While Australian tours to England had always been the golden fleece of cricket, English tours to Australia had struggled to make money. The sheer mass of cricket that could be played over an English summer, and the consistent inability of England to send its best team to Australia, meant that Test series in Australia remained the poor relation. After all the brawling in Australia, Lord’s was in no mood for charity. For the 1907–08 tour, it asked for a £10,000 guarantee.
On 5 April 1907, McElhone wrote to the Board’s member associations requesting the funds. The SACA and QCA delegations, arriving at Young and Jacksons Hotel in Melbourne on 19 April, were surprised to find that McElhone and Bean had already cabled Lord’s agreeing to the massive guarantee. Melbourne’s representative on the Board, Edward Mitchell KC, challenged the legality of an agent, the Board, binding its principals, the associations. He said, ‘Bean then got very angry’ and betrayed a ‘childlike ignorance of business and legal affairs’ before backing down.
The MCC was coming, but would the Board have a team to set against it? Trumper played only twice during 1906–07, possibly bruised by the brawling. During the winter he would become founding treasurer of the New South Wales Rugby League, a body establishing professionalism with more success than the cricketers. Of the NSWCA, he said, ‘I won’t crawl to them, especially as their object seems to be to heap every indignity on us.’
The brightest new talent in Australian cricket had walked out in disillusionment. Sunny Jim Mackay accepted an offer to play in South Africa, and the young man most likened to Trumper was lost. In the Transvaal he worked in a diamond mine and suffered an eye injury when hit by a motorcylist. He returned to coach in Melbourne in 1908 but never repeated his annus mirabilis of 1905–06.
Armstrong spent the 1906/07 summer fighting Bean and the VCA. The flashpoint was when he told them he could not get time off from his job at the Department of Home Affairs for a match against South Australia, only for the VCA to go to the Department to check whether Armstrong was telling the truth. In a disciplinary hearing with the VCA, he said, ‘The players nowadays seem to be treated like a bunch of schoolboys, and they are getting full up with it. If it goes on, there is no knowing what will happen’. At the end of the season he left the public service to follow a new business career as a stock and station agent. It was reported that he would retire from cricket. Bean, Armstrong’s sworn enemy, said: ‘Once upon a time, players put the game first and money afterwards. Now it is just the opposite.’ It is hard to imagine what ‘once upon a time’ he had in mind.
Noble, meanwhile, tried to make the best of the situation and obtain a seat on the Board. The NSWCA lifted its ban on the rebels holding office, but his nomination for a board position was voted down in humiliating fashion. Charles Lloyd, the vice-president of the NSWCA, said Noble’s very nomination was ‘a question of taste’ and ‘a menace to the good government of cricket’. Noble saw that the past wasn’t going to be buried, and that vendettas would be pursued.
The Board and NSWCA weren’t above acts of generosity when it suited them, however. Syd Gregory, who had been bankrupted when a partner in his sportsgoods store embezzled funds, was given a benefit, as were Jim Kelly and, in early 1909, Noble. But as would soon become clear, these gifts came with strings attached.
By 9 August 1907, the Board was busy doing what it thought a board should do. It set out the Sheffield Shield timetable, nominated a panel of umpires, and set up a fund for the distribution of profits, if any, from England’s tour. It discussed a visit from a Fijian team, but McElhone and Bean objected, as they thought it would violate the White Australia Policy.
Eleven days later, McElhone wrote to the associations saying the Fiji tour was now on. He wouldn’t explain what had changed his mind, but when Melbourne had found out about his objections, it offered to arrange the tour.
When the Board next met, Darling asked for the 9 August minutes to be read. McElhone objected but was voted down. When McElhone read them, the minutes indicated that he had always supported the Fiji tour. Darling said: ‘The minutes were faked as the Board had definitely turned down the application. McElhone, the secretary, had voiced his opinion against a team of black fellows visiting White Australia, and yet contrary to the Board’s decision, he recorded the Board’s approval in its minutes.’
Compared with the tectonic changes taking place from 1905 to 1912, the on-field action seems almost incidental.
The MCC team of 1907–08, under Arthur Jones, played a record 18 first-class fixtures as the Board scrambled to recoup its £10,000. The English team was far from its strongest. Jackson, Warner and Fry were unavailable, and MacLaren, Hayward, Hirst, Tyldesley and Lilley pulled out after selection. As usual, Lord’s did all it could to avoid choosing Sydney Barnes, but after Hirst’s withdrawal a deficit in bowlers was noticed and he was issued an invitation. Since quitting Lancashire, Barnes had guided Staffordshire to two good seasons, including their first minor counties championship in 1906, when he took 99 wickets in 10 matches at 8.41 and averaged better than 23 with the bat. Noble said Barnes was ‘the best bowler in the world at the present day’ after he took 6/24 against NSW.
The Englishmen had a rocky start, from the day their steamer pulled into Fremantle and a rough-looking fellow rowed out to them taunting them with ‘Five to one on Australia! Any odds you like, England for the Tests!’ Thus did they reacquaint themselves with Ernie Jones. Going into the first Test match, in Sydney, Arthur Jones caught pneumonia and was hospitalised. The captaincy went to Irish-born opening batsman Fred Fane, and a batting place went to George Gunn, Billy’s nephew, who had come to Australia to rehabilitate his health following a haemorrhage of the lungs and also to check on sales of the family’s Gunn & Moore bats.
The Australian stars were back in the fold, with one telling addition. Victoria’s 38-year-old opening batsman McAlister, faithful servant of the VCA and the main rival to Armstrong for the state’s captaincy, had been appointed by the Board as one of the three Test selectors, alongside Clem Hill and Frank Iredale, who had retired from playing but was carving out a career as a bureaucrat in McElhone’s NSWCA. Presumably with Iredale’s help, McAlister talked his way into the Test team. The Noble-Armstrong-Trumper-Hill clique thought he was a Board spy, and he did nothing to justify his self-selection, scoring 155 runs in eight innings.
McElhone was able to stage a Test series, but such was his appetite for a fight, it was a close-run thing. Under financial pressure due to the excessive guarantee he had promised Marylebone, McElhone refused to give the SCG Trustees the standard 18 per cent of gate receipts they asked for a Sydney Test match. He said that he would move the Test to the Sydney University ground, but his bluff was called when the University Senate said the applause would upset the professors. He had to back down and pay the SCG Trustees their asking rate.
Most Australian players shared Darling’s contempt for the NSWCA ‘dead heads’, and on the first day of the series Trumper pinned to the dressing-room door a list of those permitted to enter. McElhone, whose name was not on the list, tore it down. Trumper refused to go onto the field after lunch, and the game was held up for 15 minutes until the sign was restored.
The following day, The Age reported the incident, but McElhone disputed its account. Trumper wrote to The Age: ‘The players’ room has always, so far as we can remember, been reserved for them and their immediate friends. Otherwise the position would be intolerable, because, if not, men could not even dress or speak with necessary privacy. The list in question was posted on the players’ door by the decision of the team, and it was restored at the instigation of Mr McElhone only when he saw that the team was determined to insist upon it. Therefore, your report is correct.’
During the match, the press reported that Trumper and Noble appeared worn down and distracted by the squabbles. Neither champion was at his best, but the game provided one of Test cricket’s closest finishes. Gunn made a wonderful 119 and 74 in his first Test, his delight in a military band playing selections from Gilbert and Sullivan while he was batting causing Jim Kelly to remark from behind the stumps, ‘Hey, George, you seem to be taking more notice of the band than of our bowling.’ Australia stumbled to 5/95 in search of 275 in the fourth innings. As McAlister – his 41 being his best innings for Australia – Hanson Carter, 61, and Tibby Cotter staged a quixotic recovery, Fane only gave Wilfred Rhodes seven overs on a drying wicket. When Hill later asked Rhodes why he was playing at all, Rhodes said, ‘I’m in, I suppose, for my singing, Clem.’
Australia were still 56 runs short when Cotter was joined by fellow bunny Gerry Hazlitt. They swished and slashed, keeping out ‘Pip’ Fielder and the great Barnes, getting Australia home with two wickets to spare before an unduly pessimistic crowd of 3364.
Trumper and Noble scored centuries in the Boxing Day match with Victoria, but peace was elusive. This time Armstrong was on the outer, having stood down from the Victorian team because the VCA did not accept his expenses claim. The VCA attacked him in print for his ‘greed’, and the Melbourne Herald labelled him a shamateur. The Argus stated the obvious: cricketers ‘are not quite sure whether they are professional purveyors of amusement, or sportsmen who love athletic victory for its own sake.’ Bean, backed by McAlister, moved that Armstrong be suspended from state and therefore Test cricket, but other VCA members, recognising Armstrong’s service and fearing the inevitable public backlash if he was sacked from a Test match, accepted his apology when he said he had not known his claim was exceeding the maximum expenses allowance.
England had omitted Surrey’s Jack Hobbs from the first Test, and the young professional, on his first tour, was devastated. A fine 77 against Victoria won him his Test debut, and his 83 set him off on a career that no Englishman has ever matched. The Test was another cliff-hanger. Noble bounced back to form with twin 60s, Kent’s Kenneth Hutchings scored 126, Barnes, Jack Crawford and Cotter got among the wickets, and this time it was England’s fourth-innings pursuit that achieved an unlikely win. Chasing 282, they were given no hope at 8/209. Barnes and keeper Joe Humphrey got them to 243, and then Barnes and Fielder edged them closer. The former could hold a bat in a manner suggesting he knew what to do with it, and Fielder would score a first-class hundred for Kent, batting number 11 and adding a record 235 for the last wicket with Frank Woolley against Worcestershire. The burly Kent fast man probably considered himself on a lucky streak: a few days earlier, he, Joe Hardstaff and Rhodes had avoided prison time, being fined £1 each in the Melbourne Magistrates Court for behaving unlawfully at the Old White Hart Hotel.
With one run to win, and Armstrong bowling leg-theory, Barnes got his body on the leg-side of the ball and pushed what should have been an easy single to cover. Fielder, however, was daydreaming at the other end. Hazlitt had the ball before Fielder had started running. Barnes said that had Hazlitt ‘kept his head and just lobbed it to the wicketkeeper, Fielder would have been out by yards. Instead, however, he had a wild shy at the sticks, missed and the match was over … Pip kept on running flat out and my last view was of him disappearing into the crowd around the pavilion. Had not the pavilion been in the way I think he would have finished up in England and been the first to bear the good news.’
Adelaide’s heat debilitated both teams the next week, the temperature reaching 40°C-plus on the last three days. Australia appeared destined to lose when they conceded a first-innings lead and Hill came down with influenza. The game had a rustic feel: Creswell had just been fined in the magistrates’ court for allowing his sheep to graze on the pitch next to the Adelaide Oval, and Queensland woolbroker Roger Hartigan was playing his first Test with only four days’ leave from his employer. On the fourth day he requested an extension ‘as I am still batting’. His employer cabled back, ‘Stay as long as you are making runs.’
Hartigan would make 116 in a 243-run stand for the eighth wicket, in even time, with the ailing Hill. The papers called him ‘Clement ‘Ill’ and he had to pull away from the crease repeatedly to throw up. But the partnership broke England’s hearts, and Australia would win the match by 245 runs.
The Englishmen went to Tasmania for two games and some cooler weather, and maybe a bit extra – a Launceston newspaper reported that the dashing local wicketkeeper Norman ‘Joker’ Dodds had a ‘peccadillo’ with a ‘boon companion’ in the English team. The veiled comment has often wrongly been concluded to hint at a sexual encounter; the most reliable evidence suggests the two players bent the elbow too freely. Meanwhile, the Victorians continued quarrelling, with Armstrong and Laver rebelling against McAlister’s captaincy in the Shield match in Sydney. Incensed at the punishment Armstrong had been levied at Christmas, the players decided to depose McAlister by staging a vote for Armstrong. The clash, according to VCA official Mat Ellis, almost ‘led to blows over the captaincy’. Armstrong, with a full head of steam, scored a century in the match and another in the fourth Test at Melbourne, his first in a Test against England, as Australia won by 308 runs. England’s resolve had been broken by the Hill-Hartigan stand in the Adelaide furnace, and although Gunn, Hobbs, Barnes and Crawford were outstanding, the normally dependable slow bowlers Rhodes (seven wickets at 60 apiece) and Braund (five at 92) could not match the general strength of the Australian bowling, led by Saunders.
Altham notes that the series was closer than the 4–1 result suggests. In three Tests England ‘played up to a point so well as to have much the better of the argument, [but] each time they allowed the game to slip from their fingers in face of the indomitable fight put up by Australia’. The icing on the cake, for the fighting Australians, was Trumper’s overdue return to form with a sublime 166 in the fifth Test in Sydney.
McElhone’s battle to win control of the tour had many costs, the most tangible being a deficit of £2598. He complained about player payments to the Australians, which, at £25 a Test plus expenses, came to £2387. ‘It is very evident that in all future Tours these and others expenses must be considerably reduced, otherwise serious financial difficulties will have to be contended to the detriment of the Game,’ he said ominously. The Queensland, Tasmanian and West Australian associations were annoyed at receiving none of the promised ‘profits’; the NSW, Victorian and South Australian delegates were uneasy about how they would balance their books after they paid, pro rata, the shortfall to Lord’s. If one of McElhone’s claims to power was financial responsibility, it had just been blown.
The showdown was coming, as the 1909 tour of England would be the first since the Board’s establishment. McElhone saw his chance to raise the funds he needed. In the lead-up to 1908–09, he began his press campaign, briefing his mouthpieces at the Bulletin. On 17 September, the magazine reported:
‘“The Players”, those indefinite wraiths that have haunted Australian cricket like a nightmare for the past two years, are making their last effort to keep Australian tours on a boodle basis. Hitherto the Australian XI has gone to England practically on its own, and whatever money was made was divided among the players according to their own sweet will. That the men did not share equally is well known, and that they shared according to the value of their play is doubtful. Weird stories are told of young players going “on terms”, which meant they were squeezed, and only got a show on the team on the understanding that they took a sum below what was due them on a fair and equal division of profits. Certain individuals who considered themselves the salt of the expedition demanded special rates, and got them … Cash hunting is obnoxious. The Board was created to control international campaigns … the Board of Control must take charge of the coming expeditions … The players are all allegedly amateurs.’
Darling, a Board member but brave enough to stick to his principles, took up the fight, making a speech extolling the SACA on 28 September: ‘If other Associations had treated the players so well we would not be seeing the problems that are now existing in NSW.’
The Bulletin returned fire, saying the NSWCA had ‘treated the crowd Darling represents with lavish generosity’ and the players ‘ought to get down on their marrowbones and worship it’.
A month later, McElhone gave the first firm indication that he was reneging on his promise not to interfere in tour finances. He told London’s Cricket magazine: ‘To adequately control the game, the Board must control the players, and unless it takes charge of the finances it cannot succeed in that direction. The claims made by the players for expenses etc are such that international cricket is, to all intents and purposes, practically run, not for the benefit of the game, but for the financial benefit of the players.’
Everyone knew this was the crux of the matter, but in 1906 McElhone had only been able to make peace with the players, Melbourne and the SACA by promising not to ‘take charge of the finances’ on overseas tours. Creswell, seeing what was happening, went to the Board’s meeting in December 1908 with a motion confirming that the 1909 tour would be conducted ‘under the usual arrangements’. There was a long silence before McElhone announced that the Board wanted 10 per cent of profits from the tour.
He was out in the open now. Having paid too much for the 1907– 08 England tour, and lost his battle with the SCG Trust to get more revenue out of matches there, he had to reach into cricket’s big honeypot, laying bare his duplicity to everyone involved with the game.
Creswell did not have the numbers to defeat McElhone at the Board table, with Bean’s Victorians and the ever-gullible Queenslanders forming a solid majority with NSW. After some discussion, however, the Board said it would collect all revenue from the 1909 tour, retain 5 per cent of the first £6000 and 12.5 per cent of the remainder, and distribute the rest equally among the players. The players would be offered an alternative: an upfront flat fee of £400 plus expenses.
After the announcement, the Argus interviewed Noble and Hill. They said they would not accept the offer. Noble said: ‘The terms are not good enough. The calculations are based altogether too high for the takings of a tour, and by the time all expenses and the Board’s percentages are paid, there will be nothing like a fair recompense to a man who has to take the risk of leaving his business for several months.’
In most cricket disputes, the employer could appeal to some higher principle of justice and split the players into factions. Normally, this takes the form of pointing out to the rank and file that their militant leaders have been ripping them off. If the ‘weird stories’ of players being treated unequally were true, the Board might have split the cricketers. But they were not true, and the players remained united. On Boxing Day, Noble invited the leading Victorian and NSW players to a meeting at the Port Phillip Club Hotel. Afterwards, Noble said: ‘We all believe that a Board of Control is necessary in Australia. I have voiced this sentiment in Sydney many, many a time, and they didn’t believe me when I said that the Melbourne Cricket Club should not control cricket in Australia.’ But, he said, the present Board ‘is going beyond its powers when it now interferes to such an unjustifiable extent in the earnings of the cricketers in England.’ He said the Board’s demanded cut was tantamount to taking three extra players who did nothing. A grim Cotter said, ‘If there is a wet season, we may have to work our passage back.’
The meeting at the Port Phillip Club Hotel was held during the visit of the New South Wales side for the Sheffield Shield match. The home captain, McAlister, was not invited. He had again been spreading the story that Noble had offered him a place on the 1905 team for a half-share. Noble said: ‘Every cricketer knows, or should know, that I am strongly opposed to anything of the kind.’
Another reason for McAlister’s and McElhone’s resentment, which now amounted almost to a hatred, of the Australian Eleven was the 1905 publication of Laver’s book, An Australian Cricketer on Tour. Detailing the 1899 and 1905 excursions, Laver told lively stories about the exotic and exciting places the team visited and the great times they had. McAlister boiled over his exclusion from these adventures. McElhone seethed over Laver’s descriptions of the cordial relations between the team and the King’s sons, Princes Edward and Albert. Laver’s happy birthday message to Edward in 1905 ‘threw the little Prince into absolute ecstasies of delight’, said the Daily Express, and the Prince of Wales asked his father to stage a private game with the Australians. It looked to McElhone as if these cricketers were acquiring airs beyond their station.
If the players were not already annoyed by the Board’s demand to dip into their finances, they were incensed by its appointment of McAlister as tour ‘treasurer’. The players would still be able to appoint their ‘manager’, as per the Board’s constitution, but he would be weakened by being made accountable to McAlister, and therefore to the Board. It was a transparent move to circumvent the players’ insistence on having their own manager. Noble said it ‘seems very much like appointing a Grand Inquisitor, seeing we are allowed to appoint a manager whose duties are to look after the finance’.
So naked were McElhone’s manoeuvres that he might have been trying to provoke the leading players into a boycott. The Board was ready for that contingency, one member complacently telling the Australasian: ‘We have them beaten. We would like very much to get the best men as players, but if we cannot get them we will get the best we can. The Board of Control is no longer going to exist in name only.’
Yet nobody knew what the Board was going to do with the money it planned to seize from the players. Creswell couldn’t get McElhone to answer that question at its December 1908 meeting. Armstrong, ‘disgusted’ that the Board was backtracking on the 1906 settlement, said: ‘We should have a little idea where the money is going.’ The truth was that the money was going to backfill McElhone’s inept financing in the previous 12 months.
Tommy Horan – who had been on the other side of the argument in 1884 – was now with the players.
‘Australian players in the last thirty years have done immense service to advertising Australia … If the Board could advance any sound argument in favour of taking away from the Australian team a large share of the proceeds of the tour, the Board might get the support of reasonable men. So far not a solitary sound reason has been put forward for levying this extortionate, and therefore the sympathy of the public is entirely with the players.’
On New Year’s Day 1909, at the end of the Shield game, the national selectors met. The Board had appointed two friendlies, McAlister and Iredale. The third was Hill, who had replaced Darling as the SACA’s representative when the former captain had retired to Tasmania with no little dismay at the way things had gone.
The selectors’ first meeting sorted out the ‘certainties’ – Hill, Noble, Armstrong, Trumper, Vernon Ransford and, in a sop to the QCA, Hartigan.
Noble and the leading players asked for a meeting with McElhone. He took a week to respond, then said no. Finally a summit was arranged in Sydney on 14 January 1909. McElhone reasserted that the tour manager had to be accountable to the Board. He made a provocative claim that past managers had made ‘defalcations’, against which the Board now had to protect itself to look after its legal liability. The players couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Evidently, when he talked about what past managers ‘may have got away with’, he was alluding to Laver.
His tactical coup was to ask the players to prove that the Board’s terms were less fair than on previous tours. The players could not produce documentary records to support their case. The tour was, after all, a speculative venture. Compared with the 1893 tour’s dividend, the Board was offering a good deal. Compared with 1905, it was not. The players did not know what they would earn from the tour, but they wanted control. The meeting heated up, McElhone accusing Noble of untrustworthiness, a gross affront to the Australian captain who, perhaps more than any cricketer of the era, embodied the principles of honour and discipline.
McElhone was skilled, however, at PR. Having attacked the Australian captain, banning him from NSW and now saying he couldn’t trust him, McElhone drew attention to the benefit match the NSWCA had put on for Noble in March 1908. Was the Australian captain so ungrateful as to bite the hand that had fed him?
McElhone was aiming to decapitate the head, and while he could not yet take out Noble he had a victory on 23 January when Hill said he would not tour under the terms dictated. Hill, the biggest-scoring and arguably best Australian batsman of the Golden Age, would never tour under the Board’s control.
On 5 February the remaining ‘certainties’ chose Laver as manager/ player. Noble considered him still good enough to perform a useful onfield role when needed, and he had the players’ trust. But the appointment was a provocation to McAlister. The Board left Laver out of the two tour trials, considering him a ‘past’ player. The falling-out between the two East Melburnians had turned toxic.
The final selections, made on 15 February, were contentious. An easy one was the textbook Sydney left-hander Warren Bardsley, whose 264 in the Melbourne trial was unanswerable. But Hill was stunned when Iredale and McAlister proposed Syd Gregory, well past his best, Bert Hopkins, whose £200 fee was paid by the Board, plus the Boardfriendly Victorian wicketkeeper William Carkeek, known universally as ‘Barlow’ for his stonewalling … and McAlister.
Hill could not believe it. McAlister, who would turn 40 during the tour, was a proven failure at the top level. He was to be tolerated as treasurer only because the players had been outflanked. Now they had to stand him as a player. Hill said Tasmania’s Dodds and South Australia’s Gehrs had better records and, obviously, greater potential. But Iredale and McAlister let him blow himself out and would not be swayed. Hill said he was ‘washing his hands of the entire affair’ and ‘did not consider that the best men had been chosen’.
McAlister went from the meeting to a dinner thrown by his friends. In his grateful speech he said, ‘It has been my ambition to get into the Australian team. I have been fighting for years to get this trip and noone has had to fight harder than I have.’
He wasn’t wrong there. Once the team was submitted, the Board arrogated to itself a right to appoint Noble as captain and McAlister, by a 6–5 vote, as vice-captain. As tour selectors it appointed Noble, McAlister and Gregory – constantly in dire financial straits and now owing his place to the Board’s intervention.