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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The site of Lambeth Workhouse (Image: Essential History)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bankrupt Umpire: The Struggles of Alfred Farrer Smith

Alfred Smith, as illustrated for his interview by Alfred Pullin
(Image: Yorkshire Evening Post, 19 February 1898)

Alfred Smith was a Yorkshire batsman in the earliest days of the county’s existence. He played 28 first-class matches as a professional between 1868 and 1874 before leaving the game at a young age. Later he served for ten seasons as a first-class umpire before once more drifting away from county cricket. Although he was never especially famous as a player or umpire, he was interviewed by Alfred Pullin (the original “Old Ebor”) for his series “Talks with Old Yorkshire Cricketers” in the Yorkshire Evening Post. However, a somewhat bland and sparse cricketing biography disguises a complicated life. Smith’s business interests outside the sport supposedly forced his early retirement as a player, but a more likely explanation is that severe financial difficulties and a wealthy but domineering father-in-law played a greater hand. While we can only perceive a broad outline of what might have been occurring, it is a safe assumption that his life off the cricket field was more dramatic than any of his achievements on it.

Alfred Farrer Smith was born on 7 March 1847 in Birstall, a village between Leeds and Huddersfield. He was the son of Benjamin Smith, a solicitor’s clerk, and his wife Ann Willans Farrer, the daughter of a bookkeeper. The 1851 census records him living with his parents and sister in Birstall, but in 1861 he was a boarding pupil at Bell Grove House school in Ackworth where the headmaster was a man called James Russell Swift. Leaving school at sixteen, he began to take a keen interest in cricket and, in his interview with Pullin in 1898, recalled his father taking him to watch Yorkshire play Nottinghamshire at Bradford in 1864. By the following season, aged eighteen, he was in demand as a local cricketer, playing variously for Birkenshaw, Bradford and Knaresborough; his average of 48 across the season (he played 48 innings) was an impressive one. Additionally, he was a successful exponent of “single wicket cricket” which was popular around this time — where two individuals opposed each other (usually with “neutral” fielders). He told Pullin that he had never been coached; his success was — in Pullin’s words — the result of “natural ability, inclination and practice”.

Smith’s success in 1865 soon attracted wider attention and he played for Dewsbury against the All-England Eleven — a professional team that toured England playing local sides, usually against the odds — that season. Over the next few years he played several times — including appearances for Leeds and Morley — against the All-England Eleven. With his reputation growing, he was recommended to Yorkshire County Cricket Club by Elisha B. Rawlinson in 1868 and secured his place in the team with an innings of 96 for Birkenshaw against Yeadon. Yorkshire had only been a first-class county since 1863, and after a tumultuous first few seasons were one of the strongest counties in the late 1860s, at a time when there was no formal competition. Smith appeared just twice for Yorkshire (which, like most first-class counties in the 1860s, played only intermittently) in 1868 before returning to local cricket. It is possible that he had less time for sport at this point as he carved out a career for himself.

At the time of the 1871 census, Smith lived in Birstall with his grandfather — a book keeper — and worked as an insurance agent. His parents, sister and younger brother lived next door, employing a servant. He returned to the Yorkshire team later that year, playing one match. CricketArchive incorrectly identifies him playing for the “Harrow Wanderers” and “Old Harrovians” during this period, falling into a trap warned about in Arthur Haygarth’s Cricket Scores and Biographies in 1874 — confusing him with an unrelated amateur sharing the name A. F. Smith who was also active around this time. More likely to be our A. F. Smith was the one who played in 1871 for the United North of England Eleven (another professional touring team) and a possibly a team called the “Scarborough Visitors” which played matches at York and Scarborough.

Meanwhile, the Yorkshire team had gone into a relative decline as Gloucestershire became the dominant county. Conscious of the need to improve, Yorkshire began to look for new players. In 1873, Smith played regularly for the team as a professional. His highest score was 89 against Nottinghamshire, and in 13 matches, he averaged 20.40. To modern eyes, this figure appears underwhelming. But to set it into context at a time of extremely difficult pitches and consequent low scores, Smith was third in the Yorkshire batting averages (for those who played more than one game); the highest average that season was just 24.17. Smith scored just one fifty, but there were only six fifties and two centuries scored by the entire team in 1873. And his aggregate of 408 was the third highest for Yorkshire. He was clearly one of the best batsmen for the county.

George Freeman who played for Yorkshire between 1865 and 1880 (Image: Wikipedia)

When Smith spoke to Pullin, he recalled some of the hazards of batting in these days. He told of how, in one match, George Freeman of Yorkshire took around fifteen wickets and was making consecutive deliveries either take off from a length or creep along the ground. One lifting delivery made the wicket-keeper Ned Stephenson joke: “Hello George, jumping the hurdles again this morning.” Smith also remembered batting against Freeman himself; during the course of one over, the bowler struck him “from head to foot and made me wince”. When he later scored a single to get to the other end, he remarked to Freeman: “Steady, George, steady!” To which Freeman replied: “Alf, this is no place for you. Get out; if you stop [i.e. remain at the crease] you will be killed.” Smith remembered that Freeman bowled “more shooters than all the other bowlers in England put together”.

Perhaps Smith’s most notable success that season though came for Wakefield, which played the United South of England Eleven in July. The opposition included several famous cricketers — W. G. Grace, G. F. Grace, Walter Gilbert, James Lillywhite, Ted Pooley and H. H. Stephenson — but Wakefield had a good team too. Among the 22 players (local teams usually featured this number against touring elevens to make matches more competitive) were several Yorkshire stars; alongside Smith were Ephraim Lockwood, Tom Emmett and Luke Greenwood. When the match began, a spectator offered Smith odds of 25 to one on his being the top-scorer; Smith accepted and won his bet when his 18 was the highest score in Wakefield’s first innings. On the final day, Wakefield needed 216 to win, and W. G. Grace was so confident of victory he ordered his bag packed so that he could catch an early train. But Wakefield knocked off the runs for the loss of 13 wickets and Grace was forced to wait for the 6:50pm train and an overnight journey home.

Smith played regularly in 1874, appearing in 13 first-class matches, although one of these — which included his highest first-class score of 99 — was for the Players of the North against the Gentlemen of the South. The wicket in this game was very difficult, and when he had scored around 70, Smith was struck on the finger by a delivery from the fast bowler Frederic Stokes (Smith remembered in his interview with Pullin that he was hit by “one of the Mr Penns of Kent”; Stokes was related to this family by marriage). The injury was bad, but he carried on batting; he could not play for weeks after and was left with a deformed little finger on his right hand (it “forms a rigid triangle in a way which nature never intended” according to Pullin). He was caught in the deep, only realising as he walked off — when Thomas Box (a well-known wicket-keeper who had become a scorer) “was putting the numbers up” and called out “Hard times, young ‘un, not to get your hundred” — how close he had come to three figures.

Smith’s best score for Yorkshire that year was 51, but his form for the county was less impressive that the previous year, even before his finger injury. His county average was just 11.43, comfortably down the batting list, and his only fifty came at the end of the season. Nevertheless, Smith was listed that year in Arthur Haygarth’s Cricket scores and Biographies. Underneath the scorecard for Yorkshire’s match against the MCC in 1874, a brief profile told readers that Smith, playing at Lord’s for the first time, was:

“A fine batsman, having excellent defence, with plenty of hit, and has been successful in the matches in which he has participated. Is also a good field at cover-point and can bowl fast round-armed … Height 5ft 10½ inches and weight 12st [stone]. Resides, 1874, at his native place.”

Joseph Wostinholm
(Image: Wikipedia)

He also continued to play for the United North of England Eleven in 1874 but his cricket days were drawing to a close. The Yorkshire Secretary, Joseph Wostinholm, invited him to play in the first six matches at the beginning of 1875, but he had to decline for business reasons. When Smith was in good form in local cricket during 1884, the Yorkshire opener Louis Hall encouraged him to play for the county again, but he once more declined. He told Pullin: “I should very much like to have played again, but ‘business is business,’ you know, and must attended to.” He did, however, continue to play for Ossett for many years. CricketArchive is unreliable in tracking him though as it features few club matches in Yorkshire in this period and continues to confuse him with his amateur namesake.

A large factor in his retirement at the age of 28 was almost certainly his marriage. In early 1875 he married Jane Ann Wilby in Ossett. Jane’s father, Mark Wilby, was a wealthy mill owner who had built a large house in Ossett (which he named, with no apparent irony, “Manor House”). A local obituary later described Wilby as “one of the hard-headed, frugal type of Yorkshireman, even in the days of his prosperity”. Over the following years, Wilby seems to have had been a dominating — and probably unwelcome — influence on the life of his son-in-law. He assisted him financially and was the owner of two of the houses in which Smith and his family subsequently lived. It is even probable — though it cannot be proved — that Wilby was Smith’s employer. The marriage certificate lists Smith as a “manufacturer” — a considerable change from the “insurance agent” he had been in 1871 — and later events reveal that he was working in Ossett as a manager around this time. The likeliest explanation is that he worked for Wilby. In which case, it may have been Wilby who insisted that Smith end his cricket career in order to marry Jane. He does not appear to have been a man who would have approved of a career as frivolous as that of a professional sportsman for his son-in-law.

The 1881 census records Smith living in Ossett at Prospect House with Jane and their three daughters and a servant; there is good evidence that Wilby owned the house. Smith’s occupation was given as a woollen manager; it is very possible that he still worked for his father-in-law, who was in the wool trade. The employment of a servant might indicate some prosperity, but it is more likely that the money was coming from Wilby via Jane. By the time of the next census, Smith’s life had changed considerably. The only indication of what may have been going on comes from two court cases.

In July 1890, Smith was taken to court for debt, and he made arrangements to pay it off in instalments. This was only a temporary reprieve. The London Gazette records a Receiving Order against Alfred Farrar Smith, bookkeeper and insurance agent, on 8 September 1890; in other words, he was declared bankrupt. The Batley Reporter gave the full story. Smith had left his position as a manager in Ossett in 1886 to work with his father and another man as insurance agents in Birstall. However, this business was dissolved in 1888, owing to a “family dispute” — there are no details — and Smith had become an insurance agent “on his own account”. This had not worked out and by the time of his bankruptcy, he was once more working for his former employers in Ossett. Although this was not mentioned in the Batley Reporter, this was very likely to have been Mark Wilby. Smith’s total debts amounted to just over £466; he had spent a great deal on house repairs and alterations, but the furniture of his house — which was discussed as the court calculated Smith’s assets —belonged to his wife.

Bleak Cottage, photographed in 2005, where Smith lived in the 1890s (Image: Ossett History)

Behind the bland reporting, there was likely to have been considerable drama. Smith had come from a prosperous family and married into another; it is a mystery how he could have found himself in such debt in so short a time. Perhaps there is some connection with the “family dispute” in Birstall, but these events are lost to history. There may be an echo of the fallout on the 1891 census. Nearly a year after his bankruptcy, Smith lists himself as an “insurance broker”, which contradicts what he told the court. Had Wilby sacked him, or was he making another attempt to work for himself? The census classes him as an “employer” rather than “employed”. He and his family lived in a building known as Bleak Cottage or Bleak House, where he had also lived at the time of his bankruptcy; a website of Ossett history says that it was almost certainly sublet from his father-in-law, which would fit in with the overall picture. But there is another curiosity. Smith and his wife now have five children — another daughter and a son have arrived since 1891 — but their second daughter, the twelve-year-old Kathleen, is living with Mark Wilby, literally across the road at Manor House. How much control was Wilby exerting on Smith? It is tempting to wonder whether Smith’s failed business venture in 1886 and his new career in 1891 represent attempts to escape the all-pervading influence of his father-in-law.

Twelve months after the census, Smith had returned to cricket to become a first-class umpire. Presumably his latest attempt to become an insurance broker had failed and he was forced, in some desperation, to resume work in professional sport. The implication may be that Wilby was no longer willing to help his son-in-law — or perhaps Smith no longer wanted his assistance — but we shall return to family affairs shortly. It is unclear how Smith became an umpire. Unlike MCC professionals, there was no clear path for former county players to become officials. Yorkshire nominated Smith and another umpire to join the first-class list, but it is not obvious what he had done to earn their approval. For example, there is no record on CricketArchive of him acting as an umpire in any other matches. Presumably he performed the role in local matches; he certainly did so in later years.

In his first season as an umpire, Smith stood in just nine games but in 1893 he appeared more regularly. He also took charge of some matches played by the touring Australians — including their game against the MCC at Lord’s — which was usually a sign that they had confidence in an umpire. But in some seasons he appeared irregularly; it is unclear whether this was because he had other commitments or was not a “first choice” umpire in the County Championship. In ten seasons on the first-class list, he umpired 134 matches. In contrast, Valentine Titchmarsh umpired 226 matches in eleven seasons as a full-time umpire.

Smith never umpired a Test match or a Gentlemen v Players match; his only games outside of the County Championship were a handful of games played by touring team and one match played by Oxford University. This might indicate that he was not regarded as one of the top umpires. But he was hardly a controversial one, and he survived a cull of poorly performing officials before the 1896 season, which suggests a degree of competence. His only brush with trouble came as part of the “Throwing Question”. Between 1898 and 1901, several bowlers were no-balled for throwing in English cricket as umpires, led by Jim Phillips, began a crackdown on suspect bowling actions. Smith became involved in 1899 when he no-balled the Hampshire amateur Evelyn Bradford, who had recently been called for throwing in Hampshire’s match against the touring Australians. Little attention was paid — such occurrences were quite common by then — although newspapers observed “the incident gave rise to some comment” during the game.

There was only one other report of Smith as an umpire. During a match in 1901, he was involved in an unusual incident in the match at Canterbury between Kent and Essex when a batsman, T. M. Russell, apparently hit a ball in the air to a fielder, who did not appeal. The batsman himself appealed to Smith, who said he was out. But the opposition captain, J. R. Mason, called him back when the fielder revealed that it had not been a catch.

When Smith spoke to Pullin, he was reluctant to discuss umpiring, believing that it was inappropriate to share what had taken place on the field. But he did mention that the role was hard, and said: “I could name one very well-known old player who said he would rather play four days [first-class games lasted three days at the time] than umpire one, so keen was the play; and he retired from the duties after a brief experience.” He did have some tales though, such as when he umpired Arthur Shrewsbury’s benefit match against the 1893 Australians; Lionel Palairet had to be given not out from the bowling of George Giffen because both Smith and his fellow umpire were unsighted when he drove a ball in the air to the on-side. Smith also described how many players — including the Australians during that 1893 match — pressured umpires and queried the reasons for their decisions. Smith’s interview with Pullin was otherwise a cheerful one, full of stories of cricketers with whom he had played. But he was unsurprisingly silent on his financial and family troubles.

The House of Mercy, Horbury, where one of Smith’s daughters worked for at least ten years (Image: Ossett History)

The 1901 census, taken while he was still an umpire, lists Smith as an “agent for athletic goods”. But it reveals that events had moved on in the Smith household. In September 1892, during Smith’s first season as an umpire, Jane had given birth to their seventh child, but by 1901 she was no longer living with her husband. And the domestic arrangements are strange; five of his children live with him in the “New Harrogate” area of Ossett, while his wife is in the house of her father, along with her eldest daughter. Most strangely of all, Kathleen Smith (who had lived with Mark Wilby in 1891) was living in the Horbury “House of Mercy”. This was a religious establishment for “fallen women” who had “led unchaste lives”; Kathleen was not one of the inmates, but was listed as a worker (she was an embroider), and was still there doing the same job at the time of the 1911 census.

After the 1901 season, Smith’s career as an umpire ended. No reason was given, nor announcement made; he was missing from the list of first-class umpires for 1902 released in September 1901. Possibly he was removed for poor performance; or perhaps he chose to stop. But there is a more likely explanation for the end of his umpiring career, and it once more involved financial problems.

In March 1902, Smith was taken to court by a money lender, Max Cohen, for “having made a false declaration to obtain a loan”. Some details given in court cast a little light on Smith’s life. He had declared to the money lender that he was “solvent” and that “the furniture and effects in the house where he lived were his own”. When Smith failed to make his second repayment, Cohen began to take action against him. At this point, Smith’s wife told Cohen that the furniture in the house belonged to her, having been “the gift of her father … who had relived them of pecuniary difficulties.” She gave what was apparently a false address for her father, but as she was not present at the court, Cohen could not prove his case and it was dismissed. These financial difficulties may have accounted for Smith needing to find something better than umpiring to pay his bills. As he was still likely living in New Harrogate, and the furniture in the house belonged to Jane, she must have lived with him there for a time before going to her father. But her willingness to inform Cohen of something which caused trouble for her husband might suggest that the relationship by this time was somewhat bitter.

What happened afterwards is unfortunately unclear. Smith does not seem to have been taken to court again and so presumably solved his financial worries. He appeared as an umpire in Yorkshire Council matches until at least 1912, but he never returned to first-class level. The 1911 census does not provide any clues as to how he was living; he gave his occupation as “gentleman”, which does not tell us much. His address was Ferndale in Ossett, where he lived with his youngest daughter and his youngest son (who is listed as a football maker). By coincidence, one of his neighbours was a man called James Wilby — unrelated to his wife’s family. Jane and her father — along with two of her sisters — had moved to Southport in Lancashire. Mark Wilby died in 1912 at the age of 85, by which time he lived in Ormskirk, after which his family returned to the Ossett area.

Alfred Smith died in Ossett on 6 January 1915 (just two years after his mother) at the age of 67. Jane Smith died later that year, also in Ossett, at the age of 62. Of their seven children, most lived beyond the 1950s; their daughter Alice died in 1976. Smith’s obituary appeared in the 1916 Wisden. The entry largely consists of a reprint of the feature in Scores and Biographies, plus a comment: “Owing to business reasons he retired from first-class cricket at the age of 27, but afterwards was nominated a county umpire.” This was only part of a rather complicated story of which we can unfortunately only see hints.