At the beginning of the second century of white settlement, cricket in Australia was rotten. Although six versions of Australia met four versions of England through 1887–88, Australia no longer had a representative team worthy of the name. At the intercolonial level, none of the authorities trusted each other enough to act in concert. In Melbourne, the MCC and VCA were as friendly as Capulets and Montagues, while Sydney quaked as Dave Gregory, unable to stand his fellow selectors, quit as chairman of the panel. Even at club level, things were dire. On 30 April 1887, Turner had dismissed the once-great Albert club for 10.
Tours to England, which had created the problems, remained the only hope of income and redemption. But the colonial associations didn’t see it that way. Having ‘banned’ all tours to England until 1892, they turned their backs on Beal when they discovered he had secretly organised a venture for 1888.
Beal hoped to generate some of the 1882 spirit around Turner and Ferris, but even though this tour would be back under the players’ management, man after man declined Beal’s invitations. Giffen, Bruce and the beanpole young Victorian off-spinner Hugh Trumble opted out. Harry Moses, who had scored 297 not out in an intercolonial for NSW against Victoria during the season, stayed home to tend to his banking career. Most damagingly, Giffen, the mainstay of 1886, would not tour. His chief reason, he wrote, was neither financial nor, as had been written, that he had been denied the captaincy. Nor was it that his brother, Walter, was left out. George did not tour because ‘I did not consider we were strong enough to tackle the cricketers of the old land, with reasonable hope of success.’ He had also been worn out by his ‘gruelling of work’ in 1886. ‘I have heard all kinds of absurd reasons suggested for my withholding from the 1888 and 1890 teams, but none were more ridiculous than that I would not go unless I was elected captain. Such a thought never entered my head.’
A veteran rump of the great teams was selected: Alick Bannerman, Blackham, Boyle, Bonnor. Much would depend on McDonnell and Jones, the only batsmen near their peak. The debutants were South Australian hitter Jack Lyons, Victoria’s pair of Jacks, Worrall and Edwards, the Melbourne postal worker and leg-spinning all-rounder Harry Trott, plus Turner and Ferris. Never, said Lillywhite’s Annual, ‘did a party of cricketers set out on an extensive tour under circumstances so thoroughly calculated to discourage’. Altham notes that they ‘embarked amid a chorus of gloomy prophecy’.
The colonies refused to play them in the late summer, so they arranged three games with the English teams. Vernon’s Eleven beat them twice, Shrewsbury’s once. Turner continued to plunder wickets, but there was precious little else.
Even at sea on the SS Oceanien, things went against them. The recommended change to the lbw law had been sent to Lord’s for ratification. Horan wrote that this would advantage not only Turner and Ferris but the vital third bowler, Trott, against whom ‘many a batsman has saved his wicket by his legs or body’.
‘I remember well his expression of delight when he heard that the law was to be altered,’ Horan wrote. ‘The thought of that change was sweeter to Trott than the falling leaves of autumn, the perfumed breath of spring, or the delightful note of a thrush in his favourite walk through the gardens. I can figure him pacing the deck of the Oceanien, contemplating with pleasure the prospect before him, the good time he will have on English grounds with his leg-breaks under the new law.’
But during the voyage, Lord’s decided not to endorse the change.
‘Poor Trott!’ Horan continued. ‘How he will chafe when he reaches England and finds the law unaltered, and that confounded leg and body play in the same full swing that he so hated here.’
Beal did his best. Accompanied by his wife and mother (Lyons and Bannerman, too, were permitted to bring their wives), Beal clad the team in the lucky red, black and gold of the 1882 team, lodged them at the same hotel, and trained them at Mitcham Green. Against all forecasts the Sixth Australians started with five straight wins. Blackham, Bonnor, Trott, McDonnell and Turner made scores, and Turner and Ferris tore through county after county. They suffered a narrow loss to Lancashire before Grace (165) and Walter Read (109) tamed Turner and Ferris at Lord’s for the only time on tour. A rare Bonnor century saved the draw for Australia, and at the end of May they had, against all prognostications, as good a record as any tour before them.
In their next game, against the Players at the Oval, things started to wobble. Australia lost by ten wickets, and Jones, who had been in good form with bat and ball, felt weak and said he was ‘unable to get rid of the feeling of cold’. He played on, but in the next game he left the field with a fever. While Australia was losing heavily to Nottinghamshire, Beal called a doctor. Smallpox was diagnosed, and Jones was put up in a private house in Nottingham. Smallpox, fatal in 40 per cent of cases, had no cure. The only treatment was rest and care of the sores. Given the normal incubation period, Jones had probably caught it in Manchester or Sheffield, where there had been outbreaks.
So virulent was smallpox that if Jones’s illness had become public knowledge the team might have been quarantined and the tour cancelled. So Beal announced that Jones had rheumatic fever. Later, when Jones’s smallpox became known, Wisden still approved of Beal’s deception: ‘No risk was run, no danger was incurred, no steps were taken to which the strictest purist in morals could have objected; but, acting under full medical authority and sanction the secret of the highly contagious nature of Jones’s illness was strictly and faithfully kept.’
Meant to calm everyone, Beal’s concealment had an inadvertently opposite effect. The week Beal announced Jones’s illness, a British politician, Colonel Robert King-Harman, died. The cable back to Australia said, confusingly: ‘Obituary, King-Harman; SP Jones, Australian cricketer, rheumatic fever.’ An evening paper in Sydney reported that Jones had died.
In fact, he was improving quickly from what turned out to be a minor case of smallpox. The Bulletin reported: ‘A Sydney daily killed Sammy Jones over a week ago by cable, and now they have reluctantly brought him to life again.’ The Times reported he was ‘much better’ by 1 July. He would return to the field against Kent in August, but exhausted himself with a laboured 24 not out, and scored five runs in eight more innings. Having averaged 27 before his illness and been anointed by Wisden‘the best batsman in the side’, the unfortunate Jones ended the tour with an average of 16.
Replacements were always ready but of questionable quality; the exuberant Cambridge undergraduate Sammy Woods was called up in Jones’s place. His bowling had given the Gentlemen a sensational victory over the Players at Lord’s, with Aubrey Smith his partner, and he uttered the line of the season when, after bowling Grace, he said to the batsman: ‘I shouldn’t go, Doctor, there’s still one stump standing.’ (This quote was also attributed to Charles Kortright in 1898, when, in successive deliveries, he had a plumb lbw and an appeal for caught behind off a blatant snick turned down, and finally uprooted two of the doctor’s stumps.) Woods, who got on very well with Grace, captured him better than most when he called him, affectionately, ‘an artful old toad’.
When Australia were going well in May, Spofforth announced that he, with his pregnant wife Phillis and their son Reginald, would be emigrating to England to run Joseph Cadman’s Star Tea Company.
Would he join the Australians? Whether or not they wanted him was one thing. Whether he was up to it was a matter for hot debate. ‘Point’ in the Sydney Mail said that as the veteran Boyle was the ‘weak spot’ in the team, ‘I would like to know whether our old friend Spofforth has been asked to go. He was the backbone of former teams, and if he be judged on recent performances in Victoria, his arm does not seem to have lost any of its former cunning … Turner may fill Palmer’s place, but Spofforth’s never.’
In the same paper, ‘Cricket Gossip’ disagreed: ‘Anyone who has followed Spofforth’s career must see that his day for cricket has gone by.’ The Bulletin chimed in: ‘If Turner keeps up his present form with bat and ball, the Britishers will forget about Spofforth, who at his best was only one part demon.’
Murdoch made an appearance at a function at the Melbourne Cricket Club, giving Spofforth a farewell speech and suggesting the Australian team – or even England! – might call him up. With typical bravado, Spofforth agreed with Murdoch that he would arrive in time ‘to be of some service to the Australians’, and would consider playing against them too, ‘if England paid him the compliment of picking him’.
‘If as a member of an English eleven [I am] instrumental in beating an Australian eleven,’ he was reported as saying, ‘[I] would feel all the more proud of it for the sake of Australia.’
While Phillis gave birth to their second baby on the SS Orizaba, Spofforth exercised vigorously in case he got the call for the first Test match, at Lord’s. When he disembarked on 15 July, the English press’s speculations provided great entertainment but had little substance. He was not chosen for either country. At the end of the season, Cricket asked if Australia might have used ‘the valuable services of Spofforth’, and another Sydney Mail columnist, ‘Anglicanus’, said he would have been better than Woods, as, when he did finally turn out for the Gentlemen and his adopted county Derbyshire, Spofforth ‘bowled very finely, and showed plainly that the demoniacal right arm has by no means lost its cunning’.
But the unexpected truth was that the 1888 Australians were making a reasonable fist of their program, McDonnell leading the batting with some help from the old guard and the Turner-Ferris combination causing nearly as much terror as Jack the Ripper. ‘If figures go for anything,’ writes Altham, Turner and Ferris were ‘definitely the most successful [pair] that ever appeared together in any touring side, whether English or Australian, in the whole history of the game.’ Turner’s speed was measured at Woolwich Arsenal at 55 mph, making him, in our terms, a fast off-spinner, though it’s likely the technology underestimated him. Turner’s ‘terror’ came less from his pace than his ability to probe batsmen’s weaknesses. His workload, and Ferris’s, were phenomenal: in first-class matches on the tour Turner delivered 9702 balls for 283 wickets – 188 bowled – at 11.68. Ferris’s 8321 balls gave him 199 wickets at 14.74. These quantities have never been surpassed. Town and Country Journal said their achievements ‘stamp them as equal, and we are inclined to think superior, to any of the bowlers of the present day’, even to Lohmann, who was enjoying the first of his three 200-wicket seasons. He took 209 at 10.90.
Most importantly, as Wisden said, Turner and Ferris were ‘scrupulously and irreproachably fair’. There was not a hint of throwing or deliberately scuffing up the pitch; ‘their action was free from tricks of any kind’. The summer provided a welcome break from past controversies.
At Lord’s, Turner and Ferris were largely responsible for the lowestscoring Anglo-Australian Test in history. The summer was turning out wetter than usual, and Wisden said that while confidence in England’s batting would have been ‘almost unlimited’ on a dry wicket, the constant rains made the course of the match ‘so fluky, that victory would depend almost entirely upon success in the toss’.
English followers were in a state of high anxiety when McDonnell won the toss and batted – ‘all concerned, from batsmen, bowlers and umpires down to the merest spectators, felt the importance of the issue, and how much was at stake. We ought, however, to say that to the best of our knowledge there was little or no betting of any consequence, and certainly, with all the eagerness and keenness of feeling, there was no bitterness or acrimony on either side.’
Better behaved, more modest in their ambitions, McDonnell’s team snatched victory through some bold hitting and opportunism. Ferris was the hero, smacking 14 and 20 not out and producing match figures of 8/45. Australia’s 116 and 60 beat England’s 53 and 62, Grace’s second innings 24 being the highest score of the match. On the second, and final, day, 27 wickets fell in three hours. A huge crowd massed in front of the pavilion, said Wisden, and ‘cheered with a spontaneous and genuine heartiness that could scarcely have been exceeded if the Englishmen had made the runs instead of being badly beaten. So ended a game that will never be forgotten in cricket history, and one which practically ensured the fame of the Australian team.’
It was a great victory by an admittedly inferior team; but it ensured no one’s fame and was quickly overshadowed by the batting debacles that followed.
The talk of the second Test at the Oval was that Grace, cresting his fortieth birthday, would at last become England captain. Steel’s magic had run out and he retired to concentrate on his career at the bar. The decline of amateur cricket was such that Grace remained the only Gentlemen who merited a place in England’s strongest Eleven, and therefore assumed the captaincy by default. Ironically, after the class snobbery that had promoted Harris, Hornby and Steel ahead of him as captain, it was now another side of the same prejudice that delivered him the job. Had he been an Australian, he would have been his country’s captain since 1880. He was certainly the most popular cricketer in England and the most famous private individual. When he arrived at a match at Edgbaston that summer, the crowd chaired him around the ground before the start.
McDonnell’s Australians, in Wisden’s view, were now taken very seriously, comparing with not only England’s best at the Oval but the record of the 1882 team. ‘This game it was, more than any other, which took from the Australians their chances of rivalling the fame of the team that came over six years before. Whatever the results of the less important games had been, if the McDonnell-Beal combination could have beaten England twice out of the three times, the tour would have been regarded in Australia, and with a great deal of justice, as a triumph.’
The wicket was good, but Australia’s weak batting was exposed by Briggs’s left-arm spin, which reaped 10/57 in the game. A total of 80 was indefensible, and Abel and Barnes built a lead before Lohmann hit an extraordinary unbeaten 62 in 55 minutes with ten fours and just one single. England romped home on the second day, and Wisden commented (unfairly to Ferris but otherwise on the mark) that only three of the Australians, Turner, McDonnell and Blackham, would warrant selection in a World Eleven. Comparisons with the 1882 team were swiftly discarded.
Nottinghamshire, Gloucestershire and an Eleven of England thrashed the Australians in the next two weeks as morale slid. Before the decisive third Test, Manchester’s rain did enough to soften the wicket but not drown out the match, which was completed within six and a half hours. England’s 172 was enough for a comfortable innings victory; in the entire series Australia’s 116 at Lord’s and 100 at the Oval were the only times they attained three figures, and McDonnell’s 32 in the latter stood out like a triple-century. The weather contributed, but the state of Australian batsmanship was so dire as to renew the calls for a suspension of Test cricket.
Throughout the tour, dreadful losses were followed by magnificent wins, and the running joke was that Beal would be called up before the Jockey Club to explain the Australians’ form. They ended up with a creditable 17 wins, six draws and 14 losses, and, as Wisden said, ‘did not deserve a quarter of the contemptuous things said about them by newspapers of their own Colonies’.
McDonnell’s captaincy waxed and waned. Pardon felt his conduct ‘was by no means unanimously approved by the team or by English cricketers … and it is an open secret that but for Beal’s tact, the loyalty and level-headedness of Turner, and the unswerving obedience of Ferris, there was now and then a possibility of the same sort of muffled mutiny which in some former teams has been unpleasantly apparent. Now the tour is over, and there can be no harm in speaking all one’s mind, we may say that we think on many occasions McDonnell showed want of judgement. We do not mean in his batting, though after the marvellous Manchester performance [against Lancashire] his rashness was apparent to anyone; but in the general management of his bowling. He never seemed happy unless he had Turner on at one end and Ferris at the other … it was a Turner and Ferris trip or nothing.’ McDonnell can hardly be blamed for over-reliance on the magnificent pair, and if he only used the other bowlers to give his aces a rest, he was employing the same basic strategy as Armstrong in 1921, Bradman in 1948 and Waugh in 2001, all lionised as the captains of the greatest Ashes tours.
Giffen later wrote that ‘if Moses, Bruce and myself had been with the 1888 Eleven, when Turner and Ferris, being new to English batsmen, were so deadly, a great fight would have been made against England’s best Eleven’. That might have been true, but Giffen had prejudged the 1888 team, as he would the 1890 team, as failures. The brief glow around the 1888 tour was deceptive. Australian cricket still had some way to fall before hitting the bottom.
It was hoped that the absence of English touring teams would allow cricket in the colonies to grow again. Time would tell. In the shortterm, what grew was the resolve of cricket authorities to squabble, and of the public to shun the game.
Attendances were dismal for the eight first-class matches of 1888– 89. Only once, during the intercolonial at Melbourne, did a crowd exceed 10,000, and most days were so badly attended that official figures merely registered an adjective: ‘poor’, ‘sparse’, or ‘meagre’.
Cricket was also commencing its struggle against competing sports. A.G. Spalding brought out a popular American baseball troupe, while the Sydney Morning Herald reported on the popularity of sailing, saying, ‘many young men abandon the willow for the tiller’.
Cricket did little to help itself. Virtually broke, the VCA tried to ban the MCC from club competition when Melbourne took over the organisation of intercolonial matches. The South Melbourne, Carlton and St Kilda clubs defied the ban, and the VCA had to back down. All this did was reinforce the idea that Australian cricket administrators had no effective control.
Control was tested in another way in the 1889–90 season opener in Adelaide. Giffen, on 9, survived an lbw appeal off Hugh Trumble, but ‘in making the stroke I slipped down, and while in the act of rising again, was said to have knocked the wicket with my foot, and a bail fell off. The fieldsman at cover appealed, and Mr [Tom] Flynn, of Victoria, gave me out. I knew, however, that I had not touched the wicket, and, moreover, I had got into my head the idea that the ball was dead, and that a second appeal could not be made, so I declined to leave the crease.’
The Victorians were outraged, but Giffen stayed. Blackham exchanged strong words with him and said he would only continue the game ‘under protest’. Giffen went on to score 85 before Trumble bowled him.
That night, Blackham and Victoria’s manager, Robert Greig, sent Creswell an official letter of protest. They also wrote to Lord’s. The SACA made a counter-complaint about umpire Flynn and requested that the VCA submit umpires’ names for pre-match approval. The brawl dragged on into the winter until, ‘in my calmer moments’, Giffen ‘realised that I had acted wrongly, no one regretted my action more than I did, and I was not sorry when our last wicket fell at the end of the match with the Victorians 18 runs to the good’.
The matter was not fully resolved until late in 1890. The VCA passed its ‘Giffen’ motion: ‘if any cricketer refuses to obey the rules, and to concede to the judgement of the umpire, he might be disqualified for a particular term.’ It repudiated South Australia’s request to submit umpires’ names ahead of matches. Giffen finally asked his association to back down. In the peace-making match at the MCG in January 1890, he scored 237, took 12 wickets and won a trophy.
Intercolonial cricket barely had a pulse. South Australia had been invited for its first match in Sydney, but the players were haggling over loss of time payments. Giffen said, ‘it is not every player who can secure leave [from work] for more than a month’. For a four-day game, the players needed compensation for a nine-day trip. The SACA eventually conceded – it was pay up or have no game – but it lost £234 on the match, and their team was annihilated on a grassy SCG strip.
A lighter note was struck when a Sydney enthusiast presented two bronze shields, valued at 25 guineas, to the best bowler on each side. Fred Jarvis won South Australia’s. Giffen said the shield was ‘large enough to hide a fair proportion of the wall of an ordinarysized room … We had no end of fun in getting the gigantic trophy home. It would have been an effective protection if bush-rangers had chanced to fire upon the train … Trouble began, however, when the South Australian border was reached. Fred was informed by the business-like Customs sentry that he was importing a work of art, upon which he would have to pay 25 per cent duty. He would not pay the six guineas demanded. The shield was impounded and if that duty had been insisted upon, might have been in pound to this day; but representation of the circumstances to headquarters led to a remission of the tax.’
There were some green shoots of cricket recovery. Receipts from the intercolonial match between Victoria and NSW at the MCG were £977, more than double the 1887 figure. But it was assumed the English would not want another Australian Eleven going ‘home’ any time soon. Horan wrote: ‘It was thought when the last team returned that our cricketers would no longer follow the habits of the happy birds that change their sky and “live their lives from land to land”.’
But cricket was integral to Pax Britannica. An official England team toured South Africa, playing what would be recognised as the first Test matches involving that country. Vernon also took a team to India and Ceylon, and Parsee teams had toured England in 1886 and 1888. As Grace wrote, cricket tours ‘helped to deepen British interest in our colonies and to bind us in closer harmony with other nations … and I am disposed to think that the good fellowship born on the cricket-field has done more than is recognised to knit together the various sections of the British Empire and to advance the cause of civilisation’.
By late 1889, contact had been made between England and Harry Boyle, who would select and manage a private group of Australian players. The ‘veteran swallow cricketer’, as Horan dubbed him, invited the best cricketers. Giffen again declined because he didn’t think the team was good enough to turn a profit to justify his unpaid leave. His absence would be critical, as he was then by some distance the best cricketer in Australia. ‘Were it not for more important considerations, my desire to excel might have induced me to visit England in 1890, for at that time I was playing as well as I ever did.’
Affie Jarvis and Alick Bannerman also declined, and Moses pulled out again for employment reasons. Blackham, Turner, Ferris, Jones, Lyons and Trott would form the nucleus, backed up by NSW debutants Percie Charlton and Syd Gregory (son of Dave’s brother Ned, born in the hut alongside the SCG where Ned lived while curating the ground), Victorians Frank Walters, Hugh Trumble and Dr Jack Barrett, and Tasmania’s Kenny Burn. Bonnor, finally, was left out of a tour, despite staking his claim with 267 in a club match in Bathurst.
Boyle’s coup was to entice Murdoch out of retirement. For five years he had been vainly begging the great batsman to play for Victoria. Now, in Australia’s crisis, offered the prospect of advancing his interests in Britain, Achilles came out of exile.
One crucial factor in swaying Murdoch was the death of John Boyd Watson in June 1889. ‘At least one Australian paper,’ notes Derek Carlaw, ‘unkindly suggested that Murdoch would not have dared to return to the game had his father-in-law still been alive.’
Murdoch and Jemima sailed several weeks before the rest of the team, who left Melbourne on 14 March. Either before or during the tour, the Murdochs had decided to move permanently to Sussex.
At a farewell dinner at the Melbourne Cricket Club, Boyle spoke optimistically about the team’s chances, but already he was trying to sort out a mess over who should tour as Blackham’s deputy wicketkeeper. The NSW players, led by Turner, wanted Syd Deane, their 24-year-old gloveman who had made his debut that season. The Victorians wanted Jack Harry, 32, who had stood in once for Blackham in 1884 and occasional off-breaks. Deane travelled with the NSW players on the SS Liguria from Sydney to Melbourne, where he faced the humiliating news that he was no longer wanted.
Horan commented: ‘The Deane and Harry battle is still raging. Boyle is sending telegrams to Turner at Bathurst, Turner is sending telegrams to Boyle in Melbourne, and so far the issue is not at all satisfactory. There is no doubt whatever that Blackham is the man who should be chiefly consulted in the selection of an assistant wicketkeeper; yet the Sydney men when they picked Deane never dreamed of asking Blackham’s opinion. The veteran wicketkeeper knows well that in Melbourne alone we have many better men than Deane, better not only in wicketkeeping but in every department of the game.’
Blackham finally came up with a compromise. He told Boyle that he had heard ‘Burn, from Tasmania’, was a good wicketkeeper.
The touring players knew Burn – or thought they did. Kenny Burn, 27, a maintenance engineer with the Hobart tramways, had trialled with the 1888 Australians. Horan had pushed for his selection, but he did not make runs in the two trials. Now he rushed across Bass Strait to join the team in Melbourne, and Horan was happy.
‘At last the team has been finally chosen, and Boyle no longer dreams of telegrams, no longer sinks back in his chair with a nervous clutch at his forehead to feel for the extra furrows begotten of the recent weary time he had had. I am glad for Boyle’s sake that it is all over, for his appetite was gradually failing, while his wonted gaiety had almost completely left him. That last notion of sending for Kenny Burn I like very well … Indeed the very man (Blackham) who has now got Burn into the team was one of the very men who rejected him in 1888 … He is a capital batsman and a fine field.’
But no wicketkeeper. In Melbourne, nobody told Burn that he had been picked as Blackham’s back-up or, if he was told, he chose not to reveal his secret until they had left.
The team was strolling around Adelaide when, said Horan, ‘it was discovered that Kenny Burn had, to use his own words, “never kept wickets in his life”. This caused considerable amusement at the expense of the crack wicketkeeper [Blackham], who had solved the Deane-Harry puzzle by suggesting the inclusion of the crack Tasmanian. The mistake was the result of a curious misconception. Blackham had seen in print that “Burn” had stumped men in Tasmania, but that Burn was Kenny’s brother, and quite an inferior player [James Burn, by then 40 years old, who never played a first-class match]. However, the team was consoled by the reflection that the Tasmanian has the reputation of being a fine batsman, a fair bowler, and a good field. Extraordinarily heavy work will fall on Blackham’s shoulders, or I should say his hands, but, like the keen cricketer he is, he looks forward cheerfully to his task.’
Interestingly, even though the mix-up was discovered in Adelaide, it did not make it into the public domain until the team had arrived in England. There would have been time to recruit Harry or Deane, but clearly Boyle and Blackham preferred to let sleeping dogs lie. Deane consoled himself by going on to a successful career as a stage and film actor, appearing in more than 40 Hollywood films including the first adaptation of Treasure Island.
Sailing without their captain, their greatest cricketer and their most experienced opening batsman, the Seventh Australians seemed doomed from the start. Lyons fell off a trapeze and injured his hip. Then the Liguria collided with French and British ships while coming to anchor at Gibraltar. But these were minor compared with what was awaiting them on the cricket field.
As Australia had gone into decline, England had flourished. Lord’s had a smorgasbord of talent to pick from: Grace, Stoddart, Walter Read and Cambridge undergrad wicketkeeper Gregor McGregor from the Gentlemen, and Shrewsbury, William Gunn, Maurice Read, Ulyett, Abel, Peel, Barnes and Lohmann from the pros. Two of the greatest names of English cricket, Stanley Jackson and Archie MacLaren, would emerge from the north that summer. It was a bad time for Australia to be weak; a bad time for cricket to become one-sided. The great revelation since 1878 – that games between Australia and England were a bigger attraction than games between Englishmen – was in danger of being thoroughly unwound.
Turner and Ferris could yet redeem things as they had in 1888. Blackham was Blackham, and it was hoped and prayed that Murdoch was still Murdoch. Trott, Lyons and Jones had shown potential in 1888, Barrett had the ability to stonewall in the manner of Alick Bannerman, and Hugh Trumble, the towering lantern-jawed off-spinner, was clearly a cut above his brother Billy.
On paper the team did not appear any weaker than those of 1886 and 1888; perhaps, given Murdoch’s inclusion, it was stronger. But during practice at Chiswick Park, Blackham confided to Wisden’s Charles Pardon that ‘while he thought the side would be strong enough to beat any of the counties, the batting was not sufficiently powerful to offer much hope of defeating England on a hard wicket’.
Blackham proved, for once in his life, to be an optimist. As Pardon said, ‘When it came to actual play, however, the batting fell below even Blackham’s moderate estimate, and the contrast to the form shown in 1882 and 1884 was very marked indeed.’
The high point was the very first game, against a side in which Lord Sheffield, perhaps unkindly, had included Grace, Shrewsbury, Stoddart, Walter Read, Peel, Briggs, Lohmann and Attewell. Murdoch announced he had not missed a beat by scoring 93; Turner (6/50) and Ferris (12/88) did the rest. Such an emphatic start had never been made, even by the heroes of 1882. England was in total shock to see its best men rolled for 27 (of which Grace scored 20) and 130. Game, as it were, on.
A few days later, Turner and Ferris did the same to Warwickshire (38 and 51), the Terror taking 12 wickets to his partner’s six. However, reversal was not long in coming. A Test-strength team picked by cricket patron W.H. Laverton defeated the Australians at Westbury, home of the famous White Horse, in Wiltshire, and soon not even Murdoch could pull the tourists out of the low-scoring mire they had been bogged in since his first retirement. They became the first touring team to go through June without a win. Billy Gunn racked up 228, a record innings against an Australian touring team to that point, as the Players trounced them at Lord’s. When they eventually won matches again, it was only against non-first-class Staffordshire and Leicestershire. By 21 July, the start of the first Test at Lord’s, Australia had won two of their previous 14 games. Sheffield Park seemed a very long time ago.
The most harmful result of the team’s performances was the Test’s diminished status. Middlesex pulled Stoddart out for what it judged a more important fixture at Tonbridge against Kent. The Pall Mall Gazette reported: ‘the fact of the present Australian team having been found weaker than some of its predecessors does not, in our opinion, excuse the Middlesex executive for departing from a proper and well-established plan.’ Perhaps so, but tours by Australian Elevens were slipping behind the newly organised county championship.
For Australia, Jones was ill with what was reported as a ‘severe chill’ (and, for most of the tour, said Pardon, was ‘quite useless’). Sammy Woods declined the call-up from Cambridge, and Walters was out of form, so Kenny Burn became one of the luckier Test cricketers. Although ‘no other game was looked forward to so eagerly’, as Wisden said, anticipation for the first Test was founded more on past glories than present form. Australia would be forgiven if they could ‘make a fresh start to their trip’, and 30,279 turned up over the three days.
The match was studded with some batting highlights. Lyons reprised Massie, smashing fifty in 36 minutes – a Test record. The evergreen Ulyett’s 74 gave England a lead, overcoming the surprise bowling packet of Lyons who took five of his six career Test wickets. In Australia’s second innings Barrett (67 not out) became the first opener to carry his bat in a Test match. Set 137, England were carried home on the shoulders of W.G., who put paid to all the nonsense with 75 not out. Blackham, who had played every Australian Test match bar one, and McGregor, making his debut, did not concede a bye between them.
The tourists were commended for their fight, and Murdoch went to his favourite county, Sussex, the next day to score 158. Sussex had invited him to join them a decade earlier; now, having shown all his old style, he was prepared to sit down and talk.
By the second week of August, seriously hampered by injuries, the Australians again sent an SOS to Roley Pope. Since his cameos in 1888, Pope had remained in Edinburgh, playing occasional first-class cricket for the MCC and even representing Scotland against Canada, becoming a dual international, if somewhat differently from Midwinter. Pope had gained his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery on 1 August, then travelled south to watch Murdoch, who asked if he could play against Cambridge Past and Present. Pope did everything, none of it well. He took the gloves from Blackham, who had a sore hand, and twice dropped Edward Streatfeild early in his innings of 145. Blackham was rushed back on to replace him. As the Cambridge score piled up, Murdoch asked Pope if he could bowl.
‘Somewhat diffidently I said that I could bowl lobs a little,’ Pope reported.
‘Just the thing,’ said Murdoch, ‘I think we’ll try an over of lobs.’
‘Only one run was scored off me in the first over, for I fancy Streatfeild was looking out for some peculiarity about the lobs which was not discoverable.
‘At the end of the over I said, “What do you think, Billy? Shall I have another one?”
‘‘‘I should think so,” he replied, “why, you stuck ’em up!”
‘I went on. Eighteen runs were made off that over and at the end of it I said, “What do you think about it, Billy? Shall I –”
‘‘‘Come out of that,” he said, “you’re a fraud!”’
He then opened the innings and was bowled for a duck by Streatfeild.
The game, as a cricket contest, was quite remarkable. Cambridge Past and Present scored 389 and dismissed Australia for 218. Following on, Murdoch hit 129 and Trott 186 to get Australia to a declaration of 6/355. The university, with 185 to win in an hour and 25 minutes, ‘instead of playing carefully for a draw, went in for reckless hitting’ and nearly collapsed to a ‘well deserved’ defeat, in Pardon’s view. They hung on desperately to finish at 8/78.
That gave Australia heart for the second Test at the Oval, a match which showed how fine was the line between a successful tour and one that Wisden, among others, pronounced a complete failure.
Again the Test’s prestige was marred by county cricket, a dim reflection on the Australians. Middlesex, playing Yorkshire, requisitioned Stoddart again. When Lord Hawke heard the news, he recalled Ulyett and Peel from the Test team. Peel would dismiss Stoddart cheaply in both innings of a rained-out draw.
At the Oval, Australia played another doughty uphill game. Trott, as he would throughout his career, batted best on a rain-affected wicket, and his 39 was the heart of his team’s 92. The destroyer was Peel’s replacement, the left-armer Frank ‘Nutty’ Martin, called up by Lord Harris from the Kent ground staff. Martin’s 6/50 and 6/52 would not be overtaken as a Test bowling debut until Bob Massie’s 16 wickets at Lord’s 82 summers later. Martin’s reward was to be given just one more Test, against South Africa.
Ferris had Grace caught first ball as England stumbled to an eightrun lead on the still-sticky wicket. Australia, however, could do little better; Trott again stapled them together with 25 out of 102.
Ninety-five to win raised memories of the same ground eight years earlier. There was no Spofforth, but with Turner and Ferris this thing could surely be done. First ball, Grace sliced a cut straight to Trott, who for a decade was so good a catcher he was called a ‘strong-point’. The ball went in, and out, of his hands.
Grace might have avoided his only pair in four decades of first-class cricket, but by the time the score had reached 32 he was out, along with Shrewsbury, Gunn and Walter Read. Interest, wrote Pardon, was now ‘reaching a very acute point’. James Cranston, on debut, and Maurice Read pushed the score to a safe-looking 4/63 when Read chipped a catch to Murdoch at mid-on. This too was dropped. If not, Pardon thought, ‘Australia would in all probability have won’. Cranston and Read added another 20, then, with 12 to win and six wickets in hand, ‘there came a collapse that recalled the great match in 1882’. At 8/93 Jack Sharpe joined McGregor ‘and five maiden overs were bowled in succession, Sharpe being beaten time after time by balls from Ferris that broke back and missed the wicket’. Overwhelmed by frustration, Sharpe and McGregor decided to run on the next hit. Sharpe struck the ball to Barrett and ran. McGregor didn’t. The batsmen were virtually at the same end, the match was there for the taking, but an overanxious Barrett hurled the ball over Ferris’s head and the batsmen took the winning single. Trumble sympathised, ‘Barrett was positively broken-hearted, and for many days was in the depths of dejection.’
The match, largely forgotten now, is worth recalling in detail because it illustrates how sweeping judgements can be reduced to a moment’s luck. Had Peate connected with that ball from Boyle in 1882, there would have been no Ashes obituary, no Ashes, no ‘famous for all time’. Had Murdoch or Trott held their chances in 1890, had one or two of those breakbacks from Ferris clipped a bail instead of skimming over the top, had Barrett performed the simple task of throwing the ball accurately, the 1890 team, instead of being consigned to the lowest rank of Australian tours, would be acclaimed as heroes. That, as every cricketer knows, is cricket.
Murdoch’s fourth team had no chance to redeem themselves. The third Test was drowned. Rain also dogged the last first-class matches, and while Turner and Ferris continued to amass mind-boggling statistics, the animating spirit had gone out of the tour. The final matches were distinguished by poor batting, scant crowds and low morale. Murdoch had always been a liberal kind of leader, which worked well when he had a team of stars. Now he seemed to be dining out, or drinking out, on past glories. Factions were rife, as ever in a losing team, and Boyle and Lyons reportedly came to blows. The Bulletin said the Seventh Australians made ‘a fortune for the brewers’, and mocked their loose ethic: ‘The Australian cricketer in England, batting the day after a banquet, sees at least two balls approaching. One is dead on the wicket. He smites at the other and sees four bails flying about, two wicketkeepers looking the other way, two prostrate and two erect stumps. Then he retires to two pavilions, makes 22 excuses, and another cable about bad luck and wet wickets is dispatched. The Australians always play on a wet wicket after a banquet.’
Pardon’s summary in Wisden despaired: ‘The tour was a disappointment, and the players themselves made no attempt to minimise their failure. They fell far below their expectations, and they did not scruple to admit the fact.’
History has condemned the 1890 Australians as a quarrelsome touring group, but there were moments of levity, as Trumble recalled of a trip with Burn, a keen musician, to the Albert Hall. After the concert, Trumble asked what Burn thought of the cornet player: ‘Not b-bad,’ said Burn, who spoke with a pronounced stutter, ‘but we’ve got a b-b-bloke in Hobart t-t-town who could b-b-blow his b-b-blooming head off!’
The team was the first Australian Eleven to go through England with a losing record. Among 34 first-class matches, they won 10, lost 16 and drew eight. They played four other eleven-a-side matches, winning three and drawing one. Several of their wins were against opposition which, Pardon wrote, was ‘scarcely worth while to bring an eleven a sea voyage of fifteen thousand miles’ to play. Murdoch headed the averages for a fourth time, but in the Tests he scored 9, 19, 2 and 6, betraying a decline in his reflexes. As a captain he followed McDonnell’s example, bowling Turner and Ferris into the ground. Ferris took 186 wickets at 14.28 and Turner 179 at 14.21. Lyons, Trott, Barrett and Trumble gave glimpses of promise, but their overall performances, along with those of Jones, Charlton and Walters, paint a vivid picture of a tour that turned none of its younger men into better cricketers. Blackham was yet again a marvel, with one comical exception. At Manchester, Ferris lured Bill Attewell out of his crease; Blackham took the ball and appealed for the stumping. Umpire Farrands said, ‘Chuck it up’, denoting it was out. Attewell scampered back to his crease and said to the umpire, ‘You old crack-pot; he ain’t broke wicket.’ He was right: Blackham had forgotten to effect the stumping and Attewell was not out. After seven tours in 12 years and barely an error to show for it, Blackham’s oversight was forgiven.
Sammy Jones’s long absence from the tour, with no reported illness worse than the ‘severe chill’ that kept him out of the first Test and an abscess he had removed at St Thomas’s Hospital in November, attracted scrutiny. When he failed to take the field against the Lyric Club in a match at Barnes, the Athletic News hinted at more than just illness: ‘This young gentleman’s career all through the tour has been so erratic that I think the team would benefit not a little if he were sent home. His vagaries only tend to demoralise the others. It is hardly fair to his comrades to act as he does.’ Jones’s biographer, Max Bonnell, concludes that Jones ‘drank too much, and spent too much of his time at parties and dinners’, speculating further that Jones, who did not return to Australia until January 1891, might have required extended treatment in England for a sexually transmitted disease. The Bulletin did comment, allusively, that ‘Our boys will be boys, apparently … The genial Jones seems to visit England solely for the purpose of picking up the ailments fashionable during his stay.’ The record is silent on whether he was the first Australian Test cricketer brought down by an STD, but it wouldn’t have been the first time he carried a disease that was kept secret.
Trumble alluded to the temptations of touring life when he said, years later, having lived through the transformation into a more disciplined age: ‘It is really a case of self-denial, or avoidance of the many pleasures and entertainments that are offered, and of taking scrupulous care of oneself when off the field, so as to be always physically fit and able to do justice to one’s game and the side.’
Notwithstanding the closeness of the two Test matches, the Seventh Australians were a dismal team. In 22 Test innings since 1886, Australia’s average score was 108, and only once had they reached 200. Nine times they were out for less than 100. As Ralph Barker wrote decades later, ‘the truth must be faced that the Australian batting in this period was deplorably weak, weaker perhaps than at any other time before or since, so that interest in the matches began to wane, as interest will always wane when a contest is one-sided.’
The Australians had hoped to improve their finances by playing 10 matches in South Africa, on an invitation by the Wanderers Club, but it fell through. Plan B was a tour of India; that also fell through. Eventually they stopped for a game in Colombo, which they drew.
Not all were on the boat. Barrett stayed in England to continue his medical studies, while Murdoch signed with Sussex. He became an MCC member the next year. Pardon was complimentary: ‘It was rather a risky experiment for the greatest of all Australian batsmen to come back to first-class cricket after such a long interval, but the result proved that he had not misjudged his powers.’ Murdoch enjoyed another good decade of cricket for Sussex and Grace’s London County club, and toured South Africa as an Englishman, playing a Test as wicketkeeperbatsman in 1891–92. As captain of Sussex, he said, ‘These dear lads would eat lemon out of my hand and swear it was sugar but my old lot [the Australians] would swear that treacle was sour.’ Allan Steel said he was too soft and allowed too much ‘talking back’, but Charles Fry liked him immensely, saying Murdoch was always confident of scoring a century, regardless of whether he had scored any runs in the previous month. Another Sussex charge, Billy Newham, called Murdoch ‘a mighty man at shifting liquor’, though during matches he consumed only a sandwich and a glass of water.
Like Spofforth, Murdoch settled down as an English gentleman – still the ultimate measure of status for an Australian – but in another extraordinary twist in his extraordinary career, Murdoch would press for inclusion on the Australians’ next tour of England in 1893. For the last time, he was rebuffed.
Ferris had also played his last Test for Australia. Early in the season, W.G. had approached him with a proposal to join Gloucestershire, whose committee arranged for Ferris’s immediate qualification. Competitors smelt something fishy, Steel writing in Wisden: ‘We are told that Ferris has taken a house or cottage of some sort near Bristol in order to secure some so-called qualification for Gloucestershire, though from all accounts he himself is at present in Australia.’
Qualification rules were a sham, as riddled with hypocrisy as payments to amateurs. The next season, when Sussex asked Gloucestershire’s permission to field Murdoch, E.M. Grace replied, with a temerity that ran in the family, that Gloucestershire ‘feel bound to uphold the Rule of Residential Qualification for County Players’.
Ferris dramatically lost his bowling skills after a Test appearance alongside Murdoch for England in South Africa. He returned to Australia in the late 1890s and played three undistinguished matches before joining the British Army in the Boer War. Typhoid killed him at Durban in 1900, much experience having been crammed into his 33 years.
On 11 November, Murdoch’s 1890 Australians arrived home as they had left: leaderless. There was no suggestion of a banquet or parade; they came in like fugitives, unable to answer the question those serious about Australian cricket wanted to ask, which was how much lower it could sink.