“How good would he have been?”: The Revisionist Legacy of Fuller Pilch

Fuller Pilch in 1852 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Anyone who ventures into a forum for cricket fans, or browses the cricket sections of Reddit will be familiar with the sometimes bitter and rancorous arguments over who were the greatest players of all, and the related debate regarding whether cricketers of today are better or worse than those of earlier times. Is Virat Kohli is better than Sachin Tendulkar? Is Jimmy Anderson the greatest English bowler of all time? Was cricket better twenty years ago? Or thirty years ago? Or forty years ago? The answers to these fraught questions often depend on who is asking, but discussion can — and often does — become heated very quickly. As ever, this apparently modern phenomenon is nothing new; tension between past and present has been a feature of cricket since its very earliest days. It is perfectly illustrated by changing opinions on Fuller Pilch, the best batter in the world from the 1820s until the mid-1850s. When he emerged, he was merely viewed as a successor to William Fennex. By the time he retired, he was regarded as the greatest player of all time and the originator of the whole style of “forward play”, especially the forward defensive shot. And within fifty years, he had become a lightning rod in the debate between those who thought cricket (personified by W. G. Grace and his scoring feats) had improved since Pilch’s time and those who thought it was not the sport it used to be.

Perhaps the only difference between modern debate and the case of Pilch is that when he was at his peak, no-one seriously questioned his greatness and most writers believed he was the best batter to play the game. While his first-class batting average of 18.61 might appear underwhelming, it was one of the best of the period in which he played, when wickets were uniformly difficult. Earlier players might have boasted better statistical returns —William Beldham, who played from 1787 to 1821, averaged 21.47 in matches that modern historians have adjudged first-class; Frederick Beauclerk averaged 24.96 between 1791 and 1825 ; William Lambert averaged 27.65 between 1801 and 1817 — but these players faced lob bowling in a period when run scoring became much easier as batting equipment and technique improved. The introduction of round-arm bowling, often delivered at a pace which had never been previously encountered, meant that scores and averages plummeted from the 1820s, just as Pilch began to establish himself. Therefore, there was little doubt in the mind of his contemporaries that Pilch raised batting to a point which had never been reached before.

An illustration of a cricket match at Lewes in 1816, from a book by William Lambert (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

In many ways, the game that Pilch played was completely different to that played by Beauclerk or Beldham or Lambert. And it was just as dissimilar to the modern sport, making direct comparisons impossible. He played an astonishingly long time ago in cricket terms; his “first-class debut” (which to his contemporaries would merely have been his first appearance in a major match) was over 200 years ago, and he was at his peak before Victoria became queen of England. In fact, he made his debut (at the age of sixteen) only seven months after the death of George III. For a little further context, the Napoleonic Wars only ended five years before he made his debut. And by the time he was signed to play for Kent in 1836, cricket had transformed through the legalisation of round-arm bowling (which had been the dominant form of bowling for some time, despite its official illegality). But overarm bowling was still thirty years from legalisation; pads and gloves were a rarity; there were no fours or sixes because all hits had to be run on grounds without boundaries; and there was no county competition or even a recognised structure to the games played.

Fortunately for us, in this time cricket had also become the subject for books and newspapers and therefore we can begin to capture the high regard in which Pilch was held, and discern something about the technique which allowed him to succeed. Ironically, even this first cricket writing was often nostalgic, looking back to an idyllic past, such as John Nyren’s The Cricketers of My Time (first published in 1832 but republished various times afterwards), which was about players from the turn of the nineteenth century. The elegiac tone suggested that cricket was even then “not what it used to be”, but according to John Bruce Payne in the 1896 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, Nyren (who died in 1837) “used to say that Pilch’s play almost reconciled him to round-arm bowling”.

Yet writers continued to hark back, and to help their audience comprehend the appeal of the old players, used Pilch as a comparison point. When James Pycroft published The Cricket Field in 1851, just as Pilch’s career was drawing to a close, referred to famous old players as being “as often mentioned as Pilch and [George] Parr by our boys now” and discussed men “who, at the end of the last century, represented the Pilch, the Parr, the [Ned] Wenman [a famous wicket-keeper contemporary to Pilch], and the [John] Wisden of the present day.” And there is just the slightest hint of the attitude that survives among old players to this day, that the modern cricketer was not as good, because Pycroft related how the old Hambledon player William Fennex used to claim that he taught Pilch to bat. Pycroft was not convinced though, and observed that “all great performers appear to have brought the secret of their excellence into the world along with them, and are not the mere puppets of which others pull the strings — Fuller Pilch may think he rather coincided with, than learnt from, William Fennex.”

Therefore, even Pilch was compared (and perhaps in the case of Fennex’s claim, not always favourably) with players who had come before. But his excellence also commanded examination. And, in that time long before video replays and the use of analysts, we can see that Pilch and his contemporaries were technically very astute and could adapt their games as required. For example Pilch — who later worked as a groundsman himself — was very aware of the need to tame the pitches on which he batted. His entry in the modern Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, written by Gerald Howat, states that when Pilch was playing for William Clarke’s All England Eleven, he “[took] his own scythe to cut some of the rough pitches encountered in matches against ‘odds’ up and down the land.” Although he often batted (in the style of the time) wearing a top-hat, when he was dismissed when a ball knocked the hat onto his wicket, he stopped wearing one. And he used a bat specially adapted with a short handle to favour his own batting technique.

But more interesting for the growing number of cricket writers was the way in which he batted. And in the latter half of his career, before his retirement in 1855, there was no doubt about his greatness. In 1844, the journalist William Dennison wrote in Sketches of Players that Pilch “as a bat, has been one of the brightest luminaries of the cricket world, during the last 20 years … There has been no man, having played as many matches, who has approached him in effectiveness and safety of style, or in the number of runs he has obtained. His vast length of reach and powers of smothering a ball by his ‘forward’ play, the brilliancy of his ‘cuts’ on either side of the ‘point’ and into the ‘slips,’ and the severity of the punishment he administers to the ‘leg,’ have all and each, over and over again, caused a spontaneous ebullition of applause to burst forth from the spectators in every part of the field whereon his feats have been displayed.”

Charles Box, in The Cricketer’s Manual (1848), said quite a lot about Pilch. He noted how in one game, a journalist wrote of his sympathy for the Nottinghamshire fielders on a hot day as Pilch scored 61 not out for Kent: “Pilch took his place at the stumps, as usual, as the third man, and at the third ball wrote down three with a leg hit. But what of this — threes, fours, and fives appear as easy for him to get, as ’tis for us to write about them.” During the innings, “he was despatching the ball to the extreme limits of the ground, at all points of the compass, just when, where, and how he pleased”. The author jocularly observed: “All attempts to get him out were as futile as the endeavour to catch a leviathan with a lady’s reticule, or to pull the sun out of heaven with a silken halter.” He added, none-too-seriously: “We denounce Pilch as a ‘merciless tyrant,’ when at the wicket.” Box himself wrote admiringly: “As a batsman Pilch has ever been regarded as a model; few, if any, approach him in brilliancy, finish, safety and effect; his mode of cutting the ball into the slips, on either side of the point, and above all his ‘forward play,’ is so peculiar that ‘None but himself can be his parallel.’ At ‘cover point,’ the spot usually occupied by him in the field, he is equalled by few, excelled by none.”

Later writers, looking back in reminiscence, added more to the discussion of Pilch’s excellent technique. Frederick Gale, who wrote The Game of Cricket in 1887, recalled Pilch giving him batting tips in 1845, when he recommended keeping the bat straight, discussed technique, stance and what guard to take on the stumps. He suggested waiting until being set in an innings before driving balls wide on the off-side, and noted that he preferred not to go hard at the ball. Instead, he played for gaps in the field (“it is safer, though less showy”). In 1899, William Caffyn (who played against Pilch in the 1840s and 1850s) stated in Seventy-One Not Out: “His attitude at the wicket was perfect, keeping both legs very straight … He played forward a great deal, and his bat went down the wicket like the pendulum of a clock … His best hit was one in front of cover-point. I do not think anyone ever excelled him in this stroke. He was a powerful driver when the ball came to him, but did not leave his ground much.”

But if he was famous for any particular shot, it was for his ability to reach forward to the ball and “smother” it; in other words for his forward defensive shot, something that no-one else had quite perfected before. Scores and Biographies in 1862 called Pilch “the best batsman that has ever yet appeared”, and explained that his batting was “commanding, extremely forward” and able to stop the best bowling before it could “shoot, rise or do mischief”. In other words, he got to the pitch of the ball better than anyone had managed. The 1896 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography said: “Pilch stood six feet in height, and possessed a great reach, which he further increased by designing a bat of the regulation length but with a very short handle, allowing a corresponding gain in the blade. His style of play was entirely forward, its feature being the smothering of the ball at the pitch before the twist or rise could take effect.” Pilch told Gale that this shot became known as “Pilch’s poke” and it proved extremely effective for Kent because his teammate Ned Wenman used to play back and cut. The necessity to pitch different lengths to the two batters caused the opposition bowlers problems. But Pilch also told Gale that some bowlers used to counter his methods: Alfred Mynn, for example, used to drop the ball short and fast, making it hard for Pilch to play forward.

By the 1880s Pilch was regarded as the father of the forward defensive shot. Whether or not this was true is less important than the fact that over forty years after Pilch retired, this was the popular perception. Gale, for example, said in 1887: “Fennex, be it remembered that he inaugurated the free forward play, and taught it to Fuller Pilch, and Fuller Pilch taught the world; for I feel confident, in my own mind, that all the fine forward play which one sees now sometimes, is simply , the reflex of what Fuller Pilch developed in a manner which has never been surpassed by any living man (except W. G. [Grace]), and that, too, in days when grounds were less true, and pads and gloves were unknown.” R. H. Lyttelton wrote in his book Cricket (1898): “There is strong evidence to support the conclusion that [Pilch] was the originator of what we understand as forward play.”

Like leading players of any generation, Pilch was worshipped by many admirers. Charlie Lawrence, an English-born influential figure in early Australian cricket, told the Australasian in 1898 how during his childhood, Pilch was his idol and he once “truanted” from school in order to see him in person playing at Lord’s (a twelve to fourteen mile walk). When he finally arrived, he heard that Thomas Box, Alfred Mynn, Nicholas Felix and William Lillywhite were also playing, “but the only attraction for me was Fuller Pilch.” He never forgot seeing him practise, and modelled his own style on Pilch, even though he was dismissed first ball in the match itself. In 1902 Arthur Haygarth, who played for Sussex before achieving greater fame as a cricket historian, recalled being presented fifty years earlier with a bat by Pilch for one performance at Lord’s; he said that “to have a bat offered by Fuller Pilch at headquarters was a high honour indeed in the cricketing world generally.”

William Lillywhite (Image: Wikipedia)

Therefore it is safe to say that until the 1890s, Pilch was taken as the exemplar of batting. He had a reputation for style and elegance, and his record of ten centuries (not all of which are today recognised as first-class) was seen as exceptional at the time. In 1899, William Caffyn stated: “There have been few, in my opinion, to surpass Pilch as a batsman with style and effect combined … He not only utilised his forward play for defensive purposes, but scored from it very frequently as well.” As the Dictionary of National Biography put it: “Throughout his career he was opposed to some of the greatest bowlers that have appeared, and ranked among the finest batsmen and run-getters. There was no player to contest his supremacy until George Parr reached his prime, about 1850.” One story that appeared quite frequently was that one of the greatest achievements of William Lillywhite, a famous bowler from Pilch’s time, was to bowl sixty balls to Pilch without conceding a run, and to dismiss him from the sixty-first. And the duels between Lillywhite and Pilch acquired legendary status in later years, being used to emphasise the greatness of both players. But there is just a hint of tension. Haygarth told a story in 1902 about one match at Lord’s when he played in a team with Lillywhite against opposition that included Pilch. When Pilch came into bat, someone shouted: “Hullo Lilly, here comes your master!” Irritated, Lillywhite spun round and replied: “I wish I had as many pounds as I have got out Pilch.”

Of course, as Pilch was a professional, it was just as important to his middle and upper-class audience that he was utterly respectable, and writing (especially in later years) emphasised this. Box wrote in 1848: “Pilch possesses in a remarkable degree the inestimable property of self control; no temptation will induce him to protract the festivities of the night by which the duties of the coming day would be in jeopardy; his temper is never ruffled by trifling breezes on the one hand, nor provoked by the tornado of unruly passion on the other … He is hailed with pleasure in all circles where the game of cricket is cultivated, and in his own he is the very idol.” A tribute to Pilch in the Licensed Victuallers Gazette during the 1880s recalled “his frank, open, pleasing face and civil manners.” The Dictionary of National Biography proclaimed: “Of a kindly disposition and quaint humour, Pilch was universally respected.” William Caffyn said: “He was exceedingly good tempered, and very kind to all young players with whom he came in contact. He was a remarkably quiet man, with no conversation, and seemed never happier than when behind a churchwarden pipe, all by himself.” In 1902, the former Kent cricketer W. S. Norton (who had played alongside Pilch) told Cricket that Pilch was “a very quiet old chap [who] delighted in a sly joke, over which he would look as sober as a judge.” If it all seems too good to be true, Pilch himself backed up the idea that he lived a respectable life. He told Gale that he limited himself to “two glasses of gin-and-water” in evenings before matches, even when he was being offered drinks by friends and acquaintances: he used to tell the landlords that if someone bought him a drink, to leave out the gin so that he was secretly only drinking water.

But there was another side to Pilch that seems surprisingly modern, even if it does not perhaps reflect quite as well on him. Like many retired players, he railed against the modern game and was firmly of the school that believed cricket wasn’t what it used to be. He told Gale that “modern” (i.e. during the 1860s, before his death in 1870) cricket was played far too frequently and had become predictable. He had little positive to say about how cricket had changed. Although he thought that fielding at long stop (a position that was increasingly obsolete) had improved, he believed that modern bowling and amateur cricket was inferior to his own day. He told Gale: “There is so much swagger and dress in the cricket field now sometimes, and so much writing and squabbling with committees and secretaries and players about cricket, that I often feel that the heart of the game is going, and that very many are playing for their own glory more than for their county now. I know this, that we played for the honour of the county and the love of the game first, and, of course, the gentlemen took care of us in the second place.” Given that in his playing days, Pilch had switched counties for money, this was slightly hypocritical. He also became annoyed if alternative views were expressed, particularly when people said that cricket in his day could not have been as good: “Well, according to your own showing, if nothing was so good thirty years ago, when you came into the world, you admit that your father and mother were not so good as the fathers and mothers now.” And he was less than keen on the increasing importance of counties, suggesting that the game had “drifted into committee cricket”. In short, it would not be difficult to imagine him, had he lived in the twentieth or twenty-first century, sitting in a broadcasting studio disparaging modern cricket like certain ex-players have done: perhaps the nineteenth-century version of Fred Trueman on Test Match Special?

Also, at a time when professionals continued to fight the amateur establishment for control of English cricket (a battle that would be ultimately lost), and more and more cricket was crowded into the calendar, Pilch looked back nostalgically to his own day. He believed that, in the time before railways made travel easier, cricket matches were more of an attraction owing to their rarity, and were something of a holiday event. He recalled how professionals such as him played at the houses of “noblemen”, or sitting with the butler drinking and smoking cigars, while gamekeepers, housekeepers and ladies’ maids came in briefly. Sometimes the “young gentlemen” “came down” to “talk cricket”. He viewed this as the ideal, a time when “gentlemen were gentlemen, and players much in the same position as a nobleman and his head keeper maybe”. Such an attitude would have been viewed unfavourably by professionals such as William Clarke, and even more so by the professionals playing in the years after Pilch’s death who might have read his views when Gale published them in 1887.

But by then, Pilch’s position as the supreme batter was no longer secure. If George Parr was regarded as something of Pilch’s equal, he never quite had the same reputation and it took something exceptional to dislodge Pilch. The first shake of the tree came in the rapids improvement in the standards of pitches at the end of the nineteenth century; far more runs were scored, batting aggregates ballooned so that scoring 1,000 runs in a season became a regular occurrence, and centuries became commonplace. Suddenly, at a time when W. G. Grace was able to score a hundred hundreds, Pilch’s feats seemed puny by comparison to those who subscribed to the view that cricket was far better than it once was. For example, an 1891 article in Cricket noted that “we may feel inclined to laugh at the feat of that truly great cricketer Fuller Pilch, in scoring ten centuries, and ten only, in the course of a life-time”, even if his feats still deserved respect.

W. G. Grace in 1872 (Image: Wikipedia)

But it was the emergence of W. G. Grace in the 1870s that finally eclipsed Pilch in the minds of most cricket followers. As he accumulated scores that would have been beyond the imagination of previous generations, Pilch provided the obvious point of comparison. Most people agreed that Grace was better or had taken batting to a new level. For example, the Kent captain Lord Harris wrote in 1883: “I know there are some, who have seen both players [Grace and Pilch], and are thoroughly competent judges of the game, who assert that if Fuller Pilch had had the advantage of playing on the same perfect wickets as Mr. Grace, he would have got as many runs; and, furthermore, they maintain that some of the bowlers Pilch had to contend against were more difficult to score off than the best of the present day. That the wickets were not as good in Fuller Pilch’s day is an undoubted fact, and their unevenness undoubtedly would tend to make balls shoot, rise, and break unexpectedly; but that the bowlers of those times were more accurate I cannot believe.” A few years later, Gale wrote: “I say of my friend W. G., that he has simply perfected the art which Pilch taught, though Pilch was never such an all-round man as our present champion, to whose wonderful cricket powers have been added the activity of a cat, and the constitution of a rhinoceros, and the light-heartedness of a schoolboy.”

And yet not everyone approved of the direction that cricket had taken. Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game frequently featured interviews with old players, particularly around the turn of the century as the last survivors of Pilch’s generation were tracked down and their stories told. In 1902, Haygarth said in its pages that back in the days when Lillywhite and Pilch opposed each other, “the game was not all one-sided as it now is, for neither batting nor bowling had the upper hand. Equality prevailed always, and the science of the game was delightful to behold in consequence.” Interviewed in 1901, the former Kent player H. B. Biron said that while he was not sure what Pilch would have done in cricket of that time, “he certainly would not have left off balls alone; nor would he have paddled about with his legs when a leg-break bowler was on.”

And the historian and proto-statistician F. S. Ashley-Cooper, a regular contributor to Cricket, compiled a list of Pilch’s ten centuries in 1900. Feeling the need to defend Pilch’s record, he wrote: “To modern cricketers the above list of century-scores may seem but a small one for a man who for several years was the acknowledged champion batsman of England. But in Pilch’s day, and even more recently, run-getting was a vastly different matter to what it is to-day, and there can be no doubt that had Fuller Pilch had the opportunity of playing on billiard-table wickets he would have made scores which would have been considered large even in these days of huge scoring.” Ashley-Cooper wrote many times about the cricketers of Pilch’s time, and how they would doubtless have succeeded in conditions prevailing at the time. In fact he argued in 1900 (along with other leading cricketers) that batting had actually declined since the mid-1880s (Ashley-Cooper even resorted to the tired assertion that “the majority of those who have closely followed the game during the past few decades will probably agree”) and that “it is impossible for the present generation to realise to how great an extent the batsmen of years gone by were handicapped.” And interviewed in 1902, W. S. Norton judged that “if [Pilch] had been born later he would have rivalled W. G. himself. But cricket was quite a different game then, and it has now lost a good deal of the variety which made it so charming.”

Perhaps the most extreme reaction against modern cricket in defence of Pilch came from an anonymous correspondent to Cricket in 1896, who in response to an article on Grace wrote: “Pilch’s ten centuries were made on bad grounds, and without boundaries. Pilch played cricket, Grace plays boundary. Moreover Grace has played very many more played innings than Pilch. But comparison is impossible. There is not more difference between whist and bumblepuppy than between cricket and boundary. Put Grace on a bad ground to face [William] Clarke, [Alfred] Mynn, [John] Wisden and [Samuel] Redgate at their best, then you might talk about his wonderful comparative facts, but I don’t think you would.”

This obsession with the past, and the insistence that cricket was not what it used to be has continued to the present day, but just as it does today, the horizon shifted, leaving behind players from the more distant past. By the time of Grace’s death in 1916, there were few — if any — people alive who could remember seeing Pilch bat or discuss him with authority. And the emphasis had shifted once again. The editor of Wisden, Sydney Pardon, wrote a tribute to Grace for the 1916 almanack: “A story is told of a cricketer who had regarded Fuller Pilch as the last word in batting, being taken in his old age to see Mr Grace bat for the first time. He watched the great man for a quarter of an hour or so and then broke out into expressions of boundless delight. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘this man scores continually from balls that old Fuller would have been thankful to stop.’ The words conveyed everything. Mr Grace when he went out at the ball did so for the purpose of getting runs. Pilch and his imitators, on the other hand, constantly used forward play for defence alone.” This was not true, but by then it did not matter. Grace had replaced Pilch as the standard-bearer for “cricket is not as good as it used to be”, and he continued to be the point of comparison (and lightning rod) for all batters until the emergence of Bradman (and perhaps Hobbs).

We can never be sure how good Pilch was, or how the players of different eras would compare against each other. No-one mentions Pilch now when the names of great batters are discussed, not even those who love cricket history enough to recall Grace or Ranjitsinhji. But perhaps the way in which his reputation and legacy were continually revised — from disciple of Fennex, to the greatest in the world, to a sign that cricket was in decline, to proof that Grace was the ultimate batter — set the pattern that is still followed to this day of cricket followers seeking to either prove that their current hero is the best of all time or to argue that cricket simply isn’t as good as it used to be. Even so, perhaps whenever a forward defensive shot is played, it is worth remembering Pilch, the man who — possibly — first perfected it.

“A better display of the art of cricket was never witnessed”: How Fuller Pilch became the best batter in the world

Fuller Pilch (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

In discussions of who might have been the greatest or most influential cricketers of all time, there is a tendency to favour more recent players. Most critics understandably nominate those who they have seen in person, although an exception is usually made for the inevitable Don Bradman, whose statistical dominance makes him a special case. Perhaps one or two players from earlier periods, for whom there is plenty of film available (preferably on Youtube), might warrant a mention but once discussion moves further back than living memory, former stars are usually neglected, usually accompanied by assertions that cricketers from so long ago cannot possibly have been as good as their modern counterparts. This phenomenon is intensified by the lack of statistical detail available for comparison, and a suspicion that — depending on the viewpoint of whoever is judging — it must have been easier to score runs or take wickets back in the dim and distant past. One or two aficionados might buck the trend and name older players such as Walter Hammond, Jack Hobbs or Victor Trumper, but for most cricket followers these are at best just names that they have heard. And then there is the case of someone like Ranjitsinhji, recorded by the history books as the inventor of the leg-glance (but who is perhaps even more interesting for his adventures off the field). Or what about W. G. Grace? To those familiar with cricket history, he might stand comparison with Bradman: the man who invented modern batting, combining forward play, back play, attack and defence. But if we go back even further, cricket was a very different game on (and off) the field, so that any hope of statistical comparison breaks down hopelessly. Which is unfortunate because if we continue backwards, we come across names that were legends for a century after their playing days were over.

Standing at the head of this semi-legendary list was Fuller Pilch, perhaps the most famous batter before the emergence of W. G. Grace. During his playing days, there was a general consensus that Pilch was the best batter in England — and therefore the world. While never achieving the statistical dominance of those who followed — for example Grace, Ranjitsinhji, Hobbs, Hammond — any impartial assessment has to place Pilch among those names because of what he achieved at a time when batting was often little more than a lottery. When Grace emerged, it was with Pilch that he was most often compared in trying to decide who was the greatest; and not everyone agreed that Grace was better than Pilch. And across the vast span of time between the end of Pilch’s career in 1854 and the modern day, one of his batting innovations has survived and continues to be one of the foundations of the game.

Before delving too deeply into Pilch’s story, it is worth establishing how very different cricket was when he was at his peak in the 1830s and 1840s. Cricket was played irregularly and few county teams even existed; there were no competitions or cups or championships and fixtures were arranged on an ad hoc basis with no real central authority to coordinate them. Test cricket was years away. Many games were played, especially at the major venues such as Lord’s, between what were little more than scratch teams. Part of the problem was that, at a time before the railway network had become fully established, transporting teams across the country was simply uneconomical. Single-wicket matches were still extremely popular, and followed closely by the press and public. While there were amateur and professional cricketers (Pilch was a professional), the distinction was less pronounced than it became; later generations of amateurs were more eager to keep professionals in their place, but in Pilch’s time the relationship was more benevolent. He described it: “Gentlemen were gentlemen, and players much in the same position as a nobleman and his head keeper maybe.” And the concept of what today would be called first-class cricket was largely unknown, although there was a sense that some matches were more important than others.

On the field, it was a similarly different game. When Pilch first played at Lord’s in 1820, the only legal form of bowling was underarm. Although “round-arm” bowling — in which the ball could be released from shoulder height — was widely used and became very effective, it was not officially permitted until 1835. Few, if any, batters used pads or gloves and on the field, long-stop was an essential position. The science of tending to pitches was almost unknown, and therefore the wickets were rough and untamed: the ball bounced unevenly (shooters were common) and could rise sharply if it struck the stones which were found in many playing surfaces. For bowlers who spun the ball, there was a huge amount of help from the pitch. Furthermore, games were generally played without a boundary — all hits were run out, with no fours or sixes. There might have been exceptions; during Pilch’s benefit match in 1839, wagons were used to enclose the ground, but we do not know if hits beyond this point counted as extra runs. But one contemporary critic said that “Pilch played cricket, W. G. plays boundary”. In these circumstances, run-scoring was incredibly challenging; reaching double figures was an achievement and scores of 20 were perhaps as valuable as a century in modern cricket. And the development of round-arm (which gradually metamorphosed into over-arm) bowling was even more of a challenge; the big scores that had begun to accumulate before 1820 against simply lob-bowling disappeared and did not reappear until the time of Grace. Cricket had become a low-scoring game, and the surviving statistics reflect this. Those who later championed the claims of Pilch as one of the best ever were quick to remind audiences how difficult it was to score back in the 1830s and 1840s.

This, therefore, was the cricket world into which Pilch emerged and established himself as the best; alongside Nicholas Felix and Alfred Mynn, he became one of the few household names who played the sport. How did he reach that peak?

Fuller Pilch was born on 17th March 1804, at Horningtoft in Norfolk. He was the seventh (not the youngest as has often been claimed) child of Nathaniel Pilch (a tailor) and Frances Fuller (who was the widowed Nathaniel’s second wife). Records are scarce from so long ago — individuals were not recorded on the census until Pilch was 37 — and so there is much that we do not know. But Pilch’s later fame meant that some details were recorded; he and his two older brothers (the only three out of Nathaniel and Frances’ five sons to survive until adulthood) William and Nathanial followed their father’s trade, becoming tailors. However all three proved to be good cricketers as well. There are suggestions — based on one questionable newspaper report — that Pilch spent time working in Sheffield as a young man, and learned cricket there, but it is perhaps more likely that he played village cricket in Norfolk.

There are more plausible claims that Pilch was coached by William Fennex, one of the Hambledon stars from the period in the late eighteenth century when cricket’s popularity first exploded, and one of the first men to use what would today be known as forward play; Fennex himself claimed to have taught Pilch how to bat. The author Frederick Gale wrote in 1883: “Fennex, be it remembered that he inaugurated the free forward play, and taught it to Fuller Pilch, and Fuller Pilch taught the world; for I feel confident, in my own mind, that all the fine forward play which one sees now sometimes, is simply the reflex of what Fuller Pilch developed in a manner which has never been surpassed by any living man (except W. G. [Grace]), and that, too, in days when grounds were less true, and pads and gloves were unknown. And I say of my friend W. G., that he has simply perfected the art which Pilch taught, though Pilch was never such an all-round man as our present champion.” We shall return to Pilch’s pioneering forward play later.

As Pilch improved as a cricketer, he was selected to play for Norfolk — in reality at that time little more than the Holt Cricket Club — and he made his debut in “big cricket” when he played for Norfolk against the MCC at Lord’s in 1820. Pilch was just seventeen at the time, and played alongside his brothers Nathaniel and Francis. But the three fielded while William Ward scored 278 runs, the highest innings in what would today be called first-class cricket until W. G. Grace scored 344 in 1876. Pilch, at that time picked as much for his under-arm bowling as his batting, scored 0 and 2 as the MCC won by 417 runs. But for modern statisticians, this was his first-class debut, even though no-one would have had any notion of what that meant at the time.

Fuller Pilch in 1852 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The irregular and disorganised nature of cricket at this time mean that it is hard to track Pilch’s career in terms of statistical achievements. But he gradually became a more accomplished batter even though he did not play anything else recognised today as “first-class” until 1827. In 1823, he moved to Bury St Edmonds, and from 1825 to 1828, he played as a professional for Bury Cricket Club — his first century was scored for the club against Woodbridge in 1830 — and represented Suffolk. In this period he made some substantial scores and was selected for the Gentlemen v Players match for the first time in 1827. That year, he also played for a team styled “England” against Sussex in a series of three matches intended as a trial of the fairness of the new style of “round-arm” bowling (used by Sussex in those matches) and top-scored in the first game with 38. He did not stand out in the other games and, with several other “England” players threatened to pull out of the final game unless the Sussex bowlers reverted to underarm, before ultimately agreeing to play. But Pilch quickly learned to face the new style of bowling, adopted it himself, and when asked in later years about what it was like facing the old underarm style, replied: “Gentlemen, I think you might put me in on Monday morning and get me out by Saturday night”.

Pilch moved to Norwich in 1829, becoming the landlord of the Anchor of Hope Inn, and began to play for Norfolk, which was established on a more formal basis in 1827. Within a few years, it was one of the strongest teams in England, not least owing to Pilch’s batting. And in 1833, he became famous through two single-wicket matches against Tom Marsden, the “Champion” of England. Single-wicket was a highly popular form of the game at the time and was played under various rule. The main versions involved two players opposing each other without assistance in the field. Hits behind the wicket did not count, and batters had to run to the other end of the pitch and back to score a single run. Pilch comfortably won the two matches: in the first, played at Norwich, he won after dismissing Marsden for seven, hitting 73 runs himself and then bowling Marsden seventh ball for a duck, winning by an innings. In the return match at Sheffield, before 12,000 spectators, Pilch scored 78, to which Marsden could only reply with 25. Pilch hit 102 and facing an impossible task, Marsden was dismissed for 31. Just over ten years later, William Denison said of this game: “Pilch’s batting was of the finest description, and a better display of the art of cricket was never witnessed in any former match.” The contest was a huge attraction and received a great deal of press coverage. But for all his success, Pilch disliked single wicket matches and rarely took part: he turned down several opportunities (he and Alfred Mynn seem to have actively avoided facing each other in that format) and only seems to have played one other game (in 1845).

In other cricket, Pilch’s fame grew and there were hardly any big matches in which he did not feature. He played for Cambridge Town, “England”, the MCC, Norfolk, the Players, Suffolk and Surrey, and as a given man for the Gentlemen. He also featured in several of the “novelty” teams which were popular at the time, such as for the Single against the Married or the Right-handed against Left-handed. Perhaps his greatest year came in 1834. In two games for Norfolk against Yorkshire, he scored 87 not out, and 73 and 153 not out; he also scored 105 not out for England against Sussex and 60 for the Players against the Gentlemen. According to Gerald Howat (in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), “his aggregate of 811 runs in major matches was not surpassed for twenty-seven years.” Such considerations were meaningless in 1834 — batting averages were not widely published, if at all — but his average of 43 in those games dwarfed the next best, which was only 18. And in matches retrospectively reckoned first-class, he scored 551 runs at 61.22. But perhaps more importantly he had reached three figures in “major matches” for the first time, in a period when such feats were a rarity.

By then probably the best batter in the world, Pilch was in considerable demand and Norfolk could not hold on to him. A Kent county team — the second such attempt — was founded in Town Malling by a pair of lawyers called Thomas Selby and Silas Norton. After the 1835 season, they persuaded Pilch to move to Town Malling in return for £100 per year, for which he would play for Kent and manage the cricket ground. He made his Kent debut in 1836 and remained with the county until 1854, during which period he was a key figure in making it the strongest team in England. Perhaps its most powerful opposition came from another of Pilch’s teams: William Clarke’s professional touring side, the All-England Eleven. Clarke’s team made a huge impact on English cricket, and Pilch was a founding member, playing for the Eleven from 1846 until 1852. He played at least 65 matches for the Clarke’s Eleven, usually in games played “against the odds” (i.e. against teams featuring more than eleven players, to make the game competitive), and scored four half-centuries. But Pilch was not limited to playing for these teams. At a time when county cricket was an unregulated free-for-all, Pilch also made appearances for Hampshire, Surrey and Sussex. He was also a dominant figure in club cricket; he named his innings of 160 for Town Malling against Reigate in 1837 as one of his best.

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A scorecard showing Pilch’s innings of 60 for All-England against Nottingham in 1842

While Pilch was an undoubted success on the pitch — for example, he was the Kent’s leading scorer in twelve out of nineteen seasons — he did not play regularly because Kent, like all county teams in this period, only rarely took the field. And his statistical achievements have been utterly dwarfed by the inflation in scores that took place in the later part of the nineteenth century; to a modern audience, his average looks poor but at the time, given the challenges of batting, it was a different story. His record surpassed that of any of his contemporaries. He scored eleven fifties for Kent in 84 matches today reckoned first-class, with a highest score of 98, and his average of 19.61 was very good for the time. Of these matches, 36 were played against a team styled as England, which contained many of the best players: in these games, he scored four fifties and averaged 18.15. And in the Gentlemen v Players match, which was the highest form of representative cricket in England in the days before Test matches, he played 23 matches — 21 for the Players (the professional team) and two as a “given man” for the Gentlemen (the amateur team) to make the match more competitive — and averaged 14.90. As a point of contrast, he was easily the dominant batter for Kent in this period. Of his contemporaries to score 1,000 runs for the county, none approached his average: Tom Adams had 2,291 runs at 12.58; Nicholas Felix scored 1,528 runs at 16.79; and Ned Wenman had 1,063 runs at 10.42.

Hidden among the fragmented and hard-to-process figures, Pilch was remarkably consistent. It was a matter of some note that in 1836, he reached double figures in 13 innings (five of which surpassed 20); and in 1841 he reached double figures 16 times (not all of which are today judged as first-class) within which were two scores in the 20s, two in the 30s, three in the 40s and one in the 60s. In his Sketches of the Players (1844), William Denison listed many of these achievements, and wrote of Pilch: “But there are other seasons wherein Pilch has outshone all his competitors, and were they to be enumerated, it would be be to extend this publication to a size far beyond that of a ‘sketch’.” He also stated: “As a bat, [Pilch] has been one of the brightest luminaries of the cricket world, during the last 20 years.” In short, there was little doubt of Pilch’s class and superiority; he was quite simply the best batter who had played until then.

This was a precarious time for county clubs and several teams flitted in and out of existence. Kent was no exception: the Town Malling incarnation of the club struggled financially and collapsed in 1841. But Pilch maintained his Kent contention. When the brothers John and William Baker, the founders of the Beverley Club at Canterbury, took over the organisation of Kent teams in 1842 (when their club effectively assumed the role of the county team), they appointed Pilch as the manager of the Beverley Ground. When the proto-Kent team moved to the St Lawrence Ground in 1847, Pilch again moved with them, taking charge of that ground too. There are a few other traces of his life around this time. Despite claims by Denison, there is little evidence that Pilch ran a public house in Town Malling. Instead, he seems to have worked as a tailor in cricket’s off-season; this was the occupation recorded on the 1841 census (which was taken when he and the Kent team were staying at The Bear in Lewes, during a match against Sussex).

For all of Pilch’s later claims — such as the Kent team being a “eleven brothers’, or that “as soon as a man had been 12 months among the cherry orchards, hop gardens and pretty girls, he could not help becoming Kentish to the backbone” — his loyalty to Kent perhaps owed more to finance than emotion. After being awarded a benefit match — the lucrative Kent v England game in 1839 — he accepted an offer (“too good to refuse”) from Sussex to move county; it required the intervention of some of Kent’s wealthier patrons to persuade Pilch to remain where he was.

Pilch played on until 1855, when he was 52 — he later admitted that he and several of his team-mates kept going too long, meaning that Kent declined in the 1850s — having spent 35 years playing at what then was the top level. In terms of what is today judged as first-class games, Pilch scored 7,147 runs at 18.61, including three centuries and 24 fifties. He also took 142 wickets (although analyses do not survive for most of these). But it was noted at the time that he had scored ten centuries in total, a remarkable number for the time; he was also reckoned to have appeared 103 times at Lord’s.

The Saracen’s Head in Canterbury, photographed around 1945; the building was demolished in 1969 (Image: Dover Kent Archives)

Pilch continued to play minor cricket for one more season, appearing for the Beverley Club in Canterbury, and then from 1856 until 1866 concentrated on umpiring: in this period, he stood in 28 matches today reckoned first-class, almost all of which were played in Canterbury (although he had no great reputation as an umpire). He also had other cricketing interests. He began to work as a bat manufacturer — his occupation as given on the 1851 census — and continued as what would today be termed the head groundsman of the St Lawrence Ground until 1867. This was not the only ground with which he was associated. In 1849–50, he went into partnership with Edward Martin, another Kent cricketer, and developed the Prince of Wales Ground in Oxford, where he undertook winter coaching. This business partnership ended in 1855, at which point Pilch began another partnership with his nephew William Pilch, in whose house he was living in 1851. The pair became joint licensees of a Canterbury public house called the Saracen’s Head. It is not quite clear how the responsibility was split: the proprietors were often given as “F. and W. Pilch”, but William was sometimes named alone, and was listed as the head of the household on the 1861 census. From the little evidence that survives, William looks to have been the primary licensee. For example, on the 1861 census when Pilch was living at the Saracen’s Head with his nephew, William was listed as an innkeeper employing three male and three female servants; Pilch by contrast gave his occupation as a cricketer.

This particular business scheme was destined to end badly. William continued to run the Saracen’s Head for most of the 1860s but drifted into growing financial strife. Part of the problem was the new railway station that had been built in Canterbury; whereas the Pilches had previously enjoyed the custom of people (such as farmers) who would stay overnight in their establishment, the growth of the railways made this unnecessary as journeys could be made more quickly with no need for overnight accommodation. As a result, the Saracen’s Head lost valuable business. But there was also something of a financial crisis at the time that affected many small businesses after a leading bank in London collapsed. It was probably a combination of these factors that led to William’s ruin: in 1868 he was imprisoned for debt and declared bankrupt the following year, owing his creditors almost £700. By then, Pilch’s health was bad and he had been forced to give up his work as groundsman. His friends seemed to think that the problems over money with the Saracen’s Head had a negative effect on him; more than one report stated that it had been Pilch himself who had been declared bankrupt. Frederick Gale for example wrote in The Game of Cricket (1888): “The last time I saw Fuller Pilch was a few months before his bankruptcy, which, I believe, killed him. The world did not prosper with him as it ought, and he was out of spirits, and got so excited about the old times that I had to drop the subject.”

Pilch’s failing health — he was suffering from rheumatism — forced him to give up work and money became a struggle, especially with the problems faced by his nephew. Some Kent supporters arranged a subscription which it was hoped would provide him with a pension, but it fell short of expectations; some wealthy patrons had to top up the fund to provide him with an income of one pound per week. In April 1870, Pilch’s health took a turn for the worse. On 1 May 1870, he died at William’s home on Lower Bridge Street in Canterbury from what was then known as dropsy but would today be called fluid retention (or oedema); the actual cause was perhaps most likely to be heart failure. As a mark of the respect in which Pilch was held, a collection was taken among the public, the proceeds of which were used for a memorial. An obelisk was placed over his grave at St Gregory’s Church, which was moved to the St Lawrence ground in 1978 after the church had fallen into disuse. In 2008, Pilch returned to the news when plans by Christ Church University to redevelop the site of St Gregory’s were paused after it became clear that no-one was sure where Pilch was buried. An old photograph of the memorial eventually cleared up the mystery, and work went ahead; a new headstone was placed to mark the approximate location of Pilch’s grave.

The original memorial to Pilch in St Gregory’s churchyard, Canterbury, in the 1950s (Image: Kent Online)

So much for the facts. It is perhaps not as complete a story as we would like, nor could it ever be as detailed as a biography of Grace or Ranjitsinhji or Hobbs because it was plainly a very different world for cricketers of Pilch’s time. It is not possible to simply go through each season and note his scores in the biggest games or reel off impressive aggregates and averages. And yet there was no doubt among Pilch’s contemporaries that he was the best of all. As it happens, it is possible to get a glimpse of what might have made Pilch so good. But that is not the only way in which his legend continued. His reputation endured so that when W. G. Grace came along, Pilch was still for many the point of comparison. For some who remembered him, Pilch’s success must have been more meretricious simply because batting was more difficult back then. And so, more than 30 years after his death and over half a century since he last took to a cricket field, Pilch’s name became embroiled in a debate that has never been settled: was cricket a sport that continually improved, or one that was in a permanent state of decline? Were those who played in the past better than those seen in contemporary cricket? Or were the current players the best of all time?

“The Star of the North”: The Life and Death of Tom Hunt

A drawing by John Corbett Anderson of the United Eleven of All England in 1855; Thomas Hunt is standing on the far left, cradling his bat (Image: via Playing Pasts)

Although it might seem like a recent phenomenon that cricket has been played in more than one format, there was a precedent in the distant past. Once upon a time, many of the leading players took part in something called single-wicket, but — in another historical foreshadowing — some were considerably better at single-wicket than the eleven-a-side version. One of these was a man called Tom Hunt. Typically for the period, he was somewhat rootless: he was born in Chesterfield, played for unofficial Yorkshire and Lancashire teams and played regularly for the Manchester and Sheffield clubs. In another echo across the years, like many professional cricketers, he played for whichever team offered him the best terms. But it was at single-wicket that he excelled, and his reputation inspired legends and memories long after his death in an unfortunate accident at the end of a cricket match.

The two formats of nineteenth century cricket require a little explanation. As well as the traditional game, in which first-class cricket (although such a concept was some way from coming into existence) was becoming pre-eminent despite a dizzyingly muddled and disordered fixture list, there was a popular variant known as “single wicket”. The latter had its own set of rules, its own section in the Laws of Cricket, and its own stars. In the days before railway travel made it economically viable to transport teams of cricketers across the country, men became famous for their solo adventures, challenging all-comers to a game of single wicket. But single-wicket was different in several ways to the sport — then and now — as a team game. Despite the implication of “single” (which referred to how many sets of stumps were used, not how many players on each team), some of the games were two-against-two, three-against-three or more. The bowler only delivered to one end and the batter had to run two lengths of the pitch — touching the stumps at the other end — to complete one run; there could be no overthrows but the batter could not run again once the fielder had thrown the ball across the pitch. Strokes behind the wicket did not count, nor did catches in that area. In some games, fielders helped out but in others, the single cricketer competing had to do all his own fielding. Timings were generous given how tiring this could be: bowlers were allowed up to a minute to recover between deliveries. As with many forms of cricket in this period, betting was doubtless a strong driving force but the attraction of seeing leading players competing against each other was clear, particularly at a time when county cricket had barely got off the ground.

Some of the best players of the mid-nineteenth century were highly effective exponents of single-wicket: men such as Tom Marsden and Fuller Pilch were famous long after their playing days had ended, and both were good single-wicket players. Maybe the most famous (and anticipated) of all single-wicket games — one which has been written about several times — was played between Alfred Mynn and Nicholas Felix at Lord’s in 1846. These two men were among the best cricketers of their time, and the match was extraordinary. Mynn was a round-arm fast bowler and Felix was a lob bowler; both men could bat extremely well. Mynn had been undefeated in single-wicket games since beating James Dearman of Yorkshire in “home” and “away” games in 1838 and was therefore the “Champion of England” (in a rather informal sense). For this game, both competitors were allowed two fielders to support them.

Alfred Mynn (left) and Nicholas Felix illustrated before their first single-wicket game of 1846 (Image: via ESPNcricinfo)

Before a crowd of around 3,000, Felix batted first and was bowled without scoring from his sixteenth ball. Part of the problem was that, as a strong cutter, Felix was hampered by the rules which did not permit runs behind the wicket. Felix had hit eleven of the sixteen deliveries, but failed to score. In reply Mynn made five runs, hitting every one of Felix’s sixteen gentle lobs, before he was caught from a full-blooded hit back at the bowler. The latter therefore batted again and over the course of two hours faced an incredible 247 deliveries from Mynn, most delivered at pace on a notoriously uneven Lord’s pitch. This time, he hit 175 of them, many of these being beautiful cuts that thrilled the crowd but from which no runs were possible. In all he scored just three runs before he was bowled; even with the addition of a wide from Mynn, his total of four meant that he had lost by an innings and one run. In a 2016 article on single-wicket, Jon Hotten described this match as “the format’s final and defining contest” and “the last great game of single-wicket cricket in England”. But it was not quite the end; for example, Mynn and Felix had a re-match later in 1846 at the White Hart Ground in Bromley. Felix lost again, over the course of two days.

But if the Lord’s game was the high-point of the single-wicket game, less prestigious matches continued to flourish for many years. The Cricket History website includes a list of single-wicket matches; even though the list cannot be comprehensive, it is instructive. Over 1,200 games are listed which took place in the 1840s, but if the format lost prestige after that it is not reflected in the games recorded: there were close to 1,350 in the 1850s and around 1,500 in the 1860s before numbers fell away dramatically. There continued to be a market for single-wicket after the Mynn-Felix game, including between big names. Some of these became real marathons, tests of stamina as much as cricketing skill.

One particularly prolonged encounter came in 1849, when Tom Hunt and Robert Crispin Tinley faced each other in Burton-on-Trent over the course of three days in August and September. This contest was sufficiently attractive for Bell’s Life to cover it in depth. Both men were good batters and fast round-arm bowlers. The “home” player Cris Tinley was a promising 18-year-old professional from Burton. He went on to play for Nottinghamshire and, inevitably for good players in this period, for William Clarke’s All-England Eleven. He was associated with the latter for twenty years and also took part in the second tour of Australia by an English team, that of George Parr in 1863–64. In later years he ran a Burton inn and died at the age of 70 in 1900; Tinley’s Wisden obituary said that he “held a very high place among the cricketers of a past generation”. His opponent in 1849 was a far more established player; Bell’s Life noted that Hunt was ten years older, four inches taller and four stones heavier than Tinley. The author noted also that Hunt was extremely experienced at single wicket, and “has been invariable successful; for several years he has given a challenge to all England, and has in vain sought for a competitor to the championship.” In 1849, Hunt had listed a challenge in Bell’s Life to anyone who wanted to face him; his preference was for John Wisden but when the latter declined, Tinley took up the challenge, which offered a prize of £50 to the winner.

Cris Tinley photographed later in life (Image: Trent Bridge)

The young Tinley, playing his first single-wicket game, more than held his own. On the first day (31 August), Tinley won the toss and batted first but was dismissed from his first ball, attempting to hit a leg-side ball and skying it to Hunt. Nevertheless, Tinley impressed with his pace bowling; Hunt struggled to score at first and was hit several times. At one point he had to retire for repairs, and broke two bats, but gradually got on top. He batted for five hours, facing 418 deliveries and scoring 46 runs (with four wides in addition). Bell’s Life noted that he scored seven twos (the rest were ones) which suggests that there must have been some big hits as these would have been equivalent to a modern all-run four. The next day, Hunt in effect declared: he needed to be in Sheffield for an important match and needed to leave that evening; he therefore requested that Tinley should begin his innings. Hunt made a shaky start with the ball and Tinley scored eight runs in the first nine minutes before his opponent settled down. But even then, Hunt could not dismiss Tinley, who had scored 30 runs in 130 minutes when “dinner” was called; after the interval, Tinley had reached a total of fifty after another 80 minutes when, at 5pm, Hunt requested a postponement as he was exhausted and needed to leave for Sheffield. The day ended with Tinley undefeated after scoring 45 runs from 266 balls (plus four wides and a no-ball). His hits included a three (equivalent to an all-run six) and ten twos; the locals were impressed, particularly those who had backed him at very long odds, and he had done his reputation no harm.

The match resumed on 14 September — in the meantime Hunt had played in big games at Sheffield and Manchester — with the scores level. Tinley, continuing his second innings, scored another six runs in 90 minutes and 152 deliveries — and was gifted four wides. Hunt resorted to bowling lobs; these were not particularly good but made Tinley hesitant and eventually he gave a return catch. His total of 51 was scored from 431 deliveries; the extras left Hunt needing eleven runs to win. It took him just 29 minutes to score them, helped by six wides, from 48 deliveries. The drop in quality compared to the first two days disappointed spectators but Tinley had not disgraced himself and Hunt won without being dismissed in either innings, in the process extending his long unbeaten stretch. Unsurprisingly, the match accumulated legends in the retelling; as details became blurred in the memory, some said that the match had lasted “weeks” (technically this was true) and both men had scored hundreds before letting the other have a turn, and that neither man could dismiss the other for days.

As it happened, Hunt was a man about whom it might have been easy to build legends. Although never a famous figure nationally, he was renowned in the north of England and had an excellent career. His reputation was such that he was still being remembered as a formidable cricketer in the 1890s, fifty years after his unfortunate death. Even in 1907, Cricket remembered him as “one of the finest single-wicket players of his day”.

Thomas Hunt was born in Chesterfield on 2 September 1819, the son of Robert Hunt, a shoemaker, and Elizabeth Ralphs. Details on his early life are limited as his early years predate the legal requirement for births to be registered, and details of individuals were not recorded on the 1821 or 1831 census. In 1837, he married Jane Morley (a year younger than him and the daughter of a potter) at North Wingfield in Derbyshire, giving his occupation as a coachmaker. In 1840, their daughter Emily was born and the 1841 census records the family living in Mansfield; Hunt was once more listed as a coachmaker. However, Jane died in 1842, aged just 23.

It was during this turbulent period that Hunt emerged as a cricketer. From what can be pieced together, he made his name in single-wicket matches; it is not impossible to imagine that a scenario in which he answered a challenge in a newspaper as a way of making money. But however it happened, he very soon made an impression. In October 1843, Hunt played George Chatterton at Sheffield and scored 165; this seems to be the highest innings in that form of cricket. It was not his only remarkable performance. In November 1843, he defeated Sam Dakin by an innings and 40 runs. Two years later, in August 1845, he took on an eleven from Knaresborough single-handedly at Chesterfield and won. Bell’s Life listed the game in a review of the 1845 season as taking place on 14 August. Hunt scored 33 and bowled out Knaresborough for 16; in the second innings, he managed ten but his opponents could only score nine in reply, leaving Hunt the winner by eight runs. The Knaresborough eleven was entirely amateur and presumably not very good; Hunt also had “home” advantage and possibly — according to legend — one of the umpires was not entirely sober. Presumably Hunt also had fielders to assist him, otherwise it is hard to see how he could have defeated eleven men, no matter how poor they were.

These and other achievements in single wicket games earned Hunt the nickname “The Star of the North” and provided him with opportunities elsewhere. By the mid-1840s, he was playing as a professional for several clubs, most notably the Manchester Cricket Club, Sheffield Cricket Club, and the Wednesday Club of Sheffield (out of which cricket team grew Sheffield Wednesday Football Club). Through his connection with Sheffield, Hunt played several times for a team known as Yorkshire between 1845 and 1851 (not the official county team, which did not come into existence until 1863); he also played matches (which have been given retrospective first-class status) for Manchester and Sheffield, and for an unofficial Lancashire team in 1849 (both appearances coming against “Yorkshire”). In the early 1850s, Hunt was engaged as the professional and groundsman of Manchester Cricket Club; when a new ground was opened at Old Trafford in 1857, Hunt and his wife were given accommodation in the pavilion.

Despite his growing reputation as a cricketer, Hunt listed himself as a “coachman” on the 1851 census. By then, he lived in Sheffield with his new wife and family; he had married Elizabeth White, who was from Chesterfield, in Nottingham in 1848. They had several children: George Henry (born 1850) and Elizabeth (1851) were later followed by Ann (1855) and George Herbert (1857). However, at the time of the 1851 census, his daughter Emily, from his first marriage, was living with Hunt’s family back in the Chesterfield area.

During the 1850s, Hunt’s reputation reached its height. The best professional side in England was William Clarke’s All-England Eleven which travelled around the country playing local teams; only the growth of railways made it possible for such a team to exist and made it economical for whole teams (rather than individuals, as in the case of single-wicket games) to travel to matches any distance from home. Hunt had already played against Clarke’s eleven for Manchester and for Sheffield, bringing him to Clarke’s notice and in 1850 he joined the touring team. On some occasions, as was common practice, Hunt travelled with the eleven but was “loaned” to the opposition to give them a greater chance of success. He also appeared in several games which offered a clear sign that he was among the best cricketers in England: his first appearance at Lord’s was for the North against the MCC in 1847; in 1850, he played for the Players against the Gentlemen at Lord’s, for much of the nineteenth century unquestionably the most important fixture in England, during which the leading professionals faced the leading amateurs. He also played in another prestigious series of matches, representing the North against the South six times (three of which were at Lord’s). His greatest achievement in first-class cricket came in 1856, opening the batting for the North against the South, when he scored a century against leading bowlers — including John Wisden — at a time such achievements were rare. Bell’s Life described the innings of 102 as “surpassing for defence and style all that we ever saw.”

William Clarke’s All-England Eleven, pictured in 1847 before Hunt joined (Image: Wikipedia)

This was Hunt’s only score over fifty in matches today recognised as first-class, but his overall average of 15.11 in 39 matches was good for the period in which he played; it is worth comparing the career averages of leading contemporary players such as Fuller Pilch (18.61), Nicholas Felix (18.15) and Alfred Mynn (13.42). But as a cricketer, Hunt seems to have done a bit of everything; he could keep wicket (he had nine first-class stumpings) and his fast bowling was responsible for 67 first-class wickets. As a large, powerfully built man (he was 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 12 stones), his reputation was for hitting, but Scores and Biographies called him a “fine, upright and scientific batsman”.

He was also involved in a dispute involving the leading professionals around this time. In 1852, a group of rebels who had become disgruntled with Clarke’s leadership of the All-England Eleven broke away to form the rival United All-England Eleven; Hunt was one of the original signatories to a letter which made public their unhappiness with Clarke. Mick Pope, in his Headingley Ghosts (2013), suggests that there was “no love lost between Hunt and Clarke, for whenever the opportunity arose Hunt thrashed Clarke’s lob bowling with great relish”. After Clarke died in 1856, an annual match between the All-England Eleven and the United All-England Eleven became one of the highlights of each season; Hunt played in the first two such fixtures, at Lord’s in 1857, under the captaincy of Wisden. One of his All-England opponents was Cris Tinley. In games such as these, when the team included the best cricketers in England, Hunt rarely, if ever, bowled but occasionally kept wicket. He performed this role in what became his final first-class game, for Manchester against Sussex at Eccles in September 1858.

By this time, Hunt was 39, having celebrated his birthday on the first day of that game, and, having gained weight, was perhaps past his best. He had played for the opposition in a couple of games for the All-England Eleven that season, perhaps indicating some kind of rapprochement after Clarke’s death. A week after he played against Sussex, Hunt appeared in a game in Rochdale, when an “All-England and United All-England Combined Eleven” played a local twenty-two (such games were usually against the odds to make for a better contest) at Merefield Cricket Ground. Alongside Hunt in the Rochdale team were H. H. Stephenson, John Jackson and Thomas Sherman, leading professionals whose role was to strengthen the opposition. For Hunt, it was quite a convenient outing as he lived nearby in Manchester.

The game was unremarkable; it was scheduled for three days, but the weather prevented much play on the first two. Hunt scored 0 and 9, and although Rochdale held their own, the home team collapsed before a crowd of around 5,000 when the weather relented on 11 September, the final day. Needing 80 to win in the fourth innings, they were 33 for thirteen (with eight wickets to fall) when time ran out and the game was drawn.

The location of Merefield Cricket Club was probably on the ground next to Castleton Hall on this 1851 Ordnance Survey Map (surveyed between 1844 and 1847). The railway line can be seen passing to the south-east of the ground. Unfortunately, there are no other maps from this period which might give more information; the next was created over forty years later when the ground was gone. (Image: National Library of Scotland, CC-BY-NC-SA licence)

At the end of the game, Hunt went to collect his fee of £20 but did not stay for the celebration being held at a nearby hotel as he wanted to get home to Manchester by the 7pm train. He had arranged to meet his wife at Manchester’s Victoria Station, as he had done after each the first two days’ play, from where they would take the omnibus to Old Trafford. There was a little-known shortcut from Merefield Cricket Club to Rochdale’s railway station, saving approximately two minutes, which involved going around the back of the pavilion and walking approximately 200 yards along the railway line. Hunt had apparently taken this route many times, including on the first two days of the match in question. After receiving his match fee, he left the ground via this route at around 6:40pm, according to one witness, “perfectly sober”. Accompanying him was a local man called John Wild, who had worked on the railway, but now assisted at Rochdale Cricket Club; Hunt had paid him to carry his bats to the train station. Wild went first along the train track, followed by Hunt around 100 yards behind. It was the practice of those working on the line to keep to the right so they would always see a train coming; perhaps because of his experience on the railway, this is what Wild did. Hunt, however, walked between the tracks.

Wild later told an inquest how a goods train (with around forty carriages) had come past; he had stepped aside to let it go. At the same moment, a passenger train was coming in the other direction travelling at ten or eleven miles per hour. The driver told the inquest that he had sighted Hunt from 100 yards, just after passing the cricket ground, having not seen him sooner owing to the goods train. He immediately shut off his engine and sounded his whistle. But Hunt, who had his back to the train, appeared not to hear it. The driver threw the engine into reverse but it was too late and the train struck Hunt, knocking him down and running over his legs. Both his legs were severed at the calf and the fingers of his left hand, which was on the rail, were crushed. The driver believed all six of his carriages passed over Hunt before the train stopped.

There were various explanations of why Hunt did not react to the train. Wild had previously given a slightly different version, as reported in the press but not repeated at the inquest, that Hunt had seemed “bewildered” by the approach of the train and had been unable to find a safe place to which he could escape, but the driver seems to have been clear (under oath) about what occurred. Another witness to the accident, also not called to the inquest, suggested that the other train had drowned out the sound of the approaching passenger train. The same witness also reported that an acquaintance of Hunt called James Clegg, who had been at the cricket match and had seen Hunt leave, was there; the witness said that Hunt did not initially realise the extent of his injuries and asked Clegg to help him to his feet. When he became aware of what had happened, the witness reported that Hunt said to Clegg: “Yes, I’m dying. I feel it. Lord forgive me. Lord forgive me.” Clegg was a witness at the inquest but did not repeat any of this, although he did state that he saw Hunt after the accident. There seems to have been some discussion at the inquest over whether Hunt was at least partially deaf, which his wife appears to have suggested after his death, but those who played alongside him dismissed such an idea, reporting that he had no problem hearing when a batter had edged a ball.

In the aftermath of the accident, passengers from the train immediately got out to help, and locals arrived on the scene. The time was around 6:50pm. Hunt was placed in a labourer’s truck and carried to the railway station, and when it was seen how serious his condition was, he was taken to a nearby hotel. Medical attention was given, but it was hopeless and Hunt died just after 9pm — five minutes before his wife arrived, having been urgently summoned from Manchester when it was realised that Hunt was dying. She had been warned on her arrival at Rochdale what had happened, but the attempts to prepare her for what she would see delayed her enough so that Hunt was dead before she reached the hotel. Most reports said that he was only conscious for a few minutes after the accident, apart from a few isolated moments. When news reached the celebrating cricketers at another hotel, they immediately ended their gathering and began a collection for Hunt’s widow and children.

An inquest was held on 15 September, four days after Hunt’s death. The coroner made clear that no-one, particularly the train driver, was responsible and the 16-man jury returned a verdict of accidental death. There was some argument about how much the train company could have done to prevent such incidents, and the discussion became quite heated at some points. A representative of the railway company emphasised that any such travel along the tracks was unauthorised; he insisted that his company bore no liability for what happened. The manager of the railway station conceded that he had allowed some people to travel along the line to the cricket ground, but Hunt was doing so without permission; the company representative seemed less than impressed by the discovery that anyone at all had been allowed to do so and the manager had clearly exceeded his authority. A recommendation from the coroner, endorsed by the jury, was that the railway company should prohibit anyone walking on the track. The representative of the company gave a donation there and then to the growing fund for Hunt’s family and planned to ask the directors, on behalf of Rochdale Cricket Club, to open a subscription. The company also waived a fee for transporting Hunt’s body back to Manchester. By the time of his burial later that day, the fund had raised over £70.

Hunt’s death was widely reported in newspapers, and the inquest was covered across the country, including in the Morning Chronicle in London. The fullest account of the death and inquest was printed in the Rochdale Observer; the details from the witness who claimed to have heard Hunt’s last words were printed in the Liverpool Mail. A later claim by R. S. Holmes in his History of Yorkshire County Cricket Club 1833–1903 (1904) that Hunt had been drunk was entirely without substance. A subscription was also opened for Hunt in Sheffield.

To compound the misery of Hunt’s wife Elizabeth, she was around four months pregnant with their fifth child, Henrietta (who was born in March 1859), at the time of his death. By the time of the 1861 census, she and four of the children (there is no further trace of George Henry; he was either dead or the family had subtracted eight years from his age and changed his second name to Herbert) were living in Hulme, Manchester. She listed herself as a “fundholder”, perhaps still living off the collections made for her late husband. The 1871 census lists Elizabeth (with the occupation of “housekeeper”) and the same four children still living in Hulme, but with an additional child, Bertha, born in 1865. Bertha died in late 1871, but the others were still at the same address in 1881. Mrs Hunt, and her daughters Elizabeth and Anne, still lived in Hulme in 1891, albeit at a different address, but she is listed as “living on her own means”; the three women, joined by George Herbert, are still there in 1901. By 1911, they had moved to Stretford and the 60-year-old Elizabeth was working as a shopkeeper, assisted by her sister Annie. Elizabeth Hunt née White died in June 1912, never having remarried. Only Emily (who was 17 when her father died) and Henrietta seem to have married and had children.

The Merefield Cricket Ground no longer exists; it was sold for redevelopment in 1867. The bowling club which succeeded to the land is still there; known today as the Castleton Bowling Club, it is surrounded by houses and remains close to the railway line and station where Tom Hunt was killed over 160 years ago.

The Three Hodsons of Sussex

The Cricket Match between Sussex and Kent, at Brighton by Charles Jones Basebe. This engraving from 1849 includes James Hodson (1808–79), pictured fielding at fine leg immediately before the church (Image: Government Art Collection)

Sussex is the oldest of the English first-class county teams, having been formed in 1839. Several famous cricketing “dynasties” have been associated with it over the years, including the Lillywhites, Tates and Gilligans. But one interesting family is hardly remembered at all today, despite being involved with Sussex for almost thirty years, including from the first years of the club. One of the early stalwarts in the team was a man called James Hodson; he was followed into the team by his cousin William Hodson. Almost thirty years later, his cousin’s son, also known as William Hodson, followed his relatives into the Sussex side.

The three Hodsons were part of a wealthy family from East Sussex. James Hodson was born in Streat, a village near Lewes, on 30 October 1808. He was the son of Thomas Hodson, who owned “Hodson’s Black Mill” in Brighton. Following in the family tradition, James worked as a miller most of his life and always gave this as his occupation on census returns. Others in the family were farmers: three of his uncles owned substantial farms, including William Hodson (1778–1857), who was responsible for the construction of the West Blatchington Windmill around 1820.

Two of the family windmills. Left: Hodson’s Black Mill in Brighton, shortly before its demolition in 1866 (Image: Wikipedia). Right: West Blatchington Windmill in 2002 (Image: geograph.org.uk)

James Hodson emerged as a cricketer in the late 1830s, initially playing for the “Players of Sussex” and then for a team representing Sussex in 1838, the year before the official formation of the county club. Despite coming from a wealthy family, he played as a professional. Normally, and particularly in later years, someone from a background like his would not have been paid to play cricket. But the distinctions were not as rigid in the 1830s as they were to become, and perhaps his branch of the family was struggling financially.

By the end of the 1830s, Hodson was judged by the press to be the best bowler in Sussex. He was regarded as less accurate but more dangerous than F. W. Lillywhite (known as “the nonpareil”). Like most leading bowlers, Hodson utilised the round-arm style which had been belatedly legalised in 1835 and which replaced underarm bowling. But even though the updated Laws of Cricket forbade delivery of the ball from above shoulder height, some bowlers had already begun to stretch the rules and were releasing the ball from a higher point. Although many umpires turned a blind eye, this was illegal and there were numerous attempts by the authorities to crack down.

Detail showing James Hodson, from The Cricket Match between Sussex and Kent, at Brighton by Charles Jones Basebe (Image: Government Art Collection)

One of those who pushed the limits was Hodson. On 10 and 11 June 1839, Sussex played the MCC at Lord’s. Hodson took eight wickets (no bowling analyses survive from the match), but this is not what drew attention. When the MCC batted a second time, needing 81 to win, Hodson bowled from the end where W. H. Caldecourt was umpiring (all his other bowling had been in front of the other umpire, Bartholomew Good). Caldecourt almost immediately no-balled him for raising his arm above the shoulder. The resulting furore — from the widespread observation that Good had seen no problems with Hodson’s delivery to the crowd’s anger towards Caldecourt — was a portent of arguments to come regarding fair and unfair bowling many years later. After Hodson had conceded 26 runs to no-balls in around ten minutes, he was withdrawn from the attack.

This match made little difference to Hodson’s career; he played for Sussex until 1854 and took part in 54 matches now recognised as first-class. In 1844 he played for “England” against Kent; in 1845 he appeared for the Players against the Gentlemen at Brighton; and in 1849 he played for the “All England Eleven” against Kent. It is unclear if he modified his bowling style or continued to raise his arm above his shoulder (nor can we be certain if he was ever no-balled again as he is entirely missing from the most widely recognised list of bowlers who were “called”), but his regular selection for games at Lord’s and his inclusion in “England” teams might indicate that he was not considered an unfair bowler. In fact, Hodson was clearly a good cricketer, but was quickly forgotten when his first-class career ended. We know little else about him except he married in 1850, had four children, and died in 1879 leaving an estate worth around £3,000 (the equivalent of over £300,000 today). His death was unreported in the press (and fell in that awkward period before Wisden began publishing obituaries and before the creation of Cricket in 1882).

William Hodson (1808–96) photographed in 1890 by William Hall and Son of Brighton (Image: Courtesy of Geoffrey Boys)

Another branch of the Hodson family was also associated with Sussex cricket through James’ cousin William (the son of his uncle William — there were a lot of men with that name in the family!), who was born in 1808 at West Blatchington. William was the same age as his cousin James, but played for Sussex first. However, he only appeared in one match today recognised as first-class. This was at Lord’s in 1833 when Sussex played an “England” team of leading cricketers. At the time, there was a regular series between “England” and Sussex, involving matches at Lord’s (the home of “England”) and the Royal New Ground in Brighton. “England” were usually stronger, but Sussex were reckoned a powerful team in 1833 (although a report in Bell’s Life hinted that Sussex were not quite at full strength). William Hodson batted at number ten and made a pair; no bowling analyses survive so we cannot be sure if he bowled, nor if he took any wickets (only catchers were credited — a bowler only made the scorecard if the batter was out bowled). And so ended his very brief first-class career.

Similarly to James, William appears to have played as a professional: advertisements for the game identified only one “gentleman” playing for Sussex; the other ten, including Hodson, had no initial listed — an indication that they were all professionals. Otherwise, we know even less about him than we do about James. There is sketchy evidence that he played cricket regularly in Brighton in the 1830s, but it is often unclear whether the “Mr Hodson” recorded in the Brighton Gazette as playing for the Clarence Club was William or James. Further muddying the waters, James’ younger brother Charles (1810–1896) also played for the Clarence Club. But it is likely that the Hodson who played against Worthing a couple of weeks before the England v Sussex game of 1833 was William; he scored 0 and 11 and took at least three wickets. And a player called Hodson — again, probably William — scored 42 and took at least four wickets in another game against Worthing that August. In 1834, both W. Hodson and C. Hodson played for the Clarence Club (including at least one game together), but it is likely that the Hodson playing in the Brighton area towards the end of the decade was James rather than his brother or cousin.

After his brief cricket career ended, William was a farmer for the rest of his life. He married Mary Gould in 1837 and when their first child was born in 1838, they lived in Patcham in Sussex but had moved to Crypt Farm in Cocking by 1841. The couple had eight children in total; after Mary died in 1862, William remarried in 1868. As with James, we know little about his life away from cricket, but we know a little more about his second child — also inevitably called William — who continued the family association with Sussex.

William Hodson (junior) was born in Cocking on 24 January 1841. The census from that year lists him, aged four months (the census was taken in June), living at Crypt Farm, where his father was as a farmer. Ten years later, we find him on the 1851 census as a pupil at Oaklands School in Woolavington, which catered for the under-10s. He subsequently attended Brighton College, appearing in the school cricket team in the mid-1850s. By the time of the 1861 census, William lived with his maternal aunt and her husband, Thomas Coppard, a solicitor and farmer in Albourne. William is listed as an apprentice solicitor, and presumably worked for Coppard.

Having made several appearances for the Gentlemen of Sussex from 1858, Hodson made his first-class debut for Sussex in June 1860, aged just 19, and played three matches that season. Although he achieved little with bat or ball, he must have impressed enough people to make several appearances over the following seasons. He played just once for Sussex in 1861, but appeared in every one of their games in 1862 and 1863; in the latter season, he also played for the “Gentlemen of the South” against the “Players of Surrey” at the Oval.

William Hodson (1841–96) photographed for the Supplement to Fashion and Sport, date unknown (Image: Courtesy of Geoffrey Boys)

Hodson played no first-class cricket after 1863, but was a regular for the Gentlemen of Sussex until 1881 (including an appearance against the touring Australian team in 1878). He must have been a good batter; his overall first-class record was 496 runs at 21.56, with a highest score of 50, but in this period of low scores and impossible pitches, that was a very respectable record. For example, in 1863 (counting only players who made five or more appearances) he was ninth in the first-class averages with 298 runs at 24.83. We know little else about his cricket, but a tribute written upon his death in 1896 in Cricket stated: “Standing well over six feet, he had great hitting powers, which he used to advantage. Besides, he was a splendid field, especially at long-leg and cover.”

The reason for the end of his Sussex career was almost certainly because he had qualified as a solicitor. In 1868, and for the following few years, the Post Office Directory named him as a solicitor in Hurstpierpoint until he moved to Shoreham around 1878. It appears that he continued to work with his aunt’s husband: he was a partner in Coppard and Hodson, which later became Coppard, Hodson and Wade when Charles Aubrey Wade joined the firm in the 1870s.

Away from the world of cricket and law, Hodson junior seems to have had an unusual life and there are many unanswered questions. In 1866, he married Annie Edith Staplehurst, the daughter of William Staplehurst who is listed on her marriage certificate as a “Gentleman”. But Annie’s identity is the first of the many mysteries surrounding Hodson. Census entries after her marriage state that she was born around 1844 somewhere near Chailey (according to the 1881 census) or Piltdown (according to the 1871 census); the villages are fairly close to each other, around 12 miles north-east of Brighton. She gave her address on her marriage certificate as 60 London Road, Brighton, but this does not help much. In 1861, Charles Sprake lived at that address with his wife, his sister and a servant; ten years later, the house was occupied by John Clegg, his wife, his daughter and a servant. No-one on either census return seems to have had any connection with a family called Staplehurst.

But there might be a hint there at what was really going on, because also on the 1861 census is a woman called Annie Staplehurst who was working as a servant in the Kemptown area of Brighton, employed by Lucy Burdett, a lodging house keeper at 160 Marine Parade (not far from London Road). Could Annie have been a servant who was working at 60 London Road at the time of her marriage? Which begs the question: why would Hodson — a member of a wealthy family and a qualified solicitor — marry a servant? The most obvious solution — a pregnancy — does not work as the couple had their first child around 12 months after their marriage.

Finding Annie on a census before 1861 is difficult. The most likely candidate is an Annie Staplehurst, the daughter of William and Hannah, on the 1851 census; she was ten years old and had been born in Fletching, Sussex (between Piltdown and Chailey). Her father was a farm labourer. There is another possibility. According to a descendant who has seen it, Annie’s gravestone states that her maiden name was Leeves. And a man called William Staplehurst married someone called Lucy Louisa Leeves in 1843. By 1851, they had four children, the eldest of whom was Sally Ann; she was born in Fletching around seven months after her parents’ wedding. Her father was a “Master Carman”. This would not, however, explain why “Sally Ann” became “Annie Edith”.

If either of these women are our Annie (and she might have been someone else entirely, or someone who changed her name), the identification of her father as a “gentleman” on her marriage certificate is clearly a polite fiction aimed at disguising her background and humble status. Some of her descendants who have researched the family history believe that Annie was the illegitimate daughter of a “gentleman”, which would explain her marriage to Hodson. While this is possible, there is no evidence to support it. Whichever way we examine the marriage, it is hard to explain; Annie Staplehurst remains a mystery.

Returning to more certain ground, Hodson and Annie had eight children in total. By 1881, Hodson had joined the Freemasons and was settled in Shoreham. The census records him living with his family and two servants on the High Street of New Shoreham. But the marriage may already have been in trouble, and by the time of the next census, the couple had separated.

On 6 June 1888, Annie and six of their seven children arrived in Nova Scotia, Canada, on board the Nova Scotian. William was not with them, nor was their eldest daughter who had just married (according to descendants of the family, Annie was a witness at the wedding, which took place shortly before her departure to Canada). The family appear on the 1891 Canadian census, living in Annapolis Royal, although one of the children seems to have returned to England. Annie died in Canada, aged fifty, in 1893. The fate and movements of the rest of the family are complicated. However, there is evidence that they were financially supported, possibly by their father and probably by various family trusts.

Walter Gilbert (Image: Cricket, 20 May 1886)

What is not clear is why they went to Nova Scotia at all (there was no family connection with Canada) and why William did not accompany them. We might find a hint of an explanation for the destination, but it is a very tenuous link. In 1882, a case came before Chichester County Court, reported in the Weekly Dispatch, concerning Walter Gilbert, a cousin of W. G. Grace who was often in severe financial difficulty. He was the manager of the United South of England cricket team and one of his players had taken him to court over non-payment of wages. The solicitor for the plaintiff was William Hodson. During the case, when the court was arguing over the fees the plaintiff should have been paid, Hodson recalled that when he played for Sussex, he received £5 for a home game and £6 for an away one (although as an amateur, he should not have been paid at all).

In 1886, Gilbert and his family moved to Canada, effectively exiled by the Grace family, following his disgrace after serving a prison sentence for theft. The Gilberts settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Walter opened a school. There is no obvious connection between Hodson and Gilbert other than that one court appearance (when Gilbert was not even present), but it is quite a coincidence, especially given the timing. Another possible link is that Gilbert was married to the daughter of James Lillywhite, who played for Sussex between 1850 and 1860 (although he never played with William Hodson) and was the son of F. W. Lillywhite who had played alongside James Hodson in the 1830s. Did the Hodsons go to join the Gilberts? Was there some unknown connection? Was this a similar “exile” for reasons lost to history? Unfortunately, there seems no way to know.

The reason that William and Annie separated is much clearer. William was in a relationship — over a long period — with a married woman. This emerged publicly, and somewhat embarrassingly, in an 1890 divorce case when John Ince, a retired surgeon who had served with the British Army in India, petitioned to divorce his wife Kate Montgomerie Ince on the grounds of adultery.

Kate Montgomerie Davidson had been born in Huntingdonshire in 1851, the daughter of a doctor. She had married George Kelly at Brixton in February 1870. Shortly after the marriage, the couple moved to Ludhiana in British India where Kelly worked as the district’s police superintendent, but he died on 4 December 1870 (the cause of death is unclear). Ince was a doctor who attended Kelly when he was ill, but eyebrows may have been raised when Ince married his widow on 12 January 1871. According to Ince’s evidence at the divorce hearing, as reported by The Times: “On the death of her first husband [Kate] was in such straitened circumstances as to be almost destitute … [Ince] married her out of sympathy with her in her unfortunate position.” She was also heavily pregnant, and gave birth to her first child, Isobel Kelly, on 4 March 1871. Over the following five years, she had another three children with her new husband, although only two of them survived.

It was not a happy marriage, and both parties had an extensive list of complaints about the other. Unsurprisingly for this period, only Ince’s side came out in court, and he told the divorce hearing — clearly playing to the gallery and drawing several laughs — that “almost immediately after marriage [Kate] commenced to exhibit great violence of temper, that she threw ink bottles and gum bottles at him, that on various occasions he bore marks of her violence, and that only on one occasion did he strike her, that being during one of her assaults upon him.” They spent periods apart but returned to live together in various parts of India before they returned to England in 1876. Later that year, they were granted a judicial separation. Ince claimed to have been in a state of melancholia between 1876 and 1884, leading “a very retired life”.

The Royal Court of Justice, where all divorce cases were heard at this time
(Image: sjiong (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikipedia)

In 1889, Ince discovered that Kate had been living with William Hodson “as man and wife” since October 1886. Until then, Ince had believed that “his wife was leading a virtuous life”. When Ince filed for divorce in 1890, he claimed damages against Hodson (named as a co-respondent in the case). If we can believe Ince, Hodson must have separated from his own wife by that date (which fits with the birth of his youngest child Gladys in mid-1885). But it may not be quite so straightforward; in the documents she submitted to establish that she was not guilty of adultery, Kate stated that her husband had been aware of the relationship between her and Hodson in either late 1884 or early 1885 — she was attempting to prove that he had delayed proceedings unreasonably after becoming aware of the alleged adultery.

Ince’s wife responded with several counter-allegations: that no adultery had occurred, but if it had her husband had “connived” in it; that her husband had neglected her and “treated her with unkindness”; that he had turned her and their three-year-old child out of their house in Rawalpindi in 1874; that he had not fed her or treated her when she was ill; that he had variously beaten and assaulted her; that he too had committed adultery with one of his servants in 1888; that he had called her, on various occasions, a whore and a street-walker and denied being the father of her children. It seems to have been a bitter and unpleasant affair. One of her most gruesome accusations (mentioned only once by Kate and then dropped) was that in the early 1870s, when she was in a delicate mental state, he had forced her to sketch the private parts of decomposing female corpses. None of this emerged in court, and he strenuously denied her accusations in private.

Kate called two witnesses to support her allegation of adultery: the servant concerned, and another servant who had seen evidence of intimacy. But the first servant had written a letter to Ince before the case which contradicted her testimony and so the judge told the jury to disregard her evidence.

But the most sensational witness was their only surviving child, the fourteen-year-old John Ince, who began his evidence by saying he had seen the servant come out of his father’s bedroom and had seen him kiss her. But as he alleged this had happened in 1885, when he would have only been ten, his reliability was called into question. Under cross-examination, it further emerged that John had taken the name Hodson and had been living with his mother and William Hodson. And he was largely discredited when a letter was read out which he had sent to his father. He had written it after learning that his father had stood outside his mother’s house earlier that month (on 5 November 1890) shouting and swearing. Although he wrote to Ince that he “made every allowance for your being mad”, he threatened to “break every bone in your miserable old carcass” if he ever annoyed his mother again.

John made a few other allegations about his father’s eccentric behaviour, but wrote something which made the press very excited: “I hear you were in London yesterday. I hope you enjoyed yourself. One thing I should like to know. Where were you when the Whitechapel murders were committed, as I have read the papers and it is my opinion you have done them all, as they all agree that he was a doctor, that he carried a black bag, and was mad, and was a most repulsive-looking party; isn’t it wonderful how exactly you answer to that description?”

He had not initially sent the letter, at the request of his mother, but upon seeing his father a few days later, sent it with a follow-up, which included this passage: “I will never own that you are my father. The man I call father [i.e. William Hodson], and whom I respect and love, can trace his pedigree 500 years back, and never any but brave and true gentleman in the count.”

For what it is worth — without entering into any debates about the identity of “Jack the Ripper” — the accusation against Ince seems to have been born out of teenage anger and a few unremarkable coincidences rather than any compelling evidence. Ince has never been a suspect for the killings, not even in the more esoteric realms of Ripper theorising. And in later years, his son resumed using the name Ince, suggesting that the pair reconciled.

The report in The Times drily stated: “The contents of the letter appeared to create amazement in court, but the reading of it did not at all disconcert the witness.” Nevertheless, the barrister representing Mrs Ince announced that he would not be taking her case any further. The jury found Mrs Ince and Hodson guilty of adultery and the judge pronounced a decree nisi; although Ince withdrew his claim for £1,000 in damages, the judge granted costs against Hodson, despite the plea of Hodson’s barrister that he did not know that Mrs Ince was married. This was somewhat undermined when one of Ince’s representatives pointed out that Hodson’s name was on the deed of separation (which had been made in 1876), and he therefore must have known that she was married when they began their relationship. If this was true, Hodson could have been in a relationship with Kate for fourteen years, but as he had five children with Annie in this time, and as Ince did not make use of the deed to strengthen his case, it is far from certain. As only The Times reported this, perhaps it was a mistake.

Hodson made little contribution in court, and his responses in the official documents are somewhat lacking; it is quite likely that embarrassment was the main emotion he felt at being drawn into such a sensational story where his private life was displayed — albeit incidentally — across many newspapers. Nor can the gleeful reporting of the claims made by Ince’s son have made it any easier.

Again, what happened next is mysterious. There is no trace of Hodson, Kate Ince or her son on the 1891 census. The next public mention of Hodson came in 1896 when the Mid-Sussex Times printed a death notice on 28 April for “William Hodson, late of Hurstpierpoint” on 19 April in Barbados. A brief article in the same edition said:

“Mr. Wm. Hodson, well known in 1861–2 as a member of the Sussex county cricket team, died on Sunday week at Barbadoes [sic], from yellow fever. Deceased was a native of Cocking, near Midhurst. Retiring from the county eleven 1862 in consequence of an accident, Mr. Hodson settled in Hurstpierpoint as a solicitor, and frequently played in the local club matches.”

Cricket also reported his death on May 7, saying it had occurred “within the last few days”. All very mysterious; what was he doing in Barbados? Some of his descendants researching the family history have written that he died on a ship in the “waters off Barbados”, but it is not clear from where this information comes. Was he visiting Barbados, or had business taken him there? Even more interesting is the record of Ince’s will in the Probate Index; it states that “Hodson William of Damaraland South West Africa died 8 April 1896 at Barbados West Indies.” Damaraland is part of what is now Namibia; again, we have no indication of what took him there, but it appears that Kate was with him. The Probate Index records that the executor of his estate (worth just over £816, a substantial but not huge amount) was “Kate Montgomerie Ince single woman”.

Kate was not too upset as by early 1897 she had married again — her new husband was Andrew Christopher Palles — in London, but she died on 13 November 1897 in hospital; the cause of death was an ischiorectal abscess and septicaemia. Her death was announced in the Sussex Agricultural Express under her former name of Ince, after “a long and painful illness from rheumatic fever”; she was listed as the “only daughter of Dr. F. M. D. Davidson, of South Norwood” and the wife of John Ince. Did this announcement originate from her father (who was still alive at the time)? Her husband Andrew Palles died in South Africa in 1903; her son also lived there from, at the latest, 1901 until his death in 1941. Is there a connection with Hodson’s residence in Damaraland?

As with the rest of William Hodson’s life, the answers seem to be beyond our reach.

Note: William Hodson junior’s death has been muddled up with that of his father in cricket databases. CricketArchive states that William junior died on 15th May 1896 at Preston Park, Brighton, but this was actually his father. William senior was around 87 years old, and his death came just over a month after that of his son; he is listed on the same page of the probate index, leaving an estate worth just over £3,335 (worth around £400,000 today). William senior’s death is unrecorded on CricketArchive, which also does not mention that he was related to William junior or to James Hodson.

“Most of them appeared afraid to play in their accustomed style”: The Curious History of Lob Bowling

Sketches by George Shepherd of a match at Lord’s around 1790; the top row of drawings shows underarm bowlers operating (Image: The Hambledon Men (1907) via Wikisource)

To most modern cricket fans, mention of underarm bowling brings to mind the infamous incident with Trevor Chappell in 1981, when the Australian bowled the final ball of a match underarm on the orders of his brother Greg, the team captain, to remove any possibility of New Zealand hitting a six to tie the game. Until then, underarm bowling had not been seen in important cricket for sixty years. It was — and remains — a forgotten part of cricket. But in the first days of the sport, all bowling was delivered underarm and even when changes in the laws made it obsolete from the early nineteenth century, “lob” bowling lingered for almost a century before dying out.

When cricket first rose to some kind of prominence in England in the eighteenth century, the only legal form of delivery was underarm. Bowlers rolled the ball along the ground (in the manner of bowls), sometimes quite quickly if the legends can be believed, at batters who wielded something akin to a modern hockey stick. Gradually, the more cunning bowlers realised that if they pitched, rather than rolled, the ball, it would bounce over the bat and onto the stumps; the result was a change in cricket bat design to something more similar to its modern counterpart to account for this new challenge. And so bowlers looked for a new advantage, which they sought by releasing the ball from higher and higher points. Over the first decades of the nineteenth century, the classic underarm method was left behind when bowlers began to raise their arm — first to waist, then shoulder height — in delivering the ball. This was initially in contravention of the laws that existed at the time. Round-arm bowling (usually delivered from shoulder level) was legalised — many years after it had been widely adopted — in 1835 but bowlers continued to push the rules and raise their arm higher. Once more, the laws were increasingly ignored until they changed in 1864 to allow the bowler to release the ball from whatever height he liked.

The older style became something of a relic, but that did not mean that it disappeared completely. Although lob bowling — the name usually given to what we would term underarm bowling — was a rarity from the 1830s onwards, some cricketers persisted with the method until well into the twentieth century. The aim of the best practitioners was to provoke the batters — through bravado or deception — into attempting big shots and falling to catches in the deep. For a modern audience, it is hard to imagine how lob bowling operated in practice as there are few first-hand accounts of it and no-one today has seen it used seriously. Nevertheless, Scyld Berry and Simon Burnton have suggested some of the threats it may have posed: spin both ways, a high ball aimed directly at the top of the stumps (in a similar manner to the story by Arthur Conan-Doyle, The Story of Spedegue’s Dropper), the grubber, the second-bounce yorker. But as Berry noted: “Under normal conditions it has to be admitted that batsmen get themselves out when faced with lobs which seldom have the technical excellence to beat a defensive stroke.” Yet there were challenges for a batter unaccustomed to facing this relatively rare style in later years: he faced huge potential humiliation at the prospect of getting out to an underarm delivery, even if he was caught in the deep. For anyone who tried to avoid the risk of a big hit, it was not easy to block a lob; one article discussing the best way to play them in a 1900 article in the Westminster Gazette suggested taking singles. The huge difference in trajectory for a batter accustomed to facing overarm bowling was also a factor: from expecting the ball being delivered from above head height, it would suddenly be lobbed up from close to the ground.

The question posed by Berry and Bunton — what had happened to all the lob bowlers — was a familiar one, being frequently asked from the middle years of the nineteenth century. For example, Cecil Headlam wrote an article which pondered this in The Cricketer Annual for 1922–23. He was writing within living memory of first-class lob bowling; the last specialist played county cricket in 1921 and there had been several practitioners before the First World War. Yet it is easy to trace the story, which tells of the decline, surprising revival and ultimate extinction of the lob bowler after the change of the laws in 1835.

The frontispiece from Nyren’s Young Cricketer’s Tutor (published in 1833), showing underarm bowling at Lord’s (Image: The Hambledon Men (1907) via Wikisource)

Although early cricket reports in newspapers often lack detail that is helpful to historians, the scarcity of mentions for “lob” or “underhand” bowling, and the way it is often described as a rarity, shows that very few lob bowlers operated by the mid-19th century in serious cricket. For example, a Bell’s Life report on a local match between Watlington and “The Etonians” in 1840, said that the Etonian batters were “‘rather abroad’ [i. e. confused] at the old-fashioned slow lobbing bowling against which they had to contend.” There were other intermittent reports in the 1840s of “puzzling” or “unusual” lob bowlers baffling various batters. Most of the time, these seem to have been slow bowlers, but occasional faster practitioners are mentioned, such as when the Worcestershire Chronicle reported that “the fast underhand bowling of Mr Barnes was again much admired” in a game between Stow-on-the-Wold and Worcestershire in 1847.

Incidentally, it is extremely implausible that any underarm bowler ever achieved great pace, even if they rolled the ball along the ground. Although a legendary story (told for example by Harry Altham in his History of Cricket) suggests that the underarm bowler George Brown of Brighton, who played between 1819 and 1838, was so quick that one of his deliveries passed through a coat held by a fearful long-stop and killed a passing dog, later writers were skeptical. For example, a correspondent to St James’s Gazette wrote in 1890:

“Veteran cricketers not unfrequently speak of underhand bowling as having equalled, if not exceeded, in pace the fastest roundhand bowling; and, if I remember rightly, this is suggested even in the Badminton cricket book. Allow me to say that, in the first place, this is a physical impossibility; for the underhand bowler’s arm describes a much shorter segment of a circle than does that of a roundhand bowler. In the second place, I feel certain that nineteen practical cricketers out of twenty would laugh at the idea.”

The writer suggested that these “veteran cricketers” had not faced other styles of bowling that would have made a comparison useful; it is hard to argue.

Lob bowlers remained a rarity into the 1850s; one report in the Reading Mercury described how one lob bowler, Mr Phillips, appearing for the village of Newton against neighbouring Woodhay, “did great execution among the timber in the first innings, but in the second it told in the opposite direction.” They were even scarcer in what is now termed as first-class cricket, but one man inspired a minor revival.

William Clarke (Image: Wikipedia)

William Clarke of Nottinghamshire, better known now as the founder of the All-England Eleven, was a lob bowler who had some success. That his style was unusual at the top level is clear from an account in the London Evening Standard of a match at Lord’s between the “MCC and Ground with Pilch” (Fuller Pilch was probably the best batter in England at the time) against the “Northern Counties with A. Mynn, Esq.” in July 1844. When the MCC batted, Clarke took five for 52. The report said:

“The great difficulty the club had to fight against was the underhand slow bowling of Clarke of Nottingham, and that bowling strictly speaking, was only well played by Dorrinton, Sewell, and Hillyer. All the others were ‘stuck up’ by it. Indeed most of them appeared afraid to play in their accustomed free style … But the truth is that nearly all those who played in the club eleven did not understand how to deal with these balls, and for this very good reason, that they have had no practice at its like. The hitting, therefore against Clarke was feeble and tame, except with those whom we have mentioned.”

Opinion was divided on Clarke’s merits as a bowler, as displayed in a frankly strange discussion which played out over several weeks in the correspondence pages of Bell’s Life in 1851 and 1852. Many of the arguments concerned his “All England Eleven”, to which many of the correspondents had serious objections on the grounds of Clarke’s professionalism and his claim to represent “All England”. One letter, written under the pseudonym “A Bowler”, argued that Clarke merely took wickets on account of his reputation, and “if he were to disappear for 50 years, and then came up again when no one knew him, he would be hit ‘to Jericho.'” As it was, batters were inclined to play back and “poke”, thereby getting out, when they should have been attempting to hit.

There are plenty of other indications that even in this early period, underarm bowling was regarded as antiquated. A somewhat smug article in the Berkshire Chronicle in 1854 looked back on some of the larger scores recorded in earlier times and concluded that they were a result of the tame nature of underarm bowling: “Indeed, the underhanded bowling must have afforded great and frequent opportunities of making long and splendid swipes, especially as soon as the eye got accustomed to the bat.” The writer believed that this was how William Ward had been able to score 278 in 1820 — the highest score in what is now recognised as first-class cricket until W. G. Grace scored 344 in 1876. The author noted that at the time he was writing, scores of just fifty or sixty were considered very good, and that round-arm bowling — or as he called it, “bias bowling” — was much faster than that faced in earlier days. Similarly, a syndicated article from 1850 which appeared, among other places, in the Leeds Intelligencer, outlined some large totals which were clearly considered impossible by the 1850s, such as when Hambledon made 403 in 1777, or a game at Lord’s in 1817 when Sussex scored 737 across two innings against the Epsom Club (and William Lambert became the first man to hit a century in each innings).

But Clarke’s success with his old-fashioned style prompted a minor revival, which produced a small number of largely amateur “lobsters”. An article in Sporting Life in 1862 summarised the position: that Clarke had done well largely because his style of bowling had fallen out of fashion, and therefore inspired some imitators:

“At first, Clarke took all the best batsmen in; indeed, it would hardly be believed by any scientific and well-grounded player that, with men in a Kent Eleven, you might see some men puzzled with balls pitched almost to their crease while some men were running in and being bowled with [long hops]. For the first time they had encountered a man with the head to see the weak point in their game, and with the hand to pitch at the very stump, and with the very length that they did not wish to have.”

The writer also suggested that Clarke — and underarm bowlers in general — were able to impart more spin to the ball than their round-arm counterparts, making the ball turn sharply: “We were always of the opinion that the bias of underhand bowling was far more difficult than with round-arm.” For this reason, he wondered if more bowlers should abandon the round-arm style and take up lobs, which he thought would baffle batters, particularly in minor cricket.

V. E. Walker from a photograph published in 1893 (Image: Wikipedia)

But most commentators agreed that lob bowling should have held few terrors at the top level. Once the novelty had worn off for a batter new to the crease, it was far easier to play than round-arm or overarm bowling. Nevertheless, a few bowlers, usually amateurs, experimented with lobs and had occasional success. For example, V. E. Walker, following the example of Clarke, switched to bowling lobs after briefly being a round-arm bowler. He was very successful in this style in 1858 and took 80 first-class wickets in 1859 but faded thereafter with the ball. E. M. Grace (the older brother of W. G.) began his career as a round-arm bowler but switched to lobs, with which he had some success in club cricket; even at the age of 68, he took 119 wickets while playing for Thornbury in 1909. His record at first-class level was less impressive — his 305 wickets between 1862 and 1896 came at an average of 20.37, which was high for the period in which he played — and his Wisden obituary stated that “he did not pretend to be a first-rate bowler”. Both Walker and Grace benefitted from being able to bat, so that their success did not depend on taking wickets. Additionally, both were amateurs, which also allowed them to experiment without fear.

There were other occasional successes. Alfred Lyttleton relinquished his wicket-keeping gloves to take four for 19 with lobs in an 1884 Test match against Australia. And although in 1888, the Badminton Library book about cricket stated that lob bowling had “disappeared forever” from first-class cricket, that was not quite true.

One of the best of the later lob bowlers was Walter Humphreys, a professional for Sussex, who was born at Southsea in 1849. He first appeared for the county in 1871, but only played intermittently at first-class level for ten years; furthermore, in 36 matches before the 1880 season, he bowled just 40 deliveries. Humphreys’ obituary in Wisden stated that, in this period, he was “a fairly good young cricketer with no special qualifications. He could bat and field and, in an emergency, keep wicket.” Some accounts suggested that he initially bowled medium-paced round-arm, but he himself claimed always to have bowled lobs.

Walter Humphreys, from a photograph published in 1897 (Image: Wikipedia)

Having not played at all in 1879, Humphreys finally unveiled his lob bowling in 1880. He took only 17 wickets in total, but had some spectacular success when Sussex played the Australians at the end of the season: he took five for 32, including a hat-trick. Even with this performance, he did not play regularly for his county until 1882. His bowling was moderately successful, but he was played for his batting as much as anything: he averaged around 20 with the bat in most seasons, more than respectable for the period. With the ball, he remained a novelty. But the Australian teams of the period found his bowling a huge challenge: he took another hat-trick against them in 1884 (the only season in that decade in which he took more than fifty first-class wickets), and when Sussex defeated the 1888 Australians, he had match figures of nine for 40. In Humphreys’ Wisden obituary, the editor Sydney Pardon wrote: “To the fast-footed Australian batsmen of those days, Humphreys caused so much trouble that I have often wondered whether, at some sacrifice to the team in run-getting power, it would not have been wise in 1884 to play him for England at the Oval.”

From 1890, Humphreys’ batting began to decline — he averaged 12.44 in 1890, a considerable fall, and less than ten in each season from 1892 to 1894 — but his bowling reached new heights. In 1891, he took 70 wickets, followed by 74 in 1892 and an almost unbelievable 150 in 1893 — of which 122 were for Sussex, the first time a bowler had taken a hundred wickets in a season for the county. As Sydney Pardon said in Humphreys’ obituary of his overall record in 1893: “As he played so much of his cricket at Brighton, with easy boundaries on the Pavilion side of the ground, these were remarkable figures.”

Humphreys’ success prompted the old Harrow cricketer William Kington to write to the Rev R. S. Holmes, a letter published in Cricket in September 1893; he suggested that few batters knew how to play lobs but that such bowlers were badly used by captains. Kington suggested that lob bowlers should be used at the beginning of an innings before a batter had settled, and taken off immediately if they began to be hit. Kington attributed Humphreys’ success not to an improvement in his bowling but in having a captain who knew the best way to use lobs; the Sussex captain at the time was the Australian former Test player Billy Murdoch. The latter had scored 286 not out for the Australians against Sussex in 1882, but later said of Humphreys: “Even when I had made 200 runs I could not tell from watching his hand which way he meant to turn the ball.”

Humphreys success inspired another of the periodic minor revivals of lob bowling; J. B. Woods played for Oxford University between 1891 and 1893 and took 53 first-class wickets at 26.39 with lobs, generally opening the bowling. But Woods’ figures also reveal the biggest weakness of this style: he conceded 4.09 runs per six balls (overs at the time consisted of five deliveries). And while he picked up wickets, he could also be very expensive, such as when he returned two for 127 from 19 overs against the MCC in 1893. And even Humphreys gave away runs. In 1893, he bowled the equivalent of 674 six-ball overs and conceded 2,598 runs, which would have given an economy rate (had anyone cared about such things in 1893) of 3.85. It was a similar story in other seasons, making Humphreys, for all his success, a high-risk option if the batters got on top of him. For example, against Kent at Hove in 1893 his figures were five for 152 from 40 first-innings overs (although he took six for 67 from 25 overs in the second innings).

Walter Humphries bowling lobs against Victoria at the Melbourne Cricket Ground during the tour of Australia by A. E. Stoddart’s team in 1894–95 (Image: The First Great Test Series (1994) by David Frith)

Although Humphreys was less successful in 1894, memories of what he had achieved, particularly against Australian batters, prompted A. E. Stoddart to take him to Australia as part of his team in 1894–95. The experiment was a failure. Although Humphreys, who turned 45 during the tour, baffled a succession of batters in minor matches against “country” sides (including ten for 52 against a New England XXII, ten for 51 against a Ballarat XVIII and nine for 48 against a Toowoomba XVIII), he played only four first-class matches (and none of the Tests), taking six wickets at 52.33. David Frith, in The First Great Test Series (1994), his book on the tour, described how observers of the team’s first practices did not think Humphreys would present a threat, and how the crowd laughed when he first came on to bowl against South Australia (although he took a wicket with his second ball). Even if spectators were intrigued, Humphreys’ ineffectiveness left Stoddart with huge selection problems: he had only taken thirteen players, two of whom were wicket-keepers, meaning that he had to keep the same team playing almost throughout, particularly in the Test series.

After a poor season in 1895, Humphreys retired in 1896, apart from a one-off appearance for Hampshire in 1900. Away from cricket, he worked as a bootmaker (as his father had been) who also made cricket balls and footballs; this was always the occupation he gave on the census. He married Mary Ann Roberts in 1870 and the couple had six children. When he died in 1924, Humphreys left an estate worth £4,810 (worth around £280,000 today). Incidentally, his son (also called Walter) played for Sussex between 1898 and 1900; he too was a lob bowler.

Occasional lob bowlers continued to operate in county cricket — including Digby Jephson who played for Cambridge and Surrey (captaining the county in 1901 and 1902), taking healthy numbers of wickets after discarding his overarm style. In 1899, he took six for 21 for the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s. But the last bowler to have any impact in any meaningful sense was the only specialist underarm bowler to have any notable success at Test level.

George Simpson-Hayward (Image: The Tatler, 4 May 1910)

George Simpson-Hayward was an amateur who played briefly for Cambridge University and then Worcestershire, captaining the latter in 1911 and 1912. For much of this time, he was a mediocre batter who bowled occasionally and it was not until he began to play regularly for Worcestershire from 1908 that he began to be successful. A maiden first-class century and 68 wickets in 1908 was followed by 57 wickets in 1909. As a man very much in the mould of the old-fashioned amateur, he had already been on several tours, including an MCC tour of New Zealand in 1906–07. So his selection to tour South Africa in 1909–10 was perhaps not a shock, given the generally low-key nature of tours to that country. The team was far from representative, and only Jack Hobbs, Wilfred Rhodes and Colin Blythe would at that time have been first-choice selections in a full-strength England team. But on the matting pitches used in South African first-class cricket, Simpson-Hayward was able to make the ball turn enormously. His Wisden obituary summarised what happened: “Going to South Africa with Mr. H. D. G. Leveson Gower’s team in 1909, he took 23 wickets at 18.26 runs each in the five Tests, and in the first at Johannesburg his first innings analysis was 6 for 43. The matting wickets just suited his exceptional power of spinning the ball.” Pelham Warner wrote how “the crowd roared with laughter when he first went on”, but his bowling soon lost its humour for them.

Simpson-Hayward was not a typical lob bowler; his Wisden obituary said: “He seldom flighted the ball like the ordinary lob bowler and did not often use spin from leg. In fact he was quite unusual with the speed at which he could make the ball, delivered with low trajectory, break from the off.” And in the first Test, he may have been helped, as one correspondent to Cricket suggested, by the remnants of a banked cycle track surrounding the Johannesburg ground; there was around three feet of red soil at the bottom of the sight-screens. As Simpson-Hayward delivered the ball from very low, it is possible that batters lost sight of it against this background. But even at the time, there was the impression that this was a one-off success. The problem — which is in many ways a perfect metaphor for English cricket — was that while he was taking wickets with a bowling style which had been all-but obsolete for nearly a century, the South African bowlers brought the English batting to its knees with the newly-invented googly. The home side won three of the first four Tests to take the series.

Despite his relative triumph, and his good returns in county cricket, Simpson-Hayward made little impression on the cricket establishment. Never featured in a profile in Cricket, he passed largely unnoticed. Like those before him who took up lob bowling, he owed most of his success to novelty, but even here he was unfavourably compared to Jephson in many quarters. He continued to play for Worcestershire until 1914 without distinguishing himself. He played regularly in 1911 and 1912 but his bowling was less effective, and he only appeared intermittently in 1913 and 1914.

Simpson-Hayward was also a good full-back, receiving a football blue at Cambridge (he was never a cricket blue). And, like many amateurs of the period, he was perhaps more interesting away from sport. He was born George Hayward Thomas Simpson in 1875, the son of a wealthy farmer (whose lands covered 430 acres and employed twelve men and three boys, according to the 1871 census), but changed his name in 1898 to George Hayward Thomas Simpson-Hayward for no obvious reason (Hayward was the maiden name of his maternal grandmother). He married Mary Stenson in 1911 and they had one daughter. From 1916, he served in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Most of his time was taken up with affairs in his village, Icomb; he served on the parish council and was a church warden for a time. He played local cricket for Stow-on-the-Wold and Bourton-on-the-Water and was a lepidopterist with a large collection of butterflies. He left an estate worth just over £15,000 when he died in 1936 (worth around £1 million today).

Meanwhile, lob bowlers struggled on until the First World War. There were various features in newspapers which questioned why the method was not used more, given than it had brought some success to men like Humphreys and Simpson-Hayward. But there was never any sense that it was going to make a comeback. The last gasp came in 1921, when Surrey’s innovative captain Percy Fender selected an underarm bowler for a handful of matches. Trevor Molony was a schoolboy cricketer at Repton who took just one wicket for its team, and failed to reach the Cambridge eleven as a freshman in 1920. But Fender gambled on him after he dismissed Jack Hobbs in an early-season trial game (Hobbs was stumped attempting to hit a fourth four off the bowler). Molony made his first-class debut against Nottinghamshire, but Fender did not bring him on until the score was 170 for five. He bowled leg theory, with just one fielder on the off-side, and with four men on the leg-side boundary. Bowling deliberate full-tosses, he presented unaccustomed difficulties to the batters, who tied themselves in knots, and he took three for 11 in seven overs — two caught on the boundary and a third, W. W. Whysall, attempting an overhead smash at a full toss which only went as far as mid-off. The crowd found the struggles of the batters amusing. But Molony played just twice more, and barely bowled, drifting out of first-class cricket, although he continued to play club cricket for the Incogniti and Repton Pilgrims. Fender later recalled that his wicket-keeper, Herbert Strudwick, had told him: “It’s him or me — if you go on playing him, I’m off.”

The bowling of Molony seems to have been a long way removed from the earlier endeavours of bowlers such as Clarke or Humphreys. Although it was common for lob bowlers to aim for catches in the deep, they also attempted spin and deception, rather than simply bowling full tosses. Perhaps the art had been finally lost. Certainly it appears that no full-time lob bowler appeared in first class cricket in England after Molony. Others used the underarm style occasionally: J. C. Clay of Glamorgan took a wicket with a lob in 1933, as did Jack Iverson in India during a tour of India in 1953–54; Hedley Verity bowled underarm against Surrey as a protest at a delayed declaration in 1933 (and was no-balled because he had not informed the umpire he was switching method); and of course there was the Trevor Chappell incident.

The current laws of cricket do not permit underarm bowling except by prior agreement between the captains; this means that it is effectively outlawed in first-class cricket. But even before this change was put into operation, no one was tempted to return to the old ways except for those one-offs.

Note: After this was published, Rameses on Twitter pointed out two articles from the Manchester Guardian (and there is a similar report in the Birmingham Daily Gazette, but curiously no mention of this in The Times or even in Wisden) that in June 1920, Vallance Jupp and Jack Mercer took all ten wickets between them for Sussex against Worcestershire bowling lobs. The report might indicate that only Mercer was using the underarm style, but it seems extraordinary that — if one or both men really had taken so many wickets with lobs — no-one else picked up on this, at the time or later.

There was an extraordinary incident in 1920 when Jack Mercer and Vallance Jupp bowled out Worcs for 85 bowling underarm.

Hat-tip – @statseditor & @JohnWar79031335 pic.twitter.com/ay4uc5YZ8j

— Rameses (@tintin1107) January 5, 2022

“You’ve forgotten your long-stop!”: The Evolution of Wicket-keeping

Jack Blackham (Image: National Library of Australia)

Cricket orthodoxy has often lurched between extremes as rules and tactical theory have changed over time. What seems obvious to a modern cricket audience would have been utterly ridiculous to one in the past, and vice versa. For example, bowlers used to rub the new ball on the ground to remove the shine; spinners always opened the bowling; gentlemen did not hit the ball to leg. Just occasionally, echoes of the past survive into the present. The expression “sticky wicket” is still used even though pitches have been covered for almost sixty years and few modern cricket followers can ever have seen one affected by rain. And while many people are familiar with the idea of a “long-stop” fielder, positioned directly behind the batter, that position is all but obsolete except in school games or the lower reaches of amateur cricket when the wicket-keeper proves unable to stop the ball effectively. For many years, this was one of the most essential fielding positions, yet it disappeared from first-class cricket remarkably quickly. How did the long-stop become extinct? The reason was the evolution of the role of the wicket-keeper, as a massive improvement in the skills of leading practitioners brought about the change.

Wicket-keeping is one of the few areas of the game which has changed massively over the years without any outside intervention. Although modern wicket-keeping gloves and pads are far more robust than their historical counterparts, these technological improvements have not altered the role of a wicket-keeper. In fact, there is a strong argument that wicket-keepers from the past were far more skilful than those of today simply because they did the same job with flimsy gloves while standing up to the stumps far more often — with the result that wicket-keepers were usually recognisable in retirement because of their gnarled and deformed hands. But despite their superior equipment, modern wicket-keepers in men’s cricket only stand up to spinners; until the 1960s, they did so to fast-medium bowlers. On the other hand, wicket-keepers are now expected to be able to bat in the top seven whereas in the past they were selected purely for their ability with the gloves; it was not unusual for a wicket-keeper to bat at number eleven and few wicket-keepers were particularly good with the bat. Expectations continue to increase in this regard so that wicket-keepers are primarily chosen for their batting ability; as a result, most commentators agree that in men’s cricket, wicket-keeping standards have declined as runs are prioritised over skills with the gloves. It is almost unarguable that the best wicket-keepers in the world today are to be found in women’s cricket, in which it is frequently necessary to stand up to the stumps. Comparing the batting and glove-work of leading practitioners from different eras would be a revealing exercise, although any analysis is hampered by the lack of any useful statistical judgement on how good a wicket-keeper is; instead, we only have the opinions of those who have seen them.

However, the biggest changes in wicket-keeping came in the 1870s and 1880s, when the entire role was practically reinvented by some highly skilled practitioners.

Before this time, the wicket-keeper was there solely to dismiss the batter through a catch or stumping; their role was not to stop the ball. Pitches were often uneven; it was quite possible for the ball to shoot unstoppably along the ground — this meant a wicket if the ball was straight but byes if it was not. Additionally, the main form of bowling, especially before overarm bowling was legalised in 1864, was round-arm. Faster bowlers operating with this method were often inaccurate, and wild deliveries which flew wide on either side of the wicket were a regular feature of the game. The wicket-keeper could not have been expected to take every ball, particularly as he almost always stood at the wicket for potential stumpings, even to the fastest bowlers. Therefore, the job of stopping the ball was allocated to the long-stop, a fielder standing directly behind the wicket-keeper whose job was to prevent byes.

“Old Stonewall”: William Mortlock in 1864 (Image: Illustrated Sporting News, 20 August 1864)

As the ball could shoot along the ground or fly wide, it was not easy being a long-stop, so the position was often filled by the best fielder on the team. Some bowlers were fast enough that they used two long-stops; Gerald Brodribb notes in his Next Man In (1995) that one bowler named Marcon used three long-stops. And when byes were listed on the scorecard, the name of the long-stop was often given too. In some publications, long-stop averages were published. For example, Bell’s Life in November 1860 revealed the best long-stop that year had been William Mortlock, who played for Surrey and was a regular for the Players against the Gentlemen. He had conceded only 15 byes in 17 matches and 30 innings (10,168 deliveries); three of those byes were recorded when there was no long-stop, and another four came from a deflection off the wicket-keeper, meaning that Mortlock really only conceded eight byes. His skill in the position resulted in his nickname: “Old Stonewall”. However, “long-stop averages” do not seem to have been commonly printed. The Kentish Mercury in 1861 noted as part of the Kent averages for the season that the long-stop William Goodhew had conceded 37 byes in seven matches, but the practice never seems to have been widespread.

While the idea of a long-stop remains in cricket consciousness, there is a modern misunderstanding of what the historical role involved. Today, we usually think of long-stop as a fielder right on the boundary behind the wicket-keeper. But the historical long-stop was not there simply to stop the wayward delivery crossing the boundary (in fact until the 1860s there often was no boundary). As William Clarke wrote in an 1851 article (reprinted in Cricket in 1884), long-stop was best positioned close enough to the wicket to stop a single being scored; Clarke even seems to suggest that some long-stops stood too close. It was also the case that long-stop often took catches — not something a fielder positioned on the boundary would have expected. For example, our superstar Mortlock held 44 catches in 81 matches between 1854 and 1862; in 1860, the year analysed in Bell’s Life, he had four catches in 12 first-class matches. For long-stop to be taking catches (assuming that batsmen in this period were not playing ramp shots, and that bowlers were not so fast that edges carried to the boundary) suggests that he quite likely was positioned almost where a modern wicket-keeper would stand to fast bowlers.

When R. H. Lyttleton, a top-class wicketkeeper who played between 1877 and 1887, wrote about long-stops in a chapter for his and A. G. Steel’s book Cricket in 1888, he said that the best long-stops “stand rather on the leg side, and if the bowling is very fast, just deep enough to take the ball as it rises after its second pitch. This is not easy to do, and young hands feel tempted to leave more room. But this, when the ball is very swift, scarcely diminishes its speed at all, and the further off long-stop stands, the more chance there is of the ball bounding awkwardly by the time it reaches him.”

Although long-stop has long been obsolete, the change came about only gradually, and it was common until the 1880s — especially when fast bowlers were operating — for a wicket-keeper to have a long-stop. Pinning down when each innovation arose is tricky and identifying the original wicket-keeper to make the change is all but impossible. Part of the issue may have been that spectators could see what was happening, but not all newspapers thought it worth mentioning, especially at a time when reports were dryly factual affairs concerning bowling changes and runs scored. All we can do in historical cases is look to see where something is unusual enough to warrant comment. We are also helped a little by the rather wearying tendency in old match reports to list every fielder and their position at the start of an innings.

The accepted version of history is usually that the Australian Jack Blackham was the man who first dispensed with long-stop during the first tour of England by an Australian team in 1878. But the picture is not quite so straightforward. There are several instances before Blackham in 1878. Brodribb lists some examples he had found. For example, A. H. Winter did not use a long-stop in the Oxford v Cambridge match at Lord’s in 1867, to widespread astonishment. But if there are plenty of examples before Blackham, they seem almost exclusively to have been when slower bowlers were operating. In fact, we can trace the practice of dispensing with long-stop for slow bowling quite precisely.

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A match at Lord’s in the 1850s

In July 1844, a match took place at Lord’s between “Marylebone Club and Ground with Pilch” and “The Northern Counties with A. Mynn Esq.” Modern reference works refer to the game as MCC v North, but whatever we call the teams they contained some of the leading players of the time: Fuller Pilch, Frederick Lillywhite and William Hillyer for the MCC; William Clarke and Alfred Mynn for the North. The London Evening Standard for 16 July contained a report of the first day’s play which contained an almost throwaway reference: “There was a feature in this match which has upon no occasion been witnessed at Lord’s. Clarke bowled without a long-stop, and we think did not lose one bye.” The wicket-keeper was not named in any reports (and remains unidentified by CricketArchive on the scorecard for the game); there are several candidates as quite a few of the North team made stumpings in their career. But the unnamed wicket-keeper clearly did a good job. Clarke bowled underarm slow — and incidentally caused huge problems for the MCC batsmen, who according to the Standard were unaccustomed to facing such a style and therefore were very hesitant facing him.

It must quickly have become apparent that having an extra fielder available was a huge advantage to the bowling team which offset any extra byes conceded. The result was that the role of wicket-keeper gradually expanded to include gathering every ball without allowing it to pass. At first, long-stop was only removed when slow bowlers were operating, but this must have become common practice quite quickly. For example, the long-stop averages recorded in Bell’s Life in 1860 note that three of Mortlock’s byes were “obtained from slows when no long-stop”, as were four byes recorded against the second-placed Diver. Wicket-keepers seem to have gradually become more daring and long-stop became less important. One indication of the change in fashion can be found in the career of “Old Stonewall” Mortlock. From his 1851 debut in matches today designated as first-class until 1861, he never scored a half-century and his batting average was a touch over 13. From 1861 onwards, he scored three centuries and 22 fifties, while averaging 22 with the bat. He also began to bowl regularly; having bowled only 28 balls (for 19 runs and no wickets) between 1851 and 1860, he was a regular bowler between 1863 and 1867 and finished his career with 147 first-class wickets. This looks to be clear, albeit circumstantial, evidence that the greatest of long-stops had to find an alternative way to justify his place in the team from around 1862; was this when it became common for long-stops to be used less often?

But it was still notable enough to be mentioned in newspapers for there to be no long-stop for medium-paced bowlers. In 1870, Nottinghamshire’s Samuel Biddulph kept wicket to Alfred Shaw without a long-stop in a match against Yorkshire. In 1873, the Sheffield Independent noted in a report on a match between Sussex and Yorkshire: “As [the Sussex wicket-keeper Henry] Phillips keeps wickets without long stop, the score was opened with two byes off the first ball”. That this is stated as a fact rather than being unusual might suggest that Phillips had been doing so for some time. The opening bowler was James Lillywhite, a slow-medium left-armer. The lack of surprise in the reports might be an indication that some wicket-keepers by this stage commonly dispensed with long-stop to medium-paced bowlers, but for it to be noted at all means that it was still relatively unusual. And it should be emphasised that reports make clear — especially when describing the field — that long-stops were still regularly used.

Even if we cannot confidently date when fashions began to alter, by the late 1870s, many wicket-keepers only had a long-stop when the fastest bowlers were operating. The final step in the revolution was to dispense with the fielder altogether, no matter who the bowler was. Who was the first to take this final step?

In later years, the Yorkshire wicket-keeper George Pinder claimed in an interview with Alfred Pullin (“Old Ebor”) in 1898 that he had been the first man to keep wicket to fast bowling without a long-stop.

“The first man to do without a long-stop was myself, and I’ll tell you the match. It was a North v South game on the Lord’s Ground, Mr A. N. Hornby being captain of the North, and ‘W. G.’ of the South. Fred Morley was bowling at one end and W. Mycroft at the other. Mr. Hornby came up to and asked if I could do without a long-stop. I said, ‘Well, you know, sir, if one passes it means a four.’ He replied, ‘ Well, let’s try it,’ so of course we did. By and by, one ball which I could not get to went past me for four, so of course I looked at Mr. Hornby, who said, ‘Never mind that,’ and I went on without long-stop to the finish.”

The match being remembered by Pinder can only have been the North v South at Lord’s in 1877. Although Pinder’s claim to be the first ever to have no long-stop is patently false, if his memory was correct about the match, this would have been one of the first times a wicket-keeper dispensed with the fielder when taking a fast bowler. But no contemporary account seems to have thought this worth a mention. Does this mean that it did not happen? Or that it was not considered to be remarkable, and had perhaps happened before?

Others also made claims to have been the first: in Next Man In, Brodribb mentions Charles Brown of Nottinghamshire, Tom Plumb of Buckinghamshire, Richard Pilling of Lancashire and Mordecai Sherwin of Nottinghamshire. But while there are clear records of these men having no long-stop, most evidence comes 1878. Which brings us to Blackham, the man generally regarded as the pioneer of having no long-stop to fast bowlers.

Contemporary reports of the 1878 tour by the Australian team, when Blackham supposedly revolutionised wicket-keeping, take little notice of him. Early in the tour, some reports noted that Frank Allan was bowling with no long-stop, but this was because he was slow enough not to need one. The Daily Telegraph and Courier said in September, late in the tour, that “Blackham, as wicket-keeper, delighted the spectators by dispensing with long stop, and taking Spofforth’s lightning-paced balls with a single hand.” This was clearly unusual and perhaps unprecedented, but Blackham had definitely been using a long-stop earlier in the tour: the Birmingham Daily Post, giving a routine list of fielding positions at the start of the game between the Australians and “Twenty-two of the Birmingham Pickwick Club” in June, noted that there was a long-stop when Blackham was keeping to Allan and Spofforth.

In fact, Blackham does not stand out in contemporary reports during the 1878 season; an end-of-season report in the Nottinghamshire Guardian instead drew attention to the wicket-keeping of Frederick Wyld in Nottinghamshire’s match against the Australians in May, when it stated that his wicket-keeping “deserves especial mention, and was so safe that in the second innings, [the fast bowler Fred] Morley did not find it necessary to have a long-stop.” Blackham was on the opposing team, but the somewhat parochial report did not discuss him. There was also an instance of Surrey having no long-stop for the fast-medium bowling of Frederick Johnson recorded in The Times in June on account of the number of byes conceded by the county against Cambridge University.

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  Fred Spofforth (Image: Wikipedia)

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  Fred Morley (Image: Wikipedia)

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  George Ulyett (Image: Wikipedia)

The lack of reaction for much of the tour does not necessarily mean that Blackham was not doing remarkable things — as we have seen, newspapers are not always reliable indicators for innovation that creeps in gradually — but later accounts almost unanimously credit Blackham for being the first to dispense with long-stop to fast bowling. Even during his playing career — for example during features about him when he toured England in 1893 — he was recognised as the pioneer. Later accounts emphasise the wonder of what he achieved; these come a long time after the events they describe, making them less reliable, but might perhaps be better indicators than those sparse contemporary reports. One account written in an Australian newspaper in 1928 told a story of the surprise caused in England (which assuming that it was remembered accurately after fifty years, must have been when the Australians played Middlesex at Lord’s, the only match on the tour umpired by Bob Thoms:

“When the first Australian team played in England the famous umpire Bob Thoms looked with amazement when he saw Blackham standing up to Spofforth without a long-stop. He whispered to Tommy Horan who was fielding at square leg, ‘You’ve forgotten your long-stop,’ and he stared in amazement when Horan replied, ‘We never use one.’ As ball after ball was taken by Blackham, Bob Thoms could only murmur, ‘Wonderful, wonderful.’ From that moment no self-respecting wicket-keeper in England would belittle himself by having a long-stop.”

Blackham’s innovation had one crucial impact on cricket history, in one of the most famous and influential matches of all time. In the 1882 Test match — the “Ashes” match — between England and Australia, Blackham had no long-stop to Spofforth when Australia bowled England out in the fourth innings for 77 chasing 85 to win. This was at a time when most wicket-keepers still had one to faster bowling. Cricket noted the accuracy of Spofforth and the skill of Blackham to use this strategy when every run was at an absolute premium; and it is not impossible that having the extra fielder made all the difference to the result, which created the legend of the “Ashes”.

Blackham was modest about his achievements. In an 1893 interview, he suggested that other Australian wicket-keepers had dispensed with long-stop before him, although he suspected he was the first to do so to express bowling. He told how he realised he did not need one when keeping to a South Melbourne fast bowler called Conway, and he noticed that the long-stop never touched the ball; his captain therefore moved long-stop. Just 15 years after he had caused a sensation in England, he noted: “In first-class cricket now we should look upon a wicket-keeper as a bit of ‘a muff’ were he to ask for a long-stop.”

Whether Blackham was actually the first wicket-keeper to remove long-stop for fast bowlers is impossible to answer with certainty. Maybe Pinder did so before him; maybe even Wyld in 1878, or someone else unrecorded by history. It does not matter too much except that we can reliably date the practice to the late 1870s. We are on much firmer ground in suggesting that Blackham was the man who popularised the tactic for all wicket-keepers, and his performance in 1878 was the beginning of the end for the position of long-stop.

The idea of who was the first wicket-keeper to dispense with a long-stop became ridiculously controversial more than forty years later when Wisden — principally through its somewhat miserable and reactionary editor Sydney Pardon — took issue with the claim that Blackham was the pioneer. In a bizarrely jingoistic “Notes by the Editor” in the 1922 edition — possibly stung by the fact that Australia had just won eight consecutive Tests — Pardon wrote:

“I was frankly astonished to read one day last summer that Blackham taught Englishmen to keep wicket. To those of us who could recall Pinder, Pooley and Pilling in their prime this was too much. Pilling came out for Lancashire in 1877 — the year before Blackham was seen here — and potentially great in his first match. Blackham was by general consent the best of all wicket-keepers, but he did not discover a new art. The whole science of wicket-keeping does not consist in dispensing with the long stop and as a matter of fact Pinder was the first to do that in a North and South match at Prince’s [this probably refers to Pinder’s claim to “Old Ebor”, when the match in question was at Lord’s]. One can say without much risk of contradiction that Tom Lockyer during the tour of George Parr’s team in 1863-64 taught the Australians to keep wicket. It is quite possible that Blackham as a child saw him at Melbourne.”

Eleven years later, Blackham’s obituary in Wisden (now edited by Charles Stewart Caine) grudgingly conceded that he may have been the best wicket-keeper of his time, but still managed to disparage the claim that he was the first to dispense with long-stop:

“At different times it has been urged on behalf of Blackham that in standing up to fast bowling without a long-stop he set a new fashion — indeed that he first taught Englishmen what wicket-keeeping really could be. This claim is incorrect. Several English wicket-keepers — George Pinder, of Yorkshire, Tom Plumb, of Buckinghamshire and, most notably, Dick Pilling, of Lancashire — were always prepared to stand up to fast bowling without a long-stop, and often did so, but on the rough wickets of 60 years ago or more the ball flew about to such an extent that the practice of doing without long stop was, generally speaking, ill-advised.”

Curiously, when Blackham was named as one of the “Five Great Wicket-Keepers” in the 1891 Wisden, the citation (presumably written by Pardon, who had taken over the role of editor that year) was less equivocal about how good he was, and stated: “No one, to our thinking, has ever taken the ball quite so close to the wicket as Blackham, and, as is well known, he was one of the first wicket-keepers who regularly dispensed with a long stop to fast bowling.” What seemed to have irked Pardon in later years was the claim that Blackham was the sole pioneer. Certainly by the mid-1890s, he was the one given the most credit, but the story was more complicated than that.

After Blackham — or Pinder, or Wyld — began keeping with no long-stop to fast bowlers, it was not a signal for everyone immediately to follow suit. Even so, orthodoxy switched remarkably quickly so that by the middle of the 1880s, long-stop had practically vanished from first-class cricket.

George Pinder in 1875 (Image: Wikipedia)

It was still notable in 1879 that Pinder had no long-stop against a touring Canadian team; similarly, it drew comment that Ulyett bowled without one in Australia in 1881–82 and for Yorkshire in 1882, and that Joe Hunter of Yorkshire had no long-stop to the fast bowlers in 1883. Hunter was also singled out by Wisden for his work during the 1884–85 tour of Australia: “Hunter kept wicket admirably. He was in brilliant form at times, and always stood up to the fast bowling of Ulyett without a long-stop.” Around this same period, Richard Pilling of Lancashire also seems to have distinguished himself by having no long-stop to the fast bowler Jack Crossland; an obituary in the Lancaster Gazette in 1891 remembered how Pilling had stood up to Crossland and when someone was bowled, had “been seen to take the ball with one hand and the flying stump with the other with equal calmness”.

Soon, the practice had even spread to local and club cricket: in 1882, the Barnsley Independent reported that the local team’s wicket-keeper T. Bonson had dispensed with long-stop; the following year P. M. Walters of Leatherhead was singled out for having no long-stop in Cricket. But it did not always work. In a match played by the touring Australians in 1882, Billy Murdoch kept wicket in the absence of Blackham and had no long-stop to Spofforth against Middlesex; he made something of a mess of it, conceding 29 byes out of a first-innings total 104. That he conceded only one in the second innings might suggest he used a long-stop.

By the time he was writing for the Badminton book on cricket, Lyttleton said: “Wicket-keepers are so good, the bowling is so straight, that, in the present year (1888), it is impossible to say who is the best long-stop in England, for the simple reason that no long-stops are wanted. But in the days of yore, every schoolboy who was fond of cricket could tell you of the prowess of Mortlock, H. M. Marshall, and A. Diver. Mr. Powys was a splendid bowler, and so was Mr. R. Lang.”

Not everyone liked the change. A letter printed in Cricket in 1882 from T. Edwards of Blackheath lamented the “modern freak of doing without a long-stop” owing to the numbers of byes being conceded. He singled out a recent match between Surrey and Oxford University when the county had conceded 12 byes and 6 leg byes in a total of 78, and he implored the Surrey captain to field a long-stop. But soon long-stop was confined to club and school matches until the position was almost extinct. The use of a long-stop now became notable; the obituary of Frederick Fane in the 1960 Wisden recalled: “At Leyton in 1905, when Essex beat the Australians by 19 runs, Fane ended the match with a remarkable catch at a position approximating to deep long-stop where, with Buckenham bowling very fast, he had placed himself to save possible byes.”

However, it may not be a coincidence that the practice of wicket-keepers standing up to fast bowling became rarer as they edged backwards to save byes. Some thought that wicket-keeping had been changed for the worse by the alteration in its focus. Lyttleton thought that it spoiled wicket-keeping and affected his own form. And an anonymous “old Cambridge captain” wrote in the 1895 Wisden: “One reason why so few bowlers bowl round the wicket now is because they cannot do so safely without a long stop. I may be wrong, but my opinion is that the ball which beats the batsman inside the leg stump will very often beat the wicket-keeper too, especially if it shoots. Bowlers don’t like the balls to go for byes. Aiming at the leg stump, some balls must go crookedly and outside the legs of the batsman, and these the very best of wicket-keepers cannot always secure.”

Today, long-stop would almost certainly never be seen in a first-class match, except in highly unusual circumstances. One such example came in January 1998 when the England team touring the West Indies faced Jamaica in dangerous conditions; Jack Russell — one of the best wicket-keepers of the last fifty years — had to resort to using a long-stop (and wearing a helmet) while standing back to the quick bowlers, such was the impossible nature of the pitch. And sometimes a version of long-stop reappears in T20 cricket to prevent the ramp shot, or in junior and amateur cricket to protect an incompetent wicket-keeper. Although not the essential position it once was, long-stop is still remembered, an odd historical relic. And it survives in a surprising place: in the legal world a “longstop date” is an informal name for the latest date by which the conditions of a legal contract must be met. But on the cricket field, the days of the world-famous long-stop are long gone.