There is one sports writer who has done the extraordinary job of defining the complex Bodyline Series in one sentence. Simon Barnes: “Bodyline is the longest whinge in sporting history.” The controversy dragged on for years and years and sometimes after a gap of 10 years it would appear again. Charges and counter charges would fly the moment one person would say something about it.
There are thousands of stories about the genius of Bradman and comparatively very little about Larwood; unless you go inside the pit and find them. Otherwise there aren’t any that he’s deliberately left for his legacy; he was too modest a man to do that. It’s Hamilton’s brilliant work that has given people a chance to fully appreciate this extra-ordinary man.
His previous autobiography, The Larwood Story, by ghost writer Kevin Perkins, was published in England, where it sold 20,000 copies. Only a part of Larwood is visible and John Arlott wrote in Wisden that it was not complete. Hamilton points out that the observant reader learns as much about Larwood from the gaps he purposely leaves unfilled in the narrative—everything important is missing the significance it carries, like the scale of his desperation and dejection after Bodyline, his opinion of Don Bradman’s personality, his financial hardships both pre- and post-war, his trepidation about leaving England for Australia and the accusations of chucking.
Between the lines, you draw the conclusion that ‘here is someone so deeply hurt that he cannot articulate it; someone so careful in what he says, and reluctant to cause any offence, in case that level of hurt returns; someone so utterly bewildered about why it happened to him at all that he still can’t fully grasp the reasons behind it; and someone who feels terribly wronged but is determined to retain his dignity and pride.’
Biography is a unique art and often, as in the case of Bradman, it turns out better with the least input from the subject. Since I haven’t read the ones available on Bradman all I can do is go by the word of Melbourne-based writer Gideon Haigh—author of the classic Mystery Spinner on Jack Iverson—who described Bradman’s biography by Irving Rosenwater to be the best in comparison to those by AG Moyes, Michael Page, and Charles Williams. Depending on your nature there is another ‘book-shaped object’ by Roland Perry that was written with complete ‘access’ to the Don for those of us who take credulity to incredulous levels.
A biography of Harold Larwood is a doubly-difficult task because of the complexities at the very foundation of it. The brilliant thing about the biography by Hamilton is not that it highlights the sporting brilliance of Larwood or that it charts his journey through life factually, neither is it in what the various people say about him and his relationships—all these are part of the biography and have been given due consideration. The brilliance stems from Hamilton’s complete understanding and the psychological implications of the hurt—the obvious, the subtle, and the hidden. Hamilton never loses sight of how it shapes the life and decisions of Larwood and it is in this sensitive portrayal that you get to realise that you are reading about someone who is much rarer than even ‘one in a billion’.
Anecdotal evidence tells us that he was in all probability the greatest fast bowler ever. Dennis Lillee, a great fast bowler himself, was impressed by Larwood’s technique and action, which he studied on film. “It’s a natural action, a very strong action, a very athletic action,” he said. “His balance is beautiful… and look at the size of his forearm. He was obviously a very strong guy.”
More shy in his later years, quite a bit of it deliberately because of the prize he had paid in his most-glorious hour. Larwood was not self-centred (this is absolutely clear by seeing the fact that he did his captain’s biding even to his own detriment. He could have created a believable excuse but he didn’t lie and asked Jardine to rest him for the final game) and those who knew him found him never to be driven by ego. What he had was a lot of inner-dignity.
There were serious repercussions that flowed after the Bodyline Series and despite it being a team sport Larwood as a professional was in a unique situation that only he had to face. The fate of Jardine though linked to Bodyline was different as he was an amateur and he had a ‘who-the-hell-cares’ attitude. Voce was not that strongly identified with the skipper and he was more professional in outlook. Voce had lost his father at the age of 13 and he was the bread-earner of the family that gave him a maturity and stability different from Larwood. When you are responsible for dinner on the table for a big family then there is no pressure that comes anywhere close to it for you to forget your real role in life.
Larwood was sensitive and vulnerable. It wasn’t that he was emotionally weak but he was coping with too much silently. Larwood had been called a ‘bastard’ so many times that the word lost its meaning to him. He used to come out with a policeman close to his shoulders; Voce followed behind to ward off anyone who might lurch at Larwood from behind. ‘Bastard… bastard … bastard’ was all he could hear.
Despite all that at a time when he was broken, under extreme pressure following Bodyline, still young and not knowing where to go with a childhood spent completely in the darkness of coal mines just look at this incident that makes you marvel at the man. After Bodyline, when he didn’t know whether his foot would stand up to the number of overs Nottinghamshire and England expected him to bowl he went to watch a friendly match against Sir Julien Cahn’s XI in Cahn’s private ground near Trent Bridge. Cahn arrived in his chauffeur driven chocolate-and-cream Rolls Royce. Cahn had defended him after Bodyline saying he would have nothing said against a member of ‘his club’.
When he sent for him asking if ‘dear Harold’ could spare a moment of his precious time Larwood could not understand the purpose of his call. Cahn asked many things about the tour and England’s team, and the Australians, and how the future contests stacked up, etc, etc. When all small talk ran out, Cahn said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to apologize to the MCC. There’s a letter here, and I want you to read it.’
The details can be avoided but basically Cahn wanted a written apology for his bowling telling him that this would settle things and he could be available for selection again. Larwood made an understandable error as he had no idea about how Lord’s functioned; he presumed that it was the MCC that had given Cahn this job as a go between. Larwood asked what should he apologize for?
Cahn expected it to go smoothly and said ‘you must apologize to the MCC for your bowling and you must agree to bowl legitimately in future. If you don’t, you will not be picked in the Tests against Australia.’ Cahn wanted to do this as a favour to the MCC for a seat at the high table. Larwood was disgusted with the proposal and he was angry with the MCC for recruiting another member of ‘the Establishment’ (he had no idea that MCC had a very low opinion of Cahn) to deputize for it and carry out what he saw as the dirty work that Lord’s didn’t have the backbone to do itself.
The truth settled on him like a chill. The MCC was prepared to jettison the one man who had done the most to win the Ashes, purely for the sake of defending them harmoniously again. For him the MCC was amorphous—the committee were simply ‘posh rich bastards’ who were ‘out to get me’. “When provoked, Larwood could be an implacably stubborn man. Probably only the King could have persuaded Larwood to sign the letter Cahn gave. But even the King would have needed to explain why it was necessary and coerce him far more skilfully than Cahn could ever manage.” Cahn’s approach revealed how little he knew of Larwood or his character. He underestimated Larwood’s independent streak, his allegiance to his family and his class.
Larwood knew immediately that however couched the apology may appear it would destroy his life. He’d be demeaned in the eyes of his family, his team-mates, and the public. He wouldn’t be able to walk into Trent Bridge without his head down in shame. He wouldn’t be able to face anyone: his mother and father, Bill Voce and Douglas Jardine or even his own reflection in the bathroom mirror. He’d be remembered as the bowler who was unsporting—and had confessed to being so. ‘I won’t sign this,’ he said to Cahn, giving him back the letter. Cahn couldn’t believe it and he asked out of desperation: ‘Would you take it home and show it to your mother and father?’ He shot back: ‘I will… but I know what both of them will say.’
Larwood found his mother Mary sitting in her chair at home. She was reading the newspaper; her glasses high on her nose. He told her about Cahn and the letter. She settled the newspaper in her lap, dropped her head, pushed her glasses down and peered over the silver rims. Larwood was emphatically his mother’s son. She was defiant, proud, and hard. She stared at her son and listened to the conversation in chronological order. When he’d finished, she said: ‘If you apologize, you’ll never see me alive again.’ And then she went on reading her newspaper.’
Before Fingleton suggested what Australia might offer, Larwood hadn’t been sure what to do next. It was 1948 and he was almost 44-years-old and he’d paid too heavy a price for his fame. He wanted to pick up a newspaper and not find his name in a headline. The family was his biggest concern.
Larwood wasn’t a man who fussed too much about money or the material things of life but it would have rankled him when he reached Australia towards the end of 1950 that he was starting afresh while Sir Don Bradman was a seriously moneyed man who was also a member of the Australian Board. As far as the MCC was concerned Larwood did not exist for them, ‘it was as if he had died bowling during that series’.
There is a reason why the Bodyline Series has lasted so long and will perhaps last forever: It is a microcosm of life with every conceivable human emotion tested under immense pressure. The Don wanted to brush it aside completely because it was the only series that reveals everything that is worth knowing about him. Why just him, no one who was at the epicentre of it came out of it without being wounded in some way. Apart from the two captains, Larwood and Bradman were the most-obvious victims.
Larwood believed that Bradman had been scalded raw by the treatment he gave him. Although in later years he was always willing to point out that Bradman did well—‘and that they would’ve given him 75 runs just to stay in the pavilion’—but he felt his adversary became almost neurotic in defending each innings, his tactics to fight Bodyline and, of course, the charge that Larwood petrified him. Larwood mellowed down his earlier stance in later years where he said that ‘he was shaky’.
Hamilton argues that Larwood ought to have stood by his original claim. He spoke nothing but the truth. The proof of it lies in the fact that Bradman had a brain, for anyone capable of rational thought would have a sliver of fear running through them when Larwood came on to bowl.
Warwick Armstrong’s view, expressed contemporaneously, that Bradman ‘showed unmistakable signs of fright when facing every ball from Larwood’ was a direct accusation of cowardice, and he fought to rid himself of it. Had MCC backed Larwood like he should have been he would have had the confidence to stick with his beliefs which he knew were right. And if only Jardine had not been so myopic to just see that one Test in Sydney and given Larwood as much rest as possible in tour games it would have saved his foot. And that would have been the biggest weapon for England in the years to come.
Larwood did get something to hold on to and it was his most precious cricketing possession and even in his darkest days there was one Bodyline memento that he cherished and he just had to look at it to remember one man: Douglas Jardine. In front of 20,000 people on a Championship match day at Trent Bridge in June 1933 Jardine gave a cheque from a shilling fund created for Larwood and Voce. He made a short speech. ‘I was a fortunate captain,’ he said on being able to call upon Larwood. ‘None of you,’ he added, ‘can have any conception of the mental courage’ he had shown in Australia.
The crowd was heading home when Jardine made his own gift: an ashtray each for Voce and Larwood. The inscription on Larwood’s ashtray—every word in capital letters—was heartfelt:
TO HAROLD FOR THE ASHES — 1932-33 —
FROM A GRATEFUL ‘SKIPPER’
“For Larwood, the ashtray became a symbol of the Bodyline Series, the evidence that he had nothing to be ashamed of. Jardine paid for it from his own pocket and that act was the final confirmation for Larwood that Jardine was one of the most exemplary human beings he had ever met: decent, fair, scrupulously loyal, staunchly committed to Larwood’s own cause.
While others tried to make him feel like a shabby failure, Jardine was a true officer. He was, nevertheless, always ‘Mr Jardine’ or ‘Skipper’; Larwood never referred to him by his Christian name. Asked what he thought of his captain in 1933, Larwood replied simply: ‘I loved him’. The statement was strikingly unusual for the period. Grown men—especially from pit backgrounds—didn’t publicly admit platonic love. It was a sign of what Jardine meant and would always mean to Larwood. Who was the greater cricketer between Bradman and Jardine? Larwood never doubted it was Bradman. Who was the greater man? Larwood never doubted that it was Jardine.”
Almost every Larwood story has something human to it and that is what makes him such a unique cricketer. Bill Voce was like his fifth brother and there was just one friction that came between them in 1936, during the fallout of Bodyline, which threatened to ruin the friendship. They could confide in each other and Larwood said that Voce understood what he was thinking even before he understood it. Larwood realized that the coldness had more to do with his own situation than due to any fault of Voce and when he wife Lois said that ‘you can’t be like that with a friend’, he made up. Voce and Larwood were in touch well into their old age and visited each other with families.
His relationship with Jardine was unique, to others Jardine looked like an aloof aristocrat but Larwood could connect to him easily. Larwood though Jardine cut him years of slack. “I could talk to him. I think I understood the way he acted. He wanted to win so badly, and so did I, and I’m sure he saw that in me from the start.” And Jardine stood by him till the end.
With Jack Hobbs the relationship was reverential and Larwood idolized him but they were also close friends. When one sees that Archie Jackson sent him a congratulatory telegram from deathbed a simple truth about Larwood’s personality opens up: Larwood could connect with the core of people he befriended. Somehow I feel that the pit had a lot to do with this characteristic as inside a dark coal mine you develop a very direct way to communicate.
His friendship with Nottinghamshire captain Arthur Carr is another great example where Carr claimed that Larwood’s success came out of a beer bottle. After his father Robert, it was the jolly rogue Carr who was the most-important influence in the development of Larwood as a cricketer and a man.
Many Australians became his friends starting from Fingleton and Bert Oldfield who came looking for him in Blackpool at his sweet shop. Keith Miller would call upon him and became close to him and he along with others made him finally accept the invitation for the Centenary Test in Melbourne. An experience Larwood cherished. Frank Tyson, Dennis Lillee, Ray Lindwall looked up to Larwood.
Larwood was uncomfortably aware of Bradman’s accusation, but he didn’t say anything about it in public for fear of harming the ordered calm he had built around himself and his home. But he did make the obvious conclusion about Bradman’s motive: that it was an escape clause for his accuser. If Bradman could tarnish his image by implying he threw the ball then it would explain why he didn’t do that well against him.
The fame of Larwood and Bradman cannot be compared on any scale as they are qualitatively different. Larwood was unknown and for a period infamous among the masses that idolize or degrade sporting heroes but he was loved and respected by people who knew him. Bradman was worshipped by the masses and disliked by the people who knew him.
When he was almost 90, Larwood was asked—once more—whether he wanted to repudiate it and to criticize Douglas Jardine. Was there anything he regretted about the tour? Was there anything he wanted to recant? Was there anything he would have wanted to do differently? Larwood shook his head. ‘Not a thing,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think Bodyline was unfair at the time… and I don’t think so now.”
A brilliant life that began in the coal mine, a career that could have been sparkling like a galaxy ending so pre-maturely due to lack of vision in leadership, and then a scar that was pricked day in and day out with sharp and hurting words and deeds. It’s difficult to comprehend that he came out of it as a real winner. I feel that to call it the Bodyline Series is unjust and the 1932-33 Ashes in Australia should ideally be renamed as Larwood’s Ashes.
Can we appreciate and feel the meaning of what Larwood had as his defence all those years?
“Harold Larwood, the former 100 miles-per-hour bowler, would dip into his trunkful of memorabilia to oblige visiting admirers. Always he made sure they laid eyes on his presentation ashtray from Douglas Jardine, which symbolised the greatest of his many achievements on the cricket field. It is inscribed:
‘TO HAROLD FOR THE ASHES — 1932-33 — FROM A GRATEFUL SKIPPER’
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