George Giffen came home refreshed by six months’ constant play. Starting the Australian season with 205 at home to NSW, he carried South Australia to its first Sheffield Shield. Not for nothing did Adelaide parents teach their children to say at bedtime, ‘God bless Mummy and Daddy and George Giffen.’ He was in the midst of a 12-year period in which he scored one-third of SA’s runs and took fiveeighths of their wickets. He has never been matched, for that state or any other.
Billy Murdoch made a surprise reappearance, playing three times for NSW before he missed the last day’s play against Victoria in Sydney ‘for business reasons’. He would be ducking an almighty row. After umpire Jack Tooher delayed play on the third morning to allow the wicket to dry – Victoria ended up collapsing on the sticky dog – Blackham accused him of favouring the home team. Tooher threatened never to umpire again wherever Blackham was playing, and the NSW premier and NSWCA president, George Reid, weighed in, saying Victoria were ‘blue mouldy for a fight’. The VCA cajoled the Australian captain into apologising, at first without success.
As the winter drew on, Harry Moses, the NSW captain, said he would retire if Blackham did not back down. Only when it looked like the stand-off might affect the plans for the next English tour did Blackham withdraw the insinuation that Tooher was cheating, while maintaining his belief that the umpire was wrong.
The 1893 property bust had hurt cricket. The Melbourne Cricket Club was £2336 in debt after the collapse of the City of Melbourne Bank. Frank Grey Smith took out a personal overdraft from the National Bank, then approached Lord Sheffield to see if he might bring an England team to restore Melbourne’s finances. Sheffield declined, but Andrew Stoddart agreed to round up a team. In a rare show of coordination, the ACC helped plan a five-Test series. The SACA’s Creswell said three Tests would suffice, whereupon he was threatened with the cancellation of the Adelaide Test.
Adelaide was becoming a force in cricket beyond its Shield win. Aside from the Test men – the Giffens, Lyons and Affie Jarvis – it was producing a rich young crop. Ernie Jones, a wrestling, drinking, footballing former Broken Hill miner, was emerging as the fastest, if not always fairest, Australian bowler. Two teenaged left-handers from Prince Alfred College emerged: Joe Darling, the son of a parliamentarian who didn’t care much for cricket, and Clem Hill, whose father had scored the first club century on the Adelaide Oval. Both boys had scored double- and triple-centuries for their school, and were being rushed into the colonial team. Very soon they, and Jones, would be the new heroes of Australian cricket.
In the first week of November 1894, Stoddart’s team docked at Port Adelaide in the SS Ophir, soon to be the Royal yacht for Edward VII. They would contest one of the most memorable series ever played. In his biography of Stoddart, David Frith argues, ‘The 1894–95 rubber sparked off the frenzied interest which has always since surrounded Test matches between England and Australia; it saw a new dedication and application by the players involved; the Press gave the public what it wanted – detailed coverage, with comments by retired cricketing warriors; the Pall Mall gazette gave the word ‘test’ a capital ‘T’, and spent large sums telegraphing the action across the world every few minutes. The English, from their Queen down, loved it.’
Stoddart proved an instant favourite, a relief after Grace’s hauteur. Large crowds turned out in Adelaide to see the locals, spearheaded by Darling and George Giffen, beat England for the first time, and in Melbourne, where the Lancashire amateur Archie MacLaren, prematurely imperious at 22, scored 228 in his first innings on Australian soil. Ben Wardill said of Yorkshire’s beefy, song-loving Jack Brown, ‘He won’t get ten runs in five months, and had better go home.’ Brown was a bit of a character. In an up-country game, he and Johnny Briggs put a couple of spectators in flannels, stationed them in the deep, and repaired to the refreshment tent. Brown scored centuries against South Australia and NSW; later in the summer he would prove Wardill wrong most conclusively.
Cricket in Australia had come alive again. Batting had improved, both technically and with the assistance of more carefully prepared pitches. Charley Checkett was getting the most of his Adelaide Hills soil, while in Sydney Ned Gregory, Dave’s brother and Syd’s father, switched from Merri Creek to Bulli soil, which produced faster, truer bounce, and designed and built an iconic new scoreboard.
Audiences responded. For the first Test in Sydney, 62,113 turned out over five days to see one of the most remarkable matches ever played.
It certainly contained more switches of fortune than any previous Test. After Richardson dismissed Lyons, Trott and Darling, the last to his first ball in Test cricket, in the opening hour, Australia amassed 586. Giffen, ‘determined to vindicate myself ’ after criticisms that his Test record didn’t match his domestic form, had put himself through a rigorous winter training program that paid off with ‘the best innings I have ever played’. His 161 was his only Test century. ‘The Midget’ Gregory bettered him, scoring 201 and adding a record 154 for the ninth wicket with Blackham, who made his Test-highest 74. Nearly 30,000 fans contributed £103 for Gregory after two glory days for Australia.
Giffen said, ‘With 586 runs on the slate, we never for one second dreamt of losing the game.’ Yet they did. Chasing 177 on the fifth afternoon of the timeless match they cruised to 2/113, with Darling and Giffen in total command, the latter becoming the only player ever to take eight wickets and pass 200 runs in an Anglo-Australian Test match.
At the Baden Baden Hotel in Coogee that night, recounted Giffen, ‘the match seemed as good as won. All of us thought so that night save Blackham, who feared rain. I know I turned in to rest with an easy mind on the subject. When I awoke next morning and found the glorious sun streaming into my room, I was in ecstasy. But the first man I met outside was Blackham, with a face as long as a coffee-pot. The explanation of his looks came with the remark, “It has been pouring half the night, George.”’
Over in England’s quarters, Bobby Peel was also up all night, drinking to dull the pain of five teeth he’d had extracted. When he was still drunk on arrival at the SCG, Stoddart put him under a cold shower. Peel wiped himself down and said, ‘Give me the ball, Mr Stoddart, and I’ll have the buggers out before lunch.’
He did, with some help from Briggs and a wicket sticky under the hot sun. ‘Some one said the rain beat us,’ said Giffen, ‘but Blackham was nearer the mark when he rejoined, “No, it was the sun that did it.”’ Australia lost eight wickets for 53 and fell 10 runs short. Throughout the collapse, Blackham paced about the balcony muttering ‘Cruel luck’, over and over. When he was out for 2, unable to bat through the pain of a split thumb, his 17-year Test cricket career was over. The third of the four pillars of early Australian Test cricket – Murdoch, Spofforth and Giffen being the others – had fallen.
Betting, which had been combated but not eradicated, was heavy during the Test match, and MacLaren won £200 after placing £4 on England at 50/1. The Tattersall’s Club bookmakers did so well, nonetheless, that they raised a collection to reward Gregory for his innings.
One footnote to that Sydney Test would have great repercussions. When the Australians were fielding, they came in for lunch and had a wash before eating. ‘One can well imagine our surprise on entering the dining-room,’ Darling wrote many years later. ‘In those days the players dined with [NSWCA] delegates and hosts of their friends, “dead heads” who had been invited to lunch, not at the expense of the delegates, but as part of the expenses of the match – when three of us were unable to obtain seats, and had to wait until such time as these hangers-on had finished … It was not until the players took a stand and demanded that a room be set aside entirely for the two teams to dine in that these socalled legislators for the benefit of Australian cricket gave way.’
He was only a debutant, but Darling foresaw the biggest conflict in Australian cricket over the next 20 years: the fight for control between the players and the Sydney ‘dead heads’. Darling would, in time, be at its centre.
Fourteen thousand Melburnians waited for a new Australian captain to come out and toss with Stoddart on 29 December. Finally it was Giffen who emerged, on his teammates’ vote. The two teams combined for 198 runs in their first innings and 808 in the second. The strange match resolved into a duel between the captains. Stoddart stonewalled for 173, the best innings of his career – ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I had to buck up for England, home, and beauty’ – while Giffen bowled 78.2 overs and took six wickets. When the Australian players urged Giffen to take himself off, he said, like George Lohmann, ‘Yes, I think I’ll go on the other end.’
England’s 2–0 lead did not disguise their emerging problem, which was Lockwood’s utter loss of form. One of many English cricketers who have found Australia ‘a tough place to tour’, Lockwood was extremely accident-prone off the field. During the NSW match, he dived off a boat in Sydney Harbour for a swim and nearly drowned. Rescued by passing yachtsmen and revived with brandy, he then had a glass splinter embedded in his finger when Peel’s soda bottle exploded. ‘One feels that he must have been a careless fellow,’ Ralph Barker comments with nice understatement. On another occasion, some Englishmen went shooting. ‘Lockwood frightened everybody by standing in the wrong places and on one occasion firing his gun by mistake. “He is a most uncomfortable chap to be out with on this sort of expedition”, wrote Albert Ward, the Lancashire batsman, who was one of the party.’
The highly strung Lockwood could not pull himself together on the field. While Richardson recovered from a miserable start – he took 5/251 in his first two matches on tour – Lockwood was a non-event. Their contrasting fortunes highlighted their differences: Lockwood a mercurial, brittle genius, Richardson an iron horse. Lockwood had a habit, if he was being no-balled, of trying to trick the umpire by overstepping the line and pretending to bowl but holding onto the ball. ‘It was a piece of childishness,’ writes Barker, ‘quite outside the scope of the less sophisticated Richardson.’ To highlight the worthiness of the Surrey Express, Barker says of the shooting expedition: ‘An interesting sidelight on character is that Tom Richardson would not take part in the shoot, though he went with the party and acted as game-carrier. He would not spoil the atmosphere by making an issue of it with his teammates, but he hated hurting beast as well as man.’
Australia won the third and fourth Tests by unveiling a brittle genius of its own. Harry Trott’s tall, wilful, immensely strong younger brother Albert, who bowled medium-pace breakbacks, had been hammered by Giffen in Adelaide because he bowled too straight. He set up a target on a pitch that he named ‘George Giffen’, and practised cutting the ball back between the inside edge and the pads. Now he was picked to play England on the same ground, but it wasn’t his bowling that made the immediate impact. In heat that reached well above 40°C, the Australians collapsed before Albert Trott and Syd Callaway put on 81 for the last wicket. Richardson the Lionheart took 5/75, reminding Giffen of Spofforth: ‘With the broiling sun streaming on the back of his curly black hair, and the intense heat trying him severely, he bowled like a veritable demon … England has not, to my way of thinking, had so deadly a bowler in my time.’
Giffen and Callaway ran through England for 124. Stoddart had the chance to avoid trying to save the follow-on and make Australia bowl again in the heat, but sportingly said, ‘We are going to play the game and get every run we can.’
In Australia’s second innings 411, Albert Trott whacked 72 not out off the exhausted visitors. ‘While most of us were in our element,’ Giffen said, ‘the Englishmen were almost prostrated. Some of them took two or three shower-baths during the night, which, of course, was the worst thing they could have done.’
In the final act of the most astonishing all-round debut in Testcricket history, Albert came on as first change in England’s second innings, got his breakback working, and took 8/43.
He did it again in the fourth Test. Coming in at 7/119, he hit 85 not out in 120 minutes. He now had 195 runs in three Test innings and the English still hadn’t found a way to get him out. After Giffen and Turner tore through England for the win, becoming the first men to pass 100 Test wickets, the Sydney crowd waited outside the members’ gate. England’s all-rounder Bill ‘Bandbox’ Brockwell observed: ‘It is a demonstrative, ribald crowd that, especially the boy section of it, has so much to say in a way that is personal that even a big man like [Jack] Lyons won’t face it alone.’
The decisive fifth Test in Melbourne was billed as the ‘match of the century’. It started with the controversy of the decade, when Giffen and Blackham voted their third selector, Turner, out of the team in favour of Bathurst’s Tom McKibbin, who had only played five first-class matches. In light of the ensuing result, and Turner’s and McKibbin’s respective Test records, history has deemed the move a monumental blunder. When told he was dropped, Turner exclaimed to Lyons: ‘I’ll never play cricket again!’ Lyons replied: ‘It’s no use talking like that, Charlie. You’ll have to go to England if we go next year.’
Giffen said ‘there was a great deal of controversy, but on intercolonial form and with a good wicket in prospect I am sure we acted wisely.’ It’s worth assessing his and Blackham’s judgement. The weather in Melbourne was forecast to be hot and dry, the pitch hard and fast – conditions in which Turner was least effective. He had pulled out of the Adelaide Test with a late illness, which did not endear him to his colleagues. And in the month since the fourth Test in Sydney, McKibbin’s figures did outshine Turner’s: 34 wickets at 12.5 to seven at 23.5. Australia, encouraged by Albert Trott’s performances, were also looking for generational renewal. At the end of February 1895, the selection was not as wrongheaded as it seems.
More than 90,000, a record, crowded into the MCG over the five days of the big match. ‘Special trains brought human freight in hundreds from Sydney and Adelaide,’ Giffen said. The Argus reported: ‘There appears to be an idea somewhere that there is a Depression here. To the spectator on Saturday (crowd 29,123) at the MCG that word had no meaning.’
Giffen said that at the toss, Stoddart was ‘white as a sheet, and I have been told that the pallor of my own countenance matched his. It was a trying moment, for both knew that with two such strong batting sides, much depended on the toss.’
When the coin fell Giffen’s way, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that he ‘ran to the coin and Giffen, with a joyous shout and a dive down on to the coin, exclaimed, “It’s tails!”’
Giffen said he ‘felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Poor Stoddart gave me a despairing look, which said as plainly as words, “I’m afraid it’s all over, George.”’
It should have been when Australia compiled 414. But MacLaren’s 120 confirmed him as a top-shelf Test batsman and kept England in touch. In England, Grace said, ‘news was telegraphed every few minutes, awaited with extraordinary interest’. Queen Victoria was said to be following keenly. Richardson’s incredible stamina and a dust storm kept Australia’s second innings to 267; Albert Trott’s dismissals for 10 and 0 gave him a Test average of 102.50. England lost Brockwell and Stoddart early, and the rubber appeared to be Australia’s. But Jack Brown, who Ben Wardill predicted would not score a run, scored fifty in 28 minutes, another fifty in an hour and was finally dismissed for 140 in five minutes under even time. In a whirlwind, he and the watchful Albert Ward (93) stole the match and series, England coasting home by six wickets.
Giffen, as captain, bowled 31 overs and took Brockwell’s wicket. Captains who bowl are often criticised for keeping themselves on too long, or not long enough. Giffen explained: ‘I have been blamed for keeping myself on too long in that innings. I know I did not bowl well, but throughout I acted in concert with Harry Trott, and more than once, when I wanted to go off, he said, ‘No, Giff, you are bowling better than any of us, and had better stay on.’
McKibbin had little effect, which enraged Turner’s supporters. After the match, McKibbin kept the ball. Stoddart said he would trade his soul for it, but McKibbin accepted a photograph of the England captain, under Blackham’s persuasion.
‘The jubilation in English cricket circles was unbounded,’ Grace wrote, and the first five-Test series was indeed one of the greatest. The Melbourne Cricket Club made £3599 on the tour, wiping out its debts. Brown’s century was arguably the most exciting innings in a Test, and one of the greatest Ashes innings. Celebrity was reported to turn his head, however. Trying to recover from the ongoing celebrations, he tipped a bottle of beer down his sink and became a teetotaller. But he never gave up smoking, and died of a heart attack 10 years later, aged 35.
Stoddart, Ward and Brown had the series of their lives, Richardson took 32 wickets, and Peel 27. But no individual performance has ever come near Giffen’s 475 runs and 34 wickets. And for four of the Tests he was captain. The Australian public presented him with a purse of 400 sovereigns. But for Giffen there was little celebration: he had written a victory speech for the fifth Test, and having lost it, he resolved that Australian cricket would now need a captain from the younger generation.
As Lyons had discussed with Turner, Australia would be touring England in 1896. This time the invitation was issued to the Australasian Cricket Council, which took the opportunity to try to assert control over international touring.
Creswell became secretary of the ACC, which appointed Giffen, Bruce and Garrett as selectors, strangely asking them to choose the team before the main intercolonials.
Among the three, Giffen would tour, Bruce would not because of the demands of his legal profession, and Garrett’s position was most interesting. At 38, the last survivor of the first Test match in 1867–77 had revived his career as a captain and batsman for NSW. He rarely bowled anymore, but his batting had improved with age and he led NSW to the Sheffield Shield title in 1895–96. He became the public’s favourite to lead the 1896 tour – 10 years after his previous tour. The Daily Telegraph said: ‘Mr Garrett undoubtedly has the necessary qualifications, and no other available player has them to the same extent.’ Even the Age, in Melbourne, agreed that ‘Garrett would be a captain with brains, experience, and a level head’. But Garrett told the Referee’s J.C. Davis, ‘There is no probability of my going. If I thought of doing so I would not act on the selection committee.’
The trio sat on the living-room floor of Garrett’s home in Strathfield and went through the candidates. ‘The interest taken in the selection of the 1893 team,’ said Giffen, ‘contrasted with the excitement aroused in 1896…as a breeze to a tornado.’
The problem, as he and other players saw it, was the ACC’s interference. ‘I, in common with many other cricketers, cannot see what the Council really has to do with the matter. If it financed the tours, the position would be entirely different, but it did not take upon its shoulders one iota of financial responsibility; as in former years, the players had to bear the whole of what risk there was. Certainly it is not very great; still, things might go entirely wrong, and a loss ensue. This being the case, it seems to me that the players should be allowed to select the team themselves; that is to say, half a dozen or so men whose claims are indisputable should choose their companions. It is significant, that invariably when this course had been followed in former years there had been very little cavilling, whereas in 1896 the selection caused no end of heartburning.’
Under the sway of the ACC, which insisted on even representation across the colonies, five notables did not tour. The veterans Bannerman and Jarvis were overlooked. Lyons, having taken up a stockbroking career, was considered to have played too little recent first-class cricket. Turner was selected, but declined. In their Sheffield Shield encounter in Sydney, played after the touring team was chosen, Turner took 6/35 off 43.3 overs on a shirtfront pitch, the best figures of the season by anyone and, he said, his best bowling ever, while Lyons smote 46 in 25 minutes.
But none of these omissions compared with the firestorm over Albert Trott. In the most recent season, he had only scored 101 runs in eight completed innings and taken 14 wickets at 25.28. But Horan’s view that he was the best young all-rounder produced by Australia in a generation was widely shared. He appeared to have fallen victim to a quota system – Victoria had five places, including the plum, the captaincy, which had gone to, of all people, his elder brother. When Albert next saw Harry in Melbourne, he cut him dead. His next move was to emigrate to England and qualify for Middlesex; he would even represent England twice.
J.C. Davis sheeted blame to the ACC, not the selectors. ‘The Council should either entirely control these teams, or, while taking no part in the selection, merely reserve the right to see that they are representative of Australian cricket. By taking no share in the responsibilities of organisation and management it cannot in common fairness continue to appoint the selectors and manager without reference to the players. It is unbusinesslike. And, after all, the [players] are the only persons interested in the financial success of a team. Failure in this respect would entail personal loss to them.’ A decade later, Davis would be singing a different tune.
Giffen thought that if the team had been ‘chosen according to the old method’, Lyons and Albert Trott would have been taken. ‘Public feeling ran very high, Sydney people crying out for the inclusion of Turner, Melbourne urging the claims of Trott, while we in Adelaide could not realise that Lyons was no longer fit for an Australian Eleven.’
That was not the end of it, but barely the beginning. The ACC had exercised its discretion to appoint the manager, Harry Musgrove. One of the strike-breaking Test players of 1884–85, Musgrove had made a career managing theatre companies. Overcoming the players’ early suspicions, he would end up a popular and efficient manager, Giffen saying he was ‘undoubtedly the best I have ever travelled with to England’, but this judgement only came after Musgrove crossed the lines to take the players’ side against the ACC.
At the time of his appointment, the senior players were unhappy. Until 1893, the players had chosen their own manager on every tour except 1886, when, on the Melbourne-sponsored venture, Wardill went. In 1893, the ACC-imposed Cohen had been resented as a spy, the instrument of an ACC attempt to seize the players’ profits. Now Musgrove’s appointment promised a repeat of that debacle.
As a final trial, the selected Australian team played The Rest in Sydney. Victoria’s Jack Harry – an extraordinary former miner who took up bowling at 34, would occasionally switch bowling arms, and had only kept wickets twice in 12 years – had been chosen as ’keeper, but injured his knee and was replaced by NSW’s Jim ‘Mother’ Kelly. Harry protested, but gained no support from the ACC. He claimed compensation and, after rejecting an offer of £50, settled for £160, which was paid by the players, not the barely solvent ACC.
More excitingly, 18-year-old Clem Hill, who had scored 150 not out and 56 against Stoddart’s team and 206 not out against NSW in Sydney, claimed a spot by scoring 74 in the trial, which, Giffen said, proved ‘how great a mistake had been made in excluding Clem Hill from the originally chosen band’. Hill was one of nine debutants in a talented but very inexperienced side; the others were Harry Donnan, who had hit the first Sheffield Shield century four years earlier, Iredale, McKibbin and Kelly from NSW, Alf Johns from Victoria, Darling and Jones from South Australia, and the bulky all-rounder Charlie Eady from Tasmania, who later sat as a member of the Tasmanian upper house with Joe Darling. The only tourists who had been to England before were Harry Trott, Giffen, Gregory, Graham and Trumble. Graham, whose brief brilliance was fading, was most likely the subject of a piece by the journalist James Edmond before the tour, examining Musgrove’s abilities as manager. He would have to control ‘one man who has a sturdy theory that he cannot make a score unless he has had six rums, several long beers, and sundry whiskies the night before … That batsman will go through a window if interfered with in his programme. The great qualities required in a manager are discretion, a colossal thirst, and the power to settle brawls resulting from mixed drinks and jealousy.’
Taking nine debutants was criticised. Iredale, writing in J.C. Davis’s Australian Cricket Annual, defended the selection: ‘For years the older hands had kept the younger ones back, until at last the younger players had literally forced themselves into the team. The one great fact was forgotten that every man in the team had earned his place. Of how many new members of previous teams could the same thing be said?’
At the other end of the career arc, the leader of The Rest in the Sydney trial was Percy McDonnell, the hard-hitting stylist who had taken over Murdoch’s mantle as Australia’s champion batsman. He lived in Queensland now, having moved to improve his health. Within six months heart disease would claim him at just 35.