Remembering Bodyline
It's 75 years since the Bodyline series and the Weekend Australian has reprinted some pieces from the Times looking back on the infamous tour
Brydon Coverdale
25-Feb-2013
It's 75 years since the Bodyline series and the Weekend Australian has reprinted some pieces from the Times looking back on the infamous tour. Murray Hedgcock writes that Bodyline remains a scar on the body of Australia, though one which has long since healed.
It is ridiculous to argue, as some fanciful commentators have done, that Bodyline threatened the Empire and that Australia might even have seceded to become an independent state. E. Rockley Wilson, the former England bowler who had taught Douglas Jardine at Winchester, forecast bleakly when his former pupil was made captain of the touring party: "We shall win the Ashes - but we may very well lose a dominion." But it was a philosophical rather than a political assessment.
However, those few weeks of increasingly unhappy cricket certainly strained relations between dominion and Mother Country in an age when Australians, almost exclusively British by background, looked on Britain as home. There were no spin doctors to massage the facts: cricket administrators debated with political leaders, diplomats and newspaper executives, hoping that the heat of the argument could be cooled by media restraint.
David Frith explains that Don Bradman made peace with Harold Larwood but never with Douglas Jardine.
Patrick Kidd looks at how Bill Woodfull handled the situation as Australia's captain.
Brydon Coverdale is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo. He tweets here