Fear and Loathing in the Long Room
There was an edge to what happened in the Long Room at Lords that seemed to be about more than a few old, entitled, aristocrats venting their spleen at an Australian team in a game of cricket. For all the hoo-ha that followed the run out of Jonny Bairstow from the cricketing public and the media, it was the Lord’s Members who were most affronted by a batsman being dismissed, albeit controversially. Was it just about Bairstow being run out? Or were these Members, dressed in their faintly absurd bacon and egg blazers, threatened by a more desperate predicament and a greater loss? There seemed to be more at stake than a game of cricket.
The Lords Test and its aftermath have revealed many things about the relationship between Britain and colonial Australia. It is bitterly ironic that the first cricket team to tour England in 1868 was made up entirely of First Nations Australians. White settlers played cricket with First Nations people who, being the athletic and tenacious people they are, soon excelled. A team was put together and a tour planned that was fully supported by private donations and came all the way from cattle stations in the Western Districts of Victoria. When the touring team played exhibition matches in Melbourne and Sydney, huge crowds turned up to watch them. The team’s game at Lords was described by The Times as “a travesite upon cricketing at Lords.”
The next Australian team to tour England in 1877 was made up exclusively of white players. It is telling that Wikipedia doesn’t count the First Nations team as “Australian” and records the first Australian team as touring England in 1877.
While white Australia was in every way subjugated to England, cricket was the one expression of its independence. It was a game that Australians excelled at and they took enormous pride in beating the Mother Country. This did not go down well in England. When an Australian team had the temerity to beat England at The Oval in 1882 the country went into mourning. The bails used in the game were burnt and the Ashes were born.
White Australians didn’t take this as a cue to adopt any sort of identity that forged a new culture. They were more than happy to remain as subservient colonies
beholden entirely to their British masters. The only place they wouldn’t doff their caps to their masters was on the cricket field.
When the independent colonies - inspired by a drunken oration by Henry Parkes at the Tenterfield School of Arts in 1889 - were federated into one nation, the Commonwealth of Australia was born. It didn’t recognize the original inhabitants of the Land and, in an effort to destroy Indigenous culture, legislated barbaric policies like the Aboriginal Protection Act that herded Aboriginal people onto reserves and ultimately resulted in children being stolen from their parents. This made it impossible for them to play cricket, let alone go on tours.
Cricket did infiltrate the lower classes and many of Australia’s best players were drawn from Irish Catholic working class families. The Australian team didn’t quite stoop to the English system of “Gentlemen and Players” that allowed working class Englishmen to represent their country, if not mix with their upper-class teammates.
Cricket was played in laneways, on beaches and on dusty paddocks, anywhere where a ball could be bowled at a bat. Australia continued to assert itself on the cricket field and to get up the noses of their rulers. In stark contrast to the English team, even today very few Australian teams feature players from private schools.
There was another dimension to playing against upper class Englishmen for working class Catholics of Irish decent like Bill O’Reilly, Jack Fingleton and Stan McCabe. For the freemasons in the Australian team like Bradman, Oldfield and skipper Bill Woodfull it was a game of cricket. For the Irish Catholics in the team whenever they beat England it was sweet revenge for a history of wrong-doing. While winning the Ashes was the Holy Grail for most Australians, losing them was a Tragedy for most Britons - particularly for those in the English team who looked down their noses at their colonial opponents.
Douglas Jardine, the captain of the English team that toured Australia in 1932-33, once famously opined,
“All Australians are an uneducated and unruly mob”.
Not surprisingly this kind of attitude did not go down well with Australians and came to a head in that series. Due to the tactics devised by Jardine and his upper class mentor, Percy Fender, the series became known as Bodyline. Bodyline was devised
to curtail Australia’s boy wonder, Don Bradman. The English were so hell bent on wresting back the Ashes they were prepared to do anything to achieve that goal. Anything. Including decapitating a few Australian batsmen if necessary. The plan was to bowl at the batsman’s head and body with a ring of fielders clustered on the leg side to snaffle deflections. They dragooned working class men Harold Larwood and Bill Bowes into the front lines to implement this plan. Larwood was a relatively small man but as strong as an ox from spending his childhood working down the mines. He might not have agreed with the tactics but he did as he was told. Two of the Gentlemen players in the English team, fast bowler Gubby Allen and the Nawab of Pataudi, refused to participate in “leg theory”.
The Australian batters took a battering, in particular opener Jack Fingleton, one of the Irish Catholics in the team. Fingleton top scored in the second innings of the first Test in Sydney and the first innings of the Melbourne Test and in doing so batted for long periods against the Bodyline attack. The crowd at the Sydney Test had been so incensed by the barrage of bouncers that they tried to tear pickets off the picket fence to attack the English players with.
The Bodyline tactics really came to a head in the Third Test in Adelaide when Australian wicket keeper Bert Oldfield, a tailender, was nearly killed when Larwood felled him with a bouncer. The Adelaide crowd went one better than the Sydney mob and a few spectators did tear pickets off the fence before being restrained by the constabulary. Oldfield’s felling led to the normally restrained Australian captain, Bill Woodfull, storming into the English dressing room and declaring,
“There are two teams out there. One is trying to play cricket, the other is not”.
A cable sent by the Australian Cricket Board to its English counterparts read,
“Unless stopped at once it (Bodyline) is likely to upset the friendly relations existing between Australia and England”.
The gravity of this statement cannot be underestimated. Politicians in both countries became involved and tried to dampen the fires.
Given the current imbroglio over Bairstow’s dismissal it is ironic that in the Bodyline series it was the Australians who played in the “spirit of the game” while Jardine’s team played to “win at all costs”.
Ever since Bodyline, Ashes series have been hotly contested as Australian teams have refused to kowtow to their perceived superiors. They have been a metaphor for our relationship. Australians have been like teenage children separating from their parents (although not enough to leave home yet) while the English see the opportunity to reassert their status over these same children and remind them who’s Ma’am.
The current Test series, as personified by the Members reaction to the “incident”, seems to be about a lot more than any of these things. It as if the English upper class feel cheated, not just by Australia, but by the winds of change and a world up-ended. It is hard not to see the Members lashing out as an expression of their accumulated frustration at the sight of their world slipping through their fingers. The death of Queen Elizabeth exposed a way of life that is fast disappearing in England. No longer do the people tolerate the outlandish behaviour of people like Boris Johnson who seem to think they operate in a realm above the peasantry. To an outsider it seems that Brexit was an expression of an “up you” attitude to the ruling classes. It may not have been logical but it was borne of frustration at how their cards had fallen, at how their concerns were consistently ignored.
The events that unfolded in the Members Pavilion were so out of line that mild mannered Usman Khawaja, an Australian cricketer of the Muslim faith who was born in Pakistan, was the one to remind the Members of their manners. The symbolism couldn’t have been starker.
After two brilliant days at Lords, I watched Day 5 in the Old Nag’s Head pub opposite Burrough Markets. I was the one of a handful Australians glued to the tele. Bairstow’s dismissal angered, or even appalled, the English supporters but they were as infuriated by Bairstow’s brain fade as they were by the actions of the Australians. Apart from one punter who gave me a gobful, the rest of the pub took it on the chin and sat glued to the game hoping against hope that Ben Stokes could pull off a miracle. But travelling around England it was clear that Olde England is on its last legs.
With the sun setting on the Empire and Australia, moving to give First Nation people a Voice to Parliament, and inching its way towards a Republic, it is only a matter of time before the old prejudices are relegated to the dustbin of history