The Summer Field

90 Australia Australian cricketers were not like Czech or Austrian footballers, seldom met and never understood. England and Australia shared language, culture and education. Their newspapers quoted each other, and then quoted their quoting. During bodyline, figures in each country went into print whose mixed backgrounds allowed them to address either side. The Daily Mail ran an article by R.H.Bettington, who played for Oxford University then returned to his native New South Wales. Lionel Tennyson’s father was a governor-general of Australia. Meanwhile the Daily News in Perth (Western Australia, not Scotland) even found a way to link Harold Larwood to something its readers could appreciate. For generations Larwood’s family had ‘earned their bread hewing coal’ in collieries owned by the Duke of Portland, whose hospitality to Australian teams visiting Trent Bridge was ‘princely’. These ties of goodwill were renewed, and provoked new English admiration, in two World Wars. After a Royal Australian Air Force eleven of unknowns bested on first innings an RAF team with a top four of Test batsmen (Charlie Barnett, Washbrook, Edrich and Bob Wyatt) at Lord’s on May 20, 1944, Country Life wrote: ‘How difficult these Australian cricketers are to beat! What desperate fellows they are when they are up against it!’ Despite all the angry words said during bodyline, on both sides at least some felt a genuine warmth for the other. ‘We want to bring back happy memories as well as the Ashes,’ the Yorkshire Post said in January 1933. As that implied, some on either side played to win, whatever it took,and not only Jardine. Fingleton in 1963 noted that Australian sportsmen, at Wimbledon and Lord’s, were sometimes criticised as ‘too stern’. They were perhaps only guilty of trying too hard, because each country’s cricketers saw playing in the other country as the peak of their career. On tour the dinners, invitations to cinemas and theatres (touring cricketers in the audience would be good for business) and celebrity status could become exhausting. Pelham Warner was presumably joking in February 1933 when he said most players could not sign any more autographs because they had writer’s cramp. Some blew the togetherness out of proportion. At a tour dinner in Leicester in 1926 Warner spoke with his usual humbug of ‘Greek meeting Greek’, linking England-Australia Tests to a glorious classical past; never mind that the Greeks, ancient or modern, never played the game. Warner did it again in January 1933, after England lost at Melbourne, when he said: ‘We shall meet at Philippi, I mean Adelaide!’ This would have gone over the heads, or got up the noses, of English and Australians alike. Bodyline did prompt stocktaking: what were the tours by England or Australia for ? In the first place, sport; so said the Yorkshire Post in January 1933. Others, without ever going into detail, suggested something political, such as cementing the Empire. Whether out of desperation to avoid a scene, or out of habit, Warner appeared to regard being ‘the best of friends’ (or the pretence) as an end in itself. After that dressing room snub by Woodfull during the Adelaide bodyline Test, Warner sought to assure the press that he and Woodfull had shaken hands (though Warner only prolonged that dispute, because he took the handshake to be an apology