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52 Shepherd Street, Bowral, NSW, Australia 2576

52 Shepherd Street is the childhood home of Sir Donal Bradman and is historically significant as the location of the legendary tank stand and paddock where the young Sir Donald Bradman honed his batting and fielding skills.The house was built in 1890 and has been occupied by numerous families over time. The house is noted for having been a childhood home of thecricketer, Sir Donald Bradman, AC. The house at 52 Shepherd Street was built in 1890 for Jane Pearce (widow of William Pearce, railway worker) on Lots 15 and 16 of Section B of the Upper Bowral Subdivision which comprised a land areaof 24 perches (approximately 1200m²) (see Figure 2. 1). The house has had numerous owners and tenants throughout its 120-year history, including George Bradman, father of celebrated cricketer SirDonald Bradman, who was a child of 3 years old when his father purchased the property. Although 52 Shepherd Street had long been known among the Bowral community as a childhood home of SirDonald Bradman, the house was rediscovered and publicised as such by local solicitor Garry Barnsley, the first chairman of the Bradman Museum Trust, around the time the Museum opened in 1989. In May 1890 Jane Pearce and her daughter Charlotte Caroline Theresa Pearce bought the property from Walter Joseph Cole. In November of that year, Jane Pearce died and entrusted the property to her sons Benjamin, Charles, William, John and Henry. Her will, written in 1890, presumably before she purchased Shepherd Street, initially instructed her three eldest sons to sell her estate and use the funds to buy a house for her younger sons and unmarried daughters. However, a codicil added in October 1890 revoked this earlier direction since Jane had, by that time, ‘already built a house’ on the Shepherd Street property.2 In 1911 Jane Pearce’s sons sold the property to Marion Bowen, wife of architect Edward Joseph Bowen, who sold it almost immediately to George Bradman. George Bradman, his wife Emily and their children, Islet, Lilian, Elizabeth (known as May), Victor and Donald, lived at 52 Shepherd Street until 1923. Photographs exist of Sir Donald Bradman at the house, including a well-known image of 3-year-old Bradman standing against the front fence and another of him several years older, perched on a stool on the verandah with the family’s terrier, Teddy, in his arms. At the time the Bradman family left Shepherd Street, Donald Bradman was 15 and already working locally at Percy Westbrook’s real estate office. It is said, but not confirmed, that he occupied, with his brother Victor, the fourth bedroom at this time. In his spare time, Donald helped his father build the family’s next residence, a brick house at 20 Glebe Street, opposite Glebe Oval. By the time they moved Donald’s cricketing skill was just becoming recognised by local school and community clubs, though he was playing tennis more frequently than cricket.3Frank Toose (1874-1948), of ‘Toose, F. & Co. General Merchants, Moss Vale’4, who purchased 52 Shepherd Street from George Bradman in 1923, owned the property for the next 23 years, though he never lived there.5 His son, Harold Toose, played for Moss Vale against Donald Bradman in the MossVale vs. Bowral cricket final of the Tom Mack Cup in 1926.6 As directories and listings for Bowral do not include street numbers until 1938, it is impossible to ascertain who lived at 52 Shepherd Street for the majority of Toose’s ownership. In 1939, the house was unoccupied, but by 1941 John Albert Hanson (no occupation) and his wife Mary were living there. The next residents of 52 Shepherd Street were labourer Cecil Clarence Plain and his wife Alma Grace,who purchased the house from Frank Toose in 1946. Around 1950 the land was subdivided into Lots A, B and C along Shepherd Street, each comprising 42 roods (approximately 420m²). Plain sold Lots B and C to Ronald Henry Springett in1950 and kept for himself Lot A, the lot on which the house stood (see Figure 2. 3). In 1958 Cecil and Alma sold the house to Rodney Keith Wrench, an engineer, but continued to live there for another year. During Rodney Wrench’s ownership of 52 Shepherd Street the house had three separate tenants: Owen Victor Bond, a brickmaker, his wife Vida Mary and daughter Doreen (later listed as a shop assistant), who rented it from 1960-1963; John Melvin Wright, a railway worker, and his wife Jean, who rented it from 1964-1968; and Phillip and Janice Andrew, who occupied the house from 1970 and eventually bought it from Wrench in 1976. Phillip Andrew, a heavy machinery operator, and his wife Janice (Jan)8 lived at 52 Shepherd Street for 18 years. The next owner, Joan Arthur, a widow, occupied 52 Shepherd Street with her daughter Julia and infant grandson Jonathan from late 1988 to 1991. At the time Joan Arthur purchased the house, it had been recently placed under an Interim Heritage Order by the NSW Heritage Council, on account of its strong association with Sir Donald Bradman’s ‘formative cricketing years’ and the historical significance of the remains of its water tank stand, against which the young Bradman batted a golf ball with a cricket stump to develop his co-ordination skills. The tank stand was immortalised in now-famous film footage of SirDonald Bradman re-enacting his childhood game as an adult in1932. Although the tank stand had already been demolished when Joan Arthur bought the house, its cobbled foundations were still visible on the side porch.10 Another game Sir Donald Bradman played on his own in the paddock next door involved throwing a ball at the rail of the post-and-rail fence on the property’s boundary. The profile of the fence rails meant that, unless the ball landed in a precise spot, it would rebound unpredictably. In this way, the young Bradman honed his throwing accuracy. This paddock was presumably the vacant land to the east of the house