There is no book that comes within touching distance to CLR James’ Beyond A Boundary in describing the love of cricket while conducting a severe examination of the world in which it is played. The Guardian said: To call it the “the best cricket book ever written is pifflingly inadequate praise.” Part memoir of a West Indian boyhood, part passionate celebration and defence of cricket as an art form, part indictment of colonialism, Beyond a Boundary addresses not just a sport but a whole culture to ask the question: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”
The life and the career of Harold Larwood answers that question as it is not just a cricketing story but an extraordinary human story—a full personal and professional circle; and I don’t know of any other cricketer who has had such a rich life.
Nottingham was a coal city and Larwood had been a pitman. He had experienced the rapid descent from daylight into darkness and back. There were so many mines at that time that switching between them wasn’t an issue. At 14 Larwood had become a pit-pony boy, carrying an oil light and driving the pony and a train of long, high-sided tubs, each holding about 50 kg of coal. At 17 he had moved on to the night shift of another colliery.
“If you grew up in Nottingham, as I did, you knew all about Larwood. He was a local legend. You were told about him as a rite of passage,” Duncan Hamilton wrote in the opening chapter of Larwood’s biography. “The miners my father worked alongside—though none of them ever saw him play—regarded Larwood as one of their own and would have nothing said against him. He was working class, manifestly proud of it and made of the right stuff, which was good enough for them,” Hamilton added. Larwood earned 32 shillings a week as a miner. That was exactly the sum that he was offered at Trent Bridge after selection and leaves meant the pay would get cut.
When he went for his first trial to Trent Bridge with his father Robert, who had scraped together £9—six weeks’ wages for a senior pitman—for new kit and a shilling each for return train tickets they walked five miles to the nearest train station and then two more to reach the ground. With no gyms and sophisticated training techniques walking for hours every day is what gave Larwood the strength and the stamina that he needed to bowl season after season.
The hand of fate ensured that cricket didn’t spare him the pit experience and his finest-hour rapidly descended to give way to the darkest days of his life. The hardships of a hero add to the romance of his tale and to his legend but in living through them there is no romance. The darkness inside a coal mine that he had ample experience of, in my view, helped him survive the inner darkness that engulfed him in his middle-age. It is tough to comprehend how else someone could have taken so much heat and yet not crumbled. His story encompasses ‘betrayal and justice, sacrifice and class snobbery, loyalty and eventually, redemption, reconciliation and peace’.
‘In Nuncargate, the north of Nottinghamshire village where he was born in 1904, almost every house was home to a miner or to a retired miner. The place was built on coal, survived through its dependency on coal, and the dust from the coal fell everywhere like black confetti.’ Almost every line of Larwood’s family tree was coated in coal dust. The Larwoods had almost always been miners. There were few other ways of earning a living. Cricket took him away from the darkness of the mines and then threw him to a much worse soul-wrenching darkness.
For a fast bowler his built was quite slight and in pictures taken during the third Test of the 1977 Ashes at Trent Bridge he looks more like a philosophy professor. With a cigarette in his right hand—and his muscular, broad, and every-inch-a-fast-bowler partner Bill Voce to his left—Larwood or ‘Lol’, as his friends called him, looks diminutive, even smaller than BBC’s interviewer Peter West.
How could he bowl between 95 to 100 mph with that lean physique is a question that comes to mind. Larwood had the gift; searing pace of the kind that he generated is always a gift. In itself, though, speed is nothing and it can’t take a bowler as far as Larwood went. The work in the mines gave him the one thing he needed for fast bowling: A strong back. He also had a supple spine. Nottinghamshire coach Jimmy Iremonger saw it straight away and was struck by his upper body strength, a remarkable facet in someone with such a lean frame.
Iremonger was a hardened sportsman, ‘the football gene as prominent as the cricket one. He had played thirteen seasons for Nottingham Forest as a left back and won three England caps. With his dual sporting background, plus the fact that he’d been prominent in the 1907 Nottinghamshire team that won the County Championship without losing a match, he didn’t have to work to win Larwood’s respect. The novice from the pit was already in awe of him, listening to every word as if it was scripture.’
Iremonger saw the raw talent and made Larwood put in the ‘bloody hard work’. His run-up was awry, he was too chest-on, and he gripped the ball just one way. There was no variation in pace and line and he began his run-up with a needless jerk. Iremonger wasn’t overly concerned by the problems as the new pupil possessed scary pace and that was what mattered. He instilled in Larwood the discipline required and ingrained the belief that speed does not stem from physical power but from balance and rhythm. Without discipline, Iremonger insisted, Larwood might as well go back to the pit.
The coach drove home the significance of balance and taught him to run almost on tiptoe: “If you don’t have balance, you don’t have anything. You’ll never be a bowler.” Iremonger kept repeating that ‘every step of every run to the wicket must be the same’, until it was achieved without thinking. The ideal run-up for the length of his stride was worked out by them. Contemporaries observed that his approach was almost soundless, as light as a ballet dancer. ‘I didn’t realize,’ said Frank Chester, who stood in 48 Tests, ‘that he was bowling at all until he was right beside me.’
When Larwood returned from Australia after the 1932-33 Ashes, he had become the face of the full-blown scandal and the MCC just distanced itself. The MCC got away with it principally because the prevailing norm in England those days was that the professionals were expendable and only the amateurs (Gentlemen) mattered. The worst part of it was that he wasn’t deliberately harmed as for that to happen he would have to be at least important enough for the MCC.
Hamilton recollected seeing Larwood in Trent Bridge in 1977 and he had found him resembling his grandfather; a kindly man who would slip a bill for sweets and comics, and tip his hat when a woman came into a room. He found it impossible to believe when he later found out that the Australians could have labelled this man as ‘The Killer’, ‘The Murderer on Tip Toe’. Or that he’d been spat at in the face. There was much more to it as Hamilton discovered later.
The agonies that Bodyline caused him were disguised behind a brave show of pride. Inside he was confused. He survived the dark inner torment of his life and was forced to re-evaluate and then re-order his entire life. In the mid-1930s the distress signals he was beaming went unanswered: loss of sleep, panic attacks, bouts of drinking and aggression born out of frustration. These days we know about post traumatic stress disorder and that it needs tenderly supervised convalescence. In his case it was actually a double blow as he came back wounded to find that more was in store for him.
‘He had been verbally abused inside and outside Australian grounds. After Adelaide there was always the prospect of physical assault. Back home his living room resembled the sorting desk’ of a post office. Larwood defied his wife Lois, who wanted to make a bonfire and burn the most malicious, and opened every letter. He was called ‘dirty’, a ‘liar’, a ‘lousy cow’ and a ‘craven Pommie bastard’.
The compelling aspect of Bodyline is what Larwood went through after it was over. A lightening quick fast bowler need not have been a hard nut. A lot of fast bowlers are gentle souls and the cold, calculating cunningness is usually a batsman’s privilege. Archie Jackson, ‘called the greatest master batsman since Victor Trumper’, was sure that quick footwork was the key to countering short balls and maintained that Larwood would ‘not intentionally hurt a fly’.
“When I think about the desolation that Larwood experienced, and the way he eventually cut himself off from his former self because of it, I appreciate why the sense of recrimination took so long to leave him and was eventually overtaken by a different hurt. He regarded his treatment as unjust and dealt with it by leaving behind both cricket and his home in Nottingham. In his own mind he exaggerated—wrongly but understandably—the depth of feeling against him. When he realized his mistake, what rankled were not the original slights, real or imagined, but how much time he had wasted worrying about them. With the clarity that hindsight brings, Larwood saw that he hadn’t been damned at all. Far from it. In Australia, he discovered how much he was liked and genuinely respected. In England he was treated as a deity,” Hamilton describes Larwood’s inner turmoil in the first chapter of his biography.
In 1950 after years of unsuccessful financial ventures including some seasons of cricket for Nottinghamshire, the initial newspaper columns and comments about the Aussies, his sweet shop in Blackpool, and the defence of Bodyline that harmed him as much as Bodyline, Larwood left England. Larwood remembered Jack Fingleton as one of the bravest batsman during that 1932-33 tour. He had got a pair at Adelaide but Fingleton felt privileged to have faced a bowler at his fastest. He held nothing against Larwood. He was also interested in Larwood as a person and when he heard about him, the human interest of his story fascinated Fingleton.
Larwood by that time had just one concern, he wanted to give his daughters a better chance in life and despite a lot of apprehensions he decided to go to Australia, where Fingleton had done all the groundwork for him. “I’ll never be able to repay him,” said Larwood. On his final afternoon in England his former captain Douglas Jardine hosted a lunch for him and gave him a present that Jack Hobbs had once given to him. A gold and brown pencil made to mark Hobbs’ hundredth hundred about 25 years ago. The inscription read: To D.R. Jardine. From Jack Hobbs. 1925
Larwood asked what Hobbs would make of it and Jardine replied he would be thrilled. What it would have meant for Larwood can be appreciated by knowing what Hobbs meant to him. Hobbs was Larwood’s hero. For Larwood, Hobbs was ‘The Master’. As a boy in his street games, with his makeshift bat and ball, he pretended to be Hobbs. “When he spoke of Hobbs, Larwood referred to him in hushed tones, like someone half-whispering in a church. He was also the ‘greatest gentleman’, and a true sportsman in every way’, a man incapable of anything ‘paltry or mean’.”
He took the pencil and set off across London to look for Hobbs. “There was only one man I really wanted to say goodbye to… I knew I’d never see him again,” he said. After finding out that he was at the Cheshire Cheese pub from his sporting-goods shop in Fleet Street, Larwood found him sitting alone in a corner. Hobbs was happily surprised: ‘Harold,’ he said. ‘We’ll have some champagne.’ Larwood took out the pencil and laid it in his hand. Hobbs picked it up for a moment and said ‘it’s an honour to know you have it’.
Hobbs always maintained that Larwood was the fastest and the most accurate bowler he had ever seen. It was Hobbs who had pushed his case in 1926 after being dismissed in a first-class game by Larwood twice. They drank till evening talking about the past and then Hobbs pushed the hopelessly-drunk Larwood into a taxi. He spent his last day in London vomiting into the toilet bowl. “But it was worth it,” he said, “to be with Jack Hobbs for a few more hours.”
Frank Keating had retired after decades as the Guardian’s sports writer when Hamilton’s book came out. Those who remember Editor Matthew Engle’s tribute to Keating on the pages of the Guardian would recollect that one of his main strengths was an elephant’s memory. He looked back at the day Larwood left after years: “On that same mid-morning, giving Kingston a miss, BBC radio’s cricket commentator, 36-year-old John Arlott, took a train from London’s Liverpool Street station east to the estuary seaport of Tilbury.
Earlier that month, Arlott had been signed as a weekly freelance columnist by the editor of the Daily Mail, Frank Owen, a drinking buddy and erstwhile fellow parliamentary Liberal candidate. Now, for his third column, Arlott was off to Tilbury to bid farewell to a once fabled—now faded and forgotten—national sporting legend who had sold up his rundown sweetshop in Blackpool to emigrate on an assisted passage to Australia with his wife and five daughters.
It was a poignant mission. Arlott was surprised, not to say saddened, to find he was the only person bothered to mark the pathos of such a leave-taking and having shared a cup of tea aboard ship and tenderly enacted the God-speed honours with the slight, pale and stooping former athlete and hero—icon is today’s overused proper noun—the writer made it down the gangplank and looked for a wharfside telephone-box to dictate his intro to the Mail: “As I stand on the quay, the sun has come out to temper the cold wind of late April, and a figure of cricket history is leaving England aboard the liner Orontes. Bare minutes ago the ship cast off, and is standing out in the river, the oil smoke running out of her yellow funnels—and the man who has just turned away from the deckrail is ‘Lol’ Larwood who, in September 1932, sailed from this same quay and in this very same Orontes to Australia and an epic Test match series.”
The rivalry with Bradman is a salute to the competitive spirit of Larwood. Bradman had made Larwood very tired in the English summer of 1930. Overall in seven Tests he had taken Bradman’s wicket just once and that too after Bradman had got his double hundred. Bradman had also made him extremely angry as there were professional and personal scores to settle. Larwood nursed a sense of injustice. He thought Bradman had been dishonest. “He was out at Headingley in 1930 even before he’d scored,” he always maintained. “The first ball I gave him was a bouncer, and he snicked it …you could hear the snick all over the ground. George Duckworth caught it, and you could hear his appeal in Manchester. We all went up. I knew he’d snicked it, and everyone who was close to it will tell you the same. Even Jack Hobbs… the umpire gave him the benefit of the doubt.’ To Larwood, Bradman hadn’t done the right thing, something he could never imagine Jack Hobbs as doing.
There is an eerie truthfulness to this story and I can believe it as if I was a witness to it in Headingley. Such stories are almost inevitably true and I can recount several of them and their merit is the reason why they survive even longer than the scoreboard.
It was also Larwood’s belief, encouraged by his father, that everyone was equal and you treat people the same irrespective of class or creed or achievement. It was a different England then and in that respect Larwood liked the Australians and considered them matily earthy, and always willing to split a round of drinks. The over-mannered, unsociable, and icily detached Bradman was different—as if he didn’t belong to either team.
Larwood never strayed from his working-class roots. He identified with the ordinary man, especially the miners, to such an extent that it embarrassed him to drive past his friends or former workmates from the pit. This should not be taken as a value judgment but rather as a detail of their personality. Larwood diagnosed Bradman’s frostiness as arrogance rather than shyness. It was also Larwood’s view that Bradman became so intense in his hunt for runs that he found it impossible to loosen up without the bat in his hand.
Hamilton described what Larwood stood for despite their differences: “But, while mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, one genius instantly recognizes another. Larwood always honoured the Bradman of the record book than the Bradman he knew in the flesh. ‘He was a genius in the middle,’ he said.”
Compare this to what Bradman said about Larwood and you’ll get the point regarding who is the genius. Ten years after Larwood had settled down in Australia there were smears and whispers about him and his bowling action: the accusations—which Donald Bradman implied in 1960 with his use of cinefilm from Bodyline—that Larwood was ‘a chucker’, a man who threw his fastest ball.
After becoming the Chairman of the Select Committee on Throwing, created by South Australian Cricket Association, the next year he began showing a strip of black-and-white film, which he reversed. Larwood appeared on the screen bowling left-handed and Bradman frequently stopped the film when the ball was about to be delivered to ask his audience to name the bowler and give an opinion about the action. ‘The few seconds of Larwood footage—he was one of the several bowlers on Bradman’s home movie—was shown to former and current Test umpires in May 1960 in Adelaide and then again the following month to the Imperial Cricket Conference at Lord’s, where the issue of what constituted fair bowling was being discussed. The film ‘brought a few gasps from the assembled dignitaries’, said Richie Benaud, who was with BBC Radio as well as News of the World. But Benaud added crucially: ‘He then showed the same film right-handed and there was no problem at all.’
The umpire George Hele, who stood in every Bodyline Test, found Larwood’s action poetic. He called his action ‘copybook, classic, and utterly direct’ and added that there was ‘nothing loose, untidy, or wasted’ about it. ‘I never saw a faster and more consistent bowler,’ he said. When Hamilton found out about the accusation he thought that Larwood embodied the poet Dryden’s line: “Ev’n victors are by victories undone.”
Australian fast bowler Ray Lindwall with the help of newsreels and pictures grew up committed to bowl like Larwood. He wrote about Larwood’s ‘smooth approach and gradual acceleration, the fire and the control in the delivery and the whipped follow-through’. He said that ‘the action could not be faulted’. Watching him from the Trent Bridge pavilion on the 1948 tour, Nottinghamshire members threw accusations of plagiarism at the bowler, a charge that Lindwall accepted as a compliment. He killed the argument by saying, “Why shouldn’t I copy the very best?”
Larwood went back in 1932 to Australia as a tougher character and literally bullied Bradman into submission. The effects of it on Bradman are visible in black and white starting from the tour games in Australia to more than half of his next season. Bradman could not establish mastery over Larwood when both of them were at their peak but Larwood was able to kick Bradman out of his orbit in his own backyard despite the crowd against him practically everywhere.
There was redemption on the personal front as well as he had suffered the wrath of the Australian public and later went back to become one of them.
*The story of Larwood in this post and and in some parts in subsequent chapters is largely taken with permission from Duncan Hamilton; the author of his brilliant biography.
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