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.
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.
Old Ebor 
