“As Oldfield went down under the blow, the Oval swelled with anger, and that anger rolled down and across the pitch as a primal, shrieking roar that ‘frightened’ Larwood. ‘I felt,’ he said, ‘as if one false move would bring the crowd down on me.’ He was convinced if one ‘idiot’ lunged over the fence, thousands would follow and he’d be buried beneath them. He turned to Les Ames, who was equally distressed: ‘If they come,’ he said, his voice breaking, ‘you can take the leg stump for protection. I’ll take the middle.’ The police deployed mounted troopers to ensure order. Reports from the day talk about the threat of riot and physical violence, and all his life Larwood was convinced that that view was valid.”
Leaks in those days were considered as ‘moral offences of the highest order’. As Fingleton was the team’s only full-time journalist he stood accused for many years in the eyes of Warner and the England team. Warner offered Larwood £1 if he got Fingleton’s wicket in the second innings; Larwood, who never needed the incentive of hard cash to remove anyone, uprooted Fingleton’s stump for a duck to hand him a pair for the match. What gets buried amid all the furore is that England won the match by a massive 338 runs and Larwood took seven wickets in the match.
On the fifth day of the match the Australian Board of Control sent the following cable to the MCC: “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.”
Hamilton has argued with sufficient logic that this was a hasty and intemperate reaction that lacked the guile needed to condemn Jardine without insulting the MCC. Rather than resolve the problem, its accusations made it worse. The Board fell into the easy trap of relying on the term Bodyline, a word created in the world of journalism rather than cricket, and then of adopting a mildly threatening tone. The other big mistake was to release the statement to the newspapers at the same time as dispatching it to Lord’s. It was carried in the Stop Press columns before arriving at Lord’s.
The Board missed the crucial point that the view of MCC on Bodyline was based on accounts in English newspapers, which were mostly positive. The newsreel footage those days could take up to six weeks to arrive from Australia. The MCC took five days of careful thinking and “slapped the Australians straight across both cheeks. The opening two lines of its cable were deliberately wounding:
We, the Marylebone Cricket Club, deplore your cable. We deprecate your opinion that there has been unsportsmanlike play. We hope the situation is not now as serious as your cable would seem to indicate, but if it is such as to jeopardize the good relations between England and Australian cricketers and you consider it desirable to cancel remainder of programme we would consent, but with great reluctance.”
Once the cables started the matter had gone out of the hands of the players. And it entered a territory where the MCC even with all its complexity clearly had the edge having people with a lifetime or in most cases a generational experience (by virtue of birthright) of running cricket. The Board realized that the opinion of MCC was prejudiced by the fact that it hadn’t seen ‘the actual play’. It could easily shelter behind the irrefutable point that Bodyline did not contravene cricket’s sacred laws; any tattered copy of Wisden proved that too.
“The Australian Board appointed a committee to report on how Bodyline bowling could be scrubbed cleanly out of the game and added, rather sheepishly, that ‘we do not consider it necessary to cancel the remainder of the programme’. For one thing it would have been financial insanity to have done so. As Larwood made clear: ‘Bodyline drew back the crowds’. The Australians did reiterate that Bodyline was ‘opposed to the spirit of cricket’—another euphemistic dig at England’s supposed lack of sportsmanship—and said that it had become unnecessarily dangerous to the players’.
The Board missed a trick. It ought to have withdrawn the allegation of ‘unsportsmanlike’ behaviour, instead of sharpening it. The MCC was again able to politely bite them when it asked: “May we accept …that the good sportsmanship of our team is not in question? The Board had no other option unless it wanted England to go back to concede that Bodyline hadn’t been unsporting at all. ‘We do not regard the sportsmanship of your team to be in question,’ the next cable assured the MCC. The Board had just performed a Tour de France of back-pedalling.
The accusation of unsportsmanlike play—the worst possible insult as it implied cheating—would not have been allowed to stand. To have been boneheaded enough to level it in the first place was one blunder. To repeat it was more than a slur.”
This should have led to an immediate assessment of the people holding the office of the ACB and their credentials. The other party did it immediately as Jardine was anxious before and after the cables began. The local press had carried stories about dissent in the England camp describing it as ‘being at war with itself’. Larwood made clear that ‘grievances …were not nearly as serious as was made out’ and stemmed not from Bodyline but from the frustrations of players who couldn’t get into the Tests. Australia is an awfully long way to go if you don’t get a game.’”
Jardine still was foresighted enough to use the opportunity even though he had to put himself under the sword. He called a meeting at the end of the fifth day of the Adelaide Test in his private room to discuss a two-point agenda. Should Bodyline/leg theory be abandoned? Should Jardine continue as captain? Jardine won the vote of confidence unanimously; ‘a vote for England’ is how Larwood put it. Larwood said ‘that he may have been unpopular with a few of the players but everybody respected and admired him and many of us liked him.’ Asked to define his qualities, Larwood simply said: ‘He was ruthless.’
A month later in Brisbane England regained the Ashes during a heat-wave so intense that Larwood was given half a dozen sips of champagne for lunch as he couldn’t force down a scrap of food. It was Eddie Paynter’s match who was lying in a hospital with 102 degree fever due to tonsillitis and against the advice of the ward nurse he went to the ground to help his team in danger of falling short of Australia’s 340 in the first innings. He arrived at the ground in his pyjamas and changed there and put on a panama hat and went in at number eight.
He was 24 not out in 75 minutes against the new ball at the day’s end. He went back and slept in the hospital and came back in the morning to reach 83. England got 356. Australia was dismissed for 175 and England began the hunt for 160 runs to seal the Ashes. When they lost Hammond for 14, England was 118 for 3 with Maurice Leyland batting with command. He lost his wicket at 138 having made 86. It was Paynter who hit a six to secure the Ashes.
Fingleton learnt years later after reading Plum Warner’s book Cricket Between Two Wars that England had thought it was he who leaked the dressing room conversation. He then spoke to Warner, and Bill O’Reilly wrote that he and Fingleton confronted Warner during Australia’s 1948 tour to England and that he apologised saying he no longer believed that it was Fingleton. Fingleton blamed Bradman for the leak in his 1978 biography of Victor Trumper, and Bradman denied the version.
The Adelaide Test is the heart of the entire Bodyline fiasco and this Test is the ‘crime scene’ around which everything relating to that series revolves. Journalist Claude Corbett had the most extensive accounts of the dressing room story in The Sun and The Daily Telegraph. The leak in itself is a detailed and complex story and in the 1990s it was investigated by Gilbert Mant, a journalist who had covered that tour. Mant died in 1997 but had arranged for a summary of his findings to be sent to David Frith. Bradman, in correspondence with Mant in 1992, continued to blame Fingleton by calling it a “dastardly lie he concocted about me” and hoped that Mant would clear his name.
Frith commenting on his book Bodyline Autopsy said: “It helped to have known many of the cricketers who took part in those matches, and I was glad also to have some input from Gilbert Mant, the last of the journalists who covered the tour. It was he who passed on the most astonishing revelation of all: the name of the player who leaked Bill Woodfull’s forceful protest to the England manager during that stormy Adelaide Test match.”
This is what Rob Steen said about the book: “No detail is left unturned. Even the state matches are brought to life. The source of the dressing-room leak at Adelaide is examined in especially revealing fashion. Bradman, despite decades of denial, emerges as Prince Machiavelli.” The Don’s embittered team mate Fingleton is quoted in the final paragraph: “I think, looking back, the Australians perhaps made too much fuss about it (Bodyline).”
Hamilton adds: “Whether Bradman did so for cricket’s sake, or for the sake of his own skin, is a moot point. Fingleton thought that the case of mistaken identity cost him a place on the 1934 tour to England.” Hamilton is being courteous as it is not the leak in itself that is the crime as it is a legitimate story but doing it with the knowledge that it would incite public opinion and then never coming clean on it is where the significance lies. It also shows the degree of conflict in Bradman’s life that dragged on till the end of his life.
Bradman specifically instructed Lindwall and Miller to bowl short to Len Hutton and Dennis Compton in 1948. Hutton got five bouncers in eight balls and one of them struck him on the shoulders. ‘It isn’t very pleasant, is it?’ Bradman said to Hutton adding, ‘I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like it.’ Compton saw Bradman smiling to himself at cover at Hutton’s discomfort, and he made his point when he walked off with him: ‘I saw you were enjoying yourself just now. I can’t understand why and how you were. I thought you used to say this wasn’t the right way to play cricket.’ Bradman snapped back: ‘You’ve got a bat in your hand, haven’t you? You should be able to get out of the way of them anyway. I used to love it when I played against bouncers. I used to hook them.’
Bradman didn’t have a problem with bouncers but with bouncers bowled at him. Once Keith Miller bowled a few bouncers to Bradman, who lost his wicket in that period, in a Shield game only to find himself dropped from the next tour despite being the best all-rounder in the world at that time.
Bradman’s point that no one could have played that kind of bowling does not mean that it wasn’t legitimate fast bowling and he would have done better by saying what Kippax said, ‘he is too quick for me.’ That’s called giving credit. Did anyone say that no one can make 974 runs in a series and so it is all deceit? We shall examine those runs in a comparison piece as it’s not the point here. The only problem back then used to be sticky wickets where Bradman does not have a single good innings and Jack Hobbs was considered the master of them.
The injuries in Adelaide were the only two significant ones in the series and neither of them were the fault of Larwood. There are many more serious ones in the modern era as Dravid Frith pointed out when he said that West Indies sent 40 batsmen to the hospital in stretchers during their pomp. England won the series in Brisbane where Larwood took out Bradman in both the innings. He took seven wickets in both Adelaide and Brisbane and then five in Sydney.
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