… they nursed no quarrel, they cherished no feud,

They were strangers to spite and hate;

In a kindly spirit they took their stand,

That brothers and sons might learn

How a man should uphold the sports of his land,

And strike his best with a strong right hand,

And take his strokes in return.

ON December 2nd, 1932, the Marylebone Cricket Club began the traditional series of Test matches against Australia at Sydney. Australia, who had held the Ashes since 1930, had a certain unearthly confidence, born of the fact that they also possessed the not quite earthly Bradman. The first Test seems to have been played happily enough, with a resulting win for England by ten wickets. On December 30th the second Test was played—at Melbourne—and this time Australia won by 111 runs. All was sweetness and light. One can search the sporting columns of the English Press vainly for a hint of the typhoon to come. The English team, captained by D. R. Jardine and made up of players whose names still resound like hosannas in the great cricket anthem; Sutcliffe, Hammond, Ames, Larwood, Verity, Leyland, Wyatt, Paynter, Allen, Voce, emerged from the pavilion, each quite obviously the receptacle of honour and virtue. The crowd applauded them with good-mannered impartiality. The heat was very great and hopes were high.

After playing an interim match at Bendigo the visitors went to Adelaide for the third Test. Here, on Saturday, January 13th, 1933, and in glorious weather, began a game which came near to destroying the central mystery upon which cricket is founded and without which it could only exist as one of the dullest pastimes imaginable. To the 30,000 spectators it came near to seeing a cardinal perform a black Mass. Their formal staccato clapping and encouraging platitudes broke down into outraged mob baying. And half-way through the match the Australian Board of Cricket Control sent the Committee of the M.C.C. a cable accusing the English team of unsportsmanlike tactics. If a cable had arrived at Lord’s accusing the English Eleven of cannibalism it could scarcely have produced greater horror. When the full nature of the charge was understood England drew back in stunned silence, while The Times cleared its correspondence columns of all extraneous matter and waited for the deluge.

Before being wise after the event it is a matter of probity to take a close look at the event itself, even though, as in this instance, doing so merely confirms one’s incredulity. Why was such a campaign ever dreamt of, let alone put into action? Wisden, in the exalted language taken for granted by cricketers, says, ‘the plan of the campaign was to reduce Bradman to mortal limits’. To the crowd which watched it looked more as if Bradman and his colleagues were to be reduced to mortal remains. As the injured staggered from the field, Woodfull from a blow over the heart with, as Mr. R. H. Lyttelton remarked, ‘a thud that was heard in the grandstand and very likely round the ground generally,’ and Oldfield from a blow on the head which concussed him, the crowd vented its indignation in sounds never before heard on a cricket ground. Larwood, whose bowling had caused this agony, and Jardine, who had given permission for the bowling, were heaped with personal abuse. The elaborately chivalric structure of the game momentarily rocked and looked as though it was about to cave in, and for a fraction of time it seemed that from these sublime ruins there would emerge a knock-about summer pastime which would be so obviously ‘not cricket’ that another name would have to be invented for it.

How could such a thing happen? Or, more to the point, how did it?

Play opened at the Adelaide Oval in exquisite weather, on a near-perfect pitch and to a record crowd of nearly forty thousand people on the mounds. Within the first hour England, who were noticeably nervous, suffered the worst revenge they had known since the Sydney Test Match of 1925. Jardine was always uncomfortable as he faced O’Reilly, who it was thought was bowling faster than at any time during the whole of his career. Jardine was out when he made only three runs and the English demoralization continued apace when Hammond was caught out by Oldfield after making a miserable two. Ames then took thirty-nine minutes to make three and although the English batting eventually made a fairly lively recovery, it could have been that the note of sourness, with its Empire-shaking reverberations, crept into the game at this juncture. Leyland and Wyatt rescued the English team from complete disaster and the great Australian crowd, blissfully oblivious of the ferocity latent in its breast, clapped generously. All wasn’t well, although on the other hand there was still nothing to indicate a state of affairs which could be called sick.

The second day’s play opened before a vast crowd—the biggest ever seen at Adelaide—of some 51,000 spectators. The wicket was described as a batsman’s paradise, an uncomfortably ambiguous description in the circumstances. England consolidated the lead given them on the previous day by Wyatt and Leyland, and when the last wicket fell their score was a cosy 341. Australia began badly. Fingleton, McCabe and the great Bradman himself were all out for a total of 34. This would have been worrying enough for the crowd had not Larwood’s curious bowling begun to cause a more complex anxiety. He was bumping the balls down most disconcertingly and the easy way in which McCabe and Bradman were trapped was faintly shocking and somehow not quite acceptable. Also it was observed that the batsmen were ducking and dodging as the ball rushed at them. The reason for this was only too apparent when a ball crashed against Woodfull’s left breast and he had to leave the ground to receive massage. Uproar then broke out. The enormous crowd stormed and barracked. But Larwood seemed to hear nothing—even when every ball he sent down was booed and jeered, even when, in the twinkling of an eye, he must have sensed that he had suffered a metamorphosis in esteem and was now the Sweeney Todd of the wicket. He bowled on imperturbably. The crowd howled. At the end of this day’s strange play the score was, England 341, Australia 109.

The gate was noticeably reduced when play began on the third day; some 15,000 people had stayed away. Those who were present were tense, suspicious and watchful. Larwood began to bowl from the river end and at once employed his body-line bowling. Like Louis XVIII’s court, he had forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. Three times he struck Ponsford on the back with deliveries which got up high and each time the crowd roared its disapproval. The chapter of accidents continued after lunch with Paynter crashing into a fence and hurting his leg so badly that he had to leave the field for a bit. But the grim climax of the day came when Larwood, still practising leg-theory in spite of the arena of hostility which ringed him and threatened his every action, sent a ball down which hit Oldfield on the head. He was helped away suffering from concussion and shock to a crescendo of hooting, booing and every kind of furious noise. At the end of this dreary day the Australian score had roughly doubled and stood at 222.

On the fourth day of this appalling Test match an air of lassitude and withdrawal infected the mounds. The play was dull, the weather was threatening and sultry and Jardine’s monumental patience bored the much-reduced crowd into ripples of open derision. As if to flaunt his powers, Larwood showed his bowling superiority by not employing his controversial body-line method against Fingleton and Ponsford, but dismissed them just as easily. Bradman did well and was applauded rapturously, though more because at that moment he personified the old spirit of the game before it was disgraced than for any very great batting brilliance. A dove had circled the wicket as play began, a somewhat satirical bird as it proved, for that evening the Australian Board of Control sent its notorious cable, a communication as sensationally synonymous to the world of sport as the Zinoviev Letter to the world of politics. Addressed to the M.C.C., the cable read:1

Body-line bowling has assumed such proportions as to menace the best interests of the game, making protection of the body by the batsmen the main consideration.

This is causing intensely bitter feeling between the players as well as injury. In our opinion it is unsportsmanlike.

Unless stopped at once it is likely to upset the friendly relations existing between Australia and England.

This cable, sent at a time of passionate indignation and while the third Test was in mid-progress, crashed against the well-bred facade of the M.C.C. and left it gasping, while at Adelaide things had sunk to such a level that they had no parallel in all the history of cricket. The public had to be kept out of the ground when the English  team were practising and once, when one of the English managers tried to express his personal sympathy in the battered Woodfull’s dressing-room there was a violent scene. Jardine, Larwood and Voce (the latter had also been practising body-line bowling), England’s best, were seen down under as a triumvirate of villainy. Abuse followed them everywhere. The overworked analogy between the game and national honour fed the scandal and made it assume grotesque proportions. The Empire watched and waited. If cricket itself was fallible then surely anything might be fallible. What in fact had Larwood (and Jardine and Voce) done to bring such shame on the Anglo-Saxon world?

The Times2 got in a good word for the defence before the stupendous correspondence began. While the pundits in the shires were still crouching dazedly over their inkhorns it said:

‘In due time, no doubt, the M.C.C. will send a considered and courteous reply to the cable of protest against what has begun to be called “body-line bowling” which they received yesterday from the Australian Board of Control. Meanwhile an attempt to give some idea of how the matter strikes the average Englishman may not come amiss. First of all there is nothing new in the kind of bowling to which exception is now taken. Really fast bowlers are as rare as truly great statesmen. But they do every now and then spring up, both here and in the Dominion, and have been known before now to hit the batsman as well as the wicket. English players who some years ago suffered many a shrewd knock from the bowling of Macdonald and Gregory—not to speak of Jones in his earlier days—have the right to recall their own experiences to those who are now criticizing the tactics of Larwood and his Captain. Australians know as well as our men that cricket is not played with a soft ball, and that a fast ball which hits a batsman is bound to hurt. They also know that, so long as a “shock” bowler is not bumping down short-pitch balls or purposely aiming at the batsman, his bowling is perfectly fair. It is inconceivable that a cricketer of Jardine’s standing, chosen by the M.C.C. to captain an English side, would ever dream of allowing or would order the bowlers under his command to practise any system of attack that, in the time-honoured English phrase, is not cricket. To do the Australians justice the grievance at the back of their complaint is neither the pace nor the direction of Larwood’s deliveries. What they probably object to is the array of leg-fielders … on whom the English captain relies to increase the effectiveness of his fast bowlers. But in that policy there is nothing dishonourable or unsportsmanlike…. After all, the object of every fielding side is to get their opponents out for as low a score as possible. If with that aim in view Jardine has made more use of the “leg-theory” than other captains before him it is largely due to the fashion of the two-eyed stance and the modern batsman’s habit of covering the stumps with his leg, thereby preventing the bowler from getting a clear view of the wicket, and incidentally making it more likely that he himself will be hit.’

The Times apologist then doled out tributes and diplomatic advice to both teams and ended his say fretfully with:

This leader was published on January 19th and the following day there was a noticeable hardening of opinion and feeling in favour of Larwood. England had won the Test, but it was a Pyrrhic victory in which it was impossible to rejoice and it was received in this country with the same kind of gratitude which comes to a man when a diseased tooth ceases to rage. The last day’s play was gloomy and poorly attended. An X-ray had revealed that Oldfield had a linear fracture of the frontal bone of his forehead. The weather broke. Clouds banked up fast and it became a race between the game and the rain. Larwood, who presumably could not abandon his body-line bowling since to do so might imply an awareness of its savagery, continued with his leg-theory tactics and all ended in bitterness and acrimony.

In Australia there was a certain reaction to all the fuss and a decided anger at the uncompromising language of the Board of Control’s cable. Ever over-sensitive about what the Old Country thought of them, they began to suspect that the complaint would be interpreted in London as a typical ill-bred colonial whine. The Sydney Sun said, ‘The Board of Control seems to have become somewhat confused between the verbs to cable and to burble….’ and it went on satirically, ‘M.C.C. might be forgiven, after reading the appalling suggestions of Imperial disruption, if it replied to the Board with a request that it packs its several heads in ice.’ And the Melbourne Argus followed The Times’s line in putting the whole business down to irresponsible commentators, and this in spite of the fact that forty thousand Aussies were there to know the reason why. As an Australian living in London pointed out, ‘It must be perfectly obvious that thousands of spectators and the Board of Control, all eye-witnesses of the play, thought that such tactics were being deliberately adopted, otherwise, why the protest? Has an optical illusion on a gigantic scale been performed?’

There followed an upsurge of violent reminiscences. And a gruesome showing of scars. H. B. Cameron, the South African captain, boasted that he had been knocked out by Larwood at Lord’s in 1932 and P. H. Shaw reminded the world that the marks on his limbs reminded him that cricket was played with a hard ball. Very old cricketers came out with tales which competed fiercely with the worst excesses of the Colosseum, so what were those post-war colonials whimpering about? And Lord Buckmaster’s3 recollections of actually what did happen on the classic village greens of England dismissed the white and emerald idyll with contempt.

‘… Leg bowling’, confessed this Uncle Matthew-like peer, ‘revives old memories and old desires. Pitches like billiard tables and spectators numbered in thousands make people forget what cricket used to be. Fifty years ago this new danger was a common incident in every match played outside the few places where groundsmen guarded the turf. Fast bowlers—quorum parvissima pars fui—were regarded as essential and were often, as I was, most erratic. I have often seen a ball pitch once and then bounce straight into the backstop’s hands.

‘Nor were these eccentricities confined to local grounds. I remember on one occasion the first ball of a match slung with immense violence straight at the big black beard of W. G. Grace. Did he object? Certainly not: he simply hit it out of the ground and waited for the next.

‘In the country there were some pitches renowned for their fiery qualities. On one of these I recall a game in which Ranjitsinhji took part. Two benches from the village school provided the grandstand and on these were seated the squire, the local doctor—whose patients were long-suffering and few—the publican and some countrymen.

‘Ranjitsinhji was cleanly bowled by the village postman, who wore his official uniform, and all the four innings were finished in the day. As for the leg balls and head balls and body balls, they formed the feature of the match, which no one seemed to enjoy more than Ranjitsinhji himself. The world has been made smooth for the game and its lords, but is it a better game?’

Such words were salt in the Australian wounds. Had they made—were they making too much fuss about the whole affair? Small boys saw the matter quite simply. A new game appeared on the streets in England. The requirements for it were a rubber ball, a biscuit tin and a bat. The bowler, always addressed as Larwood, bowled at the batsman, who had to prevent himself from being touched by the ball, either by swiping it with the bat or by dodging. Should the ball touch him he had to lie flat on the road and then be carried off by his friends. This game wasn’t called cricket.

A. A. Milne tried to bring a little humour to the situation by calling it ‘the laugh of the year … that batsmen should break the hearts of bowlers by protecting the wickets with their persons, and that when at last the bowler accepts the challenge and bowls at their persons, the outraged batsmen should shriek that he isn’t playing cricket!’ Most people who heard this view of the matter were obliged to believe that it was a poor year for laughs.

Immediately after winning this calamitous Test there was an attempt by the managers of the M.C.C. team to force their way back into the old grand vocabulary of the game where the crude sounds of the Adelaide Oval had no place. ‘Members of the M.C.C. and the English team had no desire to enter into public controversy,’ the statement said, ‘for they deplore the introduction of any personal feeling into the records of a great game….’ Nobody in Australia took much notice of this; they were waiting now in a crippled silence for the boomerang from Lord’s. While all intuitively knew that body-line bowling was wrong, there was also a general agreement that the wording of the Australian cable protesting against it was, to put it mildly, unfortunate. The M.C.C. Committee’s reply came on January 24th and was all the Australians dreaded that it would be.

The M.C.C. Committee, presided over by Lord Lewisham, had spoken. Here was majesty. Here was straight rejection of the scarcely mentionable charge of ‘unsportmanslike’. And here was a careful avoidance of the trouble spot—body-line itself. Before a fresh wave of cricket jabberwocky had time to obliterate the main argument, Mr. R. H. Lyttelton4 forced people to face facts.

‘Cricketers all over the world are in a fever about the cricket now being played between the picked elevens of England and Australia,’ he declared grimly. ‘In the Third Test match just concluded Mr. Woodfull got a very severe blow over the heart from a ball bowled by Larwood. It was the most deplorable event in the most disagreeable match that has been played since the game began….

‘From the reports that have reached us it appears that Larwood bowled a ball either on the leg stump or perhaps straight to the batsman. This particular ball kicked and hit Mr. Woodfull a terrible blow…. This could not have been the case were it not due to the fact that it was a direct hit straight to the body and hit it because the batsman was facing the bowler and therefore exposing the head, heart and other vital organs. This method of play is most dangerous, and that is probably due to the fact that modern wickets have been brought to such perfection that a ball very seldom kicks.

‘Now the question is, How would W. G. Grace in his prime have played Larwood and any fast bowler? He would have stood firm on the right foot, with his left shoulder well forward: to certain balls well pitched up he would have played forward and smothered, but never was W.G. guilty of adopting the two-eyed stance, or in other words exposing the full face of his body to the bowler, and never in his life was he dangerously hit.

‘As long as cricket is played with a hard ball there must be contusions, but if the modern batsman would adopt the methods of W. G. Grace by abandoning the two-eyed stance and learning to play forward and smothering the ball there would be very few accidents…. It is now up to the batsmen to kill the two-eyed stance.’

This sweet reasonableness brought a more constructive attitude to the whole affair. The Australians began to recover from the faint sense of shame they had felt about the Board of Control’s cable. Some of the English at least were recognizing that they had a case, even if they were presenting it clumsily. The smooth wording of the M.C.C.’s reply had to be admired. Immediately it arrived, Mr. Jeanes, the Board’s secretary, conferred with the South Australian delegates for about an hour and then made a telephone call to the chairman, Dr. Robertson. All that the public gleaned from this was that if the English packed up and went home at this stage of the tour there would be a loss of some £45,000 in gross receipts.

The Australian Press’s reaction was confused and irritable. It ranged from the mild servility of the Melbourne Argus—‘the M.C.C. are under a misapprehension which, in the circumstances, is quite pardonable … they don’t appreciate the good will, the comradeship which the visit of an English team evokes …’ to some good old Australian plain-speaking in the Melbourne Herald—‘it is a pity that the protest, however clumsily worded, was not received in England with a greater effort of understanding. The cable did not come from an irresponsible source.’ And it added stoically, ‘It must now be considered that the protest has completely failed and that if the English captain considers that bodyline bowling is the right tactics at Brisbane and Sydney, then our batsmen will have to do their best to stand up to it.’ As for the Sydney Sun, it saw the M.C.C. reply as pure Limey upper-class winner-take-all stuff—‘With one shrewd thrust M.C.C. has changed the question, “Shall leg theory continue?” to “Shall Tests continue?” Thus the Board is out-manœuvred and would be well advised to withdraw for the time being with all the grace it has at its command.’

But the Board didn’t withdraw. It met behind closed doors and then sent this reply to London:

The reply staggered the M.C.C. They had not expected anything like so positive an attitude, and as an authority which had always considered itself the last word on cricket it found the unequivocal statement that body-line bowling would in future be illegal in Australia audacious, to say the least of it. Nor could the independent and chilly tone of the reply be ignored. Also—and here was the sting—although there was no more mention of that ultimate gamesmanship obscenity ‘unsportsmanlike’, the cool declaration that a method of bowling which had been sensationally adopted by an English captain would in future be banned in Australia made it starkly clear what Australians thought about it. Even the Melbourne Herald was shaken by the tough line taken in this second cable and called it a pistol held to the heart of the English authorities.

The M.C.C. was now on the defensive. Did the Australians still believe that Jardine and Larwood had been unsporting? They simply had to know. Nobody could breathe, eat, sleep or think until they did. The M.C.C.’s second cable was a trifle overwrought. It noted with pleasure that the Australians weren’t thinking of cancelling the programme and then it came to the point. ‘May we accept this as a clear indication that the good sportsmanship of our team is not in question. We are sure you will appreciate how impossible it would be to play any Test Match in the spirit we all desire unless both sides were satisfied there was no reflection upon their sportsmanship. When your recommendation reaches us it shall receive our most careful consideration and will be submitted to the Imperial Cricket Conference.’

While these messages came and went the English team were moving about in Australia under a nightmarish cloud of obloquy and suspicion. Some individuals thought that their personal honour was at stake until the Board of Control publicly retracted its haunting accusation and they wanted the Fourth Test to be abandoned. The team went so far as to ask E. T. Crutchley, the British Representative in Australia, to plead for them. The Governor of Queensland, Sir Leslie Wilson, tried to lessen the tension by remarking tartly, ‘that it was a serious symptom when people take cricket too seriously’. He didn’t say a symptom of what. The Board of Control allowed dishonour to swing like Damocles’ sword over the heads of the Englishmen right up to the moment before the Fourth Test opened at Brisbane on February 9th, when it announced coldly, ‘We do not regard the sportsmanship of your team as being in question…. It is, as indicated in our cable of January 30th … the particular class of bowling which we consider not in the best interests of cricket….’

So that was that. Or was it? Not quite.

Larwood went in for body-line bowling again during the Fourth Test and the crowd jeered again, but the jeers were soon silenced by the brilliance of the Australian batting. Soon it became so good that it defeated leg-theory and Larwood. It was captivating and courageous and it forced the crowd to discipline itself, and the Fourth Test became the happiest match of the whole tour. England beat Australia by six wickets and regained the Ashes, and when the King’s telegram of congratulations arrived both victors and vanquished felt like cheering, just for normalcy’s sake.

The body-line controversy spread from the Adelaide Oval to every anglicized acre of the earth and was compulsory conversation wherever the English met. But other things were happening in the world during this three weeks’ wonder, events which were to put Larwood’s game of cricket on a par with Francis Drake’s game of bowls. For on January 31st Adolf Hitler broke Hindenburg’s long resistance to him and became Chancellor of the Reich and Captain Göring took control of the police in Berlin and over more than half Germany. The full meaning of this was only faintly comprehended—even when the Reichstag was burnt down twenty-seven days later, even as the Oxford Union was provocatively debating whether it would fight for King and Country, and deciding that it wouldn’t. England and Australia, each emerging thankfully from the sudden darkness which had overtaken them, were wholly given up to the luxury of cricket evolution. Letters flowed into the Press, though only 99% were about the two-eyed stance and leg-theory. One was from Mr. Neville Chamberlain to the editor of The Times and hoped that it might be of interest that in walking through St. James’s Park he had noticed a grey wagtail….

Notes

1 The cables which passed between the Australian Board of Control and the M.C.C. appeared in The Times (January 1933) and Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack (1934).

2 The Times fourth leader appeared on 19 January 1933.

3 Letter from Lord Buckmaster to The Times (21 January 1933).

4 Letter from R. A. Lyttelton to The Times (24 January 1933).