At the Grill Room of the Piccadilly Hotel in London, four men who didn’t want to be overheard were conversing as waiters served food and refilled glasses: Douglas Jardine, Arthur Carr, Bill Voce, and Harold Larwood. Jardine told Larwood and Voce to prepare body, mind, and heart for the Australian tour. He spoke of Bradman’s weakness on leg stump which Larwood remembering the Oval Test two years ago agreed. Jardine asked two questions of Larwood: ‘Can you keep a good length? Can you keep on Bradman’s leg stump?’
Larwood could reckon from the start that Jardine was determined to do more than take the shine off Bradman. He was going to worm his way into his head and heart. They appreciated between them that if you strike at a king, you have to kill him. In cricket terms Bradman had to be ‘demolished’. They knew that Bradman could murder an attack and anything loose would go to the fence. Larwood told Jardine that accuracy would be the key. Bodyline, he freely admitted, ‘was a gamble’.
There was apprehension in Australia even before the series started on the skewed selection of fast bowlers in the English side. ‘The evidence of Jardine’s reliance on speed was completely visible, scattered like clues at a crime scene’, well before the journey started.
To acclimatize there were six first-class tour games of four days each starting October 21, 1932 in Perth and going on till the end of November before the first Test on December 2, 1932 in Sydney. Donald Bradman played in the second first-class game between Australian XI and the MCC in Perth. England batted first and got 583 and dismissed the Australian XI for 159 and having followed on reduced them to 139 for four before the match ended. Bradman made 3 runs in the first and 10 runs in the second innings. Larwood didn’t play in this game.
In all Bradman played six innings in three tour games and made a total of 103 runs at an average of 17.16 with 36 as his highest score. The early proof of the English tactics arrived in mid-November against an Australian XI at Melbourne. Larwood claimed Bradman in both the innings with an lbw and a bowled. Bradman made a complaint to the Australian Board regarding the tactics used in the match. A telling sign of his nervousness even before the Tests started. Jardine was not playing this match and his deputy Bob Wyatt led the team. The success of the plan ensured that it would be used in the Test matches.
The Test Matches
The first Test began in Sydney in December and Bradman missed it after being medically ruled out the previous afternoon; he was described as ‘seriously run down’. Jardine always maintained that he had an attack of nerves due to high expectations, a dispute with the Cricket Board over his work as a journalist, and, of course, the prospect of facing Larwood. Bradman had accepted a contract to write for Sydney’s The Sun and the Board only allowed those players to write who had journalism as their full-time profession. The Board did not agree and old reports hint that Bradman became adamant to the point of withdrawing his name from the team. The paper ultimately released him from the contract.
In Sydney, Australia would have been undone inside three days had it not been for a brilliant 187 from Stan McCabe. Coming in the first Test of the series and being one of the great examples of hooking and pulling and sheer bloody bravery ever seen, the Australians should have got heart from it. He came in at 82 for three and struck 25 fours in his unbeaten innings where he got the runs at a strike-rate of 80.25.
The innings was so terrific that Larwood called it the ‘best I’ve ever seen’. Voce was equally effusive in praise: “I gave him everything I’d got in that Test and he hit me around the ground as if I was bowling a tennis ball at him. Why couldn’t Bradman have batted like that?” Voce added, “McCabe spared no one. It was the finest innings I ever saw.” England won the Test comfortably needing just one run in the second innings. Larwood took five wickets in each innings and in the second essay he used full-blown leg theory (Bodyline) field to get five for just 28 in 18 overs.
Bradman made a return to the side in Melbourne and it was his and Australia’s Test. Australia batted first and at 67 for two Bradman walked in after debutant O’Brien was run out. Bill Bowes had the ball and the noise that accompanied Bradman to the crease was deafening. Bowes took a few steps before pulling up as he couldn’t hear himself think. To waste a few seconds he readjusted the field and switched Leyland to silly mid-on. The noise disturbed him again and he made more adjustments to the field; there was a wave to Pataudi to move onto the boundary rope. Bowes saw Bradman looking at the field cautiously like a man inspecting ‘both sides before crossing a road’. It struck him, and he thought to himself: ‘He expects a bouncer. Can I fool him?’
Bradman was moving across the wicket to take care of the short ball and what came instead was a rank long hop that half slipped out of Bowes’ hand. “It deserved to be clouted to the fence,” said Larwood. Bradman was already committed to the shot and he got a faint bottom edge and heard the death rattle behind him. It was his first golden duck. Bowes put his hands on his hips, turned to the umpire and said in his Yorkshire accent: ‘Well, I’ll be fucked.’
Larwood had a bad Test as the sole of his boots gave up and he tried Duckworth’s and then a new pair of his own. His boots were high and he strapped them to his feet through 20 lace-holes. The crowd got edgy with his absence, perhaps believing that he was resting or soaking in a bath, and tore into him. When he tried to explain the trouble with his boots, the hooting became worse. He refused to go off again fearing physical assault. The new pair wasn’t broken in and it lifted the skin of his toes. He was not even in decent shape to walk let alone bowl.
The Australians got 228 largely due Fingleton’s 83 which Larwood called ‘a brave knock’. England made a pathetic 169 and then Bradman made them pay for the first-innings duck with an unbeaten 103 in the second-innings total of just 191. The wicket was slow and Larwood despite four wickets in the match was hardly effective and the Bodyline storm stopped for the time as the crowd was happy that Bradman was back and had countered the English tactics resulting in an Australian win. The series was poised at 1-1 and it was the only period in the over five-month long tour when there was no tour game in between Tests. Between the first and the second there were two, then three between the third and the fourth, one between the final two, and incredibly two after it as well. Some days they must have been.
The Adelaide Oval
Douglas Jardine was an unusual character and he would be uncooperative towards the press, whom he ‘regarded as rapacious and reptilian’. He would refuse to name his team in advance and was dismissive: ‘We’re here to win the Ashes—not provide stories to the newspapers.” The crowd was furious with Jardine as he had ordered the net sessions before the Test to be closed to the public. He had a previous experience where several thousand Australians watched Larwood bowl and he and his bowler had been heckled viciously. Jardine wasn’t worried about more bad publicity; criticism bounced off him like water off a duck’s back. But he realized the strain his bowler Larwood was under as condemnation of his bowling was the all-consuming topic everywhere. Larwood also realised he’d let his captain down in Melbourne and if he did it again at Adelaide, he worried about his place.
The Adelaide Oval, one of the most beautiful grounds in the world, became the ‘crucible for ugly passions’ starting January 13, 1933. “Larwood saw Adelaide as the most critical few days of the series. If England lost, he reckoned morale would fall and momentum might swing irrevocably towards the Australians. If England won, there was no doubt in his mind that the advantage it gave them would be forced home in the final two Tests—and the Ashes won. The pitch had been cut and prepared for speed. It was almost as if the strip was bespoke for him.”
The daily reports of The Cricketer (Was published between 1921 and 2003 and then merged with Wisden Cricket Monthly and later re-launched as The Wisden Cricketer) chronicling the action are a very good place to search for the sequence and the severity of events as they happened on a particular day. This is mainly because they were written without the writer knowing what would happen next; in other words when the information available was not corrupted by the subsequent outcomes.
England won the toss and at 30 for four they were a step away from a collapse but recovered to make a decent 341: Leyland 83, Wyatt 78 and Eddie Paynter 77. Verity, at number 9, added 45.
“And then came Larwood….
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