For some years, a framed set of 50 cigarette cards depicting
cricketers from a past age has hung on my living room wall. I bought it from a
gift shop in Manchester for £25. On the reverse of each card is the name of the
firm that produced them: W.D. and H.O. Wills. The players’ appearance (gaudy
caps, neck ties, almost universal moustaches) points to the set being made in
the 1890s and a Google search confirms that it dates from 1896 and was simply
named, “Cricketers”. It was the first ever set of sporting cigarette cards that
the Wills brothers’ firm produced.
Sadly, I don’t have a bargain hanging on my wall, for on the
reverse of each card is also clearly written ‘reproduction’. If they had been
originals in good condition I could have sold the set for up to £4,000. As it is,
it is worth no more than the £25 that I paid for them.
Despite this slight disappointment, like the fusty old
antiquarian that I am, I have recently been surrounding myself with dust-strewn
and voluminous cricket books to research into the 50 cricketers depicted in my
set of cards. In this article I will relate what I have found out and will
consider what the cards say about cricket at that time – and a little about the
state of England in the 1890s as well.
My first task was to put some basic details about each
player on to a spreadsheet (I’m not just a fusty old antiquarian), so that I
could sort them in different ways to discover trends. Although released in
1896, it is likely that the selection of players was based on performances
during the 1895 season. This could explain the inclusion of the otherwise
obscure Jack Painter of Gloucestershire and George Nicholls of Somerset, who
had good seasons that year. It also explains why Surrey has more
representatives (six) than any other county, as they won the county
championship in 1895 (Yorkshire, who won in 1896, has only three players
included). In 1895, the number of first-class counties was expanded from nine
to fourteen, with the admission of Derbyshire, Essex, Hampshire, Leicestershire
and Warwickshire to join Gloucestershire, Kent, Lancashire, Middlesex,
Nottinghamshire, Somerset, Surrey, Sussex and Yorkshire (Worcestershire
subsequently joined in 1899; Northamptonshire in 1905; Glamorgan in 1921 and
Durham in 1992). All the 1895 counties are represented in the cards with the
odd exception of Essex, despite their fearsome fast bowler Charles Kortright
coming eighth in the bowling averages that year. The batting averages in 1895
were headed by Archie MacLaren of Lancashire and Charles Townsend of
Gloucestershire, aged just 18, was second in the bowling averages. As well as
47 county cricketers, the cards include representatives of Oxford and Cambridge
Universities and a representative of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the
gentleman’s club that owned Lord’s cricket ground and which governed the laws
and spirit of the game (he was Herbert Hewett, a former captain of Somerset who had fallen out with the county club).
By 1896, test matches had been played between England and
Australia for twenty years and England had first played (white) South
Africa in 1891-2. England toured Australia in 1894-5 under the
captaincy of Andrew Stoddart of Middlesex, winning the five-match series
by
three games to two. Australia toured England in 1896, with England,
captained
by the famous Dr. W.G. Grace (Gloucestershire), retaining the Ashes by
two matches to one. Many
of those who played for England in these series are included in the
cards, but
some fine cricketers did not make the cut, including the batsmen William
Gunn
of Nottinghamshire, J.T. Brown of Yorkshire and Bobby Abel of Surrey and
the
Yorkshire bowlers Bobby Peel and George Hirst (from now, all the players
that I
will name in this article appear in the cards, unless otherwise stated).
In 1896, Britain was still the world’s undoubted superpower.
Its global trade was greater than any other country and its empire was the
largest the world has seen. Its navy was the world’s most powerful. At home,
the upper classes were firmly in control. Three-quarters of the land was owned
by just 5,000 aristocratic or gentlemanly families and at the 1895 general
election, the Liberal Earl of Rosebery was replaced as Prime Minister by the Conservative
Marquis of Salisbury. At the same time, the seeds of Britain's 20th century
decline had been sewn. Germany and America were catching up with Britain in
volume of trade and were ahead in the new electronic and chemical industries.
The reunification of Germany had wobbled the balance of power in Europe,
leading ultimately to the conflagration of the Great War. Conflict around Irish
home rule presaged the eventual break-up of the British Empire. Even the
aristocracy was under threat: agricultural depression due to foreign
competition had reduced the value of land, the Parliament Act of 1911 would
limit the power of the House of Lords and economic pressures would lead to the
decline of the great country houses which in the 1890s hosted much genial
cricket.
None of this was of any concern to those who governed
cricket in 1896. English first-class cricket was entering what later writers
would come to regard as its Golden Age, when the values of cricket were said to
have been manifested most clearly in the way that the game was played. Those
values can be summed up in a few familiar phrases. The first comes from a
poem entitled Vitai Lampada, written
at the end of the 19th century by Sir Henry Newbolt which, set in a
public school, compared cricket with warfare and ended each verse with the line
“Play up! Play up! And play the game!” What is valued in the poem is courage,
steadfastness and leadership – and playing by the rules. The game (or battle)
is on the line but must be won fairly and with style.
This idea underpins another familiar phrase (albeit of more
obscure origin): ‘It’s not cricket’. The manly struggle between bat and ball
must be carried out chivalrously – as must Britain’s duty to the rest of the
world. In another contemporary phrase cricket was “more than a game” - no
wonder that cricket was such an important part of the education of the public
schoolboys who were being groomed to administer the country and its empire.
These values were manifested in the way that first-class
cricket had come to be shaped by the MCC in the second half of the nineteenth
century. An important theme was that the way that games were played should be
more important than their results. The MCC had been reluctant to promote a
county championship, fearing that it would lead to a win-at-all-costs mentality
that would diminish the game as a pursuit and a spectacle. The championship had
only been established in 1890 and was a far looser concept than it is today
(counties could choose how many matches they played and who they played
against). The MCC contrasted county cricket with what they regarded as the
grim horrors of the football league, founded in 1888, or the Lancashire cricket
leagues, founded in 1892.
A second requirement was that first-class cricket games
should be three days long, in contrast to the one day games played in the
Lancashire leagues (or the 90 minute association football games). The true
spirit of cricket, it was felt, could only be fully realised in the long,
two-innings format. In the nineteenth century this of course reduced the
number and range of spectators, as working people could rarely attend due to
their long hours and scant holidays (and the fact that most county games were
played on weekdays). This did not trouble the MCC however, as it felt that the
first-class game should not be sullied by the pursuit of gate
money. Traditionally, watching cricket had been a pastime for the leisured
classes and the counties were expected to make most of their money from well-heeled
members’ subscriptions.
The third and most important manifestation of the values of
cricket was the distinction between amateur and professional players.
Only
amateurs, it was felt, could truly play the game in the right spirit,
uninfluenced by the need for personal reward. Most importantly, the
captain of a county side should always be an amateur, even if he lacked
the playing ability of
available professional players (Lord Hawke captained Yorkshire for over
20
years, despite being a moderate batsman). Amateurs, it goes without
saying,
were largely drawn from the monied classes and any public school and
university
educated cricketer was expected to play as an amateur.
The amateur-professional distinction is clearly seen in the
cigarette cards. There are 24 amateurs and 24 professionals depicted (the other
two started their careers as amateurs before turning professional). Many of the
amateurs wear gaudy blazers, while all the professionals are soberly dressed in
white. The amateurs have their initials before their surnames, (W.W. Read)
while most of the professionals are named by surnames only, or if initials or
first names are needed to distinguish them from other players with the same surname,
they come after that surname (Read, Maurice).
The large majority of the amateurs were specialist batsmen,
while the majority of the professionals were bowlers. The “golden age” was, in
the minds of those who believed in the concept, largely one of dashing,
free-scoring, upper-class amateur batsmen who played the game for fun and
toiling working-class professional bowlers who put in an honest day’s work for
an honest day’s pay. The great chronicler of the golden age was the writer
Neville Cardus. Born in a Manchester slum, Cardus was eight years old in 1896,
but a few years later was playing truant from school to watch Lancashire play
at Old Trafford. He was a decent slow bowler and was employed for a few years
as assistant professional to the now-retired Yorkshire bowler Ted Wainwright at
Shrewsbury School. In the 1920s, as cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian
he perfected a metaphor-filled style of writing that created a rose-tinted
image of cricket of the pre-war era. Consider, for example, this description of
the batting of Archie MacLaren:
“MacLaren’s cricket was a
classical education because of its magnificent outlines, and yet, at the same
time, it possessed the colour and hint of danger which tell of the romantic
attitude. His poise and the mould of his technique, as he made his runs, were
clear and firm, almost serene; but in his more commanding strokes there was an
energy that seemed to be reaching outward…an energy which signified a man very
lordly, a man born to rule, to dictate and to wear the imperial robe”.
Professional bowlers were regarded more as legionnaires than
as Roman emperors, as in this passage about the Surrey fast bowler Tom
Richardson bowling against Lancashire:
“His face was wet, his breath
scant. He was the picture of honest toil. With the ball in his hands again he
trotted back to the wicket and once more went through the travail of bowling…on
a pitiless summer’s day. This was Tom Richardson all over - the cricketer whose
heart was so big that even his large body hardly contained its heroic energy”.
And when Cardus quoted (or perhaps put words into the mouths
of) northern professionals, he never failed to give them a faux northern accent:
“These old Notts professionals
after a day’s play would sit in a tavern, or like Attewell would go home to the
village they were born in and have boiled onions for supper. Their vocabularies
were not wide, but now and then they spoke with an echo of biblical cadence:
‘If God’s willin,’ Attewell would say, ‘Ah s’ll be down at ground next Saturday
mornin’”.
So the image of a golden age when amateurs and professionals
responded in their own ways to the call of “play up! play up! and play the
game!” and cricket represented all that was good about England was a powerful
one and we can see it reflected in the cards. But did it accurately reflect the
reality of cricket in the 1890s?
In two fine books, The
Willow Wand and A Social History of
English Cricket, Derek Birley examined many of the myths of the golden age,
concluding that while some (mainly well-off) cricketers could be said to
practice the ideals of cricket, others had a more hard-nosed approach. Some
events in 1896 illustrate the gap between the myth of the golden age and its
reality.
The principle of playing by the rules was sometimes
challenged. One incident of gamesmanship occurred in that epitome of the
amateur spirit, the Varsity match between Oxford and Cambridge
universities. At
the time, if the team batting second fell short of their opponent’s
score by
more than 80 runs, they were obliged to follow on, whether their
opponents
wanted them to do so or not. In the 1896 Varsity match, Oxford, batting
second,
were likely to follow on, but the Cambridge captain, Frank Mitchell (not
depicted on the cards) told his bowlers to deliberately bowl no-balls to
ensure
that Oxford were less than 80 runs behind, thereby saving his bowlers
from having to come straight back out to bowl in Oxford's second
innings. His action was greeted by spectators
with ‘a great shout of “Cricket!” “Play the game!” “Shame!” and other
cries’. A
few years later the MCC was obliged to change the follow-on rule to
prevent
further occurrences.
In the 19th century, the superiority of white
people over non-whites was taken for
granted. In 1896 this view was challenged by the emergence of the Indian Prince
K. S. Ranjitsinjhi (universally known as Ranji). Although rich and supremely
talented as a batsman, Ranji initially struggled for acceptance by the
cricketing establishment. He only won a single “blue” at Cambridge and despite
being the leading batsman in the country was not selected for the first 1896
test match against Australia, due to opposition from Kent’s Lord Harris.
Officially this was due to doubts about his qualification status, but others
not born in the country had played for England and it seems likely that racism
was involved in the decision. Selected despite Lord Harris for the second test,
Ranji scored 62 and 154 and headed the first class batting averages in 1896.
Thereafter he was accepted as “English” and learned to flatter his adopted
countrymen, dedicating his 1898 Jubilee
Book of Cricket (ghost written by his fellow Sussex and England player
Charles Fry) ‘by her gracious permission to Her Majesty, the Queen Empress’.
Another smouldering issue that cast doubt on the purity of
cricket was “throwing”, the suspicion that some bowlers used unfair means to
put extra speed or spin on the ball. The onus was on umpires to call a no-ball
if they suspected a bowler of throwing, but only the brave and determined did
so. In 1896 questions were raised about the bowling actions of two of the
Australian tourists, the fast bowler Ernest Jones and the spinner Tom McKibbin,
but neither were called for throwing. In later years, however, three of the players
on the cards were called for throwing; the Somerset left arm spinner Edwin
Tyler, the Sussex all-rounder (and future England captain) Charles Fry and the
Lancashire fast bowler Arthur Mold. Remarkably, a film exists of Mold bowling in the nets in 1901 to the veteran Lancashire batsman A.N. Hornby (not depicted
on the cards), to attempt to demonstrate that his action was fair. Modern video
techniques enable viewers to “freeze-frame” the film to form their own
judgements about whether Mold threw.
The spirit of 19th century cricket implied that
amateurs played for the love of the game and sought no financial reward from
playing, while professionals were loyal servants who accepted their wages
gratefully. Both views were challenged during the 1896 test match series
against Australia. Prior to the deciding third test at the Oval, five English
professionals, including Tom Richardson and George Lohmann, wrote to the Surrey
committee (the match organisers) demanding a £20 match fee per head instead of
the usual £10, otherwise they would refuse to play. The committee resisted and
three of the rebels backed down but George Lohmann and William Gunn stood their
ground and were left out of the team.
As well as illustrating the bolshiness of some professional
players, this incident highlighted another issue that had long been around in
cricket, that of “shamateurism”. Part of the professionals’ argument for more
money was that supposed amateurs were being paid ‘expenses’ that amounted to as
much as, or more than, the professionals’ fees. The issue of amateurs making
money from playing the game rumbled in the background of English cricket until
the amateur/professional distinction was abandoned in the 1960s.
The amateur ideal had its roots in the days when cricket was
a pastime for the leisured gentry. Some of our 24 amateurs had private incomes,
from land or business; Charles de Trafford’s father owned Trafford Park, south
of Manchester, on which Old Trafford cricket ground had been built, while Andrew
Stoddart’s father was a wealthy wine merchant. However, most late 19th century
amateurs needed to earn a living. Lord Harris was a colonial as well as a
cricket administrator and Stanley Jackson of Yorkshire, the son of a former
cabinet minister, later entered politics himself and was knighted for his
services as Governor of Bengal. Some followed professions: John Mason of Kent
and Charles Townsend of Gloucestershire became solicitors and Charles Fry of
Sussex earned money from journalism. Some amateurs were stockbrokers, an
occupation that carried social status without being too demanding on time. And
some were offered sinecure administrative posts by their counties, such as
Surrey’s Walter Read, formerly a schoolmaster, who was appointed the club’s
assistant secretary, a position which, as Wisden
put it with satisfaction, “enabled him to devote all his life to the game”.
But regardless of their outside incomes, few leading
amateurs (not even the holier-than-thou Lord Harris) turned down the chance to
boost their finances with expenses for playing county and international
matches, or going on overseas tours, often being paid considerably more than
the professionals. Some, like Walter Read and Andrew Stoddart, were to all
intents and purposes full time cricketers. When in 1896 the five professionals demanded
more money for playing in the third test, the press made much of this fact and
Stoddart prudently withdrew from the match through “injury”.
Overshadowing all in 1896 (and for many years before) was
the towering figure and formidable beard of Dr. W.G. Grace. Grace’s recent
biographer, Richard Tomlinson, entertainingly sets out how he epitomised all
that was good and bad about cricket in the second half of the 19th
century. He was by far the most prominent cricketer in the world, scoring
54,211 runs in his first-class career and taking 2,809 wickets with apparently
innocuous slow bowling. In 1895, aged 47, he experienced an Indian summer,
scoring 1,000 runs in the month of May and 2,344 runs overall, following it
up with another 2,135 runs in 1896. He captained England to victory in the 1896
Ashes series.
At the same time, Grace was notorious for his extensive use
of gamesmanship. For years, he had intimidated umpires, caused
resentment by
tricking opponents into getting themselves out and perpetrated other
shady acts. Despite this, he retained the support of the cricket
authorities and
popularity among the public. Neville Cardus, who tended to avoid
controversy in
his writings, described him as “a great Victorian”. However, he added, a
touch
archly, “he shared their view that authority was a matter to be
exploited
drastically”. An unnamed professional put it more succinctly. Asked if
Grace cheated, he replied, “no, he was too
clever for that”.
Grace was also cricket’s most notorious ‘shamateur’ and made
many thousands of pounds out of the game. In the 1896 professionals’ dispute,
the question of Grace’s expenses became an issue and the Surrey secretary,
Charles Allcock had to declare that Grace had never been paid more than £10 by
Surrey for any match he had played at the Oval. As £10 was the match fee that
the professionals were objecting to, it was not a strong argument.
Despite his cricketing income, however, Grace was not good
at living within his means and remarkably he maintained his practice as a
General Practitioner throughout his career. Richard Tomlinson suggests
that one reason why Grace only went on two overseas winter tours was his
need to
maintain his position with his employers, the Board of Governors of the
Barton
Regis Poor Law Union. So the best cricketer in the world spent his
winters as a
humble G.P. in North West Bristol. How good or conscientious a doctor he
was is an open question, but 19th century medicine was largely a matter
of common sense and good luck and being treated by the world’s most famous
sportsman could have had a profound placebo effect on some patients.
What else can we glean from the set of cards about cricket
in the late 19th century? Well, one thing that might surprise modern
followers of the game is that there are only three specialist fast bowlers
depicted – Arthur Mold of Lancashire, Tom Richardson of Surrey and his teammate
Bill Lockwood. Fast bowlers were valued, but 19th century wickets
and playing conditions often meant that other styles of bowling predominated.
It was customary at the time to open the bowling with a quick bowler at one end
and a slow bowler at the other. Leg break bowlers, such as Alec Hearne of Kent
or Charles Townsend of Gloucestershire were also important, but the googly had
not yet been invented. There were also many successful medium pace bowlers,
such as William Attewell of Notts, Jack Hearne of Middlesex and George Lohmann
of Surrey, exploiting indifferent wickets with cut and seam. Only two wicket
keepers are included in the cards, Arthur Augustus Lilley of Warwickshire
(universally known as Dick) and Gregor McGregor of Middlesex.
It was an age when top-level sport was less specialised than
today and many of the cricketers on the cards excelled at other games. Andrew
Stoddart and Gregor McGregor played rugby for England and Scotland respectively
and John Dixon and Harry Daft of Notts played association football for England,
while Robert Lucas of Middlesex represented England at hockey. Two men stood
out as all-round sportsmen: the Lancashire and England batsman Frank Sugg was
also a professional footballer and according to his Wisden obituary,
“he excelled as a long-distance
swimmer, held the record for throwing the cricket ball, reached the final of
the Liverpool amateur billiards championship, won prizes all over the country
for rifle shooting, bowls and putting the shot and was famed as a
weightlifter”.
Even Sugg had to cede first place as an all-round sportsman
however to Charles Fry, who captained England at cricket, played for England at
football and for Southampton in the F.A. Cup final of 1902 and in 1892 set a
world long-jump record which stood for 21 years. He was also an accomplished
classical scholar, which Frank Sugg wasn’t.
The portraits on the cards seem to have been based on
photographs but appear stylised, with colours painted on, and give few clues to how
the players appeared in action. We can, however, see a handful of the players performing
on film. We have mentioned the film of Arthur Mold bowling to A.N. Hornby in
1901. The earliest surviving cricket film is a short clip of Ranji batting in the nets during the England team’s tour of Australia in 1897-8. Ranji appears
again demonstrating his batting in an 1899 film that also features W.G. Grace. Lord Hawke can be seen on the same clip coming determinedly out to bat (though his
career batting average suggests that he probably wasn’t at the wicket for very long).and yet another film of Ranji from 1901 includes some shots by Charles Fry.
All of the players are of course long gone. They were too
old to have seen action in the First World War, but J.J. Ferris, who was
something
of a lost soul, died of enteric fever in 1900 while serving with the
British
army in the Boer War. He was 35 years old. Next year, George Lohmann
died aged
36, his body weakened by a previous bout of tuberculosis. The fine
Lancashire left-arm spinner Johnny Briggs contracted
a neurodegenerative disease that confined him to an asylum and led to
his death
at 39. A possible diagnosis is General Paralysis of the Insane, a
dementia-like condition caused by tertiary syphilis – there is no reason
to believe that 19th
century cricketers were any more chaste than the rest of the male population.
Then in 1912 Tom Richardson died aged 42 of a heart attack that was triggered
by alcohol abuse and obesity.
At the other end of the scale, seven of our cricketers
reached their 80s. Six were amateurs but the longest-lived was the professional
Alec Hearne, who died in 1952, aged 88. The last survivor was the Oxford
University blue Gerald Mordaunt, who died in 1959 aged 87. Three years later,
in 1962, the amateur/professional distinction was finally done away with and
the next year, 1963, saw the first sponsored limited-overs one-day county
tournament, the Gillette Cup. Thus does one age give way to another.
But the cards also bear witness to one of the grimmer facts
about first-class cricket, for two of the fifty players committed suicide. They
have not been the only ones; the cricket writer David Frith has shown that
cricketers have higher suicide rates than players of other sports and the male
population as a whole, though explanations for this finding remain speculative.
Few conclusions can be drawn from the two on the cards who ended their own lives.
In 1903, Arthur Shrewsbury of Notts, one of the finest professional batsmen of
the 19th century, shot himself at the age of 47. Despite his fame as
a cricketer and his success in business, he was afflicted by demons and died
believing (wrongly) that he had a terminal illness. Then in 1915, the dashing
amateur Andrew Stoddart, rugby international and England cricket captain, shot
himself aged 52, apparently depressed by the war and his own loss of role. Shrewsbury
and Stoddart had opened the batting together for England in 1893. Such
tragedies remind us that while cricket may be more than a game, there is always
more to life than cricket.
Sources used:
Birley D (1979) The Willow Wand: Some Cricketing Myths Explored. London: Queen Anne Press
Birley D (1999) A Social History of English Cricket. London: Aurum Press
Cardus N (2012) Cardus on Cricket: A selection from the cricket writings of Sir Neville Cardus (Rupert Hart-Davies editor). London: Souvenir Press
Frith D (2001) Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides. Edinburgh: Mainstream Press
Green B (ed) (1986) The Wisden Book of Cricketers Lives. London: Queen Anne Press
Tomlinson R (2015) Amazing Grace: The Man who was W.G. London: Little, Brown
ESPN Cricinfo
...and various editions of Wisden Cricketer's Almanack
Sources used:
Birley D (1979) The Willow Wand: Some Cricketing Myths Explored. London: Queen Anne Press
Birley D (1999) A Social History of English Cricket. London: Aurum Press
Cardus N (2012) Cardus on Cricket: A selection from the cricket writings of Sir Neville Cardus (Rupert Hart-Davies editor). London: Souvenir Press
Frith D (2001) Silence of the Heart: Cricket Suicides. Edinburgh: Mainstream Press
Green B (ed) (1986) The Wisden Book of Cricketers Lives. London: Queen Anne Press
Tomlinson R (2015) Amazing Grace: The Man who was W.G. London: Little, Brown
ESPN Cricinfo
...and various editions of Wisden Cricketer's Almanack
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