Bodyline endures as the most emotive word in Test cricket. Seventy-five years this month, the England team led by Douglas Jardine and under the auspices of the Marylebone Cricket Club, arrived in Australia on the steamship, the SS Orontes.

Over the ensuing six months Jardine’s despised tactics not only threatened the future of Test cricket but even undermined the bonds of the British Empire.

The combatants and the eye-witnesses have all but gone, although Bill Brown, now in his 96th year, played for New South Wales against the MCC but did not play in a Bodyline Test.

Jardine, a cold, calculating product of Winchester and Oxford, devised a strategy of dangerously short-pitched bowling using his two fast bowlers, Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, to combat Don Bradman, Australia’s sporting hero of the Depression-ravaged times.

‘The Don’ had been rewriting cricket’s record books since his Test debut in 1928 and when the Australians won the five-Test series 2-1 in England in 1930, Bradman amassed 974 runs at a batting average of 139.14, an aggregate record that stands to this day.

Jardine’s theory of directing his bowlers to bowl at leg stump and make the ball rear into the batman’s body became known as ‘Bodyline.’

When Jardine was appointed England captain for the Australian tour, one of his former Winchester schoolmasters, Rockley Wilson, is said to have warned that he might win the Ashes but he would lose a dominion in the process.

It was a tumultuous time for cricket.

Passions became so inflamed that during the third Test at the Adelaide Oval in January 1933, seething spectators threatened to jump the fence as anti-English feelings soared.

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