Extract from ABC News
English cricketer Harold Larwood was at the heart of the Bodyline controversy, and an incident at Quorn in SA's southern Flinders region prompted a wave of headlines. (Trove/ABC News: Stephan Hammat)
In short:
The infamous Bodyline series of 1932-33 involved England's bowlers aiming short-pitched deliveries at Australia's cricketers.
English bowler Harold Larwood generated fierce speed as well as controversy, especially when Australian captain Bill Woodfull and wicketkeeper Bert Oldfield were struck during the Adelaide Test.
When returning to Perth at the end of the series, Larwood received a hostile reception at a remote South Australian railway station.
At Adelaide Oval, where a bar now commemorates the series, Bill Woodfull and Bert Oldfield were both hit by deliveries from Larwood.
But the episode at the South Australian town of Quorn, in which a disgruntled mob spat fruit pips at England's spearhead, remains an illuminating footnote in the rich story of Ashes acrimony.
More than nine decades on, Bodyline bowling has not lost its power to provoke rancour, and is still solemnly recounted in the manner of a fireside fable as a dastardly thing that was once sprung on our unsuspecting shores.
The decision to instruct England's bowlers to aim at Australia's batsmen — in order to induce false shots that would lead to legside catches — was made by Douglas Jardine, the Oxford-educated England captain who swiftly entered Australian demonology as a national nemesis.
Douglas Jardine captained the England side that arrived in Australia in 1932. (Trove/Fairfax)
If Jardine was like Lucifer, Larwood was his Beelzebub. During the Bodyline summer, the Nottinghamshire speedster became a veritable hit man, releasing the ball with a ferocity and a velocity that were too great for Australia's top order.
In the Adelaide Test alone, captain Bill Woodfull received a fearsome blow over the heart and wicketkeeper Bert Oldfield had his skull fractured.
Despite his own bruises, Australian opener Jack Fingleton could not help admiring Larwood, and in his book Cricket Crisis compared the fast bowler to an express train on the renowned line between London and Edinburgh:
"His legs and arms pistoned up his speed, and as he neared the wickets he was in truth like the 'Flying Scotsman' thundering through an east coast station."
It wasn't, however, an east coast station, but a southern Flinders one, that provided the stage for the showdown between Larwood and the pomegranate pips.
There are various accounts of the fracas that erupted at Quorn when the train taking Larwood and fellow Test player the Nawab of Pataudi back to Perth stopped at the local railway platform.
"About 100 youths invaded the corridor carriage in which the two cricketers were having a game of bridge with friends and for the whole 20 minutes during which the train was at the platform uttered hoots and cat calls," Rockhampton's Evening News reported.
"The youths also made insulting remarks about Bodyline bowling and threw paper and missiles at the two Englishmen."
When Woodfull was hit in Adelaide, booing erupted in the crowd. (Trove/Fairfax)
The incident prompted a flurry of newspaper articles, and a commotion swiftly became a minor sensation.
"Larwood attacked on train, police to rescue", one headline shrieked. The fast bowler, it was claimed, had been "pestered" and "pelted" by youthful "hooligans" armed with chewing gum and fruit pips.
As the story gathered steam, details were added, some of them apparently baseless.
One report, for example, suggested Larwood had become "annoyed and attempted to strike" one of the youngsters, while another claimed a pomegranate had hit him flush in the face.
Larwood in batting gear in New South Wales. (Trove/Fairfax)
The rumour mill was in overdrive, but it didn't take long for some to start wondering what all the fuss was about. Adelaide's News, for example, quoted a certain Constable Beer, who downplayed the encounter and was adamant there "was no hooligan element" within the throng.
"Several small boys crowded round the window of the carriage in which Larwood and Pataudi were travelling, and said, 'Where's Larwood?' 'There he is'," the constable told the paper.
"This apparently annoyed Larwood, who drew up the shutters."
Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi, the Nawab of Pataudi, played three Test matches for England and three for India. (Trove/Fairfax)
When a local sergeant told them "to quieten down, the boys obeyed".
Sydney newspaper The Referee was even more dismissive, and claimed that a furore had been "built out of a trivial incident" involving jilted autograph hunters.
Its basis for that statement was the testimony of an international journalist who was said to have been on the train at the time, and whose recollections were published by the paper.
"A fairly large crowd of townsfolk, most of them school boys and girls, had evidently assembled on the platform to see the two great cricketers and many of them hoping to get their autographs," the journalist stated.
"If Larwood and Pataudi had only looked out of their window they would have received a very hearty reception from the gathering who were all cricket enthusiasts."
But the affair left Larwood — who recalled it very differently — nursing a lingering sense of bitterness.
Memorabilia from the Bodyline series on display at Adelaide Oval. (ABC News: Daniel Keane)
Larwood himself had initially, but perhaps inadvertently, exacerbated the controversy by maintaining silence.
Upon arrival in Perth, he refused to tell journalists what had happened in Quorn.
When he broke that silence weeks later, there was another flutter in the press.
In a book about the Bodyline tour that was published after his return to England and was serialised in newspapers, the fast bowler (or his ghostwriter) made it clear he felt genuinely threatened by what he called the "Quorn incident", which "might have ended in a personal attack".
"These larrikins bombarded us with the pips of pomegranates — which they had been chewing," he wrote.
"We sat it out as best we could, hoping the train would not overstay its wait."
Ninety-three years later, a question persists: why was so much made of something of such little consequence?
Perhaps it really was as menacing as the initial reports suggested. Or perhaps, after months of abuse from indignant Australian spectators, Larwood was mentally drained.
There is a poetic irony in the possibility it wasn't the barracking occasioned by Bodyline but the banter of country kids at Quorn that broke him.
Harold Larwood settled in Australia in 1950, and in later interviews with Tim Bowden and Norman May he reflected on the origins of Bodyline. (ABC Archives)
One of the paradoxes of historical understanding is that the moment of complete comprehension never arrives.
Those who have lived through tumult often wonder how such events will strike the minds of the future, when the dust has settled and things can finally be seen in perspective.
But when present-day historians look back on a past that is both distant and irretrievable, their most tantalising thought runs in the opposite direction: what was history like to those who lived through it?
Bodyline is very much a case in point. Today it is a magnet for myth and hyperbole, but its contemporaries were quick to recognise it as something genuinely momentous, and realised it would be of much more than fleeting interest.
"There seems every reason to suppose that in due course the literature dealing with the … Australian tour of 1932-33 will exceed in volume that of any other British campaign except the Great War," wrote English author Eric Gillett, in The London Mercury, in a review of Larwood's book.
England cricketers George Duckworth, George Geary and Harold Larwood in Australia in 1929, four years before the Bodyline series. (Trove PIC/15611/7992 / C. Piggott)
Bodyline had no Ashes sequel — the tactic was banned before Australia's tour of England in 1934, and Larwood did not play Test cricket again.
But the Bodyline series will not be so easily railroaded into the mere hinterland of cricket's folklore, and has long since cemented itself as a major stop along the main line of Ashes history.
In the minds of cricket lovers everywhere, the "Larwood Express" will be forever thundering through remote and far-flung stations.
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