In 1836, Alfred Mynn’s legs were so badly injured after being hit numerous times by the roundarm bowling of Sam Redgate that his doctor considered amputation. Mynn suffered these blows because he was not wearing pads due to this being the era of the cult of virility, an early version of muscular Christianity, and his captain, Lord Frederick Beauclerk, was an advocate of that trend. Thus began a period of sporting history in which batters, relatively unprotected by the standards of today, were expected to take blows to the body as part of the masculine ritual of facing fast bowling, which itself was an art being developed by men who were often resentful of being looked down upon by the gentleman amateurs to whom they bowled.
The cricket ball in the hands of a great fast bowler was, to a degree, a weapon of class warfare and retaliation against colonialism, but it was also a source of pride and freedom for superb athletes for whom society had deemed this to be their primary mode of expression. In the century and half before Packer (and helmets), bowlers were usually poorly paid and cricket was not always a viable long-term career. The rarity of first-class cricket meant that they often only had a short window of time to make an impact, and the batter was the obstacle to their career. If the batter was also privileged enough to be able to play as an amateur, the resentment was naturally likely to increase.
A further aggravating factor was racial condescension. This reared its head, for example, in 1925-26, when Walter Hammond snubbed Learie Constantine in the Caribbean, probably because whites were more self-conscious about maintaining codes of white supremacy when on tour. Constantine responded by pounding Hammond with bouncers, which he later admitted to have been “bodyline”, although he does not seem to have set a leg-side field that would normally be required for such bowling to be classed as such (bodyline was derived from fast leg theory, surrounding the batter with a ring of leg-side fielders).
The debate over bodyline exposed competing assumptions about fairness, masculinity and intimidation that had been developing for several decades. On May 25, 1905, for example, on a spicy pitch at Gravesend, Kent’s Arthur Fielder hit two Nottinghamshire batters above the heart, one of whom was George Gunn. He also struck three other batters, one on the elbow and two on the hands. According to a letter by a Notts supporter published in The Observer on Feb 6, 1910, Kent took offence when a Notts player was overheard complaining about Fielder’s bowling and this led to an estrangement between the counties whereby they had not played each other ever since. This was only ended after a campaign by Lord Hawke to rejuvenate the county game led to a reconciliation and the two resumed their meetings in 1911.
According to Simon Wilde, the first Test cricketer to use intimidatory bowling as his primary tactic was Australian Ernest Jones, who broke Stanley Jackson’s ribs in a match against Lord Sheffield’s XI at Sheffield Park, Sussex, in 1896. He was followed in 1905 by his fellow national Tibby Cotter, who delivered a hostile spell in the Ashes series that resulted in the crowd demanding, “Take Him Off!” As Arunabha Sengupta notes, “Cotter made the ball lift at great speed, around the batsmen’s head and shoulders. One eye-witness vouched that he was pitching it ‘about half-way’. Wisden recorded Cotter’s bowling as demoralising. The batsmen hopped to his pace and bounce.”
There was also a gradual increase in the frequency of terms to describe this type of bowling, namely the ‘bumper’ and ‘bumping ball’. However, these were not new because “caught off a bumping ball” had been used in Derbyshire newspapers in 1871, while “bumper” had appeared in 1882 in an Australian report on the match between a Castlemaine 22 and England, when “Smith was now a caught off a bumper, the ball striking the extreme tip of [the] handle”, off a ball from Fred Morley. On July 13, 1895, The Star (Guernsey) reported that a batter was “caught off a bumper” in a college match. A drought had caused the pitch to produce “a delightful interchange of shooters and bumpers.” The phrase “hit by a bumping ball on the face” then appeared in Australia in 1908 and the clause “hit by a high bumper from Cooney, and fell on to his wicket” appeared in 1913.
‘Bouncer’ took longer to emerge. The first usage I have found is in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, July 7, 1919, where a batter was “tempted by a bouncer ball.” On July 2, 1920, The Daily Telegraph reported that Harry Howell dismissed A.W. Carr with a bouncer in the Gentlemen v Players match at Lord’s. Howell also hit P.R. Johnson on the wrist, the ball rising “from the ground at an angle of about 70 degrees”, but the Telegraph blamed the pitch.
The evolution of “fast leg-theory” started with the tactics of Frank Foster, the English left-arm bowler, in 1911-12. However, Foster claimed he always bowled it from around the wicket so that it slanted into the pads, not over the wicket at the body. In 1921, Armstrong had threatened to instruct McDonald and Gregory to bowl fast leg-theory during the tour of England after county captains had threatened to do the same with their bowlers, but the counties had always backed down and the threat was never put into action. However, McDonald still hit Tennyson over the heart while bowling off-theory while Gregory’s short-pitched deliveries were dangerously high.
According to Andrew Sandham, fast leg-theory had been used by Buster Nupen for South Africa against England in 1922-23. The next Ashes captain to use it was the fascist Arthur Gilligan in 1924-25, although these were aimed at the legs not the torso or head. In Australian state cricket, it was used by L.T. Gun in January 1925 and by Whitty in January 1926, the latter taking the wicket of Kippax after the ball hit the stumps off his body.
Another important figure in this period was Jack Scott. In a 1928 profile, Charlie Macartney described him as someone who “makes the ball get up and fly more than any other fast bowler I can remember, and at times when he flies a short one along, he is positively dangerous.” On January 28, 1929, in the second innings of a tour match for South Australia v England, he bowled fast leg theory at Sutcliffe and Jardine. Two days earlier, he had taken Jardine’s wicket. Jardine was thus exposed to intimidation on Australian soil four seasons before he took it to back to Australia.
For Nottinghamshire, in a 1926 tour match against Australia, Barratt had used leg-theory unsuccessfully but Larwood, at the other end, appears not to have tried it but perhaps took a mental note. Learie Constantine’s 1933 book “Cricket And I” (written with the help of C.L.R. James) claimed that Larwood used a bouncer followed by a yorker to dismiss West Indies opener Tommy Scott just before the close in their tour match at Notts on July 7, 1928. He claims Scott was intimidated by Larwood. Constantine, in turn, bowled bouncers at Jardine in that summer’s Old Trafford Test, which may have influenced Jardine’s later adoption of Bodyline. He also noted that in the 1930 series in the West Indies, Voce had knocked out Clifford Inniss in a tour match in Barbados at the start of the tour. Constantine defended bodyline in all of the books he wrote from 1933 to 1949, noting that batters had no moral qualms about smashing the ball at short leg fielders so should be expected to face hostile bowling with no complaints.
This brings us to Larwood and his preparations for the 1932-33 Bodyline tour. As David Frith noted, Larwood’s claim that he never intended to hit batters was contradicted by the 1932 tour match against the All-India side, when he and Voce had a private bet to knock the turban off the head of Sikh, Joginder Singh (Frith’s source was 1930s Notts player Frank Woodhead). This was vicious and (given that Singh was targeted for his ethnic religious symbol) surely racist.
In conclusion, however, it is notable that batters did not, then or since, usually complain vociferously about hostile bowling. The bodyline series of 1932-33 was the exception because England employed three bowlers directing fast deliveries at the body and head to a packed leg-side field. The Australians had legitimate fears that a batter would be killed if this form of bowling became accepted as the norm. It was also tedious to watch as the batter was unable to play most of his normal range of strokes. Conversely, Larwood and Jardine could be forgiven for believing that masculine norms had permitted intimidation and the Australians had been using it since 1896 when they had the necessary firepower. The line that bodyline crossed was probably the level of legitimate danger that cricket could tolerate at that time, and this was caused by the speed and accuracy of England’s trio, especially Larwood. There would be more Tests where that line was crossed before helmets gave batters some protection after 1976. Lindwall, Miller, Trueman, Hall, Griffith, Lillee, Thomson, Holding and Roberts all exceeded the line of acceptable danger at times, such as when Griffith almost caused the death of Nari Contractor in 1962 and Thomson bowled at lethal speed at the heads of tailenders in 1974-75. Again, however, these men believed that their batters had faced intimidation in the past with no repercussions so all was fair in Test cricket.
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