the cricket field,
pleasantry prevailed in the Long Room
at Lord’s. During his tenure as chief
executive and secretary, MCC became a
less insular environment, even if it did at
times experience some turbulence.
Bradshaw achieved a considerable
amount in his five years in the post
quite apart from altering outsiders’ per-
ceptions of the club that had run the
game for much of its 219 years of exis-
tence. He was popular with the mem-
bers and praised by many of them for
trying to expand the increasingly popu-
lar Twenty20 format of the game. His
attempt to carry through a sweeping
£400 million redevelopment of Lord’s,
which he felt appeared tired in certain
areas, met with a more mixed recep-
tion. His plans were aborted amid
much recrimination and bad publicity.
The 14th secretary of MCC and a dis-

tinguished 11-man development com-
mittee were convinced that this re-
building project was necessary for
Lord’s to compete with revamped and
emerging Test match grounds. In 2011,
however, the club’s chairman, Oliver
Stocken, and treasurer, Justin Dowley,
threatened to resign if the project went
ahead, citing that it was too financially
risky. The development committee was
disbanded — sacked — and one of its
members, the former prime minister Sir
John Major, was to resign from the
main committee.
Bradshaw, somewhat naive in the
ways of administrators in England and
wearying of the infighting and the time
expended on the redevelopment (in all
probability none of his predecessors
worked such long hours) decided to
leave MCC later that year.
His second wife had returned to Aus-
tralia, his mother had died and his
brother had learning difficulties and
required supervision. He himself had
suffered from cancer. He was to claim
that, had he remained at the club and
continued to support the “Vision for
Lord’s”, as it was termed, he would have
been sacked.
He had been an unexpected choice by
MCC’s three-man selection panel when
he was appointed. He had played profes-
sional cricket for Tasmania, but with no
great success, and subsequently worked
as a chartered accountant in Hobart. He
had never run any sports institution and
came from a very different background
to previous secretaries of the club.
Nevertheless, he was an able and
energetic man who communicated well

He often played backyard

cricket with the young

Phil and Gary Neville

day Nov

Obituaries

Child actor turned

Hollywood star

Dean Stockwell

Page 50

Keith Bradshaw in Adelaide in 2019. He introduced day-night Test cricket with the pink ball when he returned to Australia

Keith Bradshaw

Administrator who, as the first Australian to take charge of Marylebone Cricket Club, championed Twenty20 and crossed Sir John Major

MATT TURNER