“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 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.

“Fair play, fair pay and friendliness!”: The resolution of the Players’ Strike of 1896

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A photograph of the Oval in 1896, taken during Surrey’s match against the touring Australian team

Before the deciding Test of the 1896 series between England and Australia, played at the Oval on 10 August, five professional cricketers from the England team sent a “demand” to the Surrey Committee asking for their fee for the match to be doubled to £20. The five men — William Gunn, George Lohmann, Bobby Abel, Tom Richardson and Tom Hayward — were unhappy that wages for Test matches had not risen in line with the increased popularity of cricket over the previous twenty years. Additionally, it emerged that they were also dissatisfied with both the profits being made by the touring Australian team and the amount of expenses claimed by the amateurs on their team which meant that several were surreptitiously being better paid than any professional — a practice known as “shamateurism”. At the time, the teams and playing conditions for Test matches in England were under the control of the individual county committees on whose grounds the games were played. Therefore, the five professionals wrote directly to the Surrey authorities; to further complicate matters, all the rebels except Gunn were Surrey players.

Unsurprisingly, Surrey were unwilling to submit to what they perceived as an ultimatum; they refused any pay increase, dropped the five men from the England team and selected replacements. It was at this point, just three days before the Test was due to start, that the story appeared in the press. Two of the five rebels spoke to the newspapers, making the threat to strike — and their grievances — more explicit.

Once the story had broken, reaction was mixed. Much of the hysteria in the press arose because the Test was a crucial one; two well-matched teams had won a Test match each, and there had already been a huge amount of interest in the deciding game. The drama surrounding the strike only heightened tension, especially when it appeared that England would not be at full strength.

Unsurprisingly, the “quality” newspapers supported Surrey. Most opposition to the professionals was not about their demands for more money, but arose because they were made just before a crucial match against Australia. Even the Surrey Committee did not dispute that the request for £20 was hardly unfair, but refused to discuss it in the circumstances. In fact, almost everyone agreed in principle with the strikers’ belief that they should be paid more.

The Times, while criticising the strikers for the heavy-handed nature of their actions, was not as condemnatory as might have been expected. When the players were dropped, the Times correspondent said: “The Surrey committee, without discussing the merits of the case, naturally refused to be dictated to by professional cricketers who had played at Lord’s and Manchester [in the first two Tests] under the regular terms [of £10] … Had the professionals shown more tact by approaching the Surrey Club in a less dictatorial manner, the committee would no doubt have discussed the matter with them and the difference that has arisen would probably never occurred.” Nevertheless, the article outlined in favourable terms the argument made by the rebels about wanting a share in their sport’s increased popularity; but it concluded that they should have “sought some other means than an attempt to force the hands of Surrey in the week preceding such a great test at cricket as England v Australia”. The author also regretted that the revised England team was no longer a particularly representative one.

Other publications also took an interest in the underlying issues. The Field suggested that “these rumours of amateurs’ expenses have been in circulation for some time” but were being peddled by “sensation-mongers” who had “grossly” deceived the public in exaggerating how much money amateurs received in expenses. As it happens, contemporary reports vastly under-reported how much money amateurs such as W. G. Grace or Walter Read made. Nor was the Field sympathetic. It rubbished any suggestion that county professionals were close to poverty in an article that portrayed them as “surprisingly jolly and content with their lot”. But while the article writer concluded that professionals were amply paid and could not grumble about their much-improved social status, even he did not object to the raising of the fees for a Test match to £20.

The London Evening Standard commented that the strike was “the sole topic of conversation in cricket circles on Saturday”. It suggested that the professionals were being criticised for trying to “force the hands” of Surrey at a “critical moment”, showing “an utter lack of patriotism”. However, it also reported that the majority of their fellow professional cricketers were supportive of the strikers. It suggested that the four Surrey men were prompted to act for that Test rather than earlier ones because Surrey were a wealthy county. Additionally, they were playing on their own ground — all four were very popular with their home crowd — which may have emboldened them to act.

Many newspapers were openly on the side of the professionals. As an article in the Huddersfield Chronicle put it, “sympathisers are not wanting for the players — whose claims are generally regarded as worth consideration, though the methods adopted may be open to question”. The support was most explicit in what were euphemistically referred to as the “popular” papers. For example, the Weekly Sun took issue with the criticism of the strikers by the Australian captain Harry Trott; it pointed to the hypocrisy of the Australian “amateurs” given how much money they made from the tour and stated bluntly: “The charm of this criticism would be more apparent were Trott to tell an excited public the exact terms upon which he, personally, undertook the trip to this country.” The correspondent sided firmly with the strikers, whom he believed “are entitled to our respect for having raised another protest against the shoddy amateurism which waxes fat on ‘expenses’.” Other newspapers singled out individual amateurs who had received generous expenses — notably W. G. Grace and A. E. Stoddart, both of whom were in the England team.

Also in press circulation were the surprising opinions of a “prominent” but anonymous member of the MCC: “Why should [the professionals] only get £10 a match when a certain amateur [almost certainly he was referring to W. G. Grace] gets five times that amount under the name of ‘expenses’?” He believed the public would side with the professionals. Further press enquiries around London revealed many members of the public to be supportive. And a Surrey member, Major Flood Page, stated publicly that he thought his committee should grant the request for £20 as it was “only fair and reasonable” given how much the Australians took from the game.

As the controversy raged back and forth, the strikers again made contact with the press. The four Surrey professionals sent a letter to the Sportsman, defending their actions. Against claims they had waited “until the eve of the test match” before their demands, they responded that they sent the letter on Monday 3 August. The story only broke in the press the following Friday which led to the impression that they “had waited until the eleventh hour”.

But there were also signs of their unity beginning to fracture. William Gunn wrote separately to the Sportsman, saying that he only requested more money “in view of the important nature of the match and the strain involved.” He added that he had not refused to play, but had merely asked for a higher rate and disassociated himself from the comments made by the others, stating “emphatically that no remarks have been made by him concerning amateurs’ expenses or the Australians’ share of the gate”.

George Lohmann (Image: Wikipedia)

One of the rebels, George Lohmann, also began to make conciliatory gestures, in his case because of considerable criticism of his role in the affair. It did not escape attention that he was extremely well paid at Surrey, and was hardly in financial difficulty. Not only that, Surrey had always stood by him despite his frequent unavailability with ill health. And crucially, just over a week before the Test, his benefit match had taken place, which ultimately raised around £1,000, a substantial sum of money. Therefore, Lohmann was singled out in the press for criticism, and accused of ingratitude.

Having previously spoken to the press anonymously, Lohmann now went on the record to defend himself and give some background to the dispute. He spoke to a reporter from the Morning Leader and revealed that he and the other professionals who played in the first Test at Lord’s had discussed the wage and decided “after the match had been played, and not until then, we should ask the MCC for a larger sum than £10.” However, their request was turned down. They were unable to discuss the issue further as the same professionals were not chosen for the Manchester Test and as they were playing away from London did not have a chance to get together beforehand. Nevertheless, according to Lohmann (who did not play at Manchester), Abel and Richardson asked the Lancashire Committee for £5 expenses on top of their £10 fee, but had not heard anything since. Having failed to get a response by approaching the committees at the end of the first two Tests, the rebels decided to act before the final match in the hope of more success.

Having justified the strikers, Lohmann then began to distance himself from them. He said that Abel, Hayward and Richardson, motivated by the money being made by the Australians, wrote their letter to the Surrey Committee and asked him to add his name to it. According to his interview, he told his team-mates that he had wished to consult “my friend Gunn” before signing; he claimed that he had still not seen him at the time of the interview. But something is not quite right about Lohmann’s version: his name was certainly on the letter to the Surrey Committee.

Having played down his role, Lohmann went on to say that the problem had been “brewing for years” and they had received messages of support from “players from every part of the kingdom”. He also claimed that the other professionals in the team would have joined them but had not been asked: “The only mistake we can see we have made is that we kept the matter to ourselves and did not organise our forces.”

In this last point, he was correct. Of the seven professionals originally selected, neither Bobby Peel nor Dick Lilley joined the strikers; nor did the three replacements — George Hirst, Arthur Mold and Dick Pougher. The most likely reason is that, other than Peel, none were regular England players; the prospect of receiving £10 was probably more attractive than being left out in a probably vain attempt to earn £20.

The Surrey Secretary Charles Alcock also wrote to the press; he emphasised that the terms offered to the professionals matched those for the Test at Manchester — £10 plus expenses — and exceeded those offered at Lord’s — a flat rate of £10. But the sympathy of the public was largely with the strikers; there was even speculation that there might have been crowd trouble on the first morning at the Oval if Abel and Richardson were not included in the England team. The police met the Surrey authorities beforehand, presumably to discuss any necessary security arrangements.

On the day the Test began, shortly before play started, the four Surrey rebels were called before the Committee. Richardson, Hayward and Abel backed down and signed a letter of apology. Part of their letter put forward their case: that the Australians, who were nominally amateurs, were making far more from each match than English professionals “and it seemed to us only reasonable that we should beneficiate in a small way out of the large amount of money received”. But having apologised, they played in the Test match.

Lohmann was less accommodating and refused to sign until he had spoken to William Gunn; he and Gunn were therefore omitted from the team. The Surrey Committee also told Lohmann that he would not be selected for Surrey until he apologised. On the third and final day of the Test, Lohmann did so; his letter was circulated to the press and stated that he only refused to sign the first letter of apology because he wished to discuss the matter with Gunn. He also regretted for use of the word “demand” in the original letter, saying that he had not wanted to use it as he considered the matter a request rather than an ultimatum. Lohmann’s involvement as one of the key figures in the strike and his subsequent attempts to disassociate himself from the other rebels does not reflect especially well on him. He never played for England again, but not because of the strike; five years later, he was dead of tuberculosis, leaving a reputation as one of the greatest bowlers of all time.

When Abel, Hayward and Richardson backed down, the Times was forgiving, suggesting that they “never dreamed of the trouble that their demand for extra payment would cause”. Although once more condemning “the clumsy and almost arrogant manner in which their demand was made”, and suggesting that “the action of the Surrey Club in refusing to be dictated to by those whom they employ has been generally commended”, the Times reporter suggested that it was better for everyone, not least English cricket, that they forgave the three professionals and returned them to the team. And again, the article was sympathetic and supported their claims for fairer treatment, although it pointedly refrained from mentioning amateur expenses as a motivation. The author noted approvingly that the affair had “brought the subject of their cricket remuneration very prominently before the public.” But he concluded that the strike “has been a great grief to the best lovers of the game. Loyalty to the Surrey Club and patriotism for English cricket should have been a sufficient incentive to the players to have practised self-denial a while longer.”

Looking back when the issue had been settled, the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News took issue with the way some newspapers had attempted to polarise and escalate the dispute. It also took the view that if the request was a fair one, the manner in which it was presented as an ultimatum meant that it was doomed to failure. The writer praised both sides for the “entire absence of the bitterness which sundry papers did their uttermost to engender”. It also praised the way the strikers had backed down and that Surrey had reinstated them, despite some calls for them to take a harder line in punishing the rebels. The writer was sympathetic to the position of the professionals, praising them as an “estimable body of men” and saying: “That in some respects the position of professional cricketers is capable of improvement will be conceded by the majority of those who really know the details of cricket management.” The article suggested that they could be paid more given the amount of money circulating in cricket, and admitted that there were amateurs who abused the system of expenses.

Wisden reported: “It is betraying no secret to say that [the Surrey Committee] felt greatly aggrieved, on the eve of the most important match of the season, at being placed in a difficulty by four of their own professionals.” On the decision to reinstate the professionals before the game, it said: “After a good deal of deliberation, it was determined that Abel, Richardson and Hayward should play for England. Among leading cricketers, opinions were a good deal divided as to the wisdom of this policy, but in our judgement the match committee took a just, as well as popular choice of action.”

The Wisden editor Sydney Pardon was unsurprisingly not on the side of the strikers, writing: “The earnings of the players have certainly not risen in proportion to the immensely increased popularity of cricket during the last twenty years, but to represent the average professional as an ill-treated or downtrodden individual is, I think, a gross exaggeration.”

But this was not quite the end of the controversy; there was more trouble on the morning of the game. W. G. Grace and A. E. Stoddart arrived at the ground and complained bitterly about the publicity surrounding amateurs’ expenses. To mollify Grace, Surrey put out a statement denying that he had ever been paid anything more than £10 per match to cover his expenses, and had otherwise not received “directly or indirectly, one farthing for playing in a match at the Oval.” Grace indignantly wrote of the matter a few years later in his autobiography, saying: “The incident was regrettable, not only because the strike was ill-timed, but because it led to an unseemly controversy, in the course of which many irritating statements of an absolutely false character were made with regard to prominent amateur cricketers.”

Andrew Stoddart photographed in 1898 (Image: Wikipedia)

But no such statement was made about Stoddart. Part of his problem was that no-one was clear how he could afford his cricketing lifestyle with an income that was estimated at the time to be around £500 or £600 per year. Nor did he have a wealthy family to provide money or an eventual inheritance. While he followed amateur conventions, such as shooting, he did not come from the typical public school background of his contemporaries. In Cricket Captains of England, Alan Gibson suggests of the 1896 season and the controversy over payments to amateurs: “When rumour was flying free, it was inevitable it should rest on him.”

And unlike Grace, Stoddart refused to play in the Test match. The official explanation was that he had a cold, but no-one believed that, at the time or subsequently. David Frith in his biography My Dear Victorious Stod (1977) notes that Stoddart’s withdrawal caused “an usual amount of comment among the people at the ground.” Archie MacLaren later argued, in a 1921 article in the Cricketer, that Stoddart withdrew because there were too many players (after the extra professionals had been called up as a stand-by). At the time, the press suggested he may have withdrawn out of sympathy with the strikers rather than because of his convenient “cold”. Frith wonders if Stoddart “felt himself out of form and unable to do himself justice” but concedes that the primary reason was criticism in the “popular newspapers”, particularly an article in the Morning Leader which “ran a facetious sketch of him and a scathing criticism of his alleged backhanders.”

In later years, Stoddart defended himself in the press: he claimed that the Australian authorities had paid all travelling and hotel expenses during his two tours, and he had merely been given money to order champagne for the team.

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After all the various permutations and withdrawals, the England team was finalised for the Oval Test match. Back row: William Hearn (umpire), Tom Hayward, Arthur Lilley, Tom Richardson, Jack Hearne. Middle row: Archie MacLaren, KS Ranjitsinhji, WG Grace, FS Jackson, Teddy Wynyard. On the ground: Bobby Abel, Bobby Peel.

The Test match itself was something of an anticlimax, ruined by rain. While the crowd waited on the first day, a correspondent for the Star found that “the talk around the ropes is all about the great strike … the voice of the people in this instance is unmistakably in favour of the professionals.” On an unplayable pitch, England won easily but had the advantage of batting when conditions were at their easiest when play finally began late on the first day. The Australians were also handicapped at the start by a wet outfield and a wet ball, and suspected that the match only commenced at all in order to appease an impatient crowd.

But there was yet more controversy on the third morning which began with England’s lead worth 86 for the loss of five second-innings wickets. Wisden merely reported: “It was anybody’s game on the third morning, everything depending on the condition of the ground. It was freely predicted that the wicket would improve, but such was far from being the case, the pitch being perhaps more difficult than ever.” Joe Darling, the Australian batsman, later related how the England captain W. G. Grace went into the Australian dressing room at the close of the second day to say to their captain: “Well, Trott, you are going to beat us, as now the weather is settled there will be a good wicket tomorrow.” If this is true, Grace’s remarks are either unduly pessimistic or more likely to be gamesmanship given that England still had two batsmen at the crease and two other capable batsmen to come in Lilley and Peel if conditions had eased.

There was no further rain overnight, and according to Darling: “We went down to the Oval very sanguine of winning. One can well imagine our surprise when we found that there had been a ‘local rain’ of about 22 yards long and 6 feet wide, just where the wicket was.” Only the middle of the ground was wet, and the Australians suspected the Oval groundstaff were responsible for the sabotage. Grace ordered his remaining batsmen to get out as quickly as possible, and Australia were bowled out for 44 to lose by 66 runs. According to Malcolm Knox, in Never a Gentlemen’s Game (2012), Trott afterwards adopted a policy of always tipping the groundsman before any game. Knox adds that the former Australian bowler Fred Spofforth commiserated with the captain afterwards: “Terrible, isn’t it? Things could hardly be worse!” Trott seemed unperturbed and replied: “But tell me, Spoff, are there any decent leg shows on at the theatres?”

A cartoon in Punch: “‘The Three F’s.’ Mr Punch, the Universal Umpire (addressing Dr Gr-ce and Messrs Ab-l and Tr-t). ‘Now, Gentlemen all, I’ll give you a toast that every good cricketer may join in – fair play, fair pay and friendliness!'” (Image: Punch, 22 August 1896)

After the game, Punch printed a poem praising both sides, and a cartoon which encouraged everyone in the dispute to remember the “Three F’s — Fair play, Fair pay and Friendliness”. Whoever drew the picture may have been having a sly dig at the Australians. In the image, Bobby Abel wears a cap denoting him as a “Pro”; W. G. Grace wears his usual striped cap which was worn by many amateurs to differentiate them from professionals. But the third figure in the drawing — identified by the caption as Harry Trott — has a label on his belt that says “Profess[ional]”. As the Australians were nominally amateurs, this is quite likely a criticism of the profits made by the team.

While the strike had been averted, and the professionals had been kept in their place by the authorities, most people agreed that the rebels and their supporters had a point. Over the following years, English cricket tried to address the most blatant injustices in the system to avoid further accusations of hypocrisy. In September 1896, Surrey attempted to end their arrangement with the amateur Walter Read by which he was paid to be their Assistant Secretary despite performing no such duties; although he managed to extend his deal for twelve months, it stopped after that. The following year, both Lancashire and Surrey introduced stricter rules over amateur expenses to prevent abuse. However, these were largely cosmetic changes, and “shamateurism” continued in various forms until amateur status was abolished in 1962.

Once the dust had settled, sweeping changes were made to the way that Test matches were organised in England. The reasons were unrelated to the strike — Yorkshire’s Lord Hawke believed it was fitting that the MCC should take charge of affairs related to the national team. By the time the Australians toured England again in 1899, England selection was no longer in the hands of individual county committees but a Board of Control appointed by the MCC. This new body, instituted in October 1898, was responsible for all aspects of home Test matches. No more would there be inconsistencies over selection (such as the practice of favouring local players), or embarrassing situations such as that in 1896 where Ranjitsinhji was not judged to be qualified for England by one county committee, but could be selected by another.

One of the first decisions of the new Board of Control was to settle the issue of professional pay and amateur expenses. Test match fees for professionals were raised to £20 for the 1899 series; amateur expenses were fixed at 30 shillings per day up to a maximum of five days — which conveniently worked out at £10 per match. Despite the bluster and criticism from the cricket Establishment, the strike had its desired effect. Thereafter, despite the many differences and inequalities that existed between amateurs and professionals, there were no major disputes for some time.

Only after the First World War, when the higher cost of living drove many professionals into league cricket, which offered better wages, were the counties once more grudgingly forced to offer improved terms.

“Extremely unfortunate in his affairs”: Walter Gilbert, the amateur who became a professional

Walter Gilbert as he appeared in the feature in Cricket (20 May 1886), less than two weeks before his “disappearance” from cricket. The drawing was based on a photograph

On 26, 27 and 28 April 1886, during Easter Week, a fairly unremarkable early-season cricket match took place at the Oval between Surrey and Gloucestershire. Surrey dominated and won by five wickets. But the scorecard conceals an unusual occurrence. Two former amateurs, Gloucestershire’s Walter Gilbert and Surrey’s Edwin Diver, were by coincidence both making their first appearances as paid professional cricketers. Neither man had an especially impressive match, although Gilbert took three wickets in one over, while Diver shared a fifty-run partnership with Bobby Abel, who scored a century. But their performances were a side-note as most of the interest in the game came from their almost unprecedented conversion from amateur to professional.

As we have seen many times before, amateur players – almost always members of the upper or middle class – were revered in this period. The cricket Establishment viewed amateurism as something to be encouraged as, in their view, it guaranteed sportsmanship, fair play and adventure. Professionals were a necessary evil, socially inferior and a group of people to be kept in their place.

Therefore, it is hardly surprising that it was extremely unusual for players to switch their status in either direction. In its report on the Surrey v Gloucestershire match, Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game observed in the case of Gilbert and Diver: “Instances of the kind are of the rarest.” The article nevertheless identified a handful of cases. The most famous before this was probably Nottinghamshire’s Richard Daft, the best batsman of the 1860s; he had played as an amateur in 1858 before becoming a professional 1859 to 1880, then reverted to an amateur afterwards. William Wood-Sims of Derbyshire (who played between 1879 and 1886) had originally been an amateur before turning professional, but there is little information available about him. A more high-profile case was that of Valentine Titchmarsh, a Hertfordshire cricketer whose first-class career extended from 1880 to 1891; he went on to become a first-class and Test umpire. He was remembered in his Wisden obituary as “one of the best umpires of recent years” when he died in 1907.

Sydney Santall in 1896
(Image: Wikipedia)

In The Players (1988), Ric Sissons identifies four other amateurs who became professionals in this period. Sydney Santall of Warwickshire, the father of Reg Santall, originally played as an amateur for Northamptonshire in the years before they became a first-class county before joining Warwickshire as a professional and later becoming the county’s abrasive coach. George Spillman of Middlesex had played in amateur club cricket in the Brighton area before playing as a professional for Middlesex in 1886. This was Spillman’s only season in first-class cricket which meant that he never appeared in County Cricket as an amateur. He was successful enough to have a front-page feature in Cricket at the end of the season. CJB Wood was a coal merchant who, like Santall, played as an amateur for Northamptonshire before they attained first-class status, but played most of his cricket for Leicestershire after joining them in 1896. In later years, he became an amateur once more and captained the county from 1914 to 1920, and finally became the County Secretary. And HB Daft, the son of Richard, followed his father in playing as an amateur and then a professional at Nottinghamshire in a first-class career lasting from 1885 to 1899.

Given that many amateurs suffered from sometimes severe financial difficulties, why was this not a more common occurrence? In his 1907 book The Problems of Cricket, Philip Trevor wrote that amateurs would be reluctant to turn professional as they could lose friends and suffer a decline in their social status. And indeed, it was this danger that led many amateurs to pursue a career as a “shamateur”, being paid for roles such as Assistant Secretary at a county which allowed them to play as much as required without having to become professional.

Despite the taboo nature of their switch, Cricket (29 April) was sympathetic towards Gilbert and Diver (although as we shall see, there may be reasons for this):

“Circumstances have caused, as was the case with [Richard] Daft, the two cricketers named to join the professional ranks, and the public will thoroughly appreciate the motives which have prompted them to take a step which involves, as everyone will readily understand, no small amount of moral courage. The relations between amateurs and professionals, though well defined and strictly kept, are of such a pleasant character that the change is not after all such a hard one, and as both are excellent players their prospects ought to be of the best. In any case cricketers of every class will hope that success will follow the resolution they have taken.”

The Times was perhaps more representative of the Establishment; it made no comment. And as was standard in that newspaper, its report prefixed the surnames of all amateurs with “Mr”. For example, one passage reads: “Without addition, however, Mr Radcliffe was easily taken at mid-on. Since the fall of the last wicket 79 runs had been added. Mr Page followed in…” But the newspaper made no mistake in omitting this when referring to Gilbert and Diver; for example, describing the start of Gloucestershire’s innings, the report stated: “Gloucestershire began batting, on an excellent wicket, a few minutes after noon with Dr WG Grace and Gilbert”.

As it happens, of the handful of amateurs-turned-professional, Gilbert and Diver are by far the most interesting. As well as sharing the day of their professional debut, both men died in 1924. But there was one crucial difference between them. The match in April 1886 was only the start of a professional career for Diver that lasted until 1901. But it was Gilbert’s only game as a professional, and his final first-class appearance. The Wisden report on the game made the enigmatic comment: “About [Gilbert’s] subsequent disappearance from cricket there is no need to speak.” With this, Gilbert vanishes from the cricket records until his death was reported 38 years later.

Because of this abrupt end to his cricket career, Gilbert is more widely remembered in cricket history than Diver. His story was unearthed over a few years. The first to comment in print on his sudden disappearance was the magnificently, bizarrely eccentric historian Rowland Bowen, who wrote about him in his History of Cricket (1970). Bowen also added a footnote: “Another indication of the recurring instinct for suppression was a suggestion to me that if this story had not appeared in print before (it has not) it should not now.” Another writer to discuss Gilbert was the surprising figure of Benny Green, a jazz saxophonist, radio presenter and prolific writer. Between 1979 and 1983, he edited four Wisden anthologies. As part of these, Green wrote introductions to the period from which the selections had been made. One of these, in the anthology for 1900-1940 concerned the tale of Gilbert.

Green was fascinated by the way Wisden had treated Gilbert. Apart from its silence over his final appearance, there was an obvious attempt at discretion in his Wisden obituary printed in 1924: “At the beginning of 1886 [Gilbert] became a professional, and the season was not far advanced before his career in first-class cricket ended abruptly. He then left England for Canada.” Green also observed with perplexed amusement that the editors of Wisden did not quite know what to make of Gilbert. The “Births and Deaths” section listed him as a professional (by omitting “Mr” from his name) until 1935, when he was mysteriously restored to amateur status (Mr WR Gilbert). But his 1924 obituary had listed him as Mr WR Gilbert, indicating either confusion or indecisiveness.

Subsequent work by Robert Brooke in The Cricket Statistician for March 1982 uncovered the full explanation for the disappearance, and Simon Rae in his 1998 biography of WG Grace filled in more of Gilbert’s background. The fascination with the end of Gilbert’s career has continued – there was even an article about him by Simon Burnton for the Guardian this year. But no-one appears fully to explain what drove Gilbert to the actions which ruined him as a cricketer. Surprisingly, it is possible to fill in most of the gaps.

In fact, Gilbert was something of a cautionary tale for amateur cricket in this period. Everything that happened to him was driven by financial worry. But despite years of desperation, even to the point of declaring bankruptcy, he clung onto his amateur status – even though he was stretching the definition of “amateur” well beyond breaking point – until he became so overwhelmed that, shortly after becoming professional, he resorted to theft.

Walter Raleigh Gilbert was born in 1853 in Ealing. His mother, Rose Pocock was a school mistress whose sister Martha was WG Grace’s mother, making the two men cousins. Gilbert’s father George Mowbray Gilbert was listed on the census as a schoolmaster in 1841 and 1851, and as a “landowner” in 1861; on the latter census, his wife is listed as a schoolmistress. In each of these years, the family lived at their school along with several boarding pupils. George’s first wife Sarah Pocock had died in 1847, but just over 12 months later he had married her sister Rose – which was technically illegal at the time. Perhaps not coincidentally, George Gilbert was in partnership with Alfred Pocock, the brother of Sarah and Rose, running a lead manufacturers. Their business was liquidated in 1864. On the 1871 census, George has no occupation listed while his wife was still running their school. It appears that the family had considerable financial worries; when George died in 1877, he left under £100 to his widow. When she died two years later, her estate was valued at under £600 and passed to someone who was listed as “a creditor”.

Therefore, Gilbert – unlike many amateur cricketers of that time – did not come from a wealthy family who could support him. Furthermore, he was in the unfortunate position of being the youngest of the twelve children of his father’s two marriages. So Gilbert began working for himself. In 1871, he lived in Birmingham, boarding at the house of a doctor and working as a hardware merchant’s clerk. At this time, he was already playing cricket for the Worcestershire county team (which was not first-class at the time). Around 1870, he began to play for the United North of England XI touring team and in late 1871 he made his first-class debut when his cousin WG Grace included him in a team that he selected. At some point after this, he moved to London.

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A photograph of the 1876 Gloucestershire team. The smiling Walter Gilbert is third from the left on the back row.

While playing for Middlesex in 1873 and 1874, Gilbert appears to have become close to WG Grace. He accompanied him in the latter’s team which toured Australia in 1873-74, where the two men got along very well, even going on a kangaroo hunt together. Gilbert then qualified for his cousin’s formidable Gloucestershire team, for whom he played between 1876 to 1886. He also played for the Gentlemen against the Players four times, although never at Lord’s.

Although Gilbert was among the leading batsmen of 1876, he never really followed up on this success. This may partly have been owing to financial worries. Like Grace, despite being nominally an amateur, Gilbert played for some of the many teams composed of professionals that toured England – in Gilbert’s case, mainly the United South of England XI. Whether he was paid for these games is unclear, but it seems likely: unlike his cousin did not have an outside career to support him. Nor was he a big enough attraction to justify huge expenses. From later events, it is highly likely that Gilbert struggled financially in this period.

By now, he was prominent in the Grace family. He was the only relative present when Fred Grace, WG’s younger brother, died suddenly in 1880 after a short illness. The 1881 census also records that he lived with Martha Grace and was working as a “commission agent”. It is not impossible that he lived there for financial reasons, and the Grace family appear to have helped him as much as they could. After the death of Fred, Gilbert took over his role as manager of the United South of England XI, a paid position, in a move probably orchestrated by WG. But by then, the attraction of the touring teams had been surpassed by the wider appeal of County Cricket. As manager, Gilbert could not always pay his players, being taken to court in 1882 over unpaid fees.

But his problems went further than this; Gilbert owed many people money and found himself locked up on more than one occasion. In October 1883, he declared himself bankrupt, owing nearly £820 (worth around £80,000 today) and, according to newspaper reports, having assets amounting to just the £4 he judged four of his used cricket bats to be worth. At a hearing reported in the Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (20 October 1883), Gilbert detailed how he had come into this situation:

“Mr Gilbert, it was stated, had been extremely unfortunate in his affairs. In 1882 he arranged 21 matches for the United Eleven and expected to clear £600, but the bad weather proved disastrous to the speculation, which only realised about £70. For the past 15 months the debtor had been alternating between writ and judgement, and he had repeatedly, while playing cricket, had to appeal to his friends to release him from the bailiffs before he could continue the game.”

Then a curiosity arises. Gilbert told the hearing that “he received £5 or £6 each match he played, and that he probably made about £140 last season, out of which he had to pay travelling expenses.” The implication seems to be that this was from the team he was managing rather than from Gloucestershire. But Gilbert as an amateur, should not have received this money at all – and curiously enough, it exactly matches the home and away match fee for a professional playing county cricket. Amateurs were only allowed to claim expenses to cover matters such as travel and accommodation – they should certainly never have been paid for playing. Nor were Gilbert’s creditors too impressed with how he had been spending money – including £22 on a gun which he later sold – which suggests that some of his problems were from extravagance rather than not having a large income.

Shortly after this, in November 1883, Gilbert married Sarah Jane Lillywhite, the daughter of James Lillywhite, a cricketer who played for Middlesex and Sussex in the 1850s (and who died in 1882). The Lillywhite family were hugely influential in professional cricket; among their achievements were the captaincy of the first team to represent England in Test matches and the foundation of the sports retailer Lillywhites. James also had the idea for James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual, named after him and published between 1872 and 1900. It was edited by Charles Alcock, who also edited Cricket; this family connection may explain Cricket’s sympathetic treatment of Gilbert in 1886. Continuing to maintain the facade that he was an amateur cricketer, Gilbert described his rank/profession as “Gentleman” in the marriage register.

In March 1884, Gilbert came to an agreement with his creditors. According to a report in the Leamington Spa Courier (29 March 1884), Gilbert “undertakes to pay a composition of 5s [shillings] in the pound in two yearly instalments, the amount being advanced by a gentleman, who takes security on the debtor’s earnings in the cricket field in the coming seasons.”

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A photograph of the 1884 Gloucestershire team: Walter Gilbert is sitting on the floor, second from the left and immediately in front of WG Grace

If this gave Gilbert a two-year breathing space, he still needed to solve his financial problems. And it seems that he planned to do so through cricket. Perhaps nothing is more revealing of the low regard in which professional cricketers were held in this period: even in such financial difficulties that he had been declared bankrupt, he still clung to his amateur status and did not become fully professional. Maybe he hoped the Lillywhites might still help. Therefore Gilbert continued to play as a nominal amateur despite still being short of money. At this stage, the Grace family continued to do what they could: a proposal by WG Grace that Gilbert be given extra expenses for the 1885 season was turned down by the Gloucestershire Committee.

At the beginning of the 1886 cricket season, Gilbert must have reached breaking point. It may not be a coincidence that this was also the time when he was due to have paid his creditors following his bankruptcy agreement. Finally having nowhere else to turn, Gilbert’s desperate solution was to announce that he would in future play as a professional cricketer. Whatever lay behind this decision – and something had evidently changed – matters were obviously worse than they had been in 1884, when he had stubbornly remained amateur.

If the reaction in Cricket is representative of the views of the wider cricketing world, Gilbert’s decision was viewed sympathetically. Around a month after his professional debut (Gloucestershire had not played since, having an unusually long gap in their fixtures), Gilbert was featured on their front page of the 20 May issue, an article which spoke highly of him. But perhaps Charles Alcock was merely being sympathetic to an in-law of his colleagues at Lillywhite’s Cricket Annual.

WG Grace’s biographer, Simon Rae speculated that Gilbert threatened to turn professional in an attempt to pressure Grace into securing him better expenses; either Grace or the Gloucestershire Committee called his bluff and Gilbert was left with no choice but to make the switch. However, he was still viewed favourably by the Gloucestershire Committee who privately offered him a £25 bonus if he appeared in all their county fixtures for 1886.

Rae also suggests that the low fees paid by Gloucestershire would not have solved Gilbert’s financial problems, which may have been another factor in his worries. However, Gloucestershire appear to have paid the standard wage for the time. A much bigger issue may have been the long gaps between Gloucestershire’s fixtures. The county only played 15 first-class games in 1886: after the Surrey game, they did not play again until 7 June; in the whole of June, the team played only three times and only once in early July. It was only from 22 July that Gloucestershire played regularly; by then, it was far too late for Gilbert. The stress had finally become too much.

While playing for a Cheltenham club called East Gloucestershire on 4 and 5 June 1886, Gilbert was caught taking money from clothes in the pavilion – because there had been some suspicion that he had been stealing for some time, a trap had been set. There was no doubt about Gilbert’s guilt. He was dropped from the Gloucestershire team (and never played for them again), and appeared at Cheltenham Police Court. The defence offered by his solicitor was that he had been suffering from severe stress, a skin condition known as erysipelas and the effects of heavy drinking: he was not responsible for his own behaviour. This did not make much impression, and he was sentenced to 28 days hard labour. Even as he was in court, Gilbert expressed plans to move overseas – claiming he would move to Australia.

The fact that his team-mates suspected Gilbert enough to set a trap for him suggests that he had been stealing for some time. The only explanation – which also accounts for his stress, illness and heavy drinking – is that his financial worries had finally become overwhelming. Even professional cricket was not enough to save him. For one final time, his family stepped in. WG Grace’s biographer Simon Rae believed that Grace would have been “furious” with Gilbert, but also compassionate as the two men had been close for a long time. He may have immediately travelled to Cheltenham to quieten any scandal. While Gilbert was carrying out his sentence, Grace and two of his brothers arranged everything, and plans were made for Gilbert to move overseas with a minimum of publicity.

After completion of the sentence, Gilbert and his family went to live in Canada, where he remained until his death. This move was unrecorded in Wisden, Cricket (although again, Alcock’s connection with the Lillywhite family may explain that) or any newspaper of the time, and Gilbert was left to begin a new life.

In truth, it seems that the historians who have written about Gilbert may have over-dramatised some aspects. Green suggested that Grace avoided mentioning Gilbert in any of his later works, and claimed that Wisden’s attempts to draw a veil over events was a kind of “conspiracy of silence”. He interpreted the comment reported by Bowen that “if this story had not appeared in print before … it should not now” as part of this conspiracy, even so many years later. Bowen himself may have been seeing shadows where there were none: he never said who made this comment, and although his work was well received and remains highly respected, he certainly had his own agenda against the cricket establishment. More likely, all these silences and omissions were an attempt to avoid bringing embarrassment to Gilbert, or to his memory, and are perhaps better interpreted as a kindness than a conspiracy.

But all of this overlooks the simple fact that the story was widely reported in the press when it happened – including in the pages of The Times which would have been widely read in the cricketing world. Even if the editors of Cricket and Wisden were explicitly trying to hide the scandal rather than simply being politely discreet, it was probably known by most of their readers. For example, when Gilbert appeared in a newspaper story in the Gloucester Citizen in 1893, the article said “The circumstances under which Mr Gilbert’s connection with the Gloucestershire Eleven was severed will be remembered.” It is most likely that the editors saw no need to rake over the coals.

The grave of WR Gilbert in Calgary (Image: Find A Grave)

Gilbert lived out the rest of his life quietly in Canada, continuing to play cricket with great success. He and his wife had five children – two of whom were born in Canada and a further two adopted there. Their youngest son was killed in the First World War.

According to his obituary in the Western Daily Press in 1924, Gilbert opened a school shortly after arriving in Canada in Halifax, Nova Scotia, before opening another in Montreal. One curiosity is that his wife divorced him for adultery in 1893 (which was reported in the Gloucester Citizen article mentioned above) while they lived in Halifax, but the pair remarried in 1896 in Montreal. In later years, Gilbert worked for the Land Titles Office in Calgary for 17 years, and with his financial worries presumably over, there was never any other suggestion of wrong-doing, and he died in 1924 as a respected man.

So what do we make of Walter Gilbert? In many ways, he was hardly representative of the differences between playing as an amateur or as a professional. Did his problems arise through the success of county cricket at the expense of the professional touring teams? Or were they self-inflicted through wasting what money he had? Do we feel sympathy for an amateur reduced to bankruptcy through his love of cricket, or do we disapprove of how he surreptitiously received match fees and the extra help that would have been denied a professional in similar situations?

The story of his fellow professional debutant from 1886, Edwin Driver, is rather different. Largely forgotten now, he had a reasonable career until, like Gilbert, he too mysteriously disappeared from cricket…