Keith Johnson

Keith Ormond Edley Johnson (28 December 1894 – 19 October 1972), was an Australian cricket administrator. He was the manager of the Australian Services cricket team in England, India and Australia immediately after World War II, and of the Australian team that toured England in 1948. The 1948 Australian cricket team earned the sobriquet The Invincibles by being the first side to complete a tour of England without losing a single match.

Johnson joined the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket in 1935 as a delegate for New South Wales and served in the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II, performing public relations work in London. With the allied victory in Europe, first-class cricket resumed and Johnson was appointed to manage the Australian Services team, which played England in a series of celebratory matches known as the Victory Tests to usher in the post-war era. The series was highly successful, with unprecedented crowds raising large amounts for war charities. As a result, further matches were scheduled and Johnson's men toured British India and Australia before being demobilised. Johnson's administration was regarded as a major factor in the success of the tour.

In 1948, Johnson managed the Australian tour of England, which again brought record profits and attendances, in spite of Australia's overwhelming dominance. Johnson's management of the tour—which generated large amounts of media attention—was again lauded. However, in 1951–52, the Australian Board of Control excluded Sid Barnes from the team for "reasons other than cricket". Barnes took the matter to court, and in the ensuing trial, his lawyer embarrassed Johnson, who contradicted himself several times under cross-examination. Following the trial, Johnson resigned from the board and took no further part in cricket administration.

Early years and pre-World War II career Johnson was born on 28 December 1894 in the inner-Sydney suburb of Paddington. He later moved to the north shore suburb of Mosman, where he worked as a mechanic before serving briefly in the 3rd Field Company Army Engineers.

After the end of World War I, Johnson married his wife Margaret.

Managerial career Australian Services

During World War II, Johnson served in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). He enlisted in the RAAF on 13 April 1942 in Sydney. In June 1945, he was appointed as manager of the Australian Services cricket team on its tour of Britain for the Victory Tests, India and Australia from mid-1945 to early-1946. Officially a military unit, the team's commanding officer was Squadron leader Stan Sismey of the RAAF, although the on-field captain was Warrant officer Lindsay Hassett of the Second Australian Imperial Force.

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack praised Johnson's organisational work in arranging the services' tour: "A stranger to this country, he found the programme in only skeleton form; and that the tour proved such a success from every point of view was due to his hard work and courtesy." The almanack reprinted Johnson's message of thanks to the English cricket community in full before the team sailed to India.

In the First Victory Test, the Australian Servicemen scraped home by six wickets with only two balls and minutes to spare. The last pre-war series between England and Australia in 1938 had been an attritional and hard-nosed contest, but in the afterglow of the war victory, the cricketers played flamboyantly with abandon in front of packed crowds. The attractive, attacking style of play was widely praised by commentators and the match raised £1,935 for war relief charities. England then levelled the series by winning the Second Victory Test at Bramall Lane, Sheffield with a hard-fought battle, by 41 runs. Australia won the Third Victory Test by four wickets late on the final day and drew the Fourth Victory Test at Lord's. That would have been the end of the series, but because of the record attendance of 93,000 at Lord's, another match was appended. England drew the series by winning the Fifth Victory Test in front of another capacity crowd. The Victory Tests were regarded as an outstanding success, with a total attendance of 367,000 and bright and attacking play.

Due to the unexpectedly strong success of the Victory Tests, the government of Australia, acting on the impetus of Foreign Minister H.V. "Doc" Evatt, ordered the Australian Services to delay their demobilisation. With the team raising so much money for war charities, the government directed them to travel home via India and Ceylon to play further matches, in order to raise more funds for the Red Cross.

alt=Two small men aged around 30 walk off the steps of a cricket ground pavilion onto the grass towards the centre of the playing area. Both wear light-coloured shirts, with rolled up sleeves, trousers and pads to protect their legs, all white. They wear batting gloves and hold a bat in readiness for play. The crowd sit behind a wooden fence; most are wearing suits and black cylindrical hats.

Johnson found himself in a difficult situation during the Indian leg of the tour. The team—mostly made up of RAAF personnel—had been ill with food poisoning and dysentery, and travelled across the Indian subcontinent by long train journeys. The airmen wanted to travel by air, and threatened to abandon the tour or replace Hassett, an AIF member, with either Keith Carmody or Keith Miller, who were RAAF fighter pilots. However, the standoff was ended when Sismey arranged for a RAAF plane to transport the team. On the playing arena, it was not a happy tour for Johnson and his men. They lost the three-match series against India 1–0 and recorded only one victory, against South Zone, in their nine matches.

Johnson's team arrived in Australia towards the end of 1945, but the armed services and Australian Board of Control ordered them to play another series against the various Australian states. Johnson had sought fixtures for his team in Australia, but this was before the Evatt had added the matches in the subcontinent. He implored the administrators to recognise that the players were already overworked, but was ignored. The Services performed poorly; after playing out consecutive draws against Western Australia and South Australia, they were crushed by an innings by both Victoria and New South Wales, before drawing against Queensland and Tasmania, the smallest state in the country.

Johnson was involved in another administrative dispute during the Australian leg of the campaign. Cec Pepper—whom teammates Miller and Dick Whitington regarded as one of the best all rounders in the world and a certainty for Australian Test selection—appealed for leg before wicket against Australian captain Don Bradman in the match against South Australia. The appeal was turned down and Pepper complained to the umpire Jack Scott, prompting Bradman—who was also a member of the Australian Board of Control and the board of the South Australian Cricket Association—to ask Scott whether Pepper's behaviour was acceptable. As he was an employee of the SACA, Scott answered to Bradman, and he lodged a complaint about Pepper to the Australian Board of Control. Pepper was never selected for Australia. Cricket historian Gideon Haigh said that "Johnson was clearly upset by the affair, and also by the failure of the [national] selection panel [Bradman among them] ... to send Pepper, second only to Miller as a cricketer in the Services XI, to New Zealand". Johnson tried to intercede on Pepper's behalf, to no avail, although the other board members claimed that no pressure had been placed on the selectors to exclude Pepper. Johnson then helped to arrange England's first post-war tour of Australia, in 1946–47.

Led by Bradman—widely regarded as the greatest batsman in history—the Australians went through their 34 matches without defeat, earning the sobriquet The Invincibles. They won 25 of their matches, 17 of these by an innings, and crushed England 4–0 in the five Tests, winning most games heavily. and the record attendance for a Test match in England was broken twice, in the Second Test at Lord's and the Fourth Test at Headingley. The 158,000 spectators that watched the proceedings at Headingley remain a record for a Test on English soil. As a result, Australia made £82,671 from the tour, resulting in a profit of £54,172. The popularity of the team meant that they were inundated with invitations for social appointments with government officials and members of the royal family, and they had to juggle a plethora of off-field engagements, with 103 days of scheduled cricket in the space of 144 days. As a result, Johnson was flooded with phone calls and letters, which he had to attend to by himself, as he was the only administrator among the touring party. Bradman later said he was worried that Johnson's tireless work would cause health problems because he "worked like a slave day and night" and that "it was the tribute to a bulldog determination to see the job through".

Johnson was again praised by Wisden in its report on the 1948 tour. "Indebtedness for the smooth running of the tour and general harmony of the team was due largely to the manager, Mr Keith Johnson, hard-working and always genial," it said. "Paying tribute to the loyalty of the players, Mr Johnson said there had not been a discordant note in the party throughout the tour." Flanagan labelled Johnson as "conscientious, reserved, dignified, extraordinarily industrious and scrupulously trustworthy". During the 1948 tour, Barnes organised a multitude of business deals while not playing cricket,

Barnes then made himself unavailable for first-class cricket, preferring to pursue business interests instead, and ridiculed the fee paid for the 1949–50 tour of South Africa. He wrote a column for Sydney's The Daily Telegraph, titled "Like It or Lump It", in which he often lampooned the administration of the game.

However, in 1951–52, Barnes made a return to cricket, and sought selection in the national team to play the West Indies during the 1951–52 Australian season. Australia's batsmen struggled in the first two Tests, and before the Third Test, Barnes scored 107 against Victoria, putting on 210 in partnership with Morris for New South Wales.

In the meantime, the team was not announced at the scheduled time due to the delay caused by the veto. Journalists deduced the story and Barnes became a cause célèbre for many weeks, missing all the remaining Tests. Speculation abounded as to the nature of his supposed misdeeds. These included jumping the turnstile at a ground when he forgot his player's pass, insulting the royal family, theft from team-mates, drunkenness, stealing a car, parking his car in someone else's space, or that Barnes had lampooned the board in the narration accompanying the home movies he made of the 1948 tour. In later years, a file of unknown authorship regarding Barnes's behaviour was deposited in the NSWCA library. It accused Barnes of allowing young spectators to enter the playing arena to field the ball instead of doing so himself, and of denigrating umpires by cupping his hands over his eyes and showing dissent by implying that they were blind. Raith's letter said that the board must have had good reason to exclude Barnes.

The Board of Control had previously granted itself the power to exclude a player from the national team "on grounds other than cricket ability" following the poor behaviour of some members of the 1912 team that toured England. Instead, Barnes sued Raith for libel and engaged a top Sydney lawyer, Jack Shand—described by Haigh as "the foremost trial lawyer of his day"— According to Haigh, "it was effectively the Board, not Raith, in the dock".

It emerged very quickly during the trial that Raith had no particular knowledge of the workings of the board. A series of administrators came forward to say that Barnes had reportedly misbehaved on the 1948 tour, even though Johnson's official report as manager had made no mention of any disharmony. Aubrey Oxlade, the chairman of the board and one of the four board members who voted to ratify Barnes's selection, The case ended at that point; Barnes was vindicated, and Raith's counsel issued him with a public apology. According to fellow administrator Alan Barnes, Johnson was a "wide-open type of bloke" who was vulnerable to manoeuvring. Johnson wrote to the Australian Board of Control, ostensibly tendering his resignation on the grounds of difficulties in travelling to meetings, and thanking the other members for their "courtesy, cooperation and help".

Johnson retained the support of many of the players: six Victorian members of the 1948 team, including Lindsay Hassett, Ian Johnson and Neil Harvey, wrote to the Herald newspaper in Melbourne expressing their "confidence, respect and affection" for the tour manager. Derriman described Johnson as a "considerate, patient, inoffensive man for whom nothing was too much trouble. As a cricket official, he was efficient and dedicated." Johnson was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to cricket in the 1964 Queen's Birthday Honours, and died in 1972 after collapsing when rising to make a speech at a charity lunch in Sydney.