“Faults of private character”: The Decline of Edward Pooley

Ted Pooley in a photograph published in 1893 (Image: Wikipedia)

Professional cricketers around the turn of the twentieth century led a precarious existence. Their lack of job security meant that they were never more than a short step from ruin unless they reached the top of the game. For example, Luke Greenwood played for Yorkshire but only kept out of the workhouse through the help of friends; his team-mate Alfred Smith was declared bankrupt at least once; and Harry Pickett’s financial desperation led him to take his own life. Perhaps it could be argued that none of these men ever reached the top of the professional game, but even achieving those heights was no guarantee of future prosperity. William Scotton played regularly for England but financial worries after losing his place in the Nottinghamshire team might have played a role in his suicide in 1893; Bill Brockwell played for Surrey and England in the 1890s, yet died in homeless poverty in the 1930s. But the ultimate “cautionary tale” for late-Victorian professional cricketers was Edward Pooley, an earlier Surrey cricketer, who would have played for England in what is today recognised as the first ever Test match had he not been temporarily imprisoned at the time.

Pooley was one of the few first-class cricketers to have been forced into the workhouse; other professionals had a similar fate, such as John William Burnham, who played briefly for Derbyshire, and William Ralph Hunter who spent time on the groundstaff at Lord’s and the Oval. But Pooley was many rungs up the ladder because he was one of the leading players in England and among the best wicket-keepers of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for him, he also seemed to attract controversy; his Wisden obituary concluded: “Of the faults of private character that marred Pooley’s career and were the cause of the poverty in which he spent the later years of his life there is no need now to speak. He was in many ways his own enemy, but even to the last he had a geniality and sense of humour that to a certain extent condoned his weaknesses.” Was this too harsh a view? Or was Pooley entirely responsible for his own fate? As usual, the answer lies somewhere between those two extremes.

Pooley’s full story has been told by Keith Booth in a biography published in 2000, but he has recently been the subject of a very unusual book by Rodney Ulyate called The Autobiography of Edward Pooley. Although it is not in any sense a conventional autobiography, most of it was written by Pooley in the sense that it is culled from various interviews and pieces of writing that he provided during his lifetime. While there are limitations with such a format, this approach offers something different from the usual biographies of old cricketers. Too often all that survives from this period are the pseudo-official verdicts of Wisden or the deliberations of Harry Altham’s Olympian Judgements from his History of Cricket: for example, the Lords Harris and Hawke were benevolent dictators; Pelham Warner and Gubby Allen were patriarchs acting for the good of cricket; and Pooley was a “bad boy”. In any kind of serious history, such views would long ago have been challenged, modified or re-examined, but until very recently the interpretation of cricket’s past appeared to be unchanging, set in stone.

Part of the problem has been a lack of accessible sources. Many older biographies of cricketers relied either on the recollections of those who were around at the time or reheating the same tired stories and anecdotes. Today, excellent primary sources are often available online and historians increasingly make use of them, and of various archives that contain fascinating material. Booth for example used Surrey’s own archives to write his biography of Pooley, but Ulyate’s Autobiography of Edward Pooley is a move towards a more serious historical approach; in effect, the book is a collection of primary sources allowing anyone to see what Pooley had to say for himself. Such books are familiar to anyone who has studied history at an academic level, and are essential tools in the subject. For cricket to have similar resources would be a big step forward, opening up great possibilities. Furthermore, there are many cricketers for whom a similar project would be possible as there were a surprising number of interviews given by old players, even in the nineteenth century. Pooley is, however, a particularly interesting subject because he had a lot to say and was happy to tell journalists all about himself on several occasions. If the cricket establishment had made its judgement on Pooley, their target was keen to get across his own viewpoint. Because whether or not Pooley was the ultimate cautionary tale, he endured several controversial episodes, which he tried (not entirely successfully) to explain away.

What often got lost (and still does to a large extent whenever a writer revisits Pooley’s career) is what a good cricketer he was. Although there is no need to say too much here about his playing career — Booth and Ulyate provide all the detail anyone could want, and his Wisden obituary noted: “Two or three pages of Wisden could easily be filled with details of his doings” — it is worth giving a brief summary. Pooley recorded more dismissals than any of his contemporary wicket-keepers. Three times he stumped four opposition batters in an innings and twice stumped five. His twelve dismissals in a match against Sussex in 1868 has only been surpassed twice in first-class cricket; it was not equalled for seventy years and not beaten until 1995–96. As Ulyate points out, contemporary praise for Pooley was widespread (albeit not universal, particularly regarding his ability standing up to fast bowling) and he was among the first wicket-keepers to dispense with a long-stop to fast bowling. But it is notoriously difficult to assess wicket-keepers as detailed statistics about chances have only been kept in recent years, and the number of dismissals completed depends on more than simply the skill of the individual. Trying to ascertain objectively how good Pooley was with the gloves is a hopeless task, but there is no doubt that he was one of the most respected wicket-keepers of his time.

Pooley was also a decent batter. Wisden said: “Apart from his wicket-keeping Pooley was a first-rate bat, free in style, with fine driving power and any amount of confidence. He made many good scores and would without a doubt have been a much greater run-getter if he had not been so constantly troubled by damaged hands. During the Canterbury Week of 1871 he played an innings of 93 when suffering from a broken finger.” To a modern audience, his first-class average of 15.86 is underwhelming but in the 1860s and 1870s, a time of almost impossible wickets, it would have been respectable enough. Moreover, in 1870 he scored over 1,000 first-class runs, the mark of a quality batter (he was only one of three men to reach four figures that season; one was W. G. Grace), and he fell just 74 runs short of the same mark in 1871. In his best seasons, he averaged in the early 20s with the bat which placed him high in the seasonal lists. More to the point, wicket-keepers were explicitly not expected to be good batters, so Pooley’s batting record was exceptional for the period.

In short, he was a formidable cricketer. But while Ulyate regrets that so much of what has been written about Pooley concerns his faults rather than his achievements, it is this personal side that makes him fascinating. There have been many brilliant cricketers, and there is little to be gained by simply listing their deeds. Pooley’s life off the field is more interesting than his career on it, and reading what he had to say for himself brings the man to life. Rather than give a succession of bland interviews, as so many cricketers have done over the years, his voice comes across strongly in the Autobiography. And you can almost hear the anger in his tone. Yet Pooley never quite succeeds in convincing the reader that he was blameless in the many misfortunes to befall him.

Luke Greenwood in 1884 (Image: National Library of Australia)

Nevertheless, his ultimate fall should be set into some kind of context. Pooley was far from alone in struggling during his final years. Alfred Pullin, writing in the late 1890s, noted how several former Yorkshire professionals (not just Smith and Greenwood) found themselves in deep financial strife and had been “cast aside like an old shoe”. For example Pullin found John Thewlis toothless and almost blind living in abject poverty in Manchester. John Jackson, a Derbyshire bowler of the 1850s and 1860s died in the workhouse. Nor were such circumstances only endured by northern professionals; the Surrey player Julius Caesar was found dead in a tavern in Godalming having spent his final years living in great hardship. There were countless similar examples, some of which were listed by Ric Sissons in The Players (1988); and cases like William Scotton or Arthur Shrewsbury betray the lack of care given to former players by the cricket authorities around the turn of the twentieth century.

There is little doubt that the cricketing establishment blamed such players for their own fate, even if this view was rarely aired in print. Professionals who played between the 1860s and 1890s were regarded as irresponsible, untrustworthy and lacking “moral character”. The amateurs who ran county cricket culled this generation of professionals from the game so that only those who were prepared obediently to follow instructions remained. Lord Hawke’s reformation of the ill-disciplined Yorkshire team in the 1880s — which ended the careers of several talented players — was perhaps the best-known example of professionals being “brought to heel”, but the amateur leadership of many counties followed a similar process. County teams became populated by the “respectable professional”. Yet the county committees rarely — if ever — took into account the circumstances of their players; their need to earn a living, their upbringings that often featured extreme poverty, and their independence which made them reluctant to obey unquestioningly. Nor did the professionals have any reason to accept the Victorian convention that their “social class” was inherently inferior and they should give way to their “betters”, the middle and upper classes.

So when Wisden briefly summarised the fate of another fallen professional, those who read the obituary would have sighed and concluded that a sad end was inevitable for someone of that nature. It was the way of the world. These working-class men were responsible for their own fate, but the poor chaps simply could not help themselves. All of this would have been implied and understood. But in Pooley’s case, it was made explicit. Wisden concluded that “faults of private character” made Pooley “his own enemy”. Others, while lamenting the fate of a talented cricketer, concurred with this view. Ironically, Pooley had quite a middle-class background — his father was a schoolmaster — but never fitted into that world when he was a cricketer. And his actions during his playing career stripped away any sympathy that the establishment might have felt, such as that expressed for Thewlis, Greenwood, Brockwell or Caesar. By contrast, Pooley invited only condemnation, albeit tinged with some regret and sympathy after his death in 1907.

So what made him such a cautionary tale? There were several elements in his cricketing and social downfall. The first was unsporting behaviour. In 1873, Pooley was suspected of having “thrown” a cricket match when Surrey played Yorkshire in order to win a bet. Pooley denied the charge, to the Surrey Committee at the time and when interviewed by Pullin in 1899, and both Booth and Ulyate believe him. He admitted having placed several half-crown bets (or in his later version, two bottles of champagne) that certain Surrey players would outscore named opposition batters, but not having “thrown” the game. Yet the case was not quite straightforward: Pooley was replaced behind the stumps during the final stages of the match, and he was charged by the Surrey Committee not with throwing the game, but with insubordination and misconduct. In a letter to the Committee, Pooley claimed that if he had seemed not to be trying, it was because he was unwell, and he admitted “using coarse language” towards the Surrey captain. Booth speculated that if he had won a bottle of champagne, he might have been drinking, which resulted in his removal from the team, his “coarse language”, and his underperformance. In any case, Pooley was suspended for the rest of the season and only eventually readmitted to the team after making an apology.

Nor was he above what would still be regarded as unsporting behaviour; for example, when Charles Absolom of Cambridge was dismissed for “obstructing the field” in 1868, it was Pooley who had appealed when the returning ball struck the batter on the back while he was attempting to complete his sixth run. And in 1870 he ran out Charles Nepean of Oxford University after the batter had left the crease mistakenly believing that he had been given out lbw. Of this incident, Pooley said: “I most firmly assert now what I asserted at the time: that I genuinely believed that [the umpire] had given him out, and that what I did afterwards I did entirely without premeditation.” Any cricitism should have been equally attached to Surrey’s captain, who could have withdrawn the appeal if he considered it unsporting, but Pooley received the blame and Surrey held an internal enquiry after the President of the MCC intervened. It was concluded that there was no intention of unfair play, but Oxford did not play Surrey for ten years after that game. Yet perhaps stigma surrounding Pooley attracted stories like that, such as when he was accused (with little justification) of time-wasting during the Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval in 1869.

A second problem for the authorities was Pooley’s temper, because it was not just his own captain who was the subject of his fury. On at least two occasions in the late 1860s, both admitted by Pooley himself, he accosted journalists whom he believed had written unfairly about him, swearing at one and threatening another to the extent that he was forced to appear before magistrates and apologise. On both occasions, he seems to have been at least partially driven by their disregard for professional cricketers. But his temper — as well as a love of gambling — got the better of him on one particular occasion that meant he would never be a Test cricketer.

The English team that toured Australia in 1876–77. Back row: Harry Jupp, Tom Emmett, Alfred Hogben (sponsor), Allen Hill, Tom Armitage. Seated: Ted Pooley, James Southerton, James Lillywhite, Alfred Shaw, George Ulyett, Andrew Greenwood. On floor: Harry Charlwood, John Selby. (Image: Wikipedia)

In 1876–77, Pooley was the wicket-keeper in the team organised by James Lillywhite to tour Australia. Two of the games, against a full Australian team, were later recognised as the first official Test matches. But when those games took place, Pooley was absent — necessitating the use of a stand-in wicket-keeper — because he had been imprisoned in New Zealand during a brief visit there by Lillywhite’s team. He had placed a slightly unethical but not illegal bet with a local man: he used a common ruse of betting on the number of ducks that would be scored by the opposition, but one that required only a few ducks for the bettor to return a profit. But Pooley’s own account (as given in the Autobiography) neglects one detail provided by Booth: that he was umpiring the match in question, having been unwell for several days and unable to play. Although Pooley won his bet, the man refused to pay up; a scuffle resulted, Pooley made threats and when someone apparently tried to break into the man’s hotel room overnight, he was the obvious suspect (although Ulyate suspects, as Pooley claimed, that this was his team-mates trying to get his money; two possible suspects, George Ulyett and John Selby, were later involved in other troubles during tours of Australia). Pooley was charged with “assault and malicious damage to property” but ultimately found not guilty. If Pooley had done nothing technically wrong, the incident in no way reflected well on him.

A third factor might have been the nature of his personal life; although no-one ever publicly commented on it, his circumstances might have been known by the Surrey Committee. He had married a woman called Ellen Hunt in 1863, and the couple had six children. But around the time their sixth child was born in 1873, he abandoned his wife; by 1881 Ellen and three of their children were in Hackney Workhouse. He apparently never reconciled with their children, two of whom recorded him as deceased on their marriage certificates long before his death. In 1874, Pooley had the first of eight children with his common-law wife (he never divorced Ellen), Jemima “Minnie” Sabine, a woman of around 20 who was around ten years younger than him, and who was estranged from her own husband (who had failed in a bid to divorce her for adultery with two men, neither of whom was Pooley). She was listed as Minnie Pooley on the 1881 and 1891 census, although they never married.

However, Pooley was by no means the only professional to have marital difficulties. At a time when divorce was difficult and expensive, such a course was commonly taken by working class couples who wished to separate. If they had simply drifted apart — as opposed to having committed a divorce-worthy act such as adultery — it was often easiest just to go their separate ways. As they had no official means to divorce and remarry, they simply co-habited with other people. In Pooley’s case, there is one curiosity. Although he would have been expected to support his estranged wife financially, there is no record that he did so, even when she was admitted to the workhouse. In similar cases, the guardians of the workhouse ruthlessly hunted down husbands and forced them to pay for the upkeep of their wives; we do not know if this happened in the case of Pooley, but it would be surprising if an attempt was not made.

Another potential issue, which comes across in the Autobiography, was that Pooley had a creative relationship with the truth. For example, he admitted (as detailed in the Autobiography) altering his birth year so that he appeared younger to the Surrey authorities (contemporary cricket records gave his birthdate as 1843; he later claimed to have actually been born in 1838 — possibly to generate more sympathy for his financial plight in the late 1890s — but his real birth year was 1842). More importantly, he claimed to have been born in Surrey; his actual birthplace was Chepstow in Wales, meaning that he was not qualified to play for Surrey. And his own accounts of his various escapades are full of omissions, distortions and excuses so that even in cases where he had almost certainly been unjustly accused, his own defence was unconvincing. It is very possible that he was regarded by the authorities as untruthful and therefore untrustworthy.

The cumulative effect meant that when Pooley’s career went into decline in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and he ceased to be a regular Surrey player, his reputation cannot have been a good one. This would have even gone beyond the condescending idea that professionals were morally weak and irresponsible because Pooley had repeatedly broken rules and disregarded unofficial conventions. In 1883, he was granted a benefit by Surrey which raised over £400, but that was his final season in first-class cricket. The next two decades were unsettled ones. He and his family lived in a succession of houses, generally trending downwards in quality, and he tried a bewildering number of ways to earn a living. He tried coaching and umpiring, which were fairly conventional routes for former first-class players to follow in their later years, but he never succeeded in making enough money to survive, so he branched out into other areas. He tried gardening, being a cashier in a theatre, being a timekeeper on a building yard, joining the groundstaff of a cricket club and even working in a billiard saloon. Yet his decline continued.

In 1885, he wrote to Surrey asking for work, but none could be found for him. By 1890, he had been forced to seek poor relief from his parish, and it was arranged for him to be treated for rheumatic fever at the Royal Mineral Water Hospital in Bath; while there, his financial problems became public knowledge when a chance encounter with Pooley prompted someone to write a letter to The Sportsman. None too happy at suggestions that the county had abandoned Pooley, Surrey’s secretary Charles Alcock told that newspaper that since 1888, the county had provided Pooley with a weekly grant — first of ten, then fifteen shillings — to support him over the winter months until he could find cricketing work in the summer. The MCC also made it known that Pooley had been receiving support from the Cricketers’ Fund, a charity organisation that supported former professional cricketers. Generally, the public were sympathetic to tale of former players fallen on hard times, and the result was often a subscription or collection to help them. The reaction by Surrey and the MCC in Pooley’s case suggests that they thought he was trying to deceive people or to exaggerate the nature of his plight. Perhaps he was, but it is an interesting contrast to the reaction in Yorkshire when Pullin publicised the difficulties of former Yorkshire players.

In fairness, Surrey had provided Pooley with support, making various grants and allowances to him for ten years, albeit sometimes contingent on his “good behaviour”. But for unknown reasons, they cut off all financial help at the end of 1894. Around the same time, he seems to have separated from Minnie Sabine, who by 1902 had married a man called John Stuckley. From that point, he was on his own and life became even harder.

The site of Lambeth Workhouse (Image: Essential History)

He endured prolonged spells in the workhouse, the miserable destination of many of the poor who could not support themselves. This is not the place to discuss workhouses, but while they provided grim shelter and the meagrest food, they were designed to humiliate their inmates, who had to undertake strenuous work. Men, for example, were expected to break up stones. It was the place of absolute last resort, when the only alternative was homelessness, but it says much for workhouse regimes that many people preferred living on the streets.

Although Pooley was not the only professional cricketer to end his days in the workhouse, he was the only one who ever discussed his time there. In the late 1890s, he explained how he came to be in the workhouse, blaming “bad health and bad luck”. He told Pullin that it was a case of “the workhouse, sir, or the river.” He first entered a workhouse in 1890 when suffering from rheumatism. After he recovered, he was able to work to support himself financially, but in his account, the abrupt cessation of Surrey’s allowance made a big difference, and when he lost his job during another bout of rheumatic fever, his health declined and he was soon “penniless”. He wrote how he did not want to ask his family for help — there is some evidence that they had effectively cut all contact with him, possibly owing to his relationship with Sabine — so he spent a night on the streets before entering Lambeth Workhouse. Although he was able to leave for a time, he was soon forced back. Workhouse records suggest that he was homeless by this stage of his life. He said in an interview in 1898: “It is a sad state of affairs, but I am as comfortable as rheums and workhouse regulations permit … I am out of the world here, you see, and can only smoke my pipe and dream of better days. I admit I have had my faults, and may, perhaps, have been a bit to blame, but …” And at that point, he tailed off and the interview ended. The interviewer, Frederick Gale, explained: “Then he muttered something, and it was hardly fair to ask him to speak clearly. Those who know Pooley know his story.” Yet “a bit to blame” hardly suggests that Pooley was plagued by regret for his own actions.

In later years, he again appealed unsuccessfully to Surrey, asking the county to find him employment. Surrey also refused a third-party request to provide him a pension. He continued to ask intermittently, but spent the final years of his life in and out of workhouses. He had various addresses in this period, including the Duchy of Cornwall Public House, but it is unclear if he lived at any of them permanently when out of the workhouse. He died in 1907 and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

The question of whether Pooley’s final years were a result of his own behaviour, his apparent abandonment by Surrey or the entire social system of Victorian England is perhaps unanswerable. He was not unusual in the sense that many professionals found life an intolerable struggle. Nor was he unique in the way that he was cut off by Surrey. If his behaviour over the years might suggest an explanation for Surrey’s loss of patience, it would not account for the county’s similar treatment of their former player Richard Humphrey, who was given £10 in relief by Surrey in 1890, and for a few years paid him six shillings a week to assist him. But this aid suddenly ended in 1894; having lived in poverty for several years, Humphrey killed himself in 1906. Surrey’s lack of sympathy was not a result of lack of funds; they paid their professionals very generously and managed to supply some amateurs, such as Walter Read, with an extremely generous allowance.

There were countless professionals with similar stories; some were as talented as Pooley and a very small number (largely thanks to A. W. Pullin) were able to have their stories heard in print before their deaths. Maybe none of Pooley’s individual problems were unique, but it might have been the combination — the gambling, the insubordination, the temper and the gamesmanship — which made him too unpalatable for the authorities. But even respectable professionals were similarly left to their fate when counties cut off their money; perhaps Pooley was simply a victim of the time, one of the generation of professionals culled to allow for the amateur domination of cricket.

Maybe Pooley was to blame for some of his problems, but maybe some were just a feature of cricket — and society — in the late-nineteenth century. If he was in some ways an unsympathetic character, was that simply because he refused to accept the place determined for him by those in authority? Because he insisted that he spoke for himself? At least that has value for the historian because there could have been countless other professionals like Pooley, but they never had a chance to tell their story. Which makes Pooley more than just a solitary “cautionary tale”; he becomes the voice of all the other lost tales.

The final word should perhaps go to Sir Home Gordon. After Pooley’s death in 1907, he wrote in Badminton Magazine that “to see him in shabby clothes, with grizzly-white hair, and a strained, sordid appearance, gazing at the Oval on the scene of his former triumphs, was pitiable. Yet no-one could help him because he would not help himself, and his careless, calamitous life ended in the Lambeth Infirmary.” But the most revealing point in the article was Gordon’s emphasis that professionals in 1907 were vastly morally superior to Pooley’s contemporaries. Because for men like Gordon, the problem was not particularly with Pooley the individual; it was with an entire class of cricketer.