Maurice Kellerman – St Kilda French Cricket Star

St Kilda Cricket Club | March 19, 2024

Maurice Kellermann was a left hand slow bowler and batsman who played in the St Kilda First XI from 1903-04 to 1905-06 season after joining the Club from Mentone College and Cheltenham Cricket Club.

He played 12 First XI games scoring 138 runs, his highest score being 53 at an average of 15.3 and taking 26 wickets at an average of 10.15. His best figures were 7 for 28 in his last game for St Kilda against Port Melbourne in March 1906. Kellermann won the St Kilda bowling average with an average 9.04 for the 1905-06 season, taking 23 wickets.

He then sailed to France to join his father and help promote his famous sister, Annette Kellermann in Paris. She was known as “the Australian Mermaid, Diving Venus, the perfect woman”, and is known through her long-distance swimming races, as an actress, an author and has been included in the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

St Kilda Cricket Club was contacted in January 2020 by Simon Hewitt from Switzerland. He had found from our website that Maurice Kellermann had played for St Kilda where under the History caption we have listed every St Kilda First XI player up until Season 2017.

Simon is an English born former French first class cricketer who became the Director of Cricket in France in 1988. He is currently writing the history of French cricket, hoping to be published in 2023. He is an Oxford University educated historian.and he has provided much of the information we now know about Kellermann.

In his research, he has found that Kellermann could be potentially the best performed player to represent France. He is famous in French cricket for leading France to a win against the Netherlands at the Brussels Exhibition Tournament in 1910. France made 192 of which Kellermann made 49, batting at second drop, and then the Netherlands were bowled out for 129 of which Kellermann took 5 wickets for 71.

Between 16 June and 1 August 1910, Kellermann took 25 wickets and scored 438 runs – in just 5 games. The sequence began at the end of the Grand Cricket Week in Brussels through to Paris Championship Games and became international news in the Cricket Magazine.

The last that was read of him in France was in August 1911, captaining France against Belgium and taking 7-27 and 4-34 together with an innings of 39.

Kellermann then moved to New York in 1911 and became involved in motion pictures through the movie career of his sister.

In 1926, he applied for American citizenship. In 1930 and 1931, he was cinematographer for the movies The Viking and Lost Gods.

Kellerman died on 9 November 1943 in Long Island, New York aged 58.