Never Surrender by Mark Peel

Author:Mark Peel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

In Fingleton’s opinion, even many Australians recoiled at the clumsy, blustering manner in which the Board cast aspersions on MCC’s sportsmanship, since the charge of Bodyline was a vague one, and MCC, true to form, bristled at such allegations. According to the historian Patrick McDevitt, questioning a team’s sportsmanship was the gravest charge one could level in the world of imperial sport in which cricket was a code of conduct and the expression of a British sense of right and wrong. ‘Jardine’s world view was that of the high Victorian period, when the British ruled the waves and waived the rules. Jardine’s expectations of behaviour fit squarely in a world in which colonial subjects of the Crown deferred to Englishmen in matters of taste and culture, including in cricket.’23

In an age of sparse communication – letters took the best part of a month to arrive, there were no radio or television broadcasts, and no English national daily sent their own correspondent to Australia because of economic austerity – it was difficult for people back home to ascertain the true nature of Bodyline and the furore it generated. Jack Hobbs, working for the News Chronicle and The Star, was one witness who could have enlightened the nation of Bodyline’s perils – but reluctant to criticise Jardine, his county captain, and his fellow professionals, he chose to overlook such matters. Bruce Harris, the correspondent of the London Evening Standard, knew little about cricket, and, as an apologist for Jardine, he tended to follow the party line. Reuters correspondent Gilbert Mant was privately critical but kept his reports strictly factual in his agency’s tradition, and although Warwick Armstrong expressed reservations about Bodyline in the London Evening News, chiefly on aesthetic grounds, his main gripe concerned the failure of the Australian batsmen to combat Larwood.

On top of this, the Daily Mail complained about the barracking, the Daily Herald accused Australia of being bad losers, and Percy Fender, writing in the Daily Telegraph, dismissed the charge that Bodyline was dangerous; it was just that the Australians couldn’t play it.

The Times pronounced rather pompously: ‘It is inconceivable that a cricketer of Jardine’s standing, chosen by the MCC to captain an English side, would ever dream of allowing or ordering bowlers under his command to practise any system of attack that, in the time-honoured English phrase, is not cricket.’24

Only Neville Cardus of the Manchester Guardian challenged the prevailing consensus by describing Bodyline as violent and intimidatory, a view held by several former England cricketers such as Sir Stanley Jackson, Frank Foster and Arthur Gilligan. ‘This bodyline is disgusting,’ the latter wrote in a letter which came to light many years later, ‘and it is a miracle that Jardine has completely got away with it … I admire Woodfull for the way he behaved in such a horrid situation. I regret to say it, but Jardine is a pig dog of the worst description and he should have never been sent as skipper. His tour of office has

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.