Outside Cricket
The 1921 tour was Armstrong's swan song in first-class cricket. On the journey back to Australia, he suffered a relapse of the malaria that had plagued him since his earlier visit to Malaya. This kept him from taking part in any of the matches in South Africa, allowing Herbie Collins to captain Australia for the first time. Armstrong resigned from his job with Melbourne Cricket Club and drawing on contacts he had made while on tour took a role as an agent for Dawson's Scotch Whisky. He remained in the liquor trade until his retirement in 1946. Armstrong also applied his cricket background acting as a cricket journalist for the Sydney Evening News. His copy was promoted as "frank and fearless" and was generally contemptuous of much of the cricket and cricketers he saw, especially of what he saw as dull cricket.
In 1922 he wrote a primer on cricket titled The Art of Cricket published by Methuen & Co, London.
In July 1913 he married Aileen O'Donnell, the daughter of a wealthy Irish Australian pastoralist with large land holdings in the Riverina region of New South Wales. The couple met while Armstrong was representing the Melbourne Cricket Club in a match against a Wagga Wagga XV. Armstrong and his new wife settled in Melbourne, moving to the Sydney suburb of Edgecliff for business reasons in 1935. Aileen died of a thrombosis in 1940. Armstrong, following illness that saw him lose much of the weight that he was known for, died on 13 July 1947, leaving an estate to the value of ₤90,000. He was survived by his son, Warwick George.
Armstrong was an all-round sportsman, playing Australian rules football in the winter for South Melbourne in the Victorian Football League (VFL), the premier competition in the state, from 1898 to 1900. A slim utility, he played 16 games for the club, scoring 18 goals. He played in South Melbourne's losing 1899 VFL Grand Final team defeated by Fitzroy by one point.
Read more about this topic: Warwick Armstrong
Famous quotes containing the word cricket:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)