From the archives: the Bodyline series

For a generation of British and Australians, the word “Bodyline” signified one of the most important events of an era, something that everyone knew about, like the Wall Street Crash, Prohibition, the sinking of the Titanic or the abdication of Edward VIII. As a dispute arising from tactics on a field of sporting play, the fallout from England’s tour of Australia under the leadership of Douglas Jardine in 1932-33 was unique.

Sporting issues have been discussed in Cabinet sessions at Whitehall or Canberra since, but only because of an event of serious significance to the national economy in either country, such as staging an Olympic Games or, in Britain’s case, because of something momentous involving football crowds. Between two world wars, in which Australians fought side by side with the Britain from which most of them hailed, there was no bigger sporting contest than the Ashes. For some who played and many who followed, there were issues at stake that ran deeper than the games themselves.

When the Australian Board of Control issued the famous telegram to MCC during the bitter third Test of the series in Adelaide in January 1933, the assertion that friendly relations between England and Australia were threatened unless bodyline bowling was stopped was no more than a statement of the truth. There have been many echoes since, not least the statement made by the Australian Rugby Union chief executive during the recent World Cup that when the Aussies take on the Poms, their chief motivation is hate.

It is hardly conceivable that the Britain of today still arouses such hostility in the breasts of the citizens of the now much more cosmopolitan mix that is contemporary Australian society, but old rivalries are the strongest. It certainly remains true that winning the Ashes means more to cricketers of both England and Australia than anything else.

Because of the close media coverage that has followed these games since the days of Grace and Spofforth, controversy has never been slow to surface. To an extent, this series was no more than the most famous instance of emotional outpouring caused by Anglo-Australian matches: for example, the riot in Sydney in 1878-79 over an unpopular decision involving England’s travelling umpire; the uproar after the running out of Clem Hill on the same ground in 1903-04; the molesting of John Snow by a spectator in 1970-71 and the subsequent walk-off by Ray Illingworth and his England team; or the occasionally angry reactions of English crowds to the short-pitched fast bowling of Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald in 1920-21 and Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller in 1948.

Short-pitched fast bowling was certainly not born in 1932; nor was “leg-theory”, a familiar tactic that was developed by the coldly pragmatic Jardine during the series as a means of attack rather than the defence for which, for example, Warwick Armstrong used it several times in England in 1905, bowling outside the batsman’s legs to a heavily packed leg-side field.

As an attacking measure against the top Australia batsmen – but not tailenders – it was carried out with ruthless precision and unswerving conviction by the fastest bowler in the world, the short, wiry, supple former Nottinghamshire miner, Harold Larwood. His powerfully built county partner, the left-arm, round-the-wicket Bill Voce, was already accustomed to bowling short and swinging the ball into the chest for deflections towards a waiting leg trap.

The objective now was simple: to win by ending the domination of Don Bradman. The term “bodyline” was graphic, but its origins were best summed up by another former Test player turned pundit, Joe Darling, who called it simply “Bradman Theory”. Bradman’s genius, confidence, nimbleness, profound power of concentration and insatiable appetite for runs had, by 1932, made him larger than the game, as no cricketer had been since W. G. Grace.

In England in 1930, he had amassed 974 runs in five Tests at an average of 139. Already he had scored 452 not out for New South Wales against Queensland and in 1931-32 he made a further 806 runs in the five Test innings he played against South Africa, at an average of 201, with a century in each of the four Tests in which he batted. Bradman was to Australia then as Muttiah Muralitharan is to Sri Lanka now.

Even machines can fail, however, and every human has a flaw. Jardine was not alone in noting an occasional fall from grace against fast bowling when pitched short. The specific example that spawned the Jardine strategy occurred when, clearly discomforted, Bradman stepped away to leg, having been obliged to bat on a rain-dampened surface at the Oval against Larwood in the 1930 Test, albeit in the course of a match-winning double-century stand with the bruised but unflinching Archie Jackson.

Jardine, who had toured Australia already in 1928-29 and knew their pitches – not to mention the danger involved in facing bouncers in county cricket from Larwood and Voce, both of Nottinghamshire, and McDonald, of Lancashire – asked Larwood, Voce and their equally uncompromising captain, Arthur Carr, to dine with him at the Piccadilly Hotel during the Surrey v Nottinghamshire match of August 1932.

There it was that the plan for the Ashes was hatched, although there were sufficient examples of trial runs by the pair in county cricket that season, and in the early matches of the tour, for Australians to know what lay in store.

It worked. Bradman averaged only 56 and England won the series 4-1, but the bitterness took years to dispel and eventually an alteration to the leg-before law to encourage bowling at the off stump was followed by restrictions to the number of fielders behind the wicket on the leg side.

England might have won the Ashes back anyway with batsmen as good as Wally Hammond, Herbert Sutcliffe, Bob Wyatt and Maurice Leyland, and bowling support of high quality for Larwood and Voce from Hedley Verity and Gubby Allen. To his eternal credit, Allen refused to bowl short but still took 21 wickets in the series at 28.

That to an extent Australia got a taste of their own medicine – Bert Oldfield’s fractured skull at Adelaide echoed successive blows around the heart inflicted upon the England wicketkeeper, Herbert Strudwick, at the hand of Gregory in 1920-21 and Ernest Tyldesley had had his jaw and wicket broken by Gregory at Trent Bridge the next summer – is not in doubt. Nor is the fact that bowling at the bodies of relatively unprotected batsmen was utterly against the spirit of the game.