South Africa v England
1939-03-03
Played from 3 to 14 March 1939, the Durban 'Timeless Test' between South Africa and England ran for ten days and an aggregate of 43 hours and 16 minutes before being abandoned as a draw because the England team had to catch the boat home. With 1981 runs scored across four innings, it remains the longest Test ever played and effectively ended the timeless-Test format.
England v West Indies
1939-06-24
Across three days at Lord's in June 1939, George Headley scored 106 and 107 against England, becoming the first batsman to make two centuries in a Test at headquarters and reasserting the case that he was, ball for ball, Bradman's only post-Hammond peer. West Indies still lost by eight wickets, but Headley's twin centuries against Bowes, Copson and Verity remained for half a century the gold standard of West Indian Test batting.
England v Australia
1938-06-26
Captaining England in his first Ashes home Test in charge, Wally Hammond made 240 at Lord's in June 1938 — at the time the highest score by an England captain against Australia and an innings widely rated alongside his 336* at Auckland and his 251 at Sydney as the finest of his career.
England v Australia
1938-08-23
Across 13 hours and 20 minutes at The Oval in August 1938, the 22-year-old Yorkshire opener Len Hutton scored 364 — surpassing Bradman's 334 as the highest individual Test score and remaining the record for almost 20 years. England declared on 903 for 7; Australia, with Bradman injured and unable to bat, lost by an innings and 579 runs, the largest defeat in Test cricket. Hutton's mark is still the England record 87 years on.
England v Australia
1938-06-11
Following on 247 behind at Trent Bridge in June 1938, Stan McCabe played what Don Bradman would call the greatest innings he ever saw. With wickets falling at the other end, McCabe scored 232 in 235 minutes, the last 72 of those runs in just 28 minutes; he reached his double-hundred from 220 balls. Bradman called his team mates onto the pavilion balcony with the words, 'Come and look at this, you'll never see the like of it again.'
England v Australia
1938-08-20
The fifth and timeless Test of the 1938 Ashes at The Oval saw England score 903 for 7 declared — then the highest total in Test cricket — including Len Hutton's 364, the new world Test record. Australia, with Bradman injured and McCabe absent, replied with 201 and 123 to lose by an innings and 579 runs, the largest Test margin ever. The series finished 1-1 with two draws; Australia retained the Ashes by virtue of the previous series result.
England / Gloucestershire
1937-11-15
In November 1937 Wally Hammond — the leading professional batsman of his era — was accepted by MCC as an amateur, opening the door to the England captaincy he received six months later for the 1938 Ashes. The change crystallised inter-war debates about the amateur-professional divide and the unwritten rule that England's captain be amateur.
Australia v England
1937-01-01
On a wet New Year's Day pitch at the MCG in 1937, with Australia 0-2 down in the series, Don Bradman batted himself at No. 7, sent his tail in first to absorb the sticky, and then made 270 over almost eight hours. It is the highest score made on a sticky wicket in Test cricket, the innings that turned the 1936-37 Ashes, and the one Wisden in 2001 voted the greatest Test innings of the 20th century.
India
1936-06-21
On 21 June 1936, midway through India's tour of England, Lala Amarnath — the country's first Test centurion — was ordered home by tour captain the Maharajkumar of Vizianagaram (Vizzy) and tour management. The decision, made on disciplinary grounds that almost no contemporary account took at face value, became one of the worst administrative episodes in Indian cricket and set the political tone for the BCCI's later reform.
England v India
1936-06-27
The 1936 Indian tour of England was captained by the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram — 'Vizzy' — a princely Test cricketer whose 8-Test record at 8.25 was earned through an absurd political appointment. Vizzy mismanaged a talented squad, alienated CK Nayudu, sent the brilliant Lala Amarnath home before the first Test on a discipline charge, and led India to a 2-0 series defeat. The tour became a byword for princely interference in Indian cricket and was cited for decades afterward in arguments for democratic selection.
Australia v England
1936-12-04
Don Bradman's first series as Australia's captain, in 1936-37 against Gubby Allen's England, began with two heavy defeats and a press chorus calling for his replacement. Bradman responded with 270 at the MCG, 212 at Adelaide and 169 at the MCG again, and Australia won the next three Tests to take the Ashes 3-2 — the only time in Test history a side has lost the first two Tests of a five-Test series and recovered to win it. The captaincy that English critics had questioned was suddenly the captaincy of a man who would lead Australia for the next 12 years.
Australia
1936-03-06
Clarrie Grimmett was the first bowler in Test history to take 200 Test wickets — reaching the milestone in March 1936 against South Africa, in his last Test innings before being controversially dropped. He finished with 216 wickets in 37 Tests at 24.21, all of them taken between the ages of 33 and 44, and held the world Test wicket record until Alec Bedser broke it in 1953.
MCC / global
1935-04-01
Two and a half years after Adelaide, the MCC formally amended the Laws of Cricket to give umpires the power to stop bowling that constituted a 'direct attack' on the batsman. The 1935 amendment was the legal full stop on Bodyline. Fast leg theory, until then merely 'against the spirit of the game,' became something an umpire could call dead and intervene against. Bouncers became a rationed weapon for the next two generations.
Australia
1934-09-25
Days after the 1934 Oval Test, Bradman fell seriously ill with appendicitis that progressed to peritonitis. With antibiotics not yet available, he was given little chance of survival; his wife Jessie left Adelaide on a sea voyage to England prepared for the worst. He recovered after weeks of intensive nursing in a London nursing home and returned to first-class cricket the following Australian summer.
England
1934-03-21
On 21 March 1934 Douglas Jardine wrote to The Cricketer that he had 'neither the desire nor the intention' of playing in the upcoming home Ashes series. The announcement, taken as a quiet resignation, removed the architect of Bodyline from the field before Australia returned to England — a precondition Australia's Board had implicitly demanded.
England v Australia
1934-08-25
Recalled at the age of 47 for England's final Ashes Test in 1934 after a six-year Test absence, Frank Woolley made 4 and 0 and was bypassed for the squads that followed. The Oval Test marked the end of one of cricket's most graceful and prolific careers — 64 Tests, 58,969 first-class runs, all of them lit by what John Arlott later called 'a cool, almost insolent grace'.
England v Australia
1934-06-25
On the third and final day at Lord's in June 1934, Hedley Verity took 14 Australian wickets for 80 runs — the most by any bowler in a single day's Test cricket. Match figures of 15 for 104 gave England an innings victory, their only Lord's Ashes win of the entire 20th century. Bradman fell to him twice. The pitch had been rained on overnight; Verity's slow left-arm did the rest.
Indian first-class teams
1934-07-10
On 10 July 1934 the Indian Cricket Control Board, meeting at Simla, voted to inaugurate a national first-class championship in memory of KS Ranjitsinhji, who had died in April 1933. The first 'Cricket Championship of India' — known almost immediately as the Ranji Trophy — was contested in 1934-35 with 15 teams; Bombay won it, beating Northern India in the final at Bombay Gymkhana. The trophy itself, a gold cup donated by the Maharaja of Patiala, modelled the structure of Indian first-class cricket for the next nine decades.
West Indies
1934-06-01
From the early 1930s English newspapers, and then much of the cricketing world, called George Headley 'the Black Bradman.' Headley, polite and reserved, never publicly objected; in private and in CLR James's account, he and many West Indian writers preferred to invert the formula — Bradman as 'the white Headley.' The nickname is a small case study in how race coloured even the most generous compliments paid to inter-war Caribbean cricketers.
England v Australia
1934-07-21
Four years after his 334 on the same ground, Don Bradman returned to Headingley in July 1934 and made another triple — 304 in 430 minutes, sharing a then world-record fourth-wicket stand of 388 with Bill Ponsford. The Test was drawn, but the partnership was the high mark of the 1934 Ashes and proof that Yorkshire's Test wicket could be Bradman's personal property.
England v Australia
1934-08-18
Bill Ponsford's last Test innings was 266 at The Oval in August 1934, in a 451-run second-wicket stand with Don Bradman that won the Ashes for Australia and broke a world record that stood for 57 years. He walked off, raised his bat to a packed Oval, and retired from international cricket at 34.
Australia v England
1933-02-14
With the fate of the Bodyline series in the balance and England 216 for 6 chasing 340, Eddie Paynter checked himself out of a Brisbane hospital where he was being treated for acute tonsillitis, taxied to the Gabba in pyjamas and a dressing gown, and batted for nearly four hours to score 83. England drew level on first innings, won the Test by six wickets and the series 4-1.
England v West Indies
1933-07-22
Six months after Bodyline, Learie Constantine and Manny Martindale opened up with sustained leg-theory bouncers at Douglas Jardine in the Old Trafford Test. Jardine, captaining England, stood up and made 127 — his only Test century — proving, at considerable physical cost, that he could face the tactic he had unleashed on Australia.
India v England
1933-12-17
On 17 December 1933 Lala Amarnath, batting at No. 5 on his Test debut, scored 118 to become the first Indian to make a Test century. The innings, made out of 219 added with C.K. Nayudu, came against an MCC attack of Nichols, Clark and Verity and was greeted by spectators tearing off jewellery to throw onto the field.
India / England
1933-04-02
On 2 April 1933 Ranjitsinhji — Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, England Test cricketer, leg-glance pioneer and the most famous Indian-born sportsman of his generation — died at Jamnagar at the age of 60. His death prompted a global cricket obituary and gave the Ranji Trophy, founded the next year, its name.
England v West Indies
1933-06-24
The 1933 West Indies tour of England — three Tests, fifteen first-class fixtures, Headley's 169 not out at Old Trafford and Constantine's bouncer-led attack at Jardine — established the Caribbean side as more than a touring novelty and set the template for the West Indies team that would, a generation later, dominate the game.
Australia v England
1933-01-14
On 14 January 1933 a Larwood bouncer felled Australian captain Bill Woodfull over the heart, the crowd nearly came over the fence, and that evening MCC manager Pelham Warner walked into the home dressing room to be told, 'There are two teams out there. One is trying to play cricket, the other is not.' The exchange leaked, the Adelaide Test became the diplomatic flashpoint of Bodyline, and the most famous sentence in Anglo-Australian cricket entered the language.
Australia v England
1933-01-16
Two days after Woodfull was struck over the heart, Australian wicketkeeper-batsman Bert Oldfield top-edged a Harold Larwood lifter into his own temple at Adelaide. The blow fractured his skull. Crucially, the field was conventional — not the leg-theory cordon — but the crowd did not know that. Mounted police lined the boundary as Oldfield was carried off; the Adelaide Test came within a single Australian Board decision of being abandoned.
Australia v England
1933-01-18
On 18 January 1933, two days after Bert Oldfield's skull was fractured in Adelaide, the Australian Board of Control cabled Lord's accusing England of 'unsportsmanlike' play. The MCC's reply offered to cancel the tour outright. Two more cables, the intervention of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and a quiet retraction of the offending word were needed to keep the series alive. It is the most consequential cable exchange in cricket history.
Australia v England
1933-02-23
In the fifth Test at Sydney in February 1933, Harold Larwood broke two bones in his left foot bowling Bodyline at top pace — and Douglas Jardine kept him on the field, refusing to let him leave until Don Bradman was dismissed. Hobbling, Larwood went out to bat at No. 4 and made 98. He never played another Test. The Bodyline tour's spearhead was effectively retired by the captain who had unleashed him.
New Zealand v England
1933-04-01
On April Fool's Day 1933, Wally Hammond walked in at 56 for 1 at Eden Park and made 336 not out from the next 492 runs of England's innings. The score broke Bradman's 334 as the highest in Test cricket, took 318 minutes, and included 10 sixes — then a Test record. He still finished the two-match series with an average of 563. The match was drawn after only two days of play.
India v England
1933-12-15
On 15 December 1933 India played its first home Test, against Douglas Jardine's MCC at the Bombay Gymkhana Ground, a colonial members' club from which most Indians were excluded by membership rules. Lala Amarnath produced India's first Test century, 118 in 117 minutes on debut, and the new ground hosted only this single Test before the Brabourne Stadium took over Bombay's international cricket. England won by nine wickets; Indian Test cricket finally had a home address.
Australia v England
1933-02-28
Across the five Tests of the Bodyline series in 1932-33, Harold Larwood took 33 wickets at 19.51 — still the highest haul by an English fast bowler in an Ashes series in Australia. Including his unlikely 98 with the bat in his last Test, Larwood's tour was statistically the most dominant by a touring fast bowler since SF Barnes a quarter-century earlier.
Australia v England
1933-01-02
On 30 December 1932 at the MCG, Yorkshire's tall fast-medium bowler Bill Bowes, picked for England's Bodyline tour as Larwood's lieutenant, bowled Don Bradman first ball — a long hop that Bradman dragged on attempting to pull. Bowes finished with 1/50 in the innings; the first-ball duck is one of only seven in Bradman's Test career and has been retold in every history of the 1930s ever since.
Australia vs England
2 December 1932
The 1932-33 Bodyline series: England captain Douglas Jardine directed Harold Larwood to bowl short-pitched leg-theory at batsmen's bodies to stop Don Bradman. Nearly caused a diplomatic rupture between England and Australia; England won 4-1.
Yorkshire v Essex
1932-06-16
On 15-16 June 1932 Herbert Sutcliffe (313) and Percy Holmes (224*) put on 555 for the first wicket against Essex at Leyton, breaking the world first-class record for any wicket and adding a layer of folklore — including a scoreboard that read 554 for several minutes and a hastily reversed declaration — that has clung to the partnership ever since.
England v India
1932-06-25
On 25 June 1932 Cottari Kanakaiya Nayudu led India onto Lord's for India's first Test match, the first non-white captain of an Empire side at headquarters. Mohammad Nissar's three early wickets reduced England to 19 for 3 and India lost by only 158 runs in a result that took English critics by surprise.
England
1932-08-12
In August 1932 the MCC selectors confirmed Douglas Jardine as England's captain for the 1932-33 tour of Australia, a decision contested at the highest levels of English cricket and one that — combined with Plum Warner's appointment as tour manager — would set the conditions for the Bodyline series.
New South Wales v South Australia
1932-02-04
On 4 February 1932 Tim Wall took 10 for 36 in 12.4 overs against New South Wales at the SCG, one of only a handful of first-class instances of all ten wickets in Australia and the only one in the history of the Sheffield Shield. The figures, achieved on a damaged pitch, remain a record in the competition.
Australia v England
1932-12-02
On 2 December 1932 the Nawab of Pataudi Sr scored 102 on his Ashes debut at Sydney, the first Indian-born cricketer to make a hundred on Ashes debut. He played one more Test of the series and never another for England, his innings now a footnote inside the larger story of Bodyline.
Yorkshire v Nottinghamshire
1932-07-12
On 12 July 1932, slow left-armer Hedley Verity took 10 wickets for 10 runs at Headingley, dismissing a strong Nottinghamshire side for 67 in their second innings. The figures — 19.4 overs, 16 maidens, 10 for 10 — remain the best bowling analysis in the history of first-class cricket. Inside the spell were seven wickets in 15 deliveries, and a hat-trick. Yorkshire won by 10 wickets.
Australia v England
1932-12-03
In the first Test of the Bodyline series, with Bradman absent through illness and Australia 3 for 82, the 22-year-old Stan McCabe took on Larwood and Voce's leg-theory and counter-attacked his way to 187 not out off 233 balls. The innings included 25 fours and a string of hooks against the line of fire that briefly forced Jardine to drop the Bodyline field. Australia still lost the Test by ten wickets, but McCabe's century stands as one of the great acts of physical and moral courage in Test cricket.
England v India
1932-06-25
On 25 June 1932 India played its first Test, against England at Lord's, captained by Cottari Kanakaiya Nayudu after the Maharaja of Porbandar quietly stood aside on the morning of the match. India lost by 158 runs, but Mohammad Nissar took 5 for 93 with raw fast bowling, Amar Singh chipped in with 2/75 and 74 with the bat, and CK Nayudu stiffened the order. India had become the sixth Test-playing nation, after Australia, England, South Africa, West Indies and New Zealand.
Australia
1932-02-19
Bill O'Reilly debuted for Australia in February 1932 and was, until World War II ended his Test career, the most feared bowler in the world. A leg-spinner who bowled at near-medium pace with sharp turn and bounce, he took 144 wickets in 27 Tests at 22.59, was named Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1935, and stood at the centre of the Bradman-O'Reilly rivalry that would mark Australian dressing rooms across the decade.
Queensland v New South Wales
1931-11-06
On 6 November 1931 at the newly opened Gabba, the Indigenous Queensland fast bowler Eddie Gilbert produced a six-ball over to Don Bradman that the world's best batsman would later call the fastest he had ever faced. Gilbert clipped Bradman's cap, sent a ball over his head, knocked the bat clean out of his hands, then had him caught behind for a duck. It is one of the most discussed overs in Australian cricket and the central episode in the tragic, unfinished story of an Aboriginal bowler whose action was ruled illegal but whose pace nobody disputed.
New Zealand v England
1930-01-10
On 10 January 1930 New Zealand played their first Test match, against an MCC side at Lancaster Park, Christchurch. Tom Lowry captained the home team and Stewie Dempster batted nearly four hours for 136 in the second innings. England won by eight wickets but New Zealand's elevation to Test status was the inter-war period's quiet expansion of the international game.
England v Australia
1930-07-11
On 11 July 1930 a 21-year-old Don Bradman walked in at 1 for 1 and by stumps had scored an unbeaten 309 — still the only triple-century in a single day's Test play. He went on to 334 the next morning, then the highest individual score in Test cricket, surpassing Andy Sandham's 325. The match drew, but the innings catapulted Bradman from prodigy to phenomenon and underwrote his world-record series tally of 974 runs.
England v Australia
1930-06-27
Two weeks before his Headingley triple, Bradman walked out at Lord's and produced what he would call, decades later, the finest innings of his life: 254 from 376 balls, 25 fours, almost every stroke struck in the meat of the bat. Australia made 729 for 6 declared, levelled the series, and put English bowling on notice that the 1930 tour would be unlike anything previous.
England v Australia
1930-08-16
With the series locked at 1-1 and the Ashes on the line, Bradman walked out at The Oval and made 232 across two days. Australia won by an innings and 39 runs, regained the urn, and finished a series in which Bradman had averaged 139.14. It was the innings during which Douglas Jardine, watching from the pavilion, began thinking seriously about leg theory.
West Indies v England
1930-02-21
On 21 February 1930, in the second Test of MCC's tour of the Caribbean, West Indies beat England by 289 runs at Bourda in Georgetown — their first Test victory, three years after admission to Test status. George Headley, on debut at 20, scored 114 and 112; Clifford Roach made 209 in the first innings; Learie Constantine took 9 wickets in the match. West Indies cricket had its founding win.