Why I SOLD THOSE LETTERS
FORMER
Australian cricket captain Greg Chappell was a centre
of controversy recently when he sold his extensive
personal collection, including some sharp private
letters from Sir Donald Bradman. Chappell explained
why toThe Sporting Collector.
IT was
a revelation to Greg Chappell that
a couple of letters and a pile of old documents should
cause such a stir. Among all the signed bats, the
gear, the photos and the relics of a marvellous career,
they drew the highest price at auction. And they certainly
stirred the most emotion. It was, in fact, pretty
much an accident and an afterthought that saw them
preserved at all.
And as for the Bradman letters ,
Chappell has no regrets. He didn't set out to sell
Bradman letters, he said. They just happened to be
there. And he considered the flak thrown at him once
they were offered for sale to be commercially based,
originating from those who had a vested interest in
'sanctifying', the Bradman image.
But
let's go back to the beginning, and let Chappell tell
the story of how he came to gather a remarkable collection,
how he almost threw it away, and the reasons he decided
to sell it. He remained tight-lipped as the criticism
flew at sale time, but when he spoke toThe
Sporting Collector there
was no holding back. For starters, he spoke of an
accidental collection that had accumulated through
a Test career which began in 1970 and ended with a
record-breaking innings of 182 in 1984. This is how
he told it:
I
didn't really know what I had. It had just accumulated
in trunks and boxes. All the usual things . . . bats
and caps and old blazers. There were a lot of documents
but they had been buried in cellars and I hadn't looked
at any of it for 18 years. I knew I had a lot but
I was never really aware that I was collecting. It
just built up. I had lent some to the SACA, a lot
of it that Dad had collected early on. Ian never worried
about those things, he just took them to the dump.
In fact none of us thought that much about keeping
things in those days. I remember as a kid going to
my grandfather's place (former Australian skipper
Vic Richardson) and he had an old Australian jumper
on the floor of the dog kennel. In those days you
played, and it was a great honour, but you didn't
big note about it. I didn't feel I needed to display
stuff. I played and I enjoyed it but when it was over
it was over. So I didn't really know what I had.
I
guess I became a little more conscious of keeping
things as my career ended, and TV was making people
think more about records and milestones.
As I passed Bradman's
runs total in my last Test, I was certainly conscious
of it. I kept the cap from that Test and the bat.
Chappell may have been indifferent to the passions
of collecting, but something made him keep things
anyway. And each time he moved house, he had to deal
with 90 boxes of relics. Selling the collection first
entered his head as he faced up to another move, and
realised he simply couldn't cope with the amount of
'stuff ' that was in danger of rotting away under
the house. He went on:
I'm
actually still uncovering stuff; and I had given a
lot away over the years. But the last move we made
I realised I had to do something about it. I just
wasn't able to display it or preserve it. The options
were to throw it out, to give it away or to sell it.
I had for many years been involved in a number of
charities - one particularly which I was not in a
position to support as I would have liked. I didn't
know what the value of the collection might be, but
I talked it over with the family and decided to sell.
I didn't have much else to sell, and this would allow
me to do some things I wouldn't otherwise be able
to do -for the Happi Foundation (the charity), for
my kids.
I rang Sotheby's, but the bloke there was on holidays.
So I rang Christie's and Michael Ludgrove came to
see me straight away. I told him I had bats and things,
but he asked if I had documents -letters from famous
people, contracts etc. I didn't really know what,
but I certainly had some. At one stage, in one of
those moves, I had actually started to throw
some out. I took a few boxes down to the Adelaide
Oval, and emptied one of them in a dumpster. Something
told me I should take a look at what it was. So I
opened the second box, and there were old contracts,
letters, documents of all sorts. It suddenly occurred
to me these things might have some value. I jumped
into the dumpster to retrieve the first box. I got
about two thirds of it back - the rest had fallen
down in the bowels of the thing.
After I had spoken to Michael Ludgrove, I spent three
days trying to catalogue it. There were letters from
Kerry Packer, my first Queensland contract, the World
Series contract, the Bradman letters. In the end I
gave up and just sent the lot to Michael. The collection
of documents and letters, labelled the Greg Chappell
'thousands of letters', and they are going to start
bobbing up all over the place. I certainly have no
regrets about selling the ones I had.
In
the end it was a win for everyone. It was a win for
the Bradman Foundation, since they finished up with
them anyway. It was a win for the group that bought
them and saw them go where they wanted them to go.
It was a win for the Happi Foundation. It was a win
for the auctioneers, who saw them as a prized item.
And it was a win for me. When Greg Chappell passed
Don Bradman's run total in that final innings of 182
against Pakistan at the SCG, he played as straight
and as true as he had when he scored a century in
his first Test. He is still playing it as straight
as ever.
MONTHS
after the event, Christies' Michael Ludgrove was still
shaking his head in amazement at the furore caused
by The Case of the Bradman Letters. Vastly experienced
in the business of auctioning fine things (16 years
with Christie's in London and New York before coming
to Australia in 1993), Ludgrove was the man who studiously
pieced together the auction featuring the Greg Chappell
collection.
Says
Ludgrove: 'Prior to Bradman's death I had illustrated
(in catalogues) numerous letters from Bradman, sold
many items relating to Bradman and sent my catalogues
to Bradman - and nothing like this had ever arisen
before.'
Nor
had it in the years Ludgrove spent dealing with rare
books, manuscripts, historical documents or private
letters in Christies' European and American Bureaux.
'There was never any objection from Sir Donald, from
his son or from Richard Mulvaney (of the Bradman Foundation),'
he said. In the light of that history, Ludgrove says
he had 'no idea' that it was a legal requirement for
permission to be granted by the Foundation to publish,
illustrate or quote from such items as the two letters
Bradman wrote to Chappell.
'In
future Christie's will be seeking that permission,'
says Ludgrove, who remains on amicable terms with
the Foundation, but who doesn't hold back, describing
some of the public reaction to the appearance of the
letters at auction as 'infantile, amateurish . . .
almost laughable.'
'It
wouldn't have happened anywhere else in the western
world. My belief is that the letters were of vital
importance to any Australian cricket scholar, or to
anyone interested in the game. In my mind it (the
letter most discussed), put Bradman in a very good
light. It made him look absolutely honest and straight
-and provided valuable insights into his thinking
when he was Australia's captain.
'People
really want to know what Bradman was like. They have
these clinical images of him playing his cover drives
or his off drives. Yet no-one knows anything much
about Bradman the man. It is in primary documents
such as letters like these that marvellous insights
are contained, giving the true picture of how someone
like him felt at a particular time, in particular
circumstances. Letters are not how someone elsethoughtBradman
felt. They are how he felt . . . the essence.
The
one certainty about the whole thing, says Ludgrove,
is that there will be more Bradman letters
... many more. 'I have been offered literally hundreds
of letters,' he says. 'There is one collection overseas
of 200 Bradman letters -and I have been offered recently
a collection of 50 letters to one person.
As
we all know Bradman spent many hours almost daily
corresponding with many people here and overseas throughout
the last 50 years of his life. There is going to be
a flood and I ask the question: 'why would
you want to stop them if they teach us more, tell
us more about a man who was such an icon of Australian
life?'
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