Ernie Toovey - tremendous servant to Country and Queensland Cricket
Northern Suburbs District Cricket Club | February 10, 2023
Ernie Toovey was a patron of Northern Suburbs Cricket Club where he played 109 first grade games and was an active committee member well into his 80s.
Norths officials described Toovey as a “tremendous servant to family, Norths (and) Queensland Cricket”.
“Ern was a dashing left-handed bat who represented Norths and Queensland with distinction”
Toovey's playing career was disrupted by World War II, where the young sailor survived three years in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp.
In 37 first-class matches for his state between 1949 and 1956, he scored 1212 runs before taking up the role of selector in 1961.
Five years later, he became chairman of the panel - a role he served until 1989.
He was made a Life Member of Queensland Cricket in 1970 and also served on the Queensland Cricket Association Executive Committee between 1969 and 1990.
Ernie was interviewed in the ’90s by a historian for the Australian War memorial, the recording the family have only found a short while ago. Click on the link to hear the interview:
http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80017784
Here is also a link to an article written by Wayne Smith originally published in The Australian - the story is below with permission
By WAYNE SMITH
THEAUSTRALIAN
12:00AM JULY 19, 2012
War veteran Ernie Toovey risked life for Sheffield Shield
MANY an aspiring Queensland cricketer has whimsically offered to give up his life to play in the Sheffield Shield but there was nothing whimsical about it when Ernie Toovey said it.
Toovey, who died yesterday in Brisbane, aged 90, was a young man of only 20 and a prisoner-of-war on the Burma Railway, when the camp surgeon told him he had to amputate his left leg, poisoned by an ulcer on his shin.
"No way," Toovey told him. "I'm going to need that leg to play Sheffield Shield cricket”
It was a decision that easily could have cost him his life. There were virtually no medicines available so the only treatment was for an orderly to scrape the ulcer down to the bone, sometimes twice a day, using a sharpened spoon. "It was the worst pain I ever endured in my life," Toovey said in 2001.
Somehow he survived both the treatment and the Japanese project that would claim the lives of 2646 fellow Australians, although a rare photograph of him taken at the time shows him reduced to skin and bone.
It took him years to recuperate after World War II but in 1949, he finally made it into the Queensland Sheffield Shield team as a fearless, left-handed batsman and deadly fieldsman. He did, after all, play Claxton Shield baseball for Queensland.
Batting with extra padding on his left leg, he played six seasons for Queensland but never won the Shield.
He had the same ill-luck as a Queensland selector from 1961-1989 - as chairman from 1965 onwards - but arguably no man did more to build up the strength of Queensland cricket and certainly no man was prouder when his beloved team won the Shield for the first time in 1994-95.
As a selector, Toovey used to quip that he was always on the lookout for left-handed Catholics - like himself - and was delighted when Matt Hayden appeared on the scene. But he considered himself even more privileged to live long enough to see his real hero honoured.
In 2001, a misty-eyed Toovey boarded the HMAS Waller, named in honour of Hec Waller, captain of the light cruiser HMAS Perth that, in company with the USS Houston, engaged a Japanese invasion fleet in the Battle of Sunda Strait in March 1942. The last time Toovey saw him alive was when he gave the order to abandon ship after the Perth was hit by four torpedoes.
