The Summer Field

79 arguing that bodyline was badly reported in England, you can imply that Lord’s would have acted against bodyline, and sooner, if only they had known the truth. Similarly peasants in revolt used to claim that their king was not a tyrant, and would right wrongs if only his courtiers did not mislead him. Bodyline was in truth as well covered as any event could be in 1932/33, certainly compared with, let’s say, Japan’s war in China at the time. Take the famous exchange in the Australian dressing room between the Australian captain Bill Woodfull and the England tour manager Pelham Warner, on the Saturday of the Adelaide Test, January 14, 1933. For Harris to report it as fully as he did in the Monday’s Standard , the first edition after the event, was an outstanding journalistic achievement. As the Press Association reported the same day, ‘Press-men … were nerve-wracked by rumours and counter-rumours and sensational incidents following each other in quick succession’. Reporters had to overcome those in authority who delighted in what Harris called ‘a conspiracy of silence’. He knew he had to do good work because, as he wrote in his book of the 1936/37 tour, sending messages from Australia to England by cable cost sixpence a word, ‘which mounts up’. Harris reckoned to send 1000 words a day during a Test match, in clipped ‘cabelese’ that sub-editors at his newspaper would expand by half as much again; all feats against deadline. Harris must have done well enough, or he would not have risen to become the Standard ’s sports editor and report on Australian tours into the 1950s. Any Evening Standard reader during bodyline knew Jardine was up to something. Those in authority could choose to ignore that fact because communication was slow, hard and costly — by later standards. Men sent brief messages, on exceptional occasions; for instance, after England won that Adelaide Test, Rawdon club cabled ‘Hearty congratulations’ to their local hero, England’s spinner Hedley Verity. The English cricket authorities with the skill of habit managed the pace and content of the news. MCC made the cables from their Australian equivalents into part of the argument; even Australians agreed their authorities handled it badly. Lord’s could then pose as moral and sensible. It fooled many. As early as January 24, the cricket correspondent of the Yorkshire Post said the MCC ‘rightly’ refused ‘to allow themselves to be dragged into a squabble in which there is more hysteria than sense’. Meanwhile the MCC denied its players a voice, to guard against anyone speaking out of turn and to avoid breathing new life into the affair. As late as early May 1933 when the team docked in Glasgow, home again, the Press Association reported the players had been ‘specially asked by the MCC not to discuss leg theory’. The press stirred up trouble; even some in the press said so. Reporters were forever opinionated, even when they said ‘names need not be mentioned’ as the Nottingham Evening Post did in July 1909 after England lost to Australia at Headingley. By deploring ‘hopeless failure’ of batsmen, that newspaper was telling the MCC how to pick its team; and anyone who paid coppers to read such papers could think the same. Where would it end? The more you informed cricket watchers, or anyone, the more they Journalism