Bodyline Autopsy: The Full Story of the Most Sensational Test Cricket Series - England Vs. Australia 1932-33

508 Pages·2003·8.27 MB·English

by  David Frith

BODYLINE AUTOPSY
Historian, archivist, interviewer and writer, David Frith founded Wisden Cricket
Monthly in 1979 and ran it for seventeen years. He is also a former editor of The
Cricketer. His many books include a bestselling pictorial history of Ashes Tests
(the first 1000-picture cricket book); The Trailblazers, a reconstruction of the
first English tour of Australia (1861-62) and the thrilling 1894-95 series; Silence
of the Heart, his acclaimed study of cricket suicides; The Fast Men, Caught
England, Bowled Australia, and biographies of such disparate cricketers as John
Edrich and Jeff Thomson. He lives in Guildford, Surrey.
‘Triumphant and masterly. As well as research the book is full of outstanding
and rare pictures. No-one could possibly have done either job better. Down the
years Frith has interviewed just about everybody alive who played their part on
that fevered stage, or around it. To be sure, no historian, ever, need bother again
with Bodyline – striking testament to Frith’s exhilarating scholarship.
Relishable, climactic and unputdownable, Bodyline Autopsy is Wisden’s book of
the year’
– Frank Keating, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack ‘Frith’s masterly work may not
be the final word but it will surely never be surpassed… There is plenty of
illuminating new material and a wealth of unfamiliar photographs and drawings.
Frith has a rare ability to make clear sense of his vast quantity of accumulated
information. He has performed a valuable service to future students and
historians of the game’
– Christopher Douglas, Wisden Cricket Monthly

CONTENTS
Preface
1 ORIGINS
2 THE TARGET—THE SNIPERS
3 SOUTHWARD HO
4 THE MAN IN THE HARLEQUIN CAP
5 ACROSS THE WIDE BROWN LAND
6 THE MAGIC OF McCABE
7 DON’S ODD DOUBLE
8 ADELAIDE EARTHQUAKE
9 CABLES AND LABELS
10 SILENT MANOEUVRES
11 FROM A HOSPITAL BED
12 THE FINAL SHOOT-OUT
13 SACKCLOTH AND ASHES
14 CONSEQUENCES
15 THE CORPSE TWITCHES
16 GATHERING OF THE GHOSTS
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright
PREFACE
T
he day has come. With the death of Sir Donald Bradman on February 25, 2001
all the 1932–33 Test cricketers and umpires and newspaper-men, and almost all
of the spectators too, have now departed this life. No more argument. No more
first-person recollections. The chronicle is complete.
Or is it? Indeed, will it ever be?
Even though there have been over 1300 Test matches in the 70 years since
“Bodyline”, it remains the most dramatic Test series of them all. It incorporated
the Wild West shoot-out between the smart young sheriff (Don Bradman from
Bowral, New South Wales) and the narrow-eyed gunslinger (Harold Larwood
from Nuncargate, Nottinghamshire). In London and in the cash-strapped
dominion of Australia it sparked cloak-and-dagger activity in the cloisters of
power—governmental as well as cricketing. With the unrepentant and
emotionally repressed Douglas Jardine bestriding the tumult, tempers rocketed.
Cricket enthusiasts were shaken by what was going on out on the field of play
and off it. Relations between England and Australia were severely damaged.
Although repair work was urgently undertaken in the wake of the Bodyline
tour, there have been sinister echoes whenever England and Australia have
fought over the hallowed little Ashes urn ever since. By its divisive nature, and
because of the vast mass of conflicting views and claims springing from it, no
other Test series even remotely compares with it. Each of the major players was
distinctly either hero or villain. Bodyline polarised two nations, though not quite
in total terms, since there are and were Australians who accepted it and
Englishmen who deplored it.
By 1982 Bodyline seemed to be receding slowly into history. Then all kinds
of 50th anniversary celebrations and commemoratives materialised. Passions
were rekindled. Australian republicans pointed afresh at Albion’s cricketing
perfidy and asked what further proof could possibly be needed that the
constitutional break was both desirable and necessary. English cricket-lovers,
currently bowing before fast bowling, sought comfort in the long-ago triumph
wrought by Harold Larwood and his team-mates under their extraordinary
captain. As for Larwood, now 78 years old and happily settled in the land of his
old adversaries, a new intake of hate mail came his way.
The 1982 revival of interest has been strongly sustained. To the original batch
of contemporary books on Bodyline came important additional volumes,
together with a definitive television documentary by the BBC and an
entertaining Australian drama-documentary which added to the excitement while
being seriously flawed. Since then, the images and texts from the stormy days of
1932–33 have continued to hang over cricket and wider society, sometimes
being utilised to further an argument, or to justify strategy, to condemn, to gloat,
to berate.
My personal stance is as an Anglo-Australian who cares deeply about these
two nations and the bonds between them, and about the cricket relationship in
particular. One of the benefits this hybrid condition affords is that one can stand
back and consider the foibles of both countries with even-handed amusement.
It is, I plead, both understandable and excusable that my feelings about
Bodyline have vacillated over the years. As a London-born boy growing up in
Sydney in the 1950s, I was moved to write a fan letter to Harold Larwood. It
remained unacknowledged, but years later I was extremely happy to get to know
him. Later, the more I read about Bodyline and the harm it did to Anglo-
Australian relations the more reservation I felt about the English campaign.
Caught up in the Bradman legend, like most people, and later in a personal
friendship with him, I saw the broader implications of the desperate attempt to
cut him down to size after 1930. “No—the subject won’t ever die,” he wrote in a
1983 letter to me, “the reason being that publishers and editors (like you)
appreciate the news value of the subject. It creates interesting reading matter and
the only people who suffer (or should I say the main person who suffers) is me,
because I am the focal point. Larwood doesn’t suffer because he adopts a pious,
innocent stance.”
Bodyline bowling was worrying on two levels. Physically, it was aimed at
Australian throats. Figuratively, the “mother country” seemed to be hitting
below the belt. Two estimable umpires were distressed at some of the things they
witnessed from close quarters, but they did not intervene, for the brutal English
bowling was not against the Laws of Cricket as they then stood. But it was
thought by the majority to be against the spirit of the game. Ethics had been
firetorched. (As recently as January 2002, Dave Richardson, the International
Cricket Council’s newly appointed cricket guardian, reaffirmed that “it’s a
man’s game and I’m all for that, but the players also need to decide for
themselves if they want to play it as a gentleman’s game”, a tenet that stretches
back to Regency days.)
I began to dislike D.R. Jardine intensely. The supercilious, aloof, beaky-
nosed, tight-mouthed, ruthless, austere, Aus-hating England captain was, I
decided, the source of a major stain on the game that I cherished. The image of
the haughty “Iron Duke” served my native land poorly in the eyes of my adopted
countrymen. So I joined them in their heated disapproval of Jardine, and saw
him as even more stigmatic after discovering certain chilling remarks attributed
to him.
But over the years I learned of other people’s admiration and affection for the
man, particularly in his later life, long after he had bitterly turned his back on
cricket, his patriotic mission complete. His committee-room collaborators had
turned on him, leaving him isolated but impenitent. His better qualities were now
more freely displayed. John Arlott told me of his warmth and gentle humour at
the dinner table. We were to read of his war service. As a family man in his 40th
year, as his daughter recently pointed out, he need not have gone to war.
Australian batsmen had similar thoughts in 1932–33!
In a newsreel clip after England’s victory in the opening Test of ’32–33,
Douglas Jardine seems gentle and—laugh not, ye Jardine haters—almost
apologetic: “I’m naturally very pleased and proud to have won the first Test
match, and I’m naturally particularly proud of my side. But we shall not suffer
from over-confidence because we won the first round of what I’m sure will be a
magnificent series.” In monochrome close-up the thin lips past which the
clipped, slightly strangulated upper-class vowels were enunciated were
surmounted by eyes that, if not warm, were certainly neither icy nor dismissive.
This was the man who, in a speech made when his team had moved on to New
Zealand, was to quote lyrically a definition of cricket as: “That beautiful,
beautiful game that is battle and service and sport and art.”
As years passed, and the beautiful game underwent more change (and at a
more hectic pace than any previous generation had had to endure), I talked with
players who took part in the Bodyline series, and came to know well eight of the
English team (Sir George “Gubby” Allen, Les Ames, Bill Bowes, Freddie
Brown, Harold Larwood, Eddie Paynter, Herbert Sutcliffe, Bob Wyatt), five of
the Australians (Sir Donald Bradman, Jack Fingleton, Leo O’Brien, Bert
Oldfield, Bill O’Reilly), as well as two of the contemporary journalists (Ray
Robinson and Gilbert Mant) and several others, such as R.S. Whitington, who
played in the State matches, and Bill Brown, who scored 69 and 25 against the
Englishmen for New South Wales but played in no Tests (“A good series to
miss,” he mused in 2002, by which time he had become Australia’s oldest
miss,” he mused in 2002, by which time he had become Australia’s oldest
surviving Test cricketer). Treasured friendships they have been. I also had
passing acquaintance with nine of the other players (Harry Alexander, Len
Darling, Clarrie Grimmett, Alan Kippax, Stan McCabe, Bill Ponsford, Tim Wall,
Tommy Mitchell, Bill Voce), and met both umpires, the courteous George
Borwick, at the 1977 Centenary Test in Melbourne, and George Hele in 1971.
None of them ever forsook the slightest dignity in discussing that red-hot, long-
ago Bodyline Test series, though their convictions, one way or the other,
remained strong.
In the late 1970s there came upon Test cricket a brand of bowling that put
Bodyline into perspective. Compared with what was now being laid before us,
the 1932–33 attack began to seem mild by virtue of its restricted and intermittent
usage. Four West Indies fast bowlers habitually bowled bouncers all day long,
dragging their overs out—usually 10 overs per hour, about half the rate recorded
when Larwood and Voce were in action. None of them ever tired and there was
never a let-up, for the battery was conveniently rotated all day. Over a 15-year
period, around 40 opposing batsmen were taken to hospital casualty wards after
blows to ribs, arms, hands (usually in the process of protecting the face) and
heads. Since 1978, batsmen’s heads have been almost universally sheathed in
helmets; but still there have been injuries. Don Bradman again, on helmets:
“Much as I hate the sight of them and think they rob a batsman of personality, I
would have worn one had they been invented in my day. It is a wonder more
people have not been seriously injured—especially in pre-helmet days—and
especially in 1932–33. Perhaps a tribute to man’s evasiveness.”1
At Caribbean venues these excesses, permitted by timid umpires, went on
unabated year after year, lapped up with delirious joy by the home spectators,
who never tired of the day-long diet of vicious bouncers. The bowling tactics
were occasionally condemned by writers and commentators, who were often
then subjected to sour, muddle-headed and desperate accusations of racism by
“academics” and boring, paranoid windbags whose understanding of the game of
cricket was impoverished.
There was no inconsistency on my part in a flow of magazine editorials. I had
already tut-tutted in print at Dennis Lillee’s tasteless statements in his 1974 book
Back to the Mark, wherein he asserted that he wanted his bouncers to “hit a
batsman in the rib-cage” and “I want it to hurt so much that the batsman doesn’t
want to face me any more.” He generously conceded that he didn’t want to hit a
batsman on the head “because I appreciate what damage that can do”. But the
effect that all this might have on young, aspiring fast bowlers was worrying.
I have no idea whether he wrote to all writers who hammered Lillee’s
remarks, but Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) secretary Jack Bailey dropped me
a line of support. By the beard of Grace! The secretary of the same organisation
that backed Jardine in his nefarious venture to Australia so long ago
commending me for condemning a bloodthirsty fast bowler! And there was more
to come, for the near-unknown Jeff Thomson, who joined Australia’s fast attack
in 1974–75, now put his blood-curdling philosophy down on paper in an
Australian magazine. The ferocious Lillee–Thomson bombardment was
overseen by a captain, Ian Chappell, who happened to be a grandson of one of
Bodyline’s battered, Victor Richardson. The going-over experienced by the
West Indians in Australia in 1975–76 was then trotted out as justification for
their adoption of the four-prong smash attack.
West Indies dominated Test cricket for many years, the splendour of their
batting overshadowed by the brutality on show while they were in the field.
Batsmen certainly hadn’t a full Bodyline field to contend with. The massing of
fielders on the leg side, close in to catch the desperate parries and in the distance
to catch lobbed hooks, has been reduced by legislation. But there were still
enough vultures around the bat—themselves protected by helmets, boxes and
shinpads—to catch the desperate jabs and fend against the relentless day-long
barrage of short balls. It was not as if the West Indian fast bowlers were lacking
in skill and control. Quite the opposite, for Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall,
Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose stand in the
fast bowlers’ all-time Hall of Fame for their speed and inherent know-how.
It was a lamentable fact that throughout an entire innings front-foot
batsmanship was all but impossible against West Indies sides captained by Clive
Lloyd and, later, Vivian Richards. Scarcely a ball was pitched further than three-
fifths of the way down the track. Spin bowling was apparently obsolete. And so
marked had been the change in society’s temperament and attitude since
Bodyline—on the other side of a terrifying global war in the time-line—that
nobody seems to have been inclined to jump over the fence to express personal
outrage at what was on show—apart from one cheesed-off young man who did
leap the Adelaide Oval pickets one afternoon in 1993 and run out to the middle
to express his disapproval and despair at the interminable short stuff sent down
by Ambrose, Bishop, Walsh and Kenny Benjamin. Yet back in 1933 a squadron
of mounted troopers had come within a shout of being summoned to quell a riot
of mounted troopers had come within a shout of being summoned to quell a riot
at the normally tranquil Adelaide Oval after Australia’s wicketkeeper had been
sent reeling after edging a ball from Larwood onto his skull, their captain having
been badly hurt two days previously.
In February 1933, at the height of the furore, the magazine The Australian
Cricketer offered an unwittingly accurate prediction that was so many years later
to fit the West Indian terror squad: had Australia retaliated, perhaps forcing
England to desist from bowling Bodyline, “the argument would have been
postponed until another day, perhaps when a captain would field several really
fast bowlers who would bowl nothing else, and, by sheer frightfulness, win
matches. Then cricket would become a war, and Marylebone would move in the
matter … The only other alternative is the transformation of the game into a
battle of armoured men … This would mean goodbye to cricket as it has been
known to the present generation.” It was almost as if the writer had somehow
foreseen the Black Bodyline which would blot out its opponents’ sun half a
century later.
One of Australia’s punching-bags in the Bodyline series of 1932–33 was Leo
O’Brien, as tough a sportsman as they come, his array of achievements including
a spell as a lightweight boxer who won 29 of his 30 fights. Towards the end of
his long life he expressed an opinion on the West Indian approach: “Fifty overs
against this attack would test the courage and technique of most teams. I don’t
think many would like to play a five-day Test with this attack at your throat
every minute. 12th man the ideal job. Just as well there is a limit on the leg side.
Wacko.”2 (In an earlier letter, contemplating the general rise in aggression, he
said of helmets that “I think you are wise to wear one, as a matter of fact Ned
Kelly’s armour would be ideal.”) When O’Brien, silver hair parted in the middle
in the style of the 1930s, unearthed the bat he used in his two Bodyline Tests—
he went in ahead of Bradman in the first of them—he was dismayed to find that
borers had got into it. He later gave me one of his insubstantial rubber-nippled
batting-gloves from that series. Like so many of his team-mates, his only other
protection apart from pads and box was a sock or hand-towel stuffed into his
leading pocket.
With such fast-bowling riches at their disposal from 1976 to 1991, West
Indies, by their peculiar obsession with the short-pitcher, squandered a golden
chance of becoming not only the premier cricket team in the world but one to be
universally admired and feted by posterity. Even in 1995, Lord Deedes,
journalist/editor, former cabinet minister, and cricket-lover, was moved to write,