The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  It was not, therefore, surprising that they soon lost a match (against odds). After this they were given a ticking off in The Australasian. The English, it said,

  . . . are by a long way the weakest side that have ever played in the colonies, notwithstanding the presence of Shaw, who is termed the premier bowler of England. If Ulyett, Emmett, and Hill are specimens of the best fast bowling in England, all we can say is, either they have not shown their proper form, or British bowling has sadly deteriorated.

  It is not uncommon, to this day, for touring sides to be hailed as heroes on arrival, and dismissed as nobodies when things go wrong.

  However, the attendances were good, and the early matches suggested that Lillywhite would make a profit, as he ultimately did – on this tour, though not on later ones. But they still had much travelling ahead, even when they had settled to form. Apart from their journeys within Australia, they had undertaken to go to New Zealand (in the middle of the tour, with the big matches still to come). Touring in New Zealand then was even tougher than touring in Australia. It was in New Zealand that the English lost their wicketkeeper, Ed Pooley, in unfortunate circumstances. Pooley was a capable cricketer, and a popular one, but not one of Queen Victoria’s more reliable citizens. He was to die in the workhouse, though he battled on for another thirty years. Alfred Shaw describes how

  We were playing against Eighteen of Canterbury, and in a discussion of the prospects of the match that occurred in an hotel bar at night, Pooley offered to take £1 to a shilling that he named the individual score of every member of the local team. It is a trick familiar to cricketers, and in the old days of matches against local eighteens and twenty-twos it was not infrequently worked off against the unwary. The bet being accepted, Pooley named a duck as the score of each batsman on the local side. A fair proportion of ducks was recorded, and Pooley claimed £1 for each of them, while prepared to pay one shilling for the other scores. The man with whom the bet had been made said it was a catch bet, and he declined to pay. The man’s name was Donkin. His refusal to pay led to a scene of disorder. We next had to go to Otago, and at the close of the match there, Pooley was arrested on a charge of ‘having at Christchurch maliciously injured property above the value of £5’; and another charge, of assaulting Donkin. For the assault he had £5 and costs to pay. In the other charge he had as partner in trouble Alf Bramall, a supernumerary attached to our team. The two were committed for trial, bail being allowed of £100. We never saw Pooley again during that tour.

  Pooley’s bail did not allow him to leave the country, and though he was acquitted of the major charge, and even had a public subscription raised for him by the New Zealanders – many of whom felt he had been inhospitably treated – the rest of the English team had to leave him behind, because they had to be back in Australia. Pooley ultimately trailed home on his own, thus missing playing in the first Test match. As it happened, he never had a chance to play in another.

  It was suggested during this tour, both in Australia and New Zealand, that the English were 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. This complaint also, whether true or not, remains a recognized accompaniment of any touring team which is not doing too well. The English would no doubt have pleaded justification for at least the last of these offences, because the travelling problems did give a man a thirst. After they had spent eighty hours on the road in New Zealand, wading and swimming through swollen streams on the way, they arrived in Christchurch just in time for the start of play. George Ulyett, no weakling he, but as strapping a man as ever came out of Yorkshire, said that ‘We were so stiff, cold and sore with being wet and cramped up in the coach that we could scarcely bowl or run.’ They only just managed to get the Eighteen of Canterbury out on the first day, and the local opinion was that the English might as well have stopped at home, instead of coming all that way to teach Canterbury folks how to play cricket. Ulyett goes on (A. W. Pullin took down his recollections):

  In the evening I told Lillywhite that we had been up to our necks in water, had no bed and nothing to eat, it was worth stretching a point, so we got him to allow us a case of champagne and we had a merry evening. The next day we went on to the field new men.

  The early English touring sides were very fond of champagne, surprisingly – or so it seems to us, today, accustomed to watching the pints of beer go down. There are many instances of early English cricketers, in forlorn moments far from home, clamouring for champagne. I sometimes wonder if this is the origin of the term ‘Pommy’ (all the Shorter Oxford says is ‘origin obscure’). Pommery was a well-known brand before the end of the century. After all, we were called ‘Limeys’ by the Americans because our seamen drank lime juice, as a precaution against the scurvy.

  Well, while I am indulging in such speculations, the 1876–7 tourists are on their way back to Australia, and another rough trip they had, arriving several days late with no proper time to rest. ‘Not one of us was fit to play cricket,’ writes Shaw: ‘I was simply spun out of myself.’ There was probably some substance in this excuse. Armitage, who was the fattest member of the side, and a particularly bad traveller, bowled a ball to Bannerman which went for an overhead wide; and then rolled the next one along the ground. But only two wides were bowled in the innings, and Armitage was not primarily a bowler. It was more important that he dropped Bannerman, a simple catch at mid-off, before the Australian No. 1 had reached double figures. Bannerman went on to 165 (retired hurt) and effectively settled the match. This was a most extraordinary performance as scores went in those days. No other Australian, in either innings, scored more than 20, and the highest English score was 63, by Jupp.

  If Lillywhite’s men were not the best eleven cricketers in England, they were not so far from it, a tried professional eleven, and whatever their handicaps, they had had to give the colonials best. The Melbourne Age had no doubt of the significance of the victory:

  Such an event would not have been dreamed of as coming within the limits of possibility ten or fifteen years ago, and it is a crushing reply to those unpatriotic theorists who would have us believe that the Australian race is deteriorating from the Imperial type, or that lengthened existence under Australian suns would kill out the Briton in the blood.

  Readers of The Times in London had to wait two months for their account, which ultimately came in their ‘Melbourne Letter’, immediately after a description of a first-class rumpus in the Victorian Parliament, and just before the latest population statistics. It is a shade patronizing.

  You know the result of our great cricket match. To use Mr Trollope’s word, Australians will ‘blow’ about it for some time to come. It was played on the ground of the Melbourne Club, between Lillywhite’s eleven and a combined eleven of New South Wales and Victoria. We are told that it is the first match in which an English professional eleven has been beaten out of England. The game was watched with intense excitement by enthusiastic crowds, and those who could not get to the ground clustered round the newspaper offices to see the last dispatches from the seat of war placarded on the door posts. It began and ended in good temper, and Lillywhite’s pecuniary success must have consoled him for his defeat.

  The reference to Trollope concerns some unflattering remarks he had made in a book about his Australian travels. After the victory, some triumphant verses appeared in the Australasian, called ‘The Brazen Trumpet’, and beginning

  Anthony Trollope

  Says we can wallop

  The whole of creation at ‘blowing’.

  It’s well in a way,

  But then he don’t say

  We blow about nothing worth showing!

  Shaw, in his reminiscences, gives the full score of the match, but is careful to refer to the English eleven as ‘Lillywhite’s Eleven’. The excitement in England was not great, especially as the second Test, a fortnight later on the same ground, was won.

  That br
ings me to a last curious point about this famous occasion. When G. F. Grace was still planning his tour, he had booked the Melbourne ground, the big ground, the home of the Melbourne Cricket Club. Lillywhite’s agent had to be content with booking the East Melbourne ground, and the East Melbourne club duly went to much trouble and expense in making preparations. However, when Grace withdrew, Lillywhite naturally wanted to switch grounds, and this did not please the East Melbourne club at all. There were threats of legal proceedings. In the end an amicable settlement was reached. Lillywhite paid East Melbourne £230, and gave free admission to their members, of whom there were 500. He was not a mean man, which was one reason why he never made much money out of his various cricketing ventures. So Test cricket might have begun upon a relatively obscure ground, not at its most famous home, barring possibly one. There were several arguments during the tour, about such matters as rolling the pitch, and the hours of play. The Englishmen, their thoughts directed to the financial benefits, usually gave way. Nevertheless, there were times when feeling ran high. During the match against Fifteen of New South Wales, a lady wrote to Lillywhite imploring him to win, ‘as it would not be safe for any Englishman or woman to walk the streets of Sydney if New South Wales were victorious’.

  James Lillywhite, for all his adventures and misadventures, was England’s first Test captain, as these things came to be reckoned, and he ended with a 50–50 record, slightly above average. What is more, he lived long enough to realize something of what he had started. He outlived all the other members of his team, and died in 1929, aged eighty-seven, when A. P. F. Chapman had just been to Australia (Lillywhite was nearly sixty when Chapman was born), and beaten them, 4–1, before record crowds.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  William Gilbert Grace was the pre-eminent Victorian, better known in his day than Disraeli or Gladstone. He was so venerated by the common people of England that when he died of a heart attack, in July 1915, the Germans, hoping to deliver a knockout blow to British morale, claimed he was a victim of a Zeppelin raid. The memorial to Grace at Lord’s called him ‘the Great Cricketer’, the definitive article and the capitals rightly setting him apart from the rest. Grace had a fine tactical brain allied to a relentless will to win; it was he who brought gamesmanship into the game. But he also revolutionized modern batsmanship

  Some of the best cricket writers have expended ink on ‘W. G.’. Two chapters of C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary masterfully set the cricketer in his social context. There have also been fine lives by A. A. Thomson, Eric Midwinter and, most recently, Simon Rae. I have chosen here a study of his batsmanship written by C. B. Fry, who opened the batting for England with W. G., followed by a charming sketch of the man by Bernard Darwin.

  C. B. FRY

  The Founder of Modern Batsmanship (1939)

  W. G. always reminds me of Henry VIII. Henry VIII solidified into a legend when he had already involved himself in several matrimonial tangles and had become overweighted with flesh and religious controversies. Yet Henry in his physical prime had been, even allowing for the adulation of courtiers, the premier athlete of England, a notable wrestler, an accomplished horseman, and a frequent champion in the military tournaments of his time. So it is with W. G. He figures in the general mind in the heavy habit of his latter years on the cricket fields, a bearded giant heavy of gait and limb, and wonderful by reason of having outlived his contemporaries as a giant of cricket. Even when disputes in clubs and pavilions canvass the relative merits of W. G., Ranji and Don Bradman, the picture in the minds of the disputants is of a big, heavy Englishman, a slim, lithe Oriental and a nimble, lightweight Australian. Even those of us who wag our heads and utter the conventional and oracular statement, ‘Ah, W. G.! There will never be his like again,’ do not properly realize who it is who will never be like whom. Incredible as it may appear, I myself never saw W. G. till I played against him for Sussex at Bristol at the age of twenty-two and the great man himself was forty-six. So my own memory of him begins only five years before he retired from Test-match cricket, and he was already corpulent and comparatively inactive, though he was yet to enjoy one of his most successful seasons as a batsman and score 1,000 runs in May. But I came into first-class cricket soon enough to meet many of the leading cricketers who had played with W. G. in his early prime, and who talked first-hand of the W. G. we ought to have in mind when we institute comparisons between him and Don Bradman . . .

  One saw him at his best against fast bowling. In the days of Richardson, Mold, Lockwood and Kortright, I once asked him who was the fastest bowler he had played. He answered without hesitation, ‘George Freeman.’ If W. G. in his youth treated George Freeman as I saw him in middle age treat Tom Richardson, all I can say is that George Freeman went home a wiser if not a better bowler. There were no fireworks or extravagances. W. G. just stood at his crease to his full height (and everyone who wishes to play fast bowling well should so stand) and proceeded to lean against the ball in various directions and send it scudding along the turf between the fielders. No visible effort, no hurry; just a rough-hewn precision. He was not a graceful bat and he was not ungraceful; just powerfully efficient.

  For a very big man specially addicted to driving he was curiously adept at cutting fast bowlers very late. He did not cut with a flick like Ranji or a swish like Trumper. Before the stroke he seemed to be about to play the ball with his ordinary back stroke, but at the last moment he pressed down quickly with his wrists, with an almost vertical swing, and away sped the ball past all catching just clear of second or third slip. I remember seeing him make about 80 at the Oval against Richardson and Lockwood at their best; he scored at least half his runs with this late cut peculiar to himself, and eventually he was caught in the slips off it. When he came up to the dressing room, hugely hot and happy, he sat down and addressed us: ‘Oughtn’t to have done it . . . Dangerous stroke . . . But shan’t give it up . . . Get too many runs with it.’ He then changed his shirt and his thick under-vest and went away to have a chat with Charlie Alcock, the Surrey secretary, who was a crony of his.

  In his later years, when he was handicapped by his weight, he went in for one unorthodox stroke. W. G. never played the glance to leg or the modern diversional strokes in that direction. The ball just outside the leg stump, if he could reach it, he hit with a plain variant of his great on drive, and the ball went square with the wicket a little in front of the umpire. If the ball pitched on his legs, he played the old-fashioned leg hit with an almost horizontal sweeping swing – but, ye moderns, with his weight fully on his front foot. This was the stroke with which in his later years he hit the ball from outside his off stump round to square leg. The young Gloucestershire bloods used to call this the ‘Old Man’s cow shot’. What actually W. G. did was to throw his left leg across the wicket to the off ball and treat it as if it were a ball to leg bowled to him from the direction of mid-off or extra cover. I fancy he introduced this stroke to himself in his great year of revival in the latter part of some of his big innings. The original exponent was the noted Surrey batsman W. W. Read, who used it with much effect on fast wickets against accurate slow bowlers such as Peate, Peel and Briggs. In fact, the stroke is the genuine leg hit. Ranji told me that Walter Read had shown him how to do it at the nets and that it was an easy stroke, but I never saw Ranji try it in a match; he had plenty of strokes without it.

  Thinking back on what I have written, I am wondering whether I have succeeded in conveying the individuality of W. G.’s batsmanship, his tremendous physique, his indomitable precision, and the masterful power of his strokes. At any rate, there they were, these characters, and no one who ever saw W. G. play will admit the near equality of any other batsman, even though he thought, as I do, that in pure technique Ranji was a better.

  BERNARD DARWIN

  Genial Giant (1934)

  ‘W. G.’, said an old friend of his, ‘was just a great big schoolboy in everything he did.’ It would be difficult in a single sentence to come nearer to the cl
ue to his character. He had all the schoolboy’s love for elementary and boisterous jokes; his distaste for learning; his desperate and undisguised keenness; his guilelessness and his guile; his occasional pettishness and pettiness; his endless power of recovering his good spirits. To them may be added two qualities not as a rule to be found in schoolboys: a wonderful modesty and lack of vanity; an invariable kindness to those younger than himself, ‘except’, as one of his most devoted friends has observed, ‘that he tried to chisel them out lbw’ . . .

  It has been said that W. G. liked simple jokes, and if they were familiar ones of the ‘old grouse in the gunroom type’ so much the better. There seems to me something extremely characteristic about a story, very small and mild in itself, told by Mr C. E. Green in the Memorial Biography. Mr Green was Master of the Essex Hounds, and had the hounds brought for W. G. to look at after breakfast. He liked the hounds, and he liked the Master’s big grey horse, and, Mr Green goes on, ‘For years afterwards whenever we met he would sing out ‘‘How’s my old grey horse?’’’ That is perhaps hardly worthy of the name of joke, but, whatever it was, it was the kind of friendly chaff that pleased W. G. He liked jokes to do with conviviality, for he was a convivial soul. Essentially temperate in his everyday private life, he enjoyed good things on anything in the nature of an occasion; he had, as I fancy, a kind of Dickensian relish for good cheer, not merely the actual enjoyment of it but also the enjoyment of thinking and talking about it, and he combined with this, of course, a much greater practical capacity than Dickens ever had. A whole bottle of champagne was a mere nothing to him; having consumed it he would go down on all fours, and balance the bottle on the top of his head and rise to his feet again. Nothing could disturb that magnificent constitution, and those who hoped by a long and late sitting to shorten his innings next day often found themselves disappointed. His regular habit while cricketing was to drink one large whisky and soda, with a touch of angostura bitters, at lunch, and another when the day’s play ended; this allowance he never varied or exceeded till the evening came, and, despite his huge frame, though he never dieted, he ate sparingly. His one attempt at a weight-reducing regimen was the drinking of cider. As he believed in a moderate amount of good drink, so he disbelieved strongly in tobacco. He had been brought up in a non-smoking family (though his brother Alfred became a backslider), and stuck to its tenets religiously all his life. It was an aphorism of his that ‘you can get rid of drink, but you can never get rid of smoke’. He constantly proclaimed it as his own private belief, but he never made any attempt to put his team on any allowance of tobacco.