“Tate had not the stern fibre of character that can survive in an air of high tragedy; his bent was for pastoral comedy down at Horsham.”
Neville Cardus
FRED TATE’S 35TH birthday promised to be unlike any other. This increasingly rotund county cricketer – affectionately known as “Chub” by his many friends in the game – was finally going to the big time.
An uncomplaining county off-spinner, he was one of the supporting cast in what later became known as cricket’s ‘golden age’ – the late Victorian and early Edwardian run-fest where gentleman stroke-makers were rulers of the public imagination. Tate, a little quicker through the air than most spinners, had been steadily accumulating wickets for Sussex since 1887, while the glamour boys of the team – the technically brilliant CB Fry and the sumptuously wristy and exotic Kumar Sri Ranjitsinhji, or “Ranji” – scored and scored on the batsman-friendly wickets at Hove.
Tate’s career thus far had been a good one. Not a household name, he would have been well known to true devotees of the game, the collectors of scorecards and accumulators of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. Up until now he had teased out more than a thousand batsmen, earning little financially or in plaudits for his hard work.
There had been high points, including nine wickets in an innings against Hampshire in 1891. But 1902 was different. Surpassing the expectations of others, and probably himself, Tate was consistently brilliant. By the end of the season he had taken 180 wickets at an average of just 15.71. Touring the shires and cities, this moustachioed man tormented team after team. Normally more of a containing bowler, one against whom even the best batsmen did not take liberties but could survive with a bit of watchfulness, a
wet summer was helping to turn him into an insatiable, corpulent predator. Nine wickets came for 73 runs in the first innings of Sussex’s match at Leicester in June and 15 wickets in the Middlesex match a fortnight later.
At the same time, England were playing Australia in what turned out to be one of the most absorbing Ashes series in history. The likes of Victor Trumper, Hugh Trumble, Monty Noble, Clem Hill and Warwick Armstrong made the side one of the greatest to have visited ‘the Old Country’. England had a pretty decent line-up too, with names like Fry, Ranji, brilliant medium-pacer Sydney Barnes, dashing batsman Stanley Jackson and all-rounder George Hirst at their disposal, led by the imperious Archie MacLaren.
By the time the fourth Test at Old Trafford started on 24th July – Tate’s birthday – Australia were one game up in the series with two to go. The selectors had made several changes. Out went Fry, not a success that summer, having scored only one and four in the previous Test. Barnes, later renowned as the best bowler in history, was also dropped.
Hirst, with his careful batting and accurate left-arm pace bowling, regarded then, and now, as one of the best all-rounders to have played the game, remained in the squad. In his career he took 2,739 wickets, but that July he was out of form. In the third Test, at Sheffield, which England lost, he had taken no wickets for 99.
With England requiring two victories from the last two games of the series, the selectors felt a need for change. Tate represented some fresh, albeit 35-year-old, blood. He made his way to Old Trafford with trepidation, no doubt, but a sense of excitement and possibly thoughts that his elevation, if successful, could lead to a more permanent place with England, maybe a few overseas tours to boost the funds. And, of course, at the back of his mind, he, like anyone else who plays against Australia, would like to have been remembered as the man who won, or at least helped to win, the Ashes. How cruel a game it can be.
Ranji, who had been unable to play at Sheffield, replaced his friend Fry. Somerset batsman Lionel Palairet came in for Gloucestershire’s dasher Gilbert Jessop and Surrey medium-fast bowler Bill Lockwood took Barnes’s place. The Test was scheduled for three days, as was normal in England at the time.
Captain MacLaren was not happy with the 12 players he had to choose from, particularly Tate, whom he reportedly did not rate as Test-class. So, apparently in a fit of pique and to demonstrate to the selectors the folly of their ways, he decided to omit Hirst and include the Sussex man in the starting 11. Tate became the 135th man to play for England. The Yorkshire press and public, never fond of Lancastrians like MacLaren, were furious.
On a rainy Thursday so typical of the Manchester climate, the captains tossed and Australia’s Joe Darling won. He decided to bat. The pitch, uncovered, was very wet. It did not have the drying-out dampness of a ‘sticky dog’, the type which allowed the bowler to play cruel tricks on the batsman, with leaping or scuttling deliveries making his short-lived stay at the wicket a misery. Rather it was near-sodden, deadening the ball, allowing plenty of time to play shots. But it was sure to get more difficult with a bit of sunshine and wear and tear. As the Manchester Guardian noted: “The winning of the toss, one said at the time, meant the winning of the game... It was really a great slice of luck to them to go in first on a wicket which offered no help whatsoever to the bowler.”
Luck has to be capitalised upon, though, and, in Victor Trumper, Australia had someone capable of doing so. What a joy it must have been to watch this batsman in full flow. The England bowlers were not as enamoured as, under grey skies, he and opening partner Reggie Duff scored 135 before the first wicket – that of Duff – fell. Trumper glided and drove his way to 104, reaching his century before lunch. It was an innings regarded as one of near perfection. The writer Neville Cardus, a boy at the time, remembered, probably apocryphally, being hit by one of the crisply hit strokes as he sat with his friends on the boundary, enraptured like thousands of others by the peerless opener’s display.
His team-mates were not so successful. Australia collapsed as the wicket hardened up and Bill Lockwood, working up a nice pace, took six wickets for 48 runs, having come on as third change. Left-arm spinner Wilfred Rhodes opened the attack. In those days it was normal if a pitch began soft that the slower men came on first, as they were deemed more likely to get some assistance. Apart from Trumper and Duff, Clem Hill, at three, made 65, and skipper Darling, at six, hit a fighting 51, containing five fours and two sixes. No one else made much of an impact as Australia were all out for 299, a total which still looked imposing on a pitch likely to decline in quality.
Tate, at first change, bowled 11 overs for 44 runs, a run rate lower than the rest of the attack except Lockwood. Observers complained that he had bowled a little too short, but it was still a fairly tidy start. It was especially commendable considering Tate who, like all professionals, had to sort out and pay for their own accommodation, had spent a fitful night trying to sleep in a Manchester attic. There was little else in the way of places to stay as the city thronged with excited cricket fans.
England got into a dreadful mess when they began their reply on the Thursday evening. Hugh Trumble, the tall and devilishly difficult off-spinner, opened with the slow left-armer Jack Saunders. Batting became as grim as the smoggy cityscape of Manchester itself. With the total on 12, the diminutive 44-year-old Surrey professional Bobby Abel was caught in the gigantic hands of Warwick Armstrong off Saunders’ bowling. One run later, Palairet was out. Another run added and skipper MacLaren, to the disappointment of the adoring Lancastrian fans, was bowled by Trumble. Next it was the turn of a nervous-looking Ranji, dismissed lbw for two by Trumble. Johnny Tyldesley, another Lancastrian, at least made a bit of a fight of it before he was dismissed by Saunders for 22.
The score read 44 for five and England were in desperate trouble. It was time for someone to show a bit of gumption. In Jackson and Len Braund, the jovial leg-spinning all-rounder from Somerset, they got just that. At first, the pair played ultra-cautiously, dead-batting everything away, as Trumble, Saunders and the accurate, medium-fast Noble bombarded them. They survived until close of play. On Friday Jackson and Braund returned to the crease and began to open up a bit, as gusty winds dried the residue of overnight rain in such a way as to reduce the pitch’s stickiness. Jackson, the slim Yorkshire amateur, soon looked imperious, second only in quality in that match to Trumper himself. Braund contributed a valiant 65 off 165 balls, including nine fours. By the time the pair were separated, when Braund was bowled by Noble, they had advanced the total to 185.
Jackson, running out of partners, went on the attack. At number 11 came the new man, Tate of Sussex. He had never been regarded as a batsman but he could hold an end up and even hit a few. Remain at the crease he did, as he and Jackson put on 27 for the last wicket. Jackson was last out for 128 off 255 balls, including 16 fours. They returned to an ovation. Tate, five not out, was happy with his efforts so far.
The team had scored 262, conceding a lead of 37 to the Australians. The visitors were still favourites, but not by much. The weather was still changeable on that Friday afternoon as Australia went in to bat again and, in an enthralling couple of hours, Manchester became the scene of mayhem and mishap. This time England opened their attack with Lockwood and Braund. Lockwood dismissed Trumper for four, Hill for a duck and Duff for three. The score was 10 for three and England had an excellent chance of taking the game.
In Hollywood films, sporting contests come down to one moment when the protagonist is under the most pressure. Almost without fail they succeed, modestly accepting the acclaim of the masses, entering legend. The chance comes to very few people. Fred Tate, on only his second day in Test cricket, was one.
Captain Joe Darling, a belligerent left-hander, decided the best way to regain the initiative was to take the attack to the England bowlers. Syd Gregory, a right-hander, joined him at the crease. During an over from Braund, Gregory hit a single to give Darling the strike. MacLaren then made a decision for which he has been damned for more than a century.
Palairet, a Somerset team-mate of Braund, had been fielding at deep square leg to his bowling, his specialist spot down at Taunton. Rather than asking him to cross the entire ground to assume the same position he was in for Gregory when Darling was facing, MacLaren decided to move Tate out to the boundary. It hardly seemed worth making him traipse a hundred yards or so for the last ball of the over. So Tate, instead, trotted towards deep square leg. For Sussex, though, Tate, with no throwing arm to speak of, always fielded at slip or in the covers.
The field settled, Braund came in to bowl. He let go of a leg-break which spun in to Darling. Still only on 17, Darling played a hoick-sweep, sending the ball travelling through the air towards Tate. It seemed to sway this way and that, the pressure of the situation making the task he was about to attempt all the harder. Tate watched as the ball started to descend, buffeted by the cool breeze. He opened his hands, hoping he could do his bit for the team and return happily to slip, where a dropped catch is more forgivable and less humiliating. The crowd watched too. Tate’s hands were all wrong. Down came the ball. Towards his hands. Would he take the catch? Surely he must. He had to.
Then it happened. Tate tried to grab the ball with his left hand – and dropped it. The most famous fielding error in cricketing history played out in front of thousands of shocked Mancunians. They shook their heads, probably wondering if George Hirst would have held it, whether even they themselves would have held it. It was an abject moment, no doubt, but the full significance was not yet known. After all, the pitch was difficult and Australia were three down for next to nothing. Anything could still happen.
Tate returned to slip to ponder his failure. His sadness and embarrassment turned to horror, as Darling and Gregory pushed on. They put on a partnership of 54. At least Tate made some amends when he dismissed Gregory lbw for 24, a good first Test wicket. The enterprising Darling continued, finally going for 37, ironically caught by Palairet, the fielder who had been eminently more qualified than Tate to take him in the outfield earlier on. Rhodes, then but a youngster, was the bowler.
In the context of the match Darling’s was a supreme captain’s innings. Apart from his and Gregory’s efforts, the highest score by any batsman was four. Australia finished the Friday night on a still-parlous 85 for eight. It could have been even better for England, had it not been for Tate. Wisden reported: “If the catch had been held it is quite likely, as Lockwood was bowling in such wonderful form, that the Australians would have been out for a total of 50 or 60.”
Early on Saturday morning it rained solidly for five hours. When the players took the field just before midday, Australia’s tail, like most of the top order, showed little resistance. Tate quickly gained his second wicket: Trumble lbw for four. Rhodes snaffled Saunders for a duck to leave the visitors all out for 86, a lead of just 123. Tate’s figures – two for seven off five overs – were rather impressive, and he took the catch at slip to give the sensational Lockwood the fourth of his five wickets in the innings – and tenth of the match.
Requiring only 124 to win, the 20,000-strong crowd and the press now had England as favourites to square the Ashes with one match, at the Oval, to go. But Tate’s drop had turned winning from a formality into a mere probability.
The final innings opened at 12.40pm. MacLaren, determined to lead by example, promoted himself to open with Palairet and they made a steady start. Palairet was first out with the score on 44 – 80 more to get, with nine wickets in hand. Trumble was bowling brilliantly on a pitch not deemed to be quite as lively as at some points during Australia’s collapse, and Saunders, after a few opening overs from Noble, was landing his slow left-armers – interspersed with rapid arm-balls – on the spot.
At 68 Lancashire’s Johnny Tyldesley was caught by Armstrong off Saunders for 16. Then came a baffling display from Ranji. This most fluent of players, Tate’s captain at Sussex, stuttered and stumbled. His timing and composure deserted him, to the astonishment of the crowd. However, MacLaren was the first of the pair to go, caught in the deep by Duff off Trumble for 35. The score was 72 for three and, without the doughty captain at the crease, the dressing room became more jittery, as the players contemplated Ranji’s difficulties. Still, there was no need to panic – which made MacLaren’s behaviour even harder to understand. Furious with himself, he flung his bat across the dressing room and declared he had “thrown away the match and the bloody rubber”. This showed little confidence in his team-mates. Quite simply, it was rotten leadership.
Ranji was joined by Jackson and continued to scratch around, perhaps justifying MacLaren’s concerns. It was almost a kindness when he was lbw for the second time in the match to Trumble, this time for four runs. The score read 92 for four. Surely England had to win. Abel, at five, made some pretty strokes in his 21, but he became another victim of Trumble – 97 for five.
Tate waited quietly in the pavilion, surely hoping that he would not be called upon. Jackson and Braund, the heroes of the first innings, were in, but the crowd were looking ahead fatalistically to a tight finish. The Manchester Guardian reported that it was “darkly whispered that Tate had some time or other been known to make his fifty”. The rumour spread through the pavilion, gaining optimistic momentum. Some began to ask whether: “Tate had ever made a hundred against anybody. The evidence was not forthcoming concerning the doings of our last man in. All this in the way of cheerfulness.”
The crowd became less sanguine when Jackson was unable to reproduce his first-innings brilliance, going for just seven as he played too early at Saunders, and was caught at mid-off. Braund was dismissed for three, those runs the result of a streaky edge through the slips to make it 109 for seven. Just 15 needed.
Then it started raining again, but not hard enough to force the players off. Lockwood, the bowling star, got a huge reception as he strode to the wicket. A highly strung character, he looked overcome with emotion as he was out immediately for a duck, the magnificent Trumble knocking out his leg stump.
If Tate’s drop will be remembered for as long as cricket is played, Clem Hill ought to be immortalised for more positive reasons. The England wicketkeeper, Dick Lilley, batting at number eight, should have been run out by Hill, but a rather wild return prevented this. However, he quickly gained a chance to atone. In the same over, bowled by Trumble, he achieved something wondrous. Lilley – determined to get on with things – had a hit and sent the ball skimming towards deep square leg. Unlike Darling, Lilley did not have the good fortune to find a nervous debutant waiting. Instead, Hill, who had been placed elsewhere, raced around the boundary at full pelt and held a marvellous catch, continuing for 20 yards along the turf, such was his momentum. Cardus, watching his first Test match, wrote many years later that a watching parson had called it a “sinful” piece of fielding. Lilley was out for four and England were 116 for nine. It was Tate’s turn.
Eight runs to get.
In came Tate. Rhodes, at number ten, played out an over from Trumble. Then Manchester created its own drama. A heavy shower drove the players back to the pavilion for three-quarters of an hour. Tate and Rhodes waited. The time scheduled for play was running out. Would they get back out again? If so, would they be vanquishers or villains? One can barely imagine the tension within Tate and Rhodes, a future Test opening batsman, miscast as a number ten, as they came back out. “Two fours and we have won,” some spectators shouted, as if they needed reminding.
Tate took guard and prepared to face the first ball. Desperately trying to remind himself to concentrate, and still possessing a Test batting average of infinity, he watched as Saunders ran in to bowl. The left-armer sent down a quicker delivery which moved to leg. Tate managed to get a touch on it and it raced down to fine leg. Warwick Armstrong, a big man but not yet as bulky as he would one day become, gave chase but failed to stop the ball with an out-stretched foot. Four more runs were added. England were now just a four – a single hit – away from squaring the Ashes. Victory was a tantalising distance away. Yet the Australians were glad Tate had scored a boundary rather than run three, as it meant the far superior Rhodes – who, in his career, scored just shy of 40,000 first-class runs – was off strike. Some England supporters expressed their annoyance.
Tate managed to block out the second ball of the over. Gathering all his watchfulness, he did the same to the next. All he had to do was stay in for three more balls and let Rhodes do the rest. Saunders summoned his composure and ran in again. Then it happened. He sent down a quicker, swinging ball. It kept low and skidded on, the sort of delivery which might have done for the very best.
Tate was bowled.
Australia had won one of the most superb Test matches of all time by three runs. They could scarcely believe it as they skipped and jumped and shouted at the tops of their voices in a show of emotion most unusual on an Edwardian cricket field. Tate stood, crestfallen.
In the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai, prisoner of war Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, suddenly realises that, in his zeal to get the project finished, he might have scuppered an attempt by British forces to blow up a Japanese railway bridge built using the slave labour of troops under his command. He simply stares ahead and quietly utters the line: “What have I done?” Then he dies. Sport is infinitely less serious than war, but Tate’s sense of guilt must have been unbearable. Worse still, almost as soon as the game ended, it started raining so hard that no more play would have been possible on that Saturday. The match would have been a draw if those clouds had moved just a tad quicker.
The batting of Trumper and Jackson, Lockwood and Trumble’s bowling, Hill’s catch: all are as nothing in popular memory compared with Tate’s dropped catch and his dismissal. The Manchester Test is recalled as “Tate’s” or “poor Fred’s” match. Among those more charitably disposed to the Sussex player, the blame game persisted for decades. Why did MacLaren leave George Hirst out of the team? Why did England’s batsmen fail to reach such a small target? Could the top order not have adopted an approach somewhere between prodding and slogging? Why did it not start raining ten minutes earlier? Why on earth did MacLaren move Tate, and not Palairet, to deep square leg?
Tate never played for England again. Hirst was recalled for the Oval Test and took six for 84 in the game, a glorious show of “I-told-you-so” Yorkshire defiance. Another returning player, Gilbert Jessop, stroked a sublime 104 in 75 minutes. The match was as exciting as at Old Trafford. Last man Rhodes joined fellow Tyke Hirst to take the team home by just one wicket. If only Fred had been able to do the same. The Old Trafford and Oval games represent the only time in history that all results – win, loss, draw, tie – have been possible on the last ball of two Tests in a row. But it was a ‘dead rubber’ when Hirst and Rhodes prospered, with the Ashes already lost. The recriminations over Old Trafford continued for years. Ranji, like Tate, never played for England again.
The Hirst-worshipping, ‘what-might-have-been’ tendency in Yorkshire vented its anger, with one writer proclaiming of the England selectors and MacLaren: “Ministers of religion publicly prayed that heaven would open the eyes of these misguided men... When England lost by three runs, we felt this was the clearest instance of Divine retribution since the destruction of the Cities of the Plain.”
MacLaren’s reputation as a captain suffered. Even Wisden criticised his choice of starting XI, calling the inclusion of Tate instead of Hirst “a blunder”. “The condition of the ground – very soft and slow after a lot of rain – offered some excuse for the course adopted,” it said, “but it meant playing a bowler pure and simple in preference to a first-rate all-round man, and the result proved anything but happy.”
But Warwick Armstrong, who later led possibly the best Australian team of all – the Ashes tourists of 1921 – eventually offered some consolation. In 1934, he wrote an article in the West Australian newspaper, arguing that the reporting of MacLaren’s field-placing – albeit corroborated by pretty much everyone else watching – had been inaccurate. He claimed that it was actually Braund who had asked for Tate to be placed in his alien position. Armstrong added wryly, from experience: “Onlookers do not always know what is going on in the field, and at times a captain is undeservedly blamed.”
The selectors, led by Yorkshire supremo Lord Hawke, were also castigated. Hawke reportedly chose not to include Yorkshire fast-medium bowler Schofield Haigh, a specialist in wet conditions, and instead pick Tate, to protect his own county’s chances of winning the championship. However, Tate was also reckoned to be very good in the damp, so it was hardly one of the unlikeliest ‘horses-for-courses’ selections imaginable. Anyway, it was still MacLaren who included him in the final XI. Apart from one dropped catch, Tate did little wrong. He was, after all, just a number 11 batsman.
Tate stayed loyal to his one-time leader in later years. “As a captain I only once had the great honour of playing under Mr Archie McLaren [sic],” he wrote in a letter in 1937. “That was for England in 1902 but I always adhere to the assertion that he is the finest Captain I ever played under and it would do no harm to see him again Captain England once more.” This was a peculiar sentiment, given that MacLaren was 66 years old at the time.
Tate went on: “I have not yet seen his equal. Some only think of changing bowling but he thought of changing their minds, in which he was ever a successful venture.” Darling’s mind had seemed clouded by MacLaren’s tactics, but for only one ball. He was clearer-headed thereafter.
Tate suffered more than anyone after the 1902 Old Trafford Test, starting the moment he was bowled out. Some of the crowd booed him as he walked off, as if he had committed his twin batting and fielding failures on purpose.
When he returned to the dressing room, Tate simply sat in silence and cried, as the Australians celebrated.
The ever-jovial Braund recalled trying to cheer up his fellow professional, by joking: “Go on, Fred, get upstairs and get your money – it’s only a game.” It did not work. Tate’s train journey back to his home in the mid-Sussex town of Haywards Heath was to prove a traumatic one. At the waiting room in Manchester, feeling as if everyone was watching him, he again broke down in tears.
Tate travelled down to London with Braund and, as they trundled through the Midlands, they had a conversation. Braund recounted that he had told his friend: “Cheer up, Fred, it’ll all be forgotten in a week or so.” The Sussex man reportedly replied: “It never will.” Braund then revealed that Tate, knowing his own reputation was ruined, had told him: “I’ve got a little kid at home who’ll make it up for me.”
This is the only evidence we have that these famous words were spoken. Maybe they were. Maybe they were not. But how true they became.