The Ashes legends: Harold Larwood - All-round tough guy

“In bowling as I did, I was merely carrying out the prearranged plan”.

If Douglas Jardine was Professor Moriarty – slick, suave and conniving – Harold Larwood was Colonel Sebastian Moran, that loyal, efficient and ruthless henchman. If I may use another Sherlock Holmes reference, as far as the Australians were concerned, Larwood might well have been the Hound of the Baskervilles, and then some.

He wasn’t a very big man; certainly, he never looked the cold-blooded, calculating ruffian the Australian public made him out to be. The scourge of all that was fair and just? Not quite; just a man following his captain’s orders, a man who frightened and maimed the Australians on his way to 33 wickets at less than 20. It wasn’t very pretty, but he got the job done.

And as he remarked later on, “I had a score to settle with him … he’d got on top of me. As a professional, any scheme that would keep him in check appealed to me.” All fair in love and war then, it was clear to the meanest intelligence (all Australians in Jardine’s opinion) that this was war.

Wisden summed up his performance in the first Test at Sydney with these words: “Larwood’s speed was tremendous and nobody faced him with any confidence”. Five wickets in each innings without resorting to Bodyline. The niceties (and after what followed, these assuredly were) did not last long.

Bowling short, fast and at the batsman’s body, Larwood roughed up the Australians like a bouncer (no pun intended) in a nightclub. It wasn’t about the wickets; it was about the bloodshed and physical intimidation. Bert Oldfield copped a sickening blow to the head, fracturing his skull. Bill Woodful was struck over the heart. The fact that neither injury occurred while ‘Bodyline’ was being bowled is not remembered. As far as the Australian crowds were considered, Larwood was like a rabid dog unleashed, a menace to all and sundry.

Bodyline, and Larwood’s role in it, was not defined nor remembered by the wickets he took. Four in the second Test, seven in the third, seven in the fourth and five in the fifth; by the way, how many batsmen did you maim? He was portrayed as the demon fast bowler re-incarnated, so much so that a young boy remarked to his mother ‘Why, mummy, he doesn’t look like a murderer’.

What he was, was a scape-goat. “It wasn’t your fault Harold,” said Bert Oldfield after being struck by Larwood. Needless to say, popular opinion remained and continues to remain unchanged. In the end, ‘Bodyline’ consumed him. Douglas Jardine refused to let him go off the field in the final Test after he broke down; getting Bradman out was considered more important. “You can’t go off while the little ba*****’s in.”

An oft forgotten occurrence is that he scored 98 as a night-watchman in the fifth Test. It was a dashing knock too, replete with 10 fours and a six. What is remembered is the Australian fast bowler Bull Alexander’s excited utterance “I’ve killed him! I’ve killed him!” after striking him on the hip. It was very much a Clint Eastwood moment, and Larwood did not even bat an eye-lid.

Perhaps that is how we should remember Harold Larwood. Not as a menace to society, not as a rabid hound, but as the guy in the saloon in the Western classics that nobody messes with. Continuing with the Clint Eastwood references, ‘What are you looking at, punk?’

We can chastise him for bowling ‘Bodyline’, we can even laugh with glee at the fact that he was never picked for England again after that tour. What we should do instead, is salute him. He might have been an all-round tough guy, but he wasn’t the villain he was made out to be. Just a man doing his job. A pretty damn good job at that too.