The Summer Field

60 Private Life Many times I have seen him black and blue on coming in from batting, taking the brunt of the bowling on his body rather than playing the ball, resisting the chance of getting out; in other words laying the foundations for the later batsmen to consolidate. While it is traditional to remember the dead fondly, it is also significant that Robinson only revealed something so personal – and broke confidentiality – about a dead colleague he so admired. During the bodyline affair in January 1933, Major R.T.Stanyforth recalled in the Yorkshire Post Learie Constantine’s fast bowling against MCC on their tour of the West Indies in 1929-30: ‘I think Wilfred Rhodes will agree with me that our batsmen did not like it, but they confined their remarks to their dressing room!’ Rhodes was not dead, but at least retired, so that Constantine (and any other fast bowler) could not use the confidence against him. An exception to this rule of confidentiality was arguably the most famous of all dressing room conversations: Pelham Warner’s mistimed effort to ask after the Australian captain Bill Woodfull, hurt after a ball from Harold Larwood hit him during the third, Adelaide Bodyline Test in January 1933. Leaving aside exactly what Woodfull said, newspapers in Australia and England ran the story promptly. In his aptly named Bodyline Autopsy , David Frith wondered at tiresome length who betrayed the dressing room confidence. It evidently never occurred to Frith that – just as all the suspects were the murderer in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express – several players might have told the papers: because they wanted the truth told, it was too good a story to keep a secret, and any guilt over breach of privacy was best shared. Usually, much of dressing room life was dull winding down, as after any mine or factory shift. Or if it rained all day, the players never wound up. Such occasions are important as sources because reporters, who still had to fill pages, gave details off the field that usually they might only mention in passing as ‘colour’. When the Leicester ground was sodden on the Saturday of the Australian tourist match in May 1926, the columnist Reynard noted the county pros played ‘a little gramophone music’. Likewise, when summing up the Bodyline series, Bruce Harris wrote for the Evening Standard in London that Jardine’s stand-in captain Bob Wyatt was ‘the most ardent gramophonist of the side’: ‘Along a score of hotel corridors I have heard his modern hymn, “Today I feel so happy.”’ It is hard to imagine Douglas Jardine playing that record. Singing, as in an army or church, bonded men. Frank Sugg in July 1928 recalled his former Lancashire teammate ‘little Johnny Briggs’. In their hotel at Taunton sometime in the 1890s Briggs chose to sing ‘The heart bowed down’, ‘which we had heard from him many times’. The practical joker Arthur Mold gave the players the wink when Briggs turned to the sheets of music on the piano, ‘and one by one we stole quietly out of the room’. Briggs finished and bowed, ‘and his face when he found the room empty was a study. For the rest of the evening he was very upset at what he termed a rotten joke.’ Briggs had a point; yet so had the others, if they were bored. While staying in a hotel could become routine