Those Who Watched and Waited
State Premiers and Governors and politicians; women in the elaborate hats and copious yet cool finery of the late 19th Century, parasols held demurely; tradesmen in their bowler hats, stetsons and straw boaters, with wing collars, waistcoats and watch-chains; homesick immigrants young and old; dreaming office clerks, warm in their jackets; opinionated men from the professions, some in top-hats; seething republicans, moustaches drooping; romantic club cricketers; pilgrims from bush outposts, dust still on their boots; schoolboys in knickerbockers or short pants and straw hats; militia men, splendid in uniform: they all filed through turnstile and members’ gate to watch the 1894–95 Test matches.
And many of those who couldn’t get to the match joined the overheated scrummages on the pavements outside newspaper offices as the progress of the Tests was posted on scoreboards in the display windows. The cheering was loud and uninhibited, the conversational exchanges high in speculation and, as always in such groups, heavy with borrowed opinion.
The clamour was just as intense at newspaper offices in England as details were rushed into edition after edition. Victoria RI, of course, had no need to join the crush. ‘The Queen evinces the keenest interest,’ stated one paper, ‘in the Anglo-Australian cricket matches which are now being proceeded with, and has all the telegrams brought to her the moment they are received. It may truly be said that her subjects share her sentiments, for no cricket matches ever played have excited so much enthusiasm.’
At peak times during the Test series business stood still—even at the Ballarat Stock Exchange, where victory and defeat sent a London-born sharebroker soaring off into Rule Britannia in ‘a tenor voice of high register’, soon to be challenged by some Australian brokers who raised the Southern Cross to flap alongside the British flag and lustily sang The Men of Australia. Then a Cornishman leapt onto a chair and hollered: ‘Look here, you! It’s all very well, you talking about Hingland and Hostralia, but where would you all be without Cornwall, eh?’ And they all burst into God Save the Queen.
Communications between the Melbourne Exchange and Ballarat were limited one afternoon to a wire which read: ‘Nothing doing; cricket mad; Stoddart out.’
To be there was everything, for there was no TV substitute, or even action close-ups in the newspapers. A Captain Lee, in command of Arawatta, even delayed her sailing from the Port of Melbourne during the second Test match so that he could witness more of the cricket in person. Hunger for news of the Tests even spread to the maritime species. When the mail steamer Arcadia berthed at Adelaide, passengers raced to the Oval to watch the stirring third Test, with many of the crew left on board making do with updates as various launches came to and fro. When Arcadia sailed, on the Saturday evening, with Australia well placed, she passed sister ship Himalaya, out of Melbourne, and flying the signal ‘How’s the cricket?’ The score was flown in reply.
‘Felix’, the former Australian batsman Tom Horan, often devoted as much space in his columns in The Australasian to the people he met at matches as to describing the matches themselves. In writing about the opening day of the final Test, at Melbourne, he noted that one friend had travelled 1300 miles to be there, another 1800. He was told by one acquaintance that ‘all the boats from Sydney are packed’. His sympathy went out to all those who had not made it to this historic match; but at least Ned Gregory was there, maker of the first Test duck in the very first Test, 18 years earlier, also at the MCG, when his brother Dave captained Australia. All must have been relieved to get inside the ground and secure a seat, for, as ‘Felix’ observed, there were ‘cabs rushing to the ground in scores, trams loaded, pedestrians making the pace hot so as not to lose the toss.
During the peak days of the Test series, spectators who failed to get a seat or a good vantage point at least had first access to the food and drink outlets. At Melbourne (‘Felix’ again), ‘the people were literally banked up round the rink, the great trees appearing to grow out of a vast bed of straw hats … the pavilion enclosure could not have held another man and given him even a glimpse of the wickets’.
As for a land riven by industrial unrest and struggling against economic depression, the man from the Argus wrote: ‘A wise government desiring to improve our credit abroad might do worse than send away thousands of photographs of the scene on the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Saturday. There appears to be an idea somewhere else that there is a depression here. To the spectator on Saturday that word had no meaning. Stoddart ought to make an excellent agent-general when he returns and looks in at the Royal Exchange and tells some of the haughty financiers of that poorly-informed institution that Australia is most prosperous, that a happier, better-spirited, better-dressed, and better-behaved crowd could not have been seen than he saw at the Melbourne ground … He should be able to tell the English people, too, that however anxious we might be to increase our exports, we fought hard to prevent “those Ashes” leaving the country; that all classes, free-traders and the other sort of people were determined to “protect” them at all costs.’
‘Felix’ found that this deciding Test match ‘stirred me strangely’ with its huge crowd awaiting the outcome of a cricket match which was for ‘the championship of the world’, played under ‘a serene sky of true Australian blue’, with a ‘delicious breeze’ to moderate the temperature. He cast his imagination further: ‘Though the old folks at home are freezing and snowbound, they are warm to boiling-point in their interest in this wonderful encounter, and I’ll wager a trifle that in India and the States the cable messages giving the results of this meeting on the beautiful Melbourne ground are waited for and read with an avidity not second to that which is shown in Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart, Launceston, Dunedin, Christchurch, or any other city, town, or hamlet in Australasia.’
‘Queen Bee’ was equally smitten by the scene at the MCG during the second Test, two months previously: ‘There was a very large muster of ladies in the reserve … their bright dresses made the scene brilliant’; but she complained of cramped accommodation, many of the female spectators having been forced to stand all day, and there was irritation at the narrowness of the promenade, which made walking difficult. ‘Muslins were much worn, both flowered and plain, trimmed with lace or ribbon. Crepons and chiffons were also greatly in favour, and most of the hats were very large, which did away with the necessity of using sunshades and parasols.’
Among the celebrities and socialites seen that day were Mrs Ivo Bligh, a Miss James ‘in a smart suit of fawn covert coating, with a pink chiffon blouse’, the Earl of Yarmouth, the President of the Legislative Council, Bishop Wandsworth of Salisbury, the Bishop of Melbourne, the South Australian Commissioner of Railways, and scores of ladies, some of whose photographs, clipped from magazines, were later stuck into AE Stoddart’s tour scrapbook.
The large hats worn by the women, as ever, prompted complaints from those behind them, whose view was interrupted, and the complaints must have been loudest in the smoking pavilion, which was usually the exclusive preserve of the men. The males may also have been a little jealous of the lunch-baskets brought along by the better-prepared ladies.
Away from the matches, interest extended into the courtroom, where, as one judge (a’Beckett) mentioned during a banquet to Stoddart’s team, frequent bulletins on the match’s progress were gravely handed up by counsel to the Supreme Court Judges in the guise of legal notes.
The spectators in the ‘public’ or ‘outer’ areas were naturally the more vocal. Their shouting seems to have been of an almost completely friendly and humorous kind, such as the cry to MacLaren as he hovered underneath a big hit towards the emerging Hill at Sydney. ‘Miss it, Archie,’ came the urgent shout, ‘and you can kiss my sister!’ The gentlemanly amateur would not have been used to being addressed by his christian name. The call, which was also addressed to Patsy Hendren on the same ground a generation later, probably preceded either MacLaren’s dropped catch from Reedman’s bat in the thrilling closing stages of the first Test or the catch which he completed shortly afterwards to end Ernie Jones’s brief innings. It was Hendren, it seems, rather than MacLaren who turned to the spectator and explained that he’d clung to the catch because he had no idea what the sister looked like.
There was much conjecture throughout the tour as to various alleged romantic associations, Stoddart the obvious prime target, several of his players by name or unsubtle innuendo. A female journalist in Sydney linked Tom Richardson to an heiress from Armidale, northern NSW: ‘but the difficulty in the way is a nice little wife in England’. Billy Brockwell, wrote the same source, ‘has paid marked attention to a fair Jewess whose sister is the wife of a famous Sydney cricketer’. All the professionals in the team apart from Brockwell and Brown, it was remarked, were married men, and Briggs seemed never to tire of talking about his little twin sons.
There was no incriminating correspondence stuck into Stoddart’s tour scrapbook, merely a note from Gwen Thomas of 20 Bayswater Road, Sydney, written in neat lettering over half-an-inch (10mm) high: Dear Mr Stoddart, I am a little English girl, and I want you very much to win this test match. I am so sorry you lost the last match. I am only eight years old, and I sit in the big stand near the Governor’s box and watch all the game. I hope you will make your usual big score. Your little wellwisher, Gwen Thomas.
‘Stoddy’ almost certainly waved in her direction when he took the field.
England and Australia had deeper feelings for each other than is the case 100 years later, but that is not to say that patriotism never showed its ugly head, provoked or otherwise. One well-meaning moderate wrote to The Bulletin: ‘One Australian characteristic—perhaps, after all, it’s only a general human characteristic-is to take a beating badly and to be over-exultant in victory … I think we have all been a little too cock-a-hoop over the Adelaide win. Let us comport ourselves with moderation in the presence of so game and modest a sportsman as Stoddart.’
‘Felix’ meanwhile was hugging himself with delight at the Anglo-Australian bond: ‘I wish they could stay with us for ever. They are the most popular team that ever came to Australia, and as for their captain, why the reception he gets whenever he comes out to bat makes me feel proud of my countrymen.’
Not all the English cricketers, or their camp followers, were as highly regarded as Stoddart. Writing in a satirical society column during one of the Sydney Test matches, a female observer flicked some acid ink at certain individuals from the Old Country: ‘At the wicket, Stoddart stands at the stumps with quite a Piccadilly manner, and an aroma of heels-together and toes-out broods over the whole team. As for the Cornstalks, they seemed all clothes. One fielder’s continuations looked like a divided skirt, whereas the visitors “filled their flannels”, as was emphatically remarked on the Members’ Stand. But some of the objects who flaunted the English colours on the lawn were scarcely a credit to their townies. All the bandy-legged remittance-men in the province, with paper dickies and frayed hems, seemed to have found enough money in their clothes to purchase a blazing party hat-band and necktie in which to totter up and down the grass-plot looking superciliously at the dem’d Australians, don’tcherknow, through raw-edged eyeglasses. One elderly derelict on our social shores even displayed a tri-color cotton handkerchief—but as he was the most broken-kneed of the lot his violent patriotism was scarcely a kindness to the dear mother country.’
Doubtless great-grandfathers of today’s ockers.
There was emphatically nothing of the snob about Stoddart. Another periodical remarked that although he was the recipient of numerous invitations from his influential Sydney friends, he ‘invariably preferred the elegant comforts, the unparalleled spaciousness, and the surrounding quietude of the Hotel Australia to all the attractions of private Sydney hospitality.’
In the solitude of his hotel room, Stoddart would have written his letters, one of them in reply to Henry James Ashmore, honorary secretary of the Aboriginal Cricket Club in Shellharbour, on the NSW south coast. Ashmore had written to ‘Mr. Sttorade Caption’ asking if the English team would play ‘a game of cricket for honor on the Sydney ground’. He said it would be ‘a curiosity for the Sydney people to see a team of us Aboriginals’, and asked how much of the gatemoney they would be permitted to keep. But even the bonus offer of a corroboree in the evening failed to persuade England’s captain to fit in such a fascinating match.
Indeed, almost from the start, it was a tour that excited such public interest that gimmicks were unnecessary. The 1894–95 Tests were a major topic of conversation in the street, in the workplace, in the classroom and doubtless even among Clancy and his shearing mates down the Lachlan and down the Cooper. Test matches between England and Australia were being confirmed as the premier events in cricket, a status which was to remain unchallenged until well beyond the Second World War.
