The first was a child. Jack and Jean’s first, Sherry, was born on 10 July 1946, at hospital in Armadale. Sherry was a bonny infant, Jack a devoted father from the first. In their first photograph together, which shows Jack bathing Sherry at the seaside across the road from Moana, he is a picture of doting gentleness.
After the child, next most important was Jack’s brainchild. He would explain that, after his epiphany in the park with the blind cricketers, he rehearsed for tackling cricket by bowling a tennis ball at Jean in the garden at Moana. If this is the case, she must either have made a remarkable recovery from the strain of childbirth, or been an uncommonly devoted consort; one suspects the latter. He considered joining one of the local church competitions but decided-probably for no better reason than that its practices took place just a five-minute walk from The Esplanade-to try his luck at Brighton Cricket Club, a member of Melbourne’s sub-district competition.
Jack’s account and club records suggest that it was on Tuesday evening, 1 October 1946, at about 5pm, that he began that short stroll for the first time. It had been an overcast day, but the threat of rain had held off. The suburban reserve Brighton Beach Oval would have appeared invitingly picturesque with its rambling stand and 180-degree view of the bay.
Jack admitted later to a certain anxiety on that stroll; he was, after all, thirty-one years old, and had never voluntarily been a member of other than the most informal XL He arrived early, something he’d done ‘on purpose’. It may have been in his mind that, if things didn’t work out, he might make good his escape before too many people were round. He was wearing his old grey bags and an ordinary shirt, too, even though he actually had a pair of flannels. Perhaps he didn’t want to be thought too serious in case he embarrassed himself.
The first few cricketers were arriving for the twice-weekly practice, while club secretary Charles Berriman rolled the pitch. The owner of a local mixed business store, Berriman had been secretary for thirteen years and attended to everything from the club’s accounts to the cleaning of the pavilion; the sort of yeoman servant on which every club depends. "When Jack accosted him asking for a bowl, he replied: ‘Certainly, feller, have a go by all means.’ Berriman would have issued this proforma welcome to dozens of newcomers over the years, but never have seen anyone tackle their task like this one; rolling in off a run of arbitrary length, his massive fingers coiled round the ball as though for an outsized game of marbles.
Nobody could quite figure what the new arrival was doing with his fingers, but he was certainly accurate and even bowled a couple of reputable club batsmen out. As practice broke up with the sun setting over the bay, Berriman asked him to return on Thursday for selection night. There the committee picked him to play on the coming weekend in Brighton’s third XI, which competed in the Victorian Junior Cricket Association (later the Victorian Turf Cricket Association), in a game against its most proximate rival Sandringham.
This team was only a year old, formed essentially to soak up surplus players, and played its home games on a rough track at the corner of St Kilda and Head streets. Nonetheless, there was considerable excitement at Moana; as Jack put it, ‘a great to-do’. He squeezed into creams he hadn’t worn for thirteen years and bowled a few more in the garden with a tennis ball just to make sure he had the knack. Jean dug out an old pair of sandshoes and ironed a fresh white shirt. He must have cut a distinctive figure, this quiet, craggy giant bursting his flannels at the seams, but his arrival at the bowling crease had the same effect as the appearance of a fox in a farmyard chicken run: the game was over in a few hours with Jack taking 15 wickets for 25 runs.
Sadly, no scorecard or real details of the game survive beyond this record: the grade seems to have been considered too inferior for newspaper coverage. But it’s not difficult to imagine the scene; batsmen groping like those blind cricketers Jack had seen, the big man accepting the backpats and handshakes of colleagues whose names he could hardly have known, the disoriented Sandringham players packing their club kit and muttering that they’d never been ambushed by a bowler like this before.
Jack took 27 wickets at an average of 5.5 in three games for Brighton’s third XI: a forceful case for promotion. Club lore has it that he was actually considered first for an incremental elevation to its second XI, but that its earnest, teetotal skipper Bill Easton felt an obligation to his own two spinners and wouldn’t hear of their replacement. If so, it was a costly piece of selection table loyalty, for Jack would scarcely look back.
Sub-district cricket is self-explanatory: it was and is a subsidiary competition of Melbourne’s district game, set up in 1908. In the summer of 1946-47, it was only just getting back on its feet after a long and taxing war in which 800 of its players had enlisted. As its president E. Glen Roberts—an octogenarian who had played cricket for Kew as far back as 1884—commented in its annual report: ‘Many of these gallant lads have paid the supreme sacrifice, many still languish as prisoners in enemy hands-we remember them all.’
Brighton was more fortunate than most in the competition: it owned its home ground, which it leased in winter to the State Savings Bank for a princely £2 2s for use by senior and reserves football. It had furthermore a proud history, stretching back more than a century. Among its alumni were six Test cricketers, two of whom had captained Australia: Jack Blackham, the peerless wicketkeeper; Harry Trott, the postman turned Test all-rounder. Between the wars, its star had been Lisle Nagel, a medium-pace bowler of subtle variation with a lofty air to match his 198 centimetres whom Sir Jack Hobbs had classed among the best of his kind.
Brighton had not, however, won a premiership since the halcyon days of Lisle Nagel and his twin brother Vern, and had recently sought to hire a player-coach from outside. Thirty-three-year-old all-rounder Dudley Fitzmaurice from South Melbourne had played four times for Victoria with a top score of 102; part of a generation of Victorian cricketers unlucky to coincide with a period of uncommon state strength, when its first-string team had regularly been composed entirely of present or future Test cricketers. At an annual fee of £50, he was a cheap acquisition, a repository of great experience and the owner into the bargain of an excellent baritone voice. And though he wouldn’t have known it, Fitzmaurice was also now captain of the world’s most extraordinary slow bowler.
Fitzmaurice’s chief recommendation to his new spinner was practice; Jack should do a minimum ten hours a week, against a wall if he could not find batsmen to act as guinea pigs. Fitzmaurice also preached the value of fitness, of the sort favoured in those days; Jack should run three laps at the end of each net session. Brimful of a novitiate’s enthusiasm, Jack complied, and became an insatiable net bowler, always first at the ground on weeknights toiling in a vacant net until someone put the pads on. Indeed, after the diffidence of his initial approach, Jack was suddenly bordering on the impatient. Former teammate Col Shipley recalls that, on Jack’s debut for Brighton’s first XI against Elsternwick, he prowled round the field awaiting his turn at crease, and finally remarked: ‘What does a fella have to do to get a bowl round here?’ When eventually Fitzmaurice called him into the attack, Jack took two wickets in his first over and finished with 4-25 as the opposition crumbled to 114 all out and a 110-run defeat.
Jack was right to be impatient. He was improving at each outing: the statistical progression of 4-56 against Yarraville, 4-55 against Brunswick and 5-47 against Preston culminated in a deadly dozen overs at Kew in which he finished with 9-33. So quickly was he done against Kew, indeed, that his feat made the stop press of the weekly Sporting Globe and earned a short citation in the pages of the local Sandringham News for 8 February 1947:
Kew lost their opener run-out for 4, but the next partnership was beginning to look dangerous until Iverson got it on the spot and committed a sustained effort of devastating bowling. No batsman was comfortable against him and he claimed victim after victim with well-concealed spinners.
Well-concealed they were for, as Jack revealed much later, his quiver at that stage contained but a single arrow: a top spinner flicked straight down the pitch by his middle finger, like a man disposing of a cigarette, the spin imparted coinciding with the line of flight from wicket to wicket. And though his figures of 38 wickets at 11.1 for 1946-47 were the best in the competition, Jack was still a figure of some obscurity even in sub-district ranks: the Sub-District Cricket Association’s annual report ascribed his 9-3 3, the best bag of the season, to ‘R. Iverson (Brighton)’. It was clear that he was unorthodox, but few understood his gift or its origins, and not even Jack himself foresaw his future trajectory.
It was in the winter of 1947, Jack would explain, that he ‘took the bit between the teeth’. He wanted to bowl a ‘break’, that is, to make the ball deviate off the pitch from its direct flight. The toppie’s haste onto the bat had been sufficient to discompose sub-district batsman at first encounter but—even on the basis of his limited experience—Jack realised that such a method risked losing its novelty. He found that by changing the position of his arm so that the thumb was turned to the right-hand side, or the leg side for a right-hander, the delivery that squirted out spun clockwise, both viciously and naturally.
What Jack had conceived was a delivery so unusual that it was not even clear what to call it. In effect, as it spun from the off, it was an off spinner; in cause, as it appeared like a wrist spinner, one might also have classified it a googly or wrong ‘un. But even if you resolved what to call it, there was still the matter of playing it, and as Brighton reconvened for pre-season training in September 1947 few could resist long: it not only turned a long way but, from Jack’s height and at his standard velocity of just below medium pace, often kicked armpit-high. Word got round. Even before Brighton took the field that season, the Brighton News sensed that something was up; in brief pen-pictures of the local team it published on 2 October, Jack was described thus: ‘He is an unorthodox bowler. He bowls spinners and has an extra good length. But he also has a wrong ‘un which is very hard to pick.’
For ‘very hard’, read next to impossible. Jack had a little trouble landing the new delivery before Christmas. Some days, he was even comparatively expensive, and when batsmen occasionally had a successful slog there was a curious sense that Jack didn’t quite know what to do. In such situations, Col Shipley recalls, Fitzmaurice was a sympathetic leader: ‘The only time Jack wasn’t a really good bowler was when someone got after him, hit him round. Dud would always take him off and whip someone else on for a few overs then bring Jack back later.’ His pre-Christmas record, nonetheless, was excellent; twenty-seven wickets at 12.3 placed him second in the bowling averages behind Fitzmaurice with his pawky swingers. And when everything about this exotic new bowler clicked, any batsman who survived long could expect sore legs from the repeated pummelling of his pads, and keeper Lex Tileman could anticipate a frightful day of scuttling blindly to leg as the ball jagged back. Tileman, a former fast bowler, was an infallibly cheerful character, but he was no Blackham, and dreaded Jack’s wrong ‘un. ‘You guys should leave me out,’ he would constantly moan. ‘I’m the dead weight in the side.’
No-one took him seriously; there was a premiership on the horizon. Brighton soared to the top of the table just before the season’s halfway mark when Jack claimed 8-56 including a hat-trick against Caulfield then 7-32 against Ivanhoe. And in the New Year, his dominance was almost absurd. Against Footscray he claimed 11-80. Against Yarraville he was introduced earlier than usual when opening bowler Ken Brinkman’s boot split and, despite being slogged for 19 in one over, reduced them from 0-28 to all out 113 with a bag of 9-47. Fitzmaurice had some other handy players at his disposal-left-hander John Cooper had a touch of class, Ken Whyte was an honest all-rounder-but you’d hardly have known it. As the Brighton News commented of Jack on 26 January 1948: ‘His recent efforts have convinced old timers that he is the classiest bowler Brighton has ever had, not excepting the Nagels.’
A home game against Williamstown loomed as critical. The team from Melbourne’s western suburbs contained a number of accomplished batsmen, including their rough diamond skipper and former Test all-rounder Maurie Sievers. Sievers even indulged in a little psychological warfare in the preceding week, telling the Southern Cross that he was confident of getting Iverson’s measure. An unheard-of crowd of more than a thousand gathered, including a number of local politicians: Brighton’s mayor and town clerk plus Brigadier Ray Tovell, a former Rat of Tobruk and now a member of Victoria’s Legislative Assembly.
Jack may also have sensed the growing expectation. For once, he was not keen to bowl, turning up complaining of flu and expressing doubts about his ability to land them. Fitzmaurice indulged his spinner but, when the visitors marched to 0-86, had no choice but to deploy him. And whatever his condition, Jack showed no sign of handicap when entrusted with the ball: in 9.4 overs, he claimed 7-22, including Sievers for six. ‘Williamstown were reputedly a strong batting side,’ reported the Brighton News, ‘but they were made to look like novices against Iverson’s inspired bowling.’
Having waited so long, it seemed that Jack could scarcely get enough cricket. He was early to every practice and the last to surrender his ball as dusk closed in, boundless in his energy for the game. The week after the Williamstown showdown, he even volunteered to stand with teammate Charlie Stevens as an umpire in a series of country week games for juniors at Brighton Beach Reserve. On one occasion when a young leg spinner hit the pads, Jack himself appealed, then gave his adjudication: ‘How’s that? Out!’ He gave a gusty laugh as the batsman trooped off.
Jack’s success was also being savoured at Moana. Upstairs every Monday morning, in the sunroom she shared with Harry, Jack’s mother Ede would be found with that day’s newspapers spread before her, meticulously cutting out and trimming items concerning with her son, which she pasted in a thick 180-page Conquest scrapbook. There was never any want for material. In the local press, Jack had become as big a cricket star as anyone could recall, and on par with Brighton’s other sporting idols: the cyclist Jack Hoobin, hurdler Ray Weinberg, swimmers John Marshall and Judy Joy Davies, all then striving for selection in Australia’s Olympic Games team for London later that year. The Southern Cross summed up Jack’s allure on 20 February 1948 with a picture and article beneath the headline ‘Brighton’s Wonder Bowler’. It began:
One spring evening in 1946, a tall, solid stranger walked over to cricket nets where Brighton sub-district players were practising and asked for a bowl. He was given one. A month later he took four for 25 for the first XI. At the end of the season he topped the competition averages.
Thirty-three-year-old [sic] Jack Iverson, standing six feet three inches and weighing fourteen stone, is unaffected by his sudden spectacular success. His dominant cricket emotion seems to be a supreme confidence that Brighton will win this year’s premiership.
It proved well placed. Port Melbourne prepared the slowest and deadest of pitches when they hosted Brighton in the semifinal, and their experienced left-handed captain Ian Lee, a former Sheffield Shield player, ground out a sterling 107. But Jack bowled 23 consecutive eight-ball overs to claw in 5-103, and John Cooper’s 13 8 the following week guaranteed their team a berth in the final.
That first flag in twenty-two years now seemed Brighton’s for the asking. Cooper’s wife gave birth to twins on the morning of the final, played over Easter, again at Port Melbourne oval, but there was no question about his availability. There was equally no question that Iverson shaped the match with his huge hands: he claimed 6-61 and 4-47 in Brighton’s eight-wicket victory, taking his seasonal harvest to 79 wickets at a cost of 10 runs each. It would have seemed to Jack the most important match he had played, but he’d already played one more significant without even noticing.
Almost four months earlier, Brighton had played a friendly at the Albert Ground with its sister club in district ranks, the Melbourne Cricket Club; an annual fixture played when the latter had a bye. On a slow pitch, Melbourne’s young opener Colin McDonald had scored a poised century. But the big, tall bloke playing for Brighton caught the district players’ attention by bowling...well, what exactly was he bowling? Melbourne’s captain Harcourt Dowsley was at the non-striker’s end when Jack began his spell, and watched as partner Jack Green struggled through a very testing over in which he was beaten several times:
Jack and I were batting pretty well when this bloke came on, straight away hit the spot and bowled a very good maiden. He [Jack] came down the pitch at the end of the over and said: ‘Better watch this bloke.’ I laughed: ‘I can see that!’
He was tall, looked six foot three or something like that, and he just hit the spot again and again. Jack and I were both pretty good players, aggressive, we drove and pulled, and we could both cut well. But we just couldn’t get down at this fellow, couldn’t get him away at all. He just seemed incapable of bowling a bad delivery...! know it sounds extraordinary. But he was landing everything on a threepenny bit.
Jack Iverson took only 2-62, but the Southern Cross commented that he ‘did not appear to have the best of luck’ and the Melbourne players agreed. Green and Dowsley both talked to him at the end of play, wondered whether he might be interested in joining district ranks; Green was ex-Brighton himself, as were a number of his colleagues. Jack was circumspect, doubtless flattered by the approach, but saying no more than that he would think about it.
There were others on Jack’s trail, too. Just after Christmas, Richmond’s captain Jack Ledward had visited Brighton to watch this new phenomenon in action. He was also impressed, popping in on his old cobber Fitzmaurice to test the water. ‘Fair go, Jack,’ Fitzmaurice replied. ‘He’s going to win us a premiership. Come back at the end of the season and ask again.’ Ledward complied.
On 2 April 1948, the phone rang at Moana for Jack. It was Vernon Ransford, secretary of the Melbourne Cricket Club, before World War I a dashing left-handed batsman and electric outfielder. A personable and softly-spoken man, he congratulated Jack on his performances that summer, then popped the question: might he be interested in coming to play at the prestigious Melbourne Club? Jack must have sorted his attitude out before the call, for he agreed on the spot. Ransford sat down that day at the club’s 314 Collins Street head office—the Colonial Mutual Life Building—and dictated a letter of invitation on the club’s handsome notepaper:
Dear Sir,
Following upon our telephone conversation today, we are pleased to extend to you an invitation to play cricket with this club.
Heartiest congratulations on your performances at Brighton, and look forward to meeting you personally next season.
Yours faithfully
VS. Ransford
The day of its arrival, Jack briefly replied:
Dear Sir,
I thank you for your letter of 2nd April and accept with pleasure the invitation to play cricket with your Club next season.
Yours faithfully
J. B. Iverson
Jack had an end-of-season function at Brighton Beach Reserve a week later, where film was screened of the 1947 Victorian Football Association Grand Final between Port Melbourne and Sandringham; presumably he told his Brighton colleagues there of his decision. Far from being displeased, the clubmen were delighted to see their star bowler following the route previously taken by Jack Blackham, the brothers Trott and Nagel. The club’s annual report sent him on his way with good cheer: ‘He is a truly great bowler and all club members wish him well in the coming season with Melbourne.’
The very next day, by coincidence, a letter arrived at Moana from the secretary of Richmond, P. H. Maybury, issuing Jack ‘a cordial invitation’ to join that club. It contained the added inducement of a season’s ticket admitting the holder to all Victorian Football League games played at Punt Road, Richmond Football Club’s home ground, in the winter of 1948. But Jack Ledward was too late; the bowler sent a reply that day explaining regretfully that he had already accepted Melbourne’s offer. A model of probity, Jack even sent back the football tickets. On 20 April 1948, Jack became a father for a second time, when Jean gave birth to their second daughter, Beverley. Family, business, sport; at the time, satisfaction for Jack in all must have felt attainable.