The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  A. A. THOMSON

  Bat, Ball and Boomerang (1958)

  The All Blacks of 1905, that formidable phalanx of Rugby footballers from New Zealand, were the first Commonwealth visitors to go by that name, but the title might have been more reasonably claimed by the cricketing ‘all blacks’, that first visiting side from Australia of thirty-seven years earlier, who, apart from their captain, Charles Lawrence, who was also their manager, were Aborigines to a man. In comparatively recent years, only three Aborigines have played state cricket: A. Henry, ‘Eddie’ Gilbert and J. J. Marsh, the first two of them for Queensland and the third for New South Wales. Of the three, only Gilbert lent much colour to the game. The two best-known facts about him are: (1) his speed was so furious that he once knocked the bat clean out of Bradman’s hands and (2) Learie Constantine hit a very fast ball from him out of the Woollongabba ground at Brisbane. They never found the ball. Knowing Constantine, I fancy it may have reached the Great Barrier Reef.

  In the 1860s, however, there were more Aborigines in the game, and in the side that Lawrence brought over there were thirteen. Lawrence himself was a remarkable cricketer. He played at different times for Middlesex and Surrey, and undertook professional engagements in both Scotland and Ireland. Playing for a Scottish Twenty-two against the All-England XI, he bowled Julius Caesar so comprehensively that all three stumps were knocked out of the ground. I should have thought this hardly physically possible, but the records are firm and clear. He went out to Australia with H. H. Stephenson’s team and, when they came home, he stayed on to coach the Albert Club, Sydney’s leading cricket combination. It was he who conceived the idea of the tour undertaken by his pupils. The visit, like all early tours, was an effort of private enterprise, and, on Lawrence’s persuasion, was backed by four gentlemen of speculative temperament, headed by a Mr Graham, of Sydney.

  You can see the portraits of the Aborigines, built up into a composite picture, in the Imperial Cricket Museum at Lord’s. They were members of the Werrumbrook tribe, a race then living in Victoria but now extinct, and in its day very different in character from the present-day Aborigines of Northern Queensland, with which modern ethnological research, benevolent social work and the delightful detective stories of Arthur Upfield have made us familiar. Our cricketing Aborigines, it is claimed, were nearer in race to the Maoris of New Zealand, though their photographs hardly seem to support this theory. Frankly, they are not as handsome as Maoris, but nothing could now matter less.

  Their photographs show them to be black, bearded and, with one or two exceptions, wiry rather than muscular. Their costume is fascinatingly varied. Some are clad in unexceptionable flannels; others appear to be wearing shorts over their trousers. (Who would presume to be fashion’s arbiter in such matters?) Their feet are bare. Only a few bear (or brandish) the simple implements connected with their cricket. Mullagh carries a bat over his shoulder and is well within his rights in doing so, for he was by far the best batsman, not to mention the best bowler and wicketkeeper, in the side; Johnny Cuzens, the second-best bowler, is shown in the act of delivering a deadly ball, and Red Cap, in a solemn manner which he seldom assumed in real life at the crease, is squaring up defensively. All the others are provided with examples of their true native weapons: boomerangs, spears and a curious narrow shield, in shape rather like a pelota basket. Some of them are adorned with gay sashes, just as footballers wear numbers, to distinguish their identities,3 and the colours—maroon, pink, yellow, magenta—all added to the brightness of the scene.

  Apart from polar explorers, our Aborigines must have become in time the most harassed (or hardened) of travellers. They endured a sea voyage of inordinate length on the Paramatla, not the kindliest of ships, but this was no unkinder than what came later. They took up their first headquarters at Town Malling in Kent. Afterwards, they moved into a pub called the Queen’s Head in the Borough and seemed to have found London less idyllic but more congenial.

  At first, because of a prejudice, not against the colour but against the sheer strangeness of the visitors, the business of planning their fixture list hung fire, but the MCC, in characteristically courteous and helpful fashion, came forward and offered them a game at Lord’s. After this became known, fixtures in plenty were showered on them. They might possibly have complained that their fixtures were imperfectly arranged, but no one could say that a total of forty-seven matches was insufficient.

  Their first game took place at the Oval. It was not played against the county side, which in those days of H. H. Stephenson, George Griffith and Billy Caffyn would no doubt have been too strong for them, but against an excellent Gentlemen’s side, the Surrey Club. The Club, who batted first, eventually won by an innings, but the Aborigines put up a stiff enough resistance to show they had good quality in them. Lawrence, of course, helped to give the side a certain stiffening, but splendid batting in each innings came from Mullagh, whose keenness and success were to last right through the tour.

  After this game the Aborigines gave a quite electrifying display of spear and boomerang throwing, the grand finale of which was a contribution by Dick-a-Dick, who allowed five gentlemen of Surrey, including Mr William Burrup, the county’s honorary secretary, to pelt him with cricket balls as hard as they could go. It sounds an ungentlemanly thing to have done, but everybody, including Dick-a-Dick, swaying, swinging and dodging fantastically, seems to have enjoyed it.

  Several interesting things happened to the Aborigines at the Oval that day. Mullagh, because of his unexpectedly brilliant batting, was awarded a golden sovereign as talent money, formally presented by the Surrey secretary in front of the pavilion. Among those who took part in the sports with the Aborigines was a lanky young fellow, just short of his twentieth birthday, who had come up from Bristol to try his hand at throwing the cricket ball. In three goes he threw 116, 117 and 118 yards and, at his fourth attempt, he threw the ball 109 yards one way and 104 the other. His name was William Gilbert Grace, and whether he was acclaimed the winner of this particular competition I do not know.

  After the game the visitors were joined by William Shepherd, a young member of the Surrey ground staff who had stood umpire for them. He became a valuable addition to the side, helping with the general management, umpiring and captaining the eleven when Lawrence took a rest.

  Some 7,000 watched the game and about half of them stayed to see the sports. The Aborigines were subsequently taken to see the Derby at Epsom. They missed Hermit’s Derby by a year, but I hope they found the winner at equally long odds.

  So they were launched upon their arduous Odyssey which lasted from 26 May until the third week in October, and for sheer strenuousness I can think of nothing to compare with it except the Maori rugger team, brought over in similar circumstances in the 1880s, and condemned to a programme of seventy matches that a galley slave would hardly have considered leisurely. Our Aborigines played 47 matches, won 14, lost the same number and drew 19. It is to their credit that most of their losses were incurred early on, before they had had a chance of getting used to English conditions. Indeed, when you consider the sheer wear and tear of their itinerary, it is highly to their credit that they won any matches at all.

  It was the day-to-day travelling that they found most punishing. Nobody knows if any of them when at home had ever followed the Aboriginal custom of ‘going walkabout’, but their stay in England was one long ‘walkabout’. Try to imagine forty-seven uncoordinated journeys, including trips between such far-flung places as Kennington and Keighley, Plymouth and Tynemouth, Brighton and Bootle. Shepherd, a sharp-eyed, good-natured little man, mopped his brow in the fierce heat of England’s hottest summer for many years, and wondered why these journeys, so ill-arranged and costly, could not have been put into the hands of some more intelligent wanderer. Why, for instance, had they not consulted George Parr, captain and manager of the All-England XI, who had been touring the cricketing towns for years, and whose knowledge of the tricks of transport might have saved the managers m
uch money and the players much discomfort? Even under these hardships the ‘demeanour of the Blacks was most becoming’ and they travelled from Rochdale to Swansea and from Swansea to Bradford without a murmur. Perhaps they were sustained and uplifted by the fact that at Bootle a boomerang was swung off course by the wind and decapitated a spectator’s tall hat.

  For publicity’s sake, the circus always put up at the best hotels and, at this distance of time, it is impossible not to be awed by the thought of Bullocky, Dick-a-Dick and Jimmy Mosquito flaunting it in the best hotels in Hunslet, Rochdale and Bootle. This, it was complained, played havoc with the venture’s finances.

  The two leading accounts of the tour are not agreed upon its financial results. One, quoting the large crowds which the visitors attracted everywhere by their enterprising cricket and especially by their athletic displays, declares it to have been a success. The other authority, our Mr Shepherd, argued otherwise. Indeed, Shepherd, whose business acumen should have stamped him as a Scot or a Yorkshireman instead of a mere Southerner, demonstrated in relentless Micawber-like economic logic how the tour lost £2,000, a deficit which should have been shared by four speculators, but fell in fact most heavily upon the unfortunate Mr Graham of Sydney, who had planked down the money in the first place. This loss, and doubts for the future that it spread, put an end to the plan which Lawrence had conceived of wintering in the South of France and returning the following season. The money risk was too heavy.

  Besides a well-patronized game against the MCC at Lord’s, in which Mullagh again distinguished himself with both bat and ball, the Aborigines made spasmodic forays into Kent and East Lancashire and had some gruesome experiences at Turnham Green on a truly rural wicket, which consisted wholly of ridge and furrow.

  Not all the players enjoyed equal success throughout the tour. Easily the most dexterous was Johnny Mullagh, who made 1,670 runs and took nearly 250 wickets, an impressive season’s performance by anybody anywhere. Not content with such an excellent record, he frequently kept wicket as a substitute for Bullocky, the regular practitioner, and took a toll of forty victims, half of them stumped. His bowling was of the old-fashioned honest sort, fast and straight. He reinforced his formidable quality by moving swiftly towards the batsman as he finished his delivery, just as W. G. habitually trotted towards silly mid-off. The result was that a surprising number of batsmen found themselves first mesmerized and then caught and bowled. An even bigger number were run out by his swift, deadly aim.

  Johnny Cuzens, another remarkable athlete, came next highest among the records both for batting and bowling. His bowling action was not unlike that of some other bowlers we could name; it was, they say, ‘of the windmill description’. His deliveries were menacingly fast and bumpy and the manner in which he exploited the relaxed rule about raising the arm above the shoulder is just nobody’s business. Conservative old gentlemen who had muttered darkly about the thin end of the wedge were beginning to say: ‘I told you so’, but the authorities were past worrying about this now. Overarm bowling had come to stay. Johnny Cuzens also made his 1,000 runs and took his 100 wickets and was probably the side’s best sprinter. It was his habit to run barefoot until the solicitous Mr Shepherd had a pair of special running pumps made for him in Sheffield. On the third day of the last match of their tour Cuzens was challenged by an anonymous sprinter from the north. Shepherd, who suspected some jiggery-pokery in the wager, was disposed to frown on the challenge, but the tourists’ London host happened to be William Holland, proprietor of the old Canterbury music hall, who was full of admiration for his guest. Holland was a man of large ideas and was what we should now call publicity-minded. He once proposed to place an outsize carpet, value at £1,000, in the vestibule of his music hall and was undeterred by the suggestion that patrons would only spit on it.

  ‘Fine,’ said he. ‘We’ll advertise in the papers: ‘‘Come and spit on our £1,000 carpet’’.’

  Nothing could stop him from offering to put a fiver on Johnny Cuzens and, almost before Shepherd could open his mouth in protest, the race had started. Cuzens sent his supporters’ hearts into their mouths by being slow off the mark and subjected them to something near thrombosis when, halfway down the track, he kicked off one of his running pumps. But from that instant he moved like the wind and slipped past his rival. As he breasted the tape he was engulfed in the warm embrace of his chief backer, who, true to the openhanded tradition of the music hall, pressed both stake and winnings into the runner’s hand.

  Bullocky was a courageous wicket keeper with a granite frame and would have kept just as boldly unarmed by pads or gloves. He was also a stubborn bat, sometimes exasperatingly so, and had one heroic innings of 64 not out at Hastings which would have done credit to the last of the Saxons.

  The rest of the Aborigines, though keen fielders and good sportsmen, were fair-to-indifferent performers with bat and ball. One of their drawbacks (if drawback is the right word) was that they showed a certain rashness in hitting and something more reprehensible than rashness in running between the wickets. To such a degree was their judgement at fault that on the tour there were nearly sixty run-outs. Is this, you may well ask, a record? Twopenny, despite the fact that his sash was drab in colour, was a hearty smiter of what we should now call the ‘Jim Smith’ school, and performed a feat which I do not think either Grace or Bradman ever achieved: he once hit a 9 (repeat nine) all run and without benefit of overthrow. I hope that news of this feat can be kept from Messrs Wardle and Trueman, who might spend the rest of their active (and otherwise blameless) lives in striving to emulate it.

  The Aborigine named Sundown played in only two matches and, despite rival historic claims, must have been the original hero of the legend: ‘In the first innings he made one and in the second he was not so successful.’ There is an air of Odyssey about the thought of a man travelling right round the world (once round the Horn) for the pleasure of making one run. What is even odder is that he had never made a run in a match before the tour and that he never made a run when he got back home. It is no cliché to say that he never ‘troubled the scorers’. Poor Sundown. Or should we say: ‘Happy Sundown’? Perhaps it is better to travel hopefully towards the supreme ambition of breaking your duck than to arrive, and he remains a magnificent example of hope and endurance to all the worst batsmen in the world. (Was he by any chance a bowler or a good fielder? And it is interesting to ponder on the stroke that brought him the one historic run: can it, for instance, be proved beyond question that the shot was intentional?) The triumphs of Peter were much more spectacular. His tale of 42 matches was studded with 17 ducks. Old Jemmy Shaw of Notts never did anything half so clever. Even among the bowlers who took more wickets in their careers than they scored runs, this remains an impressive achievement. I doubt if even Eric Hollies could show so proud a record.

  . . . Our Aborigines could all throw the spear and boomerang, but Charley Dumas was outstanding. He had been a champion in his own land and was undoubtedly paramount here. Great crowds came to see him hurl the slender stick almost out of sight and apparently keep it voyaging, rather like an antipodean sputnik, by remote control. Gaping, spectators would see it return, slowly and, as it seemed, deliberately, to make a perfect three-point landing between Charley’s bare feet. In the last fifty years much has been learned about the control of aircraft and missiles from the ground and the science of aerodynamics has few secrets, but much of the mystery of the boomerang remains. Some newspapers suggested that more people came to see Charley Dumas’ bravura performance than to see the cricket and, although this is not strictly true, Dumas had a large following.

  The master of the Australian stockwhip was Jimmy Mosquito, the brother, in spite of their different names, of Johnny Cuzens. Jimmy was demonstrably inferior to Johnny as a cricketer and a sprinter, but with the stockwhip he displayed the same touch of wizardry as did Charley Dumas with the boomerang. Between lunch and the resumption of play Shepherd introduced a pretty ritual. Outside the pavilion
he would stand with a shilling in his outstretched fingers and Jimmy, with a nonchalant crack of his eighteen-foot lash, would flick the coin clear. This performance was repeated two or three times and then Shepherd would toss the shilling to Jimmy as his prize. From the knot of spectators who had gathered to watch this little game, one man after another would come forward, waving his shilling and inviting Jimmy to flick it out of his hand. By the time the bell rang for resumption of play, Jimmy’s pockets were bulging with shillings. But his ethical standards remained high. After his haul he always returned his partner’s decoy shilling.

  The poverty of some of the visitors in cricketing skill had probably a basic cause in the state of their health, for which the English climate may be held responsible. Fine and warm as was the English summer of 1868, it was not so dry as summer, or even winter, in their own Australia; several of them suffered from chest complaints and one of them died. King Cole was taken ill during the match at Hastings and was sent up to Guy’s Hospital, where he died, as Fred Grace was to die twelve years later, from congestion of the lungs. Some fragments of a rambling elegiac poem mourned him sadly and this, along with his photograph among his comrades in the museum at Lord’s, are all we have to remember him by:

  Now run out for nought in the innings of life

  By the grave of the good he is sleeping;

  Yet sad are his comrades, though reckon they well

  How safe is their mate in our keeping.

  A sad and sincere effort, but I do not think poor King Cole would have liked that ‘run out for nought’. Though kindly meant, it seems a distressing commentary on human effort.

  An odd point about the Aborigines was that on their return home, though two or three of them turned out in state cricket, none of them achieved any success. Johnny Mullagh, by far the highest of them in capacity, played happily in good club cricket, and when he died at the age of fifty he was buried in his club blazer. There is a splendour in his epitaph: ‘He was a cricketer to the core.’