The Summer Field

81 Journalism in January 1933, ‘like Bismarck I can be silent in seven languages’, ran The Cricketer magazine. Others, captains who felt independent enough, or simply men with power who liked the sound of their own voice, said what they liked. The week before Yorkshire’s 1933 meeting, captain Brian Sellers opened a fund-raiser for Barnoldswick club. ‘I am only a beginner in the game and I have had one season only in first-class cricket,’ the Yorkshire Post reported him saying. Such a line begged Sellers’ next word – ‘but’. He went on to have his say about ‘leg theory’, sounding much like Hawke and English authority (‘no man in Australia will ever do anything on the shady side’). To put it more kindly, some men could not help going over the past, if asked. In 1983 the former England captain Gubby Allen called ‘bodyline’ (his inverted commas) ‘an unhappy episode … and in my opinion the sooner it is forgotten the better’. Presumably he did not see the irony that his foreword to Le Quesne’s book helped keep the controversy going. Just as British generals of the 1939/45 war enforced censorship of soldiers’ letters while using the press to give their point of view (and later had their memoirs profitably serialised by papers), so articulate captains made contacts with journalists, of mutual use. To return to that February 1933 genuinely pioneering interview by Harris of the newly-victorious Jardine, oddly overlooked by bodyline historians: Harris put Jardine on the telephone from their Brisbane hotel to the Evening Standard , which duly bragged about its scoop. Calls to Australia only dated from 1930. Jardine was careful to thank the press (and ‘especially’ the Evening Standard ) and all his team, including men left out of the Tests, such as George Duckworth and Maurice Tate. As Jardine diplomatically put it, they ‘only lacked the opportunity of distinguishing themselves’. By building up his team as loyal, Jardine cleverly silenced critics. While the Evening Standard man on the other end of the line in London was laughably flattering, it helps explain Jardine’s smooth and modern-looking move from the England captaincy into a media job. He told the world in the Evening Standard that he would not play against the Australians in 1934. Instead he wrote a Test commentary – for the Evening Standard . Jardine was only following others. Harris in his 1936/37 tour book contrasted ‘old internationals’ with ‘working journalists’, ‘the pukka full- time newspaper men’. Was Harris hinting that former players had not earned their chair in the press-box by rising, like Harris, from regional newspapers to Fleet Street? As with all jobs, the deal suited both sides. A famous name always helped sell newspapers, as it impressed some readers (and editors). While cricketers-turned-journalists blurred the line between the two jobs, the line in truth was always blurred. As Harris explained, the journalist covering a tour was not ‘with’ the side – not officially; ‘he is a free agent, responsible only to the newspaper’. Sometimes in the name of a ‘good’ story (meaning important, not virtuous), a journalist sought to write things that might upset officials and players, named or not. Harris’ book, including the foreword by the then England captain Gubby Allen, described how journalists and players shared the same hotels and trains for months. Everyone could not be on their best behaviour forever;