Cricket: A Modern Anthology. Jonathan Agnew

Bertie,’ said Larwood in blind terror. Oldfield’s eyes were flat and blank, like dark windows. ‘It’s not your fault, Harold,’ said Oldfield eventually in a low moan. ‘I was trying to hook you for four.’ If only Oldfield’s reply could have been broadcast at the moment; or if only the crowd could have heard his view that ‘criticism of Larwood is unjustified’.

      As Oldfield went down under the force of the blow, the Oval swelled with anger, and that anger rolled down and across the pitch as a visceral, shrieking roar that ‘frightened’ Larwood. The atmosphere turned sulphurous. Crimson faces, with eyes on stalks like cartoon characters, came to the fence and seemed to press against Larwood’s own face – even though he was more than 30 yards away from most of them. He could feel the crowd’s loathing prickling his skin. There was screaming, and he could see fists clenched into tight balls of hate. ‘I felt,’ he said, ‘as if one false move would bring the crowd down on me.’ If one ‘idiot’ lunged over the fence, he was convinced that 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. Contemporary reports talked about the threat of riot and physical violence, and all his life Larwood was convinced that view was valid. On the field, he prayed quietly to himself that it wouldn’t happen. A jug of water and a towel were brought to bathe Oldfield’s bloody, broken head. Woodfull emerged from the picket pavilion gate in a dark suit – his face grim, his stride long, purposeful and bristling, his legs and arms working furiously to get him to his stricken colleague. There’s no question that Woodfull’s sole concern was the welfare of his wicket keeper. He was a loyal, principled man, and he would have seen it as his duty as captain to be alongside the wounded Oldfield. But the sight of him in such sensitive circumstances – solid and slightly aggressive, like a marching soldier heading for the front line – was inflammatory. Here was Woodfull, who everyone now knew abhorred Bodyline and was sickened by it, emerging as the gallant focus of the opposition to the tourists’ tactics; white knight to Jardine’s black.

      Larwood lay on his side near his bowling mark, tossing the ball up in the air with his right hand, as if casually flicking a coin on a street corner. Waiting for his panicky heart to slow, he began picking at dry stalks of grass and tried to give the impression that the noise – so extreme he could barely think – and the stream of insults didn’t worry him. But his stomach was churning, and there was a rough, dry taste in his mouth as he watched Woodfull slowly guide Oldfield off the field.

      Larwood got to his feet gradually, as if any sudden movement might provoke the crowd, and the England fieldsmen returned to the same positions for the new batsman, Bill O’Reilly. ‘I reckon it took me ten minutes to get in and to shape to the first ball,’ remembered O’Reilly. ‘I wouldn’t have minded if it had taken me twenty minutes.’

      Jardine displayed what Larwood called ‘cold courage’. He looked unflappable, as if just waiting for a lightning storm to pass. ‘I don’t know what was going through his mind,’ said Larwood, ‘but he seemed so calm.’ Jardine gestured with a nod of his head to check whether Larwood was composed enough to bowl. As he began his run, the crowd started to count him out in a ghastly shout of ‘one, two, three’ which ended after ten with the cry ‘out, you bastard!’ Their words couldn’t hurt him. England bowled out the shaken Australians for 222.

      On the field, Larwood was so commanding that he created an illusion. His wide shoulders and stocky build gave the impression of height. Off the field, he could wander into an Australian bar in his suit and tie rather than his whites and no one recognized him. ‘I’d go in for a quiet drink and hear them say all sorts of things about me. People who’d just seen me play had no idea that I was standing next to them eavesdropping on their conversation. Most Australians thought I was six foot six.’ It explains why at the end of that day’s play the flustered policeman who came into the dressing room to escort him out of the ground had to ask: ‘Which one is Larwood?’ Bill Voce pointed out his friend. ‘What have I done wrong?’ asked Larwood innocently.

      Larwood had been called a ‘bastard’ so many times that the word had lost its meaning to him. He came out into the jostling knot of swearing, spitting men in suits, who looked ready to string him from a gibbet. The policeman stood close to his shoulder; Voce followed behind to ward off anyone who might lurch at Larwood from behind. ‘Bastard … bastard … bastard’ was all he could hear. Larwood went back to the hotel and stayed in his room.

      As the crow flies, just three miles separate the terraced house where Larwood was born and grew up from Lord Byron’s ancestral home, Newstead Abbey. Setting aside the geography of Nottinghamshire, the poet and the fast bowler have nothing else in common – except for this: Byron awoke one morning to find that his poetry had made him famous. Larwood awoke, the day after striking Oldfield, to find that his bowling had made him infamous. He sat in the lobby and hid behind his newspaper.

      Soon the cables began. The Australian Board of Control was thoughtlessly knee-jerk in its approach and intemperate in its language. It didn’t possess sufficient guile to frame an appropriate and subtle policy against Bodyline. It also lacked the cleverness to condemn Jardine strongly without insulting the MCC and the farsightedness to draft a diplomatic plan that might have curtailed the tactics. Rather than resolve the problem, its accusations made it worse. Its first cable to the MCC – sent on 18 January, the penultimate day of the Adelaide Test – 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:

      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.

      The Board of Control made another crass mistake in releasing the telegram as a curt statement to the newspapers at the same time as dispatching it in a huff to Lord’s. It appeared in the Stop Press columns in London before arriving at Lord’s. The subsequent headlines raised the stakes still higher, and pricked the egos of the MCC committee. In its rush simultaneously to reclaim its dignity, communicate its anger and lash out, the Board of Control failed to grasp two fundamentally important things: from half a world away, the MCC’s view of Bodyline was based on accounts in English newspapers, which had been generally positive. If Bodyline was used today, the Test would be live on satellite television. The wickets and major incidents would be seen on an endless loop on news programmes, and played and re-played in slow motion in front of pundits – grizzled ex-pros gathered around a microphone pontificating about it. The newspapers would provide sophisticated graphics of field-placings. The TV cameras would be waiting outside the hospital where Oldfield was taken and the hotel where England were staying. The average-man-in-the-street – in England and Australia – would be canvassed for his views. And Larwood would be pursued for an interview even before leaving the field. He and Bodyline would be in the swirl of ‘instant news’.

      In 1932–33, newsreel footage could take up to six weeks to arrive from Australia. Bodyline for the MCC was read about rather than viewed. Also, the phrases in the Board’s cable, such as ‘menace the best interests of the game’ – and certainly the use of the word ‘unsportsmanlike’ – were provocative. At that stage, the MCC saw its duty as supporting its captain and manager. It wasn’t fully aware of the sensitivities Bodyline had pricked, the growing resentment among the Australian public, or the passion that had spurred the Board to write the cable in the first place. The MCC slapped the Australians straight across both cheeks. The opening two lines of its cable, which followed after five days of thinking carefully about what to say, were deliberately wounding:

      We, the Marylebone Cricket Club, deplore your cable. We deprecate your opinion that there has been unsportsmanlike play.

      The last, very long, line was an exercise in gauntlet-throwing:

      We hope the situation is not now as serious as your cable would seem