Love and death accompanied the Australian and English teams as they sailed south in October 1884.
Already the Australians had left Spofforth in Derbyshire, where he was courting his sweetheart Phillis Marsh Cadman, daughter of a successful merchant. Cupid was busy; aboard the SS Mirzapore, Murdoch met Jemima Watson, whose Scottish-born father John Boyd Watson, a Bendigo gold-mining magnate, was one of Australia’s richest men, with holdings in banking, real estate, rail and tramways, a steamship company, and farming. Watson also helped fund the launch of the Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney. By his death in 1889 he would be a veritable Croesus, worth possibly £2 million.
Within a few weeks, Spofforth would be engaged and Murdoch married. John Watson, unhappy about the whirlwind romance, did not give Jemima away; George Alexander did.
An England team had left Plymouth three weeks before the Australians, on the SS Orient. It was a reversion to the Shaw-Lillywhite-Shrewsbury professional model, only this time the players’ strength had overtaken the gentlemen’s. The team contained nine of a firstchoice England Eleven. Only Grace and Steel of the amateurs would have dislodged any of them. It was by common consent the most representative England side to have come to Australia.
In Adelaide, they received terrible news: Morley was dead. ‘We did not recover from the shock for a long time,’ wrote Shaw and Shrewsbury, ‘for although poor old Fred had been ailing for many months, none of us had thought when we left home that his end was so near. Everyone had some recollection of the Notts bowler, and “Poor Fred” were words that were frequently uttered, and which meant a very great deal.’
Morley had been Shaw’s partner in the famous Nottinghamshire attack, causing Australia problems on all their tours. Less exalted was his batting, which brought him just 130 more runs than his 1274 career wickets. It was said that when Morley padded up, the horse that pulled the roller at Trent Bridge knew to walk around the ground and stand between the shafts.
Waiting for the Englishmen at Port Adelaide, loitering at the dock for 24 hours, was the persuasive and persistent John Creswell. Nine months earlier he had written to Conway, who would be the Englishmen’s local agent, negotiating a Test match in Adelaide. South Australia’s performances in the intercolonial matches had been fair, and Giffen’s feats in England raised their reputation further. Creswell had thought he was getting a Test in 1882–83. Now he would not let Shaw, Shrewsbury and Lillywhite disembark from the Orient until they had signed a contract. Then he travelled to Melbourne to secure Murdoch’s and Alexander’s signatures when they docked on the Mirzapore. So far, thought Creswell, so good.
Initially there was little hint of the pending earthquake. Shaw’s men were given public welcomes by the Adelaide Mayor and other dignitaries, and after two odds matches against South Australia they sailed to Melbourne for a game against Victoria. There they learnt that the Victorians in Murdoch’s Eleven were not going to play them, and nor would the NSW members play in the following week’s game in Sydney. They claimed to be unfit after their sea journey.
Their unavailability was not unusual, as we have seen. The Elevens, when they returned from England, did not disband until after Christmas, continuing a home tour in effective competition with the intercolonials. In 1882–83, these home matches had saved their bacon. The 1884 team wanted to repeat the exercise, but the latest Englishmen had a harder commercial edge than Bligh, and the Eleven viewed them as rivals for gate money. Charles Pardon wrote in Wisden that ‘from the moment Murdoch’s team landed … it became evident they were animated by a feeling of bitter hostility towards Shaw and his party.’ Having claimed to be unfit, they announced a rival match in Sydney. Lillywhite was disappointed, writing: ‘Ill will seemed from the first uppermost with [Murdoch’s Eleven], as immediately on arriving home if they had been allowed, they would have signally spoiled our first match in Sydney. Being annoyed at this, the Victorians refused to play for their Colony against us at Melbourne, on the plea of being out of practice, although they would have commenced the same day at Sydney to do us an injury. The same feeling was also shown by Murdoch and [Alick] Bannerman in the New South Wales Match.’
England won both matches against the weakened colonies, but behind the scenes was a total breakdown of relations. One reason was that the Nottinghamshire members of the England team – Barnes, Flowers and Shrewsbury – had boycotted the Players’ match against Australia in Sheffield. There was also a falling-out between Alexander and Murdoch, on the one side, and Conway, whom they had dumped in 1880. When the Age reported that the English team did not want to play Murdoch’s Eleven, Alexander wrote to Conway asking for an explanation. Conway passed the note to Lillywhite, who did not reply.
The real issue was, of course, money. Murdoch and Alexander felt that as they were continuing as the Australian Eleven, they were entitled to the terms they had enjoyed in England: that is, half the gate. This would be unprecedented. A touring team bore much greater expenses than a home team, so the convention had always been for generosity to err on the tourists’ side. But Murdoch and Alexander considered their Eleven to still be a touring team.
England then played at Windsor, Parramatta and Grafton. Ulyett ‘fell’ out of boats in Sydney Harbour and the Clarence River, showing off his diving and swimming ability through shark-infested waters. He said he only fell into the Clarence after he had been trying to ‘bleed’ a local doctor, who pushed him away. Ulyett just avoided the propeller, then saw a shark. A teammate held a spear in case the shark went for him, and Ulyett had his knife out, but he made it safely onto the boat. On board, the doctor promised £100 in apology for pushing him off. He gave Ulyett a possum rug, but the money never eventuated.
In the game at Parramatta, Shaw had an unusual meeting. ‘Among our visitors to the ground was a detachment of harmless people, who were patients in the Parramatta Asylum. I had a long talk to a decentlydressed Englishman, who was never suspected of being one of the afflicted, the conversation turning on trade and other matters in the old country, but much to my surprise I learned afterwards that I had been talking to Thomas Cresswell, an inmate of the asylum, who is said by some to be the real Arthur Orton of the Tichborne romance.’
This was a rare light moment during what Shaw described as ‘a chapter in Anglo-Australian cricket that it is not pleasant to recall’.
Negotiations for the Test in Adelaide, and two to follow in Melbourne and Sydney, became deadlocked. Murdoch’s demand for half the gate, wrote Shaw and Shrewsbury, ‘coming from a team supposed to be composed of amateurs, and playing at home, staggered us. We replied that 30 per cent was the utmost we could afford to give. We held that it was absurd, not to say ungenerous, to expect the same sum for playing at home as would be paid to a team who had travelled thousands of miles in pursuit of their profession. Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide were the only places where we could hope to realise a substantial profit, and to give half of this profit to a team who had been making a handsome profit in England, when playing against professionals who received only £10 per man, was most unreasonable. Our offer of 30 per cent was refused, and I made a personal offer of £20 per man, which was rejected with contumely.’
Lillywhite wrote that even 30 per cent was ‘far too much when taking into consideration the pay these men (i.e. the English eleven) had when playing against you in so many of these large money-making matches’.
The England manager threatened to ‘rouse’ public opinion against the Australians, but it was happening anyway. On 22 November, the Sydney Mail noted ‘great indignation’ at the Eleven’s ‘grasping policy’.
For the first Test, Alexander said he would accept 40 per cent and give 10 to charity. Shaw rejected this. Fearing the cherished, longawaited Adelaide match would fall victim to the squabbling, Creswell offered each team a flat fee of £450 plus one-third of any profits, which the teams accepted. Shaw said, ‘We thought it very hard that we should have to submit to the demand of the Murdoch combination – for that is what the playing on equal terms amounted to – but had we not done so there would have been no match.’ Brokering the compromise was an enormous risk on Creswell’s part, and the SACA set prices at a high four shillings per seat in the stand and two shillings in the outer.
While the Englishmen prepared, the Australians were hopelessly distracted. Giffen wanted to make a success of the historic event in his home city. He, McDonnell and Blackham ‘practised assiduously for a fortnight to get into form, but none of the others took the interest they should have in the match, and some of them played without having had more than a day’s practice since they left England’.
Four days before the match, Murdoch married Jemima and practised little, if any, cricket. Spofforth, meanwhile, had only just arrived from England, and said he had an ankle injury. Aside from not having bowled for two months, he had other reasons not to play. His brother-in-law, Charles Farquhar Clive, had died a month earlier, and he wanted to go back to Cassilis, this time to comfort his widowed sister, Anna.
When Horan met him as he got off the SS Ganges in Melbourne, Spofforth revealed that he did not share the Murdoch–Alexander position on gate money. Spofforth, wrote Horan, ‘does not intend to play with the Australian Eleven against the Englishmen in Adelaide, and he regrets very much the position taken by his comrades in connexion with the now fully ventilated question of gate money. The want of tact and good management on the part of the executive of the Australian Eleven has surprised the “demon” not a little.’
An expectant South Australian government declared Friday 12 December, the opening day of the Test, a public holiday. But the high ticket prices kept the crowds away, and a disappointing 7000 showed up on what Shaw nevertheless called ‘a grand [day] for cricket’.
Any expectations of peace were quickly shot down. At the last moment, Murdoch objected to Lillywhite standing as England’s umpire. Forced to accede or abandon the match, the English backed down. ‘As it was then too late to get any thoroughly competent men from either of the two great centres of cricket,’ Shaw and Shrewsbury wrote, ‘we had to put up with two unknown men [Tom Cole and Isaac Fisher], one of whom proved by his decisions that his knowledge of the game was limited.’
The Englishmen didn’t make the umpires’ life any easier, according to the Advertiser, which said ‘the English have the irritating habit of appealing in chorus at every possible opportunity, presumably with the motive of discommoding the batsmen. The sooner this undesirable habit is corrected the better.’
The Australians were the first to suffer, Bannerman getting a bad lbw decision. The home players were not, said Shaw, ‘slow to express dissatisfaction’. Murdoch and Scott followed, and then Blackham joined McDonnell, who had made a fine start. Soon Blackham was given out lbw, but made such a commotion – enough to earn him a long holiday today – that the umpire changed his mind. ‘Then it was our turn to grumble,’ Shaw said. ‘An over or two after Blackham had been allowed to keep his place, the same umpire asked [Billy] Barnes why he had not appealed for the batsman’s dismissal in a similar way to another ball. “Why,” asked Barnes, “should you have given him out?” “Certainly,” replied the clever judge. And this was to a ball that was pitched two or three inches off the wicket.’
Blackham went on to 66, the only support for McDonnell’s 124, made out of 190 while he was at the crease, in Australia’s 243.
The next day, Creswell halved the admission and 10,000 attended. A dust storm blew up, and Boyle, Giffen and Palmer bowled over after over on the dry wicket while Cooper was again ineffective. Showers turned the wicket sticky for the third day, but Barnes made 134, Scotton 82 and England led by 126. The ‘practisers’, McDonnell, Blackham and Giffen, were the only contributors to Australia’s second innings. McDonnell looked set to become the first Test cricketer to score two centuries in a match when, on 83 and the score at 125, he called Giffen for a run. ‘I wish I were anywhere but in the middle of the ground’, said the sickened South Australian, whose indecision ran McDonnell out.
After more rain, England won by eight wickets. Shaw said ‘every member of our party felt as if he had obtained personal satisfaction for an unpleasant business.’
Nobody could have known that the Test match was the beginning of a dark age for cricket. Creswell must have been wondering what he had got himself into. His gamble had failed: gate receipts of £792 left the SACA with a loss of several hundred pounds.
This only hardened the VCA’s and the Englishmen’s resolve for the second Test: they would not let the Eleven push them around. Lillywhite offered Alexander 30 per cent of the gate for the January Test in Melbourne and a February Test in Sydney. Alexander rejected it, and Lillywhite threatened to play against a replacement team: ‘I have not the slightest doubt that both matches will pay us better than playing you at 30%.’ The local press had now swung behind the Englishmen.
Horan, who was hosting Shaw and company in Melbourne, appealed to Murdoch’s Eleven to ‘make what you can in the old country’ but in Australia ‘act a little generously towards our visitors’.
The Englishmen toured the rich Victorian gold-mining centres of Maryborough, Sandhurst (Bendigo) and Ballarat, plus the pastoral town of Benalla where local entrepreneurs funded their matches. Ulyett and Scotton won mining shares as prizes, which they auctioned off, said Shaw, for ‘a useful sum’.
When the English returned to Melbourne, eight of Murdoch’s Eleven, including the captain, were playing in the intercolonial. Murdoch made 97 for NSW, Blackham a century for Victoria. Horan played, but not Spofforth. To the Englishmen’s surprise, the Australian stars mixed amicably with them. This convinced Shaw and Shrewsbury ‘that many of the side were willing from the first to meet us in the field, but they were very badly advised by their captain and the secretary, Alexander, who, as many of our English readers will know, was wonderfully keen in the commercial department throughout the whole of the English tour’.
The Australians had overreached fatally in Adelaide. By taking £450 and scorching the SACA, they had pushed the VCA and the Englishmen together. When negotiations again stalled over the second Test, the VCA refused to underwrite a loss. Conway and Lillywhite offered £20 per man, which Alexander and Murdoch rejected. Seeing the public and VCA were backing England, Alexander and Murdoch asked for 40 per cent of net profits, which they would hand over to Melbourne charities after deducting their expenses. When this ploy was rejected, the members of the Eleven boycotted the match.
On 27 December, Horan wrote that the VCA ‘should show some backbone in this matter and take notice of these refusals. If every member of the recent Australian team disappeared from the country tomorrow, cricket would still flourish in the land. Indeed, according to their action since they came back, it would be a good thing for Australian cricket if they never played here again.’
It was an extraordinary outburst by a man who had been on two tours of England and was a good friend of the Eleven. The press, the visitors, the administrators and many Australian players were now arrayed against Murdoch and Alexander.
In addition to the members of the Eleven who boycotted the match, Midwinter said he was sick, Giffen could not get leave from the Adelaide Post Office, and Spofforth was still in Cassilis. He did, however, send a letter to an English friend stating his ‘thorough disgust’ with the Eleven.
Asked to explain why they would not play, the Victorians in the Eleven – Boyle, Blackham, Bonnor, Palmer and Scott – sent a message saying simply: ‘Because Conway is manager.’ Lillywhite said this was a ‘despicable excuse’ and a ‘ridiculous subterfuge’. It might have been true that Murdoch and Alexander didn’t like Conway, but nobody bought this as a reason. Horan said the message was ‘so feeble, frivolous and absurd that a schoolboy of 12 would hesitate to sign it’. The real reason, he said, was gate money. He launched into a defence of Conway against the objections, which were ‘of the lamest and most impotent description’. The Eleven, he wrote sarcastically, would happily play in a Conway-organised game for 50 per cent of the gate, but at 30 per cent he was suddenly a man they could not stand. He called attention to Conway’s history as a founding force in Australian Test cricket:
‘Mr John Conway was made the stalking horse, and, believing some tittle-tattle that had been carried to them by some meddling busybody, they pronounced him solely responsible for their refusal to play against the Englishmen. Poor Conway! Had it not been for him there would have been no Australian Eleven for years, for it was to his energy and judgement that we owed the existence of an Australian Eleven, and had it not been for his pertinacity some of those who were members of the first eleven and are now his bitterest enemies, would not have accompanied the team.’
The president of the VCA, Mr Justice Hartley Williams, had ‘dispersed to the winds the assertion that Mr Conway was the obstacle … This move was aptly described by his Honor as ‘drawing a red herring across the trail’. No one had been more loyal to the Australians than Mr Justice Williams. He had fought their battles at home and abroad, but he expected, as we all expected, that, having done well in England, they would on their return fight for the honour of their country, apart from all monetary considerations.’
What upset Horan most was that after the Australian Elevens had had to defend themselves against English accusations that they were mercenaries, now, at home, they were proving the accusations correct.
‘Many a time and oft have we resented what we considered the illnatured remarks of the English press when denouncing the Australians as mercenary men, and had we considered them in the right upon this occasion we should have written our pen to the stump in their defence. But they were clearly in the wrong, and it grieves us to think that those who were so ready in England to take every opportunity to twit them with being mere money grubbers will now consider that they have strong corroborative evidences in the demands they have made in their own country.’
Things got even worse when it was rumoured that Murdoch and Alexander were trying to bully some waverers into maintaining the boycott. Alexander went to print refuting this, and wondered where the rumours had come from. Horan replied: ‘If he is very desirous of knowing [who], let him ask the members of his own team. Let him ask them, and see if each one can lay his hand upon his heart and honestly say that not one of them used any expression, did anything, or caused anything to be done in any way that would tend to influence any player against the Englishmen, and keep him from playing in the combined team.’
Now worked up to outrage against his former teammates, Horan revisited the November dispute, when the Australian Eleven had talked of staging a match competing with England’s game against Victoria. Horan thought that was ‘the meanest thing ever done in the history of Australian cricket … in one breath the members of the Australian Eleven [said] they could not play for Victoria in the first match against the Englishmen because they were out of form after their long voyage. In the next breath they wired up to Sydney to arrange a match a week before the Englishmen, so that they might keep all the money out of the pockets of the latter, and so destroy their match. That indeed was a noble action, was it not?’
The VCA chose Horan to lead Australia in the Test, and banned Boyle, Palmer, Scott, McDonnell, Blackham, Bonnor, Cooper and Alexander from any matches under their jurisdiction. Horan and Sam Jones were the only Australian players at the MCG with Test experience, and five of the debutants were appearing in what would be their only Test. One, Harry Musgrove, had only ever played one first-class match – three years earlier. Musgrove, a theatre manager with a reputation for creative financial doings, would resurface in Australian cricket a decade later.
England despatched the tyros by 10 wickets. ‘Altogether,’ said Shaw, ‘the match was a very pleasant one’. The attendance of 23,000 over four days was well down on the 50,000 who had gone to watch three days of the corresponding Test two years earlier.
The strikers became outcasts. Shaw and Shrewsbury wrote: ‘Everybody we met condemned the stupid, paltry and selfish conduct of the team, and the press generally sided with us, and expressed sympathy towards us, while they were unsparing in their denunciation of the behaviour of the men who had been so well treated and had made so much money in England.’
On 3 January, Horan again let fly at his old mates: ‘That the members of the fourth Australian Eleven have since their return lost all the good opinion they gained by their splendid play in England is patent to any ordinary and impartial observer. On all sides their action as a team has been condemned in the strongest terms. And now that they act not as a team but as individuals they are pursuing exactly the same course which called forth the well-merited censure of the press … these men, who have all their time at their disposal, and could easily play, deliberately slight the association and the cricket public of the colony. The public desire to see the best team in Australia meet the Englishmen but rather than please the public these men prefer to vent their petty spite by doing all in their power to keep the pounds out of the pockets of our English professional visitors who make their living by cricket … They have done all they can to destroy the good feeling between English and Australian cricketers … They have shown no manliness, no courtesy, no spark of kindly feeling whatever to our English friends. I wonder how our men would feel if they were similarly treated in England. What would they think if W.G. Grace and the best men of England refused to meet them at Lord’s or Kennington Oval?’
Shaw’s team resumed their country odyssey. They endured an alarming voyage on rough seas from Nowra to Sydney, some players preferring the long road trip. Johnny Briggs got kicked by a horse, nearly toppling off a cliff at Fitzroy Falls, and six weeks later at Armidale his pipe stem stuck into the roof of his mouth when he fell off his bucking mount. He was unconscious for four hours and reports spread that he’d been killed. Shaw said: ‘The poor fellow was so skinned and bruised that he could not recognise his own face.’ Another time Briggs killed a venomous snake as it was about to bite him, while walking from a match to the team hotel.
Meanwhile, the Australian cricketing landscape rearranged itself. On 17 January, Boyle, Blackham, Palmer and Scott signed a letter to the Australasian detailing their objections to Conway. Softening, Horan wrote, ‘Everybody would like to see them playing again.’ Shaw, Shrewsbury and Lillywhite removed Conway as agent, as an olive branch. It was a sad end to the relationship between Conway and Murdoch, who would remain unreconciled. When Conway died in 1909, only Horan and Allan of the 1878 team went to his funeral. Horan wrote a tribute calling on the MCC to put up a memorial ‘to keep green the name and work of the dead and gone old warrior’.
On 24–27 January the English recorded a hollow victory over NSW, but none of the Eleven appeared. Murdoch did not even answer his invitation. Three weeks later, the return intercolonial was staged in Sydney. Again Murdoch stayed with his bride in Cootamundra, and the VCA’s ban still kept out Blackham, Boyle, Scott and Palmer, but there were some surprising faces for NSW. Spofforth was back, opening the batting. Alick Bannerman was 96 not out when NSW won, after Charlie had top-scored with 83 in the first innings. And Bonnor was now playing for NSW after he and McDonnell had moved north. McDonnell’s shift seems to have been genuine, as he was offered a position with the NSW Education Department, while Bonnor appears to have been trying to dodge the ban. In response, the associations imposed a four-month residential qualification period.
With the proposed third Test in Sydney a week away, the VCA appealed to the NSWCA to support its ban. The NSWCA did not, regarding it as a ‘domestic Victorian matter’, and said of its players’ refusal to play for NSW against England, ‘this committee does not consider that it comes within its province to demand any further explanation, or to take any further action with regard to such refusal’.
Lillywhite intimated that the NSW move ‘was no doubt owing to a very powerful party in Sydney secretly siding with what the Colonists had done, and outvoting those who condemned their actions’. It is quite likely that Dave Gregory, a ‘powerful party’ in NSW cricket, was squarely supportive of ‘the Colonists’.
So the NSWCA, which selected the Australian team for the Sydney Test, chose a mixed bunch: four members of the Eleven (Bannerman, Scott, Bonnor and Spofforth), four players from the second Test (Horan, Jones, Affie Jarvis and Billy Trumble), and three NSW veterans (Evans, Garrett and finally Massie, whom, for good measure, they made captain). An exciting, low-scoring Test match ensued, punctuated by a hailstorm on the first day that blanketed the ground in white, and Spofforth’s ten wickets had the final say as Australia won by six runs.
Sydney staged another Test match in mid-March, a reconciliation affair in which Palmer, McDonnell, Giffen and Blackham were brought back, to play alongside the ‘strike-breakers’ such as Horan, Garrett and Spofforth. Only Murdoch was unavailable. On financial matters, Lillywhite wrote that the Australians had ‘come to their senses’ and played for their ‘bare expenses’, ‘except Bannerman and Giffen, who charged an exorbitant price’.
The excitements were on the field, for a change. Giffen starred in England’s first innings with seven wickets, then Bonnor crashed his only Test century, 128 in 115 minutes. The English complained that Giffen and Horan bowled at the ‘spot’ created by Spofforth’s followthrough. The Demon and Palmer shared nine second-innings wickets and Australia squared the series.
If there was a feeling that peace had descended, it was cautious. The rancour that had built up over seven years was not going to dissipate in a few weeks. A Bulletin cartoon on 24 January showed the Eleven gathered under the banner of ‘Professional players who keep a sharp eye on the Gate Money’ while standing on a mat titled ‘Gentlemen Amateurs’. Another on 7 March showed an octopus of ‘£.s.d.’ dragging down the body of ‘Australian Cricket’. It mocked Murdoch as ‘the giant’ and ‘the Australian Great Man’, and welcomed his absence. ‘It’s about time that William resumed his profession as a gentleman’, it said, and ‘gave the gate-money racket a rest’. ‘We consider him a bore.’ He had ‘had his day … Billy is getting too fat’.
Yet at another point in the season, the Bulletin remembered its nationalist leanings, saying Australians ‘would never consent to be spat upon by dirty little cads whose soap-boiling or nigger-murdering grandfathers left enough money to get the cads’ fathers “ennobled” and to enable the cad … to live without working.’
By March, Lillywhite wrote that the tour had been ‘unsuccessful … financially up till now’. Little wonder. Hoping for an increased gate for a newly scheduled fifth Test match in Melbourne, he asked the VCA to lift the bans on the Victorian stars. It refused, but promised the Englishmen 100 per cent of the gate. The match was a bizarre one. It had seven umpires, due to ill-health, walk-offs and the teams’ objections. Elliott died the day before the match and was replaced by Hodges, Phillips replaced Lillywhite on the morning of the match after the latter decided to concentrate on his managerial duties, Garrett stood after tea on the third day when Hodges objected to remarks made by the Englishmen about his competence, and Lillywhite came back to stand on the last day. Allen of the Melbourne CC stood for the last two days when Phillips fell ill. Even Massie, visiting Melbourne as a spectator, had a hand at umpiring. Spofforth scored his only Test fifty, but England won by an innings, spearheaded by a Shrewsbury century and seven wickets from Ulyett.
Widespread relief greeted the end of the season. The English promoters left with a bare profit of £150 each, but gained some compensation by winning opportunities to sell sportsgoods. The Australian public had responded appropriately: the five Tests drew 98,000 spectators compared with 175,000 for the four Tests of 1882–83. This would start a decline that would soon threaten the very viability of Anglo-Australian cricket.
In mid-1885, the participants tried to play the dispute down. Shaw said it was ‘an unpleasant family jar’ more than ‘a serious international quarrel’. He wondered ‘if the cricket rivalries of England and the Colonies might not have a lamentable influence upon the more vital relations between the Mother Country and its off-shoots’. It was pointed out in the press that the cricket quarrel hadn’t stopped NSW and Victoria supplying men to Britain’s war in the Sudan.
Horan, summing up a season in which he had made a surprising and not entirely happy return to Test cricket, wrote on 25 April 1885: ‘Never in the history of Australian cricket has it fallen to the lot of cricket scribes to make a retrospect so full of unpleasantness and discord as that of the season which has just terminated. In bygone years we have had occasional dissensions, but they were usually of a mild and evanescent type. Those troubles left not even the faintest speck to tarnish the lustre of our cricketing fame. They passed away as speedily almost as the cloud shadows that flit across the turf we play upon. But in 1884–5 there came a deep and lasting shadow, which cast a universal gloom upon our manly game.’