The Summer Field

62 humour could share jokes. In February 1933, the Ashes won, Bob Wyatt broke his bat when batting in the fifth Test at Sydney. Freddie Brown brought to the wicket a bat only a foot long, which Wyatt took mock guard with; the crowd laughed. Douglas Jardine cannot have been the stern captain of myth (and film and theatre) to have stood for such public mischief. Likewise, in good humour, the bodyline tourists not chosen for the Tests called themselves ‘the ground staff’, Bruce Harris reported. Players from rival teams could be friends. Cricketers did have more in common with each other than spectators and selectors, just as in war the suffering fighters on either side had more in common than with the generals and civilians. Rival players, like friends from rival parties in politics, or companies in business chasing the same sale, knew well that for someone to come first, someone had to come second. Cardus in his obituary of Maurice Leyland recalled that before the Brisbane Test on the 1936-7 tour – outside the Belle Vue Hotel, a sign that cricketers of those days might well stay in the same place – Leyland said to the Australian bowler Bill O’Reilly: ‘Well, Bill, destiny of this rubber’s in the lap of the gods. But I can tell thi’ one thing all right for certain – I have got thee taped, and tha’ knows it.’ While we could read that as one more competitive, even aggressive remark between a batsman and a bowler, Leyland was crediting O’Reilly with shared knowledge. Which brings us neatly to a remarkable event, mentioned in passing in a free exhibition in 2012 at the Library and Museum of Freemasonry in London, Game, Set and Lodge , about sport and Freemasonry. On January 25, 1933, nine days after he missed a ball from Harold Larwood that fractured his skull, Bert Oldfield, the Australian wicketkeeper hosted fellow Freemason Douglas Jardine at his Roseville Lodge in Sydney. To name only the English bodyline Freemasons – from a longer list of sporting Masons on the official Freemasonry website – Jardine was a member of the Old Wykehamist Lodge, and Gubby Allen the Old Etonian. You did not have to be privately schooled to be one: Wally Hammond was a member of Charity Lodge, Bradford, through his businessman father-in-law; Herbert Sutcliffe’s lodge was in London, presumably through business; Maurice Tate was of South Down Lodge in Brighton; George Duckworth, Travellers Lodge, Warrington. Bill Bowes and Hedley Verity became Freemasons later. Game, Set and Lodge showed a May 1948 letter from Sir Sidney White, grand secretary of the United Lodge of England, to Australian tour manager and Freemason Keith Johnson. White had written to lodges where the Australians were playing, and asked secretaries to write to Johnson care of his hotel in London, to arrange invitations (‘I quite realise that the exigencies of playing hours and travel may largely prevent their acceptance’). Freemasons among the Invincibles were Bradman, Arthur Morris, Bill Brown, Don Tallon, Sam Loxton and Ron Saggers. The place of Freemasonry in Bodyline, cricket or indeed any sport, or indeed anything, is little studied or admitted. Matches between teams of Masons appear in public records only rarely. The Dursley Gazette in July 1936 reported Sodbury Vale and Sympathy lodges played at Mangotsfield Private Life