The Summer Field

128 rate high and make the quarter-finals; only, other counties voted Somerset out. Rose went on captaining and indeed later serving Somerset as a coach; typically, the game sought to deplore the episode in vague ‘spirit of cricket’ terms, and forgot it. Yet the incident – like bodyline – was a rare breaking to the surface of an always-present tension. Bowlers or batsmen, in the name of bettering the other man, sometimes do ugly or unpopular things that, if persisted in, disgust or bore those watching, who will stop paying to watch, and thus throw professionals out of work. Some condemned bodyline for upsetting the balance between batting and bowling. It depended how you viewed your fellow men. Did you believe that some days suited bat or ball: rain made the pitch wet and lively; or the home umpire never gave leg befores. Over a season, or career, the favours to bat and ball evened out. Were cricketers rational, trustworthy creatures, who understood bat and ball had to keep in equilibrium, even if they never quite managed it? Or, was a pro’ so aggressive and ingenious that someone in authority had to rule over him, in case he led himself into a dead end, like the scientist that, if allowed to make weapons of war, might be the death of us all? * After giving a lecture with slides ‘Down under with the MCC,’ around his native Lancashire in the winter of 1933, George Duckworth, the reserve wicketkeeper on the bodyline tour, spoke to the Nottinghamshire Society of Lancastrians in Nottingham in February 1934 (proceeds went Batting and Bowling Newspaper cartoon, Burton Daily Mail, May 1933, commenting on bodyline: ‘It’s wonderful results we’d seen / Played upon a Test Match wicket / We tried it on our village green / Their opening batsman ‘got his ticket’. English cricket opinion evidently understood such bowling and yet joked about it – perhaps in ignorance, having mainly formed an opinion of it from the written word.