Douglas
Jardine, will forever be linked to Bodyline, for it
was during this season that he had the greatest effect
on Test Cricket history. Not so much for his batting
or bowling feats, but his captaincy and the decisions
he made off and on the field. The events are well documented,
and are still talked about around cricket grounds in
the 21st Century.
When
war broke out he was among the first to join. Dropped
behind enemy lines he Served his country with distinction.
Son of a Rhaj, he died of cancer on June 18th, 1958
(Montreux, Switzerland). He was cremated and his ashes
were scattered over the glens and lochs of Scotland.
Douglas
Robert Jardine was born in Bombay in 1900. The son of
a Scottish lawyer who had gone out to India six years
earlier to practice law - and ended up as Advocate general
of Bombay. Douglas a young boy was sent to Scotland
at the age of nine to stay with his Aunt Kitty to work
his way through the educational system, then appropriate
for a member of the Scottish upper middle class. Prep
school led to Winchester. Jardine was not particularly
adept intellectually but he was good at sport, which
in turn earned him the respect of his peers. By the
time he went to Oxford University, Jardine was tall,
un-athletic, thin faced and had a sharply beaked nose.
It
need hardly be said that Jardine's politics were Conservative
- his upbringing in India had seen to that. On the 1928
- 29 tour of Australia he had performed well, just missing
his century in the 4th test match, but his habit of
wearing a multi - coloured Harlequins cap and a white
silk 'choker' while in the field was a gift to the Australian
barrackers, who accepted it with pleasure! Jardine never
took kindly to such treatment and from that moment on,
Australians (to Jardine) were known collectively as
bastards !
Jardine's
strategy for the tour (1932 - 33), once he had accepted
the Captaincy - about which he had doubts as it happened,
doubts which took some time to overcome - was very simple.
It was to contain Bradman. Bradman had after all during
the 1930 tour of England changed the nature of the game.
He had shown even on soft English wickets that he could
dominate any English bowling attack, even one containing
Larwood, to such an extent that on even harder Australian
wickets he would be invincible.
Jardine
studied the film records of Bradman batting in the 1930's;
he read accounts of his matches and discussed Bradman
with the players who played against him. All in all
a very professional research job was done by Jardine,
even by modern day standards. However, according to
his daughter it was the film of Bradman and Archie Jackson
at the oval in the last test of the 1930 series when
they were facing Larwood on a rain - affected wicket,
that put an idea into Jardine's mind. 'I've got it',
he apparently said, 'he's yellow' - referring to Bradman.
It would be wrong to imagine that Fast Leg Theory or Bodyline
emerged fully formed from Jardine's head at that precise
moment. Jardine sounded out both Larwood and Voce in early
August 1932, at a dinner in the grillroom of the Piccadilly
Hotel. Could they bowl accurately at leg stump, 'making
the ball come up into the body all the time' in Larwood's
own words, ' so that Bradman had to play to leg' - 'we
thought Don was frightened of sharp rising balls.'
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