The idea of Australians competing with England at cricket was a daring novelty. Lillywhite’s tour was the fourth by an English team, and in most games the touring Eleven was confronted by claustrophobic fields and snaking batting orders of fifteen, eighteen or twenty-two colonials. Even with such numbers, these hordes were seldom good enough to beat eleven Englishmen.
Cricket in Australia, though, was on a steep curve of improvement. The sports explosion, which percolated from the upper classes in England in the Victorian age, arrived in Australia ready-democratised. Men of all kinds mixed in the cricket clubs of Sydney and Melbourne. Better-organised club matches, the enclosure of grounds permitting the taking of gate money, the coalescence of accepted rules, and tuition from a professional player-coach, most notably English imports such as Charles Lawrence and the ‘Surrey Pet’ Billy Caffyn, but also homegrown stars such as Melbourne’s Tom Wills, made a more appealing spectacle. Lawrence, Caffyn and Sam Cosstick had stayed on from English tours to coach in Australia while others such as Billy Greaves and George Marshall were hired direct from England. Public interest and newspaper coverage followed, and by the 1860s the big club and intercolonial matches were feeding a growing appetite for the sporting event.
Australians’ attitude to the English teams led by H.H. Stephenson (1861–62), George Parr (1863–64) and W.G. Grace (1873–74) was that of students to masters. The press said the English were touring to demonstrate ‘perfection’, and exhorted Australians to learn the lessons that came with certain defeat. There were other lessons, too.
Grace taught Australian cricketers not only batsmanship but the sharp practice of gamesmanship and shamateurism. ‘Square Leg’, a columnist in the Sydney Mail, recorded that ‘the example of the champion cricketer of the world, in starting disputes in the field, has not been without its ill-effect here’. No sooner had the Champion pulled one of his notorious tricks than it would be copied on the club ovals of Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne.
It was in turning his talent into money that Grace left his deepest mark. The Champion had demanded £1500 for his tour, enough to virtually sink its hopes of surplus, and used it as a paid honeymoon for himself and his wife Agnes. His worst of many crimes was to extort payment for an ‘exclusive’ South Australian game from the ambitious folk of the Yorke Peninsula. To the locals’ surprise and dismay, nobody from Adelaide came to the match, which decimated their expected gate receipts. Why hadn’t the Adelaide folk come to Grace’s only appearance in South Australia? Their questions were answered when Grace left, literally half-way through dinner, to play in Adelaide, double-crossing his hosts and scooping the pool. Simon Rae, whose 1998 biography of Grace is sympathetic to the Doctor, said: ‘With the exception of Douglas Jardine, he is the most unpopular England captain ever to tour down under. Never was he subject to such close scrutiny, and never – as he questioned umpires’ decisions, appealed for catches that he knew were not out, threatened to come to blows with officials, and ran a piratical course through his contractual agreements – was his character shown up in such a bad light.’
Gambling on cricket was another part of the colonies’ inheritance. In the early nineteenth century, as historian David Kynaston puts it, ‘the underlying purpose’ of cricket was as ‘a vehicle for betting’. John Conway had played in Grace’s match against Victoria, which many thought was rigged. Bell’s Life reported that ‘the gentlemen of the grandest nation on the earth have sold themselves for lucre, and given away a match they could have won as easily as it has been lost … Mr Grace and his coadjutors have been wilfully and dishonourably dishonest.’ There were rumours that the Englishmen had cautioned friends against backing them; they were known as ‘the bookmakers’ team’. Playing a Combined Fifteen in Sydney, Grace led a walk-off when Sam Cosstick didn’t accept the umpire’s decision to give him out hit wicket. England won, but the Sydney Mail said: ‘those who have strenuously opposed any attempt to introduce the betting element into cricket had a specimen on Saturday of how a game may be marred when the players are pecuniarily interested in the result.’ ‘Square Leg’ wrote that ‘the leading bookmaker of Melbourne has an interest in the project’ and it was an ‘accepted fact that [Grace] had wagers on the result … The play of Grace and his team is looked upon with the utmost distrust, and even when they score an easy victory the public think they have all the more reason for saying that previous performances, where they were less fortunate, were not fair and above board.’
But suspicions about fixes did not stop colonial cricketers from believing they could compete, on level terms, with the best English players. Off the field, Australian confidence was flowing. Gold, wool and other agricultural exports gave the colonies new economic muscle. English capital flowed to and increasingly depended on Australian business. It wasn’t long before this seeped into cricket. At the conclusion of his tour, Grace said, ‘If you ever come to England, and your bowlers are as good there as they are here, you will make a name for yourselves.’ When Victoria beat Grace’s tourists, Bell’s Life speculated: ‘The effect will be to make cricket between England and Australia now and henceforth really interesting … We may eventually see an Australian eleven … doing battle at Lord’s.’
This was, by 1877, Conway’s dream: to take a representative team ‘home’. As Conway and Gregory recruited the leading colonial cricketers through the winter of 1877, they agreed that Gregory might be the better figurehead. Conway had some lingering bad blood with Grace from the 1873–74 tour, which might pose a problem in England. Together they charmed the young players with two unheard-of ideas. One was entrepreneurial capitalism. The idea of twelve middle-class Australians investing in their own sporting circus, taking it around the world for profit, surviving on their entertainment value, was intoxicating. The second idea was that such a group could represent a ‘nation’ which, of course, did not exist. The tension between these two ideas – a nationally representative symbol in private, profit-oriented hands – would, over the next 35 years, be a constant pull at the seams of Australian cricket.
Gregory and Conway convinced their dream team to take the risk. The nucleus of the eleven that had played Lillywhite’s professionals signed up: Charlie Bannerman, Melbourne’s champion Tommy Horan, the wicketkeeper Jack Blackham, the bowlers Harry Boyle, Tom Garrett and Tom Kendall. Also in was Frank Allan, the ‘bowler of the century’ who hadn’t played in the Melbourne ‘Tests’ owing to his commitments at the Warrnambool Show. On 19 April 1877 Conway invited John Arthur and George Bailey of Tasmania; the more colonially diverse, the better for ‘the economical working of the team’, meaning better able to pass themselves off as ‘Australia’. Alas, Arthur died two days after receiving his invitation, but Bailey accepted.
Two key signatories were young mates from inner Sydney. Before he had played for Balmain against neighbouring Glebe, Billy Murdoch, a law student whose family had moved from Tasmania, couldn’t sleep, as he would be facing the terrifying bank clerk Frederick Robert Spofforth. Murdoch said he had a ‘very peculiar action’ that made him ‘difficult to watch’. Garrett called it ‘extravagant’. In England, Home Gordon said Spofforth was ‘like a human octopus’; Sammy Woods said he was ‘all arms, legs and nose’.
However hard he is to describe, Spofforth soon made his name in club cricket. When he moved to Balmain, he and Murdoch became such friends that Spofforth famously refused to play in the first ‘United Australia’ team because Murdoch was not picked as wicketkeeper. Gregory, faithful to Blackham’s skills and wanting not to be seen as favouring his New South Wales men, stood by the Victorian. Spofforth was dragged into the second match, where Blackham won his approval with a lightning stumping off his bowling, standing fearlessly up to the wickets.
Reporting on that match, the Argus depicted Spofforth’s action:
‘He took a run of 10 or 12 yards, and amidst a somewhat bewildering movement of legs and arms, hurled the ball forwards with the velocity and recklessness as to the consequences enough to make all timid people tremble for the safety of the batsman, the wicketkeeper and even the longstop.’
Beyond his physical gifts, Spofforth was the prototype of the thinking fast bowler who analysed batsmen’s weaknesses and intimidated them with his brain power as much as his ability with the ball. Where he trod, Ray Lindwall, Graham McKenzie, Dennis Lillee and Glenn McGrath followed. He lay awake at nights scheming about how to remove specific batsmen. He was the first Australian scientist of bowling, even consulting university professors on the subject of aerodynamics and grip. After studying baseball, he developed four ways to move the ball: to the leg, to the off, upwards (with ‘backswing’) and downwards (with topspin).
As for his speed, that is something we can’t know, but Spofforth’s biographer Richard Cashman has correctly written that ‘Pace is a relative concept: a bowler who is much faster than the others of his generation will appear fast.’ The number of wickets Spofforth took bowled or lbw suggest that whatever his pace was, he was too slick for the batsmen of his day.
His personality got as many wickets as his speed and cut. Fiftyfive years later, the Reverend Richard Llewellyn Hodgson, as ‘Country Vicar’, recalled: ‘[H]e had rather the type of countenance which one associates with the Spirit of Evil in Faust. A long face, somewhat sardonic; piercing eyes; a hooked nose; and his hair, parted in the middle, giving the impression of horns. He was also immensely tall – lean, sinewy and loose-limbed – with long, thin arms; he would have looked the part of the stage-demon.’
A player who had faced Spofforth told Neville Cardus exactly what it was like: ‘His look went through me like a red-hot poker. But I walks on past him along t’ wicket to t’ batting end. And half-way down something made me turn round and look at him over my shoulder. And there he was, still fixin’ me with his eye.’
Spofforth would be the central figure of the tour, and the avatar of a singularly Australian idea of cricket: that the big star of the game can as easily be a bowler as a batsman. In England (and later in the subcontinent, when cricket spread there), bowlers were the patsies of the game, whose purpose was to serve the ball up for the batsmen to provide the thrills. Spofforth – and through him, an animating spirit of Australian cricket – would challenge the idea that the stage belonged to batsmen.
His mate Murdoch was still a work in progress as a right-handed opening batsman, but the pair were intelligent, fun-loving goers prepared to take a risk. Upon graduation, Murdoch became a solicitor in partnership with his elder brother Gilbert. Spofforth had to ask for 12 months’ leave without pay from the Bank of New South Wales’ Balmain branch. His father Edward didn’t want him to. His boss, Shepherd Smith, warned him against the risk. But Spofforth went and Edward, ‘secretly admiring his independence, gave way’.
Through the winter of 1877, the ranks were winnowed: younger men came in for older. Sydney’s Nat Thomson and Ned Gregory (Dave’s brother) were replaced. The cricketing adventure to end all adventures was seen off from Sydney by about a hundred well-wishers on 3 November 1877. Gregory was the only man older than 30; their average age was 23. They travelled to Brisbane and beat a local Eighteen, a Toowoomba Twenty-Two, and then a NSW Fifteen before a tiny crowd in Sydney. They took their entertainment to Maitland, Newcastle and Adelaide, tied with a strong NSW-Victoria Fifteen in Melbourne, beat a Bendigo team, then swung for seven matches through New Zealand, losing only to a Canterbury Fifteen.
In New Zealand, Tom Kendall’s drinking violated what would become an iron Australian rule of ‘drink all you like but turn up fit to play’; he was dropped for Charles Bannerman’s younger brother Alick, who came onto the tour as a ‘professional cricketer’ playing for a set fee, not a share of profits, although he had a job in the Sydney Government Printing Office and was not a professional in the English sense. Already the Australians were blurring the class definitions of cricket.
On their return to Sydney there was great anticipation for a rematch against a Combined Fifteen. But a rift had opened between the touring Eleven – moneymaking celebrities already – and those left behind. Four Combined Fifteen players refused to accept Conway’s terms. Others, reported the Argus, ‘took umbrage and would not play on account of derogatory reflections which some members of the Eleven had injudiciously cast upon them’. The Eleven were even known to be injudicious towards their own; during a storm off the New Zealand coast, Charles Bannerman, a strong swimmer, speculated that he would save fellow Sydneysiders Spofforth, Murdoch and Alick, but none of the Victorians.
Already the stitches binding private enterprise and the responsibilities of representing a ‘nation’ were splitting. Conway sought the New South Wales Cricket Association’s support to ‘promote what is in reality a national undertaking’ by giving the Australian Eleven’s games precedence over the intercolonial match between NSW and Victoria. The NSWCA and the Victorian Cricketers’ Association declined, but offered Conway 10 per cent of the gate for the intercolonial match if he released his players to participate. They also offered him fundraising matches after the intercolonial. Conway replied that ‘the members of the Australian team are resolved not to disunite and play against each other’ – he, and they, feared that the success of the tour could be compromised by reigniting intercolonial rivalries. He also wondered if the intercolonial might threaten the profitability of the Eleven’s matches. The associations, he said, ‘ought to be proud to lend their assistance’ to the Australian Eleven. The associations were having none of it: they saw Conway’s team as a private circus, not a ‘national undertaking’, and the impasse remained: the stars did not take part in the intercolonials.
Public opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, was against the Conway–Gregory team. The senior Victorian player Dan Wilkie, writing as ‘A Bohemian’ in the Australasian, said ‘we have had too much said about the self denial and patriotism of these eleven or twelve gentlemen … it cannot be denied that it is nothing more nor less than a speculation which the promoters hope to carry through without a loss and possibly with a fair margin of profit’. Spofforth later said that ‘the public generally seemed to regard the scheme with coolness … The sporting papers again ignored our movements almost entirely.’
But wider public opinion was, not for the last time, gravitating towards the superior entertainers. The Eleven’s farewell games in Sydney and Melbourne drew crowds of 10,000. Charles Bannerman, Horan, Gregory and Spofforth were spurring hopeful pressmen to write that ‘everyone looked forward eagerly to hear with what measure of success they would face the Elevens of Old England’. The tantalising thought that a team of colonials could compete at home was beginning to override antagonism towards the cricketers’ profit motive.
The Eleven’s departure, on 29 March 1878, was a shambles. Gregory’s initial plan was to sail on the Chimboraso from Melbourne, but it was wrecked on Point Perpendicular, so the Eleven had to rush to Sydney to board the City of Sydney to San Francisco. Garrett wrote: ‘This was the only hope we had of getting to England in time to play our first match.’ They left Melbourne at 6 am on the Friday, and three train and coach rides later arrived at Circular Quay at 7 am on Saturday, to embark at 3 pm.
Among the 128 passengers on the City of Sydney were singing troubadours, businessmen and emigrants. Gregory’s men put in two hours of daily deck practice. They reached San Francisco, still rolling with the sea as they slept in the Palace Hotel, took a seven-day train journey to New York, and left on the City of Berlin, farewelled by a local cricket team, on the nine-day voyage to Liverpool.
There they were met by Conway, who had preceded them on the Suez mail boat. He escorted them to Nottingham where ‘an immense crowd of people had gathered at the railway station, and a splendid band was playing “Auld Lang Syne”, but so great and long-continued was the cheering, that the music was completely smothered’.
In Nottingham they met up with their secret weapon, ‘The Sandhurst (as Bendigo was then known) Infant’ Billy Midwinter, who had bolstered Australia with bat and ball in the Melbourne ‘Tests’ and had since followed Lillywhite’s team back to England, improving his game under W.G. Grace in his United South Elevens. Born in Gloucestershire, Midwinter regarded himself as an Australian – on the cricket field, at least – and was made a shareholder by Conway. Yet the presence of this mercurial character, a wonderful all-round sport as skilled at billiards, shooting and archery as batting and bowling, could not counterbalance a sudden depression in the Eleven’s spirits. The journey had given them too much time to ponder the task ahead.
The 1878 spring was proving even wetter than the previous year’s record drenching, and colder too. The innocent Australians had packed silk shirts but no sweaters. They shivered from cold and nerves as eight thousand lined the streets of Nottingham to cheer them to the Maypole Hotel in their omnibus drawn by four grey horses. A surprised oldtimer was quoted saying, ‘Why, they bean’t black at all; they’re as white as wuz.’ The speaker, apparently, could not square this mob with his memories of the 1868 Aboriginal troupe.
Two hours after a champagne civic reception, the Eleven arrived at Trent Bridge. They remarked on how small the ground seemed, how green was the turf and how the red roofs of the surrounding flats hemmed them in. The wind blew chilly, and their heavy brown brogues slipped on the sloppy turf.
Cricket in England was undergoing rapid transition. William Clark’s All-England Elevens, which had dominated cricket as a spectacle, touring the country and taking on all-comers, mostly at odds, for the benefit of bookmakers and punters, had fractured under commercial pressures. Since the 1860s the Marylebone Cricket Club, based at Thomas Lord’s ground in St John’s Wood, London, began to aggregate control over laws and playing conditions. The professionals lost their grip on the game as the county clubs, run by amateur committees, began to organise a national competition. By 1873, the professionals’ freedom to ply their trade was constricted by a rule that they could only play for one county per season.
Beneath these power shifts lay centuries of English tradition. Professionals were working-class or lower-middle-class men who coached, curated grounds, bowled to amateurs in the nets, and, when they got a chance, played for poor wages. The touring English professional cricketer didn’t enjoy a high reputation. Lillywhite’s wicketkeeper, Ted Pooley, for instance, had missed the famous Melbourne matches because he was in a Christchurch jail, having got into a fight with some punters who thought he had tricked them. (Pooley had cleaned up by ‘predicting’ the batsmen’s scores in the match; he put them all down as zero, and enough Christchurch batsmen made ducks to leave Pooley well ahead. His ‘victims’ accused him of scamming them, and when he tried to collect his winnings, blows were exchanged.) On tour the professionals were, wrote Alan Gibson, ‘too fond of diddling an innocent colonial, and of looking upon the girls when they were bonny, and the wine when it was red – even more when it was sparkling.’
A mid-level professional in 1878 earned no more than an unskilled labourer – around £85 a season – and lived a life that was nasty, brutal and often shortened by a soaking in alcohol and brawling. This did not characterise all professional cricketers, but it encouraged amateurs to wrest away control of the game.
The amateurs were drawn from aristocratic and middle-class ranks. Not necessarily rich, they did not depend on cricket for their living – at least, not in theory. Amateurism was more a distinction of symbol and ethos than of money. As Anthony Trollope wrote, ‘To play Billiards is the amusement of a gentleman; to play Billiards pre-eminently well is the life’s work of a man who, in learning to do so, can hardly have continued to be a gentleman in the best sense of the word.’
Amateurs supposedly played for the love of the game, and brought it a dash and joy that professionals could not afford. Naturally, they were almost always batsmen, leaving the hack work to the lower orders. Amateurs were received in good society, dressed in better-appointed rooms, went by their full titles on scoresheets (giving rise to an immortal team of the 1880s, ‘The Gentlemen of England, and Pougher’), and played only for ‘expenses’, though the actions of Grace and others boosted expenses far above professional wages.
It was not until they were in England that the Australians could witness Grace’s full impact on the game. His average, in many years of the 1870s, was twice that of the next batsman. He was, says Rae, ‘the greatest draw ever known; the man whose popularity required the introduction of turnstiles and then set them clicking so merrily that, it was said, he provided half the bricks in the cricket pavilions of England’.
The ‘look’ of cricket was also being revolutionised. When the 1878 Australians arrived, on-field vestiges of olden days were still common: top hats, striped, checked or spotted shirts, boots that were black or brown, and flannel jackets. The pitches and grounds were, to put it kindly, variable. As Frederick Gale had written about a match at Lord’s in the 1860s: ‘Had I been a wicket-keeper or batsman at Lord’s I should have liked (plus my gloves and pads) to have worn a single-stick mask, a Life Guardsman’s cuirass, and a tin stomach-warmer.’
In many grounds boundaries were still yet to be allowed – every hit had to be run out. Among bowlers, the great mid-century dispute between round-arm and under-arm had been resolved in the roundarmers’ favour, but they were soon to be superseded by over-armers, the most educative of whom would be the Australian Spofforth.
The Australians did not initially want to play Nottinghamshire, the famous nursery and proving ground of professionalism. The local team would feature the father of Notts professionals, Richard Daft, the two best bowlers in England, Alfred Shaw and Fred Morley, and the rising batsman Arthur Shrewsbury. Due to the cold and the danger of being thrashed, Conway asked for a postponement, so that Australia’s first match could be against the MCC and Ground, at Lord’s on 27 May. Fearing failure, Conway wanted to play the big game at Lord’s, the moneymaker, before his men lost their gloss.
Lillywhite told him that Nottinghamshire had advertised the match and a postponement was impossible.
Three days’ practice deepened the Australians’ trepidation, and on a grey, squally 17 May the Bannerman brothers’ blue and white caps and scarfs were the brightest thing about them as they walked onto Trent Bridge.
All England awaited. Seven thousand hardy souls braved the rain; elsewhere, Wisden reported, ‘the interest of cricketing England centred on Nottingham … and the enquiries that day on other grounds of “Do you know how the Australians are getting on”, were earnest and frequent.’
Australia flopped for 63, routed by Shaw and Morley. Then they bowled with what Garrett called ‘a ball like a lump of mud’, and conceded 153.
Among the crowd, there was still confusion about their racial characteristics. What did Australians look like anyway? Spofforth heard a comment: ‘They bean’t furriners after all.’ Garrett explained: ‘Evidently the locals expected a team of black men. One of them remarked to his neighbour, “They bean’t black, Bill” but as he spoke Dave Gregory, Billy Murdoch and Jack Blackham appeared on the scene, and he exclaimed, “but those three chaps have black blood in them”.’
Such comments would follow them throughout the tour; Lord Harris, the president of Kent and Lord’s, sniffed that ‘the ignorance of Colonial ethnology and geography was in those days lamentable’. His fellow amateur Allan Steel showed similar sentiments, but with a sense of humour, when he introduced Spofforth to friends as ‘the demon nigger bowler’.
By the end of day two, Australia, batting a second time, had lost four wickets and were still 46 runs behind. Gregory, who made a pair, said they hoped to make a game of it on the third day. Instead Shaw and Morley humbled them for 76. Enough time remained for a single-wicket, four-a-side match to compensate the crowd.
At a dinner at the George Hotel, the Notts secretary, Captain Jack ‘Hellfire’ Holden, graciously predicted the Australians would win more than they would lose. Gregory thanked Nottingham for the unexpected turnout. Privately, he was questioning whether the whole venture was worthwhile. Some players were talking about going home, and Spofforth, who had taken one wicket to Shaw’s eleven, said, ‘our confidence in ourselves [was] rudely shaken’.
They spent a day sightseeing around Nottingham before taking a train to London, where no crowds met them. As they bumped into the Horseshoe on Tottenham Court Road, they wondered if they had bitten off more than they could chew: the fabled MCC awaited. Wisden applauded them for their ‘pluck’ in presuming to take on ‘the well seasoned skilled cricketers of old England’, but Charles Alcock, the secretary of Surrey, said ‘the idea of a visit from an Australian team … was at first treated as something of a joke by our English cricketers’. Grace was ‘not very much alarmed about being defeated by them … [We] never for a moment thought of classing them with an English representative team.’
A week into their tour, Gregory’s Eleven was in danger of vindicating an Australian newspaper which had called it ‘a presumptuous adventure calculated to dampen the ardour of the most enterprising speculator’. But Spofforth, so shaken after Nottingham, would on his deathbed 49 years later say, ‘I made my reputation in May.’ To be precise, 27 May, the day cricket changed forever.
The Marylebone Cricket Club and Ground Eleven seemed chosen for the purposes of humiliation. Garrett said it ‘was almost a representative English team’. Grace, of course, headed the batting, and the bowling featured the Trent Bridge destroyers, Shaw and Morley. Among the rest were the cracks from several counties: Lancashire’s ‘Monkey’ Hornby, Middlesex’s ‘AJ’ Webbe, Notts’s Fred Wyld and Wilfred Flowers. George Hearne, the top wicket-taker for Kent, would back up Shaw and Morley. Making up the numbers was George Vernon of Middlesex, a future England captain.
The Australians were driven to St John’s Wood at 11.30 am. A storm had lashed Lord’s at 10 am, and another blew in soon after their arrival. Fewer than 500 spectators were present, ‘failing to recognise the team’. When it became clear that a game would start, more filtered in – eventually 4742, handing £119/7/- into the tourists’ kitty.
The rain was interspersed with warm sunshine drying the wicket stickily, so the toss, in modern parlance, was a good one for Gregory to lose. There was no question that the MCC would bat. Even on wet wickets the captaincy adage was, ‘Always bat. Sometimes consider bowling; and then bat.’
Grace liked to start with a swing to the leg boundary, setting the tone, and this he did to Allan at 12.03 pm. He often said he didn’t like defensive strokes ‘because you only get three for them’.
Gregory left square leg open; as Allan ran in again, Dave indicated to Midwinter to shift into the space. Sharp practice by our standards, but not in 1878. Grace duly pulled the ball again and found Midwinter. His shock was profound, but the crowd, hoping the underdogs could put on a show, cheered. ‘It seemed the applause would never cease,’ reported the Argus. The stands rang with cries of ‘Bravo Allan!’ and ‘Well done, Australia!’
Hampshire’s Clement Booth fell in Boyle’s first over, but Hornby crashed one over square leg, breaking the fanlight of the billiard-room door. The crowd recovered their patriotism and cheered Hornby and Arthur Ridley to 2/27 before Gregory brought on Spofforth for Allan.
The most significant bowling change ever? The Demon proceeded to take the MCC apart. He gave up two runs in his first over, but in his next five, of four balls each, he took six wickets for two runs. He bowled Hornby in his second over and Webbe in his third. In the first three balls of his fifth over, he caught and bowled Flowers, bowled Hearne, and had Shaw stumped. Next over, Murdoch ended the innings by stumping Vernon.
Incredible. MCC, all out 33. ‘The rush to the gate to view the wonderful Australians as they reached the pavilion was something to be remembered,’ the Argus wrote. ‘The public were fairly stunned by the performance.’
Wisden was only a little more measured: ‘Spofforth and Boyle [were] thoroughly mobbed … The fielding of the team was smart and effective, all working together admirably, their backing up being the very perfection of our cricket, and quite a pleasure to look at.’
But Australia still had to bat on the gluepot. In Morley’s second over Charlie Bannerman was caught by Hearne, a running catch with the sun in his eyes. ‘It was a remarkable catch, and the crack Sydneyite was highly chagrined,’ said the Argus. Garrett and Midwinter survived to lunch, but soon Australia fell to 8/24. Gregory, with another duck, still waited for his first run in England. Allan came in, his style triggering great laughter around Lord’s, but he ‘clung tenaciously to his bat’ and, with Murdoch, eked out a nine-run lead. Alfred Shaw bowled 135 balls in taking 5/10.
It was 3.57 pm when Grace went back out, expecting to set matters aright. The Argus reported: ‘Every one said that W.G. would make up for it in the next innings.’
Spofforth stood at the top of his short run, his ‘beak nose, high cheekbones, heavy eyebrows, piercing eyes and cleft chin’, in Ralph Barker’s re-creation, seeming ‘to exude a pathological hatred of all batsmen’.
The MCC were out by 4.50 pm.
It was, said the Argus, ‘the most extraordinary bowling triumph ever witnessed in a great match. The first ball from Spofforth completely puzzled the great batsman, and his uncertainty was quite apparent to the spectators. The Sydneyite’s second, a beautiful breakback, just lifted the bails, and a perfect storm of applause, lasting till the Leviathan reached the pavilion, greeted the bowler.’
The bail flew 30 yards. In surprise as much as glee, Spofforth cried: ‘Bowled!’
He knocked down Webbe’s stumps first ball and hit Hornby in the midriff, causing him to retire hurt. Boyle removed Booth, Ridley and Flowers, and the MCC were 7/17 when Hornby returned, with W.G. as his runner, to great cheering. But Boyle bowled Hornby before Grace was needed, and the MCC were all out for 19, Boyle having taken 5/3 and Spofforth 5/16.
Twelve runs later, Horan ended the game by slicing Morley through slips. It was 5.30 pm, five and a half hours after the start.
The thousands burst their banks, rushing the players and applauding them to the pavilion in what Wisden called a ‘maddened crowd’ that included MCC members ‘who shouted themselves hoarse before they left to scatter far and wide that evening the news, how in one day the Australians had so easily defeated one of the strongest MCC elevens that had ever played for the famous old club’. Except for 400 Australians, they were Londoners, little understanding the historical magnitude of what they had witnessed but knowing a great spectacle when they saw one.
Spofforth would ‘well remember that, when we left Lord’s and returned to our hotel, we could scarcely realise our victory, and all the evening callers kept pouring in with congratulations. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of this victory in its effect on the future matches and the destiny of Australian cricket, for another defeat like that at Nottingham might have made us lose heart, besides giving the English public a far lower idea of our merits than we deserved.’
The telegraph flashed through England and Australia. The Globe said the MCC team ‘was as good as could be found to represent London and England, and probably nearly as good as the Club has ever turned out’. The Home News agreed: ‘it was clear that our Antipodean cousins could more than hold their own with the best cricketers in this country.’ Punch, in a parody of Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib, sang:
‘The Australians came down like a wolf on a fold;,
The Marylebone Club for a trifle were bowled,
Our Grace before dinner was very soon done,
And Grace after dinner did not get a run.’
The win supercharged Australian nationalism. Punch praised the victory as proof of ‘more than gold, Australian beef and kangaroos’. Reserved at first about Gregory’s Eleven, Wisden said the victory was applauded ‘tumultuously so by the thousands of other Englishmen present, whose bones will have mouldered to dust long, long before the cricketers of the future – Colonial and English – cease to gossip about the marvellous short time match played by the Australians at Lord’s on the 27th of May, 1878.’
And the tour’s fortune was made. A happy Garrett said, ‘The match undoubtedly placed Australian cricket on the map.’ A century later, even though the game was never given the status of a Test match, Alan Gibson summarised its significance: ‘It had more to do with the development of international cricket than any other that has been played.’
Wherever the Eleven appeared, crowds converged. Of a night train trip from Yorkshire to London, the Argus wrote: ‘At most of the stations on their way back to London hundreds of people assembled to have a look at them, and the windows of the saloon carriage set apart for their use was darkened by the faces pressed against it. The team had innumerable instances given them of the general ignorance of Australian geography, very few persons appearing to understand that Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane are hundreds of miles apart. Some one inquired about a Mr Blank, at Ipswich, and a Mr Dash in Western Australia, and one of the cricketers stated that even their fellow-lodgers looked steadfastly at them, surprised to find them fashioned as they were, and their customs and habits the same.’
When they played Surrey at the Oval, ‘so great was the pressure of the crowd that the turnstiles could not admit half of them. Small doors were broken open in the fence, and money-takers were placed who received one shilling and half a crown, and neither gave nor were asked for change. It was evident that the crowd would give anything so long as they could get in and get a sight of the play.’ The playing surface was shrunk by the numbers pressing over the boundaries. Wisden said ‘the throng was simply marvellous in its numbers, the pavilion seats and steps were chock full; the spacious rows of seats, dignified by the title of “Grand Stand”, were literally packed with people, who willingly parted with extra coin to obtain the “coign of vantage” that those seats certainly gave; the little terraced embankment, that so happily hides the hideously ugly “Skating Rink”, was crowded to inconvenience.’ Bell’s Life estimated the first-day crowd at 20,000.
At Leicester – the only county to guarantee the Australians a lump sum upfront – the Argus said: ‘The spectators crowded around the tent and called lustily for them. They were hand-shaken and questioned in the most confidential manner. It was evident that they had also made an impression on the ladies, for one fair one was heard to remark that they were really as nice-looking as the English people.’
After worrying about insufficient fixtures, Conway tried to cancel some to give his players a rest, ‘but the fame of the Eleven had become so great that every town had made its arrangements, and did not want to be disappointed’.
Though they played in East Melbourne colours, they were the ‘Australian Eleven’, the words painted on their huge canvas carry-all known as the ‘caravan’. They lugged it democratically, drawing lots. In New Zealand, Spofforth and Murdoch had hauled it ‘a mile and a half … to climb fences and scramble over gates with the huge thing in tow’. The ‘caravan’ went through Australia to New Zealand and back, by steamer to San Francisco then rail to New York, over the Atlantic to Liverpool, to Nottingham and finally London, where, Spofforth recorded, ‘it was lost, and no man knows its burying-place’.
The men lasted longer than the ‘caravan’: only thrice did they need a replacement. They were acknowledged as England’s superior in fielding: sharp movers, aggressive throwers, inventors of new attacking positions. Wisden admired them for ‘demonstrating, as they frequently did, how a well placed thoroughly disciplined Eleven, working with a will all round, could at times win matches by their splendid abilities in saving runs – the most beautiful and enjoyable portion of our good old game.’ Their bowling revived the over-arm style, which before 1878 had suffered under the batting punishments of Grace and others. They introduced England to the fast off-break, which would dominate cricket for decades, spitting off uncovered wickets and flying off gloves or batshoulders to specially-set catchers on the leg-side.
Though Charlie Bannerman justified his reputation as the crack batsman, making centuries in four countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada and England), the bowlers were the celebrities. Boyle invented ‘Boyle’s mid-on’, which we call silly mid-on. Against an Eighteen of Elland, in west Yorkshire, when Boyle took seven wickets in eight balls, one spectator called out: ‘Send a man in!’ Another replied: ‘Send in three or four at once: one’s no use!’
Allan, whose strange batting style caused great mirth and earned him the nickname ‘Crouching Panther’, played some useful innings and had great days with the ball, delivering it from 23 yards to allow more time for swing. He offered entertainment to the English crowds, though Lord Harris observed ‘an unhappy, ungainly cricketer, and I shall never forget the contemptuous “You crab!” hurled at him by one of his indignant comrades for some bungle in the field’.
The 1878 tour had one genuine superstar, one true colonial hero at the dawn of the age of celebrity. The late Victorian age was a time of heroes: General Gordon, David Livingstone, Florence Nightingale, the two Charleses – Darwin and Dickens – and, of course, the Queen herself. Australia’s heroes were Ned Trickett – cheered home by 20,000 after winning the world sculling championship on the Thames – and Spofforth, who advertised Australia’s health and vitality to British eyes.
Whenever the train pulled into a new town, crowds pressed against the windows crying, ‘Which be Spoffen?’ When the masses packed the county grounds, there was one Australian they wanted to see, the bowler whom Altham would rate after a half-century of peerless Test bowlers – Barnes, Lohmann, Richardson, Turner, Bosanquet, Trumble, Noble, Jones, Gregory and McDonald – as the greatest of all.
He earnt his garland of nicknames on that tour. ‘The Windjammer’, for his yorkers. ‘Loup’, for his wolfish mien. ‘The Express’, ‘The Electric Spark’, and, most lastingly, ‘The Demon’. Under this name he was caricatured in the Vanity Fair‘Spy’ series, the 1878 version of the cover of Time. Among cricketers, only Grace had been similarly honoured.
Though he ‘frightened batsmen out’, Spofforth encountered little hostility from the English crowds, who were fascinated by this long, lean, theatrical devil. Only at Keighley, in Yorkshire, did he hear disparagement, and as a form of grudging respect: ‘I’m afraid I was bowling very fast indeed, and was knocking men about a little – a fast bowler has to frighten a batsman sometimes. Suddenly an old Yorkshireman rose up among the crowd, and, amid a dead silence, called out in his loudest tones, “Chain t’long beggar up; he’s trying to kill ’em.’”
Yorkshire also produced an unfriendly atmosphere in another encounter, at Bramall Lane in Sheffield, the Argus commenting:
‘The spectators had ringed in until the slightest tap gave the Yorkshire batsmen 4 runs; the Australian Team were thus heavily handicapped, and its members had the satisfaction of hearing many remarks about themselves as they ran through the crowd after the ball; many were heard to remark in astonishment that they were so white; for the smoke of Sheffield certainly gives the skin a dull leaden colour which is foreign to all Australian natives. A rougher assemblage could scarcely be imagined, their applause was very one-sided and very rough language was used when the Australians met with any success. Every member of the Eleven had been very disagreeably nick-named long before the day was over. The smoke from the factories of Sheffield completely smothered the ground, the smut rested upon their clothing and the cricketers were right heartily glad when they got back to their hotel at Wharncliffe and could indulge in a bath.’
Success had its price, and as the tour went on the stresses built up. Garrett complained in a letter to a friend: ‘Everywhere we go it is the same style of thing. They do all they can to beat us.’ After Trent Bridge, Gregory’s Eleven were considered easybeats. After Lord’s, the top English players stalked them from fixture to fixture, guesting for whatever club or county was opposing them. Between games, Garrett said, conditions were trying. ‘The travelling in those days was most difficult. Matches had been arranged without regard to distances. One day we would be playing in the North of England, knowing that on the morrow we would have to start another match somewhere in the south. There was no comfort in travel, either – no sleeping berths – and we generally arrived at our destination in the early hours of the morning, and started to play the same day.’ Even more challenging for Garrett, his father, the colourful Sydney parliamentarian Thomas Garrett Senior, joined the tour, and his high-living habits meant that while the Australians earned a lucrative pay-out for their £50 investment, young Tom would later confide in his friend Banjo Paterson that his debts from the 1878 trip took him years to pay off.
Besides being the most significant sporting venture in our history, the 1878 Australians were involved in controversies that set the tone for what would follow.
On 20 June, Midwinter was padding up at Lord’s for the match against Middlesex. Horan, whose eyewitness account has been taken as the most reliable, detailed the ‘very unpleasant affair’ that followed.
W.G. Grace, regarding Midwinter as a Gloucestershire teammate, ‘was very vexed to hear there was a chance of losing so good a man’ and ‘resolved to try his best to get him to remain’ with his county, who were playing Surrey at the Oval. Conway went to the Oval to tell Grace about Midwinter’s decision to continue playing for Australia all summer. ‘This seems to have mightily riled Grace, and he openly told Conway that the Australians were a lot of sneaks to try and entice Midwinter away. High words, of course, followed on both sides.’ Conway drove back to Lord’s ‘where Midwinter was dressing to go in with the Australian eleven. Shortly, however, arrived on the scene [James] Bush [Gloucestershire’s keeper and Grace’s best man] and W.G., and after about a quarter of an hour’s pressing from the two of them, away walked Midwinter with his bag.’
The ‘kidnapping’ of Midwinter, then, seems only to have been a mild matter of ‘a quarter of an hour’s pressing’ from Grace and his teammate Bush. But in a second report, Horan expanded: ‘That Grace lost his temper and sadly forgot himself there can be no doubt, while the indecision of Midwinter, who did not seem to know his own mind for two minutes together, cannot be too strongly deprecated … Nothing can justify Grace’s passion and language, nor his conduct in coming to Lord’s and almost forcibly leading away the captive Middy, when the latter was ready to go in with Bannerman to commence batting for the Australians.’
Conway, with Boyle as wingman, gave chase and confronted Grace at the Oval. They accused Grace of bribing Midwinter with an offer of eight pounds a game. Grace, says Simon Rae, ‘may have bullied’ Midwinter into returning, ‘but he was in no position to bribe him’. Indeed, Grace’s claim was that the Australians had offered the bribe, a share in the joint-stock company and a benefit match back in Australia, ‘a much larger sum than we could afford to pay him’, according to Grace’s elder brother E.M.
Unable to persuade Midwinter to come back or Grace to let him go, Conway and Boyle returned to Lord’s.
‘A great deal of unpleasantness arose from this untimely interference,’ reported the Argus, ‘and as if bent on creating mischief, Grace said on leaving [Lord’s], ‘You haven’t the ghost of a show with Middlesex.’ Perhaps the result of the match surprised him somewhat; and then to complete the halo of success which surrounded the team, Surrey, whom the Australians beat by 5 wickets, defeated the Great Western County with all the cracks, including Midwinter, by 16 runs.’
Gregory, fired up by the incident, produced his best innings of the tour. The Argus summarised: ‘His 11 previous innings had only secured a total of 23, and most persons had come to the conclusion that he could not bat even a little bit. This coming out of his shell created intense astonishment; his form was magnificent, and from first to last he did not give the slightest shadow of a chance. The way in which the crowd cheered him as he returned to the pavilion, was something to be remembered … The enthusiasm of the spectators, and especially the ladies, must have been very gratifying to the captain.’
Conway wrote a letter of complaint to Gloucestershire, threatening to cancel Australia’s game at Clifton. To save the match, which would bring hundreds of pounds to Gloucestershire, W.G. Grace wrote to Gregory (not Conway, whom he detested): ‘I apologise that in the excitement of the moment I should have made use of unparliamentary language to Mr Conway.’
Grace is a dominant figure in this book, and Rae captures the essence of his relations with Australia: ‘If sport is war without the shooting, Grace was cricket’s natural warlord, and though his antics sometimes appalled them, the Australians kept coming back with wave after wave of superlative bowlers to try their skills against him … For all his faults, Grace was a difficult man to dislike for long, and for the vast majority of his contemporaries, playing with him was a privilege.’
Neville Cardus once asked a Gloucestershire veteran, ‘Did the old man ever cheat?’ The reply was: ‘No, sir, don’t you ever believe it – he were too clever for that.’
But there was no ruse he was not above. In 1878, for instance, in the Gloucestershire–Surrey match, while he was taking a run, the return throw lodged in his pocket. He kept running until the fieldsmen could stop him. Even then, he refused to hand it back, fearing an appeal for handled ball.
The Grace stories are often like this: outrages that went beyond seriousness. The Australians did go to Clifton to play Gloucestershire (Midwinter had an injured thumb), and inflicted the county’s first-ever home defeat.
Ultimately, Grace would be the early Australian teams’ most influential friend in England. Born into a doctor’s family in the backblocks, never able to earn a large living from his medical practice, Grace was not part of the amateur establishment, much less an aristocrat. For forty years, although he was the pillar of the Gentlemen of England, he was a Player by temperament, one who played for keeps and was prepared to push his market value to the limit and beyond. He was not the only shamateur in English cricket, but nobody’s income approached his, which Kynaston estimates at £120,000, or many millions in today’s money.
If the Australians learnt the game from anyone, it was from Grace, and not just in his perfection of the dual front-foot and back-foot technique of batting. Gregory and Conway took 80 to 90 per cent of the gate from their 40 matches in 1878, to which their opponents agreed because the residual 10 to 20 per cent was ample.
Following Grace’s example, the 1878 Australians were neither amateurs nor professionals, strictly speaking. They mixed in gentlemanly company and were allowed the run of the best facilities. They did not live solely from cricket. In Australia there was no traditional professional class of cricketer. As Pycroft had wryly reported, ‘Australians did not readily develop a race of professionals to do the hard work for them.’
On the other hand, they received gate money in such quantities as to make paupers of every English cricketer except the Champion.
Historian David Montefiore says Gregory’s team ‘occupied a status on tour that was entirely on their own construction’ – a new, distinctly Australian hybrid of entrepreneur-amateur. They were not shamateurs, who played for inflated ‘expenses’; they were capitalists, speculators in their own success.
On 23 July, the banqueting highpoint of the tour, the Duke of Manchester hosted them at Willis’s Rooms in London. Toasting the guests, the Duke said: ‘I am ashamed to say that I am ignorant, disgracefully ignorant, of the game of cricket, and as the eyes of so many experts are on me, I will not venture to say much on that subject; but there is one point to which I can most sincerely advert, and most cordially remark upon, and that is the plug and spirit which have induced the Australian cricketers to come half-way around the world to play an old English game on the soil of Old England (cheers). I am happy to know that they have not been altogether unrewarded (hear, hear). They, of course, did not expect to come all this way, encountering all the risk of times and seasons, and win every match they played in; but I am happy to hear that they have won ten matches against five lost, whilst three have been drawn (cheers). I think that is an ample success and reward for the enterprise, and I will add also, the patriotism they have shown in coming to England. (Hear, hear). I take it as a proof that our colonists are ready to share with us in any enterprise which England, or any portion of the Empire, may be called upon to undertake in more serious rivalry, if unhappily we should have to enter the lists against a foreign enemy (cheers). That is a spirit which we all admire in them, and that is the spirit in which we all welcome them to “Home, sweet home.’”
Gregory replied: ‘We shall carry back nothing but agreeable recollections of our trip across the ocean to visit the dear old country from which we all sprung … I am sure in one thing we are quite as English as you, and that is, in our love of cricket; and on that point I may say that we did not come here with any idea of defeating your best men … Our idea was to measure our strength against your county elevens, and against such antagonists we have more than held our own.’
The banquet, said the Argus, ‘was the most largely-attended affair that has ever met before in London, where Australia was concerned. The company numbered about two hundred, and would have been very much larger but the capabilities of the room prevented, and many coming up to the last moment for tickets had to go without them. The charge for admission was two guineas, and the banquet will be a red-letter day in Australian annals.’
By September, when the Australians were due to meet the Players of England at the Oval, the local professionals had had enough. As Rae says, they ‘would have been prepared to go along with the fiction that they were playing their social superiors had the tourists been willing to share the proceeds of the proposed match a little more generously’, but the Australians were not.
Surrey had given the Australians free use of the Oval, guaranteeing their profits. So the Players demanded £20 a man – double the going rate for a representative match (for ordinary matches the rate was £5 to £6), approximately what each Australian would earn. The Players drew on a precedent. In the ‘Tests’ in Melbourne in 1877, the Victorian Cricketers’ Association had charged Lillywhite £20 for each Australian player’s ‘expenses’. The Players of England were now asking no more than that. But Conway refused, and many of the Players boycotted the game.
The Australians played so poorly that a virtual Third Eleven of Players needed only 18 runs to win with five wickets in hand. Gregory gave the ball to Spofforth and said, ‘Loup, we are going to be beaten by a lot of second-raters.’ Spofforth took three wickets in the next over and Australia won. Afterwards, to make a point to the boycotters, Conway paid the Players £20 each, the umpires £10 pounds each instead of the standard three, and doubled the wages for the ground staff.
That might have settled matters for a day, but the boycott was the beginning of a 35-year argument. As Montefiore puts it, the cultural clash was between ‘two dominant factions’ – ‘one which subscribed to the largely pre-modern value system and economic priorities of the English game’ and ‘one which was spectator oriented, economically pragmatic and which recognised the potential to unite colonial cricket’s fragmented popularity successfully in the international arena … In adopting cricket, the Australian colonies also adopted its contradictions and perhaps its most glaring yet enduring contradiction was the “gentleman-professional”.’
The 1878 Australian tour was not just the birth of international cricket in England but the beginning of a challenge to the amateur-professional system. On 2 November, after the Australians had left, the MCC stated: ‘That no gentleman ought to make a profit by his services in the cricket field, and that for the future no cricketer who takes more than his expenses in any match shall be qualified to play for the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s.’
Furthermore, it stated, this had always been the case. A sceptical Lillywhite wrote: ‘Cricketers … know, as well as we do, this statement is, to use a mild term, hardly consistent with the facts.’ He accused Grace in all but name: ‘Ninety-nine out of every hundred cricketers know as well as we do that … one well-known cricketer in particular has not been an absentee from the Gentlemen’s eleven at Lord’s for many years past, and that he has made larger profits by playing cricket than any Professional ever made.’
The MCC could not legislate shamateurism out of existence, but the Australians’ tour, having shone a light on the contradictions and hypocrisy within the status quo, was the first crack in the paternalistic edifice.
When the Eleven farewelled England from the City of Richmond on 17 September, they had won 18 of 40 games, losing only seven. Their rate of completing matches was high, considering a summer in which Harris was ‘sure my boots were never dry from early in May to late in August’.
Improved pitches, technique and equipment would be legacies of the 1878 Originals. Acknowledging their responsibilities as colonial ambassadors, the Australians donated £100 to the Thames Calamity Fund after two steamers collided on the river on 3 September – more than 600 people died – though they turned down an invitation to play a charity match. H.S. Altham and E.W. Swanton, in their history of cricket, comment that ‘a decided tribute [was] paid to the resolution, discipline, and training of the eleven; their punctuality and smart appearance, and the automatic way in which they fell into their places, whatever change of bowling was made’; although, they added, ‘the wholehearted enthusiasm of our visitors sometimes involved impatience and resentment at the umpires’ decisions when unfavourable to themselves.’
Most importantly, the traditional appeal of domestic English contests now had to take a back seat: international cricket had arrived.
The chip on the colonial shoulder began to ease. Press coverage reflected complex emotions. London’s Town and Country Journal was earnest in its botanical reference: ‘The manly qualities of the parent stock flourish as vigorously in these distant colonies as in the mother country.’ But the Illustrated Sydney News declined to gloat. ‘We must, though, all remember that we are from the old stock, perhaps improved by grafting on Australian soil.’
On 5 October when the team left England, the Illustrated Sydney News concluded: ‘If it had done nothing more than to prove to the millions of our friends at home that the climate of Australia had no enervating influence on the Anglo-Saxon race that would have been a great deal.’
By the time they returned to Sydney, via USA and Canada, in November, Gregory’s Eleven knew they were something more than mere cricketers. In their game at Montreal, Gregory and Garrett were taking a walk round the ground when they met a ‘middle aged gentleman’ who said ‘the Australian cricketers had set an excellent example to Australian statesmen by federating’. He introduced himself as Lord Dufferin, the Governor-General of Canada. The Australians saw themselves as personages of national significance. It was a big step up for cricketers since 1862, when one of H.H. Stephenson’s professionals, Roger Iddison, said of Australians that he ‘didn’t think much of their play, but they are a wonderful lot of drinking men.’
When they returned to Sydney, Gregory’s Eleven were asked to stay aboard until a fitting reception could be organised. By the time a launch took them to Circular Quay, one-tenth of Sydney’s population, or 20,000 people, had turned out. Flags and banners decorated buildings in George and Pitt streets as the team was driven from Circular Quay to the Town Hall for an official function. Garrett said: ‘A half-holiday had been proclaimed, and amid great cheering we were driven to the Town Hall, where the Premier, Sir John Robertson, made most eulogistic speeches … Altogether we had a royal welcome that day in Sydney!’
Spofforth remembered: ‘All the crowded steamers met us outside the Sydney Heads to welcome us back.’ They proceeded into town to have ‘one of the greatest nights I have ever seen … I shall never forget the reception – an immense contrast to our cool “send off” … The old motto “Advance Australia!” seemed to span every corner.’
Conway wrote that ‘the reception exceeded anything they could have anticipated, all classes doing their utmost to show how genuine was the appreciation of the fellow-colonists … On no previous occasion had Sydney been so moved.’
While the prestige of being heroes could not be measured, the financial rewards could. When Conway did the final accounts, he netted £1200 for himself – 7.5 per cent of the gross plus his share. The players received approximately £750 each. To put that into perspective, it was five times Garrett’s annual salary as a clerk of the Supreme Court, and two and a half times Gregory’s salary as a senior accountant in the audit office. It was more than ten times Alick Bannerman’s salary in the Government Printing Office, though his agreed set fee of £200 was three times his salary.
Firmly on the front foot, Gregory asked the NSW government for the payment of his salary for the time he had been away – and likewise for Garrett, Bannerman and Henry Gibbes, Conway’s assistant. Richard Driver, president of the NSWCA and a member of parliament, petitioned the premier, Henry Parkes, on Gregory’s behalf. Parkes refused, but, on further pressing, agreed to make good Gregory’s £160 of unpaid salary. In future years, ‘Handsome Dave’ would head the NSW Treasury and refuse an invitation to become the Commonwealth’s inaugural Treasury secretary. With his efforts in 1878, he had shown himself eminently qualified to handle high finance. But he had left behind a legacy of commercial-mindedness that would cause untold problems between Australia and England.