How Bob Wyatt's revelations blow a raspberry at history of bodyline

The former Warwickshire all-rounder's autobiography suggests that Douglas Jardine was not the first exponent of the tactic
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Jack Fingleton ducks a delivery from Harold Larwood during England's 1933 Bodyline tour of Australia
Jack Fingleton ducks a delivery from Harold Larwood during England's Bodyline tour of Australia in 1933. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Allsport

Yesterday, while searching for something else, I found a book for which I had been looking for a year. Immediately, as sometimes happens with these things, it sparked a flash memory, of my grandfather. He was a Staffordshire miner and as we lived in London I got to see him only rarely, generally in the summer holidays.

I learned a lot of my cricket at a young age, bowling a tennis ball against the wall of their cottage outhouse. One day, on the village field, he batted against me and the single stroke I remember, that fleeting memory, has him clipping the ball precisely and dismissively square off his legs, with no more than a flick of the wrist. Anyone who saw it now would recognise a classy stroke by any standards.

I was always told he was a good cricketer. Somewhere I have some medals he won, for fielding and batting. They came from Warwickshire. He might have played for the county, but there was a very strong mutual antipathy between him and Bob Wyatt, the Warwickshire overlord he regarded as a snob and not someone, as he described it, who took readily to a miner who batted rather than bowled fast. So other than his medals, I have no other record of his cricket.

The book that stirred yesterday's recall though, published in 1951, was Wyatt's autobiography: Three Straight Sticks. The reason I had been looking for it a while back had to do with the publication of Duncan Hamilton's biography of Harold Larwood (he has another beautifully written book out, by the way, more about which another time) and the Bodyline controversy.

The story needs no repeating but I was interested in the genesis of Douglas Jardine's decision to use the tactic. Leg theory, bowling to a legside field, had been around since the turn of that century and was perfected in particular by the Derbyshire inswing bowler Fred Root. This, though, was a world away from what happened in Australia. Some say the idea came from watching Bradman in England on a previous tour, batting warily against pace and was agreed over a pre-tour dinner.

Reading Wyatt's book proved revealing, for it suggests that, far from being an innovative idea, the principle of bodyline, although not called that of course, had been around and exploited for at least four years previously, and maybe before that. Wyatt himself, and others, were actually on the receiving end of it. Wyatt was to be Jardine's vice-captain in Australia, and although he is generally thought of as being opposed to the use of bodyline, it doesn't quite marry with his own account, which says: "I think Jardine was fully justified in using him [Larwood] as he did."

The caveat was that it only worked because of Larwood's unique combination of extreme pace and accuracy. "The ill-feeling it caused was not good for cricket," Wyatt adds.

I wonder, though, if much of the idea did actually come from Wyatt, who seems to attribute the early use not to any English bowlers but the West Indies all-rounder Learie Constantine. One of his early, uncomfortable encounters with Constantine was in 1928, when Warwickshire faced the visiting West Indies. Constantine had already made hay with the bat, scoring 70 of 77 in 45 minutes, before unleashing a barrage with the ball.

"As I went out to bat," writes Wyatt, "Bates, the preceding batsman, was being carried from the field unconscious. He had been knocked out completely by a bouncer from Constantine. The first two balls I had from him hit me on the head and went for four. Fortunately they were glancing blows and didn't knock me out, although they shook me up a bit."

The winter after next, however, on his first visit to the Caribbean with England, he broke a foot early on and watched the first Test from the sidelines from where, "I saw my first sight of bodyline".

He adds: "In view of what was to happen later in Australia it was interesting that no one made any public protest at the methods adopted by Constantine. He was certainly one of the fastest bowlers I've ever seen. In this match he bowled at lightning pace, and from the start of the innings he bowled bouncer after bouncer at the batsman's head with only two men fielding on the off-side." Which sounds pretty much like bodyline to me.

"It was not very successful," he continues. In fact, according to Wyatt, Constantine was blunted by George Gunn, 50-years-old then, who "advanced down the wicket before the ball had left Constantine's hand and with his bat shoulder high, played a defensive stroke to the ball, which dropped dead to the ground".

Eat your heart out Brian Close and Matthew Hayden. "Each time Constantine followed through to try and catch the ball as it dropped, Gunn blew him a raspberry and toddled back to his crease." Great stuff. You didn't catch Bradman blowing raspberries.

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