Gubby Under Pressure

yet Allen never records a moment when ‘bodyline’, even under the less provocative title ‘leg-theory’ was raised in conversation with them. The nearest Allen came to recalling any incidents from four years before, occurred while he was spending a happy weekend at Moombara early in the tour. He wrote to his good friend PlumWarner, manager of the 1932/33 tour: ‘I am writing this from that lovely place Moombara, the place you were prevented from staying at as Douglas wanted you to keep guard over one of his “tigers”’. I have re-read all of Allen’s 1932/33 letters in the hope of finding some explanation for the description Jardine’s ‘tigers’, but there is nothing there, nor can I find them mentioned in any of the numerous books about the tour published in the last seventy years. After many hours puzzling over that sentence, all I can suggest is that they may have been used as code words to describe the group of female admirers whom the unmarried Jardine was known to have attracted as he travelled around Australia. Philip Derriman, in Bodyline, quotes Wyatt confirming that Jardine did have a few girl-friends in Australia, although ‘he wasn’t any kind of playboy or “ladykiller”’. Did Allen make a particular point of recalling the event because he knewWarner would be pleased that his friend still remembered the circumstances? Especially if the lady in question was the same one who would eventually follow Warner back to London, where he set her up as his mistress? The actual word ‘bodyline’ appears only once in Allen’s 1936/37 letters, when he reported to his parents that he had finally been able to visit his aunts in Sydney: ‘The great aunts were in great form and have quite forgiven me, I think, for telling them four years ago that Australia was very much to blame for the trouble re “bodyline”.’ This confirms Allen’s opinion, at the time of the rush to judgment by the Australian Board of Control during the Adelaide Test, when they made the serious tactical error of cabling MCC with accusations of ‘unsportsmanslike’ behaviour by the England players. It seems that the ‘bodyline’ controversy had been well and truly laid to rest, although we shall see that for a brief period during the first morning of the First Test, Australia’s new captain, Don Bradman, appears to have tried to give it the kiss of life by encouraging E.L.McCormick to bowl fast and short with two short legs up close for catches. Readers may wish to note that the originals of the complete 1932/33 and 1936/37 letters remain at the Mitchell Library in the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, where microfilm copies and my own transcriptions are available for inspection. In this book, these have been slightly edited to make themmore readable, removing some of the abbreviations which were employed in Allen’s handwritten letters, and introducing punctuation in some places. The letters, exactly as transcribed from the originals, appear in Appendix One. The story of the Gubby Allen letters 7