Published: Sep 28, 2014, 06:38 AM (IST)
Edited: May 28, 2015, 03:37 PM (IST)
Bill Woodfull was struck on the heart, Bert Oldfield on the head. Douglas Jardine’s tactics nearly brought the diplomatic relations of two countries on the edge. Arunabha Sengupta recounts the experiences of pressman Gilbert Mant during the acrimonious Adelaide Test of 1932-33 and how a volley of abuse actually made him and the press feel better.
A cuckoo in the Bodyline nest
Adelaide, January 1933
The third Test began ominously on Friday the 13th and ended as one of the most acrimonious of all time. What started as a sporting contest became an international issue, threatening the diplomatic ties between two countries.
And in the midst of all this Gilbert Mant felt like ‘A Cuckoo in the Bodyline Nest’. In fact the phrase became the name of his account on the series, published 60 years after the incident.
Unprecedented scenes were witnessed on the cricket ground and in the peripheral world. Attacks were made on the heart, the head and then the very psyche. There were clashes, on the field and off it, sparks flew as did cables. Rumours were abound and the press went on an overdrive. The heated emotions throbbed across the southern land, many bitter words were exchanged.
And in the midst of all this Mant was the unfortunate recipient of the foulest of fusillades.
Yet, in retrospect, the furious words did strike some funny bones. The incident came across as a silver lining around the tale of the blackest of Test matches.
Mant was in an unenviable position. He was an Australian who lived in London, and had travelled with the England team as the correspondent for Reuters. Douglas Jardine did not trust him. The England captain treated him with the same suspicion with which he eyed every Australian. Some members of the England side warmed to him while the captain and other significant members remained aloof.
Meanwhile, as he sat in the press-box, tensions flared.
The heart is struck
On Saturday, Harold Larwood steamed in from the Torrens end, with a huge crowd of 50,792 watching from the stands. The flaming red cannonball bounced awkwardly and struck Australian captain Bill Woodfull just above the heart.
Woodfull clutched his chest and writhed in pain. If the pericardium had been full of blood at the peak of a heartbeat, he might have been killed. The crowd hissed and swore.
Gwen Woodfull, the wife of the Australian captain, claimed that the death of her husband, in 1965 at the age of 67, had been hastened by the chest blows that he absorbed in 1932-33.
The events that followed did not help curb the public outrage.
Jardine motioned his men to move to the leg-trap. One by one they went across the field to join Gubby Allen at short-leg. Jardine himself, Hedley Verity, Herbert Sutcliffe — while Wally Hammond took up his position at long leg. Only Bill Voce stood alone at deep point. It looked like the conspiracy to kill set in motion.
Canon Hughes, the Victoria Cricket Association President, was shocked enough to remark: “Cancel the remaining Tests. Let England take the Ashes for what they are worth.” Larwood proceeded to knock the bat out of Woodfull’s hand.
Mant’s scoop
Later in the day, Bill Ponsford was hit again and again on his body, on his torso padded with makeshift rubber and foam protective gear. And meanwhile Woodfull lay on the massage table as England managers Plum Warner and Dick Palairet approached him to ask after his injury.
The words that were exchanged have been retold in multiple versions depending on the raconteur of choice. In gist, Woodfull told Warner that there were two teams out there, one trying to play cricket and the other not.
The message was shocking to the traditionalist Warner, the bearer of the flag of English fair play. Worse, the words were soon leaked to the press, creating immense bitterness, some of which lasted till the dying day of some of the protagonists.
During the Sunday, as the players rested, drama unfolded off the field. A cable, hastily and sketchily worded, flew towards Lord’s. The South Australia Cricket Association Secretary Bill Jeanes invited Mant and other members of the press to his office and read out the message.
It was sensational. The English had been charged with ‘unsportsmanlike’ behaviour. Mant rushed out and cabled messages at urgent-rate to the Reuter office in London. It read:
ACB OFFICIALLY PROTESTED MARYLEBONE ANTI-BODYLINE TEXT FOLLOWS MANTREUT
The text of the message to MCC followed in the next cable.
All hell broke loose. Alerted by the Reuters missive, journalists woke up MCC President Viscount Lewisham asking about the communication received from ACB. The Viscount had no idea. Not only was the ACB cable lame, they had sent it at reduced rate, to be delivered at 9 AM the following day — MCC finally received it someten hours after the Reuter cable had reached.
By then Mant had been sent a congratulatory cable from Reuter for beating the other news agencies and the original message itself.
The head is attacked
When play started again on Monday, the attendance was over 32,000. After lunch, Larwood charged in with the second new ball. The Australian wicketkeeper Bert Oldfield lost the short ball against the low sight screen. He changed his shot from a cut to a pull and swiped at it. The ball, deflected off the edge of his bat, struck his temple.
The sound of ball hitting flesh and bone was loud enough to be heard with distinct clarity on the radio. Had the impact been an inch either way, it would have been death for the plucky wicketkeeper. Woodfull, clad in suit, rushed out to escort his injured man back to the pavilion.
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The crowd hooted, jeered. “Go home, you Pommie bastards!” rang out from various sections. The policemen around the ground grew tense. There was every indication that some of the crowd would jump the pickets and attack the English players. And if it happened and the mob followed, there was hardly anything the few members of the force could do to stop them.
The South Australian Cricket Association office called the Angas Street police headquarters for reinforcement. A horde of cops arrived on motor-cycles.The English players eyed the stumps as possible weapons of self-defence.
Rumours fly
ACB and MCC had by now become engaged in a furious cable war.Not only did the cricketing relation between the two nations totter on the brink of a precarious chasm, political and diplomatic tensions were increased to the verge of breaking point.
Anglo-Australian relations could not afford such stress in those days of severe economic depression. The Bodyline issue threatened the renewal of a rather large and controversial loan to Australia. Some of the MCC and ACB officials had to negotiate with several of the cabinet ministers and other dignitaries as the cable war continued.
And all this while Adelaide became awash with journalists.Predictably sensationalism was rife. Rumours were printed, wrapped around news items without detectable seams to peel the speculation from truth.
One report spoke of Maurice Tate throwing a glass of beer over Jardine, an incident that took place only in the imagination of the journalist dabbling in yellow print.
There were other outrageous stories. Someone floated a rumour that Jardine had committed suicide over the Glenelg Pier. Another stated Bradman had signed to play with Fiji the following summer.
The Americans got interested as well, drawing parallels of the bouncers directed at the bodywith the ‘bean ball’ of baseball. The Australian gutter press cried ‘Killers’ while their English equivalent responded with ‘Squealers’. In Adelaide tempers were frayed, even scuffles and fisticuffs were reported when Englishmen were detected in gatherings.
Mant recalls that he had travelled with terms to send in a total of 25,000 words for the tour. The limit was way exceeded by the time the fourth day’s play started at Adelaide. There was no choice. Larwood’s sore foot was splashed in the headlines well above the story about thousands of Chinese deaths due to Yellow River floods.
The fury of Hammond
Amidst all this acrimony, the fourth afternoon witnessed a majestic Hammond innings. With the stadium converted into an angry cauldron of simmering passions, he responded with some regal off-drives. When the last minutes of the day approached, the Gloucestershire great was on 85, closing in on a magnificent hundred in a pressure game. And Woodfull, in a spark of inspiration, tossed the ball to Don Bradman.
Hammond and Bradman: the tales of their rivalry do rounds even today. Hammond’s obsession with the greatest batsman of all time and the tensions between the two throughout their overlapping careers has been painstakingly analysed. The crowd roared as their hero limbered up to bowl. Bradman bowled only occasionally, even in First-Class cricket, but that did not deter the fans. They cheers were loud and deafening.
Bradman ran in and sent down a rank full toss. Hammond’s eyes lit up. The mighty bat flashed in a brutal arc, the intent to dispatch the ball in the nether depths of the Torrens River. And it took the edge and went on to the stumps.
As the master batsman departed in disbelief, the press box was stunned. Some did not even believe it had been a full toss. There were no replays in those days and a voice suggested that it had actually been a leg break. No one was quite sure.
And Mant rose, in one youthful display of foolhardy rashness. “I will go down and ask Wally,” he volunteered.
He trotted down to the England dressing room. And there stood Hammond, bending down, taking off his pads. A saturnine man on the best of days, his face was like the dark thunder. The young pressman approached him bravely, “I’m sort to have to ask you Wally, but was that a full toss?”
Hammond turned and looked at him as a pregnant silence enveloped the room. It was the proverbial moment of calm before the most violent of storms. And then followed the analysis of the delivery, the Hammond way: “Yes, it was a f***ing full toss. And will you f***ing get out of my f***ing sight as soon as f***ing possible?”
Quick on the uptake, Mant took the hint. In a minute or so, he was back in the safety of the press-box, slightly out of breath. And he turned to his colleagues and summarised, “Wally says it was a full toss.”
Strangely, this volley of abuse did much to lighten the mood in the press box. The Test match once again felt like a game of cricket.
Brief scores:
England 341 (Maurice Leyland 83, Bob Wyatt 78, Eddie Paynter 77, Hedley Verity 45; Tim Wall 5 for 72) & 412 (Douglas Jardine 56, Bob Wyatt 49, Wally Hammond 85, Maurice Leyland 42, Les Ames 69, Hedley Verity 40; Bill O’Reilly 4 for 79) beat Australia 222 (Bill Ponsford 85, Bert Oldfield 41; Gubby Allen 4 for 71) & 193 (Bill Woodfull 73, Don Bradman 66; Harold Larwood 4 for 71, Gubby Allen 4 for 50) by 338 runs.
(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry.He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/senantix)
