The
Build-Up
The first tour of Australia by an English cricket team had taken place 33 years before, in 1861–62. This was a band of professionals, mostly from Surrey, who were unafraid of seasickness—or, at least, they kept their fear unto themselves as best they could—and keen to pocket the £l50 fee together with whatever else they could make by selling bats and other goods that were in short supply in the young colony. The cricketers of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania were still far from competent enough to take on the Englishmen on even terms, and all 12 matches with the locals were against teams of 18 or even 22.
Two years after Heathfield Harman Stephenson’s 1861–62 pioneering venture, George Parr of Nottinghamshire led the second English team to Australia, having been captain of the very first English overseas tour: to North America in 1859, when the rough Atlantic crossing imposed a reluctance in many of the players ever to risk another sea voyage. Parr, the mighty hitter, triumphantly landed his men in Australia in December 1863 and set about demonstrating English superiority against often feeble opposition in Melbourne, Bendigo and Ballarat—with three weeks in New Zealand halfway through the tour—having come close to losing his life together with the lives of his precious team when their ship was in collision with another vessel soon after setting out from Sydney to Melbourne. The other vessel sank, and Parr, who for a time was frozen with horror, learned something about English phlegm as his best fast bowler, John Jackson, slept through the pandemonium, having sunk a great deal of ale at the farewell lunch in Sydney, while George Tarrant, another ferocious fast bowler (who caught boy Spofforth’s imagination), was so overcome by panic that he jumped into a lifeboat which was being lowered to save drowning passengers from the other ship.
Australia at last got sight of the monarch of the game, Dr WG Grace, then aged 25, when he accepted Melbourne Cricket Club’s invitation to take out a team in 1873–74. Recently married, WG made this an extended honeymoon, and after a couple of early losses, the Englishmen won consistently, though more easily against the local teams of 15 than 18. Grace had a fair idea of the strength—or more accurately the weakness—of Australian cricket as the two preceding English teams had found it, but by the end of the tour he was prepared to acknowledge that standards were rising. These tours were helping to establish cricket as Australia’s national summer game, and the influx of immigrants who played and the settling in Australia of top players Charlie Lawrence and Billy Caffyn, who coached widely and wisely, launched an attitude and a passion which would eventually take Australia to the pinnacle of world cricket.
WG found much to dislike during his long tour: the storms at sea, unruly Australian crowds and bad umpires who were unlikely to improve because of the shortage of first-class cricket, poor-quality pitches (‘I take upon myself the credit of having shown the Australians how to prepare a wicket’), and heat, dust and tedious, bumpy journeys in Cobb & Co. coaches.
But he had the companionship of his new wife and young brother Fred, and the comfort of an astronomical tour fee in spite of his amateur status. After going down to an innings defeat by XVIII of Victoria in the opening match, before 40,000 people over the three days, The Champion hit 126 in the next match, at Ballarat, which cheered him up no end. Then came Stawell, where the ground was in ‘deplorable condition’, one slow delivery plopping into the dust and never reaching the batsman.
Thus Anglo-Australian cricket competition crawled through its early evolution. By now the first Australian team had bravely gone to England. The 1868 combination, led by Charlie Lawrence of Surrey, Ireland, Middlesex and New South Wales, was composed otherwise of Aborigines, full-bloods from Victoria’s Western District, Dick-a-Dick, Redcap, Bullocky, Twopenny, the especially gifted Johnny Mullagh and Cuzens, and King Cole, who died in England and was buried in London’s Victoria Park and whose remains are now lost forever. It would have been asking too much for European spectators to grasp the true tribal names of these men: Jumgumjenanuke, Brimbunyah, Bullchanach, and so on. Sri Lanka’s Test cricketers of today pose just as great a pronunciation problem, overcome only in reversion to their shorter forenames on their one-day cricket costumes, which are just as garish as those worn by the 1868 Aborigines as they batted and bowled and threw boomerangs and wielded nullanullas and shivered and dreamed of home.
Ten years later, Dave Gregory led the first white Australian team to England. It was a bold—probably even madcap—undertaking, stretching beyond a year from the time the players assembled for the first of a series of matches in Australia and New Zealand, through a gruelling tour of Britain, then, somehow still managing to avoid serious injury or illness among the slim number of only a dozen players, until the final matches in the USA and Canada in the Northern autumn of 1878 and back in Australia. The empty wharf at their departure now rang with cooee calls and thunderous cheers of pride and welcome home.
At last there was a truly Australian cricket team, and from the arduous odyssey heroes had emerged: Charlie Bannerman, the slightly mysterious little batting maestro; Jack Blackham, the courageous wicketkeeper, and Harry Boyle, the artful bowler and ‘suicide’ fieldsman, Victorians both, with spade beards; and ‘Demon’ Fred Spofforth, who schemed and terrorised his way to over 750 wickets in this tour of several lands, including his own.
The inspiration behind the tour was John Conway, a visionary Victorian allrounder and journalist, who succeeded in most areas of his awesome scheme, not least in attracting most of the leading cricketers into investing a necessary £150 apiece. This was eventually rewarded with a return of over £1000, an immense sum for that time. And this was in spite of the fact that England had not been prepared to play Australia in an II-a-side match, a formula which would soon be termed a ‘Test match’.
The blue-riband match of the 1878 tour was therefore to be the early encounter with MCC—WG Grace and all—at Lord’s. Dave Gregory, with the physique and strut of a blacksmith, led his Australians to victory in one day, stunning London and taking the ‘Colonials’ a giant step nearer to full acceptance as—at least—equals.
Spofforth was the key agent of irreverence on the day of that cricketing earthquake, May 27: MCC all out for 33 and 19, the Australians 41 and 12 for 1, winners by nine wickets, 4½ playing hours after Frank Allan had sent down the opening delivery to WG. There were 13 MCC ducks in the match, and the match figures for Boyle were 9 for 17, for Spofforth 10 for 20, including a first-innings hat-trick.
The Australians came down like a wolf on a fold,
The Marylebone ‘cracks’ for a trifle were bowled.
Our Grace before dinner was very soon done,
And our Grace after dinner did not get a run.
Punch’s ironic little ditty underlined the growing suspicion that while cricket was making no noticeable progress in America, Australia might well develop into worthy man-to-man opposition for the full might of England. Some day.
There had already been a match in Australia which was rapidly becoming accepted as the first great even-sided international contest: ‘Test match’. It began, at the leafy paddock known as Melbourne Cricket Ground, on March 15, 1877, and ended on the fourth day in victory for Australia by 45 runs. Charlie Bannerman, who faced the first ball, bowled by tubby little Alfred Shaw of Nottingham, scored 165 before retiring hurt with a damaged finger, and Bedford-born Tom Kendall, slow-medium left-arm bowler, finished England off in the second innings with 7 for 55.
England’s team was tough and professional, and yet fell short of what could have been a stronger XI chosen at home from all who would then have been available. But Australia lacked Spofforth, who was the Lillee of his day. He sulked over the omission of wicketkeeper Billy Murdoch, weakening still further Gregory’s combination, which already lacked Frank Allan and Edwin Evans. Still Australia won that inaugural Test match. Then, when Spofforth took his place in the side for a second Test 12 days later, and the Englishmen had recovered their poise after a physically demanding and sometimes terrifying spell in New Zealand, James Lillywhite’s tourists won by four wickets to spare themselves total disgrace upon their return to the Mother Country.
Things were warming up. Tours were becoming reciprocal. After the 1876–77 tour, the Australians embarked on the aforementioned marathon of 1878, and as they returned to their own shores, Lord Harris’s mainly amateur (and distinctly unrepresentative) English team was about to start its Australian tour. They were soon into a match designated as a ‘Test’, at Melbourne and won for Australia by tiny Alick Bannerman’s batting (73) and Spofforth’s fierce and clever bowling (6 for 48 and 7 for 62, and Test cricket’s first hat-trick). There would have been a second Test on this tour, but a thoroughly nasty match against New South Wales, when ruffians charged onto the field, one of them assaulting Lord Harris, so disgusted His Lordship that he not only cancelled the anticipated big match but saw to it that the next Australian team, which landed in England in 1880, was cold-shouldered by some of the more influential counties. Lord Harris’s sense of hurt at Australian betting, drinking and barracking habits was an obstacle to further Anglo-Australian cricket progress.
The breakthrough came when, having been reduced to advertising for matches, and travelling to all sorts of outlying grounds in the North of England and the Midlands, the 1880 Australians were offered a full-scale Test match at The Oval, early in September, the first-ever Test match on English soil. WG Grace led off with 152, which was surpassed by one run by Murdoch when Australia followed on, and England won by five wickets, the captain, none other than Lord Harris (who scored 52), being much gratified, though honest enough to admit that Spofforth’s absence through injury had considerable bearing on the outcome.
Enter now the entrepreneurial threesome of Lillywhite (England’s first Test captain) and Nottingham professionals and partners Arthur Shrewsbury and Alfred Shaw. They took an all-professional English team, all from the North, to Australia and New Zealand, via America, in 1881–82, and returned home, after initial anxieties, with a tidy profit. And for the first time, four Test matches were played, two each at Melbourne and Sydney. Young ‘Joey’ Palmer was instrumental in winning Sydney’s first Test for Australia by taking 11 wickets with controlled spin variations at a brisk pace, following up with nine wickets, also at the SCG, a fortnight later, when Percy McDonnell pounded 147 against England, the country of his birth. Billy Midwinter, also English-born, and having played for Australia in the first two Tests of all, now represented England, a precursor of the 1993 tug-of-war over British-born and Australian-raised Martin McCague.
While England could always fall back on the claim that a team without WG—and one or two others—could never truly be considered a full England team, Australia could now point to four victories in the eight ‘grand’ or ‘Test’ matches now played. And the greatest upset so far was just around the corner.
If society in England was startled by the impudent victory of Gregory’s 1878 Australians over MCC at Lord’s, it suffered deep shock at Australia’s first Test victory in England. In two days in late August 1882, Murdoch’s men overthrew a strong England team by force of character. Spofforth took seven wickets in each innings and Hugh Massie’s audacious bat brought him 55—easily the highest score of the match—in Australia’s second innings. It had rained for two days prior to commencement, and batting was a lottery. England’s left-arm bowlers Dick Barlow and Ted Peate hurried Australia out for 63, and England then nosed ahead with 101. Massie’s brutal effort took Australia to 122, thus leaving England to make 85 for a fairly routine victory. At 51 for the loss of captain Hornby and Barlow, England were cruising. But Spofforth and his mates were still seething at Grace’s running-out of Sammy Jones when the young Australian imprudently left his crease to pat down some divots, and with Ulyett caught behind by Blackham and WG pushing up a catch to mid-off off Boyle, England began to rock. Nerves tightened, and some snapped. Twelve successive four-ball maiden overs went down, and then the collapse continued—to the bitter end. Peate slogged, Boyle hit the stumps, the talented but petrified CT Studd was left not out 0, and the ecstatic Australians were winners by seven runs—probably unaware that one spectator had gnawed right through his umbrella handle and another had dropped dead.
The Sporting Times was soon quietly publishing its mock obituary notice for English cricket … ‘the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia’ … a myth which soon became a reality as some women in Melbourne decided to put the ashes of, probably, a bail into a small terracotta urn which was presented, in a handsome velvet bag, to the lofty skipper of the next English team to tour Australia, the Honourable Ivo Bligh. One of the ladies, Florence Morphy, from Beechworth, a music-teacher, married Bligh in 1884, and became a countess in 1900 when her husband succeeded to the title of Earl of Darnley.
Anglo-Australian cricket ‘warfare’ thus now had a prize over which the two countries would agonise and wrestle ferociously into the 20th Century and beyond, the intensity growing with almost every passing series.
Bligh’s 1882–83 team, another short of full strength because of the long period of absence necessitated by sea travel, lost the opening encounter at Melbourne, but Yorkshire’s Billy Bates scored 55 and took 14 wickets, including a hat-trick, to usher England to an innings victory on the same ground, and a few days later, at a well-attended Sydney Cricket Ground, England won again, elevating Ivo Bligh, despite his modest personal contributions, to dizzy—temporary—levels of heroism, almost on a par with Nelson and Wellington.
An extra Test was arranged, and Australia spoiled everything by winning it to level the series. But ‘St Ivo’ had ‘recovered the Ashes’. This was the popular, romantic interpretation of events; and though that unpretentious urn remains under lock and key in MCC’s museum at Lord’s, its symbolism from time to time causes men to take leave of their senses.
Three Test matches were played in England in 1884, the only result going to England, by an innings at Lord’s. But the memorable match was the last, at The Oval, when Murdoch, Australia’s captain, made the first double-century in Test cricket, and his side, further propelled by centuries from McDonnell and ‘Tup’ Scott, piled up 551 runs in 9½ hours, Lord Harris giving himself and every other member of his team a bowl, including wicketkeeper Lyttelton, who could not be bothered removing his pads, and took 4 for 19 with underhand lobs. For England, Bill Scotton dragged out 90 runs in almost six hours and Walter Read thrashed a 113-minute century, furious at having been kept back to No. 10 in the order.
Colourful performances were beginning to accumulate, and England v Australia Test cricket was not yet 10 years old.
Four months later they were at it again, in the first five-Test series, staging a Test at Adelaide for the first time. It had the makings of major box-office success too, for England won the first two, only for Australia to come back with the third and fourth Tests, both at Sydney, with all to play for in the fifth Test at Melbourne. But steaming resentment felt by the 1884 Australians at the large tour fees negotiated for the 1884–85 Englishmen (by John Conway, who had arranged the historic 1878 tour) caused the team which played in the first Test to be replaced by the Victorian Cricket Association with a completely new XI for the second. By the end of the series, Australia had had four captains and used 28 players, and the whiff of argument and acrimony had spoiled the summer. Individual performances stood out. Bowlers had scooped up armfuls of wickets, often on wet surfaces, and McDonnell, Billy Barnes, Johnny Briggs, giant George Bonnor, and the ‘touch’ player from Nottingham, Arthur Shrewsbury, all made hundreds. But the continuity was missing. Even though attendances were high, Australians felt frustration at the sometime absence of star players.
Just over a year later, that frustration was not eased as news filtered in from England of the dismal showing of an under-strength Australian team, led by the hapless HJH Scott. There were squabbles within the ranks, and even Spofforth’s presence could not ward off defeat in all three Tests, England winning at Lord’s and The Oval by an innings. The batting of Shrewsbury and Grace and the bowling of Barlow, Briggs and Lohmann brought a whitewash that warmed the parlours of England.
They were kept warm that winter too as Shrewsbury’s team won both Tests, at Sydney. The first began sensationally, with England humiliated on a responsive turf by newcomers Charlie Turner and Jack Ferris (left-arm), who bowled into each other’s footmarks, as they were to do often in the future, dismissing England for 45, still their lowest Test score—if only just—over 100 years later. By the fourth innings, Australia needed 111, a figure which was to take on sinister connotations in the seasons post-Second World War. They managed only 97. The last wicket to fall was that of Spofforth, who left the Test arena forever.
The expression ‘Test match’ was still anything but universally used. These two 1886–87 matches were, in some quarters, referred to as contests between the ‘English Eleven’ and ‘Combined Eleven of New South Wales and Victoria’ or ‘Combined Australia’ when Jack Lyons and Walter Giffen were enlisted from South Australia for the second match. Here, George Lohmann waded into the Australians with 8 for 35, and just when it seemed he might do it again in the second innings, he received news of his mother’s death, and merely went through the motions while Briggs and Bates bowled Australia to another defeat.
Chaos prevailed again a year later, when two English teams sailed to Australia, one led by Lord Hawke, the other by future Hollywood actor C Aubrey Smith. They combined forces for what has since been regarded as the sole Test match of 1887–88, beating a barely representative Australian side by 126 runs after Lohmann (5 for 17) and Bobby Peel (5 for 18) had disposed of Australia, either side of a rainy weekend, for 42. At least one other match during this season of the double tour might have been adopted as a ‘Test’, but was not. Order scarcely prevailed.
The ocean’s sea-lanes were loaded with cricketers again as the two English combinations steamed for home and an Australian side, gathered on a profit-sharing basis again and led by Percy McDonnell, also headed for England for a heavy programme which included three Tests.
Turner and Ferris got through more work proportionately than any pair of bowlers before or since, surely, on that 1888 tour. Medium-pace offbreak bowler Turner took 314 wickets in all matches, Ferris 220. In the three Tests, Turner took 21 wickets, Ferris 11. Their only back-up was Sammy Woods, the Australian-born rugby footballer and boisterous allrounder, now resident in England, and they won the first Test for Australia, on yet another damp and treacherous pitch, at Lord’s, with the 40 wickets producing a mere 291 runs. Australia somehow made 61 more of them than did England.
The home side’s revenge was crushing: by an innings in two days at a packed Oval, and by a similar margin before lunch on the second day at Old Trafford—all over in 6½ hours. So much for the charm of unprotected pitches.
Two years later the Australians were back in England, led by a returning Murdoch and still finding success elusive, even though the two Test defeats of 1890 were by lesser margins: seven wickets and two. Nothing there to lift the gloom of Australia’s struggling economy, even though English cricket was inclined to look back on this time as the start of a ‘Golden Age’ which lasted until the First World War began at the end of the 1914 summer. It might even have been a source of relief to Murdoch and his sagging squad when the third Test, in Manchester, was washed out completely. Stories of drunkenness and fisticuffs in the Australian ranks had begun to circulate earlier in the tour, The Bulletin in Sydney missing no chance to capitalise on the rumours, and it was yet another cricket venture that Australians were somewhat relieved to see laid to rest.
Four years had elapsed since the previous English side had landed in Australia when the greatest figure of all, WG Grace, stepped ashore with his team in November 1891. He was back after 18 years, bigger in girth and in legend, well-paid once again, and with a capable-looking group of players. The heavily wealthy Lord Sheffield was financing the tour (he shrugged off a loss of £2000, and left £150 for the development of cricket in the colony, thus inspiring the creation of the Sheffield Shield). This time Australians were cheered by victories in Melbourne and Sydney which secured the series, the first such success for 10 years, when that celebrated Ashes-creating Test match was won at The Oval in 1882. England gained a consolation win at Adelaide, where Stoddart scored 134 before rain handicapped Australia. The home side were skilfully teased out by Briggs, who took six wickets and repeated himself in the follow-on as Australia sank by an innings. At last, a worthwhile series.
The pause for breath again lasted only a year. Then Jack Blackham and his men took off to England, a promising bunch, though the captain seemed increasingly neurotic and was starting to lose his touch behind the stumps. It was his eighth tour, and any hopes he had of retaining the Ashes were stifled by the runmaking of Shrewsbury, Gunn, Stoddart, FS Jackson and Grace and the pace of Bill Lockwood and Tom Richardson, backed by canny Briggs’s slow left-arm. An innings victory at The Oval, with draws either side, at Lord’s and Old Trafford, gave England the series, despite Harry Graham’s bright beginning with a debut century and Turner and Giffen’s persistence with the ball. Once more, Australian papers were left to speculate on all kinds of alleged misbehaviour, mostly off the field but occasionally on it.
England were well pleased, though the total sum of Test cricket in that summer of 1893 was no more than nine days, only the last of them, incredibly, being a Saturday. The Tests attracted big crowds and substantial newspaper coverage, but competed, not always successfully, with ‘local derby’ county matches and the highly-esteemed Gentlemen v Players games. Middlesex and Yorkshire were two counties which sometimes enjoyed the services of players who had declined Test invitations. International honours were cherished, but in a manner which today could be little understood by sportsmen who psyche themselves up and give every appearance of being prepared to kill for their country. Little survives of Victorian sporting standards.
What cricket now needed at its top level was a Test series on a spectacular scale, to assert the Anglo-Australian bond and to establish once and for all the primacy of Test cricket which was so slow in establishing itself.
The world had little longer to wait.