A bout of malaria led Armstrong to down a couple of whiskies before he went out to bat
He stood 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighed 20 stone and wore shoes that were 12½ inches long and 7 inches wide. In short, never did a man merit his nickname quite like Australia’s Warwick Armstrong – the ‘Big Ship’, as he was called.
Neville Cardus once said of Armstrong that Australian cricket was ‘incarnate in him’, and during a first-class career that spanned nearly a quarter of a century his influence on the game Down Under was extraordinary. It wasn’t just the 16,000 runs that he scored or the 800 wickets he took, it was his attitude and bearing that set the standard for future generations of Australian players.
Armstrong also liked a tipple now and again, whisky his liquor of choice – he even made his living as a whisky seller once his cricket career was over.
It was England who suffered most at the hands of Armstrong. In all he played in a record forty-two Tests against the old enemy, scoring 2,172 runs at an average 35.03, and taking seventy-four wickets at an average cost of 30.91. In ten of those Tests he captained Australia, never losing, and leading the boys in the baggy green caps to eight consecutive victories. It would have been more, but Armstrong was one of the six Australian players who refused to play in the 1912 Triangular Tournament (see chapter 32) because of a dispute with the Board.
The first of those victories came in the first Test of the 1920/21 series, the first to have Test status following the end of the First World War. Australia won by 377 runs (Armstrong scored 158), and they also claimed the second and third Tests. The fourth Test was at Melbourne where a bout of malaria led Armstrong to down a couple of whiskies before he went out to bat. He scored 123, and Australia won again. When they took the fifth and final Test the humiliation was complete – England were the first side to lose every match in a five-Test series. (The only other Ashes ‘whitewash’ was the 5–0 thrashing suffered by Andrew Flintoff’s side in 2006/07.) It was, wrote Harry Altham five years later, ‘a disaster unparalleled in the history of English cricket’.
Three months after the series win, Armstrong led his Australian side to England for another five-Test encounter with England. ‘As the news came to hand of defeat after defeat people thought the Englishmen must be playing very badly,’ commented Wisden in its 1922 issue. ‘Not till the Australians came here in the summer and beat us three times in succession on our own grounds did we fully realise the strength of the combination that had set up such a record.’
Australia took the first three Tests, and in total won or drew thirty-six of their thirty-eight first-class matches. Altham pointed to the fast bowling of Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald as crucial to the Australian success, allied to the batting of Charlie Macartney and Warren Bardsley. Harry Altham compared Macartney – dubbed ‘The Governor-General’ – to Victor Trumper, writing that their ‘methods were unorthodox and unique’. In scoring 2,317 runs on the tour at an average of 59.41, Macartney ‘reduced our best bowlers to impotence’.
A bout of malaria led Armstrong to down a couple of whiskies before he went out to bat
By the fifth Test the series was won, and though England were finally showing some resistance, Armstrong appeared tired of so many one-sided encounters. He was also irritated that England hadn’t agreed to his proposal to play the Test to a finish, as was the habit in Australia. With the match petering out to a draw on the final day Armstrong ‘lost interest in proceedings’. According to David Mortimer, author of The Oval: Test Match Cricket Since 1880: ‘He wandered off to long leg, leaving instructions for his batsmen to have a bowl and set their own fields. Bill Hitch [the England batsman] took advantage, scoring the second-fastest fifty (35 minutes) in Ashes history, and Armstrong trapped a copy of The Times as it blew past “to see who we were playing”, as he said later.’
That Test at the Oval was Armstrong’s last for Australia. He retired from the game in 1922 and enjoyed a successful post-cricket career as a whisky merchant. Yet his legacy lives on. As recently as 2001 the Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh wrote an article for the Guardian about Steve Waugh’s all-conquering Australia team. Under the headline ‘Why art of Waugh owes much to Armstrong’, Haigh added: ‘Armstrong’s team created the formula by which later Australian XIs have lived… Australia was led by a rugged veteran cricketer whose captaincy culminated a distinguished career: Warwick Armstrong in 1920–21, Steve Waugh today.’