“We played some indifferent amateurs”: Amateur Status Away from the Top

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The Somerset team which surprisingly defeated Middlesex at Weston-super-Mare in 1922 contained nine amateurs. Back row: A. Young, T. C. Lowry, M. D. Lyon, J. J. Bridges, S. G. U. Considine. Front row: E. Robson, W. T. Greswell, P. R. Johnson, J. Daniell, J. C. White, J. C. W. MacBryan. Only Young and Robson were professionals.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the County Championship was dominated by northern teams. Apart from Middlesex’s titles in 1920 and 1921, the only County Champions between the two world wars were Yorkshire (twelve times), Lancashire (five times), Nottinghamshire (once) and Derbyshire (once). Kent and Surrey, although they never finished as champions, were always competitive; Sussex, like Derbyshire, were better in the 1930s, while Gloucestershire and Essex also had their moments. The remaining counties generally struggled. Glamorgan, Somerset, Warwickshire, Hampshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Worcestershire were often to be found battling in the lower reaches of the table and never mounted a realistic challenge for the Championship. There were several reasons for this, but the main ones were financial. Lacking the facilities of some of the bigger clubs and attracting far fewer spectators and members, these teams lived a precarious existence. On more than one occasion, some looked likely to fold completely and were often dependent on wealthy benefactors to keep them going. This had a lasting impact on the teams; they could not employ as many professionals as other counties, or offer terms attractive enough to prevent players seeking a better deal elsewhere, whether at another county or in league cricket. Those professionals who remained loyal received lower wages than their counterparts at the bigger clubs and received far lower sums if they were awarded a benefit.

The result was that these counties relied on amateurs who required the payment of nothing more than expenses. While other teams could afford to employ “shamateurs” — men who held that status in name only, receiving surreptitious payments to allow them to play for their counties (an issue that had been festering for many years) — the counties which were struggling needed genuine amateurs whom they did not need to pay. As many of these were only available some of the time, the result was often an unsettled and constantly changing team. In Gentlemen and Players (1987) by Michael Marshall, Glamorgan’s Wilf Wooller recalled: “We played some of our indifferent amateurs for economic reasons, and it has to be said that Maurice Turnbull liked to have a few cronies along with him as social companions.” This cannot have been easy for the professionals who were forced to make way.

The Kent accounts for 1930 provide some insight into the savings that could be made. The expenses claimed by amateurs amounted to just 11 per cent of the outgoings paid to players for Championship matches, even though over the season 37 per cent of the available places were filled by them. Furthermore, the Findlay Commission — a committee appointed in 1937 by the MCC, under the former Oxford and Lancashire player William Findlay, to examine the problems facing counties — revealed that over the three year period from 1934 to 1936, Somerset was the only county whose income (excluding the Test match profits shared between all the counties) was greater than their expenditure; Somerset usually played a higher proportion of amateurs than other teams.

The problem was that it was increasingly difficult to find amateurs. Fewer and fewer men whose social background precluded them becoming professionals — the upper-middle classes, the university graduates, the former public schoolboys — could spare enough time to play regular county cricket; their financial situations compelled them to have full-time jobs. In his excellent Cricket and England (1999), Jack Williams provides some statistics on amateurs between the wars. In 1920, 39 per cent of appearances in the County Championship were made by amateurs; this figure fell to 20 per cent by 1930 and 19 per cent by 1939. If the northern counties were almost always all-professional apart from the captain, southern counties had a much higher proportion of amateurs. In 1920, only two professionals appeared for Somerset in the entire season; only four played that season for Middlesex, the County Champions. It was a conscious policy at Sussex until 1928 that there should be four amateurs in every team. The contrast between north and south could be clearly seen in the percentage of amateur appearances at several counties in 1930: the figure was nine at Lancashire, 32 at Kent, 37 at Middlesex and 55 at Somerset. In 1939, the amateur percentage at Kent was 31, at Somerset 29 and at Worcestershire 25. And a final figure: in 1930, only 24 amateurs appeared in at least 20 County Championship matches. Given a limited pool from which to draw, it is unsurprising that the stronger teams quickly acquired the best amateur talent, leaving the weaker counties casting around desperately for whoever was left.

Aside from any financial considerations, an important factor in the desperation for amateurs was connected to captaincy. In this period, all teams were captained by amateurs. The reasons were largely based around class discrimination, no matter how contemporaries tried to dress it up. But this led to problems. The scarcity of amateurs who could play regularity meant that many counties had a rapid turnover of leaders. This even extended to the stronger sides: Yorkshire, where the captain was often the only amateur in the team, had seven captains between 1919 and 1939, as did Sussex.

Worcestershire’s team in the late 1920s. Back row: C. R. Preece, J. B. Higgins, C. V. Tarbox, J. F. MacLean, H. L. Higgins, H. O. Hopkins, L. E. Gale. Front row: C. F. Root, M. K. Foster, The Earl of Coventry (President), F. A. Pearson, Hon. J. B. Coventry (Image: A Cricket Pro’s Lot (1937) by Fred Root). Only Preece, Tarbox, Root and Pearson were professionals. Fred Root dated this photograph to 1927, although it appeared in Tatler on 28 May 1924 and shows the team which played Glamorgan at Worcester on 10–13 May 1924.

The effect was heightened lower down the county table. In the same period, Leicestershire had ten captains; Northamptonshire had nine. One-season captains were relatively common, as was the phenomenon of having multiple leaders in a single season: with no suitable amateur available, Leicestershire made no appointment in 1932 and were captained by six different men. And the lack of suitable amateurs for the weaker counties meant that some captains were very inexperienced. E. W. Dawson captained Leicestershire in 1928 as a 24-year-old who had graduated from Cambridge the previous year. At Northamptonshire, Alexander Snowden — who had first played for the county as an eighteen-year-old amateur in 1931 — led the team at the beginning of 1935, aged just 21. His Wisden obituary in 1982 stated: “Although [Snowden] won the toss in his first ten matches, he was not a success; he had insufficient confidence in himself and the side rather lost confidence in him. The experience had a disastrous effect on his form and in 30 innings his highest score was only 29.” The episode largely finished him as a first-class cricketer, but there was an unfortunate side-effect for his county. Snowden’s father was a local councillor and his donations had been instrumental in saving Northamptonshire from bankruptcy in 1931; at the end of the 1935 season he gave an angry speech at a meeting of the Peterborough and District Cricket League which blamed the Committee for the poor form of the county and his son that year. He hinted that all was not well within the team and indicated that the treatment of his son meant that he was ending his support for the club.

The need for amateur captains resulted in some other oddities. When the regular captain was unavailable at Northamptonshire in 1921 and in 1932, the team was captained by an eighteen-year-old. And many amateur captains had frankly appalling playing records and were included in the team purely through their leadership role. But stronger counties also fell into these traps; the permanent Lancashire captain in 1919, Miles Kenyon, had never played first-class cricket. Yorkshire, too, appointed some very inexperienced captains who were frankly out of their depth, resulting in the muddled attempt of the Yorkshire Committee to appoint Herbert Sutcliffe in 1927.

This is not the place to discuss the perception of amateurs, nor the contemporary conviction that they were essential to English cricket. While teams like Kent or Sussex favoured amateurs for stylistic, philosophical and social reasons, counties which were struggling financially simply needed to get eleven players onto the field without going bankrupt. The lack of suitable candidates led to some frankly strange selections.

Reginald Moss pictured in the Oxford University cricket team in 1890

Perhaps the most extreme example of the need for amateurs came in 1925 when Worcestershire selected the Reverend Reginald Moss, who was the Rector of Icombe — a village near Stow-on-the-Wold, between Cheltenham and Oxford — at the time. It was not particularly remarkable that he was a clergyman and although this was his only appearance in the County Championship, he had previous experience of first-class cricket, playing for Oxford University. The problem was that he played for Oxford between 1887 and 1890, and his last first-class appearances had been in 1893. When he played for Worcestershire, he was 57 years old, which makes him the oldest cricketer to play in the County Championship; the gap of 32 years between appearances is also a record. He had been a reasonable cricketer; apart from playing for Radley College and Oxford, he had played some minor matches for Lancashire in 1886, in the Minor Counties Championship for Bedfordshire between 1901 and 1909, and had played for Herefordshire. He had also worked as an Assistant Master at Malvern College. So apart from the minor inconvenience of his age, he was the ideal amateur in many ways.

It is not clear what particular circumstance prompted Worcestershire to play Moss because nothing about him stood out; his regular teams at the time were the Old Biltonians (he had attended Bilton Grange Preparatory School), Stow-on-the-Wold and Bourton Vale. His selection drew plenty of attention but Pelham Warner in The Cricketer was scathing: “Without wishing in any way to belittle the skill and enthusiasm of an experienced cricketer, we cannot help stating that it seemed a confession of weakness on the part of Worcestershire to include the Rev. R. H. Moss in their side against Gloucestershire at Worcester on Saturday last.” In any event, the game was underwhelming for Moss. He did not bowl in Gloucestershire’s first innings and batting at number nine in the first innings, he scored 2. In the second Gloucestershire innings, he bowled three overs for five runs and took the wicket of the opener M. A. Green. Batting at number eleven in Worcestershire’s second innings, he was the last man out, bowled by Walter Hammond for 0, as Gloucestershire won by 18 runs. Moss then faded back into obscurity; he and his wife Helen lived peacefully with their three children. He died at the age of 88 in 1956, but his obituary did not appear in Wisden until 1994.

The case of Moss was somewhat unusual as weaker counties were more inclined to try young amateurs just out of school in the hope of finding someone who could strengthen the team or prove to be a potential future captain. Very occasionally, a good player was uncovered; but most young amateurs of any talent, particularly those who went to Oxford or Cambridge, were attracted to the stronger counties. However, that is not to say that there are not some interesting stories to be uncovered. One of the more unusual is to be found in the tale of a fairly typical amateur experiment, a young player who appeared for Worcestershire in the mid-1930s.

Cyril Harrison in 1935 (Image: Daily Mirror, 11 January 1936)

Cyril Stanley Harrison was born on 11 November 1915, the son of George Harrison and his wife Winnifred Jessie Bradley. His father worked as a bricklayer with the Salt Union but later became a prominent builder and a member of Droitwich Council. Cyril had five brothers and three sisters; he was the fourth to be born. He attended Worcester Royal Grammar School, where he made a name for himself primarily as a batsman. He also played football and rugby. In short, he was an ideal candidate to play as an amateur for a county which struggled to attract more glamorous names.

It was not long before Worcestershire noticed him. In 1933, Harrison played for the “Gentlemen of Worcester”. The following year, at the age of eighteen, he played for the county second eleven (obviously as an amateur) early in the season. On 9 June 1934, he made his first-class debut against Lancashire on 9 June, batting in the lower-middle order and bowling slow-left-arm spin. Apart from taking three for 89 against Nottinghamshire, he did little to suggest that he was a good enough player through the course of June. But at the very end of the month, he had his one success as a first-class cricketer. In the fourth innings, Hampshire needed 122 to defeat Worcestershire after the home team lost nine wickets for 74 in their second innings. Harrison — the fifth bowler to be used — took seven for 51 to bowl his team to an unlikely win by six runs (Hampshire had one man absent injured). At one stage his figures were 4–3–1–3. The wicket had broken up, assisting his bowling, but he flighted the ball very well. When the last pair came together, Hampshire needed fourteen to win and scored half of them before Harrison bowled Len Creese, the top-scorer, for 28. The delighted home supporters carried Harrison from the field, and he was awarded his county cap; as it transpired, this was somewhat premature.

Harrison kept his place for the rest of the season, but never approached this form again. Apart from taking three for 83 against Yorkshire, he never took more than two wickets in an innings, and never scored more than 28 with the bat. He finished the season with 150 runs at 6.25 and 25 wickets at 36.92. Although some critics suggested that he needed to bowl a little quicker to be successful, he was viewed as a promising player in a team which lacked stars. But the key attraction was almost certainly that he was an amateur. So when he turned professional before the 1935 season, he immediately lost most of his appeal. We do not know why he made the change — as we shall see, he was studying to be a surveyor — but it effectively signalled the end of his first-class career.

Harrison only played twice more for the county; after conceding none for 101 in 17 overs against Sussex in his first match of 1935, and bowling only seven wicketless overs against Lancashire in his next, he was dropped from the team, never to return. The emergence of Dick Howarth and the success of Peter Jackson that season left little room for an inexperienced spinner, particularly one who now required payment without any guarantee of being effective. Had he remained as an amateur, perhaps they would have persisted with him a little longer.

Harrison therefore looks like another of the many cases of a young cricketer enjoying some early success before fading away and living the rest of his life in obscurity. But this was not quite the case. At the beginning of 1936, Harrison featured in the newspapers for reasons entirely unconnected to his cricket.

Away from the sports field, Harrison was a trainee surveyor with Worcester Corporation; he was an articled clerk to the Worcester town planner. On 8 January 1936, he was due to travel to sit an examination in London with the Chartered Surveyors Institute. He had arranged to travel by train with a friend — a colleague called Mr Dodd. Harrison’s fiancé, the 19-year-old Mary Baxter, accompanied him early that morning from his home in Droitwich to Worcester, where he said goodbye to her at the train station before heading to meet his friend on the train. He subsequently disappeared without trace. He never arrived for his examination, which was to take place over two days on 9 and 10 January, nor did he return to his family. His disappearance was reported to Scotland Yard, and his family put out a statement: “Cyril seemed fit and healthy, and very keen on his work. We know of no friends he might have visited outside Droitwich or Worcester. Mr and Mrs Harrison cannot explain his disappearance, and they are extremely worried.” Several newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, which printed Harrison’s photograph, carried the story.

After more than a fortnight, the mystery was solved when Harrison finally wrote to his parents to explain where he was. The Birmingham Daily Gazette told the story on 28 January; most other newspapers had forgotten him by then. A few days after Harrison’s disappearance, a man from Droitwich called R. C. J. Marvin, who had intended to look for work in London, wrote to his family from an address in Bayswater. Marvin’s family suspected that he was with Harrison, and contacted the latter’s family; George Harrison and Mary Baxter therefore travelled to the address to see Marvin on 12 January, only to discover that he and another man — whose description matched that of Harrison — had left the previous day. Shortly before the story was printed in the newspaper (no specific date is given), Harrison wrote to his parents from Southampton saying he was safe; at the same time, Marvin wrote to his own parents to say that he and Harrison had left London on 11 January after seeing the latter’s photograph printed in a newspaper. Marvin reported that “they had both had a good time and were looking for work.”

Kidderminster Cricket Club in 1951; Harrison is seated on the front row at the far left (Image: Sports Argus, 21 July 1951)

Unfortunately, the newspapers are silent on what happened next. We do not know if Harrison ever sat his examination, what prompted his disappearance or if he changed his career. The only clue comes on the electoral register for 1938–39, which reveals that he was still living with his parents in Droitwich. In mid-1939, he married Doris Mary Baxter in Droitwich. There is no clear evidence of him on the 1939 Register for England and Wales which might suggest that he had already joined the armed forces. Mary was listed living with her parents in Droitwich, but on the electoral register for this period, the newly-married couple share the same address.

Although details are scarce, Harrison seems to have served with the Royal Engineers during the war; there is a record of his promotion to sub-lieutenant in 1944. The rest of his life seems to have passed without incident. The couple had two daughters: Jean in 1941 and Valerie in 1948. Harrison continued to play cricket, appearing regularly for Kidderminster in the 1950s, but otherwise attracted no further attention from the world at large. He died on 28 May 1998, without an obituary appearing in Wisden; Margaret died in 2012.

Perhaps Harrison’s disappearance and his reasons for turning professional were connected in some way; it is equally possible that cricket played no part. But it is almost certain that he would never have played first-class cricket but for his background and the policy at many counties of playing amateurs at all costs. Without that desperation, we would not today know the unusual stories of men like Moss and Harrison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Lohmann (Image: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Stoddart photographed in 1898 (Image: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, the amateurs who are playing will be paid more than us professionals”: The Test match strike of 1896

In modern cricket, pay disputes rumble around every few years between players and their national cricket boards. This is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon; until the advent of World Series Cricket in 1977, professional cricketers accepted what was a usually a meagre wage in comparison to others sports without taking any action. The players struggled on, albeit grumbling often. They did not receive a particularly high wage, but were better paid than the majority of the labouring class. While it may have been a precarious existence, life as a professional cricketer was relatively good. However, in 1896 several factors combined to provoke five leading professionals to demand a pay increase before the deciding Test of the 1896 series between England and Australia. The press interpreted this as a threat to strike, and the subsequent controversy exposed some less savoury aspects surrounding pay in English cricket.

There was a precedent for a “strike” by professional cricketers. In 1881, seven Nottinghamshire professionals went on strike over several issues, including a demand for long-term contracts. Eventually they were forced to back down simply because it was easy for Nottinghamshire to replace them. As Ric Sissons puts it in The Players (1988): “The seven strikers could not count on the support of their fellow professionals or of their county brothers elsewhere in the country. In contemporary parlance, they lacked ‘solidarity'”. Looked at more broadly, this was perhaps the final attempt by professional cricketers to regain control of cricket from the amateur authorities who had usurped them over the course of the 1870s.

However, the 1881 strike took place at a time before cricket had developed into the industry that it became, and when Test matches were a new phenomenon; just four had been played by that date, and only one in England. Over the following years, the sport increased enormously in popularity so that more and more money flowed into it. The establishment of the County Championship in 1890 gave a structure and purpose to county matches. By the mid-1890s, Test matches had become the most important form of the game, attracting huge numbers of spectators. Regular visits by Australian teams also swelled the coffers; the 1896 tour was the seventh to have taken place since 1881, and the ninth overall. Cricket had become a big success.

The main grievance of the professionals in 1896 was to become a familiar one — the failure of the authorities to increase their pay in line with inflation and to reflect the profits being made by the counties. It came against the background of an enthralling — and controversial — Ashes series. England won the first of the three Tests, played at Lord’s, comfortably enough but the main story was the non-selection of Ranjitsinhji for the England team by the MCC Committee. At the time, there was no overall body in control of the national team; the side for each Test was selected by the committee of whichever county hosted that match. Other matters, such as playing conditions and the pay for professionals, were also decided by the individual county concerned. Although there was a widespread clamour for the Indian-born Ranjitsinhji to play, the MCC resisted. However, the second Test was played at Manchester, and the Lancashire Committee had no such reservations: Ranjitsinhji was selected, and scored 62 and 154 not out in an extraordinary debut. But even his efforts and an outstanding performance by the fast bowler Tom Richardson, could not prevent Australia from narrowly winning to level the series.

The final Test was to be played at the Oval on 10, 11 and 12 August, and promised a thrilling finish to the series; there was a great deal of anticipation surrounding it. The Surrey Committee announced the England team on 31 July and it was reported in the press the following day. The team contained nine “certainties” who would play whatever, and four other players from whom two would be chosen depending on conditions. Of the first nine, five were professionals: Bobby Abel, Tom Richardson, Dick Lilley, William Gunn and Tom Hayward. Three of the remaining four selections were professionals: George Lohmann, Bobby Peel, and Jack Hearne.

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  Bobby Abel
  (Image: Wikipedia)

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  Tom Richardson
  (Image: Wikipedia)

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  Tom Hayward
  (Image: Wikipedia)

But almost immediately, the Committee were rocked by a letter they received from five players. William Gunn of Nottinghamshire, and the Surrey players George Lohmann, Tom Richardson, Bobby Abel and Tom Hayward wrote:

“We the following players having been asked to represent England v Australia on August 10 and two following days hereby take the liberty to ask for increased terms viz. twenty pounds. The importance of such fixture entitles us to make this demand.”

They were demanding a doubling of the match fee for playing in a Test match, which had stood at £10 in representative matches since being agreed for the Gentlemen v Players match of 1871. However, individual cricket committees varied this fee for matches against the Australians; for example, Nottinghamshire paid their professionals £20 to face the Australian team in 1880, while Lancashire offered the professionals representing the “North of England” £15 if they defeated the Australians in 1882 and £12 if they lost. By contrast, the standard wage for a county match in this period was £5 for a home game and £6 for an away game. But administrators did not want to pay more than they needed to so that by 1896, the fee for representing England had been established at £10 per game.

Of the players involved, Gunn was one of the leading batsmen of this period and had been a regular in home Test matches (the only ones in which the strongest England team was played) since 1888, although he had only played the first Test in 1896. Lohmann and Richardson were vital parts of the Surrey and England team and two of the best bowlers in the country at the time. The former’s health was suspect, and he only appeared irregularly for England. Like Gunn, he had missed the second Test. Richardson, on the other hand, had not missed a Test against Australia since his debut in 1893. Abel was a leading professional batsman and while his England career had been somewhat stop-start, he had played the first two Tests of the 1896 series, scoring 94 at Lord’s. Finally, Hayward had just begun a Test career that would last until 1909. He first played during a tour of South Africa the previous winter (which although subsequently classed as Tests, were not regarded as such at the time), and played the first Test of the 1896 series. However, of all those who signed the letter, he was perhaps the least established as an England player.

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  William Gunn
  (Image: Wikipedia)

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  George Lohmann
  (Image: Wikipedia)

Lohmann followed up the first letter with another on 6 August repeating the demands. That was the day that the Surrey Committee met to discuss the issue. Having concluded that they could not be seen to bow down to such a demand — which amounted to an ultimatum — they responded with a telegram to their four professionals that bluntly stated: “Fee for playing against Australians ten pounds and expenses or they will be out of match”. Gunn received an even starker message: that his “terms were not accepted”. Having replied to the them, Surrey replaced the mutinous professionals with three others: Lancashire’s Arthur Mold, Yorkshire’s George Hirst and Leicestershire’s Arthur Pougher. The result was a considerably weaker England team, but one in which the professionals were happy to play for £10.

The call-up of these names was announced piecemeal in the press on the Friday, without any real explanation of what had happened. Although the original letter asking for the increase in wages had been kept quiet, rumours began to circulate about a possible strike. Then on the Saturday before the match — scheduled to begin on a Monday — the story broke in the press. The Daily Mail was the first to report the story, provoking a flurry of comment and interviews. One of the strikers, probably George Lohmann, was interviewed anonymously in that newspaper. He revealed that part of the impetus for the strike among the Surrey players was because they would not be able to claim expenses as they lived so close to the ground. He further argued that as the Australians and Surrey would each take at least £1,700 from the game, it was not an unreasonable demand. Noting that professional wages had not increased in many years, and did not reflect the popularity cricket now enjoyed, he added: “We professional cricketers in England do not get anything like adequate payment for our services.”

Challenged by the reporter that this was not a good time to strike, with the series in the balance, the professional replied that it was the best time simply because it was “the time when most is going to be made out of us without anything like an adequate return; and the time when our services will be most missed, and therefore more truly valued.” According to the interviewee, the other professionals in the team would have joined their strike, but he believed they had already accepted terms before being asked to join: “They were thus not free to throw in their lot with ours.”

He said: “What I want to know is, will the Surrey Club jeopardise this match — the greatest match in the history of cricket, you might say — for the sake of a few pounds out of their takings?” But then he came to one of the key aspects of the whole affair: “Why, the amateurs who are playing will be paid more than us professionals.” The reporter claimed shock, to which the striker replied: “I mean to say that the amateurs’ expenses will exceed the payments or salaries of the professionals, and not for the first time by a long way.”

It was these comments that caused a considerable fall out over the next few days, and beyond. The interview, which went much further than the letter in expressing dissatisfaction, was the first that the public knew of the affair. Lohmann — or whoever spoke — was clearly suggesting that the professionals would not back down, and there would indeed be a strike. Initially, the interview also caused a little misunderstanding as an impression formed in the press that the “rebels” had only presented their demands to Surrey on Friday, suggesting that they delayed to give the implied threat more force with the match just three days away.

Harry Trott (Image: Wikipedia)

The story provoked a reaction from the Australian captain Harry Trott. On 8 August, the day the story was published, Trott and his team were practising in Canterbury. Presuming that Lohmann was the man interviewed, Trott said to a press representative: “I am astonished and deeply sorry to hear that Lohmann is the leading spirit of the movement, especially after the handsome treatment he has received at the hands of the Surrey Club and the English public generally.” The other Australian players backed the view of their captain, at least before the journalist concerned, and “highly commend[ed] the firm attitude adopted by the Surrey Committee on the ground that coercive movements made like this at the last moment are an insult, not only to the public, but to English cricket and cricketers generally.”

This was a remarkably poorly judged intervention by Trott and his team, given a motivating factor for the “strikers” was the amount of money being made by the Australians. Questions over the status of the Australian players dated back to the first official Australian tour of England in 1878. The team were supposedly amateurs, and were treated as such — for example, being referred to as “Mister” in match reports and scorecards, and being honoured as “Gentlemen”. But while Australian players had jobs away from the cricket field and were not directly employed as cricketers, they each made an enormous personal profit from any tour of England — thereby breaking the prime rule of being an amateur, that you should not profit from playing.

The way the tours operated was simple, and guaranteed that the players would profit if all went well. The initial costs were underwritten by authorities in Australia — in 1896, funds came from the Australian Cricket Council, a somewhat controversial body —who provided a sum up front. Once the takings from the tour had paid off that amount, every subsequent penny went to the players; the profits were split equally between them. Each member of the 1896 team made £679 from the tour, far more than any English professional that season and more than double the fee for an English professional selected to tour Australia. Understandably, there was some resentment among county players about this state of affairs, and it remained a touchy subject with the authorities who had never satisfactorily rationalised it.

The second issue raised by the interviewee was far more controversial — that of payments to English amateurs. This had been smouldering for some time, and was a problem in other sports as well. The practice was known as “shamateurism”, a term which arose some time in the 1880s — the first reference to it in the British Newspaper Archives relates to boxing in 1888, and it is used soon after in relation to cycling, football and athletics. In cricket, Frederick Gale brought up the issue (albeit not using the term “shamateurism”) in an article in the 1878 edition John Lillywhite’s Cricket Companion; RS Holmes regularly referred to it in Cricket during the 1890s; in 1907, Sir Home Gordon suggesting that a “score” of amateurs were being paid surreptitiously: “the matter is euphemistically cloaked under the guise of ‘expenses’, the item for washing alone being on occasion preposterous.” And the Australian player Joe Darling wrote in 1926 that “very few of the amateurs in England in my time — or today — were amateurs. They were highly paid professionals.”

The problem was that amateurs ran cricket. The distinction between amateur and professional was, in reality, one of class; it was one of many manifestations of the social divide that was cultivated in Victorian England to keep the working class “knowing their place”. But this was dressed up in terms of moral superiority. And one of the most important ways that amateurs proved that superiority was that they played purely for the love of the game; they did not require payment, unlike the scurrilous professionals who only played for money.

However, the whole edifice was built on rather shaky foundations. As David Kynaston puts it in WG’s Birthday Party (1990):

“Unfortunately for the smooth running of the system [of professional and amateur players] there was one snag: for though everyone knew that the differences between the two classes of cricketer was in essence one of social background, the trouble was that not all those naturally more comfortable on the amateur side of the divide could afford to obey the ordinance (as resolved by the MCC in 1878) ‘that no gentleman ought to make a profit by his services in the cricket field.'”

As most amateurs would have found it completely socially unacceptable to turn professional owing to the stigma and loss of status involved in such a move, counties found ways to support them financially. While amateurs could not be paid for playing, it was considered acceptable for them to receive money to cover expenses such as travel and accommodation. And this became the avenue through which surreptitious payments were increasingly made. Again, Kynaston puts it very well:

“The consequence of this was widespread ‘shamateurism’, a covert practice that could not help but fuel much rumour, ill-feeling and controversy. It was a practice that took many forms — gifts, testimonials, season tickets, salaries for pseudo-posts like ‘assistance secretary’, and suchlike — and has been well documented by historians. Keeping their amateurs sweet was a problem that preoccupied many county committees, and surviving minute books are full of ingenious devices.”

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  W. G. Grace
  (Image: Wikipedia)

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  Walter Read
  (Image: Wikipedia)

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  Archie MacLaren
  (Image: Wikipedia)

The most blatant case was that of W. G. Grace, who it has been estimated made around £120,000 from cricket. The following figures come from Sissons’ The Players. When Grace toured Australia in 1873–74, he was given £1,500 in “expenses”, ten times more than the professionals received. His fee for the 1891–92 Australian tour was an eye-watering £3,000, as well as expenses and money to pay for a locum for his medical practice. The tour eventually made a £2,000 loss. As secretary for London County between 1900 and 1904, Grace received a £600 salary, almost double what leading professionals earned at the time. And he received two testimonials: one for £1,458 in 1879 and another for nearly £9,000 in 1895. The MCC alone contributed £3,000 to the latter fund. In contrast, the highest benefit for any county professional before 1900 was Bobby Peel’s £2,000 in 1894. The authorities turned a blind eye to this blatant abuse of the system, not least because of Grace’s enormous commercial appeal and long-standing excellence; Wisden in 1897 merely said of the payments to Grace: “‘Nice customs curtsey to great kings’ and the work he has done in popularising cricket outweighs a hundredfold every other consideration.” However, the moral gymnastics used to justify Grace’s earnings as an “amateur” merely exposed the hypocrisy of the establishment.

Other well-paid amateurs included Surrey’s Walter Read, the nominal Assistant Secretary at the Oval whose salary of £150 was supplemented by a railway season ticket, a fee of four guineas (£4 and 4 shillings) per match, and a bonus of up to £100 depending how many games he played. Sissons notes that the Surrey minutes make clear that Read did not do any work as assistant secretary. Additionally, Read received around £1,000 to tour Australia in 1882–83, and other lavish gifts included a testimonial match which earned him £829 in 1895, the same year that Bobby Abel’s benefit brought just £621. Additionally, Surrey paid £200 to Read’s testimonial, but only 50 guineas to Abel’s benefit.

Other “gentlemen professionals” included Archie MacLaren, who was employed through various channels over the years by Lancashire to make himself available for the county, and Somerset’s Sammy Woods who was employed as their secretary between 1894 and 1906 on a salary of £200 per year. But there were many others.

Some of the harshest private critics of this practice were Nottinghamshire professionals, who historically had stood up to amateurs far more than any other group. Arthur Shrewsbury wrote several letters to Alfred Shaw, who managed the tour of Australia in 1891–92, warning how much Grace would claim in expenses. Shrewsbury also complained to George Lohmann in 1894 that he and William Gunn had planned a tour of Australia in 1894–95 but were thwarted when the amateur Andrew Stoddart arranged one first; Stoddart’s team, containing many amateurs, was much cheaper to fund by the Australian authorities than any Shrewsbury-Gunn team would have been. In the same letter, Shrewsbury also complained to Lohmann about the arrangements being made for a “benefit” for Walter Read.

Therefore, the words of our anonymous striker shone a light where the cricketing establishment would have preferred continued darkness. At the same time, it became clear to the public why the England team had been altered, and that the professionals had threatened a strike.

When the revised team, omitting the rebels, was announced, a Daily Mail reporter visited the home of Bobby Abel to tell him the news. Abel was reluctant to speak, but the news that he had been dropped shocked him into a response. He confirmed that there had been dissatisfaction among the professionals for some time, and the reporter pressed him: “So you seized this opportunity and calculated to get the club at your mercy and to get higher wages for the future?” Abel replied: “No that would not be a fair way of putting it. We had no desire to get the club at our mercy. It was only in respect of this match that we applied for better remuneration … [because] I need hardly say it is a match of unusual importance. It is a matter of great anxiety to us when we known are playing for England in a critical encounter, and our best and hardest play is required of us. That’s why the application was made in this particular match.”

Abel’s suggestion that trouble had been brewing was later confirmed by the Surrey Secretary Charles Alcock, who wrote that a similar idea had been suggested in the previous two Tests without gaining any traction. But now that the dispute had been brought into the open, it led to several days of accusation, counter-accusation and bitter recrimination in the press. There were even fears of crowd disturbances if the Surrey players were not reinstated. Suddenly, the result of the match seemed of secondary importance…

Both a Gentleman and a Player: The story of Edwin Diver

Portrait of Edwin Diver from his interview in Cricket: A Weekly Record of the Game, 21 December 1899

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

Walter Gilbert’s first-class professional career began and ended with this match. Before Gloucestershire played again, he had been arrested for theft and, after completing a 28-day sentence of hard labour, moved to Canada to begin a new life away from the scandal that brought his time in English cricket to a close. His spectacular fall has been written about several times.

Far less well-known is the story of Edwin Diver, the other debutant professional in that Surrey v Gloucestershire match. Diver was seven-and-a-half years younger than Gilbert and had a much more successful professional career. Unlike Gilbert, whose decision to become a professional was a desperate final attempt to overcome crippling financial difficulties, Diver arrived via a gentler route. He soon became only the second player, after Richard Daft, to play in the Gentlemen v Players match as both an amateur and a professional. And despite his switch of status, he remained highly regarded by the cricketing establishment – when he died, a generous obituary appeared in Wisden. However, Diver’s career came to a slightly untidy conclusion for reasons that are unclear.

Edwin James Diver was the nephew of Alfred Diver, a professional batsman who was a member of the first overseas team of English cricketers, which toured North America in 1859. Edwin’s father James was a college porter at Cambridge University; the family lived in various locations, so it is not clear at which college he worked, but they usually lived near Jesus College. Edwin was born in Cambridge a few weeks before the 1861 census, which records a midwife was still living with the family at their home on Upper Park Street. By 1871 the family, now living at Jesus Lane, could afford to employ a servant. Unlike the Gilbert family, there are no indications that they had financial problems.

At the time of the 1881 census, Diver was an Assistant Master at Wimbledon College in Surrey (although his name is almost illegible on the census return, it is certainly him). He had already established himself as a good cricketer. On one occasion, he scored 131 playing against his employers for the Stygians.

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The Surrey team in 1885; Diver, then playing as an amateur, is standing at the back, second from the left

Working at Wimbledon College allowed him to qualify by residence for Surrey, for whom he played as an amateur from 1883. He averaged in the mid-20s in his first season, playing during the school holidays, and scored five fifties, respectable figures at the time. In his Wisden obituary, the editor Sydney Pardon recalled his early days with Surrey:

“He will always be best remembered on account of his short but brilliant connection with Surrey … A most attractive batsman in point of style, with splendid hitting power on the off side, his success was immediate. Indeed, he created such an impression that in the following year he was given a place in the Gentlemen’s Eleven against the Australians at Lord’s.”

In that 1884 game against the Australians, Diver batted very well when he came in to bat in the second innings with his team needing 45 to win having lost six wickets. He and AG Steel knocked off the runs without being parted. Further recognition came for Diver that season when he was selected for the Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval (although he scored a pair). It is clear that, at this stage in his career, he was starting to position himself among the leading amateurs in England. He never quite progressed though. In his obituary, Pardon wrote: “It cannot be said that Diver ever improved on his earliest efforts for Surrey, but he held his own, playing many a fine innings”. But in fairness to Diver, this may have been owing to what was happening off the field. Around this time, Wimbledon College went bankrupt, leaving him without an income. Diver, like many amateurs, was left struggling to afford a cricket career.

In The Players (1988), Ric Sissons details what happened next. In September 1884, the Surrey Committee made the rather unorthodox decision to pay Diver, still nominally an amateur, £2 per week throughout the winter “as long as he remains in the county”. In cricket terms, this paid off as he scored over 900 runs in 1885, including his first century for the county. In August 1885, Surrey gave him £75 to mark his “retirement” as he gave up cricket apparently to work in an office.

But in April 1886, Diver wrote to the Committee, saying that he was “heartily sick of office work and extremely fond of cricket but not having private means to allow me to continue to play as an amateur”. Therefore he asked to join the Surrey ground-staff as a professional; the Committee consented, although giving no guarantees how often he would play. Diver’s father was irritated, complaining to the Committee who replied to him that “no encouragement had been given to EJ Diver to become a professional.”

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The Surrey team in 1886; Diver, now a professional, is seated third from the left

That season, Diver played 22 first-class matches, although he was less successful with the bat than in previous years. Nevertheless, he was selected once more for the Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval, this time for the professional team, making him one of the very few men to appear for both sides in this fixture, and only the second after Richard Daft.

However, this was Diver’s only season as a Surrey professional. Perhaps the wage paid by Surrey was not enough to make ends meet. But it also appears that he wished to continue working as a schoolmaster. When the season ended, he returned to Cambridge and opened his own school. Cricket wished him luck on his “return to his old vocation” and recorded that he had “taken premises in Trumpington Street”. Around this time, he also played with some distinction for Cambridge Victoria Cricket Club. He enjoyed a remarkable season in 1887: he scored 213 against Royston, then shortly after, in the space of a week, he scored 312 not out against St John’s College and 200 against Biggleswade. Some regret was expressed that Diver had been lost to first-class cricket.

But as recorded by Sissons in The Players, Diver continued to be associated with cricket. He later became the joint secretary and treasurer of Cambridgeshire County Cricket Club; Sissons does not say if this was a paid position, but it most likely would have been, which may suggest that Diver’s school was short-lived.

In 1891, Diver moved to Birmingham, where he played professional football for Aston Villa, appearing in three matches as a goalkeeper and seems to have remained on their books for three seasons. He also played cricket for Birmingham in the Midland League, although it is unclear whether he did so as an amateur or professional. Some clues about his status also appear in the pages of Cricket. In 1891, he played a first-class match for the South against the North; the scorecard omits his initials, indicating that he played as a professional. But at the end of the season, he appeared for “Eighteen of District” against “Eleven of Warwickshire” at Birmingham in a benefit match for AA Lilley. On this scorecard, he is given initials and so must have appeared as an amateur; Sydney Santall, another cricketer who played both as amateur and professional, played in this match as a professional.

In November 1894, Diver married Alice Beasley, the daughter of a publican, at Birmingham Parish Church; he listed his profession as “cricketer”. They had one child, Nora, in 1896 (although from what Diver said on the 1911 census, they may have had another child who did not survive and for whom there is no record). The couple managed hotels after their marriage, moving several times before settling at the Priory Hotel in Walsall.

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The Warwickshire team in 1898; Diver is seated on the far right, his fellow amateur-turned-professional Sydney Santall is standing in the centre of the back row

Living in Birmingham eventually gave Diver a residential qualification to play for Warwickshire, for whom he played before they achieved first-class status. He resumed his first-class career as a professional with the county from 1894, although he only appeared a few times in 1895, the club’s first season in the County Championship. Diver was reasonably successful for Warwickshire from 1896, when he appeared more regularly. He was second in the county’s averages for 1896, but was fifth or lower from then until his career ended in 1901.

Diver had his best season in first-class cricket in 1899, passing 1,000 runs for the only time in his career. His only century came against Leicestershire, but this innings of 184 – out of a total of 276 – was his highest in first-class cricket. The runs came in 155 minutes and he reached his hundred before lunch on the first day. His reward for this form was to be selected once more for the Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval.

At the end of the season, Diver became the first professional to captain Warwickshire when no amateurs were available for their match against Essex at Leyton. As there were so many professionals, the Essex Committee permitted the Warwickshire team to use the changing room for visiting amateurs, but told them they could not use the amateurs’ gate, and instead must take a circuitous detour though the pavilion to use the side gate; they were also not permitted to sit in front of the pavilion. Contemporary reports reveal that two Warwickshire players pointedly refused to follow the instructions, using the amateurs’ gate to cheers from the crowd, and Diver protested to the Essex Committee. Sissons wrote in The Players that Diver went further and led the players along the boundary to enter the field by the amateurs’ gate, leading to a complaint from Essex, the home team. Contemporary reports do not mention this, but do suggest that there was some minor controversy over the events of the game. Sympathy was largely with Warwickshire, and Essex apologised for their treatment of the professionals.

A feature in Sporting Life in December 1899 following his successful season said that Diver claimed of his switch to professionalism that “amongst gentlemen the change made has not altered his position socially”. The article also reported: “At the present time Diver is highly respected in and around Birmingham, being the proprietor of one of the most flourishing hotels in the Midlands.” These two suggestions appear somewhat contradictory: it is hard to see that leading amateur cricketers of the time – men like CB Fry, Lord Hawke or FS Jackson – would have wished to associate with a professional cricketer who was running a hotel.

Diver was also interviewed for a feature in Cricket that December. The writer judged that “Diver’s cricket is of the kind which everybody likes to watch. He does not play a rash game, but on the other hand he never misses a chance of scoring, and while he is at the wickets it is a certainty that there will be some altogether delightful hits.” He commented that Diver hit especially hard on the off-side. Despite his experience in the Birmingham League, he considered that leagues were bad for first-class cricket; he also criticised slow play and defensive batting.

Diver had a poor season in 1900, and played just once in 1901, his final season in first-class cricket. But it is not exactly clear why his career ended as he had only suffered from one poor season and he played a good innings of 31 during his only appearance in 1901. There are a few possible explanations, but it appears the choice was his own and that he was not dropped. Perhaps outside interests prevented him playing more frequently: in October 1900 he had been elected President of Walsall Football Club, which may have taken up his time. He also may have needed to give more attention to his hotel. Or it is possible that increasing financial worries occupied his attention.

The Priory Hotel, Walsall pictured in 1983; the building is now an outlet of KFC (Image: Black Country History)

The 1901 census records him still as the manager of the Priory Hotel in Walsall, with a live-in staff of eight, plus his wife, daughter, and a relative of his wife. But this state of affairs did not last. On 12 November 1901, Diver disappeared without saying goodbye to his wife. The only clue she had came from a guest who told her that “Mr. Diver was seen at Queenstown to go aboard a boat bound for New York”. Supported by their brewery, Alice Diver applied to have the licence transferred to her name, which was approved in court. At the hearing, she explained that Diver was in financial difficulties; she also reported that she had previously managed the hotel during his absences through cricket and had great experience of managing public houses (presumably through her father). She stated that she had no intention of allowing Diver to return. By the end of February 1902, when the licence was permanently transferred to Mrs Diver, she had still not heard from her husband.

It appears that Warwickshire had not entirely given up on the notion that Diver could still play for them despite his disappearance, but an early-season issue of Cricket in 1902 listed him as “not likely to play” during 1902. Instead, Diver surfaced in Norfolk, where he played cricket in Hunstanton during the 1902 season. Shortly after this, he moved permanently to Wales. He played as a professional for Newport in Monmouthshire (Cricket reported that he scored 138 for the club in May 1903), and represented Monmouthshire in the Minor Counties Championship between 1905 and 1914. He also represented South Wales in matches against several touring cricketing teams, including Australian sides.

The only time Diver got in touch with his wife was to ask her to “intercede for him with his late employer” – presumably the brewery – and he never asked her to join him or offered her any financial support. These details emerged when Alice Diver applied for a divorce in early 1909 on the grounds of desertion, and adultery with Mrs Ellen Williams (whose maiden name appears to have been Salathiel) between 1905 and 1908. Williams, who supported Alice Diver’s claim, told the court that she had married a journalist called Samuel Williams who, it transpired, was already married and who then abandoned her. It was after this that she became close to Diver, and he “visited her” several times over the following years. The divorce, and custody of their child, was granted to Alice.

According to an article in the Folkestone Express, Sandgate, Shorncliffe & Hythe Advertiser (7 December 1910), Alice continued to have financial problems after the divorce. In 1909, she moved to Folkestone where she attempted to establish her own boarding house but business was never good enough to keep it running. By the end of 1909, she was heavily in debt and had to close the establishment; in late 1910, she was declared bankrupt and moved to Canterbury where she once more became manager of a hotel. On the 1911 census Alice, calling herself widowed, was visiting the Falstaff Hotel in Canterbury but was still listed as a hotel proprietor. By 1918, she had returned to Birmingham and was managing the Pitman Hotel: a report in the Birmingham Daily Post on 18 June recorded that she had been fined for not keeping an accurate register of food served, and exceeding the allowed amount of fat in meals. On the 1939 Register, she was still a hotel keeper, living in Hereford. She lived until 1959. Their daughter Nora married in 1921 and appears to have moved to Canada.

Meanwhile, in 1911, Diver was living alone as a boarder in Newport, listing himself on the census as a “professional cricketer and Ground Manager” at Newport Athletic Club. He remained as a coach at Newport until 1921, when he moved to Pontardawe near Swansea. Soon after, he died of heart failure, being found in bed on the morning of 27 December 1924. His obituary in Wisden, part of the same edition that reported Gilbert’s death, observed that “without realising all the bright promise of his early days, [he] played a prominent part in the cricket field for many years”.

Unlike Gilbert, Diver appears to have been happy to become professional and did not try to remain as an amateur through hidden payments, other than for a short time after he lost his job as a schoolmaster. He never seemed to believe it had brought disgrace upon him. And despite his “conversion”, he was remembered with affection by the cricketing world, as was clear from his Wisden obituary. Sydney Pardon even wrote the entry himself, a courtesy he did not extend to Gilbert in the same edition. Whatever circumstances ended Diver’s first-class career and caused him to leave his wife – and these may have been financial – he continued to play professional cricket and seems to have managed well enough in his later years. But if Gilbert lived happily in Canada with his family and in a respectable new job, perhaps Diver never quite achieved this peace. Instead he died alone in Wales.

By the time Gilbert and Diver died in 1924, few other amateurs had followed them by becoming professionals. CJB Wood had “converted” to a professional, but later reverted to amateur status. FR Santall, the son of Diver’s old team-mate Sydney, played for Warwickshire as an amateur from 1919 until 1923, then as a professional until 1939. But two examples in the later 1920s made a greater success of their conversion than either Gilbert or Diver.

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  Laurie Charles Eastman
  by Bassano Ltd
  whole-plate glass negative, 25 July 1931
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  © National Portrait Gallery, London

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  Charlie Barnett (Image: Wikipedia)

Laurie Eastman and Charlie Barnett, two amateur-turned-professional cricketers who played in the 1920s and 1930s

LC Eastman, known to the cricket world as “Laurie”, played for Essex between the First and Second World War. Other than his cricket, little is known about Eastman’s life. He was the fourth child of John and Mary Eastman; his father was a tea merchant in London, although between the 1901 and 1911 censuses, he appears to have been reduced from an “employer” to an employed clerk.

During the First World War, Eastman received the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Military Medal, but for reasons not made entirely clear in his Wisden obituary, the war ended his plan “to take up medicine as his profession”. Instead, he pursued an interest in cricket, making his debut for Essex as an amateur in 1920. In his first match, he took three wickets in four balls; in his third, he scored 91 batting at number ten against Middlesex at Lord’s. But these successes were not followed up, perhaps because, as his Cricketer obituary put it, his form was “adversely affected if the game was going against Essex”. Or in other words, he did not deal well with pressure on the cricket field.

Eastman played six times in 1920 and another six in 1921, presumably as he could not afford to play regularly. But from 1922, Essex followed the path taken by many counties to secure the services of amateurs with financial worries, and appointed him as their Assistant Secretary. From then on, he played regularly. After six years playing as an amateur, he became a professional from 1927, although there was little fanfare over this, and certainly none of the comment that followed the decisions by Gilbert and Diver in 1886. An aggressive batsman who often opened the batting, he was never a consistent performer. In 1929, he passed 1,000 first-class runs for the first time, a feat he repeated four times in the 1930s with his best return being 1,338 runs at an average of 32.63 in 1933. He never took 100 wickets in a season, his best being 99 in 1935, but generally took respectable numbers of wickets, first with medium-paced swing and later with spin. In the 1930s, he wrote several articles for newspapers in the 1930s without revealing too much or being in any way controversial. His career ended with the war in 1939, his benefit match being one of the last played. Injured by the force of a bomb while working as an Air Raid Warden, he never fully recovered and died after undergoing an operation in 1941.

Perhaps one of the most famous and successful “conversions” was Charlie Barnett. He was born in 1910, the son of a former Gloucestershire amateur who worked as a fish, game and poultry dealer. After being educated at Wycliffe, he first played for Gloucestershire as a 16-year-old amateur in 1927 and turned professional in 1929. In 1930, he married a widow who was 13 years his senior. According to his Wisden obituary, “Barnett retained a certain amateur hauteur in his cricket and his life; the supporters knew him as Charlie, but he always regarded himself as Charles. In the dressing-room he became known as The Guv’nor.”

Barnett was an extremely aggressive opening batsman and serviceable medium-paced bowler good enough to play for England in 20 Test matches. He made his debut in 1933, toured Australia for the 1936-37 Ashes series and scored 99 in the first session of the first Test of 1938, reaching his century from the first ball after lunch. Interestingly, on the 1939 Register, he listed himself not as a professional cricketer but as the manager and proprietor of a fish, game and poultry dealer. He briefly played for England after the war, and retired from first-class in 1948 when he went to play as a professional in the Central Lancashire League.

Unlike other ex-amateurs, we know more about Barnett as he lived until 1993 and was a frequent interviewee in later years, not least on the subject of Walter Hammond. And in many ways, he seems to have been an almost stereotypical amateur type; his Wisden obituary concluded:

“In retirement, he ran a business in Cirencester. A journalist called him a fishmonger. He wrote an indignant letter, saying he supplied high-class poultry and game, not least to the Duke of Beaufort. He maintained his amateur mien: he lived like a squire and hunted with the Beaufort and the Berkeley Vale, always, so it is said, with the uncomplicated verve he displayed at the crease.”

David Foot, in his 1996 book Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why had this to say:

“In the dressing room … Barnett was known as The Guvnor. This was because he’d been to a public school, had a better voice and more authority than most of the committee, and usually won an argument when he went striding in – on behalf of fellow pros with a legitimate grievance – to take on the county club’s management. He didn’t have a great sense of humour and was inclined to be bumptious … [He was] a Gloucestershire man of some social status who was not ashamed to play cricket as a professional … [He] lived in a fine Georgian house, hunted twice a week with the Beauforts and the Berkleys and didn’t stand any nonsense from anyone. The other pros very much respected him”.

But for all his impact, Barnett may be better remembered now for his abiding hatred of Hammond, with whom he had once been close. David Foot’s Wally Hammond: The Reasons Why contains a lot of Barnett’s views of his former captain. Even in the kindly hands of Foot, Barnett’s venom comes through; not a little of it appears to have been a slight sense of superiority, but his main grievance appears to have been how Hammond abandoned his first wife to have open affairs, and his unwillingness to play in Barnett’s benefit match in 1947.

Hammond himself famously switched from being a professional to become an amateur and captain England. But, overlooked by many, he actually began his career as an amateur, playing a few games for Gloucestershire in 1920 before signing professional forms for the following season. Hammond was not alone in switching from professional to amateur. Lancashire’s Jack Sharp did so, and subsequently became both Lancashire captain and a Test selector; Vallance Jupp likewise became captain of Northamptonshire after assuming amateur status. Warwickshire’s Jack Parsons went from professional to amateur, back to professional and finally became an amateur again. But perhaps these are stories for another time…

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

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

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

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

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

Sydney Santall in 1896
(Image: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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