“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 Englishman in Spokane: Legend, Reality and Charles Absolom

Charles Absolom in 1876 (Image: The Cricketer, August 1989)

Charles Absolom, who came from a wealthy family, played cricket for Cambridge University and Kent. He also played one Test match from England. But if he was extremely popular with friends (who included Lord Harris and Charles Alcock) and team-mates, and if no-one ever seems to have had a bad word to say about him, he was never a leading cricketer. What sets Absolom apart is the abrupt and mysterious end to his cricketing career, and the way he spent the remainder of his life. After playing for Kent against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge on 25 and 26 August 1879, Absolom vanished from the records — and entirely from the sight of the cricket world — and did not reappear until his untimely death ten years later when it transpired that he had been living in the United States. No-one knew for certain why Absolom left England, but there is evidence from a memoir written by Mary Vivian Hughes in 1936 that he had been rejected by a woman called Ann (“Tony”) Vivian; heartbreak might have prompted him to start a new life, and it appears that some of his friends believed this to have been the reason. On the other hand, Absolom had suffered three bereavements in a short time: his father and brother died in 1878, while his close friend Tom Thomas, with whose family Absolom spent an enormous amount of time, died mysteriously in 1879. Perhaps these factors persuaded him to make a fresh start. But in the end, we don’t know why Absolom left England. However, we can discover a surprising amount about his life in the United States, what he did there, and the events which led to his death at Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, in a tragic accident onboard a ship early in 1889.

It was only after his death that details emerged in England about what he had spent the last ten years doing. The most widely circulated story — printed in many British newspapers in August 1889, originated from New York (possibly from the New York Herald) — said that after Absolom “broke loose from the ties and associations which bound him to England, he bought a rifle and a dog, and buried himself in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. The reasons for this course he never gave. Some said it was a love affair, and that explanation was generally accepted.” But this report (and a few similar ones) bears a few signs of heated imagination: “He fled from civilisation and became the friend and trusted counsellor of many Indian [i.e. Native American] chiefs. The tribes in Montana and through the Columbian Valley knew him and loved him. The Spokanes adopted him into the tribe, giving him an unpronounceable name, signifying in English ‘the man who never wears a hat’ derived from a habit he acquired before leaving England.” This was unquestioningly accepted at the time — even though the notion of Native Americans “adopting” a white European was already something of a cliché — and has been parroted ever since. Even distinguished names such as Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Mike Atherton have been beguiled into repeating the legend in print.

Even putting aside the fantastical “Boy’s Own” nature of the story, there are other issues. By the time Absolom reached the United States, Native Americans (including the Spokane peoples) had been forcibly confined to reservations after a long period of struggle. The romanticised idea of Absolom wondering through Montana or the Columbia Valley (both of which are in the extreme north-west of the United States) was little more than a nostalgic throwback to an earlier time. Nor did anyone think to ask the obvious question: if the late Charles Absolom had been living this life of isolation, how did the writer learn about it? Quite simply, this “biography” of Absolom was an invention that grew into an accepted legend in the absence of any other information.

The safest course is to discount all these unattributed tales. As we shall see, there are reliable accounts of his final years and we can be fairly certain of what he was doing between 1887 and his death in 1889. But this leaves a substantial gap between 1880 and 1887. Absolom’s whereabouts in this period seem to have been completely unknown to his English friends and contemporaries. But if he never publicised his whereabouts, it seems that he was not intentionally hiding because it is possible to tell an almost complete story of what Absolom was doing during those years. The first clue comes with his appearance on the 1880 United States census, which recorded him living in Charlottesville in Virginia on 8 and 9 June 1880, where he was staying with an Australian-born 38-year-old farmer called James Harris, listed as the latter’s friend. There are no indications of how he got there, nor what he was doing in Virginia; the census recorded that he was not working. But we can pick up his trail three years later, when we quickly begin to see how the legends might have accumulated about his activities in the United States.

Absolom was neither living the life of an adventurer in the Rockies, nor spending time with Native Americans, nor hunting “with a rifle and a dog”. In reality, Absolom had settled in the embryonic city then known as Spokane Falls but today known simply as Spokane, Washington. Clearly someone had muddled the city with the Native American people; and from there came the legend of his time in the “wilderness”. The reality was more mundane; rather than living a romantic life, Absolom had grasped an opportunity to make money. Yet there are hints that this reality was in some ways no less dramatic than the legend.

Spokane Falls had been established in 1871 with the building of a sawmill. By 1880, a nearby fort had been built by the U. S. Army and the city was connected to the Northern Pacific Railway in mid-1881; by the end of November that year, Spokane had been officially incorporated as a city, with a population of around 1,000. The influx of workers and the expansion driven by the new railway meant that the population grew rapidly — by 1888, over 8,000 people lived there. As a result, land was an extremely valuable commodity; property brokers stood to make a considerable profit. And one of these property brokers was an Englishman called Charles Alfred Absolom.

A map of Spokane Falls published in 1890 (Image: Wikipedia)

By 1883, Absolom was advertising in the Spokane Falls Review (a local newspaper) as a real estate agent, with an office at the corner of Mill Street and Riverside Avenue. He had initially been in a partnership with a man called L. N. Van Vranken, but after the men went their separate ways in October 1883, he set up a new business with a man called W. H. Maxwell, an experienced surveyor. Absolom had bought up huge swathes of land in Spokane — later reports said that he paid just one dollar per acre — which he sold over the following years; like so many aspects of his life, it is a mystery where his money came from. Perhaps it was an inheritance from his father. Later events might indicate that he received a loan from a local businessman. But we do not know.

Absolom’s advertising did not lack confidence. For example, he offered “business property in the best parts of the city”, “the most desirable residence lots yet put on the market”, “farms improved and unimproved, within easy distance of town”, and “places for either business or residence for rent”. By the end of 1883, he was also offering loans and investments, and was willing to “locate parties” and make claims. He was clearly a big name in the property business; in 1885, he had a full-page advertisement in the Settlers’ Guide to Homes in the Northwest: Handbook of Spokane Falls for “Absolom and Maxwell” (now located on the corner of Riverside Avenue and Post Street), which offered a list of potential investments and a map of Spokane. If the suggestion that he paid just a dollar per acre was accurate, his profits must have been enormous. By 1884, Absolom and Maxwell were selling lots priced between $80 and $250, and offering whole blocks at $1,000 each.

As well as accumulating wealth, Absolom threw himself into the life of the growing city. Local newspapers eagerly reported stories about leading residents, and Absolom was certainly one of those. For example, in 1883 it was reported that he had made a point of collecting vegetables growing in the locality and displaying them to show what could be grown in the area. In 1884, he was a prominent name in an organisation formed to preserve game which was in danger of being over-hunted. He even showed some of his old athletics prowess, accepting a challenge in 1885 whereby he had to race another man over fifty yards; but as news had reached Spokane of his youthful sporting feats (the Spokane Review noted that he had been “one of the best all round athletes in merry England” during his college days), he had to run backwards (with a ten yards head start) while his opponent ran normally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Absolom lost. Nor were his cricketing skills forgotten; in 1884 he took part in a match between Portland and Victoria. And he was also a leading figure among other British residents of Spokane; in 1886 he was the “president” of a dinner that the group organised in honour of Queen Victoria.

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Riverside Avenue, Spokane, where Absolom had offices in the 1880s. The date of the photograph is uncertain but it was probably taken in the 1890s, when the city had been remodelled after the Great Spokane Fire in 1889

Although the later legends that Absolom lived a life of adventure in the Rockies were not entirely true, he did have some brushes with excitement. In August 1883, he embarked on a trip with Dr J. Whitman in which their rig collided with a tree after the two horses opted to go different ways around it; a report in the Spokane Review (which in later years was retitled to the Spokesman Review) revealed that Absolom repaired the vehicle himself. In 1885, the Spokane Evening Review reported that Absolom had been injured when the horse he was riding became frightened and set off at a gallop; afraid that it might run into a river, he jumped off but struck his head on rocks. The resulting gash required stitches, and he had to spend some time in the “college building” under the care of a doctor. His later recovery was ascribed to his being “as solid in flesh and bone as he ever was. Absolom is as tough as a cast-iron man, as few could have passed through the experience he did without breaking every bone in their bodies.” And in 1886, Spokane’s Morning Review reported that Absolom and a man called W. A. Harvey had returned home after “spending two or three weeks vagabonding up on the headwaters of the Little Spokane. The two started out one day on foot without blankets and with only what provisions and the few necessary articles they could conveniently carry. Thus supplied they succeeded in putting in the time as stated, lounging about the forest and along the streams in the neighborhood they visited just enjoying a quiet rest. Mr Harvey states that he had a delightful time of it.”

Nevertheless, there were a few question marks over Absolom’s health. The Morning Review reported in January 1886 that he “has been laid up with rheumatism for several weeks, [but] is very much better and his friends expect to see him out again in a very few days.” Just over a fortnight later, it revealed that he was once more out in public, but ascribed a different illness as the reason. Rather than rheumatism, it had been a “long siege with the gout” which had left him indisposed. Furthermore: “The confinement told on him, as he looks as though he had lost considerable flesh. He has suffered a great deal with the attack.” It is not clear exactly what was happening here, but something might have been going on behind the scenes because, later that year, Absolom suddenly vanished from Spokane.

In November 1886, the Morning Review reported: “The general impression is that C. A. Absolom, the well-known Englishman who was spent several years in this city, has gone back to England. He has talked of making a trip to his native land for some time, and those who know him best think he left the city for that purpose. We make mention of this as there are a number of rumors in circulation reflecting upon the motives that lead to his departure. We have always believed him to be perfectly honorable, a man among men, and feel confident that he will return or at least will be heard from in due time.” Unfortunately, the article did not specify the nature of the rumours, nor why some residents of Spokane might have needed reassurance that he was “perfectly honorable”. Nor does it appear that his friends in Spokane heard anything from him again.

Another curious update appeared in the Spokane Falls Review in January 1887: “The many friends of A. C. Absolom [sic] will be pleased to learn that he made a quarter of a million dollars in real estate in this city by buying land at one dollar an acre and selling on a booming market. This information comes from an English acquaintance of Mr Absolom in Chicago.” Why was he in Chicago? Who was this acquaintance?

And the mystery deepens. In May 1887 a notice appeared in the Spokane Review from the Sheriff of Spokane County proclaiming that a court had upheld a claim from John N. Squier against Absolom for $170, plus ten per cent interest and costs of $38.60. Although no explanation was given, the sheriff announced he would auction two of Absolom’s lots to pay off Squier. That November, notices appeared in court listings of a civil case between Squier and Absolom, but no details emerged in the press.

Squier was a notable figure in Spokane; he owned a saloon and offered fittings to those who wished to establish their own bars. He sold cigars and liquor, and was the part-owner of a silver mine. After Absolom’s departure, he also opened a hotel. He was clearly a man of wealth. While his relationship with Absolom is unclear, he clearly had a grievance because the archives in Spokane still hold a file on the case between the men which runs to 33 pages (mainly of legal discussion). Although there is little within the pages that explains what happened — for example it contains details of the sale of Absolom’s land by the Sheriff but no narrative — a brief note mentions that Absolom owed Squier $170 “on an account for goods and merchandise sold and delivered” from February 1884 onwards. Why did he need to buy items on credit from Squier? The amount owed would be worth over $5,000 today (equivalent to over £4,000); was Absolom’s business less lucrative than he claimed?

Perhaps this explains the illnesses of Absolom, and his mysterious departure from Spokane in late 1886. Was he heavily in debt? If he had borrowed money to purchase land, that is certainly possible. But if he had sold plots at the prices advertised, he would surely have paid off what he owed. And what of the reports that he had made “a quarter of a million dollars”? Was his business built on smoke and mirrors? When he left, was he fleeing from more financial problems than simply those connected to Squier? Or was this more serious, and was he guilty of some kind of fraud? As usual, we do not know. But there was clearly a cloud over his departure. And Absolom never returned to Spokane: he still had unclaimed letters at the Post Office in February 1888, because he was included in a list of “unclaimed mail” published that month.

What happened next? Absolom certainly England in 1887; after his death, Charles Alcock described in Cricket how Absolom had appeared unexpectedly at the annual meeting of the county secretaries in 1887, “to the great delight of his many friends there”. Lord Harris also later related how Absolom had stayed with him for a few days during this visit; “although he was always reticent of his own affairs, I learned a good deal of the life he had been living in Washington Territory, U. S. Why he went there I never knew, but being there, I know that he pursued the same straightforward, kind-hearted course that made him so many friends in the old country.” Given what we know about Absolom’s apparently hurried departure from Spokane, it is tempting to wonder if Harris had learned some of the details and was indirectly attempting to defend his old friend from any rumours which might have followed him. Or perhaps Absolom had spun a tale of living in the Rockies, with the Spokane people, to disguise the less heroic truth and sow the seeds of the story that was told after his death.

Staten Island Cricket Club (Image: via Facebook)

Mary Hughes also referred to this visit to England in Vivians (her 1936 pseudo-biography of her mother and aunt), although she made clear that Absolom never visited her family. She speculated that he had tried to visit Tom Thomas, only to find that he no longer lived in the old house. And that “something or other that was disappointing or uncongenial in England sent him back immediately to the West Indies”. However, this was largely an event of her own imagination; it implied that Absolom was unaware of Thomas’ death, but this seems unlikely. And neither Hughes nor her family saw Absolom after 1879, so they could not have asked him personally.

Rather than return to Spokane (or to the West Indies as Hughes believed), Absolom headed for New York after leaving England. There is a record of a Charles Absolom sailing from Liverpool to New York in 1887. Alcock had also been told that Absolom had recently played cricket for the Staten Island Club, and the database at CricketArchive contains several matches that Absolom played for that team between June and September 1888. He also played for Seabright Cricket Club in New Jersey; he took part in the team’s brief tour of Canada during August 1888. After his death, an article appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette (it described him, inaccurately, as a “briefless barrister” who had been “pioneering in the wild Washington Territory” and as “a bit of a journalist”) which said: “I remember he had charge of a cricket ground at Staten Island, where he was teaching the American idea how to cricket [sic].”

The biggest mystery to those who knew Absolom in England concerned what he was doing at the time of his death, when he was working as a purser aboard a mail boat operating between New York and the Caribbean. Benny Green, who was fascinated by Absolom, put this very effectively in an article for The Cricketer in 1980: “Quite apart from the inexplicable fact of his disappearance from England, how does a paragon of the Victorian amateur tradition, a young blood who has represented his varsity and the Gentlemen, how does so well-appointed a sprig end up shifting bananas in the colonies?” This question, which must have so baffled contemporaries, probably accounts for the implausible tales of a life of adventure; only through such escapades could a respectable Englishman come to be faced with such lowly circumstances. It must have been his own choice!

The solution was found (or perhaps manufactured) in Absolom’s supposed days of adventure; the New York newspaper report (the one that claimed he lived with the Spokane people) stated: “While hunting in the Rockies he fell from a ledge, receiving injuries which forced him to New York for treatment.” According to this version, a doctor advised Absolom to take a sea voyage to aid his recovery, and therefore he decided to take a role as a purser on a ship called the Orinoco which travelled between New York and Bermuda. Hughes had heard a similar version, with which she concluded the chapter called “Charlie” in Vivians. A friend of hers (who had briefly known Absolom) heard many years later that he had been injured in a fall, and a “white wanderer in the Rockies” heard that “another white man” was hurt and took him into a hospital. But this story was likely the same one related in the 1889 newspaper article.

Unfortunately for the legend, this story cannot be true as Absolom had visited England after leaving “the Rockies”; if he had been advised to take a sea voyage (which is not impossible given his poor health — whether gout, rheumatism or financial stress — as his time in Spokane drew to a close), this would have been adequately fulfilled by his trip home. But it neatly accounted for his presence in New York and his work on a ship. The reality must have been considerably different. However, there is some circumstantial support for part of the story: the suggestion he worked as a purser on the Orinoco. This was a ship with the Quebec Line; and we know that Absolom was a purser on another Quebec Line ship at the time of his death. Does this mean that after arriving in New York, he began working for that company, and played cricket when not on duty? Given what we now know of his course through the United States — and his probable financial disgrace — it is perhaps not surprising that he spent his final years quietly working in such a way, where he would not be recognised and where any potential creditors could not pursue him. And as the Quebec Line operated between Canada and the Caribbean, this might offer an explanation of how he came to tour Canada with a cricket team in 1888.

There is one final trace of Absolom, as related by the friend of Hughes in his letter. This story is far more reliable as it concerned the writer’s first-hand experience. He had met Absolom while stationed with his regiment in Bermuda. The regimental cricket team played Hamilton Town Cricket Club, for whom Absolom was playing incognito as “Smith or Brown or Jones”. He hit a rapid and brutal fifty, and despite being stiff and non-too-fit, bowled out the opposition with the ball. The letter continued: “It then transpired that ‘Smith’ was purser of the mail-boat which had arrived that morning from New York, and came every alternate Saturday.”

Soon after his cricket match in Bermuda, Absolom switched to another mail route, between New York and the West Indies. Some obituary reports claimed that Absolom wished to see the West Indies, and he supposedly became very popular there, “welcomed wherever there was a wicket.” And these reports once again drifted away from fact and into uncorroborated legend. One newspaper in Philadelphia noted how he had slept on the deck, fully dressed and bareheaded, was something “no West Indian would dare to do”. It also noted, in similar fashion, of how many years earlier he “became the talk” of Australia when playing there bareheaded, when “not even a native was capable of performing such a feat”. These claims are more likely to be based on a desire by the writers to demonstrate the hardiness of a white Englishman compared to “natives” than an accurate account of anything Absolom did.

A cigarette card featuring the SS Muriel (Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

To return to the facts, Absolom’s new route was onboard the Muriel of the Quebec line. And on 27 July 1889 — according to Hughes’ correspondent, on his very first trip with his new ship — Absolom had a fatal accident. At Port-of-Spain in Trinidad, a cargo of sugar was being transferred aboard the Muriel when the derrick (crane) collapsed and fell on Absolom, who had been watching the process alongside another man (J. A. Dupont). Both men were crushed; Dupont died almost instantly, but Absolom survived for a time. He had been paralysed by either the crane itself of a falling spar, and could not be moved until the following day, when he was transferred to a Port-of-Spain hospital. Three days after the accident, during which he had been conscious but in considerable pain, Absolom died on 30 July 1889.

An early report, printed in Dominica, suggested that no-one in Port-of-Spain (presumably including his crew-mates on the Muriel) was fully aware of who Absolom was, except that he was referred to as a “gentleman and a polished scholar” in the Port of Spain Gazette; when he discovered that his injuries were fatal, he “refused any account of himself, and carried to the grave the secret of his identity.” According to the author, it was only after his death that Absolom’s identity was established, but no-one knew how he came to be a purser. If this was true — and his anonymous cricket career in Bermuda might suggest so — it adds to the impression of a man on the run — whether from whatever took place that caused him to leave England, or the problems that arose in Spokane that forced his departure, or something else entirely — who did not want to be recognised even as he lay dying.

News of Absolom’s death reached Spokane via newspaper reports. The Spokane Falls Review printed the New York article in later August 1889 and accepted it unquestioningly, even though some readers would have known some details were wrong. The introduction said that the reprinted account contained details of “the sudden death of Charles A. Absolom, who formerly lived in Spokane Falls and was well-known to the Indians around here as their friend.” The latter suggestion had never been hinted at in any previous reports originating from Spokane; perhaps that aspect was true, but it is equally likely that the writer just believed what appeared in the New York article.

News took time to travel to England, and it was Lord Harris who broke the news of Absolom’s death in mid-August 1889. Harris immediately wrote a tribute: “A generation of cricketers is short-lived: but though it is ten years since ‘Bos’ played his last match for the county, there must be thousands of onlookers who can remember what a safe pair of hands were his; what a successful, if not very difficult, bowler he was occasionally; what good service he did many a time in his own peculiar but vigorous style with the bat; and last, but not least, how he always played up for his side. At any rate, there are many lovers of the game in Kent who will gratefully remember the yeoman service he rendered the county from 1875 to 1879. I had the good fortune to be able to induce him to play for the county. It brought me more than a right sturdy comrade in the cricket-field: it brought me a sincere, true-hearted friend, whose early death I, and all who knew him, deeply deplore.”

Many reports noted his “wasted life and aimless wandering” in his final years without ever coming up with an explanation. Maybe close friends such as Lord Harris knew of his life in Spokane, but it never became public knowledge. The Thomas family were just as ill-informed as the rest of Absolom’s friends, having no explanation for his disappearance or why he had become a purser; they only learned of his death after Tom Thomas’ oldest son read the story in a newspaper.

Although Absolom is forgotten today — apart from his minor appearances in the record books for his one Test match and the dismissal for “obstructing the field” — we have perhaps a better outline of his life than any of his acquaintances managed, simply because he seems to have deliberately obscured the full picture from them. We also have just enough of a character sketch — given by the unlikely combination of Charles Alcock, Lord Harris, W. G. Grace, Mary Vivian Hughes and the newspaper writers of Spokane Falls — to understand hints of what kind of a man he might have been. Whoever he was, there is no doubt that he is one of the most extraordinary cricketers ever to have played in England, but one for whom the sport was but a small part of his life. Perhaps the best summary was provided in 1889 by “Mid-on” in the St James’s Gazette: writing of Absolom’s death, the writer called him “the popular but rather eccentric Kentish and Cambridge cricketer”.

Note: I am extremely grateful Dana Bronson of the Spokane Public Library and Breezy Hanson of the Spokane County Clerks Department Archives for their assistance with the file on Squier’s case against Absolom.

The Heartbreak of Uncle Charlie: The Private Life of Charles Absolom

Charles Absolom in 1878 (Image: The Complete Illustrated History of Australian Cricket (1992) by Jack Pollard)

Although Charles Absolom, a Cambridge University double “blue” and Kent all-rounder, played one Test match for England, he was never a leading cricketer. He bowled effective slow-medium pace with some success in the late 1860s and early 1870s, but as a batter he was an unorthodox hitter who enjoyed playing leg-side shots but rarely defended or attempted to build an innings. Nevertheless, he was extremely popular with his fellow cricketers — his friends included Lord Harris and Charles Alcock — and stories accreted around him (as they do for many larger-than-life characters): his nicknames “Bos” and the “Cambridge Navvy”; the tales of walking twelve miles to a cricket match before breakfast; probably apocryphal suggestions that he liked to drink. Less publicised at the time were his academic feats: he was awarded a BA from Cambridge at a time when many cricketing undergraduates left university with a “blue” but no degree; he was admitted to the Inner Temple to study law (but never qualified as a barrister); and he worked briefly as a schoolmaster in Devon. Yet none of this was especially remarkable; looked at in this way, Absolom is just another of those amiable supporting characters who populate many cricketing memoirs. What sets him apart is the abrupt and mysterious end to his cricketing career, and the manner in which he spent the remainder of his life. After playing for Kent against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge on 25 and 26 August 1879, Absolom vanished from public sight — and entirely from the view of the cricket world — until his untimely death ten years later.

To understand what happened to Absolom, we can turn to two unusual sources. They have been used before — notably by Gerald Howat in an article for The Cricketer in 1989, and almost certainly by Benny Green (the cricket-loving jazz saxophonist) for his unpublished researches into Absolom — but no-one ever unpicked all of the implications. The sources in question are two memoirs published in the 1930s by a largely forgotten writer called Mary Vivian Hughes; Absolom is an important figure, especially in the second book, but we cannot be entirely certain how much we should believe the story being told by the author.

Mary Vivian Thomas in 1890 (Image: A London Family 1870–1900 (1937) by M. Vivian Hughes)

Hughes — born Mary Vivian (“Molly”) Thomas in 1866 — was the youngest child and only daughter of a stockbroker called Tom Thomas, and his wife Mary Vivian. During the 1930s, Hughes wrote a series of memoirs about her life growing up in Victorian London. Once popular, these books remain useful to historians of Victorian childhood. For our purposes, they also contain a great deal of incidental information about Charles Absolom, who knew her family when she was a child. But there are a few problems before these books are used as sources for Absolom, and not just that they were written more than fifty years after the events they describe. Hughes’ memoirs were undoubtedly shaped and refined in order to tell a good story — which she did successfully because the books are very readable — and she sometimes changed details about events in her life or steered away from difficult recollections. She also explicitly set out to make the point that children had a happier time in her youth than they did in the 1930s.

Absolom’s first appearance comes in Hughes’ most famous book, A London Child of the 1870s (1934), which described her own childhood. She recalled that her family were often short of money but that her father Tom Thomas loved cricket, so took them to watch it whenever possible. She wrote: “Among the many cricketers coming and going there was one who was so constantly staying with us that I looked on him as a kind of uncle. But we always called him by his full name, Charlie Absalom [sic], so that I thought it was one word.” The mis-spelling of Absolom persists throughout that first book, which is perhaps not surprising if she was remembering a name from her childhood that she had rarely, if ever, seen written down. She had quite a lot to say about him: “He was a well-known cricketer of the time, and played I think for England against Australia. His travelling-kit was extremely simple, and he used to say that his packing up was done in two movements — gathering up his night-shirt with one hand and aiming it into his portmanteau wherever that happened to be. His jolly face made up for the fierceness of his black beard, which I fancy he cultivated on the model of [W. G.] Grace.”

She also described how Absolom joined them in their cricket games in the back garden: “Of course Charlie Absalom played cricket with the boys [her brothers] and me in the back garden, gave me underhands when he bowled and easy catches when he batted (not that I caught them), and broke his due share of windows. I can hear his cheery voice calling out, ‘Coosh I there goes another!’ Mother never scolded when anything whatever was broken. As she justly remarked, ‘People don’t break things on purpose, and if you blame them they get nervous, and are more likely to break more.’ And she was far too sensible to suppose that you can play cricket properly with half your mind engaged in fearing what the ball may break.” It is all very pleasant and succeeds in bringing Absolom to life in a way that the most sincere of tributes written by cricketers never quite managed.

After the success of A London Child of the 1870s, Hughes wrote a prequel of sorts (although it also encompassed later events than the first book) the following year. Vivians (1935) was a pseudo-biography of the sisters Mary Vivian and Ann Vivian. Mary was Hughes’ mother, who married Tom Thomas; Ann, known to the family as “Tony”, was Hughes’ aunt. When the narrative reached the 1860s and 1870s — and Hughes herself began to feature, referred to throughout in the third person as “Molly” — Absolom became a substantial presence. In fact, an entire chapter is named “Charlie” and describes in some detail how close he was to the Thomas family. He had been a close friend of Tom Thomas; Hughes wrote that her older brother was called Charles in his honour. The phrasing of the book is a little odd: “Mary’s third boy had been named after [Absolom], and he had the status of a favourite uncle.” It was from Hughes that we learn that it was “an amusing speculation” within her family how Absolom passed his examinations at Cambridge.

The Thomas family as photographed in 1872, when Charles Absolom would have been their frequent guest (Images: A London Family 1870–1900 (1937) by M. Vivian Hughes)

There are some curiosities about the story at this point. The first is how Absolom came to know Tom Thomas, who was nine years older than him. On the 1861 census, Thomas is listed as a mining broker living in Prescot, Lancashire. By that time, he was also a freemason at the Liverpool lodge. There is no clear connection between him and Absolom, nor any indication of how they might have met; and yet if we can believe Hughes, the two men were close enough by the time of her brother Charles’ birth in 1863 (when the family lived in Woodford, Essex) for Thomas to name his son after him, at a time when Absolom was sixteen years old. Perhaps the most likely connection is through cricket; Thomas was an enthusiastic cricketer, albeit not an especially good one, and it is easy to imagine him playing alongside Absolom in local matches that took place in Essex. But it is equally likely that Hughes was mistaken about the origin of her brother’s name: it could have been a coincidence that was turned into a joke when Absolom became close to the family. The text could be read as meaning that her mother chose to name her son after Absolom. It was most likely written in that way because Mary rather than her husband was the focus of the story, but there remains the possibility that it was through Mary Thomas née Vivian that Absolom came to know the family. Although, just as in the case of Tom Thomas, there is no obvious connection between Absolom and the Vivian family before 1863, there is a possible later link. We know that in the early 1870s, Absolom spent time teaching somewhere “in Devon”; the Vivian family (apart from Mary, who by then had moved to London with her husband) lived in Cornwall.

Another curiosity is that in this second book, Hughes had corrected her spelling of Absolom’s name, and expanded considerably on the background she gave in A London Child of the 1870s: “This was a giant of a fellow with a black beard, always known as Charlie-Absolom (like that, all in one breath). His people were a wealthy family living in a large country villa nearby, at Snaresbrook.” But Hughes either did not know, or was deliberately vague about how he knew her father (or mother); when he entered her story, the Thomas family was enduring a period of relative poverty. Although he was just one of many cricketers to visit, as Thomas liked providing hospitality for cricketers and for friends who went to watch games with him, he seems to have been closer than others, to the point that he became almost part of the family (“He had the status of a favourite uncle. He was constantly dropping in”). He also got along well with Mary Thomas.

When the Thomas family fortunes picked up in 1870, and they could afford to move into a larger house, Absolom began staying for several days at a time (their previous residence had no room for a visitor). Molly and her brothers never quite realised how famous Absolom was, but she subsequently discovered more: “He had the reputation of being good all round, at batting, bowling, and fielding, rather than specially brilliant in any one of these. Consequently he was a tower of strength when things were going badly, for he could throw himself into any breach, and was always at his best when hope for his side was lowest.” This was considerably more than the vague details she had given in the first book. Clearly in the year since writing A Child of the 1870s, she had researched her pseudo-uncle because she was now able to describe how he had been chosen to tour Australia with Lord Harris. In fact, she had found a letter that Absolom had sent to her father from Australia.

Absolom batting in his only Test match, the game between Lord Harris’ Eleven and the Austrlian team in 1879 (Image: The Illustrated Australian News, 22 January 1879; via State Library of Victoria)

Suddenly Absolom comes completely alive. He had written to tell Tom Thomas “of my safety in this ghastly country.” He had enjoyed the outward boat journey — “very nice people on board, plenty of susceptible young ladies and a skipper who let us do just as we liked” — and there had been plenty of cricket practice (to the consternation of card-players relaxing on deck). He excepted to “win, I think, all our matches here, at any rate from what I have seen as yet”, but the touring life was “a monotonous round of gaiety and dissipation, and I’m blowed if some of the girls won’t marry a fellow whether he will or not, unless, like your humble servant, of adamantine nature.” Was he perhaps having to fight off female attention as an “eligible bachelor”? Several English cricketers met future spouses in, or en route to/from, Australia.

Absolom’s letter was full of gossipy details: the “behaviour of the Indian contingent of passengers [presumably Europeans based in India] of the P. and O. steamer would prohibit that company from obtaining a dancing licence” in Middlesex; how upon his arrival in Australia, he had practised throwing a boomerang, but was always “allowed a field to myself” and that all his companions “seek the adjoining pastures” whenever he started to practise. But his lack of enthusiasm for the tour shone through; he ended the letter noting that “I shall be right glad to get back again. I have a schoolboy’s list of days until we return, and religiously strike one off every morning — it’s my one ray of sunshine.” But Hughes believed that he had deliberately downplayed the tour in his letter to avoid making her father jealous.

If Hughes had learned more about Absolom before writing Vivians, and if she reprinted his letter in full to give an interesting insight into the man, she also fell back on her own memories about the relationship between her father and Absolom: “The two friends made a funny contrast, for while Tom was short and fair, Charlie was dark and colossal in all directions.” But it is hard to tell where her memories end and her curiously detailed researches begin. For example, she wrote: “Charlie, too, provided entertainment in the pavilion with a never-failing fund of good stories. From sheer affection every team in which he played called him the Boss. At one time he had been known as the ‘Cambridge navvy’, owing partly to his physique and partly to his complete disregard of the proper thing in the matter of clothes.” Perhaps she knew this herself, or perhaps the stories had circulated among her family. But it is equally possible that she or one of her relatives had read the information elsewhere. She also illustrated Absolom’s questionable dress sense with an example: “In his very first match at Lord’s he caused a sensation by playing in a red shirt and wearing no cap.” Was this a memory, or a passed-down family tale? Possibly, but that story must have been more widely known because E. B. Osborne briefly mentioned Absolom playing at Lord’s in a red shirt, without further details, in an article for the Morning Post in 1907.

Hughes told other legends: that Absolom never wore a cap (a well-known detail); that he once saved a match on a hot day when all his team-mates had succumbed to the heat; that he would carry his cricket bag for miles if no transport was available; that he once caught a ball at slip with the back of his hand. He “appeared never to be encumbered with any but the barest necessities of life, thus enjoying Mary’s [Thomas’ wife’s] idea of a rich man.” She also repeated the story of his employment by a farmer for five shillings plus beer. And within these legends is an interesting point: these were either perfectly recalled memories (either first or second hand from other family members) or, since writing A Child of the 1870s, Hughes had done a considerable amount of research. Some stories probably came from W. J. Ford’s History of the Cambridge University Cricket Club 1820–1901 (1903); or, because many of the stories were repeated in the press, perhaps someone in the family had kept a scrapbook about “Charlie-Absolom” which she was able to consult before writing the book. Why had she taken such care to find out information about Absolom, when she had known very little except a vague outline a year earlier?

But these recycled stories were filled out by some clearly first-hand memories of Hughes’ childhood as Molly. Absolom’s “chief charm to Mary lay in his unconventionality and his habit of coming out strong when things were going badly”. He was something of a hero and a legend to the children. In winter, he went for long country walks with Tom and his sons, or told stories, or played whist. For Molly, “he was a devoted slave. He would hoist her to the perilous heights of his shoulder, and allow her to order him to various stations on the route to Cornwall”, pretending to be a train. He would sit her on his knee, tell her stories, and suddenly open his legs so she would fall — a “fearful joy” that she continually asked him to repeat until “higher authority” (her parents) said “enough”. She even picked up his “strong language”, for example by repeating his favourite phrase: “I’m blowed!” There was also a story — and a very plausible one for anyone who has spent any time around young children — of how while he was waiting with the family for a steamer on one weekend outing, Absolom was “standing alone, a little out of it, Molly felt. So, stepping up to his side and reaching for his arm she said, ‘I’m not your wife, but I will be your concubine.’ It had been explained to her in reading about Solomon that this was a kind of second-rate wife; and she was greatly puzzled at the burst of laughter that greeted her reference to something out of the Bible.”

The Vivian sisters (Images: A London Family 1870–1900 (1937) by M. Vivian Hughes)

Eventually, Hughes began to expand upon the possible reasons that Absolom was so close to the family. She did so through some (almost certainly invented) expository dialogue to explain why he featured so heavily in a book supposedly about her mother and aunt. If it is unlikely that matters unfolded quite as Hughes wrote, there is no reason to doubt the essence of her story, and it would explain her detailed researches.

In the narrative, Mary — who did not like to see Absolom single, particularly as there is more than a hint in the book that she found him an attractive personality — asked him one day: “How is it you have never married?” Absolom’s reply, as written by Hughes, was a little bashful: “‘It isn’t that I haven’t considered it, but the only woman who really —’ he broke off and added hurriedly, ‘I’m hard to please. I daren’t risk getting tied to a fusser — or a nagger — or a whiner — or, worst of all, an adorer.’ He went on ‘Now if you could find me some one of the same kind as yourself I would do my utmost to induce her to put up with my ways, and perhaps we could contrive as jolly a little family as you and Tom have managed — but there isn’t any such woman.'” When Mary suggested her sister Tony as an alternative, he told her that “two seasons back” at Redruth, “I saw enough of your sister then to know that there was no woman on earth to come near her — not even you.” Mary was happy to hear her sister praised, so Absolom explained that “Tony just bowled me out first ball”. However, he told Mary that “at the crucial point [Tony] turned on me almost furiously … I can’t understand it.” This was, according to Mary, Tony’s normal approach — to reject “offers” — but she told Absolom that her apparent anger suggested that “she was probably greatly attracted to you, and could only push you off by this outburst.”

Mary explained the reason for Tony’s reticence towards Absolom (and all other men): she had once been engaged to a Norwegian man, but her fiancé had died “of a broken heart” at being unable to financially support her. Mary encouraged the reluctant Absolom to try again. He spoke to Tony once more — telling her that he knew about her fiancé, and they talked at length about her grief — but when he proposed marriage, she turned him down. As he told Mary: “When I boldly put it to her, she didn’t blow my head off, she … well never mind what she did. But I think a blow might have been easier to bear.” According to Hughes, this reply from Absolom took the form of a letter to her mother.

Several writers — notably Gerald Howat — have alluded to these events. Derek Carlaw, in his Kent Cricketers A to Z (2020) was slightly cautious about them: “Persistent researchers have since discovered not only the lady’s name, but that she was the sister of a friend and that her beloved was in fact dead. It is a sad story but a very personal one to those involved and on the whole, for the sake of good manners if for no other reason, it seems better to intrude no further.” This is a curious way to describe events that were printed in a book almost ninety years ago! But what has perhaps been overlooked in the eagerness to discover information about Absolom is that the events described in passing by Mary within Vivians had actually formed a substantial earlier part of the book: Hughes told the story of the doomed love affair between Tony and the Norwegian, a man called Otto, in great detail, although she was characteristically vague about how Otto died. And because the entire book tells the story of her Aunt Tony as much as it tells the story of her mother, Absolom’s inclusion suddenly makes more sense: he was part of Aunt Tony’s tragedy. This might even explain how he came to be friends with Tom Thomas.

The conversation between Absolom and Mary was almost certainly an invention by Hughes to introduce the link between Absolom and Tony. But the author was vague about details. We do not know the date of Absolom’s initial “approach”, nor his later apparent proposal. But if his almost-relationship with — and proposal to — Tony genuinely took place (and there is no reason to doubt Hughes, despite her invented melodramatic conversation between Mary and Absolom), Hughes does hint how she came to learn of the events. Although she cannot have been older than thirteen at the time, she reveals further on in the book that she had many long conversations with her mother and her aunt Tony, before their deaths (sometime before 1891 and in 1914 respectively); presumably it was through these that Hughes learned of Absolom’s feelings for Tony. Or maybe there was a letter, which she read before writing the book.

Because the timescale is uncertain, it is unclear if Hughes meant Tony’s rejection of Absolom to account directly for what happened next in her narrative: “In the height of cricket fever, when the deeds of W. G. Grace were the talk of England, Charlie-Absolom vanished.” And he never so much as got in touch again. Perhaps the implication is that he vanished because of a broken heart — and this was certainly how later writers understood it — but that would not quite explain why he broke off all contact with a family to whom he had been so close. Not only did he vanish from their lives, he vanished from England.

When the 1880 cricket season began, Absolom did not play. His absence drew little public comment. For all the later accolades, he was never quite famous enough as a cricketer for his absence to be noticed immediately, particularly with a visit of an Australian team in 1880, and the controversies that surrounded it.

It was only at the time of his sudden death in 1889 that stories — which had doubtless circulated privately among his acquaintances — emerged. He had left England to live in the United States. One report — apparently written in New York (probably in the New York Herald) and printed in many English newspapers in August 1889 — said that after he “broke loose from the ties and associations which bound him to England, he bought a rifle and a dog, and buried himself in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. The reasons for this course he never gave. Some said it was a love affair, and that explanation was generally accepted.” Such suggestions were sufficiently vague to indicate that they had not come from Absolom himself; from the limited evidence it seems he did not keep in contact with his old friends; even the Thomas family heard nothing from him. But the suggestion that the reason was “a love affair”, and that people “generally accepted” this explanation might indicate that a few people had at least heard rumours about Tony Vivian.

This syndicated report from New York filled in more details about what Absolom had been up to: “He fled from civilisation and became the friend and trusted counsellor of many Indian chiefs. The tribes in Montana and through the Columbian Valley knew him and loved him. The Spokanes adopted him into the tribe, giving him an unpronounceable name, signifying in English ‘the man who never wears a hat’ derived from a habit he acquired before leaving England. While hunting in the Rockies he fell from a ledge, receiving injuries which forced him to New York for treatment. After months in the hospital he was ordered to take sea voyages.” And it was during these sea voyages, when he became the purser on a ship, that he was killed in an accident while loading cargo.

As it happens, almost all of what was written of Absolom’s life in the United States was a complete fiction, and none of it provided any explanations for why he had left England. But perhaps, although no-one knew at time and although we can only guess today, there are just a few clues about what prompted his departure. His rejection by Tony Vivian might have played a part (although it must be remembered that Hughes was extremely vague regarding when this took place relative to Absolom’s disappearance). But there were other factors in the background. Absolom’s father died in early 1878, potentially cutting off any financial support that had allowed him to study law or play cricket; his brother Lewis died just weeks later. Both of these deaths might have been a considerable blow which prompted him to seek a fresh start in the United States. But potentially another bereavement played a part.

On 25 November 1879, Tom Thomas — the father of Molly Hughes and the long-time friend of Absolom — died in mysterious circumstances while apparently crossing a train track. Although the inquest ruled that the death was not suicide, that seems the likeliest explanation, because Thomas’ finances were often precarious. Was it a coincidence that Absolom left England around this time? We do not have a date for Absolom’s departure, except that it must have been between his last day of first-class cricket on 26 August 1879 and 8 June 1880, when we know he was in the United States, visiting Virginia. If we can trust Hughes that Absolom and her father were good friends — and there is no reason not to — there could be a connection. However, Hughes herself did not seem to indicate one; or perhaps she chose to conceal it. Perhaps she hid many things, but there is no means of discovering them now. Did the death of a close friend inspire Absolom to leave the country for a fresh start? Could he have somehow fallen out with the family after Thomas’ death? Unfortunately, there is no way to know.

But perhaps the reason for Absolom’s departure from England was something other than his rejection by Tony Vivian, or his various bereavements. Perhaps it was financial concerns or lack of success in his law studies. Possibly he was just bored. On the other hand, maybe something actively drew him to the United States. Perhaps the explanation lies with his new life, which had very little to do with wild adventures in the Rockies or with Native Americans. Because if we don’t really know why Absolom emigrated to the United States, we can learn a surprising amount about what he did once he arrived…

“The Cambridge Navvy”: The Cricket Career of Charles Absolom

Charles Absolom in 1876 (Image: The Cricketer, August 1989)

Charles Absolom is largely forgotten today. His name might be vaguely familiar as a “one-Test wonder” who represented England in a very early Test match, or because he was the first man to be dismissed “obstructing the field” in first-class cricket. But there is considerably more to him than these appearances on obscure lists, because he was once a relatively famous cricketer. Although never a leading player, and if he lacked quality at the top level, Absolom was well-respected for his achievements with Cambridge University and Kent, and was spoken of with fondness by his contemporaries. Yet Absolom’s cricket was perhaps the least interesting aspect of his life. An eccentric figure, and an enigma even to his friends, he vanished from England after the 1879 cricket season for reasons that remain unclear; not even those closest to him knew where he went or why he did so. Only his sudden death in 1889 returned his name to the headlines and revealed an outline of what he had been doing; and even this story did not quite make sense. Some more details emerged in later years, but this late period of Absolom’s life was largely a mystery. Many questions remain unanswerable, but it is possible today to reconstruct enough of Absolom’s life to establish that he was perhaps one of the most unusual cricketers ever to play at Test level.

If Absolom has fascinated later writers, most have taken the stories about him at face value, when they are a little more complicated than that. The always-admirable Gerald Howat wrote about him briefly in The Cricketer in 1989, but this was just a double-page spread; Absolom also featured in the Kent County Cricketers A to Z written by Derek Carlaw for the ACS and published in 2020; this covered more of his cricket career and went into a little more of his life off the field, building on Howat’s work. Benny Green implied he would write a biography but never did. Nothing new has been discovered for a long time, and little has changed in the perception of Absolom since the tributes penned by W. G. Grace and Lord Harris over 130 years ago. And matters are muddled further by the fact that Absolom is sometimes confused for a very similarly named cricketer — Charles Absolon (1817 – 1908) — who played in the same period as Absolom, but was noted more for the extraordinary longevity of his career: he never played first-class cricket, but was an active cricketer for 71 years. While the story of Absolon — who in club cricket scored 26,000 runs and took 8,500 wickets after the age of fifty — is fascinating, it is dwarfed by the mystery surrounding his near-namesake.

Charles Alfred Absolom was born in Greenwich in 1846, the fifth child of Edward Absolom — a tea merchant — and Elizabeth Glass. The family, which was undoubtedly wealthy, was absent from the 1851 census, but occupied Woodland Lodge in Greenwich ten years later. Among the household were Absolom’s oldest brother (working as a “tea merchant’s clerk” and presumably employed by his father), two older sisters, his younger brother and two servants. Absolom, then aged fourteen, was listed as a scholar. Over the following years, the family moved to Lee in South-East London, and then Snaresbrook. Absolom attended the school of William Jacobs in Calne, Wiltshire, and spent some time at King’s College before going to University.

Little else is known about Absolom’s life in this period, but by 1865 he was playing cricket with some success. He scored 66 not out for the Gentlemen of Essex against the Gentlemen of Norfolk that year and also played for the Gentlemen of Islington against a famous all-professional touring team, the United South of England Eleven. His unbeaten 11 might not have been impressive, but he faced some of the leading bowlers in England. His association with some of the biggest names continued when he played for a team called “The Cricket Company” against Southgate (which included the Walker brothers who were instrumental in the formation of Middlesex County Cricket Club) later that season. He also played at this time for Essex, which was not then a first-class county. One of his frequent team-mates (on the cricket and the football field) was Charles Alcock, who later became the Surrey Secretary and editor of Cricket amongst numerous other roles. The two men remained close throughout the 1860s and beyond.

In September 1865, Absolom entered Trinity College, Cambridge. During his four years there, he received “blues” — the colours awarded for representing Cambridge against Oxford — in both cricket and athletics. If anything, his reputation was greater in the latter sport while he was at Cambridge; when he appeared in Scores and Biographies, almost the entirety of his entry was taken up with his athletic accomplishments in running, jumping and throwing. He was also a good footballer until an injury forced him to give it up. However, if his greatest fame was eventually achieved on the cricket field, his University career in that sport was curiously fragmentary. He was selected in the freshman’s trial match at Cambridge in 1866, but played just once for the University — his first-class debut — relatively late in the season. Against the MCC at Lord’s Cricket Ground, he scored 8 and 26 not out; he also recorded match figures with the ball of five wickets for 48 runs. According to an account written seventy years later, he took the field in an incongruous red shirt, which would have been garish even at a time when players did not always wear “whites” on the field; however it was a story told to illustrate Absolom’s eccentric dress sense and should not be taken too seriously. A week later, he played in the University match against Oxford, despite little high-level experience. His scores of 13 and 9 (and three wickets in Oxford’s second innings) were not enough to prevent a narrow Oxford win by 12 runs. His role was not entirely clear: he batted at nine or ten in both games, and generally bowled as second change — something of an afterthought. Around a month later, he played for Essex (not then a first-class county) against the MCC.

C. A. Absolom in 1868, as part of the Cambridge University cricket team

Absolom was more of a success in 1867; he was a regular in the Cambridge team and in matches today regarded as first-class, he took 38 wickets at an average of 13.24. He had great success with the ball — including thirteen wickets in the match against Cambridgeshire — and played a big part in Cambridge’s five-wicket win over Oxford in the University Match, taking nine wickets in the game. Although less effective with the bat, he passed fifty for the first time in first-class matches when he hit 94 in a low-scoring draw against the MCC. The next season followed a similar pattern: he took wickets cheaply (including eight in the University Match) and produced respectable returns with the bat, when he averaged 18.78;. Although he failed to record any first-class fifties, this was a reasonable average in the late 1860s when pitches were frequently very difficult for batting, and he again contributed against Oxford with an innings of 33. His University form earned him a place on the amateur team in the Gentlemen v Players match; although he scored 40 not out for the Gentlemen at the Oval, he was not particularly successful in the more prestigious game at Lord’s.

But Absolom’s most famous feat, which still appears in record books, had come earlier in that 1868 season, and it was one he was unlikely to have been too pleased with. It occurred when he batted for Cambridge University against Surrey at the Oval. Having hit the ball into the deep, he had completed an all-run five and had started his sixth run when the throw from the fielder struck his bat from behind. The Surrey wicketkeeper Edward Pooley appealed and Absolom was — somewhat unfairly given that he must have had his back to the throw — given out for obstructing the field. This was the first such instance in a game today recognised as first-class.

Absolom had a quieter time in 1869, but left Cambridge (before the 1870 season) with a good record from his four years in the cricket team: 488 first-class runs at 16.26 and 101 wickets at 14.48. He had also taken 25 wickets in his four University Matches, of which Cambridge had won three. Perhaps the most notable achievement of his time at Cambridge came in a more casual match. Playing for a team called the Etceteras against a team known the Perambulators at Trinity College in May 1869, he scored 100 out of a total 120 in 75 minutes as the match drifted to a draw on the last afternoon. To cap an impressive time at University (by contemporary cricket standards), Absolom had also been the secretary of the cricket team in 1867 and served as its treasurer in 1869.

What manner of cricketer was Absolom? In his autobiography A Few Short Runs (1922), Lord Harris said of Absolom, whom he had played alongside for Kent: “Who that has played with him can forget him? Brown as a nut, and bearded like the pard, he was the life and soul of a weak team, always confident and always cheery. He had been a great performer on the running path at Cambridge, as well as in the University Eleven, and his versatile genius made him as good company in the pavilion on a wet day as in the field.” W. G. Grace (to whom he bore more than a passing resemblance as both men had substantial beards) also discussed him in his book Cricket (1891): “His height was 5ft 10in; weight, 13 st. As a batsman he had a peculiar style of his own. He held the bat very high up in the handle, and did not pay much attention to the pitch of the ball. Balls bowled to the off he hit to long-on — in fact, anywhere but where the bowler intended and hoped they would be hit to. It will be easily inferred that he did not trouble much about keeping up his wicket: all the same, he made some very good scores against the best bowling of his time; and more than once, like my brother E. M. [Edward Mills Grace], I have seen him upset bowlers who had been bowling accurately against good players before he went in. He always played bareheaded, and without pads or gloves.” Grace also noted his “slow medium-pace round-arm, with a high delivery, varying it with an occasional fast one”, and his ability to bowl all day without a rest. He said that Absolom was “worthy of a place in any eleven for the excellent and stimulating example he showed of working heart and soul from the beginning to end of a match, whether he was on the winning or losing side”. Alcock also wrote a little about Absolom’s game in 1889: “He was very much above the average. A medium pace bowler, with plenty of judgement, he was at times very successful, while as a bat, if he hit often in his own peculiar style, and frequently blooming high, he hit at the same time blooming hard. In the field, full of life he never flagged, and as a specimen of an unselfish cricketer playing always for his side without the smallest thought of self I have never seen his superior.”

He was also an outstanding fielder, who was certain enough of his ability to take high catches that he was even known to move other men aside and few doubted that he would taken any chance heading his way. Fred Dartnell, writing in the Morning Leader in 1906, related how in the Gentlemen v Players match at Lord’s in 1870, during a tense finish, the Players had one wicket standing in the fourth innings with five needed to win when Walter Price skied the ball. It was heading towards C. E. Green (who told the story against himself), a good fielder who was stationed at long stop, but as Green set himself to complete the catch, Absolom rushed from “short cover slip” and held the ball. The Gentlemen won by four runs. When Green asked Absolom why he had run in, he replied: “I was certain of it myself, but not so certain of you!”

In short, Absolom was an unorthodox cricketer who paid little attention to the niceties of the game. When other amateurs concentrated on playing stylish, aesthetically pleasing drives and cuts, Absolom was content to shovel the ball to leg, and hit as hard as he could. But no-one seemed to mind because everyone who wrote of him did so with undisguised affection. For example, Alcock noted that while Absolom was at Cambridge, he saw “perhaps as much of old ‘Bos’ as anyone and memory recalls many happy days spent with him in his rooms during the four years he was at Cambridge.” He noted that Absolom was “a true friend in every way, cheery always, never downhearted, but always confident and hopeful under the most trying circumstances. I shall always remember him as, to my mind, the idea of a sportsman, the best type of an athlete.”

Absolom must also have done some work off the field as well because in late 1869, he was awarded his degree. At the ceremony where he was awarded his BA that October, the Daily News recorded: “The conference of the degree upon Mr Absolom was loudly cheered from a large assemblage of undergraduates in the galleries, that gentleman having been one of the leading promoters of, and participators in, all manly and athletic sports.” While receiving a degree might might seem to a modern audience to be the prime purpose of attending Cambridge, it was something of an afterthought to Victorian students. Sport and social networking were just as important as study at the time Absolom was there; many famous cricketers left university with plenty of runs and wickets but no degree. Therefore while this does not mean that Absolom was any kind of academic genius, he must have done enough work to pass his examinations. An account written in the 1930s (by someone who knew him personally) suggested that among Absolom’s friends, it was “an amusing speculation” how he had managed to pass one examination.

W. J. Ford in 1906 (Image: Wikipedia)

Apart from his impressive sporting and academic portfolio, Absolom also accumulated legends in his time at Cambridge. He had the nickname of “Bos”; there were various origin tales. For example, Charles Alcock related that it was an abbreviated form of “Bossolom” (presumably because he was the “boss”?); an article in the Pall Mall Gazette after Absolom’s death suggested that it arose because he “was supposed to resemble a bull”. Another nickname was the “Cambridge Navvy”; again, there were various theories regarding the reason. Fred Dartnell wrote that it arose because of his “somewhat rough appearance”; he also described how Absolom never wore a cap (a common recollection). Another possible reason might have been his willingness for hard physical work. One story originated with W. J. Ford, who in his A History of the Cambridge University Cricket Club 1820–1901 (1903) told a tale of how “the only time he met [Absolom] in a match, he had walked twelve miles with his bag after a breakfast which consisted of ‘a quart of beer and a pint of gooseberries’.” Variations of this tale were repeated into the 1930s; Dartnell tweaked it in his 1906 article to say that Absolom often walked “twelve miles before breakfast” to play games, and the breakfast of beer and gooseberries became, in later retellings, Absolom’s idiosyncratic preparation for the University match. Another story told by Ford seems to have been in general circulation as a rumour: Absolom had once agreed to work for a local farmer as a haymaker for a wage of five shillings a day plus beer. When he began work on his second day, the farmer supposedly begged him to accept ten shillings a day but find his own beer. Whether or not any of these anecdotes were true, or how much they had been exaggerated, they make clear the reputation of Absolom, and the affection in which he was held.

After leaving Cambridge, it is unclear what Absolom did next. A later account of these years, published in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in 1889, claimed that after leaving Cambridge, Absolom “undertook scholastic work [i.e. teaching] in Devonshire, but this not being quite to his taste he gave it up.” And a reviewer for Baily’s Magazine, discussing Absolom’s entry in Scores and Biographies in 1896 noted from his own acquaintance with the man that “he was once an assistant master at a school in Devonshire”. He is mysteriously absent from the 1871 census, and between 1870 and 1875 he appeared only sporadically in first-class cricket (achieving little when he did so). Until 1874, these appearances were limited to teams of “Gentlemen” (i.e. amateurs) such as for the Gentlemen of the South against the Players of the South or the Gentlemen against the Players, but he also intermittently represented Kent as an amateur from 1874. He also played club cricket for Southgate in this period. His most notable performance came for Kent at Old Trafford in 1875 when he took the last three Lancashire wickets in a single over to finish with six for 52 and then smashed 63 runs, the highest innings of the game. Wisden remarked: “When that gentleman does get on to the ball, he stands not on the order of his hitting but hits here, there and everywhere where hard thumping will send the lump of leather.”

Around the time he began playing for Kent, Absolom enrolled to study law at the Inner Temple in London, the first step towards qualification as a barrister. The record of his admission on 17 November 1874 indicates that he still lived in Trinity College, but with a secondary address with his father in Snaresbrook. He was never called to the bar (in other words, he never qualified as a barrister) and it is not immediately obvious if that was ever his intention. Nor is it clear why he might have been back at Cambridge (there is no record of him living there in 1871). Nor is there is any indication of how or where Absolom earned a living in this period if he had given up teaching, nor where his income came from to study law, but the most likely explanation is that his wealthy father supported him. According to the Alumni Cantabrigienses (a register of members of Cambridge University compiled between 1922 and 1953), his name was withdrawn from the Inner Temple in 1889; however, as that was the year of his death, perhaps he never formally abandoned his studies, even if he had long ceased trying to qualify.

Something changed in 1876 because Absolom was suddenly able to play cricket regularly; over the next four English seasons, he played 54 first-class matches, almost exclusively for Kent. Given that he played just 99 matches in total in a fourteen-season career, that spell with Kent encompassed his most regular cricket. Although never a leading cricketer by any definition — he was not chosen for any Gentlemen v Players match after 1874 and did not play in the prestigious Lord’s match after 1870 — he became quite well-known in this later period. Derek Carlaw suggested that by this stage Absolom was in financial difficulties: “At any event, he does not seem to have been particularly prosperous and he may have been one of the amateurs Lord Harris had in mind when he referred to playing for Kent in the 1870s as being ‘too heavy a drain on slender purses.'” But given the wealth of his family, this seems unlikely; when Absolom’s father died in 1878 at the age of 66, his estate was valued at “under £18,000” and resworn the following year as worth “under £14,000”. While imprecise, figures such as these are generally a good indication of the size of the estate; and £14,000 would have been equivalent to around £1.5 million today.

The Kent team against which W. G. Grace scored 344 in 1876; Absolom is seated at the front, second from the right and Lord Harris is seated next to him, second from the left (Image: The Cricketer, August 1989)

In 1876, Absolom took 62 first-class wickets, his highest ever total, but his average of 21.95 was on the high side for that period. His figures might have been affected by his participation in one particular game: playing for Kent against the “Gentlemen of the Marylebone Cricket Club”; the latter team included W. G. Grace. Kent scored 473 and bowled the MCC out for 144 partway through the second day. Writing of this match in 1891, Grace observed that Absolom “was never happier than when bowling”, and when the MCC followed-on, he asked Lord Harris (the Kent captain) if he could open the bowling as “I’m in rare form and strong enough for anything.” By the end of the day, Grace had scored 133; on the final day, he took his score to 344, setting a new record for the highest innings in first-class cricket. But he wrote how, even after his own score had passed 300, Absolom “was as eager as ever and kept beseeching to be allowed another trial!” He ended the innings with the sorry figures of two for 105 from 39 four-ball overs (and had match figures of three for 148).

From then on, Absolom bowled less and less; he took only 22 wickets in 1877, six in 1878 and two in 1879. Instead, he focused on batting and began to open for Kent; although his first-class figures look unimpressive to the modern viewer — he scored only two half-centuries between 1876 and 1879, only once passed 500 runs in a season, and his highest batting average for a season was 18.22 in 1878 — he was valued rather more than indicated by his statistics. Perhaps most importantly, Kent’s autocratic captain, Lord Harris, was a firm supporter and often used him to open the Kent batting. Absolom’s form in 1878, including his highest first-class score of 70 against Derbyshire, made him an attractive proposition for an all-amateur tour of Australia over the winter of 1878–79. At the time, international tours were a regular event: this was the third visit of the 1870s to Australia by an English team and the previous season an all-professional English team had played games retrospectively identified as the first ever Test matches; an Australian team had also visited England in 1878.

The 1878–79 tour, organised by the Melbourne Cricket Club, was to have been led by Isaac Walker, who had assembled the team with his brother Isaac, but a family bereavement forced his last-minute withdrawal; Lord Harris took over as captain. Absolom’s selection probably owed more to his availability than to his cricketing ability; he was hardly a leading player, but nor were many of Harris’ team, and it was far from being representative. Melbourne Cricket Club were sufficiently worried about the weakness of the side that they requested the addition of two professional bowlers. As it happened, the tour became more famous for crowd trouble — a riot at the Sydney Cricket Ground which arose from the crowd’s anger at an umpiring decision — than any cricketing feats. The team played a game later recognised as a Test match (only the third ever played), but a second game against a representative Australian team was abandoned after Lord Harris (who was attacked during the riot) refused to return to Sydney. Absolom wrote privately to a friend expressing his dissatisfaction with the trip, although he enjoyed the journey out, and when he returned home he wrote a scathing article in Lillywhite’s which criticised the amount of gambling that surrounded state games in Australia and what he perceived as an obsession with making money from the sport — incidentally, worries which were prevalent in both England and Australia after the financial success of the 1878 tour of England. Absolom also placed the blame for the riot on the cries of the “betting men in the pavilion”, although he was also critical of the umpire.

Members of Lord Harris’ team that toured Australia in 1878–79: Absolom is seated at the extreme right of the middle row and Harris is stood at the back in the centre (Image: Cricket of Today and Yesterday (1902) by Percy Cross Standing)

Absolom bowled little on the tour, instead operating largely as a specialist batter. His biggest success came in the Test match, when batting at number nine — and coming to the wicket after Fred Spofforth had taken a hat-trick to reduce the touring team to 26 for seven — he scored 52 out of England’s first innings total of 113; this was his fourth (and final) first-class fifty. He did not bowl, and England lost by an innings. This was Absolom’s only Test match; in truth, he was never likely to be picked again, but that is academic because by the next time England played, Absolom had left the country to start a new — and very mysterious — life. When he returned to England after the tour, Absolom played one last season of first-class cricket but had little success. Perhaps he had other things on his mind; perhaps not. But his first-class career ended with that 1879 season, leaving him with a record that looks unimpressive and does not reflect the man at all: 2,515 runs at an average of 15.05 and 282 wickets at 19.40.

After this, Absolom vanished from the records — and entirely from the sight of the cricket world — and did not reappear until his untimely death ten years later. There are various stories about an unfortunate love affair, and strange tales of adventures in the United States. But to find out what really happened — and more importantly why it happened — requires digging into some very unusual sources and some locations far removed from the cricket field.