by Low, Robert
The tourists disembarked at the town pier, to the disappointment of a large crowd who had gathered at the railway pier, and were taken by coach and four to the Port Philip Club, where another crowd had assembled to greet them. But even in the brave new world of Australia the divisions between amateurs and gentlemen persisted. The gentlemen were quartered at the Port Philip Club while the players were taken on to a hotel called the Old White Hart.
The Englishmen had their first taste of the vigorous Australian approach to sport that very afternoon. Mr and Mrs Grace in one carriage, the rest of the party in another, they had a tour of the city’s three main grounds: the Melbourne Cricket Ground and the East and South Melbourne grounds. At the latter a cup final was being played in front of seven thousand spectators and the tourists stayed on to watch. With the match boiling up to a tight finish, one of the umpires gave a home batsman out, a decision to which the crowd took such exception that they invaded the pitch and the match had to be abandoned without a result. ‘There are larrikins and larrikins, but the larrikins of South Melbourne are, without exception, the worst in Victoria,’ complained the Australasian newspaper. ‘The manner in which they hooted and yelled, and then broke over the ground was disgraceful.’ W.G. was not impressed either.
After a day’s rest on Sunday, the Englishmen practised at the Melbourne and East Melbourne grounds over the next ten days in front of large crowds, eager to get a glimpse of the world’s most famous cricketer, the sessions being interrupted for the occasional champagne reception. The Englishmen graciously allowed some of the players who would be playing for Victoria in the first match, scheduled to start at the MCG on Boxing Day, to practise against them.
A great deal was expected of the visitors. ‘Unless the Englishmen hit the ball out of the ground every time they won’t satisfy a certain class of critics,’ wrote one observer. ‘By the cognoscenti, however, it has been found out that W.G. is the wonder he is described … The bowling of the Graces I like greatly, it shows a constant variety of pitch, pace and flight, which, added to plenty of break and never-failing accuracy, must make it dangerous stuff.’
But not everybody was so impressed. There was some disappointment at the form shown by most of the England squad and the suspicion grew that they might not, after all, give the Australians the beatings that had been widely forecast until then. There was immense anticipation, none the less, at the prospect of seeing the Englishmen in action and in judging what progress Australian cricket had made in the decade since the last tour.
W.G. was astonished at the Australians’ casual attitude towards preparing a pitch for the opening game. Seeing no sign of any work being done as the game approached, Grace enquired what was happening. The groundsman replied that he would pick a pitch on the morning of the game, roll it and all would be well. That was not good enough for Grace, who had no one like Robert Fitzgerald on the Canadian tour to help him out this time. He had to be captain and manager rolled into one. He immediately buttonholed the club authorities and persuaded them to start preparing and rolling a pitch. He believed his example caused a deep impression on the Australians who thenceforth took the whole business of pitch preparation much more seriously. It seems not to have occurred to them before that it mattered.
Fifteen thousand spectators were present at the MCG on Boxing Day to witness England’s debut, Victoria feeling confident enough to put out an Eighteen rather than a Twenty-two. Among them were two opening bowlers, Francis Allan and Harry Boyle, who were to develop into two of Australia’s finest bowlers of the century and regular destroyers of England’s batting in some of the most historic matches played between the two countries. Also in the Victorian line-up was Bransby Cooper, the Old Rugbeian who had put on a record first-wicket stand of 283 with W.G. for Gentlemen of the South against Players of the South, and had since emigrated.
W.G. got down to his usual batting practice in the nets before the game. A young man stepped out of the crowd to join in the bowling, sent down a couple of looseners and then clean bowled the great man with a rocket which he never even saw. ‘Who bowled that?’ asked Grace indignantly but the bowler had slipped away. He was a rangy young man who had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday and he was to play against the tourists in Sydney in January. Grace would find out all about him in the years ahead. His name was Frederick Robert Spofforth, and he would shortly join Boyle and Allan in a devastating pace attack.
Australian confidence in their growing skills was amply justified by that game. There was some doubt whether Victoria’s captain, G.P. Robertson, would be able to play because his father was seriously ill, but he turned up just before play was due to begin, won the toss and decided to bat. W.G. may have regretted the fuss he had made about the pitch because the Australians took full advantage of its good condition. The opening bowlers made little impression but W.G. took a wicket almost as soon as he brought himself on to bowl with the score on 77–2. Lunch was a splendid affair for a hundred people in a marquee with Grace sitting between the Governor and the Melbourne CC president and toasts being drunk to the Queen, the Governor and the teams. Perhaps it was no surprise after that that the Englishmen made heavy weather of bowling and fielding. The Victorians batted through the day to stand at 245–10 at close, Cooper having batted carefully and correctly for 84, seven of the wickets falling to the brothers Grace. There was a rumour that W.G. had sent telegrams back to his friends in London, from the MCG’s new electric telegraph room, advising them to lay off bets they had placed on England to win the match.
The second day was ‘a lovely morning, with a cool southerly breeze – the most perfect day for cricket that could be imagined’. Again, fifteen thousand people crammed into the ground, leaving not a spare inch. England managed to get Victoria out for 266, W.G. ending with 10–58, F.G. with 4–35. As W.G. and Jupp marched out to begin England’s reply, the Victoria players gathered in the centre of the pitch to applaud them on. Against the bowling of the left-arm medium-pace Allan and Sam Cosstick, who was also to be a pain in their sides all tour, the Englishmen accumulated runs quietly until W.G. cut the ball to point and made off towards the pavilion, as if caught. The crowd cheered but the cheers turned to laughter when he returned to the wicket; he had been kidding them. It was one of his favourite party tricks, which never failed to bring the house down. However, when Boyle came on the bowler had the last laugh, knocking out Grace’s leg stump and dismissing him for 33. It was England’s top score; they were all out for 110 (Allan 6–33) and ignominiously asked to follow on.
The next day was Sunday, a rest day, which ended with a massive thunderstorm and heavy rain drenching the pitch. Despite the last day being Monday, and a working day, five thousand people turned out in the hope of seeing Victoria complete a historic victory. There was a dispute between the captains before the start. Grace considered the pitch to be dangerously bumpy and asked for it to be rolled. Displaying the determination not to give an inch to the old enemy which was to be a characteristic of Australian captains for the next hundred years and more, Robertson refused. The only way Grace could retaliate was to refuse Robertson’s request for a substitute fielder as he was a man short.
Grace batted at five, entering with the score on 32–3 and proceeded to play both pitch and bowling with ease, but when two wickets went down, he again asked for the pitch to be rolled, and again Robertson declined. With Fred, he put on 50 for the sixth wicket, pausing only for a refreshing jug of champagne and soda water which was brought out to the middle. As Fred’s and other wickets fell, W.G. stepped up the pace, snatching quick singles wherever he could to keep the strike and once smashing Boyle over the crowd’s head and into the white fence behind them. ‘Have another, old man!’ one spectator was heard to shout. But England were all out for 135, losing by an innings and 21 runs.
‘The crowd rushed the ground, and Mr W.G. Grace, the hero of the hour, walked up a lane of shouting beings, who cheered him to the echo. He carried his bat for 51 runs, made with an ease and
power never seen equalled amongst us.’ More champagne was drunk in the pavilion to celebrate Victoria’s win and it was almost dark before the last excited spectator was ushered from the ground.
Opinions about the general health of English cricket were swiftly revised. The general expectation had been that W.G. would slaughter everything put before him but even he had struggled in the first innings and had been unable to sustain the second all on his own. ‘The great match is lost and won and what have we learnt?’ wrote one observer. ‘That colonial cricket is somewhat better than we deemed it, or English cricket somewhat worse. Which? A little of both … In batting and fielding we have advanced greatly, in bowling not so much. As to our opponents, I am greatly disappointed with their bowling … I fancy I know the secret of the long scores in England. I think Mr W.G. Grace a more dangerous trundler than any of them.’
The same writer provided a thoughtful description of W.G. as a batsman:
He was not all my fancy painted him, judging from the fulsome praises and accounts I had read of his wonderful skill. I could not recognise that ‘remarkable facility for placing the ball’ I had read so much about. Nor was cricket under his able hands reduced to billiards, as I had also read. Of course it was easy to see that his defence and hitting powers were far and away ahead of any we have ever seen before, but what I was most struck with was his truly splendid judgment, and herein, I imagine, lies the secret of his long scores. As a judge of a run, and for speed between wickets, he is unequalled in the world. He makes safe runs where we would not dream of even stealing them, and never seems bustled or in a hurry – always at the crease in time, with the wicketkeeper wondering how the deuce he got there. His innings on the Monday was worth all the rest of the match put together. Goldsmith ought to have been presented with a purse of sovereigns for missing him at long leg, and thereby giving us the treat he did. The ease and power with which the leviathan played the bowling – shooters and bumpers met equally coolly, no hitting the ball over the moon, but making runs simply and quietly, without apparent effort, showing, when opportunity offered, brilliant cutting and grand driving, defence impregnable – all this was as near perfection as it is possible for such to be.
However the Australian press was highly critical of the rest of his team. W.G. was furious and blamed the forty-day sea voyage for his side’s lacklustre performance, omitting to mention the two-week acclimatisation period before the match, which ought to have been enough for anybody.
Now came a gruelling tour-within-a-tour upcountry, to a series of small isolated communities, linked by rough tracks. Travelling was frequently a hellish undertaking, which took its toll on the English cricketers. Agnes stayed behind in Melbourne with friends. She was already pregnant and may have been feeling unwell.
First stop, for a match which started on New Year’s Day 1874, was Ballarat, reached after a long and tiring train journey. Victoria’s great win had had the effect of increasing public interest in the game against a local XXII, which was just as well as there was severe competition from the biggest day in the Ballarat year: the Caledonian gathering, the Scottish exiles being more interested in celebrating the New Year than the arrival of an English cricket team, however distinguished.
Still, the cricket drew a crowd estimated at between six and seven thousand. The visitors were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the well-grassed ground and pitch at Ballarat’s Eastern Oval. Before play got under way, the boundary scores were agreed: hits under the chain fence would be three, over it four, inside the outer fence counted five, and six would be awarded for hitting the ball right out of the ground.
The match got under way at noon, the locals being reinforced by Allan and Cosstick, two of the bowlers who had done so much damage in Melbourne. Winning the toss, Grace chose to bat and played with consummate ease, scoring 61 out of 94–1 by lunch, Jupp having gone for 23. When the slow bowlers came on after the interval, Grace flogged them all round the ground and sometimes right out of it. Cosstick was finally brought back to have the champion caught at mid-off for 126, made in four hours. He retired to a great ovation; it was the highest score made until then by an Englishman in Australia. When stumps were drawn, Fred Grace was still at the wicket and going well.
Next day, nearly as many spectators came to watch even though the main attraction had departed. The temperature reached 100° F in the shade and the wooden seats were too hot to sit on. ‘It was about the hottest day in which I ever played cricket,’ recalled W.G. much later. Fred made it even warmer for the fielders with another Grace century, scoring 112, and England’s final total of 470 was the highest one-innings score made in Australia, which a local correspondent attributed partly to the smallness of the ground – ‘the batsmen could all hit over the heads of the most distant fielders with ease’ – and partly to the poor fielding. The locals did rather better with the bat, making a creditable 276 in their only innings and the match petered out in a draw. The Australasian’s correspondent concluded that while the English were strong in batting and fielding, the bowling was ‘inferior’, adding: ‘W.G. Grace bowls chiefly for the field and generally succeeds in getting catches made, but at the expense of a good many runs’. This echoed the English opinion of him.
Back in Melbourne, someone at least was doing well out of the Grace connection. A young man claiming to be W.R. Gilbert, the Graces’ cousin, was enjoying board and lodgings with a gullible clergyman, who was a cricket fan. The false Gilbert had a complicated story: he claimed he had bet W.G. £50 that he could stay on in Melbourne undetected while a substitute took his place in Ballarat. He greatly impressed the clergyman and his friends with what purported to be inside stories from the English dressing-room and was only exposed when the cleric proudly told a friend, who happened to be one of the tour promoters, about his distinguished guest. ‘Why, my dear sir, I saw Gilbert and the rest of the team off to Ballarat by the seven o’clock train last evening,’ said the promoter with a guffaw. How strange that the real Gilbert should be disgraced as a common criminal a dozen years later – and that he should end up an exile in the colonies.
After a depressing Sunday in Ballarat, ravaged by a dust storm, the party travelled through the bush to the small gold-mining community of Stawell, some 75 miles away, in an old coach over appalling tracks. Indeed, when they saw the vehicle in which they were expected to travel, several of the players at first declined to board it and eventually agreed to do so only with the greatest reluctance. Covered with white dust, a couple of them relieved the unpleasantness of the journey with potshots at parrots. As they approached Stawell, two brass bands struck up a welcome, terrifying the horses pulling one trap and causing them to bolt and destroy the carriage, though none of the party was hurt.
W.G. and his cousin spent an enjoyable day shooting in the bush and then it was back to cricket – after a fashion – against a local XXII, again boosted by some strong guests, including Cosstick and Cooper, the hero of Melbourne.
The pitch at the Botanical Reserve had been a ploughed field only three months previously and sown with grass a few days before. It was ‘probably the worst the Englishmen will see in the colony’, was one local reporter’s verdict. ‘A square piece of turf in the centre of the reserve had been in course of preparation for the last two months, but water being very scarce, it did not make a very desirable wicket. It was as hard as a board, and the bare soil was visible between the knots.’ But as four thousand people, half the town’s population, came along to watch, there was nothing for it but to play. ‘The bumpiness and uncertainty of the wicket was apparent immediately the play began, and the Englishmen had evidently made up their minds for merry, if short, lives.’
Grace was emphatic: ‘The cricket was shockingly poor and the match a ludicrous farce … one slow ball actually stuck in the dust and never reached the batsman.’ His and Jupp’s reaction was to hit out at everything. Grace managed one decent boundary, was dropped three times, including one enormous skyer, during which he ran two, and
perished for 16, easily the highest score. England were all out in just over an hour for 43. The Stawell XXII amassed 71 and by the close England were 57–5 in their second innings. Thirty-six wickets fell in the day. There was even a swarm of flies to complete the Englishmen’s misery. They struggled to 91 on the second day, setting Stawell 64 to win, which they managed for the loss of ten wickets, thus winning by ten wickets.
The pitch was not the only cause of England’s defeat. The local hospitality played an equally deadly part, at least as far as the professionals were concerned. So freely did the liquor flow in their direction that it was little surprise, to the locals at least, that they performed so badly. The Australasian was in no doubt:
The two true causes of the defeat of the All England Eleven at Stawell were bad ground and good liquor – two experiences which the colonial cricketer meets with far more often than is good for him … The local papers spoke rather strongly and justly of the conduct of the ‘pros’ in accepting, while the match was going on, the indiscriminate hospitality that was offered them … They must remember that they are out here, and are paid to show us the best cricket they can; and it is their duty to resist the temptations which are certain to be held out to them everywhere they go, especially in such hard-drinking localities …
The division between the gentlemen and players was further accentuated when, to eke out proceedings for a third day, the six professionals played a single-wicket match against twelve of the locals, while the amateurs took the day off (W.G. went shooting). Understandably, the pros took it badly and made a nonsense of the extra day; they carried on drinking and managed a pathetic two runs between them, consisting of one hit by McIntyre – the archetypal beer match. The party retreated from Stawell in disgrace with a record of played three, drawn one, lost two. W.G. was forced to deliver a stern lecture to the professionals as to their future conduct, though whether they took any notice of him is another matter. This was not the all-conquering procession that had been forecast, and only the captain was exempt from a chorus of criticism from local observers.