The Summer Field

121 Newspapers acknowledged it during the bodyline affair. An editorial in the Yorkshire Post on January 19, 1933 for example, claimed that a settlement was possible, if only Jardine and Woodfull could discuss the bowling, ‘as cricketers should’. A week later, as the England team neared Sydney by train, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that ‘several former internationals’ agreed, when asked for their views, ‘that MCC had to show faith in its captain’. None of those players, presumably in Sydney, wanted to be named, a sign not only of the deep fear of being seen to voice an opinion, but how the captain’s right to run his team was not for challenging. It explains also the infamous snubbing by Woodfull of Warner in the Adelaide dressing room. Once Woodfull made plain that he did not approve of bodyline, Warner had nothing to offer the Australian captain; only Jardine could. We have seen Jardine for so long and so stereotypically as a cold and single- minded higher-class captain, cricket’s equivalent of the aloof generals who caused slaughter in the 1914/18 war. As with the supposed ‘golden age’ before 1914, once you look for evidence beyond the same old regurgitated stories that pass for cricket history, Jardine was no grotesque freak from the norm of a well-mannered but dim English gentleman-captain. He sat in an historical tradition of knowledgeable, able and successful ‘skippers’ that stretched, with many personal and professional links across social class and generations, at least from Lord Hawke to Brian Sellers, to Ray Illingworth and Mike Brearley. If Jardine had a fault it was that he applied himself to be captain too well. Jardine characteristically and touchingly in The Field in July 1934 complimented the former Surrey captain Percy Fender, who ‘saw every man and the team as swans and not as the geese we frequently were’. Methods differed – Jardine quoted more Latin than most captains of England – yet the aim was the same; to beat the other side. Charles Palmer was described as an ‘ideal captain’ in the 1951 Leicestershire yearbook, strikingly early into his time as a long-running and admired captain of Leicestershire in the 1950s. The man needed to know the game; and to use that knowledge. He had to make decisions to best use his men and attack weaknesses in the other team – quickly, while he could. And he had to be a good enough player to set an example. In a word, a captain needed to carry authority, as Palmer must have had, to write such judgements as: ‘It isn’t surprising that there are not many really first-class captains.’ Authority in one man, since recorded history began, can turn into tyranny. Yet even tyrants take time to learn. At that January 1933 social event in Barnoldswick, Brian Sellers urged young players not to get ‘swell-headed’ by any success: When I went to play for the county at the beginning of last season I thought I knew something about cricket. But after three weeks I found I knew absolutely nothing. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouths closed if you want to get on in cricket. As Sellers aged and became set in power, younger men would only see Captaincy and Command