“Into the Lion’s Mouth”: The Arrest of Tom Dale

The Royal Horse Guards (Blues) in 1853 (Image: National Army Museum)

In the modern age, the arrest of the captain of an international cricket team would make headlines across the world and generate enormous discussion. Even more so if it took place during a match. And if that captain proved to be someone other than he claimed to be, the repercussions would be huge. And yet all those things passed almost unnoticed during a very low key tour of England and Scotland by a Canadian cricket team in 1880. Only a handful of spectators were present when the man — listed by newspapers and on scorecards as Thomas Jordan — was taken away during the first day of a match against Leicestershire by a sergeant in the Royal Horse Guards and some policemen. Apparently only one journalist was there to see it, but news travelled rapidly afterwards until everyone knew the reason for the arrest: “Jordan” was actually an Englishman called Thomas Dale, wanted for desertion from the Royal Horse Guards eight years previously. And when the details emerged, the story was a strange one.

The Canadians — referred to by CricketArchive as the “Gentlemen of Canada”, but all contemporary reports simply called them “The Canadians” or “The Canadian Team” — were one of two sets of cricketing tourists in England in 1880. Their fellow visitors were an Australian team led by Billy Murdoch. Whereas no Canadian team had visited England before, this was the second “official” Australian team to play in England. In hindsight, the summer was a vital one because towards the end of the tour — after a summer in which they found it difficult to arrange fixtures against quality teams — the Australians played a match against a representative English team which was later recognised as the first Test match played in England.

Owing to the sensational nature of “Jordan’s” unmasking and arrest, the events of the 1880 Canadian tour have proven irresistible to some modern writers and the tale has been retold a few times online or in print. However, these retellings often get important details incorrect. Contrary to the impression given by contemporary sources — and repeated in all subsequent versions of the story — “Jordan” was not the official captain. Instead, the team was nominally led by a 47-year-old cricket enthusiast, the Reverend Thomas D. Phillips. However, Phillips did not arrive in England until the fifth game of the tour, having travelled separately. In his absence, the team was led by the “sub-captain” (i.e. vice-captain), the man who called himself “Jordan”. However, another detail in modern retellings is pure invention, a twisting of the narrative to add drama. It has been suggested that “Jordan” was responsible for organising the team and did a poor job; as a result, the tour was chaotic and unsuccessful. But most of the arrangements were made by the player-manager H. Miller, who was still seeking opposition to fill the fixture list as the team left Canada. In fact, nothing is known about how the tour came about, whose idea it was nor from where its funding originated.

Rev. T. D. Phillips, the actual captain of the 1880 Canadian team (Image: The Canadian Cricketers’ Guide)

The inspiration was almost certainly the successful (and remunerative) tour of the United States and Canada organised by Nottinghamshire’s Richard Daft in 1879. But unlike Daft’s team, or that of the 1880 Australians, the Canadians lacked a certain legitimacy. Only four of the side had been selected for the recent match played between Canada and the United States, a semi-regular series dating back to 1844. And in late May, an apparently well-informed Canadian wrote a letter published in the English press that denounced the entire tour. He revealed that three of the team were living in the United States; seven were English emigrants to Canada; and only five were Canadian. He continued: “Every honest cricketer in Canada scouts the scheme as ridiculous in the extreme. The newspapers are all down on the undertaking, and hope steps may be taken to prevent their playing as the representatives of Canada.” He claimed that only one man (not, incidentally, “Jordan”) “plays well enough to be in a second eleven of county colts, therefore their reception [in England] has not been too enthusiastic”, and that the only hope of any success was that enough money would be taken at the gate to pay the team’s expenses and allow for “an enjoyable pleasure trip”.

There was one curiosity about the anonymous letter that might have raised suspicions had anyone been paying attention. The writer named several players when discussing where they came from; one of these, who he said was based in the United States, he called Dale. But none of the coverage of the tour in the British press listed anyone called Dale as part of the team. Instead, there was someone called “Jordan”; no-one apparently noticed the discrepancy and later writers missed the implication that the Canadians already knew that “Jordan” was the assumed name of Dale. However, the author of the letter was apparently unaware of the origins of Dale/Jordan; he did not include him in the list of English-born players, even though it would shortly emerge that he had been born in Yorkshire.

In the meagre early coverage of the tour, “Jordan” did not stand out. One early article, in the Dundee Evening Telegraph, called him “a most successful bowler and hard hitter, and one of the most thorough cricketers in America”. He performed well enough in the opening four games, taking 33 wickets in the first five games (at an average of around 10), including eight for 70 (and twelve wickets in the match) in then opening game and nine for 54 against Hunslet. He also scored 126 runs at an average of 18, including a fifty against Greenock.

“Jordan” was one of the few successes in the early weeks. The team arrived via boat in Glasgow in May and began the tour in Scotland. After winning their first match, against the West of Scotland, the Canadians drew against Greenock and lost to a team of former pupils of Edinburgh’s Royal High School. Moving into England, the team lost to Hunslet before playing the newly formed minor county Leicestershire — their strongest opposition to that point — in a two-day game beginning on 2 June 1880. The game took place at the ground now known as Grace Road, but then known locally as the Aylestone Park ground (after the area in which it was located).

Overnight rain delayed the start, and play only began at one o’clock. Two of the team — including the official captain, Phillips — had landed in Liverpool the previous evening and arrived in Leicester after play began, taking part as soon as they reached the ground. The only first-hand report on the game — and therefore the only account of the arrest — appeared in the Hinckley News. Leicestershire batted first and were dismissed for 168; “Jordan” took four for 49. When the last wicket fell around 5:15, the Canadians made their way to the changing tent that had been provided. Suddenly, a small group of men quietly surrounded “Jordan”. One of the group was Sergeant Walter Strange of the Royal Horse Guards, the others were plainclothes policemen. Strange, watching the game from the boundary with field glasses, had identified “Jordan” as a deserter from the Royal Horse Guards whose real name was Thomas Dale. As “Jordan” left the field, Strange confronted him, accused him of being Dale and said that he had come to arrest him. “Jordan’s” protestations of innocence did not convince the policemen, who arrested him and took him from the ground with a minimum of fuss. The tiny number of spectators (who numbered under twenty) might not have been aware of what was happening, but “Jordan’s” team-mates were shocked, having been unaware that he was a deserter (even if they had almost certainly known his real name). The shaken team slumped to 36 for six that evening. “Jordan” was replaced in the team with the agreement of the opposition the following day but more rain meant that the match was drawn.

After Jordan/Dale’s arrest, the tour stumbled on for around six weeks. The press were kind, making allowances, but concluded that Canadian cricket was simply not very good, particularly in comparison to the Australians. Two games in Wales were abandoned in the immediate aftermath of the arrest and results remained poor. The team lost heavily to Stockport, the Orleans Club and the Gentlemen of Derbyshire, although they beat the MCC and Surrey Club and Ground by playing with fifteen men against eleven. Even the use of local reinforcements, including the Nottinghamshire professional Walter Wright, could neither improve results nor attract spectators and the team was operating at such a heavy loss that money ran out. A few days after the Canadians played Stourbridge, the tour was abandoned and the remaining fixtures — of which there were several — were abandoned. The final record — played 17, won 5, lost 6, drawn 6 — was underwhelming given the low quality of the opposition.

Meanwhile, Dale faced the consequences of his deception and his desertion. The day after his arrest, he admitted his identity when he appeared before Leicester Police Court, charged with desertion from the 2nd Horse Guards (Blues) on 8 November 1872. It transpired that Dale had been recognised by an officer of the Horse Guards while playing in Scotland. Sergeant Strange had been sent to make the arrest and located him in Leicester. He was remanded in custody by the magistrates until he could be transferred to a military prison for his court martial.

Over the following days and weeks after the arrest, the story emerged in the newspapers, which were eager to report on the sensation. So who was the man who had called himself Thomas Jordan?

Duncombe Park estate in Helmsley (Photo © Carol Rose [cc-by-sa/2.0])

Thomas Dale was born in Helmsley, Yorkshire (although his family listed his birthplace as Rievaulx, a village three miles north-west of Helmsley, next to the ruined Rievaulx Abbey), on 25 December 1847. He was the fourth child of Thomas Dale — listed on the 1851 and 1861 census as an agricultural labourer (although “herdsman” is crossed out on the latter) — and Ann Alenby. The Sunderland Daily Echo gave an account of his earlier years which said that his father was the chief herdsman (censuses from 1861 certainly list him as a herdsman) of the Earl of Faversham, whose extensive family home, Duncombe Park, was located in Helmsley. Although no official sources corroborate this, the census lists the family living at Griff Lodge, which was on the Duncombe Park estate, so it is highly probable that Dale’s father worked for the Earl.

Dale’s military record shows that he enlisted in the Horse Guards in December 1868. Among the details listed were that he was 6 feet and ½ inch tall, with a “fair” complexion, grey eyes and light brown hair. In the aftermath of his arrest, newspapers tried to fill in the background of his time in the military. The Sunderland Daily Echo reported that he “soon became a favourite amongst not only his comrades in the ranks, but the officers as well.” It also said that he excelled in sporting activities, taking part in athletic competitions for his regiment. According to the Hinkley News, Dale was a particularly keen cricketer, and played the Horse Guards against the Household Brigade. The Sunderland Daily Echo reported that Dale had deserted at least one previous time, before his disappearance, after he failed to return to barracks having taken part in a sporting event; it claimed that he soon surrendered himself and was briefly imprisoned.

However, Dale’s military record paints a less wholesome picture. He served only 324 days as a private before his first desertion in November 1869, when he was absent for just over a month. He rejoined his regiment and was sentenced to a week of confinement. The day after his release, he went absent without leave. During this time, he was involved in an incident which resulted in him being arrested for assault; he served just over two months in a civilian prison. After his release in March 1870, he returned to his regiment — perhaps through choice but more likely involuntarily — and was tried once again for desertion. This time, he was sentenced to four months in a military prison.  From July 1870 until November 1872, he appears to have served without incident before the final desertion from Windsor Cavalry Barracks on or around 8 November, after which he fled to the United States.

What happened next can be pieced together from stories that later emerged in the Canadian press. An apparently syndicated article published in Detroit in mid-June 1880 contained details of interviews with members of the Peninsular Cricket Club from that city. They said that Tom Dale had arrived in New Orleans in 1872. This can be corroborated independently because he was certainly in Mississippi, where he married an English woman called Rebecca Small, in 1873. The couple had one son but soon divorced (although there is no record of this). And it appears that Dale headed north from New Orleans because the members of the Peninsular Club believed that soon after his arrival, he found work with the mounted police in St Louis. The suggestion that he worked in some kind of law enforcement capacity was echoed by a report — perhaps copied from the Detroit source — in an English newspaper called The World, which indicated that he had operated close to the Mexican border.

A book called The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America (1998) by Tom Melville includes a few more details, taken from newspapers, about Dale’s life at this time. According to Melville, Dale played professionally for cricket clubs in St Louis and Chicago; he also was given the nickname “Jumbo” because of his size. If we can believe the sources at the Peninsular Club, Dale moved to Canada soon after this; the Detroit article explained that he “had the temerity” to work as a professional for the British officers’ cricket team in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The World went a little further, stating that Dale had been “informally identified” in Canada when he was working as a professional bowler for the Halifax garrison, but “the interests of good cricket had been allowed to prevail over the strict claims of military law, and so he had remained a free man”. However, this might have been a creative reinterpretation of what the members of the Peninsular Club had told the press.

How reliable the sources from the Peninsular Club might have been, they were on more solid ground with the information that in 1876, he moved back across the border to live in Toledo, Ohio, a city around 60 miles from Detroit. And according to their version, in 1877 he accepted a position as a professional cricketer at the Peninsular Club. Possibly their chronology is a little muddled because we know that Dale was married in Toledo in 1878, to a native of that city called Mary Ann Herr. Perhaps he only returned for the wedding.

The 1880 United States census lists Dale and his wife living in Wayne, which was part of Detroit, Michigan. By then, the couple already had two children. However, he gave his occupation as a “truckman”, suggesting that reports that cricket was not his main source of income. Nevertheless, we know that he played for several cricket clubs in this period. CricketArchive records some of appearances for the Peninsular Club, including games against the Australian team that had toured England in 1878 (which travelled home via the United States) and Richard Daft’s team the following year. And the members of the Peninsular Club told journalists that at the time of his arrest, Dale was living with his wife and children in the “Keeper’s House” at the cricket ground.

Clearly, Dale must have been a successful cricketer. There are also indications from the press reports after his arrest that he had played for Canadian clubs, which might account for his invitation to join the tour of England in 1880. For whatever reason, he accepted. By any measure, it seems a strange and unnecessarily reckless decision, particularly if he had indeed been recognised in Halifax. If he hoped that by changing his name, he would avoid detection, he had not reckoned with the determination with which the British army pursued deserters. What made the decision even more baffling was that, according to the article in The World, Dale had been a well-known cricket figure before his desertion, and was easily recognisable on the field owing to his unique bowling action. Therefore it had been an incredible risk (“thrusting his dead into the lion’s mouth” as The World phrased it) to return to England.

When he was indeed recognised while playing in Scotland, it was inevitable that Dale would be arrested. But one syndicated newspaper article published in the United States in mid-June 1880 offered an alternative explanation for his identification. It suggested that Dale had left an English wife when he fled to the United States. According to the article, she had pursued him across the ocean and had him arrested for bigamy following his American marriage. This avenging wife accepted money to divorce him and promised not to reveal his presence to the authorities, but went back on her word and passed on the information that led to his arrest. However, this appears to have been a purely dramatic invention; Dale never married in England (although his first wife was English) and no other contemporary article mentions the involvement of any angry wife. There is no evidence one way or another to indicate whether Dale’s marriage to Herr was bigamous. Yet modern writers have accepted this explanation and indicate that an angry wife reported Dale to the authorities. While not impossible, it seems unlikely.

After Dale had been uncovered and arrested, he spent a few days imprisoned in Leicester before the military authorities arrived. The Leicester Journal reported that, on 8 June: “A party from the 2nd Royal Horse Guards (Blues) arrived in Leicester from London to escort the Canadian cricketer, Dale, back to his regiment, to be tried by court martial. There was a large number of people at the gaol to witness the departure. A cab was used to convey the party to the station, and drove away amidst cheers from the spectators, the cricketer bowing in return.” Ironically, there might have been more people to watch Dale being taken away than watched any of the Canadian team’s games of cricket.

Knightsbridge Barracks as it would have looked in 1880

The only account of what happened next appeared in the Sportsman on 21 June, sourced from a “correspondent” and widely reprinted over the following weeks. Dale’s court martial was held at Knightsbridge and he was sentenced to 36 days in prison. But while in the guard room, he managed to escape until he was recaptured by a civilian. Therefore, another court martial was held immediately and another 300 days added to his sentence. Not every newspaper unquestioningly accepted this tale; for example the Liverpool Albion expressed doubts and suggested that if the tale was true, the officer in charge of the court martial deserved the strongest criticism as the second sentence was vindictive. And his military record tells a slightly different, more likely story: when he was tried after his arrest at Leicester, there is no indication of any attempted escape after sentencing. Instead, his sentence was for exactly 11 months (which amounted to the 336 days reported). Nor would 36 days have been a realistic sentence for someone who had previously already served over two months for desertion. The 1881 census records Dale as an inmate at Millbank, at that time operating as a military prison, with an occupation of “soldier and carman”. He was, curiously, listed as unmarried. Upon his release on 16 May 1881, he was discharged from the Royal Horse Guards; his record listed his “character on being discharged” as “bad” owing to his desertion and civilian sentencing. The cause was listed as “his incorrigible and worthless conduct”. His total service amounted to just three years and 117 days.

With that, Tom Dale disappeared from the newspapers. But he can be traced over the following years through his cricket and through official records, because he returned to live in the United States for the rest of his life. He and his second wife continued to live together, and had more children — nine in total — of whom at least four were born after his release from prison. Dale also resumed playing cricket; he appeared for various teams between 1882 and 1895, including Detroit and Chicago, and made a single first-class appearance when he represented the United States against the Gentlemen of Philadelphia in 1883. According to local obituaries, he also coached the Detroit Athletic Club and was a good swordsman and boxer. The Peninsular Club gave him a benefit in 1883.

By the time of the 1900 census, he and his family were living in another part of Wayne. Dale was listed as a “mailbox repairman”. But the marriage was not a happy one by this stage. His wife began divorce proceedings against him for cruelty in 1904, and the divorce was granted in 1906. No further details are available but between his repeated desertions and his imprisonment for assault in 1869, this divorce is hardly indicative of a sympathetic character. Dale remarried almost immediately. His third wife, Catherine Ashley, was a Canadian thirty years younger than Dale; the wedding took place in Prince Edward, Ontario, but it is unclear whether Dale was living in Canada or went there only for the marriage. By the time of the 1910 United States census, he and his wife had returned to Wayne; Dale was working for the Post Office as a repairman and the couple had a child. A second soon followed — Dale’s eleventh. The 1920 census records the 73-year-old Dale working as a Post Office clerk. He died in February 1921: his cause of death given as senility and he was listed on the death certificate as a master mechanic. He was survived by all of his wives.

Dale’s story is a strange one, and largely inexplicable given how little information survives. Was he a rogue who tried to be too clever? Was he a man whose love of cricket drove him to recklessness? Tempting as it is to imagine this scenario, it is more likely that something else lay behind not only his ill-fated homecoming in 1880, and his odd and convoluted route through the United States and Canada between 1872 and 1880. Unless more sources can be found, the full story will never be truly understood.

The Bigamist and the Thief: The Tales of Two Cricketers

Professional cricketers were most often used as net bowlers for members of cricket clubs such as the MCC (Image: Practising in the Nets at Lord’s by Arthur Hopkins, The Graphic, 28 July 1894)

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as cricket’s popularity exploded in England, a surprisingly large number of people found professional employment in the sport. The most talented were snapped up by the first-class counties for their teams, played at the top level and sometimes became famous; others were taken onto the county groundstaff where they fulfilled a more mundane role that nevertheless paid relatively well. Similarly, the Marylebone Cricket Club employed professionals to take care of Lord’s Cricket Ground, to bowl to its privileged members or to make up the numbers in the teams it sent to play huge numbers of fixtures around England. Many of these “lesser” professionals played first-class cricket, even if they never achieved any great success. Yet this was only one slice of the world of professional cricket at the time. Many local clubs around Britain paid professionals to play for their team; schools employed professional coaches; even some wealthy individuals engaged professionals for private instruction. As a result, it was possible to earn a living through playing cricket even for those well short of county standard, and some professionals became local celebrities, especially when playing for league clubs.

But at this lower level, most professionals were anonymous and the stories of those who never reached first-class cricket are generally lost to us. The exceptions usually involve those who found themselves in some kind of trouble. Two such examples are two men about whose cricket we know nothing; the only evidence that they played the game professionally comes from their census returns and the accounts of their lives that they gave when they appeared in court when their mistakes caught up with them. Both men were roughly the same age but had very different stories that only briefly touched on cricket. Nevertheless, they can tell us a little bit more about what it might have been like to be a struggling Victorian professional who never quite made it in the sport of their choice.

The signatures of Herbert Hopewell (from his enlistment papers in 1915) and James William Hill (from his marriage certificate in 1884)

Our first player was a man called Herbert Hopewell, born at Cotgrave, Nottinghamshire, in 1865. He was the seventh of nine children of Thomas Hopewell, an agricultural labourer, and Anne Boulton, who was a servant before her marriage. When Hopewell was baptised in July 1865, two of his sisters were also baptised at the same time. Perhaps having such a large family caused his parents some financial difficulties because by the time of the 1871 census, Hopewell was not living with his parents; instead he lived with his second cousin, a 46-year-old railway porter called Thomas Peel, who had three daughters over the age of seventeen but no children Hopewell’s age. When we next encounter Hopewell, on the 1881 census, he was sixteen years old and working as a footman for a widowed 66-year-old called Elizabeth Becher, who employed five other live-in servants.

Before long, Hopewell had entered the profession which he followed for most of his life. By June 1883, he was working as a tram conductor in Nottingham. We know this because he appeared in court that month, claiming that a man called Arthur Thompson, who had been arguing with the tram driver, had struck him when Hopewell — the conductor of the tram — had challenged him over his behaviour. The case, however, was dismissed. On 13 August that year, Hopewell married a woman called Elizabeth Southern at Basford registry office. He gave his occupation as “tram car conductor”. She was working as a domestic servant; her father was listed as a “cow keeper” on the marriage certificate but he was working as a “cottager” (someone responsible for a small plot of land containing a cottage).

The marriage was one of urgent necessity rather than romance; less than a month after the wedding, Elizabeth gave birth to the couple’s only child, a daughter called Annie Mary Hopewell. From what followed, it is clear that Hopewell had entered the marriage reluctantly. They first lived in Woodborough, where Elizabeth was from, and soon moved to Nottingham, but the relationship did not last. The story emerged in 1896 when she divorced him.

In February 1884, Elizabeth — who later said that she had been very ill, but who was just as likely to have been seeking respite from an unhappy situation — went to stay with her parents in Woodborough for a few days, and was seen off from the railway station by Hopewell. When she returned to Nottingham, she discovered that Hopewell had gone, having sold all their furniture. She returned to her parents and did not see him again until accidentally meeting him at Nottingham Goose Fair in October 1885. He told her that he had been living in Manchester, and asked for her forgiveness. He said that she should join him in Manchester; she agreed and they lived together in Manchester for two weeks until Hopewell suggested that she should live with her parents while he saved up to buy them a new home. She did so, but later discovered that he had enlisted in the King’s Own Lancaster Regiment, using the name Herbert Boulton (his mother’s surname). He remained in contact with Elizabeth and periodically suggested that they should meet in Nottingham, and he stayed there for a time while on leave.

And then his employment changed again; he wrote to tell her that he had been employed as a butler to “a lady in Dublin” and planned to emigrate to the United States. When they later met in Nottingham in 1891, Hopewell told her that he had no intention of living with her anymore: he had “got another” and suggested that “you can get one too”. At this stage, she discovered he was living with his brother at Hyson Green (a fact corroborated on the 1891 census); she once again met him, and there was “a stormy interview” before he again told her he would not live with her. The reason, as she later discovered, was that while still using the name Boulton, he had bigamously married a woman called Bertha Denial in Sheffield on 24 December 1892.

An undated image of Reginald Street in Sheffield; after his bigamous marriage, Hopewell lived with Bertha Denial in a court off Reginald Street, under the name Boulton

Elizabeth learned of this marriage in 1896, and of Hopewell’s new life and family in Sheffield, and filed for divorce. Hopewell did not contest it, and Bertha Denial even appeared in court to corroborate the fact of his bigamous marriage. Elizabeth was granted the divorce, and custody of their child. Not long after this, she remarried and emigrated to the United States with her daughter and her new husband.

During this period, Hopewell had held several jobs, and one of these was that of a professional cricketer. The 1891 census — at the time of which he lived with his brother, listed him as such and his employment was also discussed during the divorce. The court was told that he had been a professional cricketer “at the Trent Bridge ground” in Nottingham for a period around 1892. However, there is no record at Nottinghamshire of Hopewell ever being employed by the county; it is more likely that he was working as a professional at another local club. Although there are no obvious newspaper records of him playing cricket locally (there are a few possible traces, but nothing definite), there would have been no reason for him to lie about his occupation, either on the census or in court. And having such a job also increased the publicity around his divorce; local newspapers reported “A Professional Cricketer in the Divorce Courts”. It is also possible that he played professionally in Sheffield, but by the time of his sham marriage to Bertha Denial, he was working as a stoker, which implies that he was perhaps employed on the railway: a stoker was responsible for keeping steam engines fired.

Hopewell seems to have turned his life around after the divorce. He continued to live with Bertha Denial — with whom he had a daughter born in 1894 — and they married legally in 1901 and had two more children, both sons. But they moved to Lancashire. The 1901 census listed the family in Chorlton (near Manchester), and Hopewell was working as a tram driver. He had the same job on the 1911 census, by which time the family had moved to Bury where they lived for the rest of Hopewell’s life. During the First World War, he enlisted — at the age of 49 — in the 4th Lancashire Fusiliers, but poor eyesight prevented him from serving abroad. When the war ended, he began working as a stores keeper for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Hopewell died in Bury in 1937; his wife remarried later that year and died in Manchester in 1953.

It is not quite certain what we should make of Hopewell. He treated his first wife very poorly, although he never seems to have been cruel: the divorce papers limit the complaints to bigamy and desertion. His desperate flight to various parts of Britain and Ireland — and the adoption of an alias — to avoid his responsibilities reflect poorly on him. It is possible that cricket — along with his supposed career in the army, as a butler and as a stoker — was just one of many ways of earning money while he, in effect, hid from his wife. Once he had been divorced, he returned to his main career — working on trams. Yet that a man who can hardly have been a dedicated cricketer could briefly earn a living from the game demonstrates that opportunities existed.

For our second professional cricketer, the sport was more than just an escape route; he seems to have had a fairly long career, comprising at least two spells of employment. But unlike Hopewell, he never quite found a way out of his problems. James William Hill was born in Milford Haven, Wales, around 1859. He was the fourth and youngest child of Richard Hunt Hill, who had worked most of his life as a seaman in the Royal Navy, and Hannah Pierce (whose father was also in the navy). Hill’s family were from Dorset but lived in Wales at the time of his birth, probably for reasons connected to his father’s role in the Navy. At the time of the 1861 census, Richard Hunt Hill was the Acting Chief Bosun’s Mate on the HMS Blenheim, based in Holyhead; at that time, he had recently transferred to the Customs Service, with which the Blenheim was associated.

There are some curiosities about the family, however. In 1844, around a year after Richard Hill married Hannah, they had a daughter called Maria. Their second child, Elizabeth, was born in 1848. Yet when the 1851 census was taken, Elizabeth lived with her maternal grandparents while Hannah and Maria were visitors at the house of John White — another sailor, who was away from home at the time — and his wife Maria. By the time of the 1861 census, Maria Hill was listed as the adopted daughter of Maria White (although later censuses listed her as a visitor at the house). No obvious explanation can be found for this unusual arrangement, nor why Elizabeth was not with her mother.

By the time of the 1871 census, Richard Hill’s ten year engagement with the Royal Navy’s Customs Service had recently ended; the family relocated to London, where Hill senior later worked as a custom’s officer. James was at school, and there were also two female lodgers in the house, located at South Bank in Marylebone, which might be an indication of some degree of financial difficulty. After this point, it is hard to tell exactly what happened to James William Hill, but it appears that life did not go too well. At first, he might have attempted to follow his father into the Navy; in 1879, a man called James William Hill, an ordinary seaman, was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment for disobedience after a court martial at Portsmouth. However, that might have been someone else entirely because we know that around this time he began to play cricket professionally.

The 1881 census records Hill as a lodger in Marylebone, listed as a “painter”, but that August he began work as a porter for the Metropolitan Railway; his previous employment was listed as a “professional bowler” with the Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord’s Cricket Ground. In other words, he must have been a member of the Lord’s Groundstaff. To be employed by the MCC — probably as a net bowler and groundsman — offered a degree of financial security for a professional, and such positions were coveted. But he would have been some way down the pecking order, probably one of the so-called “second-class” professionals who played only when there were no alternatives. There might be a record of one game in this period in which he appeared: in July 1880, the MCC played the Royal Engineering College at Staines, and the number eleven in the MCC’s order — who neither batted nor bowled — was a man called Hill. If this was our man, he had some good team-mates: the Nottinghamshire professionals (and future Test cricketers) Wilfred Flowers and Mordecai Sherwin were also playing for the MCC.

Perhaps Hill planned to continue with the MCC, and the position with the Metropolitan Railway was intended to be a winter job — an occupational necessity for all professional cricketers in this period — but it did not quite work out. In October, he was arrested (under the name James William Hills) for stealing clothing and sentenced to a month’s imprisonment. If Hill needed to steal clothes, he must have been badly struggling; he was hardly targeting luxury items. As he was also unable to attend his job, he was dismissed for being absent without leave. There is no indication that he returned to his position with the MCC. After this, we lose track of Hill until January 1883, when he found employment as a porter at Child’s Hill railway station, where he worked until being discharged (the records do not explain why) in mid-July.

In October 1884, Hill married Elizabeth White Draper, a piano teacher and the daughter of a smith, whose family — like Hill’s — originated from Dorset but then lived in London. There is no obvious later trace of her, and certainly she did not live with Hill by the time of the 1891 census (although he still listed himself as married). There is some evidence that she later remarried and possibly moved abroad, but it is hard to be certain. On the marriage certificate, Hill was listed as a “gaoler” but there is no evidence of which, if any, prison at which he might have worked.

There is a possibility that he returned to cricket after this; there were two matches played by the MCC — in 1887 and 1888 — in which someone called J. Hill appeared. The two teams were very much “second string” sides, playing against local club sides while more prestigious MCC elevens faced schools. There is no record of these games apart from a bare scorecard on CricketArchive, so it is impossible to know if this was our Hill. However, he certainly resumed his career at some point as the 1891 census describes his occupation as “professional cricketer”.

Troopers from the Royal Horse Guards in Whitehall, around 1910 (Image: Wikipedia)

Our next trace comes in October 1888 when Hill successfully applied to join the Royal Horse Guards. He told several lies in his application: that he was unmarried, that he had been born in 1865; he also said that he had not lived away from home for more than three years, which seems unlikely. He listed his employment as a “professional cricketer”. He agreed to serve in the army for twelve years. His records listed his height as a quarter of an inch less than 6 feet, with light brown hair and grey eyes. However, he was discharged after just one year and 20 days; no reason was given on the record. However, it noted that while in the army, he contracted “chronic pneumonic phthisis”, better known today as tuberculosis. Something about this is not quite right; his subsequent activities indicate that he was hardly seriously ill at that time, and although it is not possible to trace his death, he was still living in 1901.

Whatever else was going on with his life, by the time of the 1891 census (taken on 5 April), he was living back with his parents and his sister (Elizabeth, who was working as a manageress at a dressmaker). His cricket career had apparently ended as someone had added the “ex” in front of his occupation as “professional cricketer”, but that could have been connected with what happened next. Later in the month, Hills was arrested and charged with theft. He had stolen a garden roller from a lawn tennis club in Dulwich, and with stealing (amongst other items) two cricket bats and a bag from Lloyd’s Cricket Club in Honor Oak. At the time of his arrest, he told the court that he was a professional cricketer, and it is tempting to wonder if the theft was connected to struggles in equipping himself for his job. His solicitor told the court that Hill was “very respectable connected, and … hitherto he had borne a most excellent character”, but he was sentenced to two month’s hard labour.

This seems to have been a turning point for Hill, because he spent the next decade in and out of prison for petty theft that, as was common at the time, was heavily punished. At some point, he lived in Blackpool where he was sentenced to six weeks for stealing a blanket in November 1894. Matters soon escalated from stealing the purely essential. In November 1897, he was imprisoned for six months for the theft of a bicycle in London; in July 1898 he was sentenced to eight months, with hard labour, for stealing a watch and chain from William Charles Peach, and stealing a cricket ball and two bails from Walter Guppy.

By this stage, he had a record as a “habitual criminal” which recorded details about him: his date (which was inaccurately recorded as 1864 or 1865) and place of birth (which was correct), his aliases (John Hill, James William Hills), a brief description, and details of some tattoos. Of the latter, two dots were probably marks of his time in prison but more revealingly he had a tattoo of a man holding a cricket bat on his right forearm; the sport must have meant a great deal to him. But by the time of his 1897 arrest, he was working as a cook and in 1898 he worked as a stoker.

Wandsworth Prison photographed in 2008

In 1900, Hill was sentenced to 14 months for another theft; the 1901 census listed him as a prisoner at Wandsworth, and his occupation remained a stoker. when released he went to sea as a stoker (although he was also supposed to have done this after his previous release). After that, there is no further obvious trace of him. There are several possible death records — including a James William Hill who died at St Pancras in 1902 — but nothing definitive. His mother died in 1895 and his father in 1902.

Unlike Hopewell, Hill had an apparently lengthy career as a professional cricketer and seems to have been invested in the game — particularly bearing in mind his tattoo and the cricket-related nature of some of his thefts. But from the 1890s, whether from necessity or because it had become his preferred source of income, he took part in an increasing number of thefts; and it seems a fair assumption that he stole on many other occasions when he was not caught. Whether he died — perhaps from tuberculosis — soon after his final release from prison or did indeed go to sea, his fate is a mystery. So are many aspects of his life because, like Hopewell, he was not the sort of person whom the authorities would have wanted to be associated with the supposedly noble game of cricket.

And yet, for all the trumpeting of amateur virtues, for all the prestige surrounding Eton v Harrow or Oxford v Cambridge, late-Victorian cricket was just as much about men like Hopewell and Hill as it was about glamorous stars such as W. G. Grace, Ranjitsinhji or Stanley Jackson. It was still an unregulated world of opportunity, and a lifeline for those whose lives involved struggle and hardship, even if that escape was, for many, only temporary.