So ran the obituary notice in the Sporting Times, composed by journalist Reginald Brooks a few days after Australia had left Charles Alcock sitting on his safe with his head in his hands. Australia’s victory by seven runs in a low-scoring match (the only score of note was Australian opener Hugh Massie’s 55 in the second innings) stunned the whole of England. In the final half-hour of the match, as England chased their target in front of a crowd of 20,000, ‘one spectator dropped down dead, and another with his teeth gnawed out pieces from his umbrella handle’. Nerves were as taut in the hosts’ dressing room as England ran inexorably out of batsmen. One batsman went out to bat, ‘ashen grey’ and trembling from head to foot. He didn’t last long, another victim of the incomparable Fred Spofforth, who finished with match figures of fourteen wickets for 90 runs after taking offence at the start of the match to derogatory comments about Australians (or ‘Cornstalks’, the English nickname for colonials because their children grew fast and thin). The 6-feet-3-inch Australian, nicknamed the ‘Demon’, was carried shoulder-high from the ground at the end of the match, and later immortalised by Punch:
Well done, Cornstalks, whipt us
Fair and Square.
Was it luck that tripped us?
Was it scare?
Kangaroo land’s ‘Demon’ or our own
Want of devil, coolness, nerve, backbone?
Australia departed leaving behind an England in turmoil. Three years previously her army had been humiliated in battle by the Zulus at Isandlwana (incidentally, some of the British officers had in their trunks their ‘cricketing outfits’ at the time their camp was overrun by the Zulus), and now her cricketers had experienced the ignominy of defeat to Australia. Was the nation in irreversible decline? Something had to be done, and it was – a touring party led by the Honourable Ivo Bligh was dispatched to Australia to restore England’s prestige within weeks of the Oval defeat.
England sailed for Australia minus several of her stars, W.G. Grace, George Ulyett and Alfred Lyttelton among those missing, and there was a further setback when fast bowler Fred Morley broke several ribs when the squad’s ship collided with another vessel 350 miles from Colombo.
Upon arriving in Australia Bligh declared it his intention to ‘regain the ashes’, and he got his chance to play for something tangible following a friendly match at Sunbury in Victoria in Christmas 1882. At the post-match reception, held at the home of Sir William Clarke, a group of ladies burned either a stump or a bail (historians disagree on what exactly it was), scooped the ashes into a small terracotta urn and handed it to Bligh. Bligh clearly appreciated the jape – he later married one of the ladies – and upon winning the third match against Australia he stated that the Ashes had indeed been won back. It’s believed that the urn was formally presented to Bligh and his team at the conclusion of the Test series, by which time two labels had been pasted on. The top label read ‘The Ashes’ and underneath was, a verse from the Melbourne Punch of 1 February 1883 (probably published out of respect to the earlier London rhyme), which ran:
The urn had its own business-class ticket for its 2006 tour
When Ivo goes back with the urn, the urn;
Studds, Steel, Read and Tylecote return, return;
The welkin will ring loud,
The great crowd will feel proud,
Seeing Barlow and Bates with the urn, the urn;
And the rest coming home with the urn.
Bligh, later Earl Darnley, kept the urn as a memento in his home at Cobham Hall, presumably not just of the cricket but of the day he met his future wife, and it wasn’t until his death in 1927 that cricket’s most famous trophy found its way to the MCC. The urn has been at Lord’s ever since, housed in the museum (replicas are held aloft by winning captains at the end of each Ashes series), though in 2006 it went on a fourteen-week tour of Australian museums. The 4⅓-inch-high urn had its own business-class ticket for the 26,000-mile journey and was accompanied by three MCC minders, one of whom was Adam Chadwick, the curator of the Lord’s Museum. ‘I used to be an auctioneer so I’m used to putting prices on things that are unique,’ Chadwick told reporters when asked for how much it had been insured. ‘While we’ve settled on a seven-figure sum for the urn, if it got lost, broken or destroyed, no amount of money could fill the hole.’
In the 131 years since the Sporting Life mourned the death of English cricket, there have been 310 Ashes Test matches (up to the end of 2012) with Australia winning 123 to England’s 100. Australia have enjoyed the greatest period of unbroken dominance, a nineteen-year period between 1934 and 1953 which included Don Bradman’s Invincibles of 1948 (see chapter 46). England have had the upper hand in the last decade, but whatever the outcome of the back-to-back Ashes series in 2013 and 2014 there will be many more unforgettable matches to laud between Test cricket’s oldest protagonists. ‘The fight for the Ashes has produced more magical moments through its twisting and winding paths of fortune and anguish than any other sporting endeavour,’ wrote Gordon Ross in his 1972 book A History of Cricket. ‘Let us cherish those Australian ladies for what they did nearly ninety years ago.’