Charlie Macartney's Pre-War Peak — Australia's Governor-General Bats, 1910-1914

Macartney was a New South Wales batsman who had begun as a slow left-arm bowler. By 1910 the batting was the senior part of his game.

On the 1912 Triangular tour his runs and an emergency stint with the ball — when Australia were short of bowlers — kept the depleted side competitive.

Macartney's Test debut had come in 1907; through 1910-1914 he hardened into one of the most attacking middle-order batsmen in world cricket. On the 1912 Triangular tour, even with the Big Six absent, he was the leading Australian run-scorer. He served in the AIF during the war, ending it as a sergeant in France. After the war his most famous innings — including 170 in 232 minutes at Headingley in 1926 — would come, but his foundation was laid in the immediate pre-war years. Like Hobbs, Hendren and Woolley, he is one of the cricketers whose career was bisected by the war but who returned to greater fame on the other side.

“He treated the bowling with a kind of disdain.”

Macartney returned in 1920-21 and played Tests until 1926, his most famous years. He died in 1958.