Tuffy below second Left , and Keith Miler
In the scrapbook Daphne Greenwood Mann kept after her husband Tufty's premature death, there is a letter from Keith Miller, the rakish Australian all-rounder. The two played against each other when Lindsay Hassett brought his 1949/50 Australian cricketers to South Africa and Miller wrote Mann's widow an emotionally cumbersome, strangely touching private obituary.
Addressed to
"My dear Mrs Tufty", and badly typed on Sporting Life writing paper, Miller negotiates his way awkwardly around what he wants to say. His grief - and guilt - is almost palpable.
"It's a letter I've always wanted to write, but I thought it would wait until brighter days, which I hope are sunnier than these last couple of years have been to you. No one need me tell you what I thought of Tufty. He was nature's gentleman, a man respected by all from the highbrow to the lowbrow. I remember when I was over there with the Australian team that Sunday morning we had, drinking, I think, German beer. It was a happy day. Little did we know then the sorry days ahead."Norman "Tufty" Mann was a slow left-arm spinner with a touch of Dickensian miserliness about him. He played 19 Tests for South Africa after World War II, going to England in 1947 and 1951. His bowling was flat, careful and cunning, an impression accentuated by the fact that he wore small, round spectacles. He was never a great spinner of the ball, but was consistently difficult to get away. He probably initiated the tradition of holding finger-spinning South Africans, running through Hugh Tayfield to Nicky Boje and Paul Harris. He would have played more for South Africa, but died in 1952 aged 32.
History has not been kind to Mann; indeed, it has not been kind to many South African cricketers of old. Aubrey Faulkner, who gassed himself in a Fulham boarding house in 1932, was a fine all-rounder who pioneered the idea of cricket academies; Jimmy Sinclair, the swashbuckling all-rounder and for many the founding father of South African cricket, died obscurely in Yeoville in 1913, aged 36.
Rest of Story at
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