“A better display of the art of cricket was never witnessed”: How Fuller Pilch became the best batter in the world

Fuller Pilch (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

In discussions of who might have been the greatest or most influential cricketers of all time, there is a tendency to favour more recent players. Most critics understandably nominate those who they have seen in person, although an exception is usually made for the inevitable Don Bradman, whose statistical dominance makes him a special case. Perhaps one or two players from earlier periods, for whom there is plenty of film available (preferably on Youtube), might warrant a mention but once discussion moves further back than living memory, former stars are usually neglected, usually accompanied by assertions that cricketers from so long ago cannot possibly have been as good as their modern counterparts. This phenomenon is intensified by the lack of statistical detail available for comparison, and a suspicion that — depending on the viewpoint of whoever is judging — it must have been easier to score runs or take wickets back in the dim and distant past. One or two aficionados might buck the trend and name older players such as Walter Hammond, Jack Hobbs or Victor Trumper, but for most cricket followers these are at best just names that they have heard. And then there is the case of someone like Ranjitsinhji, recorded by the history books as the inventor of the leg-glance (but who is perhaps even more interesting for his adventures off the field). Or what about W. G. Grace? To those familiar with cricket history, he might stand comparison with Bradman: the man who invented modern batting, combining forward play, back play, attack and defence. But if we go back even further, cricket was a very different game on (and off) the field, so that any hope of statistical comparison breaks down hopelessly. Which is unfortunate because if we continue backwards, we come across names that were legends for a century after their playing days were over.

Standing at the head of this semi-legendary list was Fuller Pilch, perhaps the most famous batter before the emergence of W. G. Grace. During his playing days, there was a general consensus that Pilch was the best batter in England — and therefore the world. While never achieving the statistical dominance of those who followed — for example Grace, Ranjitsinhji, Hobbs, Hammond — any impartial assessment has to place Pilch among those names because of what he achieved at a time when batting was often little more than a lottery. When Grace emerged, it was with Pilch that he was most often compared in trying to decide who was the greatest; and not everyone agreed that Grace was better than Pilch. And across the vast span of time between the end of Pilch’s career in 1854 and the modern day, one of his batting innovations has survived and continues to be one of the foundations of the game.

Before delving too deeply into Pilch’s story, it is worth establishing how very different cricket was when he was at his peak in the 1830s and 1840s. Cricket was played irregularly and few county teams even existed; there were no competitions or cups or championships and fixtures were arranged on an ad hoc basis with no real central authority to coordinate them. Test cricket was years away. Many games were played, especially at the major venues such as Lord’s, between what were little more than scratch teams. Part of the problem was that, at a time before the railway network had become fully established, transporting teams across the country was simply uneconomical. Single-wicket matches were still extremely popular, and followed closely by the press and public. While there were amateur and professional cricketers (Pilch was a professional), the distinction was less pronounced than it became; later generations of amateurs were more eager to keep professionals in their place, but in Pilch’s time the relationship was more benevolent. He described it: “Gentlemen were gentlemen, and players much in the same position as a nobleman and his head keeper maybe.” And the concept of what today would be called first-class cricket was largely unknown, although there was a sense that some matches were more important than others.

On the field, it was a similarly different game. When Pilch first played at Lord’s in 1820, the only legal form of bowling was underarm. Although “round-arm” bowling — in which the ball could be released from shoulder height — was widely used and became very effective, it was not officially permitted until 1835. Few, if any, batters used pads or gloves and on the field, long-stop was an essential position. The science of tending to pitches was almost unknown, and therefore the wickets were rough and untamed: the ball bounced unevenly (shooters were common) and could rise sharply if it struck the stones which were found in many playing surfaces. For bowlers who spun the ball, there was a huge amount of help from the pitch. Furthermore, games were generally played without a boundary — all hits were run out, with no fours or sixes. There might have been exceptions; during Pilch’s benefit match in 1839, wagons were used to enclose the ground, but we do not know if hits beyond this point counted as extra runs. But one contemporary critic said that “Pilch played cricket, W. G. plays boundary”. In these circumstances, run-scoring was incredibly challenging; reaching double figures was an achievement and scores of 20 were perhaps as valuable as a century in modern cricket. And the development of round-arm (which gradually metamorphosed into over-arm) bowling was even more of a challenge; the big scores that had begun to accumulate before 1820 against simply lob-bowling disappeared and did not reappear until the time of Grace. Cricket had become a low-scoring game, and the surviving statistics reflect this. Those who later championed the claims of Pilch as one of the best ever were quick to remind audiences how difficult it was to score back in the 1830s and 1840s.

This, therefore, was the cricket world into which Pilch emerged and established himself as the best; alongside Nicholas Felix and Alfred Mynn, he became one of the few household names who played the sport. How did he reach that peak?

Fuller Pilch was born on 17th March 1804, at Horningtoft in Norfolk. He was the seventh (not the youngest as has often been claimed) child of Nathaniel Pilch (a tailor) and Frances Fuller (who was the widowed Nathaniel’s second wife). Records are scarce from so long ago — individuals were not recorded on the census until Pilch was 37 — and so there is much that we do not know. But Pilch’s later fame meant that some details were recorded; he and his two older brothers (the only three out of Nathaniel and Frances’ five sons to survive until adulthood) William and Nathanial followed their father’s trade, becoming tailors. However all three proved to be good cricketers as well. There are suggestions — based on one questionable newspaper report — that Pilch spent time working in Sheffield as a young man, and learned cricket there, but it is perhaps more likely that he played village cricket in Norfolk.

There are more plausible claims that Pilch was coached by William Fennex, one of the Hambledon stars from the period in the late eighteenth century when cricket’s popularity first exploded, and one of the first men to use what would today be known as forward play; Fennex himself claimed to have taught Pilch how to bat. The author Frederick Gale wrote in 1883: “Fennex, be it remembered that he inaugurated the free forward play, and taught it to Fuller Pilch, and Fuller Pilch taught the world; for I feel confident, in my own mind, that all the fine forward play which one sees now sometimes, is simply the reflex of what Fuller Pilch developed in a manner which has never been surpassed by any living man (except W. G. [Grace]), and that, too, in days when grounds were less true, and pads and gloves were unknown. And I say of my friend W. G., that he has simply perfected the art which Pilch taught, though Pilch was never such an all-round man as our present champion.” We shall return to Pilch’s pioneering forward play later.

As Pilch improved as a cricketer, he was selected to play for Norfolk — in reality at that time little more than the Holt Cricket Club — and he made his debut in “big cricket” when he played for Norfolk against the MCC at Lord’s in 1820. Pilch was just seventeen at the time, and played alongside his brothers Nathaniel and Francis. But the three fielded while William Ward scored 278 runs, the highest innings in what would today be called first-class cricket until W. G. Grace scored 344 in 1876. Pilch, at that time picked as much for his under-arm bowling as his batting, scored 0 and 2 as the MCC won by 417 runs. But for modern statisticians, this was his first-class debut, even though no-one would have had any notion of what that meant at the time.

Fuller Pilch in 1852 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The irregular and disorganised nature of cricket at this time mean that it is hard to track Pilch’s career in terms of statistical achievements. But he gradually became a more accomplished batter even though he did not play anything else recognised today as “first-class” until 1827. In 1823, he moved to Bury St Edmonds, and from 1825 to 1828, he played as a professional for Bury Cricket Club — his first century was scored for the club against Woodbridge in 1830 — and represented Suffolk. In this period he made some substantial scores and was selected for the Gentlemen v Players match for the first time in 1827. That year, he also played for a team styled “England” against Sussex in a series of three matches intended as a trial of the fairness of the new style of “round-arm” bowling (used by Sussex in those matches) and top-scored in the first game with 38. He did not stand out in the other games and, with several other “England” players threatened to pull out of the final game unless the Sussex bowlers reverted to underarm, before ultimately agreeing to play. But Pilch quickly learned to face the new style of bowling, adopted it himself, and when asked in later years about what it was like facing the old underarm style, replied: “Gentlemen, I think you might put me in on Monday morning and get me out by Saturday night”.

Pilch moved to Norwich in 1829, becoming the landlord of the Anchor of Hope Inn, and began to play for Norfolk, which was established on a more formal basis in 1827. Within a few years, it was one of the strongest teams in England, not least owing to Pilch’s batting. And in 1833, he became famous through two single-wicket matches against Tom Marsden, the “Champion” of England. Single-wicket was a highly popular form of the game at the time and was played under various rule. The main versions involved two players opposing each other without assistance in the field. Hits behind the wicket did not count, and batters had to run to the other end of the pitch and back to score a single run. Pilch comfortably won the two matches: in the first, played at Norwich, he won after dismissing Marsden for seven, hitting 73 runs himself and then bowling Marsden seventh ball for a duck, winning by an innings. In the return match at Sheffield, before 12,000 spectators, Pilch scored 78, to which Marsden could only reply with 25. Pilch hit 102 and facing an impossible task, Marsden was dismissed for 31. Just over ten years later, William Denison said of this game: “Pilch’s batting was of the finest description, and a better display of the art of cricket was never witnessed in any former match.” The contest was a huge attraction and received a great deal of press coverage. But for all his success, Pilch disliked single wicket matches and rarely took part: he turned down several opportunities (he and Alfred Mynn seem to have actively avoided facing each other in that format) and only seems to have played one other game (in 1845).

In other cricket, Pilch’s fame grew and there were hardly any big matches in which he did not feature. He played for Cambridge Town, “England”, the MCC, Norfolk, the Players, Suffolk and Surrey, and as a given man for the Gentlemen. He also featured in several of the “novelty” teams which were popular at the time, such as for the Single against the Married or the Right-handed against Left-handed. Perhaps his greatest year came in 1834. In two games for Norfolk against Yorkshire, he scored 87 not out, and 73 and 153 not out; he also scored 105 not out for England against Sussex and 60 for the Players against the Gentlemen. According to Gerald Howat (in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), “his aggregate of 811 runs in major matches was not surpassed for twenty-seven years.” Such considerations were meaningless in 1834 — batting averages were not widely published, if at all — but his average of 43 in those games dwarfed the next best, which was only 18. And in matches retrospectively reckoned first-class, he scored 551 runs at 61.22. But perhaps more importantly he had reached three figures in “major matches” for the first time, in a period when such feats were a rarity.

By then probably the best batter in the world, Pilch was in considerable demand and Norfolk could not hold on to him. A Kent county team — the second such attempt — was founded in Town Malling by a pair of lawyers called Thomas Selby and Silas Norton. After the 1835 season, they persuaded Pilch to move to Town Malling in return for £100 per year, for which he would play for Kent and manage the cricket ground. He made his Kent debut in 1836 and remained with the county until 1854, during which period he was a key figure in making it the strongest team in England. Perhaps its most powerful opposition came from another of Pilch’s teams: William Clarke’s professional touring side, the All-England Eleven. Clarke’s team made a huge impact on English cricket, and Pilch was a founding member, playing for the Eleven from 1846 until 1852. He played at least 65 matches for the Clarke’s Eleven, usually in games played “against the odds” (i.e. against teams featuring more than eleven players, to make the game competitive), and scored four half-centuries. But Pilch was not limited to playing for these teams. At a time when county cricket was an unregulated free-for-all, Pilch also made appearances for Hampshire, Surrey and Sussex. He was also a dominant figure in club cricket; he named his innings of 160 for Town Malling against Reigate in 1837 as one of his best.

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A scorecard showing Pilch’s innings of 60 for All-England against Nottingham in 1842

While Pilch was an undoubted success on the pitch — for example, he was the Kent’s leading scorer in twelve out of nineteen seasons — he did not play regularly because Kent, like all county teams in this period, only rarely took the field. And his statistical achievements have been utterly dwarfed by the inflation in scores that took place in the later part of the nineteenth century; to a modern audience, his average looks poor but at the time, given the challenges of batting, it was a different story. His record surpassed that of any of his contemporaries. He scored eleven fifties for Kent in 84 matches today reckoned first-class, with a highest score of 98, and his average of 19.61 was very good for the time. Of these matches, 36 were played against a team styled as England, which contained many of the best players: in these games, he scored four fifties and averaged 18.15. And in the Gentlemen v Players match, which was the highest form of representative cricket in England in the days before Test matches, he played 23 matches — 21 for the Players (the professional team) and two as a “given man” for the Gentlemen (the amateur team) to make the match more competitive — and averaged 14.90. As a point of contrast, he was easily the dominant batter for Kent in this period. Of his contemporaries to score 1,000 runs for the county, none approached his average: Tom Adams had 2,291 runs at 12.58; Nicholas Felix scored 1,528 runs at 16.79; and Ned Wenman had 1,063 runs at 10.42.

Hidden among the fragmented and hard-to-process figures, Pilch was remarkably consistent. It was a matter of some note that in 1836, he reached double figures in 13 innings (five of which surpassed 20); and in 1841 he reached double figures 16 times (not all of which are today judged as first-class) within which were two scores in the 20s, two in the 30s, three in the 40s and one in the 60s. In his Sketches of the Players (1844), William Denison listed many of these achievements, and wrote of Pilch: “But there are other seasons wherein Pilch has outshone all his competitors, and were they to be enumerated, it would be be to extend this publication to a size far beyond that of a ‘sketch’.” He also stated: “As a bat, [Pilch] has been one of the brightest luminaries of the cricket world, during the last 20 years.” In short, there was little doubt of Pilch’s class and superiority; he was quite simply the best batter who had played until then.

This was a precarious time for county clubs and several teams flitted in and out of existence. Kent was no exception: the Town Malling incarnation of the club struggled financially and collapsed in 1841. But Pilch maintained his Kent contention. When the brothers John and William Baker, the founders of the Beverley Club at Canterbury, took over the organisation of Kent teams in 1842 (when their club effectively assumed the role of the county team), they appointed Pilch as the manager of the Beverley Ground. When the proto-Kent team moved to the St Lawrence Ground in 1847, Pilch again moved with them, taking charge of that ground too. There are a few other traces of his life around this time. Despite claims by Denison, there is little evidence that Pilch ran a public house in Town Malling. Instead, he seems to have worked as a tailor in cricket’s off-season; this was the occupation recorded on the 1841 census (which was taken when he and the Kent team were staying at The Bear in Lewes, during a match against Sussex).

For all of Pilch’s later claims — such as the Kent team being a “eleven brothers’, or that “as soon as a man had been 12 months among the cherry orchards, hop gardens and pretty girls, he could not help becoming Kentish to the backbone” — his loyalty to Kent perhaps owed more to finance than emotion. After being awarded a benefit match — the lucrative Kent v England game in 1839 — he accepted an offer (“too good to refuse”) from Sussex to move county; it required the intervention of some of Kent’s wealthier patrons to persuade Pilch to remain where he was.

Pilch played on until 1855, when he was 52 — he later admitted that he and several of his team-mates kept going too long, meaning that Kent declined in the 1850s — having spent 35 years playing at what then was the top level. In terms of what is today judged as first-class games, Pilch scored 7,147 runs at 18.61, including three centuries and 24 fifties. He also took 142 wickets (although analyses do not survive for most of these). But it was noted at the time that he had scored ten centuries in total, a remarkable number for the time; he was also reckoned to have appeared 103 times at Lord’s.

The Saracen’s Head in Canterbury, photographed around 1945; the building was demolished in 1969 (Image: Dover Kent Archives)

Pilch continued to play minor cricket for one more season, appearing for the Beverley Club in Canterbury, and then from 1856 until 1866 concentrated on umpiring: in this period, he stood in 28 matches today reckoned first-class, almost all of which were played in Canterbury (although he had no great reputation as an umpire). He also had other cricketing interests. He began to work as a bat manufacturer — his occupation as given on the 1851 census — and continued as what would today be termed the head groundsman of the St Lawrence Ground until 1867. This was not the only ground with which he was associated. In 1849–50, he went into partnership with Edward Martin, another Kent cricketer, and developed the Prince of Wales Ground in Oxford, where he undertook winter coaching. This business partnership ended in 1855, at which point Pilch began another partnership with his nephew William Pilch, in whose house he was living in 1851. The pair became joint licensees of a Canterbury public house called the Saracen’s Head. It is not quite clear how the responsibility was split: the proprietors were often given as “F. and W. Pilch”, but William was sometimes named alone, and was listed as the head of the household on the 1861 census. From the little evidence that survives, William looks to have been the primary licensee. For example, on the 1861 census when Pilch was living at the Saracen’s Head with his nephew, William was listed as an innkeeper employing three male and three female servants; Pilch by contrast gave his occupation as a cricketer.

This particular business scheme was destined to end badly. William continued to run the Saracen’s Head for most of the 1860s but drifted into growing financial strife. Part of the problem was the new railway station that had been built in Canterbury; whereas the Pilches had previously enjoyed the custom of people (such as farmers) who would stay overnight in their establishment, the growth of the railways made this unnecessary as journeys could be made more quickly with no need for overnight accommodation. As a result, the Saracen’s Head lost valuable business. But there was also something of a financial crisis at the time that affected many small businesses after a leading bank in London collapsed. It was probably a combination of these factors that led to William’s ruin: in 1868 he was imprisoned for debt and declared bankrupt the following year, owing his creditors almost £700. By then, Pilch’s health was bad and he had been forced to give up his work as groundsman. His friends seemed to think that the problems over money with the Saracen’s Head had a negative effect on him; more than one report stated that it had been Pilch himself who had been declared bankrupt. Frederick Gale for example wrote in The Game of Cricket (1888): “The last time I saw Fuller Pilch was a few months before his bankruptcy, which, I believe, killed him. The world did not prosper with him as it ought, and he was out of spirits, and got so excited about the old times that I had to drop the subject.”

Pilch’s failing health — he was suffering from rheumatism — forced him to give up work and money became a struggle, especially with the problems faced by his nephew. Some Kent supporters arranged a subscription which it was hoped would provide him with a pension, but it fell short of expectations; some wealthy patrons had to top up the fund to provide him with an income of one pound per week. In April 1870, Pilch’s health took a turn for the worse. On 1 May 1870, he died at William’s home on Lower Bridge Street in Canterbury from what was then known as dropsy but would today be called fluid retention (or oedema); the actual cause was perhaps most likely to be heart failure. As a mark of the respect in which Pilch was held, a collection was taken among the public, the proceeds of which were used for a memorial. An obelisk was placed over his grave at St Gregory’s Church, which was moved to the St Lawrence ground in 1978 after the church had fallen into disuse. In 2008, Pilch returned to the news when plans by Christ Church University to redevelop the site of St Gregory’s were paused after it became clear that no-one was sure where Pilch was buried. An old photograph of the memorial eventually cleared up the mystery, and work went ahead; a new headstone was placed to mark the approximate location of Pilch’s grave.

The original memorial to Pilch in St Gregory’s churchyard, Canterbury, in the 1950s (Image: Kent Online)

So much for the facts. It is perhaps not as complete a story as we would like, nor could it ever be as detailed as a biography of Grace or Ranjitsinhji or Hobbs because it was plainly a very different world for cricketers of Pilch’s time. It is not possible to simply go through each season and note his scores in the biggest games or reel off impressive aggregates and averages. And yet there was no doubt among Pilch’s contemporaries that he was the best of all. As it happens, it is possible to get a glimpse of what might have made Pilch so good. But that is not the only way in which his legend continued. His reputation endured so that when W. G. Grace came along, Pilch was still for many the point of comparison. For some who remembered him, Pilch’s success must have been more meretricious simply because batting was more difficult back then. And so, more than 30 years after his death and over half a century since he last took to a cricket field, Pilch’s name became embroiled in a debate that has never been settled: was cricket a sport that continually improved, or one that was in a permanent state of decline? Were those who played in the past better than those seen in contemporary cricket? Or were the current players the best of all time?

Neither Successful nor Happy: The Reputation of C. B. Fry

The three captains of the 1912 Triangular Tournament. Left to right: Frank Mitchell (South Africa), C. B. Fry (England) and S. E. Gregory (Australia). (Image: Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 11 May 1912)

Even with various caveats and qualifications, there is little doubt that the list of achievements by C. B. Fry is impressive. A noted scholar in his youth; cricket and football for England; a joint world-record in athletics; “blues” in three sports from Oxford University. Nor were these his only interests: he dabbled in writing, politics and various other spheres, albeit with varied levels of success. He also had interest in the stage; he made an impact at Oxford as the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice — albeit more for his enthusiastic rendition of the line “Oh, Hell” than his acting ability — and was later fascinated by Hollywood, expressing interest in appearing in film. Yet there is a lingering air of dissatisfaction about his life; he came across as vain, arrogant and self-centred, while later in life he suffered from serious mental health problems. But he had a questionable relationship with the truth, as can be seen in his autobiography Life Worth Living, often wildly exaggerating his feats. For all the praise given in later years to his all-round sporting credentials, he never became part of the cricketing establishment in the same way as contemporaries like Pelham Warner or F. S. Jackson. Partly this may have been connected to his prolonged spell of mental illness in the 1920s (for example Harry Foster, Fry’s old Oxford team-mate, wrote to Gilbert Jessop in 1932 that he did not see him much anymore because he was “odd”). But there were other reasons; some of them were sporting but others were likely connected to his unconventional politics and personal beliefs.

Part of Fry’s problem was that when he was part of the cricketing establishment, he made a bit of a mess of it. This can be seen in his patchy record as a captain; despite being one of the few men to be undefeated as England captain, he was not convincing in the role. If he turned himself from an ordinary batter into an outstanding one through analysis and hard work, he never managed the same with leadership. At Oxford, his proficiency at sport meant that he was awarded the captaincy of the university football, athletics and cricket teams for his final two years, winning one and losing one of his matches against Cambridge in each of the three sports. But at university level in the 1890s, captaincy was as much a social role as a tactical one, and he had little impact on any of his teams. After leaving Oxford, he showed little appetite for cricket captaincy; he generally played under Ranjitsinhji for Sussex and under Archie MacLaren for England, concentrating purely on establishing himself as a top-class batter.

When Fry was appointed Sussex captain for the 1904 season, after Ranjitsinhji resigned owing to other commitments, the county dropped from second to sixth in the County Championship and over the following seasons never challenged for the title as they had around the turn of the century. The fault was not especially that of the new captain; the team had struggled for many years with a weak bowling attack and the loss of Ranjitsinhji between 1905 and 1907 was a heavy blow. However, his relationship with his professionals was strained. When he was just an ordinary member of the team, he viewed them largely as a supporting act that should not distract from his achievements. For example, he had forced Joe Vine, his opening partner, to become a very defensive player and had once admonished him for hitting three fours in one over: “[He] told me plainly that it was my job to stay there and leave that sort of cricket to him.” When Fry took over, he rarely took the time (and perhaps did not know how) to inspire or encourage them. Sometimes he even deliberately did the opposite, for example making Robert Relf go in as nightwatchman one evening in 1907 when he had already changed to make a quick getaway for an evening out in Canterbury,

A bigger problem was that he was often absent from the team owing to his many other interests, leading to an unsettled side. A ruptured achilles tendon in the second game of the 1906 season put him out of the team after two games and restricted him in 1907. By 1908, he appeared to have such little interest in playing for Sussex that it was picked upon by the press and there were frequent rumours he was going to retire. While he had a legitimate excuse, in that his time was taken up by the need to secure funding to keep the TS Mercury running, he was still the county captain but seemed unwilling either to resign or to commit to the club. The disharmony surrounding him meant that his spell as Sussex captain was not a success; it may not be a coincidence that he was never Hampshire’s official captain after moving there in 1909, although he performed the role several times as a stand-in.

Given his reputation and generally certain place in the side, Fry was often touted as a possible England captain. After a couple of occasions where he missed out, he was invited to lead the MCC team in Australia for the 1911–12 Ashes series. But his reputation was damaged further by this episode. He took weeks to decide whether to accept, which was not ideal from the prospective captain; the financial aspect of touring as an amateur was unappealing and he was not keen to leave the Mercury for so long. And there was a backlash when a Fry-endorsed appeal was launched by The Field to raise money to keep the Mercury running and free him up to tour; this attracted a huge amount of criticism and it generated little money. Fry eventually asked Field to end its campaign and he withdrew from the team. It was an embarrassing episode.

Fry’s only experience as England captain came the following summer, during the Triangular Tournament played between England, Australia and South Africa. Although past his best as a player, Fry was well positioned to lead England as he had been a keen supporter of Abe Bailey, who had been pushing for such a competition to take place since 1908. If the press questioned whether Fry was the best man to lead England at the age of 40, his association with Bailey and the newly formed ICC made him the ideal ambassador. Even so, the MCC appeared hesitant, and if we can believe Fry only offered him the role for the first Test. Fry’s version: he replied that he would only accept if given the role for the whole summer; Lord Harris, upon reading his letter, exclaimed “I think this fellow Fry is right!” As usual, it is a questionable account. Nevertheless, Fry led the team all summer and in the end was vindicated when England won the tournament. But this was not a particularly great achievement. The South African team was horribly weak and the Australian team barely representative after six leading players pulled out in a dispute with their board. Anything other than an English win in those circumstances would have been very unlikely.

But Fry did not impress on the field. He batted particularly nervously throughout the tournament, and seemed unhappy at several dismissals. And the pressure clearly got to him; the England wicket-keeper Tiger Smith later recalled that he missed two easy catches in the first game and took himself to the outfield away from the action in embarrassment. Nor were the press enamoured with his leadership. He was criticised for not bowling Frank Woolley, England’s most dangerous bowler in wet conditions, against Australia at Lord’s (although he later claimed the decision was tactical to prevent the Australians seeing Woolley’s bowling in a match certain to be drawn); and his delay in using Woolley against South Africa at the Oval was judged to be a tactical error later in the competition.

By the time of the decisive final game, against Australia, his relationship with spectators was at rock bottom. He was booed loudly at the toss for his part in a delayed start — he considered conditions unfit when the Australian captain wanted to play — and batted particularly poorly in the first innings. However, Australia collapsed to the bowling of Woolley; he was observed, according a 1984 biography by Clive Ellis, performing a handstand when a wicket fell. In England’s second innings, he scored a dour and chancy but important 79. Tiger Smith recalled many years later that Fry seemed unaware during his innings how bad conditions were — he was batting too well — and it was the professionals in the team who realised England’s best chance of an easy win was to get out quickly and bowl. Fry was critical of their approach, but they were proven right. Australia once more collapsed to Woolley, although Fry again behaved oddly. He was heard to shout for “George” (Hirst) to take a catch when the ball went in the air — but Hirst was not in the team. England won the game by 244 runs but Fry refused to come out onto the balcony when the spectators were cheering for him, remembering his treatment on the first day. As it happened, this was his final Test, and he ended his career never having lost a Test as captain; but he had been an unconvincing leader.

Even so, Fry was briefly a candidate to lead England during the disastrous 1921 summer, when he was 50 years old. But it was not his tactical skill that appealed; the desperate selectors were thrashing about for answers against an overwhelmingly superior Australian team, and Fry’s name promoted warm feelings of nostalgia and romanticism. The revival of his claims betrayed selectorial incompetence and showed their lack of awareness for what Test cricket had become in 1921.

If there were question marks over Fry’s captaincy, there were even bigger ones over his role as a Test selector. Owing to the way that committees were composed, Fry was a selector several times. In 1899 and 1902, he was part of the committee through being one of the first amateurs picked for the England team; in 1909 and 1912 (in the latter season as both chairman of selectors and England captain) he was a permanent selector. As ever, Fry was eager to inflate his importance in Life Worth Living. For example, he claimed (not very convincingly) that in 1899 he unwittingly had the casting vote in choosing Archie MacLaren to replace W. G. Grace as England captain. In his version of the selection meeting for the second Test, Fry arrived late and when he was asked by Grace if he thought MacLaren should play, he said yes without knowing that the others had been deadlocked over whether Grace or MacLaren should be captain. Fry believed that he therefore was the man who ended Grace’s Test career. But as usual, we cannot trust Fry, and it would have been perfectly possible for both MacLaren and Grace to play.

The England team for the first Test of the 1902 Ashes. Back row: G. H. Hirst, A. A. Lilley, W. H. Lockwood, L. C. Braund, W. Rhodes, J. T. Tyldesley. Front row: C. B. Fry, F. S. Jackson, A. C. MacLaren (captain), K. S. Ranjitsinhji, G. L. Jessop. (Image: Archie (1981) by Michael Down)

Fry’s next experience in the role came in 1902. As in 1899, he was co-opted onto the panel through being one of the first amateurs picked. But in retelling his role in that Test series, Fry was aware that the selectors had been heavily criticised for their negative influence over that summer and so attempted to absolve himself from any part in the mistakes. As it happened, he was only a selector for the first two Tests (he was a late replacement in the third game and was dropped for the final two after scoring 0, 0, 1 and 4 in the series), but rather than explain this, Fry chose to portray himself as the lone voice of sanity that summer. He was critical of the selectors’ tendency change the team owing to the unsettling effect on the players; as he was dropped, this is hardly a surprising view. But he emphasised how correct Archie MacLaren, the captain, was in his opinion that Gilbert Jessop — dropped for the fourth Test before scoring a match-winning century in the fifth — was an indispensable part of any England team.

He wrote a detailed account of the selection meeting for the fourth Test in which Fred Tate was selected largely owing to a clash between MacLaren and Lord Hawke, the chairman of selectors. He said that Hawke had not allowed Schofield Haigh to be chosen as it would affect the Yorkshire side, which already had contributed three players to the England team. According to Fry: “When someone proposed Fred Tate instead of Schofield Haigh, I distinctly told my colleagues that Fred Tate could not field anywhere except at slip, and that, though he was a careful slip in a county side, he was not up to the standard required in a Test Match. Lord Hawke was huffy, and we gave way to him, me protesting.” Tate, of course, dropped a crucial catch in that game and was harshly judged as being to blame for England’s three-run loss; retrospectively (and a little unfairly) he was judged as having been an ill-judged selection, out of his depth at Test level. If we believe Fry’s account, he had seen this and attempted to stop it. It is a beautiful story, but Fry was not a selector for that Test match, having already been dropped and not being a permanent member of the panel. This discussion is nothing more than a figment of his imagination, another product of his compulsive need to be the hero of every story; even so, the tale was frequently retold in later years as if it were true and still can be seen unquestioningly included in accounts of the series.

There were similar criticisms in 1909, when Fry was one of the permanent selectors. That panel has been ridiculed as one of the worst of all time, drawing comment from Sydney Pardon in Wisden that one of their decisions “touched the confines of lunacy”. Some of the worst decisions were made before the second Test, when the chairman of selectors, Lord Hawke, was recovering from a long illness in France. Apparently going against the wishes of the captain MacLaren, the two remaining selectors — Fry and H. D. G. Leveson Gower — dropped Wilfred Rhodes and Gilbert Jessop, two men generally guaranteed a Test place in this period. Even worse, despite making five changes to the team that won the first Test, they failed to pick a fast bowler in helpful conditions. Fry, in his autobiography, unconvincingly tried to abdicate any responsibility, although he still claimed credit for the partially successful inclusion of Albert Relf. Pardon in Wisden lamented: “Never in the history of Test Matches in England has there been such blundering in the selection of an England eleven.” Even when Hawke returned, the choices made by the panel were vehemently criticised for the rest of the season.

If his final term as a selector, for the 1912 season, was more successful on paper, Fry still felt the need to prove himself in Life Worth Living. He claimed that he had insisted on being the chairman and that the rules were changed so that only two other selectors could join him. He also wrote that they met only once, and chose “a definite team with definite substitutes if required for the whole series of six matches and we never met again.” This is likely another exaggeration, and Alan Gibson in Cricket Captains of England (1979) notes that there are “stray references” that other meetings took place. Iain Wilton, in his 1999 biography of Fry, notes that 17 players were used by England that summer which, if it was not an unusually high number for the period, indicates less stability of selection that Fry indicated. Nor were all the selections an unqualified success; the weakness of the opposition meant that errors were not as costly as in previous summers.

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Aside from the damage to his reputation from his selectorial misadventures, there was another blot on Fry’s cricketing copybook. He turned to writing early in his career as a way to supplement his meagre income. To a modern audience, Fry’s writing is usually quite readable, especially his later work. But some of it can be impenetrably dense, and his style often seems contrived. For example, writing about how rain affected cricket pitches in 1902, he said: “It sounds artificial, but, by Hercules! the idea of covering up the wicket with a big tarpaulin is not so very unreasonable.” But he was undeniable prolific; he contributed articles to various publications and authored his own books, particularly on cricket technique. For a few years at the start of the twentieth century he had a regular column in the Daily Express, writing about matches in which he was playing (including the 1902 Ashes series). Although he was not alone in doing this, it was frowned upon by the establishment. In later years, he contributed to magazines, including ones aimed at boys — notably The Captain — and in 1904 became the editor of a new publication named after him — Fry’s Magazine. This often featured articles which reflected Fry’s own interests, such as motoring or flying, and promoted the virtues of sport. His involvement in the Boy Scouts movement— he was a friend of Robert Baden-Powell — also prompted him to argue that Britain should focus on sports with greater military value, such as shooting. Although not an especially unusual belief at the time, Fry’s advocacy of militarism did not escape attention — and occasional ridicule. He later reduced his commitment to magazine when the TS Mercury took up more of his time and resigned as editor in 1910. He continued to write occasional articles but the magazine ceased production when the First World War began. Not for the first time, Fry had dabbled in a new world but failed to emerge quite on top.

His other literary achievement before the war was a novel, written with his wife, called A Mother’s Son. The book was well-received by critics and praised by some of Fry’s admirers in later life, but seems to have been horribly cliched and dripping in purple prose. Wilton said of it: “The book can only be regarded as a page-turner on the basis that readers will want to escape some sections, which are cringe-inducingly bad.”

After the long seclusion caused by his mental illness in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Fry returned to journalism. He began to write for the Evening Standard in time for the 1934 Ashes series. The newspaper had also signed Douglas Jardine for that summer. The latter was to write the “straight” reports on the matches while Fry was to write something more idiosyncratic, producing columns supposedly in an impressionistic, “American” style. The result, a column called “C. B. Fry Says” proved very popular. He made an impact in the press box too, arriving by chauffeured car and sharing his enormous lunch from a hamper. He opened his first column with: “Full of people, all talking. No interest in Bradman’s broken shoelace at Suez. Or Woodfull’s fall on the deck at Crete. It’s just the age-old love of cricket and expectations.” It was in this column that Fry first called Bradman “The Don”. He wrote of him in the 1934 series: “He smashes with a sort of sardonic smile in his strokes.” “C. B Fry Says” was perhaps his greatest achievement away from the field of play, but even in this success there was controversy, because he felt the need to score points.

He managed to alienate the Australian cricket team on several occasions. For example during their match against Cambridge in 1934, he wrote: “Australians seem to be quite nice people. We, the elite, stay at the famous Bull. The actual players are at the University Arms.” His biographer Ellis noted that his articles often contained “subtle taunts.” He irritated the 1938 Australian team by suggesting that they were unsporting and took the game too seriously. And he often commented on the education of Australian players, lamenting that only a couple had been to public school, and made snide comments about their occupations away from cricket. Given the ruptures caused by the Bodyline controversy of 1932–33, and the exaggerated care taken by the MCC to avoid giving offence to the Australians in the strained aftermath, Fry’s careless snobbery and taunts must have raised a few eyebrows at Lord’s.

C. B. Fry (extreme right) and Ranjitsinhji (centre left, in profile) at the League of Nations (Image: C. B. Fry: An English Hero (1999) by Iain Wilton)

Fry’s politics probably killed any last chance of admittance to the Lord’s establishment. He began respectably enough. In the early 1920s, he worked with Ranjitsinhji at the League of Nations, although he was thought to be behind several incidents where his employer made complaints about the lack of deference according to him. It was during this time that Fry was supposedly offered the throne of Albania, an episode he described at length (and with uncharacteristic restraint, suggesting that for once he was being accurate) in his autobiography. He believed he had a good chance, but would have needed Ranjitsinhji to support him to the tune of £10,000 a year, which the latter was unwilling (and realistically unable) to do. There have been various explanations of this, from an elaborate joke by Ranjitsinhji that got out of hand, to something entirely fabricated by Fry. But most writers, most notably Alan Gibson who dug into the story in some detail, have concluded there was some truth in the tale, and the Albanians were undoubtedly looking for a king in this period.

Fry’s supposed interest in social issues such as public health meant that he was of interest to political parties and there were occasional suggestions during his cricketing days that he would enter parliament. After the First World War, he stood as a Liberal candidate in three elections, adopting unconventional tactics such as campaigning on horseback. Hampered by his political inexperience and an unfamiliarity with the Liberal manifesto, he lost fairly convincingly at Brighton in the 1922 General Election, narrowly at Banbury in the 1923 General Election and then again at Oxford in a 1924 by-election. In the latter two elections, he was affected by split votes lost to the Labour candidate. At Banbury the stresses caused his health to break down and he missed the declaration. He made no mention of these episodes in his autobiography, and his entry into politics is usually explained as him attempting to conquer a new world having finished with sport. But the question remains: why did he stand in three elections? Did he look at the achievements of those with whom he went to university, or against whom he played cricket, and feel that he needed to prove himself as more than a sportsman? In that case, his choice of the Liberal Party may have been a mistake. Although Fry was far from the only cricketer to enter politics, the natural sphere of the MCC was the Conservative Party and it is unlikely he did himself any favours associating with the Liberals. Yet the final nail in the coffin of Fry’s establishment status probably came through his later association with right wing politics.

Unlike modern readers, Fry’s contemporaries would not have batted an eyelid at his association with Robert Baden-Powell or Abe Bailey, both men were unashamed imperialists and white supremacists. Nor would Fry’s push in his writing for a more militaristic focus in Britain have been seen as necessarily wrong. And leading members of the cricketing establishment, including a captain of England, flirted with fascism in the early 1920s without any detriment to their status. But Fry became associated with the extreme right when it had lost a lot what little lustre it had after revealing its true colours in Italy and Germany. Showing tone-deafness that was one of his defining characteristics, on the eve of the Second World War, Fry devoted a whole chapter of Life Worth Living to a meeting he had with Adolf Hitler in 1934.

The background was attempts in Germany to cultivate links between the Hitler Youth and the Boy Scouts movement. When the approach failed, Fry — who had long been a supporter of Boy Scouts and had almost been the figurehead when the movement was launched — was invited to Germany. When he arrived, he spent time at the Ministry of Propaganda and met Hitler for around an hour (which Fry had insisted was a condition of his agreeing to visit), listening to his “vision” and his view of the threat of Communists and Jews. Fry was impressed, which might have been seen as unfortunate but not unforgivable in 1934. But what Fry said in 1939 was highly questionable, then and now. He wrote favourably of the devotion of the German people to Hitler and the discipline in the atmosphere. He liked this version of Germany, and openly said so: “Herr Hitler and his men genuinely wished to be friends with us.” And he liked the man himself, writing that he “gave the impression of effective grip” and admitting that he was “attracted by him”. Even when the true nature of Nazism had become apparent in 1939, Fry still was happy to conclude that the effect it had produced in Germany was a good one; he said that the way Germans “did face and outride” the “storm” of “Communism and its corollaries” which “are a turgid curse of mankind” was “a tremendous feat of national character”. He was still in favour of building links in the respective youth movements. Nor was this a one-off for his autobiography; he wrote in the Sunday Express in 1940 of his continued admiration for Hitler.

Fascism clearly had an appeal to Fry, and it was one he explored after visiting Germany. Although he was not a member of any fascist party — and he would not have been the first cricketer to join one — he attended a meeting of the British Union of Fascists as a guest in 1934, allowed members of the Hitler Youth to use the Mercury and watched film of the Berlin Olympics at the German Embassy. After the war, he downplayed his support, suggesting that he told Hitler that he should not invade England and instead recommended that Germany take up cricket.

But perhaps the damage was done. Fry would never have been entirely acceptable to Lord’s: a journalist; a difficult personality; an unapologetic snob; someone who loudly insisted on the deference he felt was his due; a man who exaggerated and blustered his way though conversation and writing; an overly garrulous, oddly dressed eccentric who had suffered from prolonged mental illness; and a supporter of Hitler just before the outbreak of a terrible war. No number of runs could quite compensate to the people who mattered.

C. B. Fry receiving his “big red book” from Eamonn Andrews when he was the subject of the TV programme This is Your Life in 1955 (Image: Big Red Book)

None of this makes Fry an appealing character. Much more could be said about his life, about his interests and the varied spheres in which he worked and moved. Others have done so at great length. But underneath the surface, there is something uncomfortable about the man. One of the most insightful pieces of writing on Fry — before the warts-and-all biographies by Ellis and Wilton — came from Alan Gibson. In his 1979 Cricket Captains of England, he said: “A business partner of Fry’s, Christopher Hollis, wrote to me … that C.B. ‘had a great capacity for living a fantasy life’. He went on, ‘It pleased him to tell the story [about the offer of the throne of Albania], and by the end I fancy that he did not know himself whether he believed it or not.’ While one does not doubt the truth of this, it would be a mistake to think that Fry was a fantasist, in the sense that Walter Mitty was. His fantasies were no more than embroideries on what was already the finest silk. His achievements were real.” Gibson wrote admiringly of Fry but noted that his character contained “not exactly an acidity, but a certain mordancy, a classical disdain”.

Another viewpoint was that given by his wife — who died in 1946 and left him free to become a genial celebrity around the radio and television circuit — that his mental illness of the 1920s was caused by “thwarted genius”. Perhaps he spread himself too thinly and never achieved what he believed what he was capable of. While his contemporaries, cricketing and otherwise, went on to bigger and better things, he stagnated. And maybe Gibson realised this, telling a story of how one of his Oxford contemporaries, F. E. Smith who became Lord Chancellor, visited the TS Mercury: “[Smith] was duly impressed, and ended by saying ‘This is a fine show, C.B., but, for you, a backwater.’ Fry replied, ‘That may be, but the question remains whether it is better to be successful or happy.'”

Was Fry happy? His marriage was undoubtedly not, nor did he really have a role in running the Mercury, which was the domain of his wife. His character betrayed defensiveness and his writing a desire to magnify his achievements and promote a vision of infallibility. If his “life worth living” was a constant search for fulfilment — in sport, or literature, or politics, or conversation — the evidence suggests that he never succeeded in finding it.

“A Cad of the Most Unscrupulous Kidney”: The Personal Life of C. B. Fry

C. B. Fry in 1895
(Image: Charles Alcock, Famous Cricketers and Cricket Grounds, 1895)

Once upon a time, C. B. Fry was the fairytale hero of English cricket: one of the greatest of all batters, accomplished in innumerable sports, academically gifted, and attracting judgements along the lines of “greatest ever Englishman”. More recently, he has been largely forgotten, even as cricketing contemporaries such as Victor Trumper, Jack Hobbs, Wilfred Rhodes and Ranjitsinhji, the man with whom he was so long associated, continue to be written about. The many reasons for this include his flirtation with Nazism, a suspicion that lingers in modern writing that he was a thoroughly unpleasant man and, perhaps most importantly for the modern statistically obsessed age, a questionable Test record. Yet in some ways it is surprising that he ever enjoyed such a reputation. While he was a dominant figure at Oxford in his student days and undeniably popular around the turn of the twentieth century, he was hardly a man who would have endeared himself to the English establishment. Astonishingly eccentric, outspoken, overconfident and arrogant, he made choices throughout his life which would his peers would have judged as questionable at best. To use one of his own more memorable phrases (written largely to disparage professional footballers), he behaved like a “cad of the most unscrupulous kidney”. Not only that, but he was often hugely hypocritical; his determination to pursue his own course left him with decreasingly few defenders until he re-emerged in the 1930s in a new career as a writer and cricketing celebrity. After that, he was eulogised until modern biographers rediscovered the truth.

Fry called his 1939 autobiography Life Worth Living, which reflected the unusually varied nature of his experiences. But that book illustrated one of his biggest failings and perhaps demonstrated his fundamental insecurity. It portrayed his life as a succession of triumphs such as might be found in a “Boy’s Own” story. As it happens, large parts of it might as well have been fiction because the writing was fuelled by Fry’s desperate desire to have the last word, to always be proven correct and to exaggerate his achievements, which even unfiltered would have been impressive.But the fact is that there remains something unsettling about C. B. Fry, reflected in a notable lack of official recognition during his lifetime. Looked at as a whole, Fry’s life and career looks like a spectacular monument of achievement in sport, literature and academic success. Only when the individual aspects are examined more closely does the monument appear somewhat unstable and ragged around the edges. It takes careful excavation to ask: “Who was C. B. Fry?” And the answer is rarely pleasant.

Even with his many adventures and varied interests, the outline of his life is surprisingly simple. Charles Burgess Fry was born in Croydon on 25 April 1872. He was the eldest of four children to Lewis Fry and Constance White. His father was a clerk in the Metropolitan Police (but generally called himself a civil servant), his mother the daughter of a Hove schoolmaster called Charles White. C. B. Fry’s parents married in Hove on 29 August 1871; perhaps not quite a shotgun wedding but there might have been an element of haste. Perhaps not coincidentally, the 1871 census records Lewis Fry as a visitor at Charles White’s school and the 70-year-old Charles White as having been blind from cataracts (although a note said that his sight had been restored by an operation).

Quite why Fry’s birth was in Croydon is unclear because he was baptised at the end of June in Hove. In fact, Fry himself was fairly quiet on his early years and little has been written about his upbringing. We can only go by official records, and when we next meet the Fry family, in the 1881 census, C. B. has been joined by two sisters and a brother, and the family are living in Orpington, Kent, with two servants. In Life Worth Living, Fry recalled attending Hove Lodge, the school of Charles White, as a small boy. He said that his family relocated to Chislehurst when he was young before moving to Orpington when he was seven. He was educated at Hornbook House, a nearby school, where after a shaky start he thrived after a change in regime and eventually won a scholarship to Repton. He excelled there, in both an academic and sporting sense, and came away with various school prizes and an enviable record in cricket and athletics. Winning a scholarship to Wadham College purely on academic ability, he attended Oxford University from 1891 until 1895.

Fry (back row, centre) in a photograph of Wadham College’s rugby team from 1892–93 (Image: C. B. Fry: An English Hero (1999) by Iain Wilton)

At first glance, Fry’s time at Oxford was a triumph. He received “blues” — colours awarded for representing the university against Cambridge — in cricket, football and athletics (equalling the world long-jump record in one athletics meeting). He even captained the three respective teams. Active in a wide range of pursuits, from drama to debating, he was perhaps the most famous man in Oxford, with a reputation that transcended sport. And in 1893, he was awarded a first in classical moderations, an apparent prelude to academic distinction as well. But in the end, he managed just a fourth-class degree when he left university when he apparently suffered a “nervous breakdown” owing to a combination of personal worries. From there, he drifted briefly into teaching and journalism, struggling to earn a living until he married Beatrice Holme Sumner in 1898. His wife already had two “illegitimate” children with her long-term (and not particularly secret) partner, Charles Hoare; and in a very unconventional arrangement, Hoare then supported Fry financially, enabling him to become, in effect, a full-time sportsman.

Fry began to play cricket regularly for Sussex as an amateur — his attitude towards professionals was at best condescending and he subscribed fully to the view of the time that amateurism was superior in all sport — and played Test cricket for England. He later moved to Hampshire and captained England in 1912. Meanwhile, he played for Southampton in football — one of the few amateurs in the football league — making an FA Cup final appearance and playing briefly for England in that sport too. Among his many other pursuits, Fry subsequently worked in journalism, writing for the Daily Express, The Captain and the eponymous Fry’s Magazine. From 1907, following the death of Hoare, he became closely associated with the Training Ship Mercury; although his wife was largely responsible for running the ship, Fry remained its figurehead until 1950.

In his later life, he had spells working with his close friend Ranjitsinhji at the League of Nations in the early 1920s and three unsuccessful attempts to be elected as an MP for the Liberal party. Disappearing from the public eye for around ten years owing to a prolonged spell of mental illness, Fry returned to cricket as a journalist in 1934 when he began an unusual but popular column in the Evening Standard. He remained a prominent figure until his death on 7 September 1956.

Over the years, many tales accumulated about his feats in all walks of life — many of them embellished, polished and propagated by Fry himself. He was the subject of a hagiography written in 1912, when he was the England cricket captain, and apart from Life Worth Living, has been the subject of two full-length biographies. If the latter works, especially Iain Wilton’s C. B. Fry: An English Hero (1999), looked more questioningly and critically at their subject, earlier writers had swallowed everything that Fry had to say and extolled the virtues of their hero.

Such a whirlwind summary can only give a brief picture of a man who squeezed a great deal into his 84 years. For anyone looking for details, Wilton’s book remains the standard work and was so influential in stripping away Fry’s mystique that E. W. Swanton — hardly a man whose opinion was easily swayed — rewrote the obituary he had written after Fry’s death, incorporating many of Wilton’s findings, in 1999 for his Cricketers of My Time. For our purposes, there are just a few aspects of his life that merit closer attention. The first — crucial to understanding Fry as a cricketer and as a man — is his personal life. For this, it is worth dipping into Life Worth Living. The book is an entertaining read, even if we should treat it with an enormous degree of caution; but if many of its facts are questionable, it tells us a great deal about its author.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about Life Worth Living is that it is an extended work of self-promotion and self-justification. Fry spends so many words trying to settle scores from decades before that the modern reader is drawn irresistibly to recall the frequent autobiographical refrain of Steve Coogan’s fictional character Alan Partridge : “Needless to say, I had the last laugh.” A few examples should suffice. Fry went into great detail to describe alleged injustices perpetrated upon him at Hornbrook House by the original headmaster’s wife (before the new headmaster took over to create an environment which suited Fry perfectly), the long-dead Elizabeth Humphrey. He bitterly — and inaccurately — detailed the circumstances of his arrest in 1894 for extinguishing street lamps, believing himself to have been unfairly treated by the Vice-Chancellor’s court; he was less than complimentary about the man whom he believed led him into trouble, F. E. Smith (who went on to be an MP and the Lord High Chancellor). He also attempted to absolve himself from a suggestion, in a long-forgotten article in The Idler, that he had been late to an interview which took place in his rooms at Wadham College one Sunday morning: the writer had noted that Fry was still in the bath when he arrived. Such defensiveness extended into his cricketing recollections, particularly his obvious resentment, four decades later, that he had been no-balled for throwing: he “borrowed” a story from another cricketer similarly no-balled — that he had hidden splints under his sleeves so that he couldn’t straighten his arm — but had done nothing of the kind at the time; he also wrote contemptuously of Jim Phillips, one of the umpires who no-balled him. Other less successful cricketing episodes were either retrospectively justified or omitted altogether, as were other incidents, such as his attempts to enter politics, which detracted from the image of constant triumph that he wished to project.

And some of Fry’s stories are so wildly implausible that he must have made them up; perhaps one or two extraordinary things might have happened to him as he described, but there are simply too many. Again, a few examples will suffice: his encounter with a man he believed to be a ghost when he was a child; his match-saving 17 not out playing in a men’s game of cricket at the age of around eight or nine; leaping from nine inches behind the board when breaking the British long-jump record in 1892; his miraculous and self-cured recovery from a ruptured achilles tendon in 1906–07; and even inflations of his cricketing scores. And some of his stories were verifiable lies: the invention of two bowling hat-tricks in first-class cricket; a claim never to have lost a match against Cambridge as captain in any sport; the suggestion that he won a house match at Repton with eight of his team indisposed so that he had to score the majority of runs and bowl half the overs. There was a similar emphasis in C. B. Fry: The Man and his Methods, written in 1912 by A. W. Myers in close collaboration with his subject. But Wilton notes several examples of how Fry embellished and exaggerated some of the incidents in his life between 1912 and 1939.

Fry also tried to enhance the picture of who he was and where he came from. In Life Worth Living, he manufactured an elaborate genealogical history — that the “Le Fre” family came to England with William the Conqueror, but another ancestor helped King Harold’s widow find his body after the Battle of Hastings. There were various other tales of the Frys through the ages which may or may not be true. But even if his ancestors were wealthy and influential (as he tried to portray them), the Fry family had fallen considerably by the time of his birth, and his parents were not wealthy: part of the reason for his “nervous breakdown” at Oxford was the worry of mounting debts and an income that matched neither his tastes nor his social obligations; financial considerations were probably a large factor in his marriage to Beatrice Sumner Holme. Fry also told a few childhood tales in his autobiography which are full of streams and woods and gardens, as well as encounters which leave the modern reader wondering if they were fabrications, such as regularly seeing the widow of the Emperor Napoleon III (who did live near the Fry family in Chiselhurst). Yet Fry also gave the impression that his parents were at best indifferent to him; for example, on one occasion he wrote: “My father, as usual to anything I said, twirled his golden moustaches and shouted ‘Nonsense!'” Nor did they particularly care for his whereabouts. According to Fry, his increasing fascination with outdoor pursuits meant that his mother “never knew where I was from morning till night” and thought he was “getting out of control”; this convinced his father to enrol him in Hornbrook House.

Fry had less to say in his autobiography about his private life. Wilton notes two abortive relationships that he had in the 1890s: Elizabeth Hopkinson, whose rejection of Fry contributed to his breakdown, and Molly Dawson, who lost interest when she was walking in Oxford and saw A Handbook of Anatomy for Art Students displayed in a shop window, open at a picture of the naked Fry, who had been photographed a few years previously, probably as a way of supplementing his income. Fry cheerfully told the story against himself in Life Worth Living, although he did not say that he was in a relationship with Dawson; Fry’s daughter-in-law told Wilton that Dawson had been with Fry’s sister at the time.

Beatrice Fry née Holme Sumner (Image: C. B. Fry: An English Hero (1999) by Iain Wilton)

Fry was equally silent about his marriage. This requires a fuller explanation (and a few double takes). The story of Beatrice Holme Sumner, told by Ronald Morris in The Captain’s Lady (1985), is frankly astonishing. When she was just fifteen, the married Charles Hoare (who was thirty at the time) fell in love with her; two years later, he was caught in her bedroom. As both families were rich and well-connected, the scandal was initially managed discreetly and Holme Sumner’s family went to extraordinary but unsuccessful attempts to keep the pair apart. Matters were further complicated when Hoare loaned around £3,000 to the Holme Summer family to cover their mounting debts. In 1883, when Beatrice was 21 and legally an adult by the law of the time, she became pregnant and the couple moved in together. At this point, the story reached the newspapers and became an enormous scandal. Hoare was taken to court for breaching a restraining order taken out by the Holme Sumner family to prevent him seeing Beatrice; top lawyers and a great deal of legal debate ended in a relatively light punishment of Hoare having to pay legal costs, even though the judge stated that through Hoare, Beatrice had “suffered a fall from which no woman could live to recover from”. It was after this that Hoare began to take an interest in the ship that became TS Mercury, establishing a naval school. Beatrice aided him in running the establishment but the couple gradually drifted apart by the end of the 1880s, although they had a second child in 1890.

Fry met the pair in the mid-1890s when he played cricket at the naval school. He became close to Hoare but in 1898, he resigned from Charterhouse, where he had been teaching without much enthusiasm, and married Beatrice Holme Sumner. The reasons are slightly unclear; Ronald Morris suggested that it was a way for Beatrice to regain social respectability; Fry certainly benefited financially from Hoare’s long-term financial support of Beatrice. Wilton has argued that the couple simply fell in love, but concedes that “the union … was a strange one”. They soon had their first child together, although the Fry family believed that Charis Fry was the daughter of Charles Hoare rather than Fry. Beatrice and Fry later had two other children: Faith and Stephen, but there is evidence that Beatrice continued to care greatly for Hoare, even after his death.

Fry’s marriage was not an easy one and the couple did not always get along well. They spent a lot of time apart, and when they were together often argued. Wilton has argued that Fry had an affair with a nurse in 1909 — although there is little evidence of this other than family rumour. Beatrice was obsessively devoted to the Mercury, which she ran cruelly and mercilessly according to the testimony of former pupils. Fry’s daughter-in-law told Wilton that she blamed Beatrice for the prolonged breakdown suffered by Fry in the late 1920s (which Beatrice herself attributed to “thwarted genius”). She told Wilton in 1997 that Beatrice was “a domineering creature”, an “awful woman” and “terrible”. Many of the naval recruits and instructors at the Mercury were intimidated by her, and Wilton argues that Fry was too.

The breakdown suffered by Fry in the 1920s was not his first. In 1895 — glossed over as “nervous strain and anxiety” in The Man and His Methods and omitted from Life Worth Living — his health collapsed in his final term at Oxford. Myers hinted that financial worries were the main cause as he was heavily in debt (something that Fry mentioned in his autobiography). His mother was also ill (she died in 1898) and his brush with the authorities over the gas lamps may have been a factor. It was for this reason, and because he had been unable to study, that Fry recorded an uncharacteristic failure in his final exams, resulting in his ignominious fourth-class degree. Wilton also suggests that his rejection by Elizabeth Hopkinson, a fellow Oxford student, contributed to his malaise. However, Fry recovered from this breakdown with no apparent ill-effects. His second bout of illness was more dramatic and longer lasting.

Fry first fell ill in India in 1928, becoming paranoid and believing that people were attempting to steal from him. He returned home but did not get any better, continuing to fear theft. Clive Ellis, in his biography of Fry, relates how on one occasion Fry strolled naked along Brighton beach; on another he cast a fishing rod out of his bedroom window. Other incidents included Fry being observed dancing with an invisible partner, or mounting a horse facing in the wrong direction. At this time, he lived away from Beatrice and his care was bankrolled by Ranjitsinhji, who was then the Maharaja of Nawanagar; Fry could not see his old friend, however because according to his daughter-in-law, one of his symptoms was “a horror of Indians”. He had brief spells of better health, but there was little overall improvement. Although he came out of “seclusion” in 1934 — perhaps not coincidentally shortly after Ranjitsinhji’s death — he continued to behave and dress eccentrically for the rest of his life. He often showed some distress in private, and his daughter-in-law suggested that he had for a time received electroshock therapy in the 1930s.

If Fry was never quite the same after recovering from his illness, he was never the easiest man with whom to get along. Clive Ellis wrote in his 1984 biography: “[Fry] was not only highly self-opinionated, but also low on tact, so it was inevitable that there would be flashpoints, on and off the field.” Ellis also wrote, for Fry’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “A stubborn conviction that he was invariably right did not always endear him to the establishment or even to his fellow journalists.” His determination could have benefits, such such as when he taught himself to head the ball to be able to compete better with professional footballers. But his snobbery led to problems. He wrote often about the superiority to amateur footballers to northern professionals: he considered the inclusion of the penalty area during amateur games as an insult to their sportsmanship: “It is a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which assumes that players intend to trip, hack, and push their opponents, and to behave like cads of the most unscrupulous kidney. I say that the lines marking the penalty area are a disgrace to the playing field of a public school.” His attitude towards class persisted all through his life. For example, in 1938, he caused some offence by writing about the educational and social backgrounds of the Australian players and continued to regard it as a stain on someone’s character if they had not attended public school.

Even during his playing days, long before his illness in the 1920s which might account for his later eccentricities, he clashed with spectators, opponents and team-mates. And despite his loud championing of the superiority of amateur sportsmen, he was sometimes guilty of the very faults which he criticised in professionals. For example, playing football for Oxford against London Caledonians, he was involved in controversy when he was accused of being too rough, and for calling an opposing player a “pig”. The matter was reported in The Scotsman, but Isis defended Fry and the other Oxford players denied anything of the sort had taken place.

This was not the only example of Fry’s difficult character. On his first appearance for Oxford against Cambridge at football, his team lost 5–1; Fry was heard to say: “I never want to play again with such a lot of **** crocks.” During an 1894 cricket match between Sussex and Gloucestershire at Bristol, when there was no play owing to poor weather, the crowd became restless as the sun shone (the pitch was still wet) so the teams played football to entertain them. But the spectators were unimpressed, wanting to see cricket. Gilbert Jessop, one of the Gloucestershire players, later wrote: “[The spectators] were orderly until Charles Fry ‘cocked a snook’ at them.” The crowd came onto the field and surrounded the players and attempted to damage the pitch. When the teams escaped to the pavilion, they were prevented from leaving by around 2,000 people; Fry and the Sussex captain were surrounded and jostled when they tried to sneak away.

On his various playing fields, he had a reputation for posing and contemptuous arrogance. And he certainly enjoyed attention, such as when in the icy winter of 1894–95 he ostentatiously skated at great speed on the Cherwell, leading enormous groups of people and attracting quite an audience. Even though he never played in Australia, Fry was keen to offer his expert guidance in the press about what teams would encounter, most notably before the 1903–04 series and to the considerable irritation of the MCC captain Pelham Warner. It was not his only incident with Warner. In 1908, Fry made a protest to the MCC Secretary over the choice of Warner as the captain of the Gentlemen at Lord’s ahead of Ranjitsinhji. It led to a strained and unpleasant atmosphere which was even picked up by the press: the News of the World referred to the “internal feuds” of the amateur side.

This was not the only time that he adversely affected his own side. On several occasions, notably in 1902, 1907 and 1908, he drifted in and out of the Sussex team, proving unreliable. He also irritated some of the team’s professionals, such as when he made Robert Relf go in as nightwatchman one evening in 1907 when he had already changed to make a quick getaway for an evening out in Canterbury. Fry failed to turn up for the opening game of the 1908 season, having promised to play for the Gentlemen of England (led by W. G. Grace) against Surrey. Most notable was an incident that season when the Sussex team, captained by Fry, failed to appear for their game against Hampshire; they were staying with Ranjitsinhji who told them that no play would take place owing to poor weather. The press — including Wisden — were critical of Fry (although he was not always directly named), mentioning “unpleasantness” and “discord” surrounding him and Ranjitsinhji, and the negative influence he had on the Sussex team. Wilton said of Fry in 1908: “His off-field antics became increasingly petulant and, as a result, began to tarnish the sporting reputation that had taken him more than fifteen years to earn.” The following year, he moved to Hampshire, for whom he was qualified by residence.

And Fry reacted badly to any perceived slights, however small. It was rumoured in 1908 Fry refused to play at Kent that season owing to some “ironic cheering” from the crowd when he had misfielded at Canterbury a year before. He had also, as at the time noted by Cricket, not played at Gloucestershire or Nottingham for some time — which may have been connected to incidents with the crowd in previous seasons. When Hampshire played Kent at Canterbury in 1911, the home crowd barracked Fry for slow scoring in the first innings, when he made a century. When Hampshire batted again at the end of the second day, Fry faced the last over from Colin Blythe, who deliberately bowled two high full tosses at him, after which Fry protested by coming down the pitch to speak to the bowler. Blythe bowled the rest of the over wide of off-stump. Fry was once again roundly jeered by the spectators, and as he left the field at the end of the day, he challenged some of them. It later transpired that his objection was that Blythe was bowling with the sun behind him and therefore he could not see the ball. Fry — who scored a century on the last day to save the game — continued to complain about the incident in writing even into the 1950s and, rather ridiculously, claimed that Blythe — a slow-left-arm spinner — was bowling extremely fast short-pitched deliveries around the wicket at him.

C. B. Fry in his naval uniform (Image: C. B. Fry: An English Hero (1999) by Iain Wilton)

This attitude persisted long after Fry’s playing career was over. When working at the League of Nations with Ranjitsinhji, he was thought to be behind several incidents where his employer made complaints about the lack of deference according to him. In Brisbane in Australia in 1936, annoyed by the lack of respect given to him and frustrated by his failure to find better seats to watch the first Test, Fry tripped over the typewriter of Bruce Harris and either hurled or kicked it into the crowd. And he was obsessive about his naval title. During the First World War — when he was never even close to active service (his brother died of typhus as a prisoner of war) — his work with the Mercury, although not especially difficult, earned him the honorary naval rank of Lieutenant, and he was later promoted to Honorary Commander. But his wartime experiences were limited to playing cricket; even so, in the 1920s and 1930s he insisted on being listed as “Commander” and enjoyed wearing his naval uniform. He was later promoted to honorary Captain.

In the 1930s, Fry enjoyed holding court on any topic, and once he started it was hard to stop him talking. When he was in Australia covering the 1936–37 Ashes as a journalist, he worked closely with Neville Cardus, who found him fascinating. In his Autobiography, Cardus wrote: “Fry, I swear, talked all the way to Australia and all the way across Australia and all the way back home. At Melbourne on Armistice Day, the English journalists and the English cricket team were about to attend a reception; we were gathered in the lounge of the Windsor Hotel when the sirens announced the two-minutes’ silence. We all stood side by side and Fry was next to me. Before all sound had subsided, I could not help whispering to Fry, “This’ll irk you, Charles.” He nearly died, but he checked his retort. I think this was probably one of the most severely disciplined acts of his career.”

To counter this negative view of Fry is difficult. There are few examples of anyone writing warmly about him as a person rather than a sportsman. But he was a relatively benevolent figurehead of the TS Mercury — certainly nothing like as cruel as his wife — and could be generous with his time and praise for others. He took interest in the careers of players like Hampshire’s Phil Mead. At times, he displayed wit and could be quite self-depreciating, such as in his assessment of his own batting in the Book of Cricket in 1899 or his columns for the Daily Express in 1902, when he wrote wryly of his repeated batting failures in the Tests. But this became less and less frequent as time went on, and his sense of self-importance increased. There may have been many reasons for his faults — his upbringing, stress, his illnesses — but tarnished his reputation in his own lifetime and afterwards. However, if there is little doubt that Fry was never a pleasant man — even before his mental illness — his fame did not arise from his personality but from his sporting achievements. Do these stand up to modern scrutiny? The answer here is more complex …

“Outspoken and Independent”: The Quaifes of Warwickshire

William Quaife in 1905 (Image: Wikipedia)

Walter Quaife in 1900 (Image: WIkipedia)

There have been several notable cricketing families, from the Graces to the Currans. Far less heralded — except perhaps among historically-minded Warwickshire fans — is the Quaife family. The most successful member was William — most recognised as “W. G. Quaife”, listed on modern databases such as CricketArchive as “Willie Quaife”, but known to his team-mates as “Billy Quaife” — who had an incredibly long career spanning 34 years at first-class level. But while very successful, he was not a batter to raise the pulse; more attractive to the public, but far less consistent, was his brother Walter, while his son Bernard was one of many cricketers who failed to match a more famous father. But the Quaife family was even more interesting off the field. William and Walter were professionals, but not the typical deferential types usually found in this period of English cricket. Not only were they prepared to stand up for themselves, they were prepared to defy convention, including the way they came to play for Warwickshire in the first place.

William George Quaife, the most famous family member, was a cricketer of great solidity for Warwickshire between 1893 and 1928. A defensive batter by nature, albeit a stylish one, he had some impressive figures. He scored 33,862 first-class runs for Warwickshire (the second highest behind Dennis Amiss). In all first-class cricket, he had 36,012 runs at an average of 35.37. With the ball, he took 900 first-class wickets for Warwickshire (the ninth best), while in all first-class cricket he had 931 at 27.32. He scored 72 first-class centuries, including four doubles, and 25 times reached a thousand runs in a season. He ended his first-class career in 1928 with a century on his final appearance at the age of 56; he remains the second-oldest man to have appeared in the County Championship (at 56 years and 143 days on the last day of the game), after Reginald Moss, who was 57 when he played in 1925. And he remains by some distance the oldest first-class centurion; in fact, he appears four times in the “top-ten” list of oldest century makers.

W. G. Quaife (Image: Cricket, 17 July 1902)

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his career, other than its length, was his consistency. He made his first-class debut in 1894, and three fifties was respectable for a first season at the age of 22; the following year — Warwickshire’s first in the County Championship — he averaged just under 24. In 1896, he scored his maiden century, passed 1,000 runs in a season for the first time, and never looked back. The only subsequent season before the First World War in which he did not reach a four-figure aggregate was 1907, when Warwickshire only played 20 matches; he still averaged in the 30s. His best season was 1898, when he averaged over 60, but he averaged 47 in 1900 and over fifty in 1901, 1904 and 1905. After the war, he continued his habit of passing a thousand runs, only failing to do so in 1919 (when Warwickshire again played less), 1924 (his only real season of failure: he managed 803 runs at an average just under 22) and 1927, his last full season. But if his average dipped in the 1920s compared to his best years, he remained the most dependable batter on the Warwickshire team for most of the decade until the emergence of Bob Wyatt. The latter got on very well with Quaife and remembered: “A very short, neat little player with perfect footwork … He was a bit on the slow side because he lacked reach but he was the perfect model for a boy to watch. Fantastically fit he was still playing hockey for the county, and after fielding at Edgbaston all day he would go home and play a couple of sets of tennis.”

Quaife was involved in the “Throwing Question” when his name appeared on a list of those with suspect bowling actions in December 1900. This was the culmination of several years of dissatisfaction with bowlers who appeared to throw the ball; the county captains, in a final attempt to stamp out dubious bowlers, produced a list of those who they suggested should not be allowed to bowl (although the MCC eventually decided not to impose any bans). Quaife spoke to Cricket in 1902, and addressed his inclusion on the list:

“I had never been no-balled by an umpire, and had never heard any suggestions that I threw, but when I was told what had been done, I went carefully into the matter. I came to the conclusion, that when I tried to put on a spin from the off, my action was occasionally something in the nature of a throw, although it was not quite a throw. You will find very few bowlers with an off-break whose action does not, every now and then, suggest a throw, although it really isn’t a throw. But I went in for leg-breaks, and last year did better than I had ever done before.”

Until then, he had bowled medium-paced off-breaks, but after switching to leg-spin bowled for the rest of his career without any issues. Most of the time, he was largely a back-up bowler and he did not take fifty first-class wickets in any season before the First World War. But in the 1920s, in a weak Warwickshire team, he took on a much bigger bowling workload and passed fifty wickets six times between 1920 and 1927. In fact, his bowling record after the war (455 wickets in eight full seasons at 26.95) was better than before it (476 wickets in 22 full seasons at 27.68).

Quaife played seven Tests for England, two during the 1899 Ashes series and five times on Archie MacLaren’s Australian tour of 1901–02. He probably deserved more chances with England than he received but was unfortunate in playing for an unfashionable county at a time of great batting depth in England. He could not expect to displace an amateur from the England team, and there were other professionals who were equally good or better. Possibly he was hampered by his defensive style — when he was named as a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1902, the citation criticised him for being too conscious of his batting average — and a perception that he was not tall enough (he was either 5 ft 3 in or 5ft 4 in according to his son) to succeed at the top level (a prejudice against shorter players that has long since been dispelled). These reservations might also explain why he only played twice (in 1900 and 1913) for the Players against the Gentlemen at Lord’s; he played ten times in the equivalent match at the Oval but this was a far less prestigious fixture, and he was not selected after 1913.

Another unusual feature of Quaife’s career is that he appeared in 48 first-class matches alongside his son Bernard, who played as an amateur while his father was a professional. Such differences across generations were unusual, but not unprecedented (a similar example at Warwickshire was that of Sydney and Reginald Santall, a professional father and amateur son, although they never played together and the latter eventually turned professional). However, when William and Bernard played together, their difference in status led to some oddities dictated by the conventions of the period. Father and son changed in separate dressing rooms and entered the field through different gates. On one occasion, in 1922, when Warwickshire played Derbyshire at Derby, each side had a father and son on its team: the Quaifes faced Derbyshire’s Billy and Robert Bestwick (the only other time this has happened in first-class cricket seems to have been when Patiala played the Australians in 1936; in this case, the Maharajah of Patiala played for the Australians against his son the Yuvraj of Patiala and the Patiala team contained both Frank and Louis Tarrant). At one point, the Bestwicks were batting together while the Quaifes bowled from either end.

R. V. Ryder, Warwickshire’s secretary from 1895 to 1944
(Image: Birmingham Mail)

Quaife senior was also something of a mentor to Bob Wyatt, who was friendly with his son (and all three men played hockey for the same club in Birmingham). Wyatt was rebuked once by R. V. Ryder, the Warwickshire secretary, for being too close to Quaife. Ryder did not like Quaife, despite his value to the team. As Gerald Pawle states in his 1985 biography of Wyatt: “[Quaife] and Tiger Smith, another outspoken and independent figure, were regarded by Ryder as the shop stewards for the team, continually airing grievances about pay and conditions, and they fought a never ending battle with the Secretary, who was equally determined to keep them in their place. This he found particularly difficult in the case of Quaife who owned a successful sports shop and financially at least could afford to risk Ryder’s displeasure.” This understates the matter somewhat; Quaife fought the Committee for better wages from the start and it was only through his persistence that Warwickshire switched from one-year contracts to award him (and other leading professionals at the club) a five-year deal at the end of the 1890s.

Quaife’s frequent clashes with the Committee lay behind that farewell century in 1928; Ryder had rejected his request for a contract extension after the 1927 season, and it was only after some negotiation — and an argument between the Committee and Warwickshire members that spilled into the press — that it was agreed he could make a “farewell” appearance in the August Bank Holiday match against Derbyshire. He took the opportunity to score 115 and bowl 34 overs. The “official” version is that he therefore begun and ended his Warwickshire career with a century, as he hit 102 on his debut in a non-first-class game against Durham, but CricketArchive rather spoils the legend by listing earlier games for Quaife in the Warwickshire team.

Quaife had two benefit matches, in 1911 and 1927, but even in combination they only raised £1,317, a fraction of what a player at a bigger county could manage. In retirement he continued to run his sports shop, manufacturing cricket bats and keeping an eye on cricket, often watching his old county play at Edgbaston.

But this man with such a long and productive career with Warwickshire was actually born in Sussex, and he played for that county in a non-first-class match in 1891. How did he come to play for Warwickshire at all? His Wisden obituary is silent, but his citation as a Cricketer of the Year is a little more revealing: “Born in Sussex, it was only by an accident that [Quaife] was never associated as a cricketer with his native county. When, following the season of 1890, his brother Walter ceased to play for Sussex and threw in his lot with Warwickshire, he also after a time went to live in Birmingham, and in due course found his way into the Warwickshire eleven.” These two sentences brush over a messy dispute between two counties. Quaife played for Warwickshire because of his older brother Walter.

At this point, we should take a step back. Walter (born 1864) and William George (born 1872) — and their sisters Elizabeth (both 1865) and Mary (born 1867) — were born in Newhaven, the children of Walter Cornelius Quaife. Their father was a watchmaker from Battle in Sussex who had originally been a miller; in the 1890s, he was also the Sanitary Inspector for Newhaven. Walter Quaife junior was originally a watchmaker alongside his father but by the time of the 1891 census, he was a professional cricketer; William was listed a watchmaker in 1891, although in later years he said that he was working at a solicitor’s office when he joined Warwickshire.

As for Walter, he began to play for Sussex in 1884. After three quiet seasons, he scored his first century in 1887, totalling over 900 runs at an average of thirty. Two less productive seasons followed, but in 1890 he scored nearly 800 runs at an average of 22. His Wisden obituary stated: “In this most disastrous season for Sussex — eleven of twelve championship engagements ending in defeat — he headed the batting averages.” Such was his form that he was selected for the Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval in 1889 and at Lord’s in 1890. Therefore, he was a valuable member of the team and a solid professional batter, even if he was hardly setting the cricket world alight. In total, he scored over 3,000 runs for Sussex. A Cricket profile in 1887 said that he was a very attractive all-round batter, whose play was “very pretty”, modelled after leading amateurs.

But he had his eyes elsewhere.

At the time, it was extremely difficult for a professional to change teams. This was dressed up in terms of loyalty and fairness but was essentially a way to keep professionals in their place. If they offended their social superiors, they could be dropped as punishment, and counties were discouraged from “poaching” talent. The attitude of the amateur establishment was perfectly demonstrated by the words of one county representative in the nineteenth century: “What would they think of any gentlemen who tried to bribe their private servants from their employment?” Players had to request permission to move, and even if this was forthcoming, they had to serve a two-year qualification period before representing their new team in county matches. Most professionals preferred to remain with their birth county. But although movement was very difficult, it was not impossible.

Walter Quaife in 1896 (Image: Wikipedia)

By 1891, the Sussex committee must have heard rumours that Walter Quaife planned to move counties and asked him outright if he was qualifying for Warwickshire. As his Wisden obituary put it, “he refused all information and was consequently dropped from the side”. There might have been a little more to the affair as well; Lord Sheffield, a patron of Sussex cricket, claimed in a letter to the Newhaven Cricket Club — of which he was President and Walter Quaife was a member — that he had paid for Quaife to receive coaching from Alfred Shaw over the previous two seasons. Sheffield grumbled that, had he known Quaife’s intention to leave Sussex, he would never have given him the money and believed that he had been misled by his professional. He threatened to resign as Newhaven President if Quaife remained a member of the club; the committee therefore requested Quaife’s resignation.

Quaife wrote a letter in his own defence — which appeared in newspapers — denying being disrespectful towards the Sussex Committee when they asked about his intentions. He observed that cricket had prevented him from working in his father’s business, and that Sussex had continually failed to find him winter work when he requested it. As he was therefore having to rely on his summer pay throughout the year, he wanted to “better his position” and had “offered his services” to Warwickshire instead. He claimed that his refusal to answer questions regarding his intentions was simply because doing so “would have cut off all chances of playing for Sussex”; a point made moot when he was dropped anyway.

To a modern audience, Quaife’s actions (and robust public self-defence) would be unremarkable, and even expected. But in 1891, this was extremely unusual. Professionals were supposed to be deferential, little more than hired hands. Attempts to stand up to the amateur authorities usually ended badly, such as the Nottinghamshire strike of 1881 or the England strike of 1896. Quaife was unusual in having the confidence to “offer his services” to other counties and to take on a man as influential as Lord Sheffield. That his brother William was also willing to take on the Warwickshire Secretary in later years might suggest a very confident family.

When Quaife moved to Warwickshire, he took William with him to live in Birmingham. William told a slightly different version in later years (for example in an article he wrote in 1951) which suggested that he had come to the attention of Warwickshire already, and been asked to play in a benefit match for one of their players so that the club could take a closer look. But it seems more likely that Walter was the driving force. In any case, the signing of the brothers left a sour taste in Sussex, and relations between that county and Warwickshire were less than harmonious for a time. In fact, Warwickshire were unpopular generally, for this “poaching” and for the general attitude of their Committee.

Having qualified for Warwickshire, Walter Quaife first appeared for the county, which had not yet been granted first-class status, in 1893. As their best-paid player (and one of only two to receive winter pay), he scored over 700 runs at an average of 31 and was a key factor in Warwickshire’s promotion to first-class status in 1894 and their debut appearance in the County Championship the following year. He passed a thousand first-class runs for the only time in 1895 — which earned him another game for the Players against the Gentlemen at the Oval — and returned solid figures, generally averaging between 25 and 30, until 1900. Between 1894 and 1901, he played alongside William in the Warwickshire team.

Embed from Getty Images

Warwickshire in 1898. Back row: A. Hide (umpire), Jack Devey, Henry Pallett, Sydney Santall, James Whitehead, Walter Quaife and Frank Barlow (umpire). Middle row: Richard Lilley, Herbert Bainbridge, Alfred Glover and Edwin Diver. Front row: William Quaife and Frank Hopkins.

Problems remained behind the scenes, however; he was briefly dropped in 1898 for a dispute with A. C. S. Glover, an amateur with the county, who had been Warwickshire’s acting-captain in a game against Gloucestershire at Cheltenham. Walter had refused to bowl and complained at being sent into bat 45 minutes before stumps on the second day; he again found himself having to deny being disrespectful, and was forced to write an apology. But this was not the only one of Walter Quaife’s adventures. He seems to have had a genius for causing problems and battling convention.

In 1892, during his qualification period for Warwickshire, Quaife had married Alice Birch, the daughter of a schoolmaster, in Islington (his address was still Newhaven, which raises a few questions about whether he had in reality qualified for Warwickshire). The following year, the first of their three children was born. But in August 1901, Alice filed for divorce, citing in her statement Quaife’s adultery with Augusta Lohmann, with whom she claimed he had been living since July. She also said that in November 1900, Quaife had struck and “grossly insulted” her, calling her a fool and an idiot. In May 1901, when Alice was pregnant with their third child, he tried to persuade her to have an (illegal) abortion, and was “abusive and unkind” when she refused; then in June, he “assaulted and beat” her, threatening to have her “put into confinement as a mad person”. He was also unsympathetic when she was suffering from ill-health during her pregnancy, “jeering” and laughing and saying it was her own fault. She claimed that as a result, her health had been “injured”. Her subsequent evidence stated that he had mocked her for “loving him too much”, told her that she should have “enjoyed herself with other men”, and said that he loved Augusta Lohmann, whom he “meant to have”. For a woman to be granted a divorce at the time required proof of adultery and a criminal offence such as cruelty or desertion; she seems to have had good evidence of all three.

This was something of a cricketing scandal, although not one that made any waves in the discreet cricketing press. Augusta Lohmann was the sister of the legendary England and Surrey cricketer George Lohmann, regarded by many at the time as the greatest of all bowlers; in 18 matches which are today classed as Tests, he took 112 wickets at 10.75. By his own evidence at the divorce hearing, Quaife had first met Augusta in 1888. Around this time, Lohmann and Quaife regularly played against each other, and sometimes together, such as when they represented the Players of the South against the Players of the North in 1887. As Keith Booth put it in his 2007 biography of Lohmann: “Then, as now, professional county cricketers were a tight-knit community, but then, unlike now, they were not accommodated in four and five star hotels during away matches and had usually to finance their board and lodgings from their match fee. It is likely that informal reciprocal accommodation arrangements existed and though it is impossible to say with any certainty, it is at least within the bounds of possibility that the future bride and groom, then aged 18 and 23 respectively, met in this way.” It may be relevant that George Lohmann was dying from tuberculosis in South Africa at the time that the relationship between his sister and Quaife resumed, and that his death in December 1901 coincided with the divorce case moving through the system.

When the case came to court in March 1902 at the Royal Court of Justice, Alice’s counsel explained how Quaife had been “corresponding” with Augusta Lohmann as early as 1893 but had broken it off despite admitting that he “thought a great deal of Miss Lohmann”; he had also formed the “acquaintance” of an unnamed woman in 1896, for which Alice had also forgiven him. But in 1899, he resumed his relationship with Lohmann, and wanted Alice to leave him; hence his annoyance when she became pregnant. In June 1901, he had left the house to be with Miss Lohmann.

Walter Quaife
(Image: Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 20 August 1898)

Quaife denied cruelty and violence, but admitted adultery, although he claimed, somewhat unconvincingly, that this had only been since he left his wife. He also said that he did not live happily with Alice, whom he called “irritable and highly hysterical”. But the judge found in her favour, granting a decree nisi with costs and custody of the children (although he did not accept the claim that Quaife tried to force an abortion as there was no corroboration). The divorce was made absolute at the end of March 1903. The costs to be paid by Quaife amounted to £120, and he had to pay £1 per week maintenance.

And possibly his actions finally affected his cricket because, having played just a few times for Warwickshire in 1901 (his last appearance came in July 1901), his first-class career was now over. Perhaps aware of what was to come, he had asked the Warwickshire Committee for a benefit match in 1902, but after delaying a decision, they decided not to re-engage him for the 1902 season. It is hard to imagine that his controversial behaviour and impending divorce played no part in their thinking. Although his form had been poor during his four appearances in 1901, his earlier successes would normally have guaranteed him another opportunity. By the end of March 1902, not only was Quaife out of work, he was faced with hefty legal bills and maintenance payments. This is probably the reason why he took up a job coaching at Woodbridge School in March 1903, and after a period of qualification, played for Suffolk between 1903 and 1905.

For all of Quaife’s denials, it seems that Alice was telling the truth because by mid-1902, both she and Augusta Lohmann had given birth to his children: in early 1902, shortly before the court case, Alice gave birth to Violet Joyce, her third child with Quaife; in April, Augusta Lohmann gave birth to a daughter who was registered under the name of Augusta Quaife. It would have been frowned upon in 1902 to have had two children with different women in the space of a few months. Even if this was not scandalous enough, Quaife continued to disregard convention because he did not marry Augusta when his divorce was finalised in March 1904; the wedding came only after their second daughter was born that August. Two more girls followed in 1909 and 1911. By the time of the 1911 census, Quaife was an “athletic outfitter”; he had gone into business with his brother William. Later, their establishment — which gave William the financial independence to stand up to R. V. Ryder — became Quaife and Lilley when the Warwickshire player Richard Lilley joined the firm. It survived until the 1960s when it was sold by Bernard Quaife.

Walter Quaife died in January 1943, less than a year after Augusta’s death. William Quaife lived until 1951, having seen Warwickshire win the 1951 County Championship; the only previous time they had done so, in 1911, Quaife had been in the team, but he regarded the 1951 combination as “the best-balanced ever to represent the county” according to his Wisden obituary. He was survived by Phyllis, whom he had married in 1898. Bernard, whose amateur status was possible through working at the family business, could not secure a regular place in the Warwickshire team and so moved to Worcestershire. He made himself into a competent wicket-keeper for the county and was the stand-in captain for most of 1937, which was his final season. After his death in 1984, his Wisden obituary stated that Quaife “did yeoman service for ten seasons [for Worcestershire] during which they were gradually working their way up from the bottom of the table. Twice he scored 1,000 runs. Usually he got some 900 by solid and consistent rather than brilliant batting.” If he was a respected cricketer, he never matched the controversy off the field which pursued his father and uncle; perhaps the fact pleased him, even if he was not following in the fiery family tradition.

The Three Hodsons of Sussex

The Cricket Match between Sussex and Kent, at Brighton by Charles Jones Basebe. This engraving from 1849 includes James Hodson (1808–79), pictured fielding at fine leg immediately before the church (Image: Government Art Collection)

Sussex is the oldest of the English first-class county teams, having been formed in 1839. Several famous cricketing “dynasties” have been associated with it over the years, including the Lillywhites, Tates and Gilligans. But one interesting family is hardly remembered at all today, despite being involved with Sussex for almost thirty years, including from the first years of the club. One of the early stalwarts in the team was a man called James Hodson; he was followed into the team by his cousin William Hodson. Almost thirty years later, his cousin’s son, also known as William Hodson, followed his relatives into the Sussex side.

The three Hodsons were part of a wealthy family from East Sussex. James Hodson was born in Streat, a village near Lewes, on 30 October 1808. He was the son of Thomas Hodson, who owned “Hodson’s Black Mill” in Brighton. Following in the family tradition, James worked as a miller most of his life and always gave this as his occupation on census returns. Others in the family were farmers: three of his uncles owned substantial farms, including William Hodson (1778–1857), who was responsible for the construction of the West Blatchington Windmill around 1820.

Two of the family windmills. Left: Hodson’s Black Mill in Brighton, shortly before its demolition in 1866 (Image: Wikipedia). Right: West Blatchington Windmill in 2002 (Image: geograph.org.uk)

James Hodson emerged as a cricketer in the late 1830s, initially playing for the “Players of Sussex” and then for a team representing Sussex in 1838, the year before the official formation of the county club. Despite coming from a wealthy family, he played as a professional. Normally, and particularly in later years, someone from a background like his would not have been paid to play cricket. But the distinctions were not as rigid in the 1830s as they were to become, and perhaps his branch of the family was struggling financially.

By the end of the 1830s, Hodson was judged by the press to be the best bowler in Sussex. He was regarded as less accurate but more dangerous than F. W. Lillywhite (known as “the nonpareil”). Like most leading bowlers, Hodson utilised the round-arm style which had been belatedly legalised in 1835 and which replaced underarm bowling. But even though the updated Laws of Cricket forbade delivery of the ball from above shoulder height, some bowlers had already begun to stretch the rules and were releasing the ball from a higher point. Although many umpires turned a blind eye, this was illegal and there were numerous attempts by the authorities to crack down.

Detail showing James Hodson, from The Cricket Match between Sussex and Kent, at Brighton by Charles Jones Basebe (Image: Government Art Collection)

One of those who pushed the limits was Hodson. On 10 and 11 June 1839, Sussex played the MCC at Lord’s. Hodson took eight wickets (no bowling analyses survive from the match), but this is not what drew attention. When the MCC batted a second time, needing 81 to win, Hodson bowled from the end where W. H. Caldecourt was umpiring (all his other bowling had been in front of the other umpire, Bartholomew Good). Caldecourt almost immediately no-balled him for raising his arm above the shoulder. The resulting furore — from the widespread observation that Good had seen no problems with Hodson’s delivery to the crowd’s anger towards Caldecourt — was a portent of arguments to come regarding fair and unfair bowling many years later. After Hodson had conceded 26 runs to no-balls in around ten minutes, he was withdrawn from the attack.

This match made little difference to Hodson’s career; he played for Sussex until 1854 and took part in 54 matches now recognised as first-class. In 1844 he played for “England” against Kent; in 1845 he appeared for the Players against the Gentlemen at Brighton; and in 1849 he played for the “All England Eleven” against Kent. It is unclear if he modified his bowling style or continued to raise his arm above his shoulder (nor can we be certain if he was ever no-balled again as he is entirely missing from the most widely recognised list of bowlers who were “called”), but his regular selection for games at Lord’s and his inclusion in “England” teams might indicate that he was not considered an unfair bowler. In fact, Hodson was clearly a good cricketer, but was quickly forgotten when his first-class career ended. We know little else about him except he married in 1850, had four children, and died in 1879 leaving an estate worth around £3,000 (the equivalent of over £300,000 today). His death was unreported in the press (and fell in that awkward period before Wisden began publishing obituaries and before the creation of Cricket in 1882).

William Hodson (1808–96) photographed in 1890 by William Hall and Son of Brighton (Image: Courtesy of Geoffrey Boys)

Another branch of the Hodson family was also associated with Sussex cricket through James’ cousin William (the son of his uncle William — there were a lot of men with that name in the family!), who was born in 1808 at West Blatchington. William was the same age as his cousin James, but played for Sussex first. However, he only appeared in one match today recognised as first-class. This was at Lord’s in 1833 when Sussex played an “England” team of leading cricketers. At the time, there was a regular series between “England” and Sussex, involving matches at Lord’s (the home of “England”) and the Royal New Ground in Brighton. “England” were usually stronger, but Sussex were reckoned a powerful team in 1833 (although a report in Bell’s Life hinted that Sussex were not quite at full strength). William Hodson batted at number ten and made a pair; no bowling analyses survive so we cannot be sure if he bowled, nor if he took any wickets (only catchers were credited — a bowler only made the scorecard if the batter was out bowled). And so ended his very brief first-class career.

Similarly to James, William appears to have played as a professional: advertisements for the game identified only one “gentleman” playing for Sussex; the other ten, including Hodson, had no initial listed — an indication that they were all professionals. Otherwise, we know even less about him than we do about James. There is sketchy evidence that he played cricket regularly in Brighton in the 1830s, but it is often unclear whether the “Mr Hodson” recorded in the Brighton Gazette as playing for the Clarence Club was William or James. Further muddying the waters, James’ younger brother Charles (1810–1896) also played for the Clarence Club. But it is likely that the Hodson who played against Worthing a couple of weeks before the England v Sussex game of 1833 was William; he scored 0 and 11 and took at least three wickets. And a player called Hodson — again, probably William — scored 42 and took at least four wickets in another game against Worthing that August. In 1834, both W. Hodson and C. Hodson played for the Clarence Club (including at least one game together), but it is likely that the Hodson playing in the Brighton area towards the end of the decade was James rather than his brother or cousin.

After his brief cricket career ended, William was a farmer for the rest of his life. He married Mary Gould in 1837 and when their first child was born in 1838, they lived in Patcham in Sussex but had moved to Crypt Farm in Cocking by 1841. The couple had eight children in total; after Mary died in 1862, William remarried in 1868. As with James, we know little about his life away from cricket, but we know a little more about his second child — also inevitably called William — who continued the family association with Sussex.

William Hodson (junior) was born in Cocking on 24 January 1841. The census from that year lists him, aged four months (the census was taken in June), living at Crypt Farm, where his father was as a farmer. Ten years later, we find him on the 1851 census as a pupil at Oaklands School in Woolavington, which catered for the under-10s. He subsequently attended Brighton College, appearing in the school cricket team in the mid-1850s. By the time of the 1861 census, William lived with his maternal aunt and her husband, Thomas Coppard, a solicitor and farmer in Albourne. William is listed as an apprentice solicitor, and presumably worked for Coppard.

Having made several appearances for the Gentlemen of Sussex from 1858, Hodson made his first-class debut for Sussex in June 1860, aged just 19, and played three matches that season. Although he achieved little with bat or ball, he must have impressed enough people to make several appearances over the following seasons. He played just once for Sussex in 1861, but appeared in every one of their games in 1862 and 1863; in the latter season, he also played for the “Gentlemen of the South” against the “Players of Surrey” at the Oval.

William Hodson (1841–96) photographed for the Supplement to Fashion and Sport, date unknown (Image: Courtesy of Geoffrey Boys)

Hodson played no first-class cricket after 1863, but was a regular for the Gentlemen of Sussex until 1881 (including an appearance against the touring Australian team in 1878). He must have been a good batter; his overall first-class record was 496 runs at 21.56, with a highest score of 50, but in this period of low scores and impossible pitches, that was a very respectable record. For example, in 1863 (counting only players who made five or more appearances) he was ninth in the first-class averages with 298 runs at 24.83. We know little else about his cricket, but a tribute written upon his death in 1896 in Cricket stated: “Standing well over six feet, he had great hitting powers, which he used to advantage. Besides, he was a splendid field, especially at long-leg and cover.”

The reason for the end of his Sussex career was almost certainly because he had qualified as a solicitor. In 1868, and for the following few years, the Post Office Directory named him as a solicitor in Hurstpierpoint until he moved to Shoreham around 1878. It appears that he continued to work with his aunt’s husband: he was a partner in Coppard and Hodson, which later became Coppard, Hodson and Wade when Charles Aubrey Wade joined the firm in the 1870s.

Away from the world of cricket and law, Hodson junior seems to have had an unusual life and there are many unanswered questions. In 1866, he married Annie Edith Staplehurst, the daughter of William Staplehurst who is listed on her marriage certificate as a “Gentleman”. But Annie’s identity is the first of the many mysteries surrounding Hodson. Census entries after her marriage state that she was born around 1844 somewhere near Chailey (according to the 1881 census) or Piltdown (according to the 1871 census); the villages are fairly close to each other, around 12 miles north-east of Brighton. She gave her address on her marriage certificate as 60 London Road, Brighton, but this does not help much. In 1861, Charles Sprake lived at that address with his wife, his sister and a servant; ten years later, the house was occupied by John Clegg, his wife, his daughter and a servant. No-one on either census return seems to have had any connection with a family called Staplehurst.

But there might be a hint there at what was really going on, because also on the 1861 census is a woman called Annie Staplehurst who was working as a servant in the Kemptown area of Brighton, employed by Lucy Burdett, a lodging house keeper at 160 Marine Parade (not far from London Road). Could Annie have been a servant who was working at 60 London Road at the time of her marriage? Which begs the question: why would Hodson — a member of a wealthy family and a qualified solicitor — marry a servant? The most obvious solution — a pregnancy — does not work as the couple had their first child around 12 months after their marriage.

Finding Annie on a census before 1861 is difficult. The most likely candidate is an Annie Staplehurst, the daughter of William and Hannah, on the 1851 census; she was ten years old and had been born in Fletching, Sussex (between Piltdown and Chailey). Her father was a farm labourer. There is another possibility. According to a descendant who has seen it, Annie’s gravestone states that her maiden name was Leeves. And a man called William Staplehurst married someone called Lucy Louisa Leeves in 1843. By 1851, they had four children, the eldest of whom was Sally Ann; she was born in Fletching around seven months after her parents’ wedding. Her father was a “Master Carman”. This would not, however, explain why “Sally Ann” became “Annie Edith”.

If either of these women are our Annie (and she might have been someone else entirely, or someone who changed her name), the identification of her father as a “gentleman” on her marriage certificate is clearly a polite fiction aimed at disguising her background and humble status. Some of her descendants who have researched the family history believe that Annie was the illegitimate daughter of a “gentleman”, which would explain her marriage to Hodson. While this is possible, there is no evidence to support it. Whichever way we examine the marriage, it is hard to explain; Annie Staplehurst remains a mystery.

Returning to more certain ground, Hodson and Annie had eight children in total. By 1881, Hodson had joined the Freemasons and was settled in Shoreham. The census records him living with his family and two servants on the High Street of New Shoreham. But the marriage may already have been in trouble, and by the time of the next census, the couple had separated.

On 6 June 1888, Annie and six of their seven children arrived in Nova Scotia, Canada, on board the Nova Scotian. William was not with them, nor was their eldest daughter who had just married (according to descendants of the family, Annie was a witness at the wedding, which took place shortly before her departure to Canada). The family appear on the 1891 Canadian census, living in Annapolis Royal, although one of the children seems to have returned to England. Annie died in Canada, aged fifty, in 1893. The fate and movements of the rest of the family are complicated. However, there is evidence that they were financially supported, possibly by their father and probably by various family trusts.

Walter Gilbert (Image: Cricket, 20 May 1886)

What is not clear is why they went to Nova Scotia at all (there was no family connection with Canada) and why William did not accompany them. We might find a hint of an explanation for the destination, but it is a very tenuous link. In 1882, a case came before Chichester County Court, reported in the Weekly Dispatch, concerning Walter Gilbert, a cousin of W. G. Grace who was often in severe financial difficulty. He was the manager of the United South of England cricket team and one of his players had taken him to court over non-payment of wages. The solicitor for the plaintiff was William Hodson. During the case, when the court was arguing over the fees the plaintiff should have been paid, Hodson recalled that when he played for Sussex, he received £5 for a home game and £6 for an away one (although as an amateur, he should not have been paid at all).

In 1886, Gilbert and his family moved to Canada, effectively exiled by the Grace family, following his disgrace after serving a prison sentence for theft. The Gilberts settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Walter opened a school. There is no obvious connection between Hodson and Gilbert other than that one court appearance (when Gilbert was not even present), but it is quite a coincidence, especially given the timing. Another possible link is that Gilbert was married to the daughter of James Lillywhite, who played for Sussex between 1850 and 1860 (although he never played with William Hodson) and was the son of F. W. Lillywhite who had played alongside James Hodson in the 1830s. Did the Hodsons go to join the Gilberts? Was there some unknown connection? Was this a similar “exile” for reasons lost to history? Unfortunately, there seems no way to know.

The reason that William and Annie separated is much clearer. William was in a relationship — over a long period — with a married woman. This emerged publicly, and somewhat embarrassingly, in an 1890 divorce case when John Ince, a retired surgeon who had served with the British Army in India, petitioned to divorce his wife Kate Montgomerie Ince on the grounds of adultery.

Kate Montgomerie Davidson had been born in Huntingdonshire in 1851, the daughter of a doctor. She had married George Kelly at Brixton in February 1870. Shortly after the marriage, the couple moved to Ludhiana in British India where Kelly worked as the district’s police superintendent, but he died on 4 December 1870 (the cause of death is unclear). Ince was a doctor who attended Kelly when he was ill, but eyebrows may have been raised when Ince married his widow on 12 January 1871. According to Ince’s evidence at the divorce hearing, as reported by The Times: “On the death of her first husband [Kate] was in such straitened circumstances as to be almost destitute … [Ince] married her out of sympathy with her in her unfortunate position.” She was also heavily pregnant, and gave birth to her first child, Isobel Kelly, on 4 March 1871. Over the following five years, she had another three children with her new husband, although only two of them survived.

It was not a happy marriage, and both parties had an extensive list of complaints about the other. Unsurprisingly for this period, only Ince’s side came out in court, and he told the divorce hearing — clearly playing to the gallery and drawing several laughs — that “almost immediately after marriage [Kate] commenced to exhibit great violence of temper, that she threw ink bottles and gum bottles at him, that on various occasions he bore marks of her violence, and that only on one occasion did he strike her, that being during one of her assaults upon him.” They spent periods apart but returned to live together in various parts of India before they returned to England in 1876. Later that year, they were granted a judicial separation. Ince claimed to have been in a state of melancholia between 1876 and 1884, leading “a very retired life”.

The Royal Court of Justice, where all divorce cases were heard at this time
(Image: sjiong (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikipedia)

In 1889, Ince discovered that Kate had been living with William Hodson “as man and wife” since October 1886. Until then, Ince had believed that “his wife was leading a virtuous life”. When Ince filed for divorce in 1890, he claimed damages against Hodson (named as a co-respondent in the case). If we can believe Ince, Hodson must have separated from his own wife by that date (which fits with the birth of his youngest child Gladys in mid-1885). But it may not be quite so straightforward; in the documents she submitted to establish that she was not guilty of adultery, Kate stated that her husband had been aware of the relationship between her and Hodson in either late 1884 or early 1885 — she was attempting to prove that he had delayed proceedings unreasonably after becoming aware of the alleged adultery.

Ince’s wife responded with several counter-allegations: that no adultery had occurred, but if it had her husband had “connived” in it; that her husband had neglected her and “treated her with unkindness”; that he had turned her and their three-year-old child out of their house in Rawalpindi in 1874; that he had not fed her or treated her when she was ill; that he had variously beaten and assaulted her; that he too had committed adultery with one of his servants in 1888; that he had called her, on various occasions, a whore and a street-walker and denied being the father of her children. It seems to have been a bitter and unpleasant affair. One of her most gruesome accusations (mentioned only once by Kate and then dropped) was that in the early 1870s, when she was in a delicate mental state, he had forced her to sketch the private parts of decomposing female corpses. None of this emerged in court, and he strenuously denied her accusations in private.

Kate called two witnesses to support her allegation of adultery: the servant concerned, and another servant who had seen evidence of intimacy. But the first servant had written a letter to Ince before the case which contradicted her testimony and so the judge told the jury to disregard her evidence.

But the most sensational witness was their only surviving child, the fourteen-year-old John Ince, who began his evidence by saying he had seen the servant come out of his father’s bedroom and had seen him kiss her. But as he alleged this had happened in 1885, when he would have only been ten, his reliability was called into question. Under cross-examination, it further emerged that John had taken the name Hodson and had been living with his mother and William Hodson. And he was largely discredited when a letter was read out which he had sent to his father. He had written it after learning that his father had stood outside his mother’s house earlier that month (on 5 November 1890) shouting and swearing. Although he wrote to Ince that he “made every allowance for your being mad”, he threatened to “break every bone in your miserable old carcass” if he ever annoyed his mother again.

John made a few other allegations about his father’s eccentric behaviour, but wrote something which made the press very excited: “I hear you were in London yesterday. I hope you enjoyed yourself. One thing I should like to know. Where were you when the Whitechapel murders were committed, as I have read the papers and it is my opinion you have done them all, as they all agree that he was a doctor, that he carried a black bag, and was mad, and was a most repulsive-looking party; isn’t it wonderful how exactly you answer to that description?”

He had not initially sent the letter, at the request of his mother, but upon seeing his father a few days later, sent it with a follow-up, which included this passage: “I will never own that you are my father. The man I call father [i.e. William Hodson], and whom I respect and love, can trace his pedigree 500 years back, and never any but brave and true gentleman in the count.”

For what it is worth — without entering into any debates about the identity of “Jack the Ripper” — the accusation against Ince seems to have been born out of teenage anger and a few unremarkable coincidences rather than any compelling evidence. Ince has never been a suspect for the killings, not even in the more esoteric realms of Ripper theorising. And in later years, his son resumed using the name Ince, suggesting that the pair reconciled.

The report in The Times drily stated: “The contents of the letter appeared to create amazement in court, but the reading of it did not at all disconcert the witness.” Nevertheless, the barrister representing Mrs Ince announced that he would not be taking her case any further. The jury found Mrs Ince and Hodson guilty of adultery and the judge pronounced a decree nisi; although Ince withdrew his claim for £1,000 in damages, the judge granted costs against Hodson, despite the plea of Hodson’s barrister that he did not know that Mrs Ince was married. This was somewhat undermined when one of Ince’s representatives pointed out that Hodson’s name was on the deed of separation (which had been made in 1876), and he therefore must have known that she was married when they began their relationship. If this was true, Hodson could have been in a relationship with Kate for fourteen years, but as he had five children with Annie in this time, and as Ince did not make use of the deed to strengthen his case, it is far from certain. As only The Times reported this, perhaps it was a mistake.

Hodson made little contribution in court, and his responses in the official documents are somewhat lacking; it is quite likely that embarrassment was the main emotion he felt at being drawn into such a sensational story where his private life was displayed — albeit incidentally — across many newspapers. Nor can the gleeful reporting of the claims made by Ince’s son have made it any easier.

Again, what happened next is mysterious. There is no trace of Hodson, Kate Ince or her son on the 1891 census. The next public mention of Hodson came in 1896 when the Mid-Sussex Times printed a death notice on 28 April for “William Hodson, late of Hurstpierpoint” on 19 April in Barbados. A brief article in the same edition said:

“Mr. Wm. Hodson, well known in 1861–2 as a member of the Sussex county cricket team, died on Sunday week at Barbadoes [sic], from yellow fever. Deceased was a native of Cocking, near Midhurst. Retiring from the county eleven 1862 in consequence of an accident, Mr. Hodson settled in Hurstpierpoint as a solicitor, and frequently played in the local club matches.”

Cricket also reported his death on May 7, saying it had occurred “within the last few days”. All very mysterious; what was he doing in Barbados? Some of his descendants researching the family history have written that he died on a ship in the “waters off Barbados”, but it is not clear from where this information comes. Was he visiting Barbados, or had business taken him there? Even more interesting is the record of Ince’s will in the Probate Index; it states that “Hodson William of Damaraland South West Africa died 8 April 1896 at Barbados West Indies.” Damaraland is part of what is now Namibia; again, we have no indication of what took him there, but it appears that Kate was with him. The Probate Index records that the executor of his estate (worth just over £816, a substantial but not huge amount) was “Kate Montgomerie Ince single woman”.

Kate was not too upset as by early 1897 she had married again — her new husband was Andrew Christopher Palles — in London, but she died on 13 November 1897 in hospital; the cause of death was an ischiorectal abscess and septicaemia. Her death was announced in the Sussex Agricultural Express under her former name of Ince, after “a long and painful illness from rheumatic fever”; she was listed as the “only daughter of Dr. F. M. D. Davidson, of South Norwood” and the wife of John Ince. Did this announcement originate from her father (who was still alive at the time)? Her husband Andrew Palles died in South Africa in 1903; her son also lived there from, at the latest, 1901 until his death in 1941. Is there a connection with Hodson’s residence in Damaraland?

As with the rest of William Hodson’s life, the answers seem to be beyond our reach.

Note: William Hodson junior’s death has been muddled up with that of his father in cricket databases. CricketArchive states that William junior died on 15th May 1896 at Preston Park, Brighton, but this was actually his father. William senior was around 87 years old, and his death came just over a month after that of his son; he is listed on the same page of the probate index, leaving an estate worth just over £3,335 (worth around £400,000 today). William senior’s death is unrecorded on CricketArchive, which also does not mention that he was related to William junior or to James Hodson.

The Contradictions of Arthur Gilligan

The MCC team in India in 1926–27. Back row: M. L. Hill, M. W. Tate, J. Mercer, W. E. Astill, G. F. Earle, G. Geary, G. Boyes, G. Brown. Middle row: J. H. Parsons, A. E. R. Gilligan, Leslie Wilson, R. C. Chichester-Constable, A. Sandham. Front row: R. E. S. Wyatt, P. T. Eckersley. (Image: The Cricketer Spring Annual 1926–27)

Arthur Gilligan captained England in two Test series: against a weak South African team who were defeated 3–0 in 1924, and in a catastrophic Ashes series in Australia in 1924–25 when his side lost 4–1. More notable than the defeat on the field though was the reception that Gilligan received off it. He was praised for his tact and diplomacy, even if most critics kept silent about his less-than-effective tactical leadership. Behind the scenes, though, Gilligan and the team manager Frederick Toone were almost certainly trying to establish fascist groups in the places they visited. Both men were active members of the British Fascists, and following the conclusion of the tour Gilligan publicly associated himself with the movement, speaking at meetings and even contributing an article to a fascist publication which suggested that cricket tours worked best when run along “fascist lines”. There was never any backlash against Gilligan; on the contrary, he was a Test selector in 1926 and wrote numerous cricket books for years to come. It was only many years later, after his death, that there was a reaction against Gilligan’s political views. But the evidence of the rest of his life presents a mixed message about what Gilligan really believed, and how much he adhered to fascist views.

Gilligan’s first-class career continued intermittently until 1932, but after the 1924–25 tour, he was never in contention for the England team again. He did respectably well with the ball in 1926 and 1928, without ever approaching his form of 1923 and 1924, and he batted quite well, even scoring a thousand runs in 1926. But after 1928, he barely played. His last significant cricket came when he was selected to lead an MCC team in India during the 1926–27 season.

Maurice Tate and Gilligan in India (Image: The Cricketer Annual 1926–27)

This was the first tour of India by an English team since the Oxford University Authentics visited in 1902–03; it was also the first MCC team to visit the country, making it quite a historic occasion. Neither the MCC nor the British government would have wanted a cricketing event to make waves at a time of growing political tension in India, making the choice of captain important. It was vital that the MCC captain was a diplomat. Which makes it doubly curious that the MCC would choose a man who, whatever his cricket or social qualifications, remained a member of the British Fascists.

Another factor in the background was that India had been admitted to the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1926, at the same time as the West Indies and New Zealand. At the time of the 1926–27 tour, there was no central governing body for Indian cricket, and the rules stated that India could not play Test matches without one in place. Not only that, but Indian cricket was dominated by Europeans; many of the teams which the MCC played were largely white. Mihir Bose in The Magic of Indian Cricket (2006) explains how the tour was the idea of a man called A. Murray Robinson, who intended that the MCC would play European teams, largely to encourage and promote white cricket in India; it was Robertson and another Englishman called William Currie who represented India at the crucial meeting of the Imperial Cricket Conference in 1926. However, the 1926–27 tour was financed by the Maharaja of Patiala and therefore the MCC team played against Indian opposition, and so it marked a huge turning point for the sport in that country.

In one of the more surprising turns of his life, Gilligan apparently encouraged Indian cricket. Bose records how, unlike many other Englishman, he “met Indians on terms of perfect equality”. While this seems to be overstating the facts, Gilligan was happy to play Indian — as well as European — opposition, which was not a universally held position among English cricketers. He also went considerably further than that. There was an informal meeting in the Roshanara Club in Delhi, after the MCC had played a match there, between Gilligan, the Maharaja of Patiala, an English businessman called R. E. Grant Govan, and Anthony de Mello, an Indian who worked for Grant Govan. The four men agreed that India needed to establish their board of control in order to cement Test status. De Mello later wrote in his Portrait of Indian Sport (1959): “Gilligan was a key man, not only in English, but also in world cricket circles at the time. It was of the utmost importance to us that he should leave India with the idea firmly in his mind that we could play cricket of a high class and — equally vital — that we could play it in accordance with the highest English traditions.” And at this meeting, de Mello wrote: “Not the least keen on the idea was Gilligan, and his enthusiasm was of the greatest encouragement to us. We felt that if a man so cricket-wise as Gilligan considered Indian cricket had reached a stage in its development where it could challenge the world then we had certainly achieved something. Gilligan promised to state our case when he returned to Lord’s”.

It is not quite clear if Gilligan ever did so, but a Board of Control was formed in 1928 which was representative of all India, not just white Europeans, and India played their first Test match in 1932. Bose believes that Gilligan should take some credit for that. Even if this seems overly generous, it is certain that his 1926–27 team gave a huge boost to cricket in India, being a huge attraction wherever it went. Bob Wyatt, one of the members of the MCC team told his biographer Gerald Pawle about his experiences for R. E. S. Wyatt: Fighting Cricketer (1985). Of Gilligan’s captaincy, Pawle said: “An immensely popular and likeable man [Gilligan] decided early on not to concern himself too closely with many problems which might easily sort themselves out without his assistance. He was fortunate in his deputy, for in Major Raleigh Chichester-Constable, an Army officer with a strong sense of discipline and great charm he had a superb Vice-captain who did much to ensure the success of the tour.”

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Arthur Gilligan (centre) leads out the MCC in Karachi in October 1926.

Even so, there were problems. Gilligan clashed with Jack Parsons, a professional in his team who was a devout Christian and therefore did not want to play on Sundays (the pair compromised after a fiery argument so that Parsons could leave games early on a Sunday to attend evening church services). Gilligan also refused to attend an official function at Calcutta unless his professionals — who had not been invited — were allowed to accompany him; whatever his other faults, Gilligan seems to have always supported professional cricketers. But there was another side to the tour; conscious of the political side to the tour, Gilligan (or the team management) did not want to offend either European or Indian officials, so almost all invitations were accepted. Wyatt did not enjoy this aspect; Pawle wrote: “The strain of innumerable social functions soon became a worrying problem, and in all the tours he was subsequently to make Wyatt recalls nothing to equal it. So many players were laid low by sheer exhaustion that reserves had to be drawn from Englishmen temporarily in India on coaching engagements.”

Given these varied considerations, results were not too important. The team played 34 matches (30 in India and four in Ceylon), winning 11 and drawing 23. Of much greater impact in the long term was the interest it generated in India and the good impression formed of Indian cricket among the English players. But for all the luxury which greeted the team, the conditions in India disturbed some of them, including Wyatt, who told Pawle that he never accepted another invitation to tour the country because “the squalor and poverty which denied hope to India’s teeming millions … made an ineradicable impression on his mind”.

But this is dancing around the elephant in the room. How could a member of a fascist organisation (and Gilligan remained a member of the British Fascists until at least 1927, after the completion of the tour) be supportive of Indian cricket? Did his views really diverge from those of other English cricketers? The actual evidence is somewhat thin. Parsons’ account of the tour as given to his biographer Gerald Howat suggests that the team were very aware of racial tensions, as white Europeans tried to maintain control of Indian cricket. Gilligan simply tried to steer a course which avoided giving offence. The idea that he actively supported Indian cricket is somewhat misleading. India was already a member of the Imperial Cricket Conference and on course to play Test cricket; the stumbling block had been the formation of an Indian cricket board. Maybe Gilligan’s notion that this should have been formed through the Maharaja of Patiala — rather than being composed of Europeans — changed the direction of Indian cricket. On the other hand, perhaps Gilligan’s benevolence has been exaggerated; even relatively reactionary members of the cricket establishment accepted the right of maharajas to play and organise cricket; this may well have happened without his alleged intervention. Nor does Gilligan seem to have taken any particular interest in Indian cricket once the tour was complete. As often seems to be the case with Gilligan, nothing is clear-cut.

When he returned to England, Gilligan gradually drifted away from cricket. By 1930, his brother Harold had taken over as Sussex captain, and also stepped in as captain of the MCC team which toured New Zealand in 1929–30, from which Gilligan withdrew with illness. As Sussex captain, Gilligan had achieved little but in Michael Marshall’s Gentlemen and Players (1987), Percy Fender credited him with leading a happy team, for giving the professionals a greater say in the running of the side and for being one of the most popular county captains. Fender also suggested that he made Sussex into one of the best fielding sides in the County Championship. Fender said: “Generally, Sussex were a happy, if unpredictable side.” He maintained his connection with Sussex until his death; he published a history of the county in 1932, served on the committee from 1950 until 1973 (and was its chairman from 1963 until 1971) and was the county president in 1974.

As for his personal life, Gilligan married Cecilia Mary Matthews (known as “Molly”), a solicitor’s daughter, in April 1921; the couple went away for a honeymoon on the Isle of Wight. They lived for a time in a flat in Maida Vale but the marriage did not last. By January 1924, Cecilia had left him. In 1926, she applied successfully for a judicial separation and in 1933 for a divorce, which Gilligan did not contest. In fact, he seems to have assisted her by sending her a copy of a bill in late 1932 which proved that he had spent a night in a hotel room with a woman called Katherine Weyand. In 1934, the day after his divorce was made absolute, Gilligan married Katharine Margaret Fox, whom he had met (according to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, based on information from Katharine, who died in 1998) on a skiing trip. She was originally from Ilkley and was the daughter of a mohair merchant. The 1939 Register records them living in a house called Oak Lodge in Chanctonbury, Sussex. Gilligan was listed as the “Director of a Canned Goods Brokers”. Although we know little about Gilligan’s occupation outside of cricket, it seems likely that this was the same firm owned by his father, who had been a partner in a food brokers with his father-in-law. Two other women lived with them in 1939: a 19-year-old domestic servant and Gilligan’s sister Alice (at that time a married woman, whose husband had presumably joined the armed forces).

Somewhat curiously, and in contrast to many cricketers, Gilligan did not immediately sign up when war broke out in 1939. But around 12 months later, in October 1940, he was commissioned as a pilot officer in the RAF and by the end of the war had been promoted to Squadron Leader. He does not appear to have played any active role in the war, but instead was responsible for organising sporting activities. He played a few charity cricket matches for the RAF, but not many. Perhaps revealingly, his Wisden obituary, his obituary in The Cricketer and his hagiographical entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are silent on his activities during the Second World War. Even From the Sea End (1989), the official Sussex history only mentions a couple of cricketing incidents from his wartime service.

Arthur Gilligan’s review of the 1946–47 Ashes for British Movietone

The obvious question is had his fascist past had come to haunt him? While Gilligan was never arrested or interned, it is likely that the authorities were aware of his very public support for fascism in the past. Did that explain why he did not join the armed forces until the war had been underway for over a year, and why his role in the RAF was minor one? In contrast to other inter-war England captains, he had a very quiet war; perhaps the authorities were less forgiving than the cricket world.

When the war ended, Gilligan continued to be a public figure. He was a member (and served as president of many) clubs. As a keen golfer, he was also a member (and president) of many golfing associations too. He became famous again as a commentator, particularly in Australia, where he struck up an on-air partnership with Vic Richardson; he covered the MCC tours of 1936–37, 1946–47, 1950–51 and 1954–55. But there was one final piece of controversy, with which Gilligan’s name is still associated. In this case, however, Gilligan was relatively blameless, albeit probably not innocent.

In 1968, the England selectors left out Basil D’Oliveira from the MCC team due to tour South Africa over the winter. The actual reasons for D’Oliveria’s omission will never be known for certain (and there was a reasonable argument for doing so on cricketing grounds), but what is not in any doubt is that the South African government, in an effort to protect its racist apartheid policies, put enormous pressure on D’Oliveria and figures within the MCC to ensure he was not part of the team. Almost everyone believed that D’Oliveira had been left out to avoid a clash with the South African government. The suspicion, at the time and ever since, has been that senior figures at the MCC were at the very least sympathetic to the apartheid regime and at worst conspired with it.

Some of the commentators for the 1950–51 Ashes series being interviewed in January 1951. Left to right: Gilligan, Bernard Kerr, Don Entwisle (interviewer) and Vic Richardson (Image: Examiner (Launceston), 19 January 1951).

The president of the MCC during that crucial period was none other than Arthur Gilligan. At the time, it was not widely known that he had been a fascist in the 1920s, but when the information re-emerged after Andrew Moore’s 1991 article — and was further recirculated when the cricket historian Robert Brooke publicised it in the early 2000s (although one newspaper article wrongly claimed that Brooke was the one to make the discovery) — people were quick to make a connection. A 2004 documentary by BBC4 claimed that Gilligan put the selectors under pressure to drop D’Oliveria, and explicitly made the link with his fascism. Certainly, Gilligan would have been aware of a letter from the South African government which indicated that the tour would be cancelled if D’Oliveira was chosen, and he was present at the selection meeting. But in reality, the role of President was largely ceremonial and the power at the MCC lay with the Secretary, Gubby Allen, and the Treasurer, Billy Griffith. Gilligan had no power to intervene, whatever his own views might have been. However, he was close to many of those at the selection meeting, not least Peter May, one of the selectors, who was married to his niece.

There is also a danger of reading too much into Gilligan’s past; the British Fascists were slightly vague about their policies and intentions. Unlike similar groups, they do not seem to have proclaimed overtly racist beliefs (although this does not mean that members did not hold them). There is a suspicion among historians that many of those who joined did not quite know what they were getting into, and saw early fascism as akin to being a member of the Boy Scouts. Gilligan’s link with the organisation might have been an embarrassment to him in later years, but it is not certain proof that he supported outright fascism and/or racism; this may also explain his support, however lukewarm, for Indian cricket.

However, in recent years, the facts have become blurred to the point where Gilligan has been described as a Nazi or — inaccurately — a member of the more extreme British Union of Fascists. In actuality, it is equally likely that Gilligan was a fool who did not know what he was supporting (which would match what we know of his personality, where enthusiasm rather than deep thought was a defining characteristic) as much as he was a vehement supporter of fascism. In the end, we do not know — but the evidence of his membership of the British Fascists should not be stretched in an attempt to prove too much, especially in connection with the D’Oliveira Affair.

This does not mean to say that Gilligan would have opposed any move to drop D’Oliveira; like many of the MCC, he would have been keen, even desperate, to maintain sporting links with South Africa. Modern writers have generally concluded that the selectors were misguided rather than racist — too keen to separate sport from politics without considering the wider picture — but that seems overly generous. However, Gilligan should not be singled out; it is hard to believe that a man such as Gubby Allen was not a strong supporter of the South African government and quite likely racist. Many prominent figures in the cricket world supported a fund to protect the ultimately cancelled 1970 tour of England by South Africa; one of the selectors, Alec Bedser, was a member of the right-wing Freedom Association which wanted to maintain links with South Africa.

Nor should we be so naive as to think that men of their generation and background did not hold racist views (even if they were not recognised as such at the time). But again, Gilligan was likely no better or worse than anyone else, despite his political leanings in the 1920s. No-one on the MCC side comes out of the D’Oliveria Affair too well; but Gilligan is often a convenient scapegoat, whose past is used as a smokescreen to hide those who were equally — or more — culpable.

Gilligan died in 1976, and his various obituaries and later tributes were often glowing. While acknowledging his shortcomings as a captain, they described him as a cheerful and much-loved figure. Perhaps the only hint of something else came in his Cricketer obituary, which said of him in later life: “Only in matters of behaviour would he allow no relaxation of the standards in which he had been brought up. Boorish or ill-tempered conduct on or off the field he hated and, if he could have had his way, some of our modern players would have received short shrift.” All of these were written before the emergence of the links with the British Fascists, but even today Gilligan’s article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reads like it could have been written in the 1930s, making no mention of any negative aspects of his life.

But the wider world now views Gilligan with some suspicion. In 1971, a stand at Hove Cricket Ground was named after him, but this was quietly dropped when the stand was demolished as part of a 2010 redevelopment. There was a protest from his surviving family (he had no children, but a niece spoke out publicly), particularly when the redevelopment was accompanied by the removal of his portrait from the Sussex Committee Room. His niece said in The Times that she had been told it was because of his fascist links; among those to protest at the change were Robin Marlar and Murray Hedgcock. All of them seemed not to know that when the stand was build, his fascist past was still largely unknown. The storm raged for a while before subsiding.

All of those involved seemed ignorant of the full story of Gilligan. Some writers today suggest that he was a complicated man because of his support for fascism and his encouragement of Indian cricket. But in reality, there does not seem to have been anything too complicated about him. I suspect he drifted into fascism without much thought and drifted into supporting Indian cricket with an equal lack of analysis. Like his captaincy, the man seems to have been straightforward, which is why he appealed to many people on and off the field.

Does he deserve to be remembered more? Not really; his captaincy record and playing record are unremarkable and he owed his position — like many others — purely to his background. He did little off the field to bring prestige to the sport — quite the opposite — and his role in the growth of Indian cricket looks somewhat exaggerated. Should he be condemned as a fascist? Probably not; it is not implausible that Gilligan never clearly looked into or understood what the beliefs of the British Fascists really were, and there is no evidence that he remained sympathetic to fascism after his last recorded attendance at a meeting in 1927. Nor did any of these beliefs have any impact on the D’Oliveria Affair in 1968. Does that mean he has been unfairly treated? No. His views were doubtless like those of most of his contemporaries: conservative and reactionary. He probably supported apartheid and probably held quietly racist views, like most of his cricketing class. But he never suffered for any of this during his lifetime; quite the contrary. Any subsequent damage to his reputation has come long after his death and made no personal difference to him in the end.

“The most popular captain of the day”: How A. E. R. Gilligan was chosen to lead England

Arthur Gilligan in 1928 (Image: Wikipedia)

Most of England’s inter-war Test captains have had books published about them, whether biographies or autobiographies. But although Arthur Gilligan led England in a home series against South Africa and for an Ashes series in Australia, he has never been the subject of any full-length publication; he himself wrote several books but these were never about his own life. It is a curious oversight. And overshadowing any recent discussion of him is the knowledge that he was an active fascist in the mid-1920s, and his role in the D’Oliveira Affair in 1968. Those who knew him, though, spoke highly of him, and he has been credited with playing a leading role in the elevation of India to Test status. He was clearly a complicated man. Although his background might indicate that his rise to the England captaincy was inevitable, the story is not entirely straightforward. He was not the best candidate for the job and, after his appointment, even the selectors seem to have had misgivings, albeit only expressed behind closed doors. Far from being the “chosen one” like some of his successors, Gilligan owed his position to a particular combination of circumstances.

Arthur Edward Robert Gilligan was born in 1894. His background is utterly typical for an amateur cricketer in this period. His father, Willie Austin Gilligan, was a food broker; his mother Alice Eliza Kimpton was the daughter of a colonial broker (Willie was a partner in her father’s firm). The couple had four children, of whom Arthur was the second. His older brother Frank and his younger brother Harold also went on to play first-class cricket; they also had a sister called Alice. The family were wealthy enough to retain domestic staff; the 1901 census records two nurses (one of whom would have been for the four-week-old Alice) and a servant; in 1911, they employed a cook and a housemaid.

Gilligan went to Fairfield School and then, from 1906 until 1914, Dulwich College. At the latter establishment he excelled as a cricketer and by 1911 had reached the school’s First Eleven, where he played alongside his brothers Frank and Harold — all three were in the 1913 team — and was captain in his final two years. He headed both batting and bowling averages in his final season. Unusually for a public schoolboy, he was a fast bowler, and this rarity prompted Surrey to invite him to play for their Second Eleven in 1913 and 1914, doubtless connected to his father’s place on their Committee. He was also chosen to play at Lord’s for the annual match between the “Lord’s Schools” — those who played fixtures at the ground owing to their preeminence among public schools — and “The Rest”. Gilligan took four for 26 in the first innings and scored 53 for “The Rest”, and was picked to represent the “Public Schools” against the MCC in the next match. By the end of the 1914 season (when he was 19), he was among the leading schoolboy cricketers in England; E. B. Noel, writing in Wisden, observed that at Lord’s, Gilligan was “fast, keeping a good length, and with dangerous yorkers”; elsewhere, it was noted that he was also a “dangerous bat of the dashing type”.

Continuing on the well-trodden amateur path, Gilligan was admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge in the autumn of 1914, but his education and his cricket was interrupted by the First World War, during which he served as a captain in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He returned to his studies at Cambridge in 1919, but in truth, did not immediately excel as a cricketer. Although he was awarded his “blue” during the 1919 season, his overall record was mediocre. However, he did display a knack for rising to the occasion, first with a century batting at number eleven for Cambridge against Sussex and then with a spell of five wickets for 16 runs in 57 deliveries in the University Match against Oxford at Lord’s. Although he retained his place in the 1920 team, he achieved little, and left Cambridge that year with a reputation as a fast but unreliable bowler. He joined his father’s business upon leaving University.

The obvious question is how such a cricketer became England captain? Even allowing for his wealthy background, and his attendance at Public School and University, there was little to make him stand out. Nor did he perform particularly well in county cricket. Playing for Sussex in 1921, he averaged over thirty with the ball, which was extremely high for a specialist bowler in this period. But despite a mediocre record, he was appointed the Sussex captain in 1922. If this seems extraordinary to modern eyes, it was common at the time. County captains had to be amateurs, for reasons of social convention, snobbery and class discrimination. A professional, no matter how tactically astute, would never been considered for the role in this period. The problem — which benefitted Gilligan at both county and Test level — was that amateurs were thin on the ground at the time. Therefore, Gilligan’s non-playing credentials made him the ideal candidate. Furthermore, even though he was not an outstanding bowler, he was at least worth his place in the team, which put him ahead of many amateur county captains. And the promotion was the making of him as a bowler.

The newly appointed captain took 135 wickets at 18.75 in 1922, a huge improvement on his previous form, which catapulted him to the forefront of national attention. He represented the Gentlemen against the Players and was chosen as a member of a somewhat experimental MCC team which toured South Africa in 1922–23 under the captaincy of Frank Mann (in this period, official touring teams representing England played under the name and colours of the MCC; only in Test matches were the teams designated as “England”). Gilligan was one of a number of promising amateurs in the team, including Arthur Carr, Percy Fender and Greville Stevens. He performed respectably without standing out, but made his Test debut during the tour.

Gilligan in 1922 (Image: The Cricketer Annual 1922–23)

When he returned to England, he had easily his best season as a cricketer, performing the double of 1,000 first-class runs and 100 first-class wickets for the only time. He and Maurice Tate, whose emergence as a pace bowler Gilligan had encouraged, formed an outstanding partnership with the new ball for Sussex. His 163 wickets at 17.50, as well as his great pace, made him one of the best bowlers in England. When the England selectors were looking for a man to lead the team in Australia in 1924–25, Gilligan was at the forefront of everyone’s thoughts. But even with his improvement as a bowler, Gilligan was not the obvious man to lead the Test team. Sussex were a middling team at best, and although Gilligan had raised their fielding standards, he had not stood out as a tactician.

However, in Gilligan’s favour was the simple fact that there were not many candidates for the England captaincy. There were few amateurs in 1924 who realistically could have been appointed, and just like at county level, the England captain had to be an amateur. J. W. H. T. Douglas had led the previous MCC team in Australia, losing 5–0 in 1920–21; he had not been the first choice then, and the selectors had no reason to go back to him. Hampshire’s Lionel Tennyson captained England as a short-lived experiment in 1921 but was not a Test batsman. The Middlesex captain Frank Mann had led the team in South Africa, but fell short of the required standard with the bat (although as we shall see, he remained a candidate). Arthur Carr, Nottinghamshire’s captain, was perhaps a touch too young. Other leading amateurs, such as Somerset’s Jack White, were not guaranteed a place on merit in a full-strength England team, and other county captains were unsuitable. For example, Lancashire’s Jack Sharp was 46 and Somerset’s John Daniel was 45; Yorkshire’s Geoffrey Wilson did not really deserve a place even in the Yorkshire team on merit; the injury-prone Kent captain Stanley Cornwallis owed his position as much to being an officer in the army and the son of a baron as any cricketing ability.

Percy Fender in 1922 (Image: Wikipedia)

Therefore, in effect there were only two realistic contenders to lead England in 1924: Gilligan and Surrey’s Percy Fender. Had the England selectors and the MCC made decisions purely on a cricketing basis in this period, it would not even have been a contest, because Fender stood out as the best captain in England. Rather like Gilligan, he assumed the leadership of Surrey through default as one of the few amateurs guaranteed a place in the team who was free to play, but from his first games in charge he was clearly exceptionally good in a way that Gilligan never was. Fender took over in the absence of the regular Surrey captain in 1920 and was given the role permanently in 1921. In this period, the county had a strong batting line-up, in which Jack Hobbs was dominant, but a threadbare bowling attack which struggled to dismiss the opposition on their flat home pitches at the Oval. But Fender somehow found ways to conjure wins from the unlikeliest situations through a combination of calculated risk-taking, aggressive tactics and cunning ruses which often lured the opposition batters (and captains) into making mistakes. He was not afraid to risk a bold declaration (even declaring behind on first innings which at the time risked losing points), offer up easy runs to provoke the batters into playing an injudicious shot, or bowling his part-timers to induce lapses in concentration. He even picked an underarm-lob bowler, Trevor Molony, as an experiment for three games in 1921. Between 1920 and 1923, Surrey finished third, second, third and fourth in the County Championship despite clear limitations in their team. This overachievement was recognised by the cricketing press, who credited Fender’s inspirational leadership. The Surrey players also appreciated his tactical genius and his ability to get the best out of individuals.

Fender was also a good all-rounder at county level. He completed the double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in 1921, 1922 and 1923, and was often Surrey’s only attacking threat with the ball, usually bowling leg-spin but sometimes mixing it up with medium-pace or something faster. He was also an aggressive batsman who scored very quickly when he was in form; in 1920, he scored a century in 35 minutes, still the fastest recorded at first-class level, but this was far from his only exhibition of big hitting. He could defend if he had to, but generally believed that attack was the best option in almost all circumstances and he encouraged his middle-order to play the same way. But the biggest question mark over his claim from a cricketing viewpoint was that he had rarely threatened to produce this form at Test level. His record in the ten Tests he had played before 1924 was mediocre: 326 runs at 19.17 and 24 wickets at 39.16 (Gilligan’s record was 68 runs and nine wickets in the two Tests he had played in South Africa). On the other hand, Fender had impressed the Australians during the 1920–21 tour, when he was badly underused with the ball, and he was always liable to make something happen.

However, the biggest problem for Fender was that his face never quite fitted. He was educated at St Paul’s School, which was never quite on a social par with the leading public schools, and never went to University like most of his amateur contemporaries. He did not come from an influential family, and could not afford to follow his ambition to become a barrister. Quite simply, his background was less attractive than Gilligan’s to the people who mattered. And Fender’s cricket did not quite fit, either. The English cricket establishment centred around Lord’s rather than the Oval, and influential figures did not approve of Fender. Not only did they raise an eyebrow at his disdain for tactical convention and his indulgence in innovation, they positively loathed his willingness to pick a fight. He publicly clashed with the hugely influential Lord Harris several times: in 1922 over an objection raised to Alfred Jeacocke’s qualification for Surrey, in 1923 over Fender’s revolutionary insistence on amateurs and professionals entering the field by the same gate, and in 1924 over rules concerning pitch covering. Therefore, Fender was not seen as a “safe pair of hands” and was never really accepted by Lord’s, although newspapers often championed him. Perhaps the widespread idea that he was Jewish (which he probably wasn’t) counted against him, although Fender did not think so.

The final nail in Fender’s coffin was that during the crucial period in 1924 when decisions were being made over the captaincy, his form collapsed utterly. He made a poor start to the season and lost his ability to spin the ball mid-way through it, becoming reluctant to bowl. His timing could not have been worse as Gilligan, who had already impressed in 1923, began the 1924 season in the best form of his life. His biggest attraction as a captain was that he was one of the leading bowlers in England. In the early part of the season, he and Tate bowled out two of the strongest batting line-ups in England for paltry totals: Surrey for 53 and Middlesex for 41. Even had he not been captain, Gilligan’s place would have been assured as the selectors imagined him and Tate bowling with similar effect in Australia. If Sussex’s results never remotely approached Surrey’s, if Gilligan’s captaincy was at best unremarkable and at worst uninspired, if Fender was indisputably a better tactician, none of this mattered if Gilligan could bowl Australia out cheaply.

Gilligan therefore became captain almost by default, setting the scene for what with hindsight was an unfortunate episode in the history of the England captaincy both on and off the field. He was given the 1924 series against a palpably weak South African team to prove himself. Neither he nor his team were extended as South Africa were horribly outclassed; their leading bowler failed, a reinforcement had to be called up from the Bradford League, and only weather prevented what would probably have been a 5–0 result. As it was, England won three Tests without breaking sweat. But even in such easy circumstances, some limitations were apparent in Gilligan’s leadership. The most damaging — although the aftermath was not Gilligan’s fault — came in his use of Cecil Parkin during the first Test.

Gilligan (right) at the toss with Herbie Taylor at the beginning of his first Test leading England (Image: Wikipedia)

England scored 438 before Gilligan, who took six wickets for seven runs, and Tate continued their devastating run of form by bowling South Africa out for 30 in 12.3 overs. Parkin unsurprisingly was not used in that innings. Following on, South Africa made a much more respectable 390. Gilligan took five for 83, to confirm his ability at Test level, and Parkin bowled 16 overs without taking a wicket. There was some discussion in the press regarding Gilligan’s reluctance to use Parkin, particularly as England’s bowling looked unthreatening for long periods of South Africa’s second innings. Gilligan’s captaincy and management of the bowling was nevertheless commended by Pelham Warner in The Cricketer. A few days later, an incendiary article appeared in the Empire News in Parkin’s regular column, under the headline “Cecil Parkin Refuses to Play for England again.” In it, Parkin criticised Gilligan’s captaincy, and wrote about his humiliation and the damage to his reputation caused when Gilligan used him so reluctantly in South Africa’s second innings. Parkin received little support from the press. Instead, there was widespread shock that a lowly professional would dare publicly criticise the England captain.

There were a few attempts at damage limitation. Parkin wrote a letter of apology to Gilligan and England’s Board of Control, which was responsible for Test matches. In a press statement a few days after his article appeared, he said that it “was not meant to convey any feeling of personal animosity against Mr Arthur Gilligan. Far from that, I have a great opinion of him as a sportsman and gentleman. My object was to protest against his policy in not asking me to bowl.” Although Gilligan sat out a potentially awkward encounter when Lancashire played his county, Sussex on 25 June, there was a public reconciliation later in the season between the two men when Lancashire next played Sussex: they walked onto the field together, and Gilligan put his arm around Parkin’s shoulder. Gilligan later contributed a foreword to Parkin’s Cricket Triumphs and Troubles in 1936 and professed no hard feelings, but Parkin unsurprisingly never played for England again.

Other than this, reports on Gilligan’s captaincy were largely positive. One thing in his favour — and this was a recurring theme — was articulated in the Birmingham Daily Gazette after the first Test: “His personal example of keenness and cheerfulness is an asset to the team.” Meanwhile Fender, although he continued to have his advocates in the press, faded from the picture and was dropped by England after achieving little in the first two Tests. He was not picked in the team which toured Australia.

Little other comment was made on Gilligan’s captaincy, either in terms of how he did in 1924, or the prospects of him leading a successful campaign in Australia. The only detailed critique of his leadership came in the review of Sussex’s season in The Cricketer Annual, which stated:

“He led the side with enthusiasm and was the most popular captain of the day as well as one of the very best, modifying his field and changing his bowling with rare skill. Towards the close, no doubt bothered by the wretched batting [of Sussex], he abandoned a regular order of going in and reverted to his 1921 habit of experiments in this direction, an injudicious method because all really successful teams have their accustomed order, but he himself showed his appreciation of this when successfully directing England. His example is so valuable and his zeal so great that what would not be noticed in a less capable leader must be criticised in his case. No one ever more richly deserved to captain a champion side.”

Nevertheless, his primary tactic as captain of England and Sussex seemed to be giving the ball to Maurice Tate and hoping for the best. Tate bowled over 1,400 first-class overs in 1924, 150 more than anyone else in the season. He had bowled over 1,600 the year before. In the 1924 Tests, he bowled half as many overs again as the next busiest bowler. With such a heavy workload, it was vital that Tate had support from other pace bowlers, and Gilligan had a crucial role in supporting him.

And here arose what became the biggest problem with Gilligan’s captaincy, one unconnected to his tactical or cricketing ability. In early July, an apparently minor incident had unfortunate consequences. Gilligan was captaining the Gentlemen against the Players in the relatively unimportant Oval match. The Gentlemen were swept aside on a lively pitch by the fast bowling of Tate and Warwickshire’s Harry Howell, and forced to follow-on. Gilligan scored a defiant 34 from number ten, but shortly before he was out, he was struck over the heart. Contemporary reports do not describe what exactly happened, as Gilligan carried on batting, but they imply — something which is attested in Gilligan’s Wisden obituary and other later sources — that the bowler was Frederick Pearson, who is usually described as a medium-paced off-spinner. Although Pearson was not a quick bowler, he was making the ball kick sharply from the pitch and it was a nasty blow. Perhaps all would have been fine, but despite still feeling the effects of the injury the following day, Gilligan chose to bat in the follow-on. From number ten, he scored a defiant but futile century; his team had no chance of avoiding defeat, and lost by six wickets. It was a gallant gesture, but it was a mistake, especially in a fairly meaningless game. Some combination of the injury and the effort of batting the following day left him with what can only have been some kind of heart strain. From that moment on, Gilligan was never even remotely as effective with the ball; he lost the pace which had briefly made him such a handful, and he seems to have become reluctant to bowl. He played in the third Test and captained the Gentlemen against the Players at Lord’s, but missed the fourth Test on doctor’s orders. The series had been won by then, and although the match was ruined by rain — leaving Jack MacBryan with the unwanted record of having neither batted nor bowled in his only Test — the sparse crowd was treated to the incongruous sight of Johnny Douglas as England captain for one more match.

In his Cricket Captains of England (1979), Alan Gibson cast doubt that the blow to Gilligan could actually explain his decline, particularly as he lived for another 52 years with no obvious health problems. However, Gibson wrote: “But there is no doubt that he was badly shaken up, and whatever the reason, the magic departed.” Perhaps the damage was psychological as much as anything; perhaps other injuries — and he had a few — played their part; or maybe, like other fast bowlers throughout history, the circumstances of body, pitch conditions and form only favourably coincided for a short time.

Frank Mann in 1924 (Image: Wikipedia)

But while this injury drama played out, there were some strange goings-on in the back-rooms of Lord’s. After the third Test, with England 3–0 ahead, the selectors chose their team for the tour of Australia. As usual, stories leaked out to the press as deliberations were underway. And it was reported that Frank Mann had been asked to lead the MCC tour. Little comment was made about this, but when the team was announced in the press on 23 July, Gilligan was named captain. Most reports included a single sentence which said that Mann had been asked to lead but had been forced to decline for business reasons.

This is very strange indeed. Mann certainly had a right to be considered, as he had led the MCC in South Africa (winning 2–1) the last time England had played overseas. But if he was the preferred choice, why did he not lead England during the 1924 series? There are two possibilities, neither of which reflect well on Gilligan despite the public praise. The first is that the selectors favoured Mann but had decided to give Gilligan a trial to see if he was a possibility; in which case they must have concluded, after the first three Tests, that Mann would be preferable. The other possibility is that something about Gilligan’s leadership — perhaps the problem with Parkin, for all the condemnation of the professional — worried them and they decided to fall back on the more proven Mann. The injury was not a factor as, at this stage, Gilligan seemed to have recovered and it was only after he had been confirmed as the captain that he sought medical advice and pulled out of the fourth Test against South Africa. The point was moot after Mann declined, and Gilligan was now the only realistic option. But the selectorial misgivings regarding Gilligan’s ability (or perhaps worries about his fitness) might be behind the decision after the fourth Test to add Douglas to the touring team as vice-captain.

Gilligan seemed to have recovered by the end of the season, and was expected to play a crucial role with the ball in Australia. But he was a shadow of his former self, and his reduced effectiveness left Tate with an even heavier workload. Over the five Tests, Tate bowled the equivalent of 421 six-ball overs (eight balls per over were bowled in the series) while Gilligan managed only 181. Tate took 38 wickets at an average of 23.18; Gilligan had ten wickets at 51.90.

The result was a badly unbalanced England attack. Although the team selected for the tour was probably as strong as possible, the bowling lacked depth. With one half of their pace spearhead ineffective, on flat Australian pitches England presented little threat unless Tate was bowling, and it was no surprise when Australia piled up a succession of huge scores. The only support for Tate in the pace attack, other than the neutered Gilligan, was Howell of Warwickshire — a 34-year-old bowler with a poor Test record who averaged 80 with the ball in Tests — and the 42-year-old Douglas — still effective in England but long past his best. Howell did not play a single Test, Douglas only one; neither man was effective in other games. The bulk of the bowling in the series was done by Tate and the spinners: A. P. Freeman and R. K. Tyldesley were ineffective and only Roy Kilner was a wicket-taking threat in the Tests. Back-up came from Frank Woolley’s left-arm spin (which was very much his second string by then) and Jack Hearne’s leg-breaks. Injuries also plagued England, including their hapless captain, who suffered a thigh strain during the third Test, and bowled little from that point. Possibly the two best bowlers in England after Tate both stayed at home: Cecil Parkin clearly was never going to be selected again, but George Macaulay had also upset the authorities with his combative attitude.

Therefore, the series was hard work for the English bowlers. Gilligan’s main appeal to the selectors — that he was a leading bowler — proved illusory. If his playing impact was negligible, England needed him to provide some tactical leadership on the field. He also had a diplomatic role off it; England captains were also expected to speak at functions, meet dignitaries and generally represent the MCC and show the whole of England in a positive light. In both of these roles, Gilligan fell short. But how far short he fell did not become known to the public for another 65 years.

“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.

“Almost frightened to bowl at him”: Alletson’s Innings

Edwin Alletson in 1911 (Image: Cricket, 27 May 1911)

On 20 May 1911, an unremarkable journeyman cricketer played one of the most astonishing innings of all time. Ted Alletson’s career with Nottinghamshire comprised just 118 first-class matches between 1906 and 1914. He came from nowhere, and shortly afterwards faded back into obscurity. But one afternoon in Hove secured him a place in cricket history. For his contemporaries, and for those who wrote about it afterwards, the innings defied belief. How could one man do what he did? How could he score so easily and so quickly? Today, we find it easier to understand because T20 has rendered commonplace even the most rapid feats of scoring. But in 1911 such an innings was almost without parallel. And even in a modern game, the pace of scoring — and its ferocity — would be worth more than just a second glance.

Edwin Boaler Alletson had spent several years on the fringes of the Nottinghamshire team, playing regularly albeit with little notable success. Although some later accounts suggested otherwise, he always had a reputation as a big hitter, and scored quickly whenever his batting came off. But it very rarely did. Before the match that brought him fame, Alletson had played 72 first-class games for Nottinghamshire since his debut in 1906; in 106 innings, he had passed fifty just eight times, with a highest score of 81, scoring 1,768 runs at an average of 17.33.

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Hove cricket ground photographed around 1907

When Nottinghamshire travelled to Hove to play Sussex on 18, 19 and 20 May 1911, Alletson had only appeared in one of the county’s two games so far that season. He would not have played at Hove except that Tom Wass, one of Nottinghamshire’s main bowlers, was unfit. So Alletson began his 73rd first-class game with little reputation, and expectations cannot have been high.

Most of what we know about Alletson comes from John Arlott, better known as a commentator, who researched the man and his innings very thoroughly. He interviewed him at length by letter, and was able to tell his story thoroughly in an enjoyable little book called Alletson’s Innings, first published in 1957 and reprinted with extra material in 1991. Most of the following details come from that book.

The first two days passed without incident. Nottinghamshire scored 238 (Alletson 7) as E. H. Killick took five for 14. Killick was another unremarkable cricketer, albeit one who played in 344 consecutive County Championship matches for Sussex. Primarily a batsman, he was a useful slow bowler, taking 729 first-class wickets at 27.30, a relatively high average for the period.

Ernest Killick

Otherwise, Sussex had a reasonably good attack. The main bowler was the 36-year-old Albert Relf, a medium-paced off-break bowler who played for Sussex between 1900 and 1921 and in 13 Tests for England between 1903 and 1914. His career record was formidable: 25 Test wickets at 24.96 and 1,897 first-class wickets at 20.94. His younger brother Robert also played in the team, but was not quite in Albert’s class with the ball. In a 28-year career with Sussex, he took 317 wickets at 27.94 bowling brisk medium pace. The other main bowler was the 37-year-old George Cox, a slow-left-arm bowler who played for Sussex into his fifties, taking 1,843 wickets at an average of 22.86. And supporting them was George Leach, a fast bowler who took 413 wickets at an average of 27.94 in an eight-year career.

Killick top-scored with 81 when Sussex replied with a first innings total of 414. By the end of the second day, Nottinghamshire had scored 152 for three in their second innings, still 24 behind going into the last day. On the final morning, four wickets fell for five runs, leaving Nottinghamshire 185 for seven, only nine runs ahead and facing a heavy defeat.

Meanwhile, Alletson had been struggling with a wrist injury. That morning, he had gone for a swim before breakfast, despite less-than-sunny weather, which helped his wrist considerably. When the seventh wicket fell, fifty minutes before lunch, he went in to bat at number nine. By playing fairly orthodox cricket, Alletson scored 47 before the interval — which based on his previous scores over fifty was around his standard rate of scoring. He later recalled that his batting until lunch was “normal”. However, he had some luck. When his score was 25, he hit a ball from Albert Relf in the air but Reginald Heygate just failed to reach it at cover, having seen it too late. Then when he had reached 42, Cox dropped a difficult chance at slip.

These chances merely looked to have delayed Sussex, ending their hopes of wrapping things up by lunch. After Alletson had added 73 for the eighth wicket with Garnet Lee (who scored 26), two quick wickets fell to George Leach, the second one on the stroke of lunch so that the interval came with Nottinghamshire 260 for nine. The Relf brothers had taken five of the wickets to fall, Leach had taken three and Cox one.

With a lead of just 84, it seemed inevitable that Nottinghamshire would lose. Perhaps the spectators did not bother to return; certainly there were few journalists present to see what followed — probably only one.

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The Relf brothers. Left to right: Robert, Ernest and Albert, probably photographed around 1912 when Ernest, who did not play in Alletson’s match, made his Sussex debut.

During the lunch break, the Sussex captain Herbert Chaplin (who was injured and not actually taking part in the match, but watched from the pavilion) overheard Alletson ask Arthur Jones, his captain: “Mr Jones, does it matter what I do?” Jones replied: “No, Alletson. I don’t think it matters what you do.” To which Alletson responded: “Oh. Then I’m not half going to give Tim Killick some stick.” Meanwhile, the Sussex players confidently expected to win easily after lunch.

The next forty minutes became one of the most famous and extraordinary passages in cricket history. They also became one of the most closely analysed because the reported details afterwards did not quite add up; doubtless all those present were too caught up in the on-field events to record timings closely. This was unfortunate because, at the time, the speed of an innings was judged not on how many deliveries a batsman used to score his runs, but how many minutes. Matters were further complicated by the two scorers present at the game. The Sussex scorer recorded the runs scored, but did not keep a bowling analysis (which was usually recorded, even at that time). The Nottinghamshire scorer, Harry Coxon, did keep a bowling analysis but it contains several mistakes. Additionally, John Arlott observes that Coxon, a man in his sixties, could not reasonably have been expected to keep up with the hitting taking place on the field. Not only were his figures, unsurprisingly, a little untidy, he later traced over the original pencil with ink, making them even harder to read.

Nevertheless, Arlott, assisted by the statistician Roy Webber, went over the scorebooks in forensic detail and between them the two men reconstructed, ball-by-ball, the post-lunch section of the innings, correcting probable errors in the bowling analysis recorded by Coxon. Such an approach was rare in the 1950s, when they were working, but their results give the most accurate picture possible of Alletson’s innings.

Alletson going out to bat in the match immediately after the Sussex game, when he scored 60 against Gloucestershire at Bristol (Image: Daily Mirror, 27 May 1911)

The match resumed at 2:15pm; Alletson was out at 2:55pm. In that time, he had scored 142 runs. The contemporary reports state that Alletson took ten minutes to reach his fifty, fifteen minutes to move from 50 to 100, and a further fifteen minutes to score his final 89 runs. This was most likely pure guesswork from the reporter who had been too caught up in the action to look at the time until Alletson was out. Arlott points out several discrepancies in these timings based on the reconstruction — for example that the first six balls of the session would have taken ten minutes to bowl, whereas seven overs would have been bowled in the second fifteen minutes, which was impossible even at a time of rapid over-rates. He points out other problems, such as the time it would have taken to retrieve the ball after it had been hit for six, or the time taken to change around at the end of an over with men scattered all over the field. He also wonders if play resumed promptly at 2:15, or was delayed by five minutes or so. His conclusion is that Alletson must have scored even faster than the reported 142 runs in 40 minutes. But if the timings are wrong, that matters less to a modern audience who are more interested in how many deliveries he took.

The Arlott/Webber reconstruction suggests that the new batsman, William Riley, faced the four balls remaining from the over started before lunch. Alletson reached his fifty by striking his second ball of the session, bowled by Killick, for four. It took him a further 17 balls to reach his century (his first in first-class cricket), 16 more deliveries to reach 152 (which meant he scored 102 runs from 33 deliveries), and 16 deliveries to reach 189. In 51 balls after lunch, he scored 142 runs, including eighteen fours and eight sixes. Meanwhile, at the other end, Riley faced 19 balls for ten runs. The pair added 152 in 11.2 overs (plus two no-balls). Most of Alletson’s sixes were hit over mid-on; witnesses remembered the ball being struck onto or over the nearby skating rink, on the other side of the stands. Five balls were hit completely out of the ground and lost. Wisden recorded that two balls were hit over the stands.

Alletson farmed the strike very well, apart from one over where Riley scored a three from the last ball of an over of which he had faced the entirety (it may be questioned why they ran three, but perhaps reason had deserted everyone by this point; Riley took a single from the first ball of the next over to get off strike). Alletson, meanwhile, failed to score from just 12 of the deliveries he faced; four of these were consecutive balls from Albert Relf when Alletson had scored 162 (the next went for four).

As for his promise to target Killick: Alletson took nine from the first over he bowled after lunch, 22 from the second, eleven from the third, and 34 (46604446, including two no-balls) from his fourth. Killick’s spell was 4–0–77-0 (Riley scored a single from one of his overs). The 34 runs scored from the over was a record until Garry Sobers hit Malcolm Nash for six sixes in 1968. Ravi Shastri matched Sobers but only three other men have equalled Alletson in the history of first-class cricket. The figures of the other bowlers were: Leach 3.4–0–43–0, Albert Relf 2–0-21–0 and Cox 1.4–0–11–1. After Leach had completed his over to Riley, 120 came from the next seven overs until Relf and Cox replaced Leach and Killick; the next 3.4 overs resulted in a more sedate 32 runs.

Alletson batting in the match immediately after the Sussex game, when he scored 60 against Gloucestershire at Bristol (Images: Daily Mirror, 27 May 1911)

The carnage ended when Alletson was caught on the straight boundary off Cox for 189. The brothers George and John Gunn, who played for Nottinghamshire, saw that the catcher, the Sussex acting-captain Charles Smith, had his foot and head pressed against the stand when he held the catch and so it should have been not-out; but although they told Smith — who agreed that it was not a fair catch — Alletson still came off as he knew time was running out and Nottinghamshire now had an opportunity to win. In total, he had batted for around 90 minutes, hitting eight sixes and 23 fours in that time.

Sussex, rather than the easy win that looked likely at lunchtime, needed to score 237 in 195 minutes. After the Sussex openers Robert Relf and Joe Vine scored 112 in the first 75 minutes, five wickets fell for nine runs. The score continued to mount, but with ten minutes remaining, and Sussex still needing 25 runs, the eighth wicket fell, and the batsmen batted out the draw. Riley, the anonymous partner in Alletson’s rampage, took four wickets.

As the dust settled, everyone began to realise what they had just witnessed. Wisden’s match report was restrained, simply saying: “A phenomenal display of driving on the part of Edward [sic] Alletson rendered this match memorable.” But the very fact that Wisden used the first name of a professional cricketer — even if the writer got it wrong — in a match report was extraordinary in itself, and indicated the historic nature of what took place. It added that he hit with “extraordinary power and freedom”.

The newspapers — despite the limited journalistic presence at the match — widely covered the innings. Alletson became (almost literally) a nine-day wonder. None of the reports were able to give too much detail, but the headlines were clear. For example, the Daily Mirror had a brief feature under a large photograph of Alletson, and a prominent headline: “Alletson Scores 142 Runs in 40 Minutes: Jessop Outdone by the Notts Cricketer”. The Referee had the headline “Sensational Batting”, and a longer report, but one which was limited to the standard (and inaccurate) timings of the innings. And for many weeks afterwards, Alletson was followed closely in the hope he would repeat his feats.

In Cricket, R. S. Holmes cautioned about expecting too much on the basis of one innings, no matter how remarkable, but wryly suggested that Alletson could expect every bat manufacturer in the country to send him their bats to endorse. In fact, Alletson stuck with the bat which had served him so well, and after his playing days, kept it displayed above his fireplace at home. And in another section of that issue of Cricket, a writer unearthed an innings by Gilbert Jessop during which he had arguably scored faster. But this involved a little statistical manipulation. Jessop had scored 191 out of 234 in 90 minutes for the Gentlemen of the South against the Players of the South in 1907; this was technically faster than Alletson’s 189 out of 227, but did not take into account that 142 of Alletson’s runs came in 40 minutes.

The same writer, somewhat grumpily, stated that Alleton’s feats had been “excelled many times” in minor cricket. In contrast to modern cricket, where every latest achievement is hailed as the greatest of all time, cricket writers contemporary to Alletson believed that their sport was in more-or-less permanent decline.

The surviving participants in the match told Arlott their memories. All Alletson said was: “After lunch, A. O. Jones told me to have a go, as I did. Runs kept coming and I cast care aside and hit harder.” He remembered landing five balls on the roof of the skating rink.

Robert Relf remembered that he “hit like a giant”. He said that Alletson:

“…had one of those days where everything comes off. He just hit firm-footed. He made no attempt to get to the pitch of the ball, but, unless it was right up to him, hit under it, straight off the middle of the bat. Fortunately, I suppose, I didn’t bowl at him, but I was out at long-off and some of his dries were carrying as far as the hotel or over the stand to the skating-rink. Once or twice he played cuts — or perhaps you could call them short-arm jabs — away on the off side, but most of the time he was hitting between long on and deep extra-cover. My brother Albert, Joe Vine, George Leach and myself were fielding out there, but, even while he scored at the rate he did, nothing came to hand to any of us.”

Relf concluded: “My chief memory is that shower of cricket balls going over the boundary and the crowd mad with delight. Of course, it cost us a match we were winning, but I don’t think anybody minded about that — it was such an experience to watch it.”

George Gunn recalled one cut over point that “smashed the pavilion window and wrecked the bar. He sent his drives skimming; you could hear them hum.” Gunn also recalled the Relf brothers and Vine fielding in the deep. Gunn, who was watching from the boundary as it became clear Alletson was doing something remarkable, called to Vine: “Look out, he’ll hit you one any minute now.” To which Vine replied: “**** him, I don’t want it!” Gunn also said that several of Alletson’s drives went straight through the Relf brothers “as if they were ghosts”.

Headline from the Daily Mirror, 22 May 1911

George Gunn’s brother John also remembered the innings: “Ted almost murdered Ernie Killick, until Ernie was almost frightened to bowl at him. I do not think he minded his bowling being hit so much as he was worried that Ted might hit one back at him.”

Cyril Foley, a former cricketer, army officer and archaeologist, wrote about the innings, which he claimed to have seen, in his memoirs, Autumn Foliage, in 1935. Some of his memories are a little suspect. He recalled a delay while the ball had to be prised out of the wood of one of the stands; he also suggested another ball was recovered from the beach (roughly a mile away), and how a small boy was later found playing with “a practically new ball” he had discovered in the streets outside the ground. The final claim is perhaps less preposterous than the first two.

A more lasting measure of the impact of Alletson’s innings is in the record books. In the years when cricket statistics were not as extensive as they are now, there was no real record of the fastest century or fastest fifty in first-class cricket. Instead, Wisden simply had a section on “Fast Scoring” which listed individual feats but not who was the fastest to each milestone. For many years, Alletson’s innings held pride of place until a more methodical record-keeping approach was adopted, but even then he remained a foot-note.

In the aftermath of the game, the press recorded that the Alletson’s former employer, the Duke of Portland, presented him with £100, which he had promised him when he scored his first century for Nottinghamshire. Alletson remembered slightly differently in a letter to Arlott: that the Duke gave him “a gold watch and guard, and a medal with [an] inscription”. And Alletson’s version seems more likely as the newspapers reported in January that the Duke had presented these items at the annual dinner of the Welbeck Sports Club. His father, more prosaically, sent him a “home fed ham” which, Alletson wistfully remarked to Arlott, would have been a nice present in the more austere times of 1956.

There are a few other points to consider that have arisen since the time that Arlott was writing. At the time, the notion of a batsman’s strike rate was unheard of, but this measure shows just how extraordinary this century was. Just taking the portion of his innings scored after lunch (142 runs from 51 balls), his strike rate was 278.43 runs per 100 balls. In modern cricket, particularly during shorter innings, this figure is good but not remarkable. However, even today, few T20 centuries are scored at this rate. For example, in a list of the highest T20 individual scores, only two innings exceeding 115 have been achieved at a higher strike-rate than Alletson’s post-lunch feats at the time of writing. More comparable would be two innings played in One Day Internationals, 149 from 44 balls by A. B. de Villiers for South Africa against the West Indies in 2015 and Corey Anderson’s 131 from 47 balls for New Zealand against the West Indies in 2014.

We can also make some other comparisons. After lunch, Alletson took 33 deliveries to score 100 runs. Only two T20 centuries have been scored more quickly at the time of writing; in “List A” one-day matches, only A. B. de Villiers, in the innings already mentioned, has scored a century from fewer deliveries. Comparisons with first-class cricket are probably fairer. The fastest official first-class century in terms of balls faced (ignoring instances that were contrived with the help of the opposing team) was scored from 34 balls by David Hookes in 1982. The fastest in terms of time was 35 minutes (between 40 and 46 balls) by Percy Fender in 1921. We do not know how many balls Alletson’s own century took, but as he batted relatively slowly before lunch, it would not have beaten either Hookes or Fender; but these numbers provide a useful comparison. We can be certain that his rate of scoring after lunch remains almost unparalleled in first-class cricket, even in the modern era of big bats and six-hitting.

However, if Alletson touched heights that even today are rare for the best batsmen to reach, he was not like modern T20 specialists because this was a one-off. He never scored another first-class century. It was an innings in which he got lucky, and scored almost entirely from huge drives. Modern batsmen play many more shots to achieve their scoring rates, and are capable of reproducing them day after day. In that sense, we cannot say that Alletson matched the scoring feats of cricket today. But for one afternoon, this anonymous professional provided the cricket world with a glimpse of the future.

The rest of his life did not match these heights, but as we shall see, Alletson’s story is no less interesting for that…

“The question is a very delicate one”: “Colonial” cricketers in English cricket before 1914

Albert Trott
(Image: Wikipedia)

By 1900, English cricket had settled into a routine, made more rigid by the formal institution of the County Championship in 1890. The rules for county qualification were well established, placing amateurs in control and preventing professionals finding the best deal by severely restricting their movement between counties. Given the relative rewards on offer, most professionals realised they had to toe the line; those who did not conform would not play county cricket, the most lucrative form of professional cricket. These rules were established in 1873, pre-dating Test match cricket. But as cricket continued to grow internationally over the next forty years, the English authorities faced an unforeseen problem: overseas players. It was one thing for an English cricketer to play for a county other than that of his birth, which was allowed after a two-year residential qualification. What about “colonial cricketers” (the term used to refer to players from the colonies of the British Empire — in other words, overseas players)? From around 1890, a small but significant number of cricketers from Australia, South Africa and the West Indies, and one or two others, saw opportunities in English cricket; and the counties were only too eager to snap up talented foreign players.

Many of these overseas cricketers came to play as amateurs, moving to England to study at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. This gave them the opportunity to play first-class cricket for those establishments; some remained in England to play for counties, others travelled back and forth for some years. For example, the Australian Sammy Woods came to England in his teens. After studying at Cambridge, he played Test cricket for Australia before he began playing for Somerset in 1891. He remained with the county until 1910 and lived in England for the rest of his life. Similarly, Ranjitsinhji came to England from India in 1888 and studied at Cambridge from 1890 to 1894. Falling in love with cricket, after much practice he became a leading batsman. He later played for Sussex and England. There were few issues over him playing for Sussex (although his later selection for England was initially controversial) because he was believed to be a fabulously wealthy Indian prince who was playing cricket before returning to India; it wasn’t generally known that he was neither a prince nor wealthy and saw cricket as a means of pursuing his claims to the throne of Nawanagar. If he had not come to England specifically to play cricket, he certainly realised that the prestige it offered could benefit him enormously.

If Woods and Ranjitsinhji played most of their cricket in England, there were others who did so at the end of their career, but did not relocate to England for cricket purposes. Fred Spofforth, the greatest bowler in the world for most of his career, moved to England in 1888, after his Test days were over. He lived in Derbyshire and became a tea-merchant, playing club cricket regularly. He qualified for Derbyshire (the county tried to have a rule set up that an overseas player could play immediately for the country in which they made their permanent residence but the other counties disagreed, realising this would be easily open to abuse) and played for that county in 1889 and 1890. Billy Murdoch, who captained Australia in the first Test match played in England in 1880, stayed behind after the Australian tour of 1890 — according to Cricket magazine, to pursue medical studies, although he never seems to have become a doctor. He lived in Sussex, for whom he qualified and later captained. He also played for WG Grace’s London County team for several years. Perhaps more questionably, he also played for England in one pseudo-Test in South Africa in 1892.

Not all cases were straightforward.  JJ Ferris played as an amateur for Gloucestershire in the 1890s while still in his prime. His Wisden obituary mentions that he “agreed to qualify for Gloucestershire” and played successfully for a short time before fading; he dropped out of cricket and died of illness while fighting for the British forces in the Boer War. Ferris seems to have come to England at least partly for cricket reasons. There was suspicion that Gloucestershire had offered inducements — newspapers suggested that the county had bought him a house and offered to pay the rent to assist his qualification, although Gloucestershire denied this — but contemporary press reports suggest that Ferris moved to Bristol to become a stockbroker. Opinions seem to have been split about whether his arrival was good or bad, but he was a popular cricketer. Like Murdoch, he also represented England in South Africa.

Charles Ollivierre
(Image: Wikipedia)

Two West Indian cricketers also made their way into county cricket. Charles Ollivierre, who toured with the West Indian team of 1900, was approached by the captain of Derbyshire, Samuel Hill-Wood with a view to qualifying for his team. Hill-Wood employed Ollivierre in his office at Glossop and, after qualification, Ollivierre played for Derbyshire as an amateur, becoming the first black cricketer to play in the County Championship. Ollivierre was a “shamateur” who was employed by Hill-Wood purely for cricket purposes; perhaps his amateur status was an attempt to disguise the fact that he was effectively “poached”. Later, Sydney Smith was a white Trinidadian who settled in England after the 1906 tour by a West Indies team and qualified for Northamptonshire to play as an amateur. He was successful enough to be on the verge of selection to play for England in 1909. Other, less established amateurs also travelled to England and played cricket. The Australian Les Poidevin went to England as a medical student and qualified for Lancashire to play as an amateur from 1904 to 1908, but he was more of a general all-round sportsman.

But what of those who came to England to play professional cricket?

The first seems to have been Albert Trott, who played successfully for Australia in the Test matches on 1894–95. When Trott was not chosen to play in the 1896 Australian touring team, captained by his brother, he sailed to England on the same ship as that team. He joined the MCC ground-staff and qualified for Middlesex, for whom he played as a professional from 1898 to 1910. When his career ended, he fell into poverty and shot himself in 1914. The next major overseas professional was Charlie Llewellyn, probably South Africa’s first non-white Test cricketer, who had played “Test” matches for South Africa in the 1890s. Llewellyn may have left South Africa partly because of racial prejudice and insinuations that he was not, as he claimed, white. He was noticed, during a tour by English cricketers, by Major Robert Poore, who recommended him to Hampshire. After the usual two-year qualification period (when he played for the county in non-Championship games), Llewellyn played as a professional in the County Championship from 1901 until 1910. He was actually included in an England Test squad in 1902, but later retuned to play Tests for South Africa. He ended his career in the 1930s in the Lancashire League, and always seem to have known his value as a cricketer; he was a notoriously hard negotiator and left Hampshire because the League offered him more money.

Alexander Kermode
(Image: Wikipedia)

Frank Tarrant
(Image: Wikipedia)

The professional trend continued in the early 1900s. The Australian Alexander Kermode was persuaded by the England captain Archie MacLaren to come to England in 1902, after some success against MacLaren’s touring team in Australia; he qualified for Lancashire and played as a professional from 1904 to 1908, albeit without too much success. But the 1935 edition of Wisden records, in Kermode’s obituary: “The importation of Kermode to qualify for Lancashire received severe criticism in many quarters. The case of Albert Trott — one of the best all-round cricketers ever produced by Australia or England — coming to Middlesex, was cited as a precedent, but the example of Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire relying entirely upon native talent was urged as desirable to be copied by all counties.” Kermode went on to play in the Lancashire League, earning £10 per week playing for Bacup in 1910 which compared favourably to the wage of a county cricketer.

Around the same time as Kermode, A. H. Mehta, an Indian bowler who had enjoyed great success playing for the Parsee team, joined Lancashire as a professional, although he made no first-class appearances. Similarly, Elicius Dwyer was an Australian “spotted” by an England captain, in his case by Pelham Warner. Dwyer was persuaded to qualify for Sussex by CB Fry, and spent five seasons with the county, appearing in the Championship between 1906 and 1909. Once Sussex no longer required him, he played for Rawtenstall in the Lancashire League in 1910. It seems that he continued to play professional cricket at Crewe, where he died October 1912. Another Australian, Frank Tarrant, although he had little reputation as a cricketer, moved to England in 1903. Like Trott, he joined the Lord’s ground-staff and qualified for Middlesex, for whom he played from 1905 until 1914. He was very successful, being a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1908, and being considered for England selection. By this stage, overseas cricketers had become a controversial topic.

In the edition of 28 May 1906, The Times took up the case. It drew a distinction between those, such as Spofforth or Murdoch, who moved to England and only played cricket incidentally and those who were lured to play by counties, and apparently by bending the rules. “Deliberately to induce men to come from abroad to play for some English county with which they have no intelligible connexion, and to provide means wherewith they shall just secure the minimum of legal qualification, is to the ordinary fair-minded person something of a travesty of the system upon which an excellent institution was founded.” The Times correspondent claimed that both the British public and the more sensible “colonial” cricketers were opposed to this practice. Some counties attempted to make this practice more difficult (supported by The Times) by extending the period of qualification for those from abroad, but they were outvoted.

Why was this a problem at all? According to The Times, aside from their presence being against the spirit of the County Championship, the richest counties would be able to afford the best players and to become disproportionately successful. There were other effects as well:

“For, whatever be the effect in Greater Britain of this peculiar cricket adoption of the foreign missionary movement, it is quite clear that the home mission must suffer. Already young men in certain counties who had legitimate ambitions are either discarding or transferring them. One man, indeed, cynically said quite recently that he was going to South Africa or Australia to await there the arrival of the next English team. He hoped then to attract the attention of one of its members and thus to receive an invitation to return and play for his own county. He thought that being mistaken for a colonial might enhance his chances of playing for his own English county, and possibly even enhance his price as well.”

The Times continued to beat this particular drum; in the review of the 1906 season (15 September 1906), it observed:

“It is a matter of profound satisfaction to true sportsmen that there seems to be a growing wish among county committees to employ, if possible, cricketers that belong to the counties for which they play. As everybody knows the five leading counties in 1906 were Kent, Yorkshire, Surrey, Lancashire, and Notts, and three of these, Kent, Yorkshire, and Notts, were represented by men who really belonged to the county for which they played.”

Tricky matters such as members of the establishment such as Lord Hawke being born outside their county, or in the case of Pelham Warner or Lord Harris, being born overseas, were brushed over with the phrase “everybody knows what the phrase ‘to belong to a county’ means”; this was apparently impossibly to express in a rule. The writer lingers at length over the issue of cricketers qualifying for counties other than that of their birth; he concludes that it is vastly preferable for counties to recruit from within their own boundaries and not look elsewhere: “The good example has now been followed by Kent, Essex, and possibly by others; and these two and Notts and Yorkshire occupy four out of the first seven of the leading counties, and this is the most satisfactory feature of the cricket season of 1906.”

If our “Special Correspondent” lamented the recruitment of those outside county limits, he was even less happy that county qualification now had to take account of cricketers from abroad. He severely criticises the trend of importing non-British players, suggesting that while the public just about tolerated the practise of British players qualifying for counties other than that in which they were born, the growing use of Australian and South African cricketers was a step too far. Lancashire, Sussex, Worcestershire, Surrey and, in particular, Middlesex are singled out for the “abuse” of the system. The article observes that acquiring foreign players “at trifling cost” was harmful to county cricket, that English cricket was not a charity for hard-up foreign cricketers and such practises actively harmed international cricket:

“Test matches, both in England and in Australia, are the matches of the day, and this perpetual bartering of Colonial cricketers must in the long run take away much of the public interest in Test matches. Australians like Trott and Tarrant come here, and, however good they may become as players, they are lost to Test matches. They have a kind of amphibious existence, they belong neither to the country of their birth nor to the country of their adoption. Australia, that has not as yet got a population as large as London to draw from, will probably be the greatest losers if the present state of things continues and increases, their numbers being so few. Test matches must suffer if some of the greatest cricketers of the Empire, instead of taking part, have merely to look on.”

Implicit in all these comments is the distinction between amateurs from overseas (who were more acceptable) and the paid professionals.

Not everyone agreed that overseas players were a problem. This is most obvious in the attempt to extend the qualification period for overseas players at a meeting in December 1906. Initially, Essex proposed to the MCC Advisory County Committee: “That the period of qualification of colonial cricketers should be for not less than five years.” According to the Times (27 December 1906), Kent were “anxious, however, to establish a valuable principle rather than to insist on the exact means of establishing it”. Essex withdrew their idea in favour of Kent’s alternative proposal: “That the time for qualification be extended for the man who comes to this country for the purpose of making a livelihood out of cricket.” In other words, for professional cricketers only. The counties narrowly voted against this 8-7; amongst those who supported were Yorkshire, Essex, Kent, and Nottinghamshire. Of the principal “transgressors”, Middlesex abstained while Lancashire and Surrey voted against. The Wisden editor Sydney Pardon later suggested that the proposal would have gone to a casting vote had not one county captain certain to support it, Gilbert Jessop, missed his train and hence the start of the meeting. The Times suggested that the counties who voted against were prompted by their “existing arrangements” and had “particular interests”, but hoped that, attention having been drawn to the undesirable practice, counties would be more careful.

A different viewpoint was given in the Observer (16 Dec 1906). The article which previewed the meeting of the Advisory Board suggested that the two-year qualification period had “served excellently” and the MCC had dealt with any problems. The writer stated that “no case has been made out for a change” and that while Middlesex and Lancashire had “run their sides on Imperial principles”, along with a few other counties, the process was slow and had not affected English cricketers; additionally, the public enjoyed seeing famous overseas cricketers. The Observer believed that the main way to keep cricket healthy was to avoid a football-style transfer system. After the meeting, a follow-up article (23 December 1906) criticised several county secretaries for being unwilling to compromise and for being too eager to avenge previous disputes; the author was very critical and concluded the result of the vote was a “victory for Imperialism; and everyone is more or less glad.”

By the start of the 1908 season, the newspaper had a slightly different perspective. The prospect of AE Vogler, probably the world’s best bowler at the time, joining Trott and Tarrant at Middlesex, and a second “Indian prince” after Ranjitsinhji appearing for Sussex seemed to make a difference (although in the event, neither man played for any county). The Observer (29 March 1908) warned of the death of county cricket, suggesting more amateurs to be the answer, and recycling some of the arguments made by the Times two years earlier.

Sydney Pardon could not quite make up his mind. Particularly scathing about the recruitment of Ferris and Kermode, he wrote in Wisden:

“The question is a very delicate one and there is much to be said on both sides. No one I think wishes Australian or other Colonial players to be excluded absolutely from our county elevens but at the same time there is a very strong feeling that the free importation of ready-made players does not make for the good of county cricket. Counties like Yorkshire and Kent that do all they can to encourage and develop home-grown talent feel that they are exposed to unfair competition. Moreover, there is a conviction in many quarters that a healthy state of things can only be brought about by limiting the choice of players to those who have some real connection with the counties they represent.”

Alan Marshal
(Image: Wikipedia)

The controversy faded over the following years but there were isolated incidents before 1914. Surrey were criticised when Alan Marshal, an Australian, joined them as a professional in 1907, having moved to London in 1905. Essex seemed particularly outraged at this, but Surrey denied that he had been approached: they claimed he came to England of his own accord and played with W. G. Grace, who advised him to qualify for Surrey. Marshal went on to have a mixed career for the county and was suspended in 1909 before returning to Australia. He fought at Gallipoli in the war and died of fever in 1916. Further controversy erupted in 1909; before the season began, there had been suggestions that some counties might approach the Australian Test team that toured England that year. In August, reports appeared in several newspapers that Warren Bardsley, the star Australian batsman, had been approached by at least one county with a view to qualifying. English commentators were almost unanimously against the idea. Northamptonshire seemed to be the prime suspects, but denied an approach.

So, if they were not common, overseas cricketers were not unknown in English cricket, and there was something of a market for them. For professionals, the thought of giving up a prospective international career seems to have had less impact than the possibility of earning more money. An article in Cricket (20 June 1907) by JN Pentelow lists all the overseas cricketers who had played in England. In total, there were 12 who actually got round to playing cricket, but he interestingly includes some who appeared as amateurs:

“Setting aside colonial cricketers who migrated hither, but were certainly not imported [i.e. those who did not come purely for cricket], the following have come to England to play cricket, and to earn money by playing it : Cuffe (Worcester), Dean (qualifying for Hampshire), Dwyer (Sussex), Ferris (Gloucestershire), Kermode (Lancashire), Marshal (Surrey), Roche, Tarrant, and Trott (Middlesex), from Australia; Ollivierre (Derbyshire) and Smith (qualifying for Northants,) from the West Indies; Llewellyn (Hampshire), Vogler, Ben Wallach, and G. Whitehead, of whom the last three all failed to finish their qualifying period, from South Africa; and AH Mehta, who after all did not stay, from India.”

Pentelow was actually reviewing a book which brought up the issue of “colonial” cricketers, and agreed with its author that there had been too much importation from overseas, but did not think that it had yet done too much damage to “the colonies” as few if any of the names had made an impact in their own countries before coming to England.

After the war, it was a different story as the controversy over imported cricketers grew fiercer than ever. Some extremely famous names ended or threatened to end their international careers to come to England to play league, and in some cases county, cricket. But before we move on, it is worth sticking with Mr Pentelow a little longer.

Pentelow continued this theme 23 years later. In The Cricketer annual of 1930-31 he listed overseas players who had appeared in English cricket to the end of the 1930 season. Although rather vague in his qualification criteria, he seems to class as overseas those who did not attend school in England. He names 37 amateurs who were “Blues” for either Oxford or Cambridge Universities (21 Australians, 7 South Africans, 2 West Indians (albeit including Pelham Warner who captained England in Test matches), 3 Indians, 2 New Zealanders, and one from each of Ceylon and Malaya. Pentelow gives upwards of 30 more names, from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, West Indies and even Canada who were given trials at the Universities, but were not quite up to the required standard. Pentelow also lists every cricketer to play for a county, first-class or otherwise, from overseas, although he concedes he might have missed some. In total, there are 73 names: 53 amateurs and 20 professionals. If only first-class counties are included, the numbers are 48 amateurs and 19 professionals. But as we have seen, there were several amateurs in name only who undoubtedly came to play cricket. The two biggest users of overseas cricketers are Middlesex (15 players, of whom 9 were amateurs including Warner) and Somerset (9 amateurs). Lancashire had 1 amateur and 6 professionals but the other county to cause a stir in the 1900s, Surrey, had just one overseas player, the professional Marshal. Of the overseas players, 32 came from Australia, 19 from South Africa and 9 from India.

These numbers suggest that there was a lot of panic over a small issue, and this was one of those stories where rumours overwhelmed the actual reality of the situation. For all the worry, for all the muttering, relatively few overseas players actually made it onto the field with county teams.