Harold Larwood, one of England’s greatest fast bowlers, was born on this day in 1904. On his death in 1995, Wisden published this tribute on Larwood and his Bodyline vice-captain R.E.S. Wyatt by historian David Frith.
David Frith founded Wisden Cricket Monthly in 1979 and edited the magazine until 1996. The magazine was relaunched in 2017 – you can subscribe here. Article originally published in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
The generations slip gently away. All the Edwardian Golden Age cricketers are gone. And in 1995, within 93 days, the last two truly eminent English survivors of the 1920s and 1930s died. R. E. S. Wyatt and Harold Larwood were not the last living pre-war Test cricketers, but they were clearly the most outstanding of the oldest soldiers, and symbolic of the two English divisions, the two castes: amateur and professional, Gentleman and Player.
For Larwood, picture a foaming tankard of beer and a cigarette, a respectable suit and a respectable trilby hat, and a virile ease among his fellow professionals which might quickly tense up when any of the officer class came by. It would take little imagination to discern for which political party each of them might have voted.
Mr Wyatt and Larwood, at opposite ends of the social and economic scales in the 1920s, when both were first chosen to play for England, could scarcely have been further apart physically from 1950 onwards, with the Larwood family resident 12,000 miles away, where so many of the disillusioned have thrown off their shackles.
That they held each other in deep respect is beyond question. Visualise cricket’s 1995 Legion of the Departed as they shuffled up the steps of the Greatest Pavilion: “After you, Lol … Naw, after you, Mr. Wyatt…”
If there was any final imbalance, it was that Prime Minister John Major, he who wished to create a classless society, gave Harold Larwood an MBE by way of long-overdue atonement. Bob Wyatt was never thus recognised. It was as illogical and unjust as Larwood’s ostracism by Lord’s following Bodyline.
