He was the first strategist of field placing

IN THE Long Room at Lord's, placed just below Sir Donald Bradman's portrait, on the south wall, is one of D. R. Jardine. It is a piquant juxtaposition: cricket's greatest run- getting machine, with the one captain who succeeded in putting brakes on his accumulation of scores.

Jardine was the first strategist in international cricket to use field-placing as an offensive weapon. Reams have been written about the wrongs and consequences of Bodyline bowling, and about the character and personality of Jardine. This is a good time to see him from a new angle, as it was in the month of March - 67 years ago - that he sent off the telegram that ended his Test career. Jardine's birth centenary was in October last year.

Douglas Robert Jardine was the first Indian to captain England. The word ``Indian'' is used deliberately, for he was born, in Bombay, in a family of Scottish extraction that had settled in India. His father, M. R. Jardine (who scored 140 in the Oxford- Cambridge match of 1892), had been born in British India's summer capital of Simla and spent his working life in the country, as had grandfather, judge W. J. Jardine. Several cousins were scattered around the sub-continent.

It was in Bombay that little Douglas first learnt to handle a cricket bat, often bowled to by the Indian bearer, Sebastian. India remained Jardine's spiritual home in a way it never was for the late Colin Cowdrey, born in the Nilgiris, the son of a Calcutta-born planter.

Jardine was so keen to get away to India for a holiday at the end of the draining Australian tour of 1928-29, that he actually left Melbourne before the last day of the final Test. Five years later, his decision to resign the captaincy of England was made after ruminations in his homeland, when he sent the infamous telegram - bypassing the MCC - to the Evening Standard. During World War II, after serving with distinction in the European theatre, Jardine was content to be posted ``home'' to India, first in Quetta and then at Simla.

When he led the MCC team in India in 1933-34, he was characteristically tough and uncompromising on the field. But off it he was totally different from the taut, hypersensitive individual who had caused so many problems in Australia a year earlier. This was because in India he was, simply, among people he liked - and understood.

In 1936, as the Olympic champion India hockey team was felicitated at the High Commission in London, Jardine was happily present as a guest of honour.

During his wartime spell in this country, Jardine renewed a latent interest in mysticism and Eastern philosophy, study of which made him apathetic to Christianity. He also learnt Hindi and became fluent in the language - possible for someone in his forties only because of his umbilical link with India.

But how much of all this, some may ask, is fact and not supposition? Yet, indeed, the Jardine myth has been created from long back, and who knows what is right and what is not?

Mike Brearley, in his Art of Captaincy, says with certainty that Jardine, in 1932, ``insisted on all the tourists having dental check-ups before leaving England.''

When this writer met Harold Larwood at his Sydney home in October 1987 and asked about the dentist bit, the old fast bowler admitted he had work done on his teeth before the 1932 tour - but ``because I needed it, not because the skipper told me.'' Two months later, the dental question was put to Sir ``Gubby'' Allen at his Grove End Road home adjoining Lord's, and his reaction was: ``Nonsense, my dear fellow, I never went to the dentist at that time!''

In his Cricket Captains of England, Alan Gibson waxed romantic: ``One hot, fierce day Larwood lunched off sips of champagne, personally administered by the captain.'' Matched against this is Larwood's own comment that at lunch-time he usually had a beer and a cigarette.

Actually, there were times during the tour when Jardine and Larwood were not on talking terms. Allen was often severely outraged by Jardine's behaviour, and manager Sir Pelham Warner almost driven to tears by Jardine's near-hysteria.

Jardine in Australia was hardly a likeable person. As far as the Nawab of Pataudi was concerned, Reuter reporter Gilbert Mant, incidentally an Australian, felt ``the dislike between them was intense... Jardine's superior attitude towards Pataudi probably dated back to the days when he was a child of the British raj.''

Yet in India in 1933-34, Jardine claimed to have learnt from his opposite number, the authoritative C. K. Nayudu - like Jardine, the son of a barrister - and was popular and thought charming wherever he went to speak.

Many years later Lala Amarnath, who hit a Test-debut hundred off Jardine's bowlers, when asked if Bradman was the best captain he had encountered, was forthright: ``No, that was Jardine - and I admired his Bodyline strategy.'' And Mant's detail of Jardine's relationship with Pataudi contrasts strongly with journalist Berry Sarbadhikary's observation on an afternoon spent with the Jardines, pere et fils, in 1946: ``Father and son talked nothing else but India but without that pat on the back which the Jardines detested as much as we do.''

It is still possible to find, in Calcutta, one person with a personal recollection of Jardine. Former Bengal skipper P. B. Datta, 76, a Cambridge Blue in 1947, met Jardine at a Hyde Park Hotel lunch in London, arranged by Sarbadhikary, late in the summer of 1946.

Jardine did speak about Bodyline, Datta recalled, and he also felt Indian cricket had some way to go. ``He stressed too,'' Datta added, ``Walter Hammond's greatness as a batsman, how he was better than Bradman...''

The great cricketing curiosity of Bodyline tour was that overs were six balls each in the Test series, and of eight balls in the other matches. But for the enigma that was Douglas Jardine, there can be no easy dissection.

SUBROTO SIRKAR

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