From the archives: the Bodyline series

Once Douglas Jardine had made up his mind that the surest, perhaps even the only way of regaining the Ashes in 1932-33 was to bowl bumpers at the Australia batsmen’s bodies, nothing could have deflected him, other than some misadventure to Don Bradman, the catalyst and the primary target.

Whether by nature or design, Jardine affected an air of disdain - not always, but often enough to be characteristic. While still at Horris Hill, his preparatory school in Berk-shire, he was said to have corrected his cricket coach on a point of technique and supported his view by a reference to C. B. Fry’s book on batsmanship.

When I started writing about cricket, Jardine was in the press box, a much more staid place than it is today, and his manner was more one of self-consciousness than superiority. In 1953, an Ashes year, when Bradman, Jack Fingleton, Bill O’Reilly and Bill Bowes, who had all fought in the bodyline campaign, were also there, their joint presence kindled no tension. Regarding Jardine, O’Reilly even surprised himself by “rather liking the man”.

Jardine’s vice-captain in Australia was Bob Wyatt, a shrewd, dedicated and respected cricketer. Like most others, he must, I am sure, have been instinctively opposed to bodyline and deplored the unpleasantness it created; but he went along with it out of loyalty to his captain.

There would, anyway, have been no gainsaying Jardine. Wyatt represented the customs and convictions of the average English first-class cricketer a good deal more closely than the other amateurs in the MCC party – Gubby Allen, the Nawab of Pataudi and Freddie Brown, the last two of whom were not long down from Oxford and Cambridge respectively. The only one of these remotely on level terms in age and experience with Jardine was Allen. The two had first played against each other in 1914 when Allen was 12 and Jardine 13: as captain of Horris Hill, Jardine put Summer Fields, Allen’s Oxford preparatory school, in to bat, but the match was drawn.

Jardine went to Winchester and Oxford, Allen to Eton and Cambridge; Jardine captained Surrey, Allen played less regularly for Middlesex. Although much more than mere acquaintances, they were never close friends. A natural, very fine, upstanding batsman, Jardine, who was said to play like a man when he was still a boy, had this strongly independent, unquestionably austere streak. Allen, in spite of having been born in Australia and lived there until he was 6½, took readily to English traditions.

He became an outstanding, fast-bowling all-rounder and, eventually, captain of England and a pillar of the Establishment.

Allen must have got wind of Jardine’s intentions when Bowes was added to the touring party a week before they sailed as a reaction to his taking seven for 65 for Yorkshire against the Rest of England at the Oval with some hostile, short-pitched bowling to a leg-side field.

Not long before, when Nottingham-shire were playing Surrey, also at the Oval, Jardine had taken Harold Larwood and Bill Voce out to dinner to acquaint them with his thinking. Both had tickled enough ribs with their lifters during the summer of 1932 to encourage Jardine to reason that Bradman might not care for them either. Early on the voyage out, Jardine told Allen of his thinking and met a disapproving response. Allen said simply that he did not want to be a part of it.

It is no trouble to picture the scene on the SS Orontes. Among teams sailing to Australia only the pretty girls on board, most of them going home, or the daily sweepstake on the ship’s run, were likely to take the talk away from cricket. “So Mister Allen’s not of a mind with the skipper, then”; Gubby’s dissent would soon have done the rounds and for the next six months he remained a passive critic of England’s main line of attack.

Many years on, Wyatt would say that Allen had lacked the accuracy for bodyline, but that did not stop Jardine asking him to bowl it before the second Test and being rebuffed again. In his letters home, Allen regularly referred to his disaffection. He had to field in the leg trap, though, sometimes as one of no fewer than six short legs for Larwood and Voce. When bowling himself, Allen kept strictly to his normal off-side field and had an unexpectedly good series.

But if certain things were difficult for Allen, they must have been worse for “Plum” Warner, the senior of the two managers and one of the most noted figures in the history of the English game. Writing in the Morning Post about that match between Yorkshire and the Rest he had been very critical of Bowes’s bowling, yet in Australia he felt obliged to hold his tongue, a further indication of Jardine’s unchallengeable sway. “One of the strongest arguments against this sort of bowling,” Warner wrote afterwards, “is that it breeds anger, hatred and malice.” He referred to the tour as “a sea of worry” on which he seems to have tossed unprotestingly.

Fifty-six years after the bodyline tour, at a Test match between Australia and West Indies in Mel-bourne, I sat with Leo O’Brien, who had played twice for Australia against Jardine’s side, making 61 in the first innings of the last Test match. As we watched Holding, Marshall, Garner and Patterson sending down a barrage of bouncers to Australia’s batsmen, he said: “This is worse than bodyline, you know – much more relentless.”

What made bodyline the sensation it was, was its total unexpectedness; it was an extreme deviation from anything that had gone before. Because its motive was only once removed, if that, from intimidation it was widely seen as unethical, but there was no law against it. Today, I believe Larwood and Voce, bowling exactly as they did and to the same fields, would be comparatively unsuccessful.

The modern batsman’s greater familiarity with aggressive bowling, shorter boundaries, thumping great bats, helmets and body armour might not produce innings such as Stan Mc-Cabe’s in Sydney, but, dare I say it, I’d back Ponting, Hayden and Gilchrist to be less disconcerted than Bradman, Woodfull and Ponsford were, and not just because two of them are left-handers. There’s blasphemy for you.

No average chap

— Douglas Jardine’s meticulous planning may have found a way to reduce Don Bradman’s average for the Ashes series to a more mortal 56.57 but his own usually fine batting went off the boil.

— Like Mike Brearley many years later, Jardine’s excellent captaincy was offset by being almost a liability with the bat during the Bodyline series. He averaged 22 and scored only one Test fifty.

— On England’s previous tour to Australia in 1928-29, Jardine had made three fifties in five Tests, averaging almost 43 as England won the Ashes 4-1. Yet his highest score was 98 and his big weakness as a batsman was a failure to convert good starts.

— Over his Test career, Jardine had an excellent average of 48, but made just one hundred, against West Indies in the summer of 1933.

— The root of Jardine’s enmity towards Australians may be found in a match when he captained Oxford against the touring side in 1921. Warwick Armstrong, the Australia captain, delayed play so often that Jardine was left not out on 96 at the end of the match. Armstrong refused a request to allow one more over to give the student the chance of a rare feat.

Words by Patrick Kidd