“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.

Unwanted and Forgotten: Professional Cricketers Away from the Top

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The cricket team of the Boys Home Industrial School in London, photographed in 1900. Establishments such as this were aimed at boys from poor backgrounds, and present quite a contrast to the photographs of teams of Eton or Harrow schoolboys; perhaps some of those in this picture may have later attempted a professional career

The contrast with the public perception of cricket and the daily reality of most of the people who played it in the late Victorian era was striking. Writers and artists often pushed the image of public school cricket as being the heart of the sport; there were photographs and artworks depicting idyllic rural scenes, or children playing peacefully. And of course underpinning it all was the notion that cricket symbolised sportsmanship, comradeship and fair play — notions as questionable in the 1890s or 1900s as they are today. Behind this facade was a whole community of professional cricketers to whom the game represented a lifeline out of poverty and their sole means of income. Those professionals who formed the backbone of most county sides — often disparaged as mercenaries who lacked quality — were indeed clinging on, not to their place in the side but the meagre wage that went with it. Their few runs or wickets were the only things keeping their families fed, with a roof over their heads. The cricket establishment — the middle and upper-class men who ruled the sport — were never comfortable with this idea and tried to rule the lives of anyone who was paid to play; they often ignored this cricket “underworld” and most cricket followers would have had little idea what life was really like for professionals, especially on the lower rungs of the cricket ladder.

Particularly at the end of the nineteenth century, there were any number of former professional cricketers — even those who had been stalwarts in county cricket — whose struggled to survive when their careers were over. Yorkshire is often the best-documented county in this respect owing to the efforts of A. W. Pullin to track down former players. For example, Luke Greenwood and Alfred Smith battled bankruptcy in the 1890s, but they fared better in many ways than their contemporary John Thewlis, who was reduced to undertaking an eight-mile round trip transporting laundry at the age of seventy in order to earn a tiny amount of money.

The Yorkshire team of 1875, all of whom were professionals. Standing: George Pinder, George Ullyett, Tom Armitage, G Martin (umpire), Joseph Rowbotham, John Thewlis, Allen Hill, Andrew Greenwood. Seated: Tom Emmett, John Hicks, Ephraim Lockwood and Charles Ullathorne. (Image: Wikipedia)

Others were even less fortunate. Among Thewlis’ Yorkshire team-mates, Andrew Greenwood and Charles Ullathorne died of tuberculosis; the former was only 41 at the time. And George Ulyett died at the age of 46 from pneumonia. But difficulties for former professionals were not confined to Yorkshire.

Ted Pooley of Surrey spent time in a workhouse and died in poverty in July 1907; the Essex professional Harry Pickett killed himself in September that year, most likely because he had lost a coaching position and faced financial problems. Later, Billy Brockwell of England and Surrey was reduced to living in a roofless hovel on a golf course, where he was discovered by Sir Home Gordon and Lord Hawke (probably in the early 1930s; Gordon told the story in his Background of Cricket (1939) but did not date the event). Even Wisden, in Brockwell’s obituary written after his death in 1935, was sympathetic: “Unhappily, after retiring from first-class cricket Brockwell fell upon evil days and he died in abject poverty at Richmond.”

Ted Pooley (Image: Wikipedia)

Bill Brockwell (Image: Wikipedia)

For men like this, and for countless others, cricket had been their only route out of a miserable life, and when their careers ended, this lifeline was severed. Even the best professionals in this period would be comfortable but not much else. In later years — and certainly after the First World War — cricket offered a very good wage and some provision was made by most counties for players in their retirement. But in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, it was a struggle for all but the top players. A loss of form, or a clash with the county authorities could result in disaster. For example, William Scotton fell into depression when he was dropped by Nottinghamshire and killed himself when he thought he might lose his job with the MCC. Roles such as working on a groundstaff offered one potential escape route; others included coaching or becoming an umpire. But it was a precarious existence even at the top.

Underneath the layer of county cricketers, however, there was a whole other world of professional cricket. These were the men employed by local clubs to assist with pitch preparation and coaching, as well as playing in the team. Edwin Alletson, who played one of the most famous innings of all time, held such a role before breaking into county cricket. So too did Edmund Kesteven, whose career of travelling the country playing professionally for various local clubs was ended when he murdered his partner in 1894. Kesteven also worked for a time as a coach at a school, a reliable form of employment for many professionals.

The censuses can give us a good idea of the scale of professional cricket in England. On the 1881 census, there were 211 men who gave their occupation as a cricketer. Their ages ranged from 83 (Richard Mills of Tenterden in Kent, who was probably retired; but there was an apparently still active 76-year-old, Robert Yeomans of Norwich) to 14 (Peter Rogers of Cowley in Oxfordshire). Even if every first-class county had employed eleven professionals — which none of the ten active at the time did — that would not account for the number of men paid to play cricket. It was the hidden “underworld” of club and school professionals which accounted for the majority of these numbers, which increased over the next twenty years.

The 1891 census lists 521 cricketers; numbers peaked at 604 in 1901 before declining to 443 in 1911 and 278 in 1921. These figures require some qualification: they were found searching for the string “cricketer” among male occupations on “findmypast.co.uk” and there are doubtless both false positives and omissions among them (searching for occupations including “cricket” brings up many people who were not actual cricketers, such as those who made equipment and even landlords of public houses containing the word). Something might not be quite right, as the same search in 1871 gives just three results and does not include some players who listed their occupation as cricketer; for comparison there are 79 cricketers on the 1861 census. There are two other qualifications. We cannot always guarantee that people entered accurate information on their census returns; Charles Pullin, who was a professional cricketer for many years, never recorded this on a census. And of course, we are dependent on the skill of modern transcribers, who may have misread what was written so long ago.

But even taking these problems into account, we can see that there were hundreds of professional cricketers in the United Kingdom, many of whom had no association with county cricket. Most of them are a mystery. We cannot know what their experiences were like, or what their hopes and dreams might have been; the only such stories to survive are of those lucky enough to make it to the top. But what does seem clear is that professional cricket was the choice of an increasing number of people at the end of the nineteenth century.

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Date being collated from the 1931 census; a similar operation would have taken place to analyse the occupations on earlier censuses

These numbers can be checked to some extent against the official reports produced for each census into the number of people in different occupations. These numbers only apply to England and Wales, and each report records the information differently. For example, the report into the 1881 census states that 3,116 men and 46 women were engaged in “Billiard, Cricket & other Games”. But the report for 1891 places together all “persons who minister to amusement” including “professionals in various games.” These combined numbers had increased 80 per cent since 1881 to 9,095. In 1901, the same groupings were used, allowing direct comparison, but the report expanded on who this involved. The heading was “Exhibitions, Games, &c.,” which included those engaged in theatrical performance as well as “Athletic Sports and Race Course Service”. There were 12,516 men and 948 women, a total of 13,464 people involved in these various occupations, an increase of 4,369 since 1891. By 1911, again apparently using the same groupings, the total had more than doubled: there were 28,194 men and 4,021 women (a four-fold increase) working in the area of performance and exhibition.

The reasons for the growth in what could be called the “entertainment” industry do not concern us here, but it seems not to have been matched in the world of cricket, where numbers began to fall after 1901. Part of the reason was the centralisation of professional cricket into the County Championship and the cricket leagues found in Lancashire and Yorkshire; it was harder to find work as a cricketer outside of these spheres.

We cannot be certain how much cricketers were paid away from county level, and the fragmentary evidence that survives suggests that club professionals who were not big names might receive from £30 to £60 per season between 1900 and 1930, although the overall trend seems to have been upwards. This was better than the wage for most manual jobs, but as with county cricketers, there was no job security and an injury or loss of form would have meant disaster.

Perhaps the best way to understand the life of a professional cricketer is look at some examples of men working in cricket’s lower reaches, and whose lives never emerged from poverty.

The High Street in Hucknall Torkard, birthplace of Joseph Breedon, c. 1909 (Image: Nottinghamshire History)

Joseph Breedon was born on 22 April 1852 in Hucknall Torkard (now simply known as Hucknall), a town in the Ashfield area of Nottinghamshire. He was the son of an unmarried couple, William Talbot, an agricultural labourer born in Suffolk, and Leah Breedon, a washerwoman thirty years Talbot’s junior; they did not marry until late 1853. Such a delayed marriage was marginally more common at this time than it became later but would still have been a huge social taboo; a shotgun wedding usually prevented the birth of a child to unmarried parents. The most likely scenario is that both of Breedon’s parents were very poor, a theory which their occupations would support.

Joseph had three brothers, John (born 1854), Charles (born 1856) and Herbert (born 1869). By 1861, according to the census, Joseph was already working as a farm boy at the age of eight (this was the only census on which his name was given as Talbot; his surname is Breedon on all the others). The 1871 census records Leah Talbot, still listed as married but now the head of the family, working as a seamer in Bulwell; Joseph and Charles are miners, at the time an incredibly difficult and dangerous occupation. Their father was not living with them, but was an inmate in the nearby Basford Union Workhouse; by 1875, he was dead. This is another indication that the family had severe financial problems; probably William Talbot had abandoned his family (although he would still have been expected to support them), otherwise they would have joined him in the workhouse. There would have been no benefit to him going in alone and leaving them with no income.

Breedon married Mary Harrison in 1873 at Basford in Nottinghamshire. Although she is hard to locate on any census returns, she was almost certainly from Basford and around the same age as Breedon. It was around this period that he began playing cricket. CricketArchive records him appearing for Halifax against Yorkshire United in 1876. In 1880, there are two matches listed in which he played for Abbot’s Hill, a school in Hertfordshire; the likeliest explanation is that he had been engaged there as a coach.

From Abbot’s Hill, he must have progressed because by 1881 he was a coach at Elstree School; that year, he scored an unbeaten 71 as “Elstree School Masters” defeated the Free Foresters by an innings. He had also attracted enough attention (and presumably qualified by residence) to play for Hertfordshire; he appeared for the county regularly from 1881 until 1884. In the 17 matches recorded by CricketArchive, he scored 137 runs at 7.61 (with a highest score of 24 not out) and took 78 wickets (a full bowling analysis is not available for all his games, so we do not know his bowling average; in the games where we do have a full record, he took 38 wickets at 13.68). One of his team-mates at Hertfordshire, with whom he often opened the bowling, was Valentine Titchmarsh, who later became one of the best umpires in England. And in playing teams such as the MCC, Essex, Surrey and Hampshire, Breedon came up against some of the most famous cricketers of the period.

We can pick up little traces of what his life must have been like. While working at Elstree School, Breedon was a witness in court against two men accused of damaging trees on a farm in October 1882. He stated that he was a professional at the school, and had been “watching a wood in Elstree Parish” which was part of the farm when he saw the men. It is quite likely that this was part of his duties at the school; professionals were treated little better than hired hands.

The 1881 census records Breedon as the lodger of a widowed dressmaker called Emma Whale in Elstree, with whom he presumably stayed while performing his duties with the school. His occupation is listed as a cricketer. His wife was not staying with him, but seems to have moved south with him: a married woman from Basford called Mary Breedon was working as a servant in Battersea for Benjamin Pope and his family on the same census.

Back in Nottinghamshire, Breedon’s mother Leah, now working as a charwoman, had returned to Hucknall and lived with William and Herbert (who had mysteriously lost 4 years and was listed on the 1881 census as aged eight). She had also had another child: Ann, who was born in 1879, although there is no indication of who the father was. Leah died in 1887 at the age of 53.

We lose track of Breedon for a while after 1884, when his Hertfordshire career ended, and by 1886 he had left Elstree and joined the groundstaff of Warwickshire (which was not a first-class county at the time). That year, he played several matches for Warwickshire Club and Ground including one match against the Parsee team touring England, but he never played for the actual county eleven. His agreement with Warwickshire ended after one season.

Breedon’s last apparent connection with cricket came in 1888, when he reached the first-class sphere in a slightly unexpected way. He umpired three first-class games in August 1888 at Clifton, the Oval and Bradford. Quite how he came to be umpiring county matches is unclear. The brief nature of his career might indicate that he was standing in for an incapacitated umpire, but he must have been performing the role at a lower level; perhaps he was on the groundstaff of a club, as umpiring was often one of the duties of a professional. Clearly, he had attracted positive attention.

Bulwell Colliery, date unknown (Image via facebook)

By 1889, Breedon no longer played cricket but had returned to mining. We know this because he told Birmingham Police Court that he was now a collier at Bullwell. His appearance there in October 1889 concerned his surprisingly complicated personal life. He had been arrested and charged with “neglecting a wife”. The Birmingham Daily Post (1 November 1889) described how Breedon’s wife had been admitted to the King’s Norton Workhouse earlier that month. The authorities had found Breedon and arrested him as the person responsible for her. According to the report: “Breedon expressed his regret at finding himself in such a position, but it was, he said, very wrong of his wife to enter the workhouse.” Breedon explained how they had separated by “mutual consent” around eighteen months before, but she had never asked him for money. The master of the workhouse, Mr Morgan, accused Breedon of “cohabiting with another woman at Nottingham”, something Breedon denied. Despite the grumbling of Morgan, it was arranged that Breedon would take his wife out of the workhouse and pay “the expenses that the Guardians have incurred”. And Breedon expressed irritation that he had been arrested and taken to court “at a minute’s notice”.

What happened after this is unclear. Someone called Mary Breedon, born around 1849, was listed as a patient at Nottingham’s general hospital on the 1891 census, but she has been crossed out without any details being completed. And there is a death recorded, around the time of the census, of a Mary Breedon in Nottingham.

By 1891, Breedon had returned to Bulwell and we discover what lay behind the claims that he was co-habiting. He was listed on that census as a cricket umpire and coal miner. Living with him were: Thomas Terry, a boarder who was a coal miner; Terry’s sister Sarah Glover, listed as Breedon’s married “paramour”; and William Terry, Sarah’s twelve-year-old son from “before marriage”. It appears that Breedon lied in court when he said he was not co-habiting (unless the relationship began after the hearing, but the master of the workhouse had clearly heard something). Sarah Glover was the wife of another miner, but they had been separated for some time before 1891.

The relationship between Breedon and Glover was clearly strong; they were still living together at the time of the 1901 census, when he was still working as a miner, although he is now listed as her boarder. There is no further trace of Breedon in newspapers or anywhere else. CricketArchive states that he died in 1907 in Stockport, but this confuses him with a different Joseph Breedon. Our Joseph Breedon died in September 1910 and was buried (on 7 September) in the Northern Cemetery in Bulwell. Someone called Sarah Woodward was buried in the same plot in 1924: this is almost certainly Sarah Glover, who married a Jeremiah Woodward in 1919.

Breedon’s experience as a cricketer was not unique; many men like him drifted around the fringes of the professional game without quite making it. But he managed almost ten years of making a living from the sport. A similar story can be told about a contemporary of his.

Charles Johnson was the son of a miner from Silverdale in Staffordshire. He was born in 1845 and by the age of 15 was working as a miner himself. In 1866, he married Julia Johnson (it is unclear if she was relation) and the couple lived with his mother in 1871. By 1881, they had their own house, and Johnson was listed as an iron miner. But it was around this time that he made a brief but successful foray into the world of cricket.

Johnson played for Silverdale for many years but he had also played professionally for Treatham some time in the early 1870s. In the mid-1870s, he represented Northamptonshire (not a first-class county at the time). In 1877, he was appointed as the professional at Dalton Cricket Club near Huddersfield and according to a report in the Huddersfield Chronicle, he had already spent two years at Northamptonshire as a right-handed bowler. (CricketArchive has records of these games, but lists him simply as “C. Johnson”, making no link to Charles Johnson of Silverdale).

In 1881 Johnson made his debut for Staffordshire, for whom he played regularly until 1890. In 37 matches listed on CricketArchive, he scored 474 runs at 9.67 (with a highest score of 50 not out) and took 138 wickets (at an average of 13.71, discounting two wickets for which no analysis survives). Although Staffordshire perhaps faced less attractive opposition than Hertfordshire, Johnson played against the MCC several times and once against Yorkshire

The Kent’s Lane Colliery at Silverdale, photographed in 1903 (Image: Aural Sculptors)

The 1891 census lists Johnson as a miner, so presumably his professional cricket career had come to an end. He suffered a knee injury around 1892 which ended his playing days, although he had continued to coach the Silverdale team, and was one of the umpires for the North Staffordshire League. But his life ended abruptly a few years later. A brief report, carried in many newspapers across the country, informed readers that on 27 October 1896, Johnson was crushed to death when the roof fell in at the “Butterley Company’s Pit” in Silverdale. The Coalmining History Resource Centre lists him as killed by the “fall of roof at working face in Brown mine ironstone.”

The only lengthy account of his death — which seems to be a report of an inquest — came in the Leicester Journal on 30 October. It reported that he had been working at the Number 16 Pit on Kent’s Lane around 8am, with another miner called Samuel Lawrence. The latter went outside for a short time as part of the work, and heard what sounded like the roof falling. He called out, but received no response. On returning inside, he found Johnson dead, his neck having been broken by the fall of “the tops”. He was survived by his wife, but the couple had no children.

His widow was still living in Silverdale in 1901, but matters clearly took a turn for the worse because by 1911 she was an inmate at the Wolstanton and Burslem Union Workhouse in Silverdale. She died in 1912.

Contrasting the lives of men like Breedon and Johnson, or the many first-class cricketers who found life so hard in their later years, with the amateurs who dominated the sport can be uncomfortable. Contemporaries of Breedon and Johnson, like Reginald Hargreaves or Herbert Rhodes, never did a day’s work but had lives of luxury and leisure. And it is unlikely that they, or any of the leading amateurs, were aware of the existence of men like Breedon or Johnson. Perhaps worse, it is unlikely they would have cared even if they did. That was simply, in their philosophy, the natural order of things. Maybe that, and not “fair play”, is the reality of nineteenth century cricket.