Ashes born as Spofforth slays England, 1882 | Daily News

Ashes born as Spofforth slays England, 1882

Fred Spofforth (back row far right) and the 1882 Australia cricket team, who inflicted England’s first ever defeat on home soil.
Fred Spofforth (back row far right) and the 1882 Australia cricket team, who inflicted England’s first ever defeat on home soil.

[Continuing our series]

If Fred Spofforth, demon bowler, egg-thrower and tea salesman extraordinaire, ascended to cricketing immortality at The Oval in August 1882, he started his climb across London at Lord’s in May 1878. It was a remarkable match between the touring Australians and an MCC team strong enough to be an England side in all but name, in which a batsman strode to the crease 37 times, and on three occasions they stuck around long enough to reach double figures; on average, each man scored 2.8.

In their first innings, the MCC managed to slip from 27 for two to 33 all out, with Spofforth claiming six wickets, including a hat-trick, while conceding just four runs. In their second they were skittled out for 19, with four more wickets for Spofforth, including that of WG Grace, bowled for a duck with the second ball of the innings.

He finished the match with 10 wickets, while Harry Boyle, who was also to make a key contribution in 1882, took nine. At the end of the day Spofforth is said to have wheeled around the dressing room chanting: “Ain’t I a demon? Ain’t I a demon?” Many agreed that he was, and he was thenceforth known as The Demon.

“Spofforth varies his pace in the most remarkable way,” wrote the Guardian the following day, “at one time sending down a tremendously fast ball and at another almost a slow one.” It was his ability to produce massive variations in pace, despite swinging his bowling arm at apparently identical speeds, that most befuddled batsmen. Variation, Spofforth wrote, is “only any use if you learn to hide it. The sole object in variation is to make the batsman think the ball is faster or slower than it really is”.

“He had a different grip of the ball for each of the three paces he bowled,” his future international team-mate John Trumble was to recall, “and it must have necessitated for him very strenuous practice to secure accuracy with the grip he had for his very slow ball. But he could do many remarkable things with his hands, even throwing a new-laid egg a distance of 50 yards or so on turf and causing it to fall without breaking.”

“His pace was terrifically fast, at times his length excellent, and his breakbacks were exceedingly deceptive,” Grace wrote. “He controlled the ball with masterly skill and, if the wicket helped him ever so little, was almost unplayable. A good many batsmen funked Spofforth’s bowling and a great many found it impossible to score off him.”

The following year Australia beat an England side in Melbourne, Spofforth taking 13 wickets, including the first ever Test hat-trick. One witness wrote of “his catherine-wheel action, rare command of pace and break and Mephistophelian cast of countenance”. Tall and thin, he liked to meet incoming batsmen with a malevolent glare. His entry in Sport Australia’s hall of fame notes that “his swarthy complexion, black moustache and steely brown eyes combined to convey the unmistakable aura of hostility”. “I verily believe,” another team-mate, George Giffen, later wrote, “he has frightened more batsmen out than many bowlers have fairly and squarely beaten.”

Billy Barnes, of Notts and England, once described playing against Spofforth. “I were in right form and not afeard of him when I goes in to bat,” he said. “I walks into th’ middle jaunty-like, flickin’ my bat. As I got near Mr Spofforth he sort of fixed me. His look went through me like a red-hot poker. I walks on past him along th’ wicket to th’ batting end, and halfway down somethin’ made me turn round and look at him over my shoulder. And there he was, still fixin’ me with his eye. Spofforth was no bowler; he were a hypnotist, and ought in all fair sport to have been made to bowl in smoked specs.”

Spofforth, a distant relative of Britain’s double Olympian and 100m backstroke world record-holder Gemma, contributed a fascinating chapter “on bowling” to CB Fry’s seminal 1906 book Great Bowlers and Fielders: Their Methods at a Glance (it’s better than it sounds). In it he spells out the value of hard work – “at the time of writing there is hardly one first-class amateur bowler in England, and in my opinion laziness is one of the main causes of this” – and constant hostility. “Always attack the batsman,” he wrote. “Bear in mind that batsmen are sometimes nervous creatures, whose first object is to score one run and then 10, and it is during this period you have your chance. Go for him for all you are worth and don’t let him get the pace of the wicket by bowling fast and outside the stumps.”

Spofforth did suffer from periods of poor form, and a spell out of the game entirely after being thrown off a horse, between that match in 1879 and him boarding the SS Assam in Melbourne on 15 March 1882 with the rest of Australia’s touring party.

Their journey took the best part of two months, but the tourists seemed anything but indisposed after their arrival in Plymouth on 3 May. For a start, some fool on board had bet George Bonner, the 6ft 6in all-rounder once described as “a giant of strength and an Apollo of grace” and widely known as “The Australian Hercules”, that once ashore he couldn’t throw a cricket ball 110 yards without a warm-up. Bonner stepped off the boat and launched one 119 yards from a standing start, earning £100 – £10,200 in today’s money – in the process. It was the first of many Australian successes that summer, and by the start of their one Test they had won 24 of 28 matches.

The Guardian considered the first day “the most considerable disaster of their visit”. It certainly featured their lowest score, 63, with England’s George Ulyatt, known as “Happy Jack” on account of his habit of merrily whistling at all times, the least economical England bowler – his nine overs (which lasted four balls each at the time) went for 11 runs.

England’s team included another fellow known for being merry, though in a different sense, in the shape of Billy Barnes, once reprimanded by Nottinghamshire, despite hitting a century against Middlesex, because he had turned up at Lord’s late, and obviously drunk. “Beggin’ your lordships’ pardons,” he told his club’s committee, “if ah can go down to Lord’s and get drunk and mek a century ‘fore lunch, then ah thinks it ud pay t’Notts committee to get me drunk afore every match.”

Keeping wicket was Alfred Lyttleton, who despite being only 25 at the time was already an MP for the Liberal Unionists, and had played football for England (and scored) against Scotland the previous year. When Australia returned to The Oval in 1884, their first-innings score ticked past 500 and, in their desperation to find a breakthrough, every single member of the England team tried their hand at bowling. Lyttleton, bowling underarm and with his wicketkeeping pads still strapped to his legs, took the final four wickets.

England’s reply started at 3.30pm in rapidly-failing light, and after a flicker of promise as Happy Jack Ulyett and Alfred “Bunny” Lucas put on 39 for the third wicket, went rapidly downhill with the loss of five wickets for 13 runs.

“The change that had come over the game was a keen disappointment to the spectators, who were very quiet as the English batsmen went down one by one before the Colonists’ splendid bowling,” we reported. Though England’s total of 101 was scarcely impressive, it did give them a 38-run lead.

The second day started, after a rain delay, with the Australian opener Hugh Massie scoring 55 runs off 60 balls in 57 minutes, an innings entirely out of keeping with the rest of the match (though he should have been caught by Lucas at long-off for 38). But more memorable was the dismissal of Sammy Jones, who hit Grace to point and took an easy single, grounded his bat at the other end and then turned to pat down a bump in the pitch. Lyttleton threw the ball to Grace, who removed the bails and appealed for a run-out. Bob Thoms, the pre-eminent umpire of his age, raised his finger. Spofforth, next man in for Australia, was utterly incensed, while at the other end his great friend, New South Wales team-mate and international captain Billy Murdoch (Spofforth had turned down a place in Australia’s team for the first ever Test, against England the previous year, because Murdoch hadn’t been invited), was equally unimpressed.

According to John Miller’s history of the Ashes, Spofforth asked his captain: “What do you think of what happened to young Jones?” “It wasn’t the most courteous piece of sportsmanship I’ve seen, Fred,” replied Murdoch. At which the incandescent bowler said: “I swear to you, England will not win this.” Within 10 minutes Australia’s innings was over for 122, and back in the dressing room he roared at his team-mates: “This thing can be done!”

“When the England innings opened with only 85 runs to win, nothing seemed more certain than that the Colonials would suffer a crushing defeat,” we reported. And though Spofforth bowled Hornby, England’s captain at both cricket and rugby union, and his Lancashire team-mate Dick Barlow with successive balls with the score on 15, Grace and Ulyett then put on 36 for the third wicket.

“After the stand made by Mr Grace and Ulyett, the betting was at enormous odds,” we wrote. “The crowd, numbering upwards of 20,000 persons, was wrought up to a pitch of intense excitement and every hit was enthusiastically cheered. The Australians, however, never bated a jot of hope and courage.”

“The strain, even for the spectators, was so severe that one onlooker dropped down dead, and another with his teeth gnawed pieces out of the top of his umbrella,” wrote Tom Horan, the Australian batsman, of the game’s final moments. “For the final half-hour you could have heard a pin drop. That was the match in which the last English batsmen had to screw his courage to the sticking place by the aid of champagne, when one man’s lips were ashen grey, and his throat so parched that he could hardly speak as he strode by me to the crease. That was a match worth playing in, and I doubt whether there will ever be such another game for prolonged and terribly trying tension.”

Next man in was the celebrated all-rounder Allan Steel, who “played his first two balls from Spofforth as clumsily as a novice” and then got out to the third. Two balls later Maurice Read was bowled, and England were 70 for seven. “With his dismissal a change came over the scene,” we wrote. “Whilst the Colonists could not help betraying their glee, the spectators became downcast and silent.” Lucas, having faced 55 balls and scored just five runs, played on to his wicket to become Spofforth’s 14th victim of the match (his last 11 overs cost just two runs and brought four wickets, including for the first time a run of three in four Test balls). “Irresistible as an avalanche,” Giffen wrote. “The finest piece of bowling I have ever seen.” Boyle took the final two wickets in the following over. England were all out for 77, and Australia had won by seven runs – “a fitting reward,” we reported, “for their superb bowling and fielding and their remarkable pluck.”

It was England’s first ever defeat on home soil, a match that would have been famous enough even if Reginald Shirley Brooks, who was to die six years later aged just 33 after a brief but memorable life of intense carousing, hadn’t placed a mock obituary in the following week’s Sporting Times mourning the death of English cricket and promising that “the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”.

An England team set sail on a revenge mission just 12 days later, with the touring captain, Ivo Bligh, pledging before his departure “to beard the kangaroo in his den and try to recover those ashes”, and a legend was born. While in Australia, Bligh was presented with a small terracotta urn, which was to become rather famous.

As for Spofforth, he wasn’t done with England yet. He returned in 1884 for a three-Test series, a tour which ended with his marriage to Phyllis Cadman, a local woman, at All Saints’ Church in Broadsall, Derbyshire. Phyllis failed to settle in Australia, and in 1887 they moved back to England. He turned out for Derbyshire for a while – where in addition to his playing achievements he memorably, through forensic examination of the club’s accounts, identified the former county captain turned secretary, Samuel Richardson, as the man behind the embezzlement of some £1,000 (Richardson, in an unpredictable twist, fled to Spain, changed his name and became court tailor to King Alfonso XIII).

Spofforth eventually took over his wife’s family business, the Star Tea Company, with considerable success – he was to leave an estate valued at £169,258, the equivalent of £8.8m today.

When he died in June 1926, the flags at Lord’s were flown at half-mast, and the former England captain Archie MacLaren was among those who helped to unload two carloads of wreaths at his funeral. “We shall not look upon his like again, no doubt,” Neville Cardus wrote in this newspaper, “at which sentiment all honest batsmen will say: ‘What a soothing reflection is that!" – theguardian


Add new comment