There has been no cricketing battle that has been as significant as The Ashes (England in Australia), 1932-33. This was a series that had everything. Even from a distance of 78 years and with no identification with either team it is still impossible to sit on the fence. It is this way or that. It was broadcast as a serial and my brother and I watched it in our early teens on the first TV set to enter our home in the hill town of Kullu sometime in early 1985. The late expansion of the satellite towers of India’s state broadcasting company had its benefits for us as our delayed first TV set was a coloured one. I presume it must have had an everlasting effect in colouring our vision.
I discovered much later that it was an Australian Production and then depressingly pondered about the analysing capability of whatever was there in our heads. Because if it was an Australian Production then it must have been made to show the Australian team in good light but I remember correctly that my brother and I watched it for Larwood and Jardine. My hero was Harold Larwood, who would bowl on a coin kept in the middle of the pitch and that image has stayed with me. In later years, to feel better about our lack of understanding I told my brother that may be we could see through even at an early age and it must have played a role in your becoming a lawyer and my choosing journalism.
The raging debate over the March-end story by Simon Hughes and Larwood’s biography that I had read much before got me excited to revisit the tour and other issues as my blog has nothing on it. So I’ve created a new section on The Ashes and on any comparisons with Sir Donald Bradman and the first set is, of course, that amazing contest 78 years ago. This introduction is just a parent category under which the articles and the sub-categories can be organised.
The few paragraphs below are by the game’s pre-eminent historian David Frith, whose book Bodyline Autopsy is regarded as the last word on the series. He is also the author of The Archie Jackson Story.
“Young folk may challenge the claim, but the 1932-33 series between Australia and England remains the most sensational Test series of them all. People were more easily shocked in those days. Cricket was a fairly polite game. The code of honour was strictly adhered to by everyone, so when Douglas Jardine unleashed his hostile fast attack of Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, who bowled short on and outside the line of the leg stump, there was outrage.
The target was Bradman, whose run-making over the previous years had transformed the record book. “Our Don” was Australia’s most treasured asset, a source of pride and a comfort to his legions of fans in desperate times of unemployment and economic hardship. England needed to subdue him. Jardine’s strategy was to restrict him by means of fast Leg Theory. And succeeded. The Don’s average was cut to a mere 56, with only one century.
Subtle unwritten pledges were extracted that the Australians would not be subjected to Bodyline during the 1934 tour, and in due course the Laws were tightened in an effort to prevent any repetition.
Thereafter, bouncers were widely regarded as unsporting and unwanted—until, that is, the Second World War changed everything. In the late 1940s Bradman had Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller at his disposal, and the bouncers flew again. Yet even those blistering sessions were but an attenuated preamble to what happened in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Then, with four hefty fast bowlers at his disposal, one West Indies captain after another let them loose all day. The survivors of the original Bodyline series marvelled that there was no public riot, for it had come close to that in Adelaide in 1933, when two of Australia’s batsmen were felled. Yet now, in a period of 20 years, West Indies fast men sent 40 opposing batsmen to hospital.
To repeat: our fathers and grandfathers were shocked more easily.”
Connect With Me