Spirited Away

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Seventy years ago the most controversial tour of them all may have brought home the Ashes, but it also led to the loss of cricket's innocence.

St Pancras Station on Saturday September l7, 1932 was thronged with cricket enthusiasts bidding farewell to the MCC team under the captaincy of D.R. Jardine as it boarded the boat-train to Tilbury. At little stations along the line people gathered to catch a glimpse of the travellers. Another large crowd was at the docks to wish bon voyage as the Orient liner, S.S. Orontes, embarked for Australia.

A few would have read, and many would have subscribed to, the words written in The Times by Lord Harris, not long before he died that same year: "Cricket is more free from anything dishonourable than any game in the world... protect it from anything that would sully it." It was "The Spirit of Cricket", a phrase revived by MCC in the Preamble to the new code of Laws.

It is difficult, at a distance of 70 years, to conjure up an image of the excitement which such an expedition (no less) engendered both in the English public and in the Australian hosts who fêted the tourists on their arrival at Fremantle on Tuesday, October 18. Yet those same tourists would leave Australia's shores seven months later with scarcely a tear shed at their departure or a hand waved in salute.

Photo © The Cricketer International

With the death of Sir Donald Bradman, in 200l, there died the last surviving player to take part in the Test match at Adelaide whose events created a crisis of such magnitude. With the death of E.W. Swanton a year earlier, there died, paradoxically, the last surviving journalist whose presence in Australia might - just might - have avoided it.

The tale has been told (not least by Swanton himself) of how his failure to get in his "copy" on the record partnership of Sutcliffe and Holmes at Leyton in June 1932 led to his editor deciding to send Bruce Harris to Australia instead. Harris was basically a tennis expert and Swanton believed he himself would have quickly identified the gathering storm and not been afraid to speak his mind (that much older generations can certainly appreciate!).

For too long, headquarters at Lord's minimised the impact that Bodyline (the Australian Press formulated the word) was having on relations between the two teams. There were, in due course, those exchanges of cables between the Australian Board of Control and MCC which, in the end, allowed the tour to continue and reach its conclusion. What did not happen was any use of the telephone - even in those days possible, if stilted - for which some of the blame must attach to the England manager, Plum Warner.

Warner wore too many hats for his own good. As chairman of selectors he had had a major share in choosing the captain and his team, as a journalist he had criticised dangerous leg-theory bowling as displayed by Bill Bowes for Yorkshire against Surrey as late as August 1932, and as manager of the tour itself he preserved an outward loyalty to Jardine.

On the other hand, he must take some of the credit for the public show of solidarity to Jardine which the players themselves displayed. But Warner was privately unable to establish any rapport with the captain (managers in those days had far less authority and influence). Furthermore, as events escalated from a mere cricket controversy to issues with political and economic dimensions, he was left far behind.

Photo © The Cricketer International

Lyons' frantic cable to the Australian Board of Control, "Government afraid success of Conversions endangered", brought home to the cricket world the wider implications of the forces that had been unleashed. The British public, whose cricketers were being called unsportsmanlike, were unlikely to want to invest in Australia.

Warner fielded as best he could the onslaughts of the Australian Press, especially when challenged not only over his own remarks made, about Bowes, in the previous summer but also over what he had written on leg-side bowling in the 1920 edition of the Badminton Library volume on cricket: "Such tactics are unsportsmanlike, and quite contrary to the spirit of the game. We would scorn such a manoeuvre and would rather suffer a hundred defeats than put it into practice." These were brave words from the past but, in his public support of Jardine and in his ambitions for England to regain the Ashes, they had little substance.

Some 50 years later, I was given access to Warner's letters home to his wife. They betray a personal anguish and a bitterness towards Jardine which one sentence typifies: "DRJ has almost made me hate cricket. He is most ungracious and rude." After the death of Gubby Allen in 1989, his 24 letters, sent home to his father during the tour, were put up for auction and bought by the state library of New South Wales. They are far less emotional than Warner's but portray a similar note of savage criticism of Jardine: "He is loathed and, between you and me, rightly more than any German who fought in any war."

Sir George Allen contributed two pages to Swanton's biography of him in 1985. In it, he declared that Bodyline had evolved rather than being the consequence of "any preconceived plot" during the voyage on board the Orontes. Yet, in a sense, whatever the pre-history of Bodyline may be, it makes little difference to the end result.

Those crowds who had wished England well at St Pancras and Tilbury were rewarded with the Ashes but at a terrible price. The players who left the Australian shores did so with faint praise, although those of them who landed at Glasgow were greeted by a pipe band and 10,000 cheering Scots. Cricket, on that tour, lost its innocence and the words of Lord Harris became bitter-sweet.

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