The Summer Field

129 to a children’s hospital). Writing beforehand to the society secretary, Mr Gwilliam, Duckworth ended the first side of his letter by saying: ‘You will of course understand that to attempt to describe last year’s Tests without mentioning bodyline bowling is absurd.’ You turn the page, wanting more – was Gwilliam trying to avoid controversy? and if so, why? Instead you find simply: ‘Yours faithfully, Geo Duckworth’. In his talk, according to the Nottingham Journal , Duckworth explained ‘bodyline’ – a word he claimed was misleading – in terms of bowling to counter batting. What he preferred to call ‘fast leg theory’ kept runs down in Australia: A bowler in England starting with a new ball could get the value out of it for an hour or more without the ball showing any real depreciation, but in Australia the new ball need only be sent once or twice to the boundary to have all the polish or varnish worn off it … the ball passed across the batsman and compelled him to play it in such a way that it was almost bound to go to the leg side where the leg trap fielders were waiting for it. Duckworth quoted Bradman: ‘You may hit my wicket if you can, but you are not going to hit me.’ Why then the fuss?! Englishmen had long bowled that way. For Derbyshire in July 1909, Sam Cadman ‘exploited the leg theory’; in July 1912 for Staffordshire against Kent seconds, Sydney Barnes bowled to what sounded like a leg trap: ‘with the exception of a man in the slips, one at point and another at mid off, he had the whole of his fielders on the leg side,’ the Stoke Sentinel reported. As a matter of fact was Plaindealer at Ilkeston in July 1930 about Larwood’s opening partner Bill Voce ‘who bowled very fast with four short legs close in and every now and again bumped one down very dangerously’. Was that ‘leg theory’ (long accepted, though grudgingly, as it cramped the batsman) or ‘bodyline’ (controversial)? It depended on the ball’s speed, and what the bowler had in mind, or said he had. On the Sunday during the fateful Adelaide Test of January 1933, among England players resting in the hills above the city, Larwood was denying that he bowled deliberately ‘at the man’, according to a correspondent of the Broken Hill newspaper the Barrier Miner . We have no way of knowing whether Larwood was telling the truth or saying what was socially demanded of him. Only in the 1970s, a more permissive time, could bowlers admit that they aimed, if only occasionally, at a batsman. A bouncer was not supposed to injure the batsman so that he had to retire (though that would do) but to make him not want to bat any more. Consciously or not, he might then give a catch or miss a straight one. Bruce Harris may have meant this when he wrote in the London Evening Standard in February 1933, once England won the Ashes, that Larwood had ‘a moral supremacy over the younger Australian batsmen’. Those batsmen must have felt Larwood was not threatening their morals. With typical hypocrisy the English deplored Australian or West Indian fast bowling, while English fast bowlers broke their share of bones. Bob Willis drew blood and made the Pakistani night-watchman Iqbal Qasim retire hurt at Edgbaston in June 1978. An unapologetic Willis was frank enough in his 1981 book The Cricket Revolution to admit that he ought to have Batting and Bowling