Defending White Manhood: The Bodyline Affair in England and Australia

Abstract

In the Australian summer of 1932–33, a cricket team sponsored by the Marleybone Cricket Club (MCC) and representing England was placed under the command of a dour Scotsman named Douglas Jardine and sent to Australia to avenge their humiliating defeat at the hands of the Australians in the English summer of 1930. Hoping to curtail the prolific scoring of a young New South Welsh batsman named Don Bradman, who had embarrassingly dominated the English in 1930, Jardine devised an arguably novel form of bowling attack which eventually came to be referred to as “Bodyline,” or as many English commentators preferred, “fast leg-theory.” Bodyline involved the highly dangerous and ethically dubious practice of bowling fast, high-bouncing balls at or near the upper-body and head of the batsman while a semicircle of fielders was menacingly placed within yards of the wicket. This left the batsman no sporting chance of success and a great likelihood of sustaining an injury³ This would all be unremarkable except for the fact that the Australian furor in response to this bowling attack, coupled with the English refusal to abandon it, led to a scandal which shook the imperial sporting world; it led to a significant loss of prestige for the English in the eyes of many in the Empire and opened the door for a variety of challenges to English preeminence in imperial culture.

Life is short, but cricket is long. We live in a world which shakes on its foundations. We have seen stable things totter and fall before our eyes. Great empires have passed away, great kings and Churches have fallen in ruin. American prosperity, the faith of the naïf, has shown itself the plaything of time. Even the pound sterling, the rock of ages, has crumbled in our sight. Darwin has disturbed our pride, and Galileo has undermined our fables. Einstein has upturned our calculations, and Freud our notions of morality. The stable things are shaky things, no match in their pretentiousness for time and tide. The simple things outlive them. After all successive ruins we still find the sand, the grass, life, and human impulse, much as they were before. Because of this nexus with simple things, none of the shakers has been able to shake our English soul and spirit which takes its form in cricket.

—“Gryllus,” Homage to Cricket, 1933¹

Ludus enim genuit trepidum certamen et iram;

Ira truces inimicitias et funebre bellum!

(“A game may beget dreadful strife and wrath,

and from wrath may spring savage enmities and murderous war.”)

—Mr. Reginald Carter, letter to The Times, January 26, 1933²