A cricketer of his time

Gideon Haigh is an erudite and elegant writer on cricket and other topics. Although he is generally thought of as an Australian, he reminds us in the introduction to A Fair Field and No Favour, his recently published collection of his writings on the 2005 Ashes tour, that he is English by birth and an English cricket supporter.

Cricinfo has just published a piece by him on Bert Ironmonger , the pre -Second World War slow left arm bowler.
The title "Tough in life and in cricket" sums it up well:

His was the Australia of rural hardship: Ironmonger was the youngest of ten children to a farming family who had to abandon working an uneconomic block north-west of Ipswich, whereupon at twenty-five he became a labourer on the railways. His was also the Australia of long-term labour: after arriving in Melbourne in December 1913, and working as a barman and tobacconist, he took a job as a gardener with the St Kilda City Council, tending parklands with a handmower until the age of 70, even though his wages were suspended when he was away from work playing cricket.

Ironmonger is the member of a genus of Australians almost vanished from today's land of plenty, a man of what used to be called steady habits,: he was frugal, conservative, neither smoked nor drank, and lived with his wife and children in the same unprepossessing house, with flower beds and vegetable patch, for forty years; they did not have a telephone until 1939, and never owned a car.