Robert Graham Williams Born April 4, 1911, St Peters, Adelaide, South Australia Died August 31, 1978, Adelaide, South Australia (aged 67 years 149 days) Major teams Australian Services, South Australia Batting style Right-hand bat Bowling style Right-arm fast-medium
Graham Williams, a former South Australian Sheffield Shield player who had spent four years as a POW, walked onto Lord's to bat in the May 1945 Victory Test.
Williams, shot down in the Western Desert during the Libyan campaign, was skin and bones, playing at 31kg below his pre-war weight. In between overs he drank glasses of glucose and water to keep up his energy.
"I can see him now," Miller recalled. "Naturally as he walked out, people began to whisper to each other 'POW', 'shot down', 'released two weeks ago' and that sort of thing. And as he walked out, everyone quietly stood and started this clap, clap, clap.. I have heard people clapping at Lord's many times. I have heard applause for wonderful batting and bowling from great players. This was an applause with a difference. Everybody stayed standing as he walked, and continued this beautiful hushed applause. And I can see him walking out there, his head going from side to side, looking around him and saying, 'Where am I? Can this be true'?"
Williams scored 53.
Keith Miller, who was one of the Invincibles and died last year, fought in that war as a pilot. His abiding cricket memory was not so much of the game as of Graham Williams, a Sheffield Shield cricketer and pilot who was shot down and spent four years in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. Two weeks after the war ended, the tall, skinny Williams walked out to bat for a team of Australian servicemen at Lord's, in a match billed as a Victory Test. "Anyway, he walks out to bat at Lord's," Miller said a decade ago. "Packed it was, with everyone sitting on the grass in the sun - and the whole crowd rises and claps him all the way to the wicket. I can still see it. Still hear it. A kind of muffled applause it was. Not boisterous. Not like anything I'd heard ever before or since. It was the most touching thing I'd ever seen in my life. And Graham, this fella only a fortnight out of POW camp, trying to come to terms with it all. Wondering, am I really alive? Am I dreaming? Extraordinary. And, you know, he scored a 50 and took two wickets. Good ones, as well. I've thought about that day many times since and it still brings tears to my eyes."
World on hold - for a moment, SMH, 8 Jan 2005
http://www.rugbyheaven.smh.com.au/articles/2006/03/26/1143330930440.html
http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/australia/content/player/8355.html